The One-Trick Tax-And-Spend Donkey By Any Other Name…

The New Hampshire democrats have a name for their new 501(c)(4) non-profit.  It’s the July Fourth Forum. What, “We just lost The Whole Damn State” was already taken?

As with most things named by democrats it presents a notion diametrically opposite its true intention.  We see this same naming tactic in their legislation  (at least in DC).  Their bills always have the words American, Freedom, Rights, Choice, or Affordable in the name, usually including two or more at any given time.  This is meant to serves as a warning to anyone who dares gaze upon the hundreds of thousands of words that follow the name of their bill–not that want you to do that.   If allowed to become law it will hurt Americans, deny freedoms, infringe rights, cost a fortune and leave you with whatever choice the government has decided is best for you and few if any other.

So the only word in any name of any Democrat bill that has any hope of being remotely accurate must be the word “Act.”  As in, that American-Freedom-Rights-and choice-stuff  is all just an act.

Which brings us back to Kathy Sullivan’s ‘”July Fourth Forum.”  It’s supposed to be a progressive and pragmatic  advocacy group with a policy arm attached.  Where do I begin?  The very juxtaposition of the words progressive and pragmatic are an oxymoron because nothing about socialism–that’s what progressivism is silly Rabbit–ever worked.   The term left-wing think tank, the policy arm–or maybe it’s just a policy thumb–is only functionally accurate as a meaningful and relevant term for democrats if you call it “Tank Think.”   And Sullivan’s choice of July Fourth Forum is simply meant to hide its real mission from the deluded or inattentive–the destruction of everything that the people who signed the actual  declaration of Independence during that historic time wanted or hoped for from their nation.  So any claims at wanting to protect our constitution outside of oppressive food legislation focused on the health and well-being of the average human colon–probably with the words American, Freedom, Rights, Choice  or affordable in its title–is a grotesque test of your bullsh*t sensor.

This is a one-trick party.  Tax and spend.  Nothing they do can be accomplished without spending first, taxing you after, and doing it with slews of regulations to protect the taxpayers “investment,”  the way a mugger defends his take.  They don’t trust you,  and never will.  But as long as they need you as willing dupes to elect them into office, hey will tell you anything to gain your confidence even if the best they can do is convince you they are the lesser evil.

So while we welcome the July Fourth Forum into the free market of political speech because that is what we do on the right, mark my words.  You wont hear anything new,  nor hear it from anyone new, you will just get more of it, more often, which it exactly the point.  July Fourth Forum is not here to protect your constitution, it is here to convince you of its other meaning.  The one where the state does what it thinks is best and you sit back quietly and pay for it.

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No Pardon, Just early release

Image source: postwortyThe New Hampshire Executive Council voted to cut the sentence of Ward Bird short, but did not go so far as to issue a pardon.  Bird spent 77 days in jail for criminal threatening–for waving or brandishing a handgun at a trespasser on his property back in 2006.

Ward will retain the felony conviction according to WMUR which means Bird will no longer be able to own a gun.

As far as we know the trespasser who was frightened off his property can own all the guns she likes.

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NH Journal Issues A Correction

NH Journal (NHJ) has published a correction to a story in which it claimed that Skip Murphy from GraniteGrok was slated to assume the roll of Communications director of the NH-GOP if Jack Kimball won the chairmanship.   This set in motion a series of awkward events in the days before the vote for NH-GOP chairman that failed to change Kimball’s momentum.

NHJ admits after the fact that they should have sought confirmation before publication.

NH Journal ran a story last week stating blogger Skip Murphy “is slated to assume the role of Communications Director of the Republican State Committee” if Jack Kimball were to win the Chairmanship of the Republican State Committee. Both Kimball and Murphy strongly denied the suggestion and we published the Kimball campaign’s remarks claiming the story was untrue. We take both men at their word and regret not seeking their comment before publication.

We all appreciate the correction.   With any luck this kind of thing can be avoided in the future.

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Want Cheap Health Insurance? Support HB 241 – And Hey! It’s Also A Jobs Bill

Iage: Insurancepersonalhealt.com HB 241  is a bill everyone needs to pay attention to if for no other reason than that it will piss off some progressives and liberals, and aggravate the behemoths who have monopolized New Hampshire’s health insurance market for years thanks to progressives and liberals like Jeanne Shaheen.

