Skip

“No”is the answer here.  But we have seen that the Federal Government will retaliate against its Citizens when bureaucrats believe that “citizens have lost sight of their proper place” (IRS targeting TEA Party, Constitutionalists, Pro-Life groups; Dept of Labor and the IRS going after high net worth donors to Romney, and the EPA targeting energy provides that do not bow down to its Environmental alter for just a few examples).  Here in NH, the “Dept of Environmental Services” expand their own reach and set of regulations – go ahead, ask water front owners who really controls their land (for ownership means naught when someone else owns the actual control) and the trouble they can get themselves into if even a wildflower is removed “counter to regulations”.

Seems like its counterpart in Tennessee has the same attitude – “You might be a terrorist if you complain about us!” (emphasis mine):

A Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation deputy director warned a group of Maury County residents that unfounded complaints about water quality could be considered an “act of terrorism.”

“We take water quality very seriously. Very, very seriously,” said Sherwin Smith, deputy director of TDEC’s Division of Water Resources, according to audio recorded by attendees. “But you need to make sure that when you make water quality complaints you have a basis, because federally, if there’s no water quality issues, that can be considered under Homeland Security an act of terrorism.”

“Can you say that again, please?” an audience member can be heard asking on the audio.

Smith went on in the recording to repeat the claim almost verbatim.

Hmm, and you thought I was kidding when I said:

Read more

This came over the transom a little bit ago:

tell me what your thoughts are regarding NYC paying for a group that comes to NH and gets space in the House Calendar as a “not for profit type group”? Is this not coercion of NY on the political system of NH?   just a thought.

I thought was a pretty good question, so here is what I sent back for a response:

Well, it wasn’t NYC itself that paid for it – Bloomberg and a couple of other big donors are bankrolling MAIG.  They may have reached out to Deputy Dawg Shurtleff (or v.v; not much matter which way it happened) and those two polls put it onto the calendar.  Coercion?  Not in my mind as Shurtleff and that other person are useful idiots at the least and willing participants most likely.

Outside influence on NH?  Absolutely.  Is it new?  Hardly.  Will it stop?  Not much likely – NH, relatively speaking, has little money of its own.  Thus, there will always be those in NH looking outward for folks to open the spigots where the hose ends in Concord.  You can’t shut it off:  money IS free speech (indirectly).  We may wail about it on this issue and the Other Side will do so on other issues.  Unfortunately, there will be no financial disarmament on either side in the near or mid-term future (if ever).  Why?

Simple – human greed, be it money for capitalists or “Power Over Other Peoples Lives and Behaviors” for politicians and bureaucrats. 

Read more

Mayors Against Illegal Guns – the gift that keeps on giving.  Remember what I said here?

I have now watched politics in detail and intensely enough to know that they cannot tell the truth about their future plans – else they would NEVER get their hands on the Levers of Power. They can only assume the Seat either by lies of omission or by commission.

Rockford, Il’s mayor has decided to quite Nanny Stater and NYC Mayor Bloomberg’s populace-disarmament group, MAIG.

Mayor [Larry] Morrissey said the chief reason he left Bloomberg’s group is because he thought the group would be against illegal guns but has instead become a group looking for ways to ban legal guns and attack the rights of legal gun owners. He also said that he intends to get a concealed carry license himself when they become available in Illinois.

And as Grokster Rick has pointed out, elevated Criminals who have been shot by Police (in the legal pursuit of their official duties) to possess the same status of “gun violence” victims like the innocent children at Sandy Hook.

Sidenote: Actually, let me correct myself – “gun violence” is just another twisting of the common language to achieve a political outcome. After all, how often goes a gun simply jump off a shelf (or out of a locked gun safe), sail miles away in mid-air, and fire itself at someone.  Guns are inanimate object – obedient to the Laws of Thermodynamics, they just sit in one spot due to inertia.  They only move under the influence of that “outside force”; a person whose evilness has decided they will kill someone.

Read more

We’ve written a lot on the efforts of the nine NH Regional Planning Commissions’ efforts to begin the process regionalization here in NH, using Fed dollars from DOT, EPA, and HUD to rewrite and “Federalize” our local zoning codes.  We are certainly against this as this is nothing but top-down centralized planning where “Professional Planners” have the hubris in that they know how we should be geographically limited, housing limited, transportation limited, water limited, energy limited, property rights limited…

…and be taxed more for their happiness and our misery.  Well, this movement by our tin-pot ruler wannabees (“hey, it’s only for your own and our Collective good – stop your *itching!”) has been going on for a while in other places in the country.  Like in California, for instance.  My co-worker just sold her nice house and moved because Regional Planners (peace be upon them as they practice their environmental religion in “saving the planet” and totalitarian leanings) “captured” her town and several others in setting their idea of “Planning Utopia”.  RightInSanFrancisco has the story from the San Fran Bay area; some excerpts (reformatting, emphasis mine):

– The nine counties of the Bay Area (which include San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, and about 100 smaller municipalities) have two primary regional planning agencies with professional bureaucracies and Boards of Directors comprised primarily of locally elected officials.

– The Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) which serves as the primary conduit for federal and state housing money.  The Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), which collects the tolls from seven bridges and recently purchased a $180 million office building in San Francisco, also serves as the primary conduit for federal and state transportation money.

Read more

One just shakes their head – WHY would NYC Nannier Mayor Bloomberg (in which he believes no one should have a gun) even think to put his AstroTurf group Mayors Against Illegal Guns that visited NH this week (ably covered by Groksters Rick, Susan, Tim and Steve here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here) on New York City Government servers?  Ace has the story (emphasis mine):

At first I pinged mayorsagainstillegalguns.org and found that it was resolving at a New York City government IP address.

Pinging NYC.gov returns the same information.

It turns out I didn’t even have to look that closely, because the mayorsagainstillegalguns.org domain is registered to the city of New York. As you can see there, the registrant name is “NYC DoITT”, which is the New York City Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications.

According to this, Mayors Against Illegal Guns appears to be a 501(c)(4).  The action fund arm of MAIG is a 501(c)(3). Even if MAIG is reimbursing the city for these services, questions would still remain. Like, would New York City offer these same services to NYCTeaParty4Eva.org? Section 1072(p) of the city’s charter on information technology appears to give the Mayor a little leeway, but I can’t imagine it would cover his personal nonprofit groups.

Read more

It’s a Wednesday.  A work day.  Short, short notice.  Still, quite a few people and a showing for the TEA Party as a movement again.  No, not the HUGE rallies that we saw BEFORE the IRS started their targeting of conservative groups (and religious and educational and….well, anyone holding social or political values other than the official Government outlook as defined by Obama, the IRS, Eric Holder, Big Sis Napalitano, just about all of the DOJ, the EPA, the Labor Dept….aw  heck – ANY part of Big Government that thinks we, their employers, are turning on them (yeah, ponder upon that)).

Jack Kimball of the Granite State Patriot Liberty PAC went down to DC and sent back these pics:

More after the jump

Read more

My feeling is that the most significant factor behind a student’s success in school are engaged parents.  I remember Mom having me sit at the kitchen table and watching me do homework AFTER she had gone over the material herself.  It wasn’t until I hit subjects like finite match, calculus, and programming and AP biology that she stopped ensuring that homework was done, done on time, and done right.  She did keep on reading my essays and tearing those up until they were rightly finished.

But it also took teachers that weren’t counting down the last years until retirement or clueless from the get go.  I had some great teachers, some that were characters, and some I hated simply because they were never satisfied and demanded more (and years later, I understood that THEY were the best of all).  The greatest will always be great regardless of their beginnings; the rest of us need to be trained.  However, it seems that those that train the students that teach our children are neither the brightest or best – an indictment of teachers programs all over; here is part of their Executive Summary:

…There’s no shortage of factors for America’s educational decline: budget cutbacks, entrenched poverty, crowded classrooms, shorter school years, greater diversity of students than in other countries. The list seems endless.

NCTQ’s Teacher Prep Review has uncovered another cause, one that few would suspect: the colleges and universities producing America’s traditionally prepared teachers.

Through an exhaustive and unprecedented examination of how these schools operate, the Review finds they have become an industry of mediocrity, churning out first-year teachers with classroom management skills and content knowledge inadequate to thrive in classrooms with ever-increasing ethnic and socioeconomic student diversity.

Read more

At the sake of breaking Godwin’s Law right from the get-go, that quote is from one of the world’s master propagandists, Herr Goebbels.   But we also have another in-kind phrase from a more up to date personage:

…of deciding what American children should eat: “We can’t just leave it up to the parents.”

That would be from First Lady Michelle Obama. In the mind of Progressives and Collectivists (hey, let’s add one more: MSNBC’s Melissa Harris_Perry), your children really do not belong to you, Parents, they really belong to us.  To feed, to clothe, to install morals, to mold – parenting is too important to leave to amateurs; we, the paid bureaucracy will raise them properly.  I’ve oft talked about teachers also having the ‘tude that they are more important to their children students than their own parents; here’s one more fact to add to that growing pile of evidence?  Who cares what the parents have been teaching their children “about guns” – we, the Teaching Profession, shall show them the Shining Path:

An elementary school will hold a toy gun exchange Saturday, offering students a book and a chance to win a bicycle if they turn in their play weapons.

Strobridge Elementary Principal Charles Hill maintains that children who play with toy guns may not take real guns seriously.

“Playing with toys guns, saying ‘I’m going to shoot you,’ desensitizes them, so as they get older, it’s easier for them to use a real gun,” Hill said.

… “Having a group of children playing cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians is a normal part of growing up,” said Yih-Chau Chang, spokesman for Responsible Citizens of California, a group whose goal is to educate the public about the facts behind gun rights.

Really, Principal Hill? 

Read more