Politico ran a story yesterday that titillated our imaginations. Apparently the USDA is being staffed by a bunch of unqualified Trump campaign goobers, and we happen to know just such a character. We would gladly promote Billy Shreve to the federal level if it would save us from having to deal with him in Frederick county. His resume certainly seems like it offers more qualifications than “long haul trucker” or “country club cabana attendant,” if only because of his “carefully” considered positions on regulations and hot dog stands. Plus he worked at 7/11, so he at least has experience with the subset of foods that you can cook on a roller grill.
Renaissance Man
On another note, the most puzzling thing about this Deplorables for Trump covfefe is that half of Trump’s supporters were supposedly–according to the lady who coined the inelegant but accurate “Basket of Deplorables” phrase–good people who had been left behind in the modern economy and were desperate for change. You have to just love all these tools who stood up and said, “I ain’t gonna identify as one of them nice folks! I am a bona fide jerk/idiot per my own self-esteem! Here’s my sign! Put me in the basket!” Pretty sure those are all the qualifications you need for a plum job at the USDA. Git er done…or whatever the GOP fair tent vernacular is.
Loquacious lecturing Tony Chmelik–imagine our surprise when we fret that Shrelauter will muck things up, and then he takes the reins. He got into orator mode again this week, and man we can do without the Tony with a condescending tone schtick. Sighhhh.
There was long discussion of the River Board process, which had Councilman Chmelik frustrated with the time these things take and the lack of television air time, but the bulk of his grievances centered on County Executive Jan Gardner’s public briefing last week regarding the school capacity report and traffic study. And he wrote and delivered an exhausting, pompous speech on the matter, in lieu of discussing like a normal person.
Jessica Fitzwater criticized him for wanting to spend additional taxpayer dollars to find something that reached conclusions he agreed with, and after listening to him complain about money already spent and tiresome, lengthy processes, it was hard not to see her point. He had some great ideas in there, though, such as how it would be inaccurate to assume all the houses would actually be sold (????). We find that kind of funny coming from someone with as large a family as he has. Why didn’t the report assume families of twelve would move into every one of those homes? We can come at this from both sides, dude. It also bugged him out that increasing costs of construction weren’t factored in, and isn’t that shooting yourself in the foot, if you want to say maybe we don’t need to plan for big expenses? We have a confuse.
At any rate, that finally ended (if you’d like to know more, the Frederick News Post has a good run down that won’t make you want to stab yourself in the ears; we cannot recommend actually exposing yourself to the archives of this meeting) and they went into closed session. Chmelik helpfully acknowledged during Council Member Comments that we had probably heard enough from him. Hoo-boy. Truer words never spoken.
And then, apparently national laughingstock Kirby Delauter wanted to take it outside with Jerry Donald over that meme someone made with Jerry spanking Kirby. We’ll put it in here for educational purposes, since he’s opened the door to that (genius!), and ICYMI. It’s in reference to Jerry Donald using his social media account to publicize the inaccuracy of Kirby’s assertions that the Democrats on the Council are planning to make Frederick a sanctuary county. How dare he insist Misleading Push-Poll and Fake News Employer Kirby stick to the facts. This caused Kirby to (allegedly) call him another name for a trendy pink knitted lady hat, approximately one time for each woman who attended that march, it sounds like. He wants Jerry Donald to monitor his Facebooking more closely, which is beyond hilarious, considering the source. Maybe Kirby should worry about the damage he does with his own Facebook account. Or lippy outbursts.
Did we think this was worth using? Not that much, really. Now that the context has changed? Yes, yes it is.
A Miner Detail spoke with Delauter, who claims that M.C. Keegen-Ayer and Jerry Donald just want to make the council look foolish–an assertion that causes us to hoot in side-spitting, knee slapping laughter, given the dedication he has to looking like a fool all by his own self.
Do you know what? Billy Shreve wasn’t even worth mentioning. That’s how bad all this was!
You may have heard there is a head-scratching controversy over the Native American war bonnet the Linganore Lancers are using for sportsballing events. And shockingly that controversy isn’t WTF does a feather headdress even have to do with “The Lancers” in the first place? Because the answer to that is absolutely nothing, so…weird.
Lucky for us, look who has chimed in on this matter!
Imagine our surprise upon noticing that Billy knows how to correctly spell both ridiculous and embarrassment. Is it because those terms are so often used in conjunction with him, or because autocorrect is a thing his phone can do? We will never know!