If passed HB241 will allow a willing consumer and willing insurance carrier to contract on mutually agreeable terms for individual or group health insurance which is not subject to regulation by the (state) insurance commissioner, insurance mandates, or administrative consumer protection law.

Put simply, individuals or groups in New Hampshire would be able to buy health insurance from any provider anywhere (that’s anywhere) on whatever terms they can both agree on and the Insurance commissioner cannot stop you.

So how many insurers might want to get a piece of that action? And what would they be willing to offer given that they could customize plans for you and your needs without the cost burden of political and bureaucratic mandates to provide for things you neither need or want?

The addition of competition would make this kind of insurance cheaper and easier to buy than anywhere else.   Getting a personal portable plan could become a reality.  And if your situation changes, or you decide you are unhappy with the rates down the road, odds are good there are be dozens of alternatives for you to consider.

With those kinds of benefits, businesses small and large would consider New Hampshire as a place to set up shop.  That means jobs.  It also means commerce and revenue without more taxes.

So who would object to an unfettered free market for health insurance?  People with something to lose.  Big Insurers like Anthem and Harvard Pilgrim who I am told currently control 50% and 30% respectively of all in-State Health Insurance policies and the premiums.  They are not going to want you to take your dollars anywhere else and they certainly do not want to have to change how they do business to keep yours.

What should be more interesting is that we can expect plenty of democrats to object to it as well which seems odd.  This is an opportunity to put their boots on the necks of big business and big insurance at the same time, while standing up for the poor helpless consumer.  Wait.  That only works when it is the boot of a massively inefficient, cost-increasing bureaucracy.  The progressives  have supported the monopolization of the market in the state, and the takeover of it by the federal government.  They are not going to just invite a free market experiment in cost reduction and increased access that could blow holes in their corporate socialist model of a few controlling the many.

Next thing you know nurse practitioners might be opening clinics all over the state to take advantage of these streamlined bargain insurers and even cash only customers.  That kind of rampant low cost access to health care–without government–makes their eyes boil.  (Do we have a bill for that yet, by the way? The nurses not the boiling eyes.)

So we do need you to support the bill and if possible get to the hearing on Thursday.  It will be crowded with Insurance lobbyists or “experts,” and left wing cry babies who don’t want to see Jeanne Shaheen’s liberal legacy of scaring off competition ruined. Oh, and the insurance commissioner will probably be there as well.  They won’t like giving up that kind of control to you “people.”

So you aggravate a state bureaucrat, put it to a couple of huge insurance companies, who also happen to be beneficiaries of corporate-socialism,  while making health insurance cheaper and more flexible.  And it will actually create jobs in places other than government bureaucracies and big insurance companies.  Democrats will hate it.

So who has the popcorn?

 

HB 241

Docket (Hearing 2/3/11 LOB room 302 at 1:15pm)

Posted in Democrats, Health Care, Local NH Politics, New Hampshire News, Republicans | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Got Civility? The “Beheading Sarah Palin” Edition

Got%20Civility.jpg

The most recent rhetorical left-wing bridge to nowhere comes courtesy of a wide-brush narrative that swept across the progressive talking points the way “teenage girls falling in love with bad-boy vampires” recently consumed the media-verse.  Everyone and everything had to be about conflicted yet overly moral, day-walking, cold-blooded bad-boys (daddy would never approve of) being fawned over by teenage girls in search a supernatural love connection. And so it is with emotional train wrecks running political parties, trying to emulate Stalin and Mao, as they tilt at a windmill named civility.

In the wake of the Tuscon Tragedy the democrats and their media propagandists went “Twilight” with a two-tined pitchfork of populism.  (Let’s call the tines team Jacob, and team Edward.)  One tine was to poke the Republicans as the voice responsible for the violence.  The other was to give their demoralized base a chance to wear that “curb opposition speech/ban guns” prom dress they all have in their closets but that just never seems to go out of style.  Together they would try to use hate speech about speech to date -ape the second amendment in the back seat of a convertible somewhere outside the dance hall.

But as with most left wing narratives this was more projection to disguise their own complicity.  The left is chock full of violent musings they can’t seem to keep a lid on, one of which just made an appearance at a Children Theater in Missoula, Montana.

The civility narrative that preceded the “Missoula Massacre” was unleashed like some plague spread via-twitter from beneath the White House, and was echoed from the President and all progressive points beneath.  It was a call for civility, to end the hateful rhetoric, made more often than an obsessive compulsive aunt checks the locks on the doors and windows before bedtime. But like every past effort to promote this narrative the progressives were only talking about their opponents being civil, which is what makes it so much fun to be a blogger.

