Skip

Co-founder of GraniteGrok, my concern is around Individual Liberty and Freedom and how the Government is taking that away. As an evangelical Christian and Conservative with small "L" libertarian leanings, my fight is with Progressives forcing a collectivized, secular humanistic future upon us. As a TEA Party activist, citizen journalist, and pundit!, my goal is to use the New Media to advance the radical notions of America's Founders back into our culture.

The City of Laconia hasn’t learned that “Hope” is not a strategy

So once again, they go back to the Well of Hope.  This is all about an old time theatre which was very popular back in the day and then went down hill from there.  From vaudeville to a movie theater to a multiplex to being shuttered for now 18 years, the City decided that it was the one that could revive the fortunes of a downtown that they screwed up back last century with “Urban Renewal” – seldom have the storefronts been full for any kind of time.  Instead of learning the hard lessons of trying to be a developer (the stupid project call Lakes Region Business Park which STILL hasn’t sold out the lots after 25 or so years), they decided they could do it again.  Again, on Hope (reformatted, emphasis mine):

Hope springs eternal for theater revitalization

There is reason to be optimistic that a much-delayed project to restore the 104-year-old Colonial Theatre will finally get underway next year, Mayor Ed Engler said. The project, intended to breathe new life into downtown Laconia, was originally slated to begin Jan. 1, 2017.

So, already two years late. And it gets worse.

Read more

Quick Thought on Steve’s post: One of Life’s Certainties – New Hampshire Democrats Raise Taxes

Here. It’s what Democrats do.  Let me remind you of what they did before: they created an $800 million hole in the NH State budget.  They spent everything they could – and then more.  You see, Democrats are:

  • They believe in Government directed EVERYTHING – every aspect of our lives.  That takes a lot of your money to allow them to do that
  • While they are always screaming about separation of Church and State, they absolutely conflate the ideas of Government and Charity.

Why the second? they too lazy to get off their Collective butts to do the hard work of creating charities and then canvassing the public at large to fund them. Government means Ruling and Crowding out private charity. When they talk about Public / Private partnerships, you can always know who is in charge and who is about to be embraced and then absorbed (if not de jure, then de facto).  Government IS Charity and Charity means Government because ONLY from Government can good things flow, according to their actions. And once again, while they’re out putting their sense of a Collective dystopia Utopia in place, they’ll be setting the stage, once again, for broadbased taxes. Which means that…

Read more

Quotes

Notable Quote – Eammon Butler

Peter Berger’s The Capitalist Revolution (1986) shows how capitalism’s features – property, capital goods, free markets, automatic asset allocation and a predictable legal system – make it well suited to promote efficiency and progress. It offers a refuge from political power, unlike socialism, which has to be imposed by force – and the grander the vision, the … Read more

Blogline of the Day:

 If This Bill Passes, Possessing Pot in Texas Will Be Treated Less Harshly Than Distributing Straws in San Francisco. And this is what passes for public morality these days.  Seriously, straws are that evil? (H/T: Instapundit)

Quotes

Notable Quote – Thomas Sowell

Similarly, people who discuss raising the government-mandated minimum wage talk as if this would automatically mean having the lowest-paid workers’ income rise, from $10 an hour to $15 per hour, for example. In reality, for millions of inexperienced and unskilled young workers, it can mean that the wages they receive in fact fall from $10 an hour to zero, when … Read more

pile-of-money

Data Point – Income Inequality?

..I mean, are Americans really no better off than they were during the late 1970s? I hear that stated quite frequently. But this chart of real income growth tells a different story. Please note that all the lines have been headed higher. Also note the 79 percent gain for the bottom 20 percent in post-transfer/tax … Read more

Budgets

Tales from the BudComm – a technical correction

As I have said before, it turns out that “No doesn’t mean NO!” when it comes to SB2 Budget Committee deliberations because of a “technical flaw” in RSA 32 (and to a smaller degree, RSA 40).  While BudComms must deal at General Ledger line levels (we are prohibited from just “lopping off” or “adding to” the net bottom lines of municipal or school district budgets, after our presented budget(s) are accepted, modified, or denied by the Legislative Body (er, the voters in a given town), the Governing Bodies (Selectmen, School Boards) then submitted the finalized budgets to the NH Department of Revenue Administration (“DRA”) using forms known as “MS-Form”).  Essentially, they are “roll up” forms – instead of listing all of the individual line items, they simply show aggregated totals of the department budgets (e.g., the entire Police budget in a single line).

Once done, and the “Purpose” (very important word, that) has been set, the Governing Bodies are then able to transfer monies from one lower level GL account line item to another – including into those line items that BudComms may have zeroed out. So, I’m looking to crowdsource for a bit of help.