We have complicated feelings about Shreve, which we are pleased to freely express. He is so terribly ill mannered during council meetings, but he does give us so very many things to laugh at. We bet you did not know that just last Friday on mid Maryland live he gave us another. Billy Shreve claimed that most people probably don’t know that Gettysburg was a battlefield and just think of it as a nice drive through a park! He needs to hang out with different “most people,” if that’s a personal observation. And so many cannons and obelisks and statues and multi story observation towers and people in your way stopping all over the place to get out and look at them to set that apart from your ordinary Sunday drive, if you just stumbled across the place, never having heard the Gettysburg Address. Which most middle schoolers we know are familiar with:
We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.
We would be remiss if we did not slide in the observation that only one side’s soldiers died so that this nation might live. The other side died trying to kill it. So, there’s that. #FreedomofExpression
But, back to The Oracle of Fredneck. In case you are new around here, or just need a refresher as to why Shreve is both so funny and so infuriating, he has also previously claimed that it would be wasteful to enact programs to prevent erosion from the Monocacy Watershed–which creates deposition into the Chesapeake Bay–because the Grand Canyon was formed by erosion. This armchair geology nerd will spare you the stone cold details, but there is a lot going on here, and none of it supports Billy’s understanding of science.
He once tried to argue for the obsolescence of libraries (in spite of his obvious need to reap the benefits of a library) in favor of shopping at Borders. This was some time back, but not so far back that Borders hadn’t gone out of business a couple of years before that came to his attention, so he must not have been a very devoted customer. Frederick is simply not large enough that this fact should have gone unnoticed.
And less humorous a proclamation of his not so distant past: there are people both for and against human trafficking. You would think all of these teachable moments would have him thinking before spouting off, but then he wouldn’t be our Billy Shreve, At-Large County Councilmember. Spread the word, Frederick. We must be willing to sacrifice of our pointing and laughing opportunities for the greater good of competent public policy.
Same batguano time, same batguano channel, folks (that’s channel 19 if you’re new here, and if so you will be able to distinguish the local boosters from the local haters right away).
Also, Confederate Kirby is still campaigning for County Exec, so there’s guaranteed grandstanding during council member comments. If Billy is worse drink a Dirty Carnie, and if Kirby is worse drink a Dirty South.
And remember folks, Frederick County’s best stories are about running the Rebs out of town…seems like some of our local folk are having a hard time recalling poor Ms. Barbara Fritchie’s old gray head.
We cannot believe you are making us interrupt her resting in peace again.
Who wouldn’t have wanted to be a fly on the wall in the office of the opinion editor at the Frederick News Post when this gem of an LTE dropped into his mailbox. Billy Shreve was criticized for missing school board meetings, and penned a lengthy screed detailing the ways in which he is actually dumb as a stump. A man who engaged in a weeks long drama about a lost key also accused the editorial board of engaging in a third grade spat. The miracle of the internet visited this memory upon us, and as we were not publishing in 2014, we thought it only fair that we douse it liberally with our attentions.
It’s hard to pick a favorite part, but here’s a highlight.
The editors of The Frederick News-Post have surprised me. They have spent so much time confusing attendance with action and results. Generally, that type of evaluation is considered in leadership circles to be a “rookie mistake.”
For a person making such a bold statement about action and results it does seem like most of what he does is moan and groan and little else–then, now and forevermore! (One does wonder what will be inscribed on his tombstone, since he admits it isn’t going to be, “Never missed a meeting.” May we offer “King of the Deplorables” as a suggestion?) It’s in his bones to make a lot of noise and do a lot of nothing, and you can tell by the “leadership circles” he admires.
Can you imagine if students were allowed to just decide that attending some parts of the school day were beneath them the way Shreve approached his responsibility to the BOE? What an example, speaking of leadership.
And then there is also this part:
One might ask, “What constitutes a meeting?”
One might also ask, “Did this really happen?” Ladies and gentlemen of Frederick County, lets not reelect the Bart Homer Simpson of local politics to any other offices. His track record is abysmal, and he does not need to fail up the ladder.
What can we say, y’all. We must be running low on our stupid quotient, since it’s been awhile between council meetings, so we dug into the archives. Frederick County is back in business next week. Brace yourselves.
The layers of this onion are as swollen and pregnant as John Donne’s flea.
