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A lot of the LSRs are now viewable here; these are the placeholders for NH bills that our lawmakers in the NH House and Senate wish to bring forward and enact into law.  One of them was put in by Democrat appointed Speaker Shawn Jasper:

2015-H-0019-R     allowing municipalities to borrow funds from any fund controlled by such municipality under certain conditions.
Sponsors:  (Prime) Shawn Jasper

This is craziness!  From my time on my hamlet’s Budget Committee, the vast number of funds are set aside for dedicated and targeted purposes – new capital equipment like buildings or purpose driven vehicles (fire engines, DPW loaders and dump trucks) or for Parks & Rec’s special programs.    It defeats the purpose of having a fund in the first place.  In some cases, these funds were not funded by taxing town residents – the monies were given by others for the town to use within covenants. 

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Congressman Bill Cassidy (R-LA) won the Louisiana US Senate run-off against 3 term US Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA), 54 – 47.  This was not unexpected as she failed to get 50% of her State’s primary election (with Republicans Cassidy and Manes splitting the vote).  The conventional wisdom was that even as she won 48% of the vote in the primary, she was toast in the runoff and thus, even her own party deserted her from the national level.

But it was clear that she would pull out all the stops and do pretty much anything for the win – including that time honored Democrat campaign trick that threatens “vote for me or YOU ALL will lose all your entitlements!”.  Yes, that time honored “pulling of the goodies”.  Doubt me?  She was so desperate that she actually put it in writing in a flier:

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To be honest, from just an engineer’s view, I used to think the same way – small State, duplication of effort, higher costs, inefficiencies;  do we need three levels of Govt?

Sidenote: with the Regional Planning Commissions, we actually have 4 levels but that’s for another post

If the goal is just in having the most efficiently running government possible, no, we don’t need Counties in a state that is just 1.3 million resident strong.  Heck, I could take an ax and make it REAL efficient (for I do think there are far better ways to get the same things done with a far more limited (and less expensive) government.  But now having been a political blogger that has been FORCED to relearn our political history and philosophy, it really is NOT not the point.  It is that checks and balances are needed, even in a small State as ours as humans are subject to, well, failure.

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And Obama has SUCH a nice smile, doesn’t he?  Benjamin Weingarten has a short explanation:

It can be said that progressivism at its core seeks to turn the world upside down.

It is an ideology and a tactic of modern-day Sophists who seek to replace facts with narrative, justice with injustice, morality with immorality and virtue with vice — but it does so with a smile on its face.

Consequently, in order to identify whether one is in fact living in a progressive Utopia, one merely needs to identify instances in one’s society, economy and political system, themselves a natural outgrowth of the culture (itself an outgrowth of the ideas that a people has imbibed), in which facts, logic and history have been shoved aside in favor of the whims of the wise collective.

Most conservatives have had that feeling that down is up, right is wrong, decency is bad, and normality is now only for “Extremists”. 

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• Michael Brown – stole tobacco (taking the private property of another), physically intimidated the shopkeeper (assault)  and then got into that now infamous event with Darren Wilson (bad decisions have consequences)
• Eric Garner – stole money (cheated The State out of tax revenues) by selling untaxed cigarettes

Consider the above and then this snippet from Liberty Unyielding on seeing the resulting street actions as Occupy Wall Street reborn:

The connection between big money and police interactions with blacks is elusive. But the New York protesters are not alone in the belief that capitalistic greed is a driver in the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. Raphael Warnock, pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, was a guest on Wolf Blitzer’s CNN show, where he spoke curiously of Wall Street bankers “gambling our money away.” Unless the reverend is mistaking Barack Obama for an investment banker, I have no idea what he’s talking about.

Right out of Occupy – anti-capitalism (see here).  Yet, look at the abridged version of the two deaths again.  One was

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A curious reaction from him in the Concord Monitor on how he will “deal” and “unify” with dissenters within the Republican caucus – he’ll just order them around:

On Tuesday, Republican House members will meet in a caucus to elect a state party committee member, who would in turn lead the body’s Republican majority, said Amherst Rep. Stephen Stepanek.  “Jasper is the Democratically elected speaker of the New Hampshire House,” Stepanek said. “He is not the Republicans’ man.”