Read more

Democrat vs GOP heros

Actually, instead of Oprah, Farrell, and Kimmel, it should have been Marx, Gramsci, and the Frankfurt School. (H/T: Powerline)

A political point well made

This would be the race between incumbent (and re-elected) Ted Cruz and his Progressive / Socialist opponent, Robert Francis (“Beto”) O’Rourke.  The former being the real Hispanic and the latter being the Irishman deciding he would identify as a Hispanic because the means justifies the end in Progressive politics. You know, like lilly white Elizabeth … Read more

Quick Thought – another thing on the NH GOP’s “we’ve done this to ourselves” list

The Tennessee Star picked up something that I had written at the very end of this post:

If the NH Republican Party wants to win, and win Consistently, act like you believe in the Platform.  Speak like you do and at each and every turn.  Vote like you do at each and every opportunity.  And Legislate like there’s no tomorrow because two days ago was that “no more tomorrow” – and you blew it

It’s another way to combine two of my favorite memes”

Read more

800px-Gadsden_flag_large

Quick Thought – If it wasn’t for double standards, they’d have no…

Well, you know what the rest of that line is, right? I do agree with Jon that money is not the root of the NH GOP problems – but it is rather easy to point to as an overall symptom:

The silver lining is a timetable in which the membership of the Republican State Committee picks a new chairman in late January. Incumbent Wayne MacDonald of Derry took over a party last July that had $650 in the bank, $14,000 in bills and $48,000 in long-term debts.

“This isn’t any one person’s fault, especially Wayne, who was handed a bag of crap at the 11th hour,” posted Jon DiPietro, a conservative activist from Manchester. “But we had better get it fixed. There’s a presidential election in two years and it’s going to be here in the blink of an eye.”

Why, what is the problem here?  His immediate predecessor was Jeanne Forrester – and he was the Vice-Chair so he knew about the problem.  Now, the point of this post is not Wayne.  It IS about

Read more

Treehugger – working on the Trifecta today!

Like I said – great place to hone your debating skill and watch the Collectivist mind thought in process.  And Gaia worship….and did I say Collectivism? This one started off OK and then devolved into a quick shot of inanity:

Money can’t fix circadian rhythm problems. Sunlight and freedom can

Circadian rhythm lighting products won’t fix body clock problems.  Circadian rhythms have been making the news lately. Humans (and animals, and plants) have circadian rhythms — wake and sleep cycles programmed into every cell. These inner clocks tell us when to wake up, and when to fall asleep. And humans seem determined to ignore them, causing us all kinds of problems, from inability to concentrate to sleep problems to depression.

OK, fair enough – TMEW, among other things, suffers from Seasonal Affective Disorder when the days gets shorter so I know what the author, Ilana Strauss, is talking about and the first parts of her post are ok for the most part. However, the inanity comes when she says that employers should put up with basically anything that would “mitigate” the folks that share this disorder:

Read more

Treehugger time – I think you’ll know where this one went

“Tell me again why it should be legal for an employer to pay a wage that doesn’t cover living expenses? Freedom to exploit is freedom to kill, and it does.”

That was a comment, in part” from Annie Cass from a post “3 concepts from ‘Your Money or Your Life‘ that blew my mind” about thriftiness:

  1. Your hourly wage isn’t your true hourly wage.
  2. It’s crucial to track every single cent you earn, spend, and save.
  3. Savings are more than just savings.

Now, I don’t necessarily agree with some of the basic premises but it did have some good information.  But of course, Cass comes with the Marxist screed:

Read more

With crap like this, you know it’s only a Power play.

I think that my friend John Hawkin’s new site is going to be a PIA to feminists everywhere. Well, actually they bring it upon themselves – like with this!

Seriously, if you are going around thinking that EVERY man wearing sunglasses is oogling you with evil intent:

  • You’ve had too much caffeine – just put the cup down and step away from the coffeepot.
  • You flatter yourself WAY too much
  • Does this also mean your Dad is evil, too?

After all, as former President (and no longer the worst President in history) Jimmy Carter once said:

Read more

Quotes

Notable Quote – John Hawkins

A comment on the news that men were putting themselves between the shooter and the women at the Thousand Oaks, CA nightclub: Social justice warriors, feminists and self hating men love nothing better than to ramble on about “toxic masculinity,” by which they mean all masculinity….until something happens and they need a man to step … Read more

When Jeanne Shaheen talks about “bipartisanship”

Shaheen hopes election leads to bipartisanship Sen. Jeanne Shaheen said the Democrats’ victory to take control of the U.S. House of Representatives shows “there are a lot of people who have not been happy with what’s going on in Washington.”…Voters on Election Day also showed “what they want to see is a check on this … Read more

Veritas

Illegal Aliens voting – isn’t that Voter Fraud?

So why is this voting official just waving off the requirement that only citizens should vote? “Right. It doesn’t matter that he’s not a citizen?” the undercover journalist asked, adding, “I saw some mess on the internet that it’s not legal for him to vote because…” “No. Don’t pay any attention to that. Bring him up … Read more

Share to...
BufferCopyFlipboardHacker NewsLineLinkedInMastodonMessengerMixPinterestPrintRedditSMSTelegramTumblrVKWhatsAppXing