I’ll Answer the Tough Questions Our Local Politicians are Scared to Answer Publicly

 

 

 

By:  David Deschesne,

Editor/Publisher,

Fort Fairfield Journal

October 26, 2016

 

   In 2002, I ran for the Maine House of Representatives and got my name on the ballot as an unenrolled candidate (not a member of any political party).  There was the establishment Republican, Dick Duncan; the establishment Democrat upstart, Jeremy Fischer, and yours truly in that race.   I ran on a “Choose Freedom from Excessive Government Control”platform and, after a mafia-style hit piece produced by WAGM television that severely tarnished me, I received a whopping 69 votes out of the 2,300 cast in the district I was running for.

 

   In hindsight, I think the reason the establishment media was so disenchanted with me is I answered questions truthfully and honestly without any sugar coating.  I also had a vastly superior understanding of the monetary system that is the basis of all government funding programs, compared to their meager understanding, so I’m sure that disdain for me was reflected in how they edited my television interview.  After that election, I vowed I’d never run for public office again.

 

   With that said, I did publish a list of cutting-edge questions in the last issue of Fort Fairfield Journal, questions which were presented to the current local Democrat and Republican candidates running for Maine House for Fort Fairfield and surrounding areas—Dave McCrea and Anthony Edgecomb, respectively.  Predictably, neither of them cared to answer any of my questions in this public forum. 

 

  In the spirit of fairness, and to show the questions are capable of being thoughtfully answered, I will now republish that list and answer them from my position.  Since I’m not running for public office, you may feel free to hate me, but don’t say you’ll never vote for me because I’m not planning to run for election again. Here are those questions and my own personal answers and position immediately following each of them.

 

1.) What is your position on the so-called “transgender” issue and what are your concerns, if any, about the social engineering program taking place in public schools that allows biological males to use female restrooms, locker rooms, showers, and stay in female hotel rooms on overnight field trips (and vice versa)?

 

Deschesne:  “The transgender issue is one of choice coming from a position of sexual depravity and confusion which has been fomented by psychopolitical operators in order to confuse and obfuscate the masses by enticing them to believe that simply by ‘thinking’ they are a specific gender, that makes them so.  Thousands of years of natural biology has sorted out what is to be deemed a male and a female, and government should not be called upon to enforce an individual’s belief that cannot be backed up by their own body’s natural physiology. As for the schools, they should completely block out any attempts by transgenders to foist their position on them because it will make it way too easy for otherwise normal, hormone-driven young males and females to take advantage of that system and co-mingle in areas they have historically never been allowed to.”

 

2.) Outside of providing a police, fire, and road maintenance service, which of the other unrelated government programs do you think are either a benefit or a detriment to the society it serves?

 

Deschesne:  “Outside of providing police/State Guard, fire and road maintenance, government has no purpose and any government agency not directly involved in providing those services should not be funded by the public.  Rather, they should be funded by private, voluntary donations and be forced to survive on the strengths of whatever benefit to society they actually provide—if any.  

 

3.) I’ve been told by senior doctors and health care workers that up until the 1960’s when government played a limited role in health care, health care was much more affordable and if a person couldn’t pay, doctors understood that and for the most part expected to provide a certain percentage of care for free, and did so voluntarily. After government got involved with regulations and mandates, the health care costs began their upward spiral. With that said, in what areas of health care do you think government can remove itself from in order to allow the providers the opportunity to provide better service and more affordable rates?

 

Deschesne:  “Government should get out of health care completely.  Except for the occasional doctor or health care worker who gets elected to public office, politicians are not trained in health care and political expediency is not the proper way to run a health care system. If anything can be done by government to reduce health care costs it would be to pass legislation to limit malpractice lawsuits to the point that it is no longer profitable for attorneys. Leave the hospitals alone and let the best hospitals with the best doctors, the best service and the best price structure attract the paying customers and ultimately flourish.”

 

4.) Public schools were originally formed to teach the “three R’s” reading, writing and arithmetic. How do you think education costs have been impacted with the advent of computer technology and the plethora of grades-reporting software and testing programs that teachers and administrators now feel the need to expend teacher time and energy on in order to build pie charts and bar graphs for bureaucrats and administrators? How can that time be better used in order to save money?

