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Yeah, I guess that environmental prediction biz is “sustainable” – turn around and there’s yet another growing up.  Good thing too – they seem to be dying as well.  Like this one (emphasis mine):

Great Lakes Go from ‘Climate Change-Induced’ Low Water Levels to Record Highs in 3 Years

Between 2010 and 2013 residents of the states surrounding the Great Lakes were told that climate change was permanently altering their environment and the record low water levels being recorded in the lakes may be the new normal. But now, only three years later, news reports are worried about beach erosion because the lakes have rebounded to record high levels of water.

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“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Given what I wrote here, I thought this was interesting as the First Amendment only talks about speech – with no modifier (e.g., hate, scornful, loving, political) in front of it; any kind of speech is speech:

Libertarian presidential candidate Darryl Perry has refused to file campaign paperwork with the Federal Election Commission because he believes there is no constitutional reason for the agency to exist.  “There shouldn’t be a federal agency that oversees campaign finance,” Perry told TheBlaze in an interview Tuesday.

Remember, it isn’t about the money, it is about the ability to exercise your Right to Free Speech in the political realm.  Which generally means

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Declaration of Independence:  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

The NH Constitution says it much better: [Art.] 2. [Natural Rights.] All men have certain natural, essential, and inherent rights – among which are, the enjoying and defending life and liberty; acquiring, possessing, and protecting, property; and, in a word, of seeking and obtaining happiness. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by this state on account of race, creed, color, sex or national origin.

Economic Fascism (or Corporatism / Industrial Policy): while private ownership is permitted, Govt laws and regulations effectively “owns” and controls businesses.

US Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D/Socialist/Fascist-NH) shows that Fascist side of her (reformatted, emphasis mine):

Shaheen hits Trump on minimum wage views

New Hampshire’s senior senator led one of Hillary Clinton’s opening attacks on Donald Trump, based on the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s recent comments about scrapping the federal minimum wage. U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-NH, said abolishing the federal minimum wage would pull the rug out from under an estimated 47,000 Granite Staters who rely on the base hourly wage.

Really?

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Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

[Art.] 22. [Free Speech; Liberty of the Press.] Free speech and liberty of the press are essential to the security of freedom in a state: They ought, therefore, to be inviolably preserved. (NH Constitution)

…for crafting this Editorial (reformatted, emphasis mine).

Year-round sunlight: Sanborn bill is a great start

The New Hampshire House can take a small but important step today toward improving the state’s campaign finance laws. Under current law, political committees raise and spend campaign cash in complete darkness for more than a year and a half out of every two-year election cycle. From November of one election year until June two years later, they don’t have to file a single public report on their activities. Sen. Andy Sanborn has mustered a bipartisan coalition to bring some light into the darkness, and the House Election Law Committee is unanimously recommending passage of his bill.

Complete editorial after the jump but I did leave a comment:

Right – government putting MORE restriction on “abridging the freedom of speech”. Political speech is just speech and political speech was specifically thought of when the First Amendment was written. As much as a Libertarian as he might be, Andy should know better than to put on a heavier govt harness on us all for simply speaking our minds and making our opinions known in the political sphere. Each time they do this, the message sent is “shut plebes” because they make it harder and more onerous to “freely speak”. This is nothing more than the “Protect The Incumbents from People Speaking Against Them” Act.

Look around at both the State and Federal levels and the strictures

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So Grant Bosse, Editorial Editor for the Union Leader, first pens an editorial that a perfectly good purpose of Government is to restrict the common man’s ability to exercise his Right to Free Speech in the political realm.  Here, he slaps the hand of Government when someone demands information from Government (reformatted, emphasis mine) but it was a commenter that draws my ire:

Open government in the iPhone era
EDITORIAL

Union Leader columnist Mark Hayward is a good reporter. He’s also frugal.  Rather than pay a $20 fee for photocopies of two accident reports, Hayward snapped a picture of the documents with his cell phone. Manchester police charged him $20 anyway. It’s the second time in six months Hayward has been improperly charged for photographing public records.

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“you have to have strong women in order to deal with masculine men“

Camilla Paglia has the right of it.  Sure, Ezra describes the lay of the University land, but what is the root cause? A root cause?

Obviously, we’re in a time now where parenting is in crisis, I would think. The reason we have all these whiny, super-sensitive girls on campus that’ll run shrieking at the slightest thing that offends their ears or drag mattresses onto the stage at commencement exercises, the reason we have that is because the parents have not prepared them for real life. In other words, they’ve been raised in this bourgeois, pampered cocoon, so I think there’s been a tremendous failure of parenting…

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If once, why not twice (emphasis mine)?

[Today’s college students] have no sense of the great patterns of world history, the rise and fall of civilisations like Babylon and Rome that became very sexually tolerant, and then fell. If you’ve had no exposure to that, you can honestly believe that ‘There is progress all around us and we are moving to an ideal state of culture, where we all hold hands and everyone is accepted for what they are … and the environment will be pure…’ – a magical utopian view that we are marching to perfection. And the sign of this progress is toleration – of the educated class – for homosexuality, or for changing gender, or whatever.

To me it’s a sign of the opposite, it’s symptomatic of a civilisation just before it falls: ‘we’ are very tolerant, not passionate, but there are bands of vandals and destroyers circling around the edge of our civilisation who will bring it down.

The Left continues its march of “IT’S ALL ABOUT

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And DANGEROUSLY wrong to boot.  At Steve’s post “Has Nashua Democrat Rep. Ken Gidge Found a Magic Money Tree?“, Horrigan The Uber-Progressive decided to haul out that old Leftism meme that Government can’t be wrong because WE ARE THE GOVERNMENT:

The United States of America is a republic: we ARE the government. I am not saying the government is perfect, I am not saying it’s not too big, but it’s not some alien enemy force.

Usually Horrigan’s comments are totally off-topic and irrelevant but here he brings up a totally falsity (to coin a word) similar to the Democrat “Government is that thing we all belong to” (and to many of us on the right, it confirms what the Left has done with Govt – it now owns us with no choices).  We ARE the government has that same whiff of collectivism with a dash of “because we ARE, we cannot be wrong, can we?”

The problem, is that it is a totally false premise: we are NOT the Government and nor did the Founders ever have this as a vision.  And he laid in the rebuttal to his argument in his own comment.

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In Iceland, some 67 percent of babies are born to parents who are not married. A combination of generous social programs and a secular society have all but made nuptials obsolete—while giving rise to a unique culture of independent motherhood.

Glenn at Instapundit just threw that up there without comment but I just can’t resist.

Years ago, I offered to expand my home so as to have my Mom and step-dad move in with us and I will admit that there self-interest there – I got tired of getting the 3am phone call of “Eldon is hardly breathing again!” (he had COPD).  It was always “Mom, did you call 911?” answered by “No, I called you first”.  While I generally beat the ambulance, I felt it would be more effective for them to be closer (er, we lived in the same town and she was only 10 minutes away). But the pushback was always

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Bosse is the Editorial Editor at the UL and decided to both call out UNH students, who are in serious knowledge deficit, and ridicule them.  Seriously, has secondary education quality dropped so low that they can’t even do the intellectual equivalent of just playing tic-tac-toe and figure out “if you do this, how does it affect this other thing?”.  This caught my eye:

Do they have the courage of their own convictions? Are they willing to divest from fossil fuels themselves?

They should refuse to ride in gasoline-powered cars, or electric vehicles recharged by a grid powered by coal and natural gas. They should put down their phones and tablets made with components shipped from around the world in bulky freighters. They should do their homework by candlelight, using pen and paper. And when they sit at their fancy electric dining table, and eat their food grown hundreds and thousands of miles away, they should realize they too are profiting from the fossil fuel industry.

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“The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.”  – President Obama, Inauguration (2009)

What POSSIBLY go wrong? I guess the Ban The Box activists are going to be proud of this – the real question is whether or not they are willing to personally take responsibility, fiscally or otherwise, if what a lot of us thinking, happens:

FEDS HIRED A CREDIT CARD FRAUD FELON FRESH OUT OF PRISON, NOW HE RUNS A BIG VA PURCHASING UNIT: Trust me, friends, the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Luke Rosiak did not make up this story that captures pretty much everything that is wrong with the Department of Veterans Affairs (and probably the federal bureaucracy in general as well).

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