Skip

Under Chavez and his designated replacement Maduro, we can see EXACTLY what will happen if Progressives keep moving us further away from the Constitution and towards Das Kapital:

With Socialism Failing To Provide, Venezuelans Resort To Looting In Order To Survive

Right now, there is a lack of access to television, long distance phone service, and even basic needs like toilet paper. The government owes hundreds of millions of dollars to companies who deal with telecommunications with foreign firms. To make matters worse, the country is experiencing rolling blackouts due to energy shortages. What’s the third wave of this misery brought on by leftist economic policy? Looting. The people are starving, and supermarkets aren’t being stocked regularly. This has lead to widespread discontent and violence. With government failing to provide, the people are beginning to steal in order to survive (via PanAm Post):

On April 26, people took to the streets in three Venezuelan states, looting stores to find food.

And yet we are told that we are supposed to “evolve” towards Socialism, as instructed by Bernie and his ilk?  Just remember that if it was not for Engles and his being a successful Capitalist, Communism would never have been birthed (but proves it has always been parasitical). The details:

Read more

(Image H/T: Powerline)  The primary season is starting to wind down and Bernie Sanders took a pounding in winning only 1 of the 5 primaries last week – he’s mathematically been eliminated.  And sure, he has raised a whole lot of money outside of the typical donor class but even that isn’t enough.  But like all Socialists, they have no problem in spending all of that other peoples’ money (emphasis mine):

Sanders is biggest spender of 2016 so far — generating millions for consultants

The small-dollar fundraising juggernaut that has kept Bernie Sanders’s insurgent White House bid afloat far longer than anticipated has generated another unexpected impact: a financial windfall for his team of Washington consultants.

By the end of March, the self-described democratic socialist senator from Vermont had spent nearly $166 million on his campaign — more than any other 2016 presidential contender, including rival Hillary Clinton. More than $91 million went to a small group of admakers and media buyers who produced a swarm of commercials and placed them on television, radio and online, according to a Washington Post analysis of Federal Election Commission reports.

Read more

Seriously – there are a TON of problems facing the nation that the Congress with which it should be concerned.  A lot of them, IMHO, are functions of what they have already done – and done badly (both from a policy decision and legislation writing standpoint).  And a lot of it is from stepping over Constitutional boundaries (or ignoring them) and getting involved in things that should not be concerning them. Like the Ambassador fromthe Federal Government to NH [Senator] Jeanne Shaheen does here:

.@nflcommish should release results of checked balls. Public has right to know. No credible evidence against #TB12 https://t.co/T3hK90lncF

— Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (@SenatorShaheen) April 27, 2016

Seriously – someone that should be considering the intractable issues of the day, be concerned with protecting our Individual liberties (yeah, I know – Progressive), and then leaving we in Civil Society alone.  But here is Jeanne Shaheen, using “official” Senator twitter feed, making sure that everyone knows THAT A US SENATOR wants to throw her official weight around and tell a private concern what it should be doing.

Absolutely wrong.  This is the appearance of

Read more

What started off as a rather free form show certainly changed quickly! Grokster Mike and I started off with a WTF (here’s the link) on the Left’s propensity to label any discussion with which they disagree with as “hate speech” – and keep moving on to silence any dissent (and then work to totally destroy those dissenters careers and lives).  Then ‘Grok commenter Kathleen and Henniker tree farmer Steve Forster came on to talk about his victory in getting back his ability to hold weddings (agrotourism) on his private property (and finally defeating the developers that wanted to run him off his lands financially).  We also talked with Grokster Kimberly about Kelly Ayotte and CASA – the bill she has gotten behind that utterly strips due process against college guys and effectively removes colleges out of the American jurisprudence system (so tell me, WHY is a Republican supporting the Obama DoEd in doing this?  A former State’s Attorney General, no less).  While we had a schedule mixup with  Robert Pondiscio of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, we did talk with Gubernatorial candidate and current Executive Council member, Chris Sununu  talked with us about governmental philosophy through the lens of Common Core, Smarter testing, and local control.

And the video:

Read more

(H/T: IBTimes)   This is not looking good.  UPDATE:

Read more

So California has just raised its minimum wage to be $15/hr in a couple of years.  And already small biz owners are really concerned that the risk they took (and in many cases, HUGE risks, relatively speaking) will be wiped out by Government fiat (as opposed to real competition in the marketplace – after all, who can compete against a taxpayer fueled Leviathan?).  And I do ask (even though I’m almost a century late) “WHY should government, driving by the Statist politicians, unions, and special interests, be interfering with the relationship between an employer and employee?  After all, how is that any different than their mantra that no one should get in between you and your doctor?