 

Deschesne:  “I think education costs have been dramatically increased by computers and their associated education-based programs that consume way too much teacher time doing data entry (not to mention the student time consumed with video games and social networks accessed on their publicly funded laptops and Ipads).  I know how much time it takes me just to update my own website on a continuing basis and I can imagine the time multiplies exponentially when a teacher must do data entry for dozens of students on an ongoing basis.  Let’s go back to the grade books and toss out all those time consuming education-based student-tracking software programs whose sole purpose is to enrich the software designers who developed them.  This will free up school budgets and teacher time to do what teachers were actually hired to do—teach.  Wow! What a concept!”

 

5.) Do you believe it is the proper function of taxpayer funded schools to promote the sexual ideologies held by sexual deviants who occupy less than 2% of the population? Please explain your answer.

 

Deschesne:  “No, I do not think it is the proper function of taxpayer funded schools to promote sexual ideologies of sexual deviants any more than promoting and endorsing the ideologies of any other special interest group.  The job of publicly funded schools is to educate, not indoctrinate.  If sexual deviants think their position is worth supporting, let them promote it on their own time and at their own expense and quit forcing the taxpayer to do it for them with a captive, student audience.”

 

6.) With more people in Maine now on welfare, or some sort of government assistance, than are working to pay into that system, what are your ideas for either raising the additional tax revenue to support those social programs, or reducing the welfare amount per individual, as the equation continues to tip toward more benefits recipients and less workers?

 

Deschesne:  “We certainly can’t raise more taxes because people are already paying more than they should to support the non-workers.  Yes, admittedly, there are some in society who do need assistance but it has only been in the last 50 years or so that government assumed that role.  It has traditionally been the work of private philanthropic and religious organizations who took care of the most needy in society, when their families no longer could,  and did so with voluntary contributions.  This system discouraged, if not prohibited, the ‘career’ welfare families from obtaining a work-free life financed on the backs of the workers in society.  Since government is elected by popular vote and the popular vote will always elect those who will continue their free ride until the whole system collapses in bankruptcy, I think government should extricate itself completely from the charity business and return it to its rightful administrators—families and the private sector.”

 

7.) Since it is understood that those people who are left contributing to the tax base in Maine do not have an unlimited amount of money that can be forcefully confiscated for public use, list three government programs or services Maine provides that you believe can be scaled back, or eliminated, without any serious adverse affects. Feel free to explain your choices.

 

Deschesne:  “1.)  I’d start with the Maine Department of Education.  Completely shut them down and let local school boards do what they were elected to do—set education curriculum and standards.  Consolidating power for all school systems in a centralized authority such as the Department of Education is at once wasteful, duplicative and enables special interest groups an easy path to insert their message or ideology into the school systems statewide outside of local school board control;  2.)  Department of Health and Human Services should be disbanded, refer to my answer to previous question; and 3.)  The Secretary of State’s office should get out of the driver’s licensing business.  If a driver’s license is merely to show that a person has received adequate training in the safe operation of a car, then the local driver’s education instructors can sign a certificate of completion for the successful drivers.  As for dealing with suspending licenses for OUI, etc., the courts are already set up to do that so there’s no point in duplicating those services with the Secretary of State’s office.” 

 

8.) The Maine Constitution says, at Article 1, Section 16: “Every citizen has a right to keep and bear arms and this right shall never be questioned.” What type of arms do you believe this applies to and how do you think the legislature can do a better job of upholding, and educating the public about, the second part of that compound sentence? Do you believe federal background checks violate the wording, spirit and intent of this right as it is written?

 

Deschesne:  “This is the easiest question in the list.  The right enumerated here applies to all types of arms.  Every means every, no exceptions.  The right also says “this right shall never be questioned.”  The legislature can emphasize this by abolishing all requirements for background checks within the State—federal included—because the right does not say it doesn’t apply to felons or lawbreakers.  It says, “every citizen.”  The malcontents in society who cannot legally purchase a firearm will always be able to acquire one anyway regardless of the background checks, so the Maine legislature should tell the federal government to take their background checks and leave the State because they are operating outside of their jurisdiction and enforcing a program that is not supported by our State’s constitution.”

 

9.) For the first few decades that Maine was a State, overdue property taxes were dealt with by the towns only being allowed to confiscate enough of the person’s property to satisfy the outstanding tax debt; if the property couldn’t be easily divided, the whole property was sold for fair market value and the owner was given the difference. Today’s laws allow the town to confiscate and sell a $100,000 home for as little as a past due amount of $500.00 with the owner, or his estate, being out the balance of the market value. Do you believe our current property tax seizure laws are equitable, or should we look back to the original model for improvements?

 

Deschesne:  “Actually, the way we used to handle property taxes makes more sense and is much more fair.  If the town takes a $100,000 home for back taxes, then they must be required to sell it for fair market value and, after collecting the taxes owed, return the balance of the proceeds to the homeowner because it is the homeowner, not the town, who put the equity into the home to begin with.”