What meanest thou, dim hashtag? It could be argued that this writer believes in deriding the elites of the tech world, in spite of the irony that those individuals make so many of the dollars that help keep the economy from sucking like a flea. A descendant theory holds that it is mere ambivalence to the U.S. stock market and its investors. Whatever the intent, this collection of loaded imagery calls the reader to remember the author’s relationship to the ironic tension created through his advocacy of the tech free Jefferson Tech Park.
The prevailing scholars at present concur that Delauter is implying #fakenews, and the statement “we don’t need them any longer,” must be interpreted as an insistence that the only news others should read is the propaganda disseminated via Facebook videos Trump’s minions produce, the Increasingly Nuclear Twitter War Tweets of POTUS himself, and retweets from members of his “intellectual” coterie. One notable local member is Councilman Billy Shreve. This is a device one will see frequently employed within the wing nut genre: by employing a heavily loaded allusion, such as the one to Soros, his reader is immediately aware of the team he plays for. It is critical for the writer convey that he is not on the team of reason and science and engineering and physics, dear readers. His allegiance is to #teamcovfefe, also referred to in texts as A Basket of Gullibles.
As to which interpretation is the writer’s intended one, readers may also determine that the answer is most like Sarah Palin’s news sources: all of them, Katie!
Billy has a couple of pages, his personal one, in which he’s free to friend or unfriend as he pleases. And a “professional” page entitled “Councilman Billy Shreve” which now falls under a totally different set of rules. Today, a federal court decided that public officials cannot block social media users because of their criticism. In a decision based on a case that originated from Loudon County, VA the judge stated:
“Defendant’s offense at Plaintiff’s views was therefore an illegitimate basis for her actions—particularly given that Plaintiff earned Defendant’s ire by criticizing the County government. Indeed, the suppression of critical commentary regarding elected officials is the quintessential form of viewpoint discrimination against which the First Amendment guards. By prohibiting Plaintiff from participating in her online forum because she took offense at his claim that her colleagues in the County government had acted unethically, Defendant committed a cardinal sin under the First Amendment.”
Well, well, well, guess who Billy blocked?! That’s right, us!!!! We look forward to being allowed back in! If any of our faithful readers have also been blocked, please let us know on either Facebook or Twitter! We know that Councilman Billy Shreve doesn’t want to be in violation of the 1st amendment.
The YUGHEST!Surely you heard the infuriating news that the Orange Menace banned transgendered people from serving in the military. He cited monetary concerns and distraction as reasons to ban people who are brave enough to sign up to serve our country. Something, both he and his relatives avoided at all costs. We won’t address the distraction part of his reasoning, because GROW UP, however, the monetary reasoning doesn’t seem to pan out either.
What does this have to do with Sheep Shreve, well look:
ABSOLUTELY THE RIGHT THING TO DO! ABSOLUTELY! Oh please Billy please talk to Nancy so your opinion can be out for all to see! And how does he suppose this makes us all great again? Oh that’s right, we keep forgetting that MAGA is code for some rose colored discriminatory 1950’s utopia that these fools believe once existed. The only thing that made us chuckle just a little yesterday was this analysis of the situation:
Seriously!!Billy had another Orange Menace re-tweet yesterday that we find perplexing:
What is that even suppose to mean? Are Billy and Trump hoping to establish some kind of theocracy? We’ll let Mr. Whiskers take it from here:
Man, Billy must have gotten into some good stuff, because these Tweets he made could have only been crafted while under the influence of something!!
Where is Here?!?!?! And what must he have imagined because from where we are sitting it’s been one scandal after the next!
The most curious one is this Retweet from one of the world’s most terrible women:
What is Billy saying here? He wants zero immigration and he thinks most white people do as well because Ms. Crazypants shared some statistics?! Remember all this folks when this crazypants runs for Maryland Senate next year!
Remember our standing drinking game. ICYMI: drink Mexican beer with a lime in the neck until every blasted fool we have to contend with is erased from memory. We will be observing (or not)–and hopefully you are too (or not)–from a hammock elsewhere. Here’s the agenda.
Anticipated highlight: Council decision on Billy’s bill that he seems to be crafting by producing something subpar and then hoping if more intense work need be done that his peers might swoop in to actually do that while he still gets credit for it (a technique familiar to anyone who hated doing group work in school). As a bonus, even the intended beneficiary of this legislation expressed disinterest in it last week. You can’t make this stuff up folks.
frederick local yokel 