Oh right – Obamacare.  Sorry – lost my head there for a moment.  While we are about to see some $15/hr fast food employees that are not economically worth that, we are also going to see a whole lot of those workers learn that the real minimum wage is $0/hr.  And this story shows that even manufacturing jobs are not immune to this Government distortion in California (reformatted, emphasis mine):

Ahead of $15 minimum wage, 1 company leaves California for Texas

California’s $15 minimum wage does not go into effect until 2022, but one Santa Fe Springs-based manufacturing company has already decided to leave the state this year to take advantage of cheaper wages in Texas. “This is the last thing I want to do, but I don’t see that I have a choice,” said Fred Donnelly, president of California Composites, which makes parts for commercial airplanes. Donnelly, who has lived in California for almost seven decades, said he is moving his company out of California because of its “dysfunctional” worker’s compensation system, excessive state and local regulations and the forthcoming $15 minimum wage.

Read more

Yeah, I’m betting that the NIMBY and BANANA enviros that hate all energy other than solar are going to watch each other’s heads explode:

CO2 Increasing Food Production And Plant Water Efficiency:

Two new papers in the journal “Nature Climate Change” are pointing out the positive benefits of increased Co2 . The first claims that increased CO2 concentrations account for 70% of the increased greening of the earth and increased plant growing seasons

“We show a persistent and widespread increase of growing season integrated LAI (greening) over 25% to 50% of the global vegetated area, whereas less than 4% of the globe shows decreasing LAI (browning). Factorial simulations with multiple global ecosystem models suggest that CO2 fertilization effects explain 70% of the observed greening trend,”

— Nature Climate Change

Read more

I keep seeing my electric bill going up and up and up – and I generally use less electricity than the year before (yes, I do look at that chart that Eversource provides giving a year’s lookback at actual KW used).  So can I blame the environmentalists that just don’t want to see conservation but want NOTHING new?

New England should be benefiting a lot more from the U.S. shale boom than it currently is. The Marcellus shale is one of the most productive formations in the country, and fracking has unleashed massive new quantities of natural gas from the basin, situated in Pennsylvania and southern New York. Despite its proximity to this new gusher of gas, New England electricity is expensive, in large part the result of a dearth of necessary pipeline infrastructure.

One company especially keen on constructing a new pipeline spur through Massachusetts and New Hampshire just scrapped the $3 billion project this week, bowing to stiff Not-In-My-Back-Yard (NIMBY) and environmental opposition…

[The pipeline], driven by Governor Charlie Baker’s administration and top officials in other states, is aimed at curbing New England’s relatively high electricity rates by bringing in cheaper natural gas to fuel power plants. Their theory: The cost of pipeline construction would be more than offset by savings in electric rates because more cheap gas could flow from Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale. Roughly half of New England’s electricity comes from natural gas power plants.

Read more

Concord Monitor had this bit about the new rest stops on I-93 here in NH just south of the Hooksett tolls.  Rusty McLear is lamenting that no one is using the electric car chargers put in by Tesla for free (and therefore, not buying his food or trinkets where his profits come from) AND that no other electric car charger company will put theirs in, that would operate almost universally with other EV cars, meaning many MORE people buying his food and trinkets, for free. Here’s the part that caught my eye (full article after the post, reformatted, emphasis mine):

Why aren’t the Tesla chargers at the Hooksett tolls used more? And why are they alone?

If you want a hint about the obstacles facing the transition to electric vehicles, stop texting the next time you drive through the Hooksett tolls and glance over at the Tesla Superchargers.  All 12 are empty, I bet.  This is not a very risky bet: According to the vague numbers provided by Tesla, bumped up by some generous assumptions, each charger in the new hospitality centers on Interstate 93 is used an average of just one hour per day. (Details on that calculation in a moment.)

This isn’t due to lack of trying, said Rusty McLear, co-owner of Granite State Hospitality, which operates the Hooksett rest stops. “We have been trying to arrange with a more universal charger company to come in and basically do the same kind of thing as Tesla,” said McLear, who makes his profit when drivers are strolling through the center, buying food or gifts. “I’d rather see 20 Leafs than one Tesla parked out there.”

Well, of COURSE he would!  His main deal is boots through the stores – not being in the electricity industry.

Read more

It is a strange election cycle when Republicans go to war with each other with a ferocity rarely manifest when they are confronting Democrats and their progressive agendas.

It is especially puzzling because a general consensus has formed on the right that the Democratic Party is moving so far left that its agendas threaten the very foundations of America’s social contract. These include a frontal assault on the system of individual rights that the Founders set in place. The left envisions a fundamentally transformed America where individual rights are secondary to the collective rights of races, ethnicities, genders and classes. That is why the particular circumstances of individual acts, such as the ones that led to the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, for example, don’t matter to progressive mobs. It’s the races of the actors that do.

Read more