Goobers, Gobshites, & Graft: Georgia GOP Gubernatorial Candidates

Republicans, especially in Georgia, have long been focused on the three G’s. That is to say God, guns, and gays. Not wanting to give up on a winning formula they are sticking with their 3G strategy but this time it is more about Goobers, Gobshites, and Graft because both of the remaining two GOP candidates exhibit these characteristics in abundance.

Let me state up from that I am a Democrat so I write from that perspective. However, I am no huge fan of Stacey Abrams.  I thought her announcement that she would remove the faces from Stone Mountain was a colossal mistake and was sure to bury her chances. Thankfully she hasn’t mentioned that in months and hopefully won’t again.  I also wrote back in February of 2015 that I thought she should step down after her failures with the New Georgia Project became public. I didn’t think she had a chance in hell of being competitive in this race nor would any Democrat in deep red Georgia. But my opinion has now changed and that is largely due to two of the most flawed candidates I have seen in any race in a long time.

The amount of scandals and mudslinging in the GOP runoff campaign is breathtaking and we still have a few weeks left before their runoff on July 24th. In the latest poll Kemp has a small lead of 44 percent to 41 percent over Cagle, within the margin of error of 3.5 percentage points. No matter which of these two candidates win on July 24th, they are sure to be 3G certified. (Goober, Gobshite, and Graft)

There was a debate today between Cagle and Kemp but for some mysterious reason they chose 12:00 PM to air the debate. Keep in mind many if not most of their GOP base were either still in church or at lunch or somewhere else. They also had to compete with the World Cup final between France and Croatia for the few at home watching TV. But even more troubling was the fact that I don’t think this debate was broadcast on any channel outside of the Atlanta TV market. Keep in mind that this race will most assuredly be won or lost outside of metro Atlanta. But then again perhaps the timing and limited viewing availability  was intentional because had most voters watched the debate I daresay they would likely stay home or vote for Abrams.

So without further adieu allow me to introduce you to the candidates. Let’s get ready to rumble!

In the left corner… Introducing Crazy Eyes Cagle

Is it just me or does this guy always looked like he’s hopped up on acid or looks just plain crazy? The question that decides how people ultimately vote is would you let this person babysit your kids or even your pets? I sure as hell wouldn’t.

His real name is actually Lowell Stacy Cagle. Casey is just a nickname. At age 20 Cagle dropped out of Georgia Southern citing a football injury. Though soon after he bought a retail clothing store called Jean’s Bridal and Tux of Class which begs the question as to why he couldn’t finish his degree if he was able to run a tuxedo rental shop.

Cagle has been the Lieutenant Governor since 2007 and was first elected to office in 1994 as a state senator from Gainesville. Cagle actually tried to run for Governor before in 2010 but dropped out due to some scandals. Many feel it was related to some rumored extramarital affairs. At the time he claimed to drop out of the race because of a severe degenerative spinal disorder which would leave him unable to campaign for Governor since  it is a statewide race and he needed to recover. But then he almost immediately decided to run for the Lt. Governor’s office which is also a statewide race so that was an obvious lie.

His career in politics is remarkable only for the fact that he has accomplished so very little in so many years in office. In fact his fellow GOP colleagues thought so little of him as Lieutenant Governor that they stripped him of all power for many years and he was nothing more that a hall monitor. Cagle got his 5 minutes of national media attention over his boneheaded move via Georgia’s largest private employer Delta Airlines with 33,000 employees. Cagle went on twitter to illegally threaten to kill any legislation that benefited Delta, unless they agreed to start working with the NRA again.

The announcement came as the Georgia Legislature considered a broad tax bill that included a jet fuel tax exemption could save Delta about $40 to as much as $50 million a year. Two days later, a state Senate committee stripped out the jet fuel perk from the broad tax bill. The airline had eliminated a discount program for NRA members following the February school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Although Delta ended its alliance with the NRA, the company said its position on the gun-control debate remains neutral. “Out of respect for our customers and employees on both sides, Delta has taken this action to refrain from entering this debate and focus on its business. Delta continues to support the 2nd Amendment,” the airline said in a statement.