After all, Shawn Jasper does not meet the requirements of the NH GOP By-Laws to sit on its Executive Board as the Democrats appointed him to be Speaker and not a majority vote of the NH House caucus (unless NH GOP Chair Jennifer Horn pulls a “lawless Obama” and changes that with a snap of her fingers).  But here’s the meat of Jasper’s problem – and his tone deafness:

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This time from the Union Leader (reformatted, emphasis mine):

CONCORD — To head off “some interesting shenanigans going on,” House Speaker Shawn Jasper officially named Rep. Jack Flanagan of Brookline as House Majority Leader Friday, and Rep. Steve Shurtleff of Concord Democratic Leader.  Supporters of former speaker Bill O’Brien who lost the speaker’s race to Jasper Wednesday, has called a “GOP Caucus” Tuesday to elect the Republican Leader for the House

“Whatever this group plans on doing,” Jasper said Friday, “frankly we’re just not interested.”

Uh-huh.  I think a decent translation of that is “My way – there is no highway“.  Isn’t that the exact same thing he accused Bill O’Brien of – being an authoritarian supreme?  And, oh, by the way, didn’t Bill O’Brien allow the majority caucus to elect its OWN Majority leader?  I guess Democrat appointed Speaker Shawn Jasper must have an issue with that whole secret ballot thingie, eh?

But, hey look, you say, he allowed the minority caucus, the Democrats, to elect their OWN leader, didn’t he

So it was OK for the Democrats, Mr. “Republican Speaker” to vote and elect their own leader but not for the Republicans to do the same?  What is your reasoning behind that?  Or is it that you don’t trust your own caucus?

Oh, back to Jack Flanagan (would this make him the Democrat appointed Majority Leader, seeing that the Speaker who just gave him this job is the Democrat appointed Speaker?) – is this a little bit of the “Royal WE” creeping in already?

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We were talking with Jorge Mesa-Tejada this morning about the problem in the Timberlane/Hampstead School Districts (SAU 55) where it seems the School Board is being co-opted by an evil confluence of their relatively new Superintendent and NH School Board Association in that they are moving in a direction to limit free speech and the ability of voters and parents to seek redress of grievance and air their concerns to their elected representatives.  This is becoming, more and more, a situation seen around the state (e.g., the Gilford School Board has done the same thing – made itself rather unapproachable to those that elected them).

After Jorge (whom I have known for almost a decade now) sent us this quick blurp on the Earl of Metzler (Dr. Earl Metzler):

The superintendent’s name is Dr. Earl Metzler, III [LinkedIn here  -Skip].  His doctorate is brand new, from Walden University.

He hired his wife as Spanish consultant—no bid—for $50K.  This week, he hired the wife of the Timberlane BudCom(Jason Grosky, just defeated candidate for Rockingham County attorney)  as the new PR person for $18,000 contract.

This guy can keep a newspaper reporter busy for life!

This is the kind of guy that gives local governance a bad name – no problem in co-opting enemies or financially aiding friends??

Update:

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Yawn and yawn again.  As we have intimated before, some of our best (and snarkiest!) conversation are not here on GraniteGrok but in our (closed) email group of Groksters.  Occasionally, some of it comes out – and here is one of them as I pretty much took exception to the message of Steve’s post:  US House Declares Obama Amnesty “Null and Void…”  My take?  All hat, no cattle.  It doesn’t DO anything:

I’m saying that I’m tired of the Kabuki-for-show theater – that which appears to be “doing something” for voters but calculated to ONLY give that appearance while it accomplishes nothing.  Nothing but PR engineering.  I think the 50 gazillion votes to pass bills that repeal Obamacare have already made that clear.  Even *I* caught that message after, oh say, 20th time.

They all campaigned on it….and where do we stand?

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And I blame Chair Jennifer Horn, the EBoard, Papa Smurf, and last century’s Republican leaders for setting the table for this absolute fiasco for happening. You caused a split in the caucus between Chandler and O’Brien and create that country lane that Shawn J(ass)per just sauntered up – with Deputy Dawg Shurtleff on one arm and Ray Buckley on the other (gawd, isn’t that a horrible visualization!). Yo, Jennifer, where is that UNITY you promised when you need it, eh?  You appointed the top slots of the ticket and the base threw them away.  Now, for the lack of UNITY that you promised, you get to oversee the worst split in the Republican caucus in a decade – nice legacy.

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Yes, with the 2014 elections now over here in NH, the Presidential Primary now starts to rear its multiple heads (like Hydra, uglier but carrying around more money).  One of the wannabees is the next in line in the Bush Dynasty, Jeb Bush, who had this to say:

“I kinda know how a Republican can win, whether it’s me or somebody else – and it has to be much more uplifting, much more positive, much more willing to be… ‘lose the primary to win the general’ without violating your principles. It’s not an easy task, to be honest with you.”

I like the post title that Big Government used as a quick translation:

JEB BUSH: REPUBLICANS DON’T NEED CONSERVATIVES TO WIN WHITE HOUSE, SHOULD NOT DEFUND EXEC AMNESTY

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