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I seem to be using the Concord Monitor as a foil more and more as of late. Guesses are, they’re fairly easy to puncture, like yesterday. They ran a piece from Bloomberg that seemed to plead for the parent’s right to sue Remington.  Remington is the parent company of Bushmaster Firearms which made the semi-automatic rifle that Adam Lanza used to kill school-children AFTER he murdered his mother to gain access to her guns. The parents sued Remington previously but PLCAA (Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act) denied their suit.

The parents’ money-grubbing ambulance-chasing lawyer, however, thinks he can spend their money to gain fame for himself with a “cutesie” line of attack. What caught my eye were these comments by the parents’ lawyer.

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The 17th Amendment was that other cruddy idea (the other being the establishment of a national income tax) by Progressive Socialists at the beginning of the last century of no longer having the various State Legislative branches elect Senators to send to Washington to represent the States’ concerns and issues in our Federal system. Their end goal is to end our Representative form of government. To replace it with the type of Government that our Founders knew to fail every time – a direct democracy – which would give them the platform to change America forever.

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SHOT: Venezuela finally admits it: The socialist country is bankrupt

Venezuela, given the odd detail of counterclaims, has finally admitted that it cannot pay back the debt it has. That is, the country is bankrupt. It’s worth leaving aside exactly what happens next in the halls of banking and asking how this all came to be? The answer being that they entirely wrecked the economy of the country with the world’s largest oil reserves. This happened not because the oil price fell, the problems started and were evident long before that.

They tried to create a non-market economy, and non-market economies simply do not work. For things just cost what they cost, something that we cannot sweep away in the pursuit of social or economic equality nor for any other reason……And in Venezuela, the Bolivarian socialists decided that prices were just made up numbers that could be assigned at near random. This does not, to put it mildly, work.

CHASER: Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher

The Problem with Socialism is that you eventually run out of Other People’s Money”.

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A lady by the name of Jilletta Jarvis is running for Governor of NH and had a Letter to the Editor printed in the Concord Monitor (I do have to give credit to our local Pravda in doing so for a person completely antithetical to their political stances).  In it I read no real surprises – I am quite familiar with most of the Libertarian philosophy and agree with a lot of it, mostly, and some not at all.

I’ve copied the full Letter after the jump if you are so inclined (go ahead, you know you want to!).  What was surprising was not its content but with the vehemence those commenters I would place in the Statist / Democrat / Progressive / Socialist / Communitarian side of the aisle with which they ripped into her for absolutely no reason and no evidence with which to back up their vitriol.  Consider them kneejerk reactions with spikes attached to their knees; how DARE anyone just want to be left alone and participate in “group” activities only when they wish to!

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…and steal their time from them instead!  I get a lot of scammers trying to get my info or trying to give me LOTS of money.  Yeah, sure thing about that last bit – all they want is your bank account info.  Well, somebody with a quirky sense of humor has a great way to get back at all those “Nigerian Princes”:

WASTE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN: Somebody wrote an email bot to waste scammers’ time.

Introducing Re:scam – an artificially intelligent email bot made to reply to scam emails. Re:scam wastes scammers time with a never-ending series of questions and anecdotes so that scammers have less time to pursue real people.

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It’s about time that the DC Republican Congresstwits got a bit smarter! Reformated, emphasis mine:

 Senate GOP Tax Plan to Include Repeal of Health Law Individual Mandate

GOP leaders have been cautious about bogging down the tax bill with controversial health-care provisions, but have been suggesting they could include the repeal because it would generate revenue that could be used to pay for tax cuts elsewhere. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) said it would be part of the tax bill. “The Senate Finance Committee has decided to include that,” Mr. McConnell said.

Sen. John Thune (R., S.D.), a member of the Senate Finance Committee, said Republicans intend to use the savings generated by repealing the individual mandate to lower taxes for middle-income households. “It’ll be distributed in the form of middle-income tax relief,” he said.

…“It’s been whipped,” Mr. Thune said, referring to the process of rounding up and counting votes.

While they’re at it, get rid of the employee mandate as well. Between those two, Obamacare will

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Well, it would be one way to not have to go begging for money again, right?  A while ago, we heard that the Belknap County Sheriff’s office was begging additional monies from the towns that it was serving for dispatch services (emphasis mine, reformatted):

TOWNS PROTEST BELKNAP COUNTY IDEA TO ASSESS FEES FOR DISPATCH SERVICE

As Belknap County considers assessing a fee to the towns for which it provides police dispatch services, the towns are pushing back, particularly when it comes to calls for a total elimination of the service. Belknap County Sheriff Michael Moyer said there’s “no fact to the rumor that it’ll be shut down completely,” but he said he is looking into charging a fee to the towns that rely on county dispatch. “A lot of counties do charge,” he said.
The sheriff was quick to add that he believes the best option is the status quo, where county taxes pay for the dispatch service.

Ayup.  If you can’t get it one way (taxes), then charge it. 

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I am still shaking my head over this piece in the Union Leader – Jeanne Shaheen agrees with me??? Emphasis mine, reformatted:

A sweet idea: Shaheen attacks sugar subsidies

Give Sen. Jeanne Shaheen points for persistence. Her Senate colleagues have shown little appetite for eliminating subsidies to the sugar industry, but she keeps trying.  Shaheen has once again joined with Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey to introduce legislation cutting back the complicated and costly federal programs that not only drain the federal treasury, but provide incentives to pump high fructose corn syrup into our food.

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No, not US Senator Diane Feinstein (who famously said),

“If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States, for an outright ban, picking up [every gun]… … Mr. and Mrs. America, turn ‘em all in. I would have done that.”

This time, however, it is Progressive Boston Globe columnist David Scharfenberg who openly and plainly says what most Statist Democrats tiptoe up to but never jump into the deep end (full piece after the jump). 

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It’s their own fault and they’ve done it to themselves.  What’s worse, they hate the idea of being held accountable, in ANY way, for reducing their taxpayers to being just ATM machines.  In that they are doing a great job because it’s not like they are solving their real problems (e.g., wanting to spend $60 Billion on a high speed choo-choo to nowhere when they can’t even keep their road or education systems in decent shapes).

On another note, as the Republicans continue on with tax reform (yeah, let’s see if these Congressional nitwits can get ANYthing done), has anyone noticed how often they say that they can’t do this, or can’t do that, or say this is the ONLY way we can do it because we can’t enlarge the national debt (their own rules say by more than $1.5 Trillion)?

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SHOT:

There has been no change in the current policy regarding the anthem. The agenda will be a continuation of how to make progress on the important social issues that players have vocalized. Everyone who is part of our NFL community has a tremendous respect for our country, our flag, our anthem and our military, and we are coming together to deal with these issues in a civil and constructive way (NFL).

CHASER:

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