Delta had reportedly sold a grand total of 13 NRA-discounted tickets, which means each one cost the airline about $3 million in tax breaks, according to USA Today. More damaging, however, was the national attention Cagle attracted to Georgia by punishing Delta over a move many other companies had taken to remain neutral in the gun control debate.

Amazon  is currently deciding which of several cities in the U.S.  will be awarded its second headquarters and the 50,000 high-paying jobs that go with it. Atlanta is in the running, but no doubt Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his senior management took notice of the widespread negative media coverage. Cagle won his ultimate prize though by getting the NRA endorsement a few weeks later. Recently the new NRA President, AKA as the disgraced traitor from Iran Contra fame, Ollie North campaigned with Cagle at three events across the state. This was never about good policy for Georgia, this was simply a move to secure the NRA endorsement. It was a decision solely for personal gain and screw Delta or those 50,000 Amazon jobs.

As bad as the Delta flap turned out to be, this was just the beginning. A few weeks ago a secretly made audio recording revealed that Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle backed a controversial education bill that he admitted was poor policy to prevent a rival candidate for governor from getting millions of dollars in support from a PAC. In the recording, Cagle says it wasn’t about policy, just politics. “Is it bad public policy? Between you and me, it is. And I can tell you how it is (in) a thousand different ways,” Cagle said. I hope you are beginning to see a pattern of putting himself above the welfare of the people in the state.

More recently the Kemp campaign released another snippet from the tapes. The portion that Kemp’s campaign leaked begins with Cagle telling Tippins that they have the same opinion about a particular issue. “The problem is, in a primary — and you and I are just talking off the record frank — they don’t give a [expletive] about those things,” Cagle said. “OK? In a general election, they care about it. OK? But they don’t care about it in a primary. This primary felt like, it was, ‘Who had the biggest gun? Who had the biggest truck?’ You know? And, ‘Who can be the craziest?’ Right? That’s what it felt like.”

If you have watched any of the TV ads by either candidate full of trucks, chain saws, guns held to the head of teenage boys, and explosions….I think you will tend to agree with Cagle. The problem is you don’t admit it publicly if you want these same people to vote for you.

More troubling news also came out that Cagle is competing with disgraced for HHS Secretary Tom Price for wasting taxpayer money on unnecessary and expensive flights. According to the Atlanta Journal & Constitution: “Records show that, when taking flights for state business, Cagle regularly had the state plane add extra legs to its trip in order to pick him up or drop him off in Gainesville, where he lives. Cagle had the plane fly from Atlanta to Gainesville to pick him up at least 59 times since 2010, and on at least 57 occasions. Overall, Cagle and his staff took at least 413 state-funded flights between January 2010 and June 2018, according to a review of records kept by the Georgia Aviation Authority and the Georgia Department of Public Safety, racking up $264,999 in costs.” Tom Price wasted $341,000 but Cagle still has time to catch up.

It is also well-known that Cagle is well-loved and supported by numerous lobbyists. The New York Times broke a story where Cagle bought a condominium in downtown Atlanta 10 years ago from a State Capitol lobbyist named Terry Hobbs, seemingly at a bargain discount. “Real estate records show that Mr. Cagle, who faces a runoff for the Republican nomination on July 24, purchased the one-bedroom apartment at 24 percent less than its appraised value — below comparable sales prices — and sold it last year at a 29 percent profit.” It must be nice to have such generous friends. But lobbyists never give gifts like these without expecting much more in return and I’m quite confident Cagle is ready to pay up if elected.

In the right corner… Introducing Lyin’ Brian InKEMPetence

At least that’s the name the Cagle team decided to call him as they pay homage to Trump’s penchant for nicknaming opponents.  They even created a website outlining their reasons at inKEMPetence.com. I would have gone with Clueless Kemp myself. On this site you can see several Cagle attack ad and they mention his defaulting on multiple loans and  the fact that he was sued twice for non-payment. It also mentions that Kemp took $2.5 million dollars worth of crops from farmers and then refused to pay for them. He still refuses to pay, and his license to purchase crops from farmers has been suspended by the state. It mentions a few more unsavory business dealings as well, but I am more concerned by Kemp’s tenure as the Secretary of State.

Brian Kemp has rightfully been labelled the worst Secretary of State in the country. In the past few years, Kemp has released 6.1 million social security numbers, allowed voters to vote in the wrong district, issued the wrong ballots in the primary election, and perpetuated the targeting and disenfranchisement minority voters. And that’s just for starters.

Jennifer Cohn, an attorney and election integrity advocate, wrote a brilliant article that I highly recommend everyone read called  Georgia: The Epicenter of America’s Corrupted Electronic Elections which include many of Kemp’s missteps along with a whole set of other troubling issues which questions the integrity of elections in many states but especially here in Georgia. Here is a short excerpt from her article.

“In August 2016, Secretary of State Kemp refused help from the Department of Homeland Security to secure its systems.

The same month, white hat hacker Logan Lamb discovered the Election Center had left 15 gigabytes of data, which looked like it could be used to hack an election, online and without password protection.

Kemp has a history of leadership failure, impacting literally every voter in Georgia. Other than blindly finding every opportunity to take an obstinately anti-federal government stance, I am not sure what’s to be gained by refusing a security inspection for a system still running Windows 2000.”

Another voter integrity expert named Marilyn Marks who happens to be a Republican had this to say about Kemp in response to his claim that Georgia elections had never been hacked.

“GA SOS @BrianKempGA released this huge lie in the wake of Mueller’s 12 Russian indictments. Kemp lies to mislead GA voters about the election security failures under his management. Don’t let him mislead re: election security and high risk. GA SOS @BrianKempGA released this huge lie in the wake of Mueller’s 12 Russian indictments. Kemp lies to mislead GA voters about the election security failures under his management. Don’t let him mislead re: election security and high risk.”

She continued in this thread on Twitter. “Worse yet, all components in the state’s system were compromised and the elections put at risk, but Kemp has done nothing to mitigate or sanitize the system from its long exposure to malicious users. He and Election Board continue to conduct elections on the compromised system. In the face of these extreme threats to fair elections, the St. Election Board met ONCE in 2018 and twice in 2017. (@BrianKempGA has not called meetings.) They spent their time on 2014-15 voter complaints.Kemp is doing exactly what Trump is doing. Ignoring the facts of a breached system and ongoing risk from those who would infiltrate and manipulate the easy-to-hack system. Protecting the bad guys and his campaign rather than your vote.

There is an easy, inexpensive solution for 2018, but Kemp ignores it in order to keep the insecure system. @CoalitionGoodGv has urged him and St. Bd. many times adopt paper ballots now. They refuse to answer. GA voters can help make a difference by signing this petition to demand that the St. Board take action now.”

I should also add the most egregious act that Kemp has committed while acting as the Secretary of State was wiping the data servers clean after a lawsuit was filed against him in regards to the Ossoff-Handel Congressional race. Ossoff  ended up with the exact same total in the runoff, where he had no Democratic challengers, that he had in the primary, where he had four Democratic challengers.

Marilyn Marks thus spearheaded a lawsuit that challenged Handel’s win and sought to enjoin the use of Georgia’s paperless machines in future elections, including the upcoming 2018 midterms.

Soon after the new suit was filed, however, Georgia’s Election Center wiped its election server, including backup copies, which would have been a key piece of evidence in the election challenge

The primary job of a Secretary of State is to ensure the integrity of elections. But what makes Brian Kemp even more dangerous is his refusal to ever accept responsibility or act with expedience to fix his mistakes when they are discovered.

Stacey Abrams may not be my ideal candidate based on a number of differences I have with her on policy, but I am confident that she isn’t corrupted by lobbyists and will do an infinitely better job as Governor than either of these dimwits.

In case you aren’t familiar with the term gobshite,  it’s Irish and British slang for a stupid or unpleasant person. I will leave it to you to decide which candidate best deserves the moniker.