Ugliness in Mendham, NJ - Rick Blood Resigns

Ex-Deputy Mayor Rick Blood faces criticism after
a Mendham Township Committee meeting Monday

It's not easy to be constantly reminded of the insidious trail of slime left behind by the Trump campaign and his subsequent so-called presidency like some kind of toxic hate-filled slug that's dragged it's ugly carcass across the American landscape.

(No offense to actual slugs.)

Garden State politicians, from former Republican governor Chris Christie, to current Democratic U.S. Senator Corey Booker often cite the fact that my current home state of New Jersey is one of the most diverse states in America.

But as an ugly incident in Mendham Township, NJ on Sunday night reminds us, that doesn't make it some kind of Utopia.

Mendham, the home of former NJ governor Chris Christie, is a heavily-Republican suburban community in Morris County - the stronghold of the New Jersey Tea Party base, the latest Census data breaks Mendham demographics down to 85% white, 12% foreign-born and 1% African-American.

As William Westhoven reported in an article for the Daily Record early Tuesday morning, Mendham Township Deputy Mayor Rick Blood (pictured above) resigned in a special closed session at the end of heated 3-hour Mendham Township Committee meeting on Monday evening.

The meeting was dominated by calls for Blood's removal from office in the wake of his decision to post a bizarre, xenophobic, hate-filled article that compared immigrants to "rabid, messy, mean raccoons" on his Facebook page on Sunday night - he tried to delete the post but it's already gone viral.

Anti-racist protesters address the Mendham Township
meeting Monday night

According to Westhoven's article the vile racist rant is apparently something that has been passed back and forth between Trump supporters since 2016.

It justifies Trump's ignorance, bigotry and hatred for immigrants by likening them to coming home and discovering a basement filled with "rabid" raccoons that can only be removed by an "exterminator".

No need to guess who the "exterminator" is.

If you're interested, Rob Jennings' NJ.com article has the text of the neo-Nazi diatribe that Blood posted to his Facebook page - which was obviously written at the height of Trump's anti-immigrant fear rallies during the 2016 presidential campaign.

I first heard about this story during a segment on the Brian Lehrer Show on Tuesday morning, and it's definitely worth a listen as Brian has Mendham Township residents call in, and he also has former "Christie Tracker" journalist Matt Katz on as well.

Katz's wife, who is Jewish, comes from the nearby town of Randolph, and he speaks to some of the anti-Semitic allegations about Mendham Township.

In fact one female caller who said she was Jewish and relocated to the area with her husband claims there's a "quiet understanding" that real estate agents won't show Mendham Township homes to prospective buyers who are Jewish, and instead try and "steer" them to nearby communities.

Another caller described the community as a "conservative cocoon", insulated from other more diverse nearby communities like Morristown.

Democratic Mendham Township Committee
member Amelia Duarte 

It's hard to unpack all that and verify such comments in such a short time, but if you read some of the comments published in the Daily Record article that Mendham Township residents gave at the meeting on Monday night it's clear that a sizable and significant portion of the population were disgusted by Rick Blood's comments, demanded his resignation and emphasized that the words in the post he shared do not represent the entire community.

After blogging about Republican efforts to unfairly rig elections on the state and local level last Friday, I think it's of interest to note that several of the 70-some attendees at the Mendham Township meeting pointed out that Rick Blood, a Republican (in case you didn't guess...) was not actually elected to be Deputy Mayor.

He was appointed to the position on the committee back in December (by a group of Republicans...) a month after loosing a race for an open committee seat to Amelia Duarte (pictured above) - a Democrat whose parents came to this country from the Dominican Republic.

So Blood basically lost a race for a seat in a heavily-Republican town to a Democrat - but Republicans simply appointed him to the committee a month later anyway - talk about sketchy Republican math.

On Monday night Duarte was the one member of the Mendham Township Committee to call on Blood to resign - a move the Republican-majority committee later agreed to in a closed session after hours of testimony by residents outraged over the comments Rick Blood posted online.

