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That was President Gerry Ford back in 1974; the quote’s attribution goes back much earlier.  Under Obama and Michelle (he of everything is a crisis and she of the “I will fix the non-existent school lunch crisis because I can (because everyone is scared of the power I can muster against you all, seeing that I’m the wife of the guy that joked about having the IRS audit my enemies (and he has)).  And given that she has decreed what students will eat, they’re stepping it up and their Federal Government is telling us how we are to eat on July 4th – fittingly, our Country’s Birthday (emphasis mine, reformatted):

The Obama administration is encouraging Americans to eat a healthy Fourth of July holiday meal — one that excludes lots of the things most people look forward to, like ribs, soda and dessert.  Jocelyn Harrison, an intern at the Department of Agriculture’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, acknowledged in a blog post that July Fourth is a big food holiday for most people.  “What do you have planned?”

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Ah, yes…President Constitutional Lecturer is yet again shows his ire against those Black Robed judges that have, once again, thwarted his efforts to dispatch that which he hates (the US Constitution).  So, he send out his Royal Gum Flapper to yet again tout his erudition and his lofty status:

“Well, as the constitutional lawyer who sits in the Oval Office would tell you is, he would read the entire decision before he passed judgment in terms of his own legal analysis. What we have been able to assess so far … is that there is a problem that has been exposed, …

And would that be that, once again (for the 13th time, folks), the fact that Obama can’t tell what is Constitutional or not?  Or is the problem is that Obama has now been exposed himself as the problem: “If its Constitutional, he’s trying to go against or around it”.  Wilson, FDR, and now Obama – can’t assemble a much more dangerous set of men against how America is versus what they decided to transform it to be.

…which is that there are now a group of women of an indeterminate size who no longer have access to free contraceptive coverage simply because of some religious views held, not by them necessarily, but by their bosses,” said White House press secretary Josh Earnest.

Nothin’ fer nothin’ says “Constitutional” like free 

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From Big Government:

…The term came into (re)use just as there was a concurrent (what I perceive as) negative shift on the Left. The politically correct generation came on the scene. A brand of leftism associated with political conformity, with hardcore statism, with an antipathy toward a Constitution written by a bunch of white, land-owning, gun-toting, in some cases slave-holding dead guys even though it was a flower of the enlightenment and a break from centuries of rule by monarch, took hold. The “progressives” were not interested in making a better America. They were interested in “fundamentally transforming” the United States as Barack Obama said in the run up to the 2008 election. They were and are about power. The were and are about shutting off debate. They were and are about intolerance of any thing or person which challenges the statist worldview. They see the Constitution as impediment to change, something which should be marginalized and certainly not celebrated.

Not only do they hold that the Constitution is an impediment, but organized religion as well as it is seen as merely another “power center” that must be overcome.  To Statists (“All for the State, nothing outside of the State”), religion is a source of competing loyalties and they brook no God before Government.  Else, how could their entire policy set be implemented?

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Social Justice, Social Justice, Social Justice – that’s all we hear from the Progressives now in control of the Federal Government.  Part of that “social justice” mantra has been wail after wail that men get paid more than women.  The President himself has pontificated through the years that Equal Pay MUST be the law and practice in the land. Great – nobody on the Right will dispute that, just willing to argue that most jobs aren’t the same and certainly the people filling them aren’t just equivalent cogs in a corporate machine either.  But you know, once again, we see President Obama leading from behind even when it comes to one of his “empty words” policy ventures called Equal Pay.  The White House has been whacked before in unequally paying men more than women.  Fine – that was years ago.  I’ll give him the mulligan – after all, he’s a man of his word (look, our gas and electricity bills are skyrocketing, right?).  However, given years now (more than half a decade), has he fixed the problem he created in his own White House?

He CAN manage, competently, a few hundred workers within the boundaries of his own words, equal pay for equal work, right?

White House press secretary Josh Earnest acknowledged on Wednesday that “we still have more work to do” to close the pay gapbetween men and women working at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “The White House has some improvement to make along that measure as well,” Earnest said, when asked why women at the White House make 88 cents for every dollar earned by a man. 

President Obama often rakes Republicans over the coals for not backing equal-pay legislation, accusing GOP members of endorsing outdated economic policies

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Oh, the heads are exploding on the Collectivist’s side of the aisle over the US Supreme Court that the US Constitution’s defense of the Right of Religion supercedes that of an overbearing State.  And indeed, Collectivist is the proper word, but it the colloquial for Socialist, Progressive, Communitarian, Communist (or, for whatever it matters, a “current Democrat”).  Here’s a great summary of why they are SO upset – John Hayward at RedState (emphasis mine):

It’s increasingly ridiculous to use the word “liberal” to describe the modern American collectivist.  There’s nothing liberal about them at all.  They’re shooting for the ultimate subversion of liberty, by re-defining “liberty” as a form of compulsion.  In other words, they’re saying you are being oppressed unless a wise and virtuous dictatorial authority can force other people to give you what the authoritarians have decided you “deserve.”  You aren’t “free” as long as you must provide for yourself.  Liberty becomes a term used to describe its exact opposite: a set of active obligations placed upon other people.  It’s right up there with any perversion of language and thought described by George Orwell in “1984.”  Actually, it is one of the perversions he laid at Big Brother’s feet: “Freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.”