 

10.) The United Nations’ “Agenda 21” program seeks to eliminate those living in rural areas and herd them into stacked-up, vertical, “sustainable” cities in order to “re-wild” 95% of the available land in Maine (and the rest of the U.S.) through the mechanism of public lands and national and state parks that would be off limits to human habitation or development. What are your thoughts on this program and what as a Maine legislator would you do to protect those rural inhabitants who don’t want to give up their land and homes to such encroachments?

 

Deschesne:  “Empower the local Sheriffs with legislation prohibiting the enforcement of any United Nations-based treaty that seeks to remove a Maine inhabitant from his or her land.  Personally, I would like to see the United Nations building bulldozed into the ocean and the communists who infest it and leach off of our taxpayer money sent back to Uganda, Zimbabwe, China or North Korea where their failed ideologies can spend their dying days in the company of fellow communists without infecting our society any further.”

 

10. a.) Do you think the State has an interest when a large land-owner, such as the recent Quimby property transfer, chooses to voluntarily opt their land into the Agenda 21 program, thus taking it out of circulation for the rest of Maine to have a chance at using, forever (or as long as the current U.S. government continues its occupation of the capitol)?

   

Deschesne:  “Yes, the State does have an interest in preserving itself from outside aggressors. I would support legislation stating all land within the border of Maine that is going to

be granted to the federal government—public or private—must receive the support of at least 75% of the Maine House and Senate after which it must be approved by the governor and 75% popular vote.”

 

11.) The governor is currently advocating for the elimination of the Maine income tax and funding that shortage of revenue by eliminating the Homestead exemption credit. There are some home owners who don’t make enough money to pay into the State income tax, after exemptions, but will see their property taxes increase with the elimination of the Homestead exemption credit. This group of people would be adversely affected the most, due to their limited income, by ending up paying more taxes at the end of the day. What is your position on this issue?

 

Deschesne:  “I think the State income tax should be eliminated, but not at the expense of the homestead exemption.  Government needs to be cut back and all unnecessary agencies and services should be culled by the amount of the lost revenues from the state’s income tax.”

 

12.) The U.S. Constitution (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 17) only allows the U.S. government the jurisdiction to legislate over its own district, U.S. military installations, and other lands it owns within a state, such as national parks and federal buildings. It does not allow federal jurisdiction to extend wholesale throughout the individual states. How do you think the Maine legislature can do a better job of deterring federal abuse of power within Maine whenever those agents insert themselves into the State, on land not owned by the U.S. government, and attempt to exercise jurisdiction they do not have?

 

Deschesne:  “We need legislation to empower local Sheriffs to escort all federal agents who are attempting to enforce federal law within the State of Maine—not on land owned by the federal government—to the border of the State, and instruct them to not return.  This goes especially for I.R.S. agents who routinely enforce a federal income tax within the State—and enforce the execution of unlawful W-9 agreements between employers and employees—completely outside of any lawful jurisdiction of the federal government.  This abuse of federal power needs to be stopped now and we need to give our law enforcement community the tools and support to do that.”

 

13.) The Maine National Guard is a federal entity that may be called into duty overseas at the U.S. government’s pleasure (hence, the word, “national” in its title), thus leaving a void when those troops are called away. The Maine Revised Statutes allows for a Maine State Guard (MRS 37-B, Sec. 222-224) that is similarly equipped and trained, but is a State entity that can only be used within the State and never be called into federal service. What are your thoughts on this arrangement?

 

Deschesne: “I think it’s a good idea for Maine to be in control of its own Maine guard unit—not the feds.  We need to invite the feds to leave, then build up our own state guard units.  These units would be available any time a natural or man-made disaster hits and they can also be used to repel invasions such as those that local law enforcement would be dealing with once the remedies outlined in question 12, above, are put into effect.

 

   There, now that I’ve answered those questions, you at least know my position on the issues outlined herein (as if regular FFJ readers didn’t already know my positions).

   One of two things can happen now.  1.)  I can suffer a severe voter backlash and never have a chance of being elected to public office (that’s okay, I don’t want to be elected); or 2.)  I can benefit from a severe voter backlash and win by a write-in landslide by people who see that I actually get it and understand what the problems are and how to truthfully and realistically solve them without pandering to the mainstream political establishment.

  Either way, you voters have to understand that you will always live under the level of government tyranny that you are willing to tolerate and continue voting for.