I'm not sure if I'd call that Karma, but I do think it's yet another reflection of American voter's repudiation of Trump and his divisive message of hatred, bigotry and "otherism".

Time will tell if this is a snapshot for what's in store for the upcoming mid-term elections.

But the fact remains that the majority of the 70-some residents who came out for that Mendham Township meeting on a Monday night in a heavily-Republican district (including Tamara Harris, the Democratic candidate for the NJ 11th Congressional District), overwhelmingly rejected the extremist pro-Trump claptrap that Rick Blood posted on social media.

And they called for him to be removed from his seat.

That oughta tell you something about how American voters around the country are feeling right now. 

Cast Your Vote & Smile For the Camera!

With live coverage of the New Hampshire primaries underway on the always-reliable WNYC, I'm preparing to go home, make dinner and binge out on political analysis.

Some of the Republican presidential candidates, particularly New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, are going to have to make some tough decisions tomorrow depending on how the primary results pan out.

Christie only captured 1.8% of the vote in the Iowa caucus last week, and he won none of the 30 delegates at stake either as he came in 10th place.

So I'm interested to see if the pummeling he gave Marco Rubio at the GOP debate on Saturday is enough to persuade the notoriously late-deciding New Hampshire voters to push Christie to a top three finish tonight - anything under 3rd place and he's really going to have to consider whether or not it's realistic for him to continue.

Earlier this morning on The Brian Lehrer Show there was an interesting segment with New Jersey Public Radio reporter Matt Katz, who produces The Christie Tracker podcast, (which has the latest on the Bridge Gate scandal) and Annie Karni who's in New Hampshire covering Hillary Clinton's campaign for POLITICO.

Definitely worth a listen if you want some insight from a reporter who really knows Christie.

Journalist / author Ari Berman

Not to be outdone on New Hampshire primary day coverage, Leonard Lopate had an insightful but disturbing interview this afternoon with Ari Berman, senior contributing writer for The Nation.

Berman, author of the timely non-fiction book published in 2015, "Give Us The Ballot: The Modern Struggle For Voting Rights in America", has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the issue of voting right in this nation.

Berman used that knowledge to cover a lot of territory during his interview with Leonard Lopate this afternoon.

From Senator Ted Cruz's long-time advocacy for the aggressive (and borderline illegal) suppression of the right to vote for those Americans who tend to pull the lever for Democrats, to the Republican party's determination to maintain control over state legislatures across America in order to enact even more restrictive laws and regulations designed to make it harder for college students, the elderly, African-Americans, Hispanics, legal immigrants and people convicted of felonies to cast their votes and participate in the Democratic process.

If you're interested in hearing how the current crop of Republican presidential candidates are also working to keep (some) people from voting, you might want to give the interview a listen.

As Berman reported in an article for The Nation yesterday, New Hampshire is one of the 16 states controlled by majority-Republican legislatures who've enacted tough new voter ID laws for the 2016 presidential elections.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice reports, those states account for 178 electoral college votes.

It takes 270 electoral votes to win the presidency - think about that.


As if the snowstorm hitting New Hampshire on  primary day isn't enough, the state's new voter ID laws include a provision that calls for registered voters who don't have ID with them at the polls to sign an affidavit, then submit to having their picture taken.

It's absurd and a clear violation of the right to privacy - and ironic that it's the law in the "Live Free Or Die" state.

But, as Ari Berman pointed out in an article for The Nation back in January, as the then-solicitor general of Texas Ted Cruz said back in 2008 after filing a court brief in support of restrictive new voter ID laws in Indiana:

"There is no right to be free from any inconvenience or burden in voting"

With that I must be off, coverage of the New Hampshire primaries is about to get underway and I'm interested to see if registered voters report having problems casting their votes because of these new Republican voter suppression measures.

I guess Republicans would say it's not that bad, if you forget your ID in New Hampshire, all you have to do is sign an affidavit and smile for the camera!

As for who does what with all those photos of folks who didn't have ID's, I'm sure right-wing Republicans and their friends at the American Legislative Exchange Council have some great ideas.