Within days the left was being the left, calling for the casual verbal or physical abuse of Republicans or any conscientious objector who would not get on board the “civility express to nowhere.”

Progressive calls for civility are no different than their calls for bi-partisanship, cutting spending, keeping lobbyists out of the White House, Pay-go, or even the US constitution; there are exceptions–those things were never meant to limit democrats.

So it should come as no surprise that at a Children’s theater performance of “The Mikado”  in Missoula Montana, the “grown ups” modified the original script to include a reference to beheading former Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin.  A letter writer to the Missoulian commented that…

Now, I realize you play to a mostly liberal audience in Missoula and so, I am sure, felt comfortable in your calling for the beheading of Sarah Palin. I am painfully aware that most in the audience tittered with laughter and clapped because “no one would miss her” but there were some in your audience who took great offense to this “uncivil tone” about another human being.

I like the part about the tittering with laughter from a mostly liberal audience.   And no, I am not going to ask the New Hampshire Democrat Party to denounce it or any other democrat to do so–they would just be lying anyway.  Besides, nothing that happens in Missoula Montana should have any political traction in New Hampshire…unless of course the play called for the beheading of Nancy Pelosi for example, in something of a more ‘conservative’ venue.

Imagine a report about conservatives giggling at the beheading of Nancy Pelosi?  It would have the progressives screeching like banshees.   Just knowing that tells us something most of us already know about who they are.  But how did they get that way?  And what is the story behind the added line in the production because the two are connected. Connected to who liberals are, and connected to the narrative.

No one just throws together a play in a few days.  There are usually weeks or months of auditions, readings, rehearsals, set construction, so you have to wonder…was the line about beheading Palin added to the script before the Tuscon shootings or did they add it after?  And does either circumstance make them more or less the raging violent, clueless, hate-mongering hypocrites they continue to show themselves to be?

Teachers, instructors, professionals and involved parents (you know grown-ups), who are rank and file liberals–not professional talking heads, politicians or political communications cranks who make their living off this kind of duplicitous nonsense–probably ran this production.  And these are people who all agreed to add the line in or to leave it in.

So from the script editor to the producer and director, to the production staff down to the actors who had to read the lines more than once before the show even went on, no one thought they should take that line out? No one thought it was…uncivil?

What does this say about the everyday liberal-progressive?

Does choosing to be a liberal just equip you with this kind of ‘pre-programmed’  hypocrisy?  Does it just come with the DNC membership or is something you “pick up” somewhere along the way?  Or is this simply the kind of people this political party attracts?

Picking it up along the way would mean that some angry or violent liberal hate speech, ‘influenced’ these people to a degree that made it business as usual to make beheading Sarah Palin a giggle line at the children’s theater, even in the absence of the Tuscon tragedy.  But just weeks after the civility narrative went viral the line was either added or left in and no one in the production noticed?

So is this is just who these people are; indifferent to their own hostility and hypocrisy, even at the middle-class white bread, soccer mom level?  And if it is not a feature of their ideology by default, then who on the left is intentionally training them to be that way?

Source: Examiner.com

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Not Afraid of Change

I am fooling around with the look of this page.  It’s not quite right yet but it is a bit cleaner and more efficient.  Do not be surprised if you drop by an it has changed again.

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Would You Rather Just Play Politics?

Yesterday NHBR.com (New Hampshire Business Review) included GraniteGrok in its content.  One of it’s staff writers or editors (there is no by-line) commented on how the GOP establishment was not the only one taking shots from their right.  The Union leader, NH Journal, and Red Hampshire–which the  author refers to as “those in the GOP media world”–are now in the sights of GraniteGrok and their sometimes paranoid always angry Groksters.

The air-raid siren has been sounded so you less conservative, less liberty minded Republicans had best rouse the troops and scramble the jets or the also “sometimes paranoid and angry” readers of GraniteGrok are going to split the party in two.

So goes the tone of the NHBR.com piece.  So what does it really say?

It says they are biased, short-sighted, and uncomfortable with the facts.

NH Journal came under attack for fabricating a story and passing it off as news to skewer Jack Kimball late in the race.  Think Dan Rather and Memogate. Making up news to mislead or frighten.

