Shaheen has made some noise about conflicts of interest, but she has plenty of her own. 

Most obviously, she’s claiming to be fighting for middle class families, but all of her policies , particularly her pandering on energy policy, will remove massive amounts of wealth from of the economy just to give it to the government.  (Hiding behind words like taking profits or cutting funding is a smoke screen.  As we shall see she is in favor of all kinds of unnecessry funding.)  But without private profits we have no jobs.  Without jobs we become slaves to the federal welfare state she favors.  So how can she be for the middle class when all her plans will remove not just income potential, but the freedom of choice from the people she claims to be helping. (see here, here, here, here,….etc.)

Another conflict is her obsession with making government bigger which will, by default, enlarge government unions.   Jeanne gets plenty of campaign cash from Unions to support policies they favor, which would only add more government and more government employees to the Union rolls, all to be paid for by us.

Next up, Jeanne is a big favorite of trial lawyers, raking in heaps of cash from them.  And it is quite obvious that most of her “energy plans” (past present and future) will enrich lawyers from the state, government, and private and environmental groups, because she plans to use our tax dollars to put windmills all over our touristy New Hampshire landscape.   At $70,000 a piece (for windmills—the lawyers will cost us a lot more than that) you have to ask yourself who is best served by this plan, because it can’t be the taxpayers.  They get to pay whether we waste money on windmills or not.

Embryonic stem-cell research would get a 12 Billion dollar raise according to candidate Shaheen, tripling the budget of the government run National Science Foundation (NSF).  Stem cell research gets plenty of private funding already and adult Stem cell research has produced over 70 treatments while Embryonic Research has produced none.  The total failure of Embryonic Research should mark it for a  decreasing role at the NSF so why give them 12 billion more per year for no obviously good reason?  Continuing Embryonic stem cell research furthers the public perception that a human embryo is little more than laboratory tissue suitable for experimentation.  12 Billion (that’s $87,000 per year for every human in New Hampshire that survived past the Embryonic stage) buys a lot of perception, but would be much better served if left in the pockets of private citizens and industries who could then invest it themselves in things with a proven track record for success.   So where’s the conflict?  Jeanne Shaheen got half a million in cash from the abortion lobby during her 2006 run, and should do equally well this time around.  The abortion lobby stands to gain significantly from any increased public perception that takes the morality issue out of the debate.  A massive tax payer funded federal mandate to make embryo’s look more like a virus than a potential person would go a long way to taking the wind out of the Pro-life argument with people who are on still on the fence.

These policy positions have no short or long term benefit to New Hampshire or the taxpaying public in general but would each enrich the interests of groups who invest very heavily in Jeanne’s campaign.    Who does Ms. Shaheen really want to serve?  So far it looks like Unions, Trial Lawyers, and the Abortion Lobby.