More Hate From Maine Governor

The controversial governor of Maine says that people of color were enemies of his state, and suggested they should be shot.

Talking about Maine's effort to combat drug crime, Governor Paul LePage said that "the enemy right now... are people of color or people of Hispanic origin".

"When you go to war... and the enemy dresses in red and you dress in blue, then you shoot at red," he said.

Democrats and political observers are urging him to resign.  LePage made the shocking comments while seeking to clarify remarks he made earlier in the week which were criticized as racist.

On Wednesday,  LePage was asked about a statement he made in which he blamed the state's heroin problem on "guys by the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty" who "come from Connecticut and New York".

"They come up here, they sell their heroin, then they go back home. Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave," he said.

He denied it was racist, saying that he had been putting together a binder cataloguing drug arrests in the state, and that "90-plus per cent of those pictures are black and Hispanic people".

Asked by reporters to provide the binder,  LePage replied: "Let me tell you something: Black people come up the highway and they kill Mainers. You ought to look into that."

On Thursday, LePage called Democratic state representative Drew Gattine and, when he was unable to reach him, left him an abusive, expletive-laden voice message.  He later invited reporters to an interview to explain the voice message, and told them he wished he could shoot Gattine in a duel.

"I'd like him to come up here because, tell you right now, I wish it were 1825," LePage said.  "And we would have a duel, that's how angry I am, and I would not put my gun in the air, I guarantee you... I would point it right between his eyes, because he is a snot-nosed little runt and he has not done a damn thing since he's been in this legislature to help move the state forward."

On Friday, the Portland Press Herald published FBI statistics which show that 1,211 people were arrested on charges of drug sales or manufacturing in Maine in 2014. Of those, 170 - 14.1% - were black, and almost all the rest were white.

LePage said he was "enormously angry" at being called a racist, but did not try to refute the FBI statistics.