One anonymous blogger at Red Hampshire came under attack for both being anonymous and taking the NHJ lie and agitating it even after it had been contradicted.  Norris Cotton, who could be working for NHJ, Bergeron, or Ray Buckley for all we know, continued bashing the false story on Red Hampshire and the players around it until one story was actually pulled. (For the record I do not advocate pulling any story unless it is so violent or vulgar it cannot be edited into something tolerable–let them swing on their own words is my motto.)

The union leader was simply using its bully pulpit to question the candidate they opposed in the race, which is what GraniteGrok was doing, yet somehow we are the ones who are “sometimes paranoid and angry?”

Unfortunately for NHBR it is actually the other way around.  Moderate bomb throwers attacking from behind fake names and made up “inside scoops” passed off as legitimate news by paid political operatives are the actions of individuals who cannot find a way to use the truth to stay in power.  It is, in fact, one of the things people find most offensive about the political process and it was on full display from the moderate establishment in the NH-GOP chairman’s race.  NHBR is always entitled to their opinion, and that is certainly what this is, but suggesting that the party is about to split in two–which his how they close their comments–is the same kind of fear-mongering that failed to get Bergeron the brass ring.

The NHBR piece does get two things right.  Yes, there were air-raid sirens, and yes someone is paranoid and angry, but it is not the conservative/libertarians, not at GraniteGrok, nor their readers.  It is the entrenched Republicans who refuse to acknowledge that the grass roots and TEA party folks learned what the democrats already new, copied it, added to it, and executed it.  And are now reaping the rewards of their efforts.  They have a better network, are more agile, and as much or more educated about the issues and how best to respond to changes in the political environment.

That is why the Republicans took so many more seats in the Legislature.  It is how they won the Speakers chair.  And that is why they won the chairmanship of the state party.  And guess what?  One of the guys at the fore-front of that movement is now pulling the levers as the Party chairman.

So I think the sometimes paranoid and angry Republicans who have been programmed to fear their own platform, who fear standing up to the one-sided political correctness of the democrats who use hypocrisy to bludgeon weak willed conservatives into silence, should just say thank you, get on board, and reap both the policy rewards of regaining control of state government, and the logistical advantages of a grass roots organizational structure that can compete with and even defeat the progressives in New Hampshire.

Or would you rather just play politics?

 

Picture from: babyblueonline

Cross Posted

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Pic-O-The Day Redux (WTF?)


WTF.jpgInspired by this mornings Picture of the Day (over at GraniteGrok.com) the NH Tenth Amendment Center’s Dan Kanna, one of our on-air guests from last Saturday’s GrokTalk! at the GOP committee meeting, took to the digital palette and crafted a new and improved version for us.

We here at the Grok encourage this kind of synergy, and are pleased to post it for your viewing enjoyment.

For those who missed it, WTF is Obama’s ‘Win The Future’ presented in acronym format, thanks to Former Governor Sarah Palin, combined with the Sputnik moment, using a creative hammer and sickle ‘question mark’ to bring it all together.

We would like to thank americanglob.com for the original background, myself for the addition of Sputnik, and once more to Dan for making it all work in a way that tells it like it really is.  WTF?

Posted in Culture, Democrats, Humor?, National Politics & Policy, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A Modest (Budget Cutting) Proposal

Public Sector Unions SuckThere are plenty of towns like mine trying to figure out where they can cut costs.  But every conversation seems to end at cutting education or safety services.  While I find it hard to believe that there is nothing else in a budget you can trim, I think I have come up with a reasonable compromise (if not just for the sake of our own rhetorical amusement) that can cut at least a little bit of money from the budget without affecting staffing or resources.

Any teacher, support staff, officer, firefighter or public employee who currently pays union dues will have the total amount of dues paid calculated and that amount removed from their respective department budgets (aka:paychecks).  This will do the one thing no one ever seems willing to do; include the unions in the burden of cost cutting.

The Unions are always in a “partnership” with the town and the residents when it comes to increasing labor and administrative costs but seem to avoid bearing any of that burden when the economy reduces the values of residents homes, eliminates taxpayer jobs, or cuts their wages.  These things make it harder for them to meet current or rising town budgets bloated by unions and things like Evergreen laws, which give Labor groups no incentive to bargain at all.

In fact, the only way to get at the union at all is to fire people.  But we don’t want to fire people, that would hurt services or put the children’s future at risk.  Isn’t that right?  So instead we should just cut everyone’s pay, knowing that the hard working, dedicated and caring public Union employees can and will take one for the team because this is not about the capitalsit pursuit of wealth before all things, it is about the quality services they provide to the community.