Indeed – you see brazen attempt to continue to turn traditional goodness into

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Kevin Williamson is one of my favorite authors and you can mostly find him over at National Review.  Here is a snippet

…The crude version of exchange — which is, unhappily, the common version — is inclined to suspect that there is an objectively correct price for a good, and that profit comes from duping somebody into paying more than the correct price for it. That error is fundamental to Marxism and other anti-capitalist philosophies, and it is implicit in such social phenomena as the anti-advertising movement, “Buy Nothing Day,” and similar political tendencies. But that bias does relatively little harm in the heads of greying Marxists, peddlers of “profit is a crime” banalities, and Occupy riff-raff. Where it is truly destructive is in the disorganized thoughts of the large majority of ordinary people with no particularly strong political commitments or economic orientation.

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Ah yes, Sandra Fluke – the gal that just keeps on giving…

Sidenote: and giving, and giving,  and giving, and giving, and giving, and giving, and giving, and giving, and giving, and giving, and giving, and giving, and giving, and giving, and giving, and giving, and giving, and giving, and giving, and giving, and giving, and giving, and giving, and giving, and giving, and giving, and giving, and giving, and giving, and giving, and giving, and giving….oh, you get the picture.  Not her, fer sure – but her Progressive attitude that screams “YOU OWE ME!!!”

…to us here at the ‘Grok – and we have yet to pay for her contraceptives (wonder if she’s ditched that stupendous free rider hubby of her’s that refused to provide for her himself).  Romney may have been wrong about the 47%, but when Sandra Fluke whines that she expects the Government to force others to provide for her most intimate moments, he had it G-spot on.  But the best summary has been given by Dr. Paul Rahe, on how radically Progressivism is changing the culture and the language:

The deepest source of our present discontents is the sexual revolution. Our abandonment of chastity as a norm has had dire political consequences.  Her right to be promiscuous trumps our right to the fruits of our own labor.

Given the US Supreme Court decisions of Saturday and the anticipated ruling tomorrow on Hobby Lobby / Conestoga vs HHS Contraceptive mandate that may well determine if there is Religious Liberty (enumerated in the First Amendment) or has it been replaced by Entitlement of Sexual Need, Sandra decided that she needed to weigh in once again.

Any day now, #SupremeCourt decides whether corporations can deny women access to contraception. http://t.co/xZ247dqtMf

— Sandra Fluke (@SandraFluke) June 27, 2014

Once again, 

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OK, I’m later than normal.  Posting has been real light as my old laptop had “severe issues” after last week’s remote at the Londonderry Fish & Game Club & GrokShoot – had to spend most of last week trying to recover from that.  Thankfully, I had done a full backup the week before so most of my time as been spent trying to recover emails, email rules, and the assorted documents received from pre- to post crash.  It also has meant that my responding to emails and other inquiries, well, has gone by the board in trying to go from barely functional to mostly operational (yeah, in trying to process video, this new Windows 8.1 Essentials Live Movie Maker decided that the audio from “videos to be processed and posted” was going to be turned into mere “audio clicks”.  In the Grand Scheme of things, all in all, worse things have beset me in the past but man, talk about frustrating!  Hopefully things will get back to some semblance of normal this week and back to “posting regularity”.

In the meantime, here are the videos that accompanies Steve’s audio posting of this week’s GrokTALK!

Pre-Show: NH State Rep Marilinda Garcia (Candidate for NH GOP nomination for US Congress, NH CD-2) comes on to promote her “Race to Congress” event at the NH Motorspeedway in Loudon, NH and offer two GOLD VIP passes to the event to GrokTALK! listeners.

GraniteGrok went to the event last nite – will post up the video later on today.

The Pre-Show – which, btw, almost didn’t come off as it might – 5 miles outside of Concord, I get a call from Steve “Hey, you ARE going to be here – I sent you email that Marilinda Garcia was calling in early for the GOLD VIP Ticket giveaway (and YOU HAVE THE HEADSETS!!!!!).  Heck, I was just happy that I could resurrect my old laptop to do the livestreaming as it was a bit recalcitrant in attaching to the UStream servers.  Oh, and did I mention that TMEW’s laptop ALSO died this past week, so I had to reset up two new systems…..Rest of the videos after the jump. 

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Kerrie Diers (Exec. Dir. of the Nashua (New Hampshire) Regional Planning Commission) doesn’t care much that your land gets in the way of her planning (for your own good as in “WHY do our perceptions of the needs of the Collective have to give way to what Individuals own?”):

• “Private Property Rights get in the way of good planning“
• “Private Property Rights won’t let us have the discussions“

That is correct – I went to the LRPC’s (ye of the dealers of the Feds’ effort to federalize local zoning ordinances and land use by dangling “crack money” to the Regional Planning Commissions) Law Lecture held this past week at the Bean Conference Center in Laconia, NH.  There were two lawyers that discussed some of the changes to the law and what planning / zoning boards should be mindful of in rendering decisions.  Here is Bernie Waugh – Part 1 with the second and third parts after jump:

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A rather astonishing remark by Obama’s Rasputin (the power behind the throne), Valerie Jarrett on today’s Meet The Press:

I think what the President said was “look, let’s start with the premise that every American should have paid leave and then let’s have a conversation on how to get there.”

The assumption left here is that this is no assumption at all; that she holds that this premise (that all Americans should have paid sick leave for themselves, paid leave to care for family members or other “important people in their lives” and paid leave for maternity / paternity leave) is reality, that the President has the authority to merely declare that this is set policy.  All that is left to the rest of us is how it is to be implemented – and with these communitarian / socialist / redistributionists, the only “discussion” that we in our formerly Constitutional Republic are now allowed amongst us formerly sovereign citizens is who is going to be gouged.

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