NEW YORK, NY – MAY 26: Dr. Mehmet Oz promotes the “The Dr. Oz Show” new time slot at Grand Central Terminal on May 26, 2011 in New York City. (Photo by Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images)
PITTSBURGH – PennLive is reporting… With Democratic U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman eyeing a return to in-person campaigning, he and Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz lit up the weekend by trading social media barbs. While Oz “welcomed” Fetterman back to the campaign trail with a YouTube video in which he jogged and derided the Democrat’s “radical agenda,” Fetterman used a Cameo video from quintessential Jersey girl Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, the star of MTV’s “Jersey Shore,” to once again pester Oz about his Garden State roots.
In the video, Snooki addresses Oz, who lived in New Jersey for decades before moving to Pennsylvania to seek the Senate seat. Snooki says she heard Oz moved “to look for another job” and wishes him luck. “I know you’re away from home and you’re in a new place, but Jersey will not forget you. I just want to let you know I will not forget you,” she says. “And don’t worry,” Snooki continues, “because you’ll be back home in Jersey soon. This is only temporary. So, good luck. You’ve got this and Jersey loves you.” This came a week after the Fetterman campaign trolled Oz on the Jersey Shore beaches, a popular getaway spot for many Pennsylvanians, by having a plane fly a banner over beachgoers that read, “Hey, Dr. Oz, Welcome home to NJ! © John.”
Oz released his video on Friday, opening with the fit 62-year-old in a T-shirt and shorts tying his running shoes, just maybe serving as a subtle reminder to voters that he’s healthy and exercising. Fetterman, 52, has been recuperating at his home in Braddock near Pittsburgh from a May 13 stroke and having a pacemaker with a defibrillator implanted for a heart condition. His campaign has said Fetterman is driving, running errands, and regularly walking while also working remotely to carry out his lieutenant governor duties.
PHILADELPHIA — TribLive is reporting… In early April, Doug Mastriano was recording a Facebook Live video on his phone after a legislative session in Harrisburg when he segued into his thoughts on global warming. The state senator from south-central Pennsylvania, who would become the Republican nominee for governor the following month, told his supporters he wanted to pull the state out of a program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, calling it “nonsense” that human activity could significantly alter the earth’s climate. A connection between burning fossil fuels and global warming? Merely a “theory,” Mastriano said, based on “pop science.”
“Heck, the weatherman can’t get the weather right 24 hours out,” he said. As supporting evidence, Mastriano referred to an event he said he attended in Washington, D.C., in about 1970 when he was a Cub Scout. Environmentalists there had been warning that when the world’s population reached 1 billion, he recalled, there would be a major catastrophe. “That was the outrage and fear back then,” Mastriano said. “There was no global catastrophe when we reached 1 billion. … They talked about it like it was fact, like with climate change.” The anecdote, of course, makes little sense, not least because the world population at that time was already an estimated 3.7 billion.
The video has since disappeared from Mastriano’s Facebook campaign page. In the past three months alone, more than a dozen other videos have also been deleted. The removed videos include freewheeling discussions in which Mastriano predicts that this November’s election will be marred by Democratic voter fraud; accuses Republicans who don’t support him of looking down on veterans; and calls the fight against abortion “the most important issue of our lifetime.” This has become somewhat of a pattern for Mastriano, 58, a retired Army colonel who bills himself as a plainspoken populist. He communicates directly with voters online, yet sometimes covers his tracks.
Before this latest batch of deletions, Mastriano removed potentially problematic or controversial posts, including tweets promoting the Qanon conspiracy theory, as well as videos in which he called local faith leaders “cowards”; acknowledged his covid diagnosis while visiting the White House; and feuded with GOP lawmakers in Harrisburg. Mastriano’s Senate website has also been scrubbed of a plan he pitched during the early days of the pandemic to lift medical privacy restrictions so the government could disclose the names and locations of people infected with covid-19. Videos have been deleted from his official Senate Facebook page, as well.