It’s about the children.

And consider the value.  Public employees pay taxes (with our taxes) so they too share in the burden but with this altruistic leap that value goes further. When someone on the public payroll takes a pay cut it reduces that employees tax burden while reducing their taxes, the town budget, and frees up much needed capital that goes back into the community or can be allocated for other important projects or purchases.  It’s a win-win for everyone.

And rather than force the taxpayers and their elected officials to bargain with the bargaining group about budgets and wages and benefits, oh my! let the employees bargain with their unions over the burden of paying union dues to the unions, who are really just a big, greedy, selfish business getting rich on the backs of their members.

Yes, their are legislative hurdles but let me dream.  Because it is time to engage the relationship where taxpayers fund unions through their town employees only to have the union mug them in a dark alley to get even more money.  So pay-cut time.  If they don’t like it they can quit.  In this economy, there are literally hundreds of thousands of people across the country to replace them. Qualified people who will do their job for less than we are paying now.  They’d be happy just to have a job.

Cross Posted

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Guns vs Progressives


Gun%20Free%20Zone%20Poll.gifAfter 12 more hours the Londonderry News on-line polling percentages tell the same story.  People who vote on polls at the Londonderry news would (so far) overwhelmingly allow their fourth grader into the New Hampshire State House even though it is not a Gun Free Zone.

For those reading this from  police states like Massachusetts, New York or New Jersey…Venezuela, Cuba and so on, you might be asking what the hell am I talking about?  Allow me to review.

In New Hampshire you can carry a firearm openly just about anywhere.  You may also carry concealed and or in your vehicle with a permit at the very reasonable price of $10.00 for residents, renewable every four years, I believe.  You fill out a one page form, no fingerprints, no photos, just a few questions, which you submit to your town.

If you are not a convicted felon, domestic spouse abuser or drug user, and not certified as having a mental illness, odds are good you will get the license.

People who were raised in liberal bastions or who have not been adequately deprogrammed every day after returning home form the government run propaganda ministry (public school system) may be reading this with their mouths agape. Oh My God!  They all have GUNZZZ! (You can also add “What about the CHILDREN! at no additional cost.)

Fear-not brainwashed victims of a decades-long (not so secret) government “experiment” run by the media, entertainment, and Edu-cution industrial complex.  Despite being armed to the teeth, New Hampshire is consistently one of the safest states in the nation, and always has one of the highest quality of life rating. (Liberals will tell you there is no connection.)

To the lefts credit, we did very briefly have a gun ban in the state house in the last year of their tenure in the majority, but a shift from a Democrat majority to a Republican super majority–and perhaps adding to the rules that the members of the House have the right to carry on the floor of the chamber as well–has set the democrats and their progressive leash-holders into a brow-furrowing, lip-spittling tizzy over the ban’s repeal.  So to appeal to the populace they have decided to pull out the template and use the ‘for the children’ narrative, in a PR campaign to make the Republicans appear to be putting ‘the children’ at risk.

Add the Arizona shooting, in a public space, filled with unarmed law abiding citizens and one certified armed lunatic, and the progressives think they have a winner.  Stories of armed conflict raging on the floor of the state house read like old-time western gun battles, with innocent women and children senselessly butchered by hot flying lead.

This narrative is of course written by unhinged left-wing moon-bats who all seem to have anger-management issues that might actually preclude them from getting a pistol permit, even in New Hampshire. They are the very people the fear most, so the best possible remedy must be to have fewer of them in Concord, but that may be a story for another time.

So this almost brings us full circle, with the democrat scaring people unnecessarily to advance their fringe gun agenda, and looking desperately for support from the education industrial complex for aid in their new Spring campaign- “its for the children.”

Of course the real risk to children in New Hampshire comes not from guns at the state house–or the fact that there are guns everywhere else you might take your kids except the School itself and maybe a federal building–but from progressives and an educational system cluttered up with left-wing addled union members directed by the NEA. These people exist to nothing more than build union power on the backs of taxpayers using children as the grease for their wheels.

So if we really wanted to ban something that would actually benefit the health and well being of students forget the guns and the state house, we should consider banning the Teachers Unions from the public schools.  That would actually make a difference.

 

Cross Posted

Posted in Culture, Democrats, Education, Local NH Politics, New Hampshire News, Progressives, Second Amendment, The Narrative | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment