Skip

Co-founder of GraniteGrok, my concern is around Individual Liberty and Freedom and how the Government is taking that away. As an evangelical Christian and Conservative with small "L" libertarian leanings, my fight is with Progressives forcing a collectivized, secular humanistic future upon us. As a TEA Party activist, citizen journalist, and pundit!, my goal is to use the New Media to advance the radical notions of America's Founders back into our culture.

GrokTV: NHListens / Granite State Future – Circle “BBBB” Parts 1, 2, & 3

After talking with Tim Carter of the Lakes Region TEA Party and listening to the Intro remarks by John Krebs and Molly Donovan, it was time to start observing “how” the “what” was going to happen.  As I said in the Intro post, I was not there to participate but to merely observe.  To recap some of what I had observed thus far:

  • A strictly controlled meeting agenda of questions and issues
  • A division of the prospective audience / attendees into “circles” consisting of about 10 people (remember that number)
  • Paid “Facilitators” and “Scribes that are to guide the “conversations” and to “take notes” – in this case, paper easels

The meeting lasted just about two hours so there is a lot of video.  Again, I apologize for the relatively low sound quality (even though I was using a shotgun mic that is supposed to mitigate that – sometimes room acoustics trump technology.  I’ll have a few more observations from observing NOT just the circle that I chose to record (circle “BBBB”), but another one as well (to be explained later).  Now to be sure, NONE of the segment / clips are NOT what I would call riveting and jaw dropping excitement video – in fact, they are rather boring if you are expecting “gotcha” moments.  However, I did see some rather interesting dynamics being played out – not only in how each small group was run (and make no mistake – by the end of the evening, it became VERY clear that these were not just simple listening session) but the dynamics between the two poles of the culture / political worlds too.  First Segment here with two more after the jump – and yes, there will be more posts with more later as well as a single post on the other circle I “observed after the fact”.  Each of these 3 three videos runs about 9 to 10 minutes; here is Part 1:

Read more

GrokTV: NHListens / Granite State Future – Circle “BBBB” Parts 4 and 5

Continuing on from Parts 1, 2, and 3 of the NHListens “visioning” meeting at the Meredith Plymouth Senior Center (NH).  Thus far, the important takeaways that I have observed thus far:

  • A strictly controlled meeting agenda of questions and issues
  • A division of the prospective audience / attendees into “circles” consisting of about 10 people (remember that number)
  • Paid “Facilitators” and “Scribes that are to guide the “conversations” and to “take notes” – in this case, paper easels
  • The “Enforcer” – tasked with being the person who would argue with anyone that was challenging the narrative.

and a new one to add:

  • The Enabler(s) – those folks that dribble in “talking points” during the discussion usually at the most opportune times to be “slick and smooth”

This seemed to emerge in Part 3 (2 minute mark) when Susan started in on talking about Smart Growth principles, caught herself, and started to label them as if they were traditional New Hamspshire ones (instead of being cooked up by “Planners” that know better then we how and where we should live – certainly NOT a Live Free or Die Sentiment, or a Liberty & Freedom one either).  So, let’s return to my phrase: “and remember that number 10!“.  Next up is Part 4 which starts to show another dynamic right off the bat – those that are perfectly fine with a forced collectivism concerning land use, community priorities, taxes, and services, and those that believe that the voters have things right:

Read more

GrokTV: NHListens / Granite State Future – Intro

Well, after running into Tim Carter at the Meredith (NH) Senior Center for the latest NHListens versioning of what our “collective future” is supposed to be with respect to the Granite State Future collectivist Utopia (after all, once taxes are used to socially engineer our behavior in our living conditions, our living standards, the modes of transportation that are allowed, we are no longer free but live solely at the mercy of others planning our lives – like that has worked out so well in other countries?).  Well, after I got done interviewing Tim, I went on inside.

Anyways, back to describing how this “listening” session would work:

Read more

Guest post by NH State Rep. Jane Cormier: Bad Bill of the Month (HB 617)

HB 617 – Gas Tax Bill “…The Gift That Keeps On Giving…”

Last Wednesday, the NH House approved the largest tax hike in state history by increasing New Hampshire’s Gas Tax by a BILLION dollars over the next four years. Basically, it means paying about $3.00 more at the pump EACH time you fill up! The bill’s primary sponsor, Democrat David Campbell, from Nashua, sounded the CRISIS alarm that our bridges are about ready to drop! FEAR – FEAR – FEAR – a great way to hike taxes and raise fees. Now, I am not saying we do not have work to do on our roads and bridges, but to cause such alarm and use it to raise gas taxes by a whopping 83% is beyond the pale.

In trying to answer the “concern” for our roads and bridges, Former Speaker of the House, Rep. William O’Brien offered an amendment to the bill which would “fix the leaky bucket” that is our Highway Fund. (This fund is historically raided to serve other budgetary priorities.) This amendment would have dedicated 100% of the highway funds directly to the New Hampshire roads and bridges infrastructure. O’Brien offered, “If we stop the leaks, we’ll have twice as much in this budget than if you pass the tax increase.” Of course, this amendment was voted down by the Democratic majority and the original bill was debated (over 2 hours – UGH) then finally passed. Commonsense did not prevail, sad to say. And unfortunately, 15 Republicans voted FOR this immense tax increase.

Read more

Belknap County Republican Committee (3/13/13) – NH GOP Chair, Jennifer Horn

The featured speaker of last Wednesday night’s Belknap County Republican meeting was the new NH GOP Chair Jennifer Horn.  She talked about some of the issues that confront the State Party and some of the ways she is going to try to mitigate them.

Please note that there is a section of her speech that I have deliberately not show dealing with fundraising.

Questions 1 & 2 after the jump

Read more

Notable Quote – Bobby Jindal

If our vision is to better manage the disaster that is the federal government, you can count me out. I won’t sign up for that. (I don’t want to) slow-manage the decline of America. That’s why we have Democrats. – Bobby Jindal, Governor of Louisiana (R) at CPAC

Belknap County Republican Committee (3/13/13) – Tim Carter, Lakes Region TEA Party

Well, let’s see if I remember HOW to blog – it’s been a bit as I’ve been out straight since this past Sunday with events or tasks to attend to each and every night.  Lots of video to put up and other stuff to catch up on, and this is one of the first ones.  Wednesday was the regular monthly meeting of the Belknap County Republicans and the new NH GOP Chair Jennifer Horn was the featured speaker.  While we did endorse her rival for the position, we’ve been waiting to see how she starts her term.  So far, not bad – especially with this.  However, that set of videos (a lively set of questions happened after her talk) will have to wait – there was another speaker that spoke before her.  To set the table, from the NH GOP Platform:  Oppose laws and programs contrary to our founding principles such as Sharia Law, the International Baccalaureate Program, UN Agenda 21 or other “sustainable development” programs

Since the inception of the  TEA Party movement, there has been an uneasy tension between the TEA Party and the GOP as the former has seen the latter as complicit in the mess that the Country finds itself even as it sees the GOP Platform (it’s “supposed” beliefs, but more on that later) close to the TEA Party philosophy than the Dems.  On the flip side, the Establishment Republicans see the TEA Partiers as a threat to their stranglehold on political power on the Right (as we watch this play out in DC right now).  But there are times that things mesh – as the quote from the NH GOP Platform indicates.  Tim Carter from Lakes Region TEA Party was allowed to speak to the full room quickly on the Federal Government over reach to Federalize local NH zoning codes in the form of HUD / EPA / DOT’s Sustainable Communities Initiative  – otherwise known locally as Granite State Future (why can’t Progressives ever use the plain truth for their programs?  Is it because they KNOW people would reject them out of hand if, you know, they actually were truthful and honest about what they were doing?):

More later on today on this topic.  Intro from the meeting after the jump.

Read more

GrokTV: NHListens / Granite State Future – MicroInterview with Tim Carter

This past Thursday, the Granite State Future project (the project that the Federal Departments of HUD, EPA, and DOT are using locally to Federalize  the local zoning codes here in NH via their “Sustainable Communities Initiative”).  The “purpose” is ostensibly to “listen” to the public and get their input as to what the future of … Read more

Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter (Progressive-NH) blows off constituent concerns; deja vu all over again?

Heck, I’m still waiting for her to fulfill her promise that she made to me during her first time in Congress – so why am I not surprised?  After all, back in 2008 she told a Republican woman, a member of one of NH’s “main Republican families”, to her face that “You are not my constituent” because of her party affiliation (even though she lived in Carol SEIU-Porter’s district).  Well, another loyal reader has had a run in with Carol Shea-Porter’s cubicle minions – here is the sordid tale of trying to get a simple answer to a simple question on drones:

So, last week, I made a few phone calls to our “representatives” in DC. My concern was the possibility of drone strikes on any America citizen deemed a “terrorist” ON American soil. Well, as you well know, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, many of the Tea Party affiliated folks are considered “terrorists.” Shocking? You bet! But fact. Anyhow, I called Kelly’s office and was assured she would not be supporting anything such as this act which could strike someone without due process, no trial, no defense … etc. I called Sen. Shaheen’s office and spoke to a nice young woman who said that she would give my thoughts to the Senator. (Sorry, I actually did get the names of the people I spoke to at the Senators’ offices, but I have misplaced that note at this point.) Then I called Ms. Shea-Porter’s office, where I was confronted with a less-than-cordial young woman staffer. When I told her that I wanted to know where Ms. S-P stood on the drone strike on American soil issue, the girl acted as though she knew nothing about it. I asked her to ask the Congresswoman please stand up for the Constitution, and support our rights, since this arbitrary way of using drones on American soil on American people was a complete contradiction of our Constitutional rights to a fair trial and due process. She started laughing. I was outraged. I hung up.

Below is the letter I received today in answer to my phone call.

CSP On Drones Header

Anwar Al-Awlaki????? Really???? A form letter? Oh goody. If it’s not her sending them, it’s Jeanne Shaheen. How very personal. And my name is misspelled. This has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with what I called for. Argh. To deal with this situation for another 2 years!

Read more

Belknap County Republican Committee (3/13/13) – Vesta Roy, Belknap County Budget

Well, these should have gone with the “intro” post, but that’s OK – blogging means never having to recycle pixels if you don’t want to.  The Vesta Roy is a training program for Republican women and given that the Belknap County Convention just finished setting up its budget (along with cry baby Commissioners), NH State Rep Frank Tilton gave the attendees an update.

  

Vesta Roy                                                                         Budget Update

Previous video:

Read more

So, which do YOU think is the correct philosophy?

US President Ronald Reagan (R-CA): “Government exists to protect us from each other.  Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves?“ NH State Rep. Kris Roberts (D-Keene):  “Government has to protect us from our own stupidity.” One takes the attitude that Citizens are stupid and must be herded … Read more

“I despise bullies……wealthy officials who exercise school choice for their own families while denying it to others less financially fortunate”

This column came to my attention from Ann Marie Bannfield who as become one of the most knowledgeable and articulate defenders of the need for Educational Freedom, for local control,  and an ardent foe of lowered educational/academic standards that have swept our country.  Thus, when she emailed out a link to this Op-Ed, I read it.  After doing so, it became clear that this is one of the best pieces I have read that simply and plainly call out the real bullies in the educational field.  No, not other students but the adults on the other side of the desk in the form of the teachers unions.

The political bullying of NH school children continues  BY RICHARD EVANS

I despise bullies.

One of the most profound impressions ever made on me was when, as a young man in the 1980s, I travelled along the border between China and Hong Kong. I vividly remember watching the people on the Chinese side laboring in the rice fields, literally in the shadow of the gun towers which sprouted from the barbed wire at frequent intervals. At the end of the day, my wife and I crossed back to the other side of the wire beyond which lay freedom and prosperity.

For our Chinese guide and the folks in the fields, however, that was a forbidden land. How unimaginably galling it must have been for them to peer through that barrier every day of their lives, and see Nirvana so close and yet so unattainable.

Years later I realized that the most telling feature of any wall is the posture of the guards. The Chinese guards on the border, like their counterparts who once manned the equally dismal Berlin Wall, were not defending their fellow citizens against outside attack. They were facing inwards, preventing escape. Arch bullies, one and all.

Not all walls are physical structures. The wall that has been erected around our public schools is purely economic, yet it traps those it surrounds equally as effectively as any barbed wire. Escape is theoretically feasible, but it comes with a price tag that is beyond the means of most families. To leave is to forgo, for some completely unfathomable reason, all access to a share of the substantial funding that society allocates to education. All of the money must stay behind.

Read more

Is the Resistance against a Leviathan Government growing?

ComeAndTakeThem

 

We have all gotten used to the handmade signs set on the overpasses to welcome home the troops after a tour in either Iraq or Afghanistan.  Now, a new one?

To the right of the highway sign, see that white sign on the guardrail?  If you do not know what that white sign is or says, I believe it is a cousin to the one after the jump.  From the email that came to my attention:

“You may not be able to really see this well. See if you can enlarge it without distorting it. I took it while I was driving up to the overpass (not the best idea) but its a picture of a gun and the sign reads “Come and take it”. This is on the overpass just before Shaws in Milford. Wonder how long it will stay there!!!!!”

Molon Labe

“Come and Take Them”.

(H/T: John)

Read more

Data Point – Worldwide Temperature rise from 1997 – 2012

From the Telegraph, reporting on the Met Office / Hadley Center (one of the leading “climate change” official entities: That would be 0.08 degrees Centigrade, or 0.144 degrees F. Dunno about you folks, but I certainly do not have a thermometer that is reliably accurate to measure that small of a difference!  And what are … Read more

Getting outside the echo chamber: “The Right opposes Social Security because…every person has worth….” Part 2

The Right opposes Social Security because it is based on the social democratic idea that every person has worth, even if they are too old to work, and that no one should live in poverty.

And so we debate!  I received Professor Joseph Schwartz’s opening remarks on the defense of this line written by Maria Svart, National Director of the Democrat Socialists of America.  Tomorrow I will post my response:

3/11/13:  Prof. Schwartz

The democratic left has always supported collective means of social insurance, such as publicly-funded (through equitable taxation) universal health care, old-age pensions, disability insurance, and unemployment insurance. We support all citizens being covered because both the rich and poor, young and old get sick or disabled and they often don’t have jobs or the purchasing power to cover themselves thru individual insurance. The right has always resisted the implementation of social insurance and always fights to “privatize” it as much as possible, arguing that individuals should have the foresight (and “the freedom”) to insure themselves (or those who pay in more should get better coverage).

Read more

Email Doodlings: NH GOP – Bang! There goes one foot

BackStory: Since the national election, much has been made of the Obama Data Machine – hundreds of millions of dollars spent, hundreds of people employed, and a use of advanced IT married with Big Data and Behavioral Engineering / Science for the singular purpose of keeping Obama in the Oval Office seat.  Certainly, the GOP, the NH GOP, needs to learn that lesson (one among many) that the terms, conditions, and actions of campaigning have been forever changed.  The ability to find, persuade, motivate, and get new and low information voters to go and vote was a model of technology – far beyond what has been yet defined, spec’d out, implemented, and used.

Agreement all around: the GOP, heck – the NH GOP, has to get with it and soon.  Or either be relegated to minority status for a long time -or come out with another kind of disruptive technique (perhaps totally orthagonal to even the “new normal” of Big Data / Behavioral Science / Campaigning. If the latter happens, great but in the mean time, it is pretty much agreed that Tech must be upgraded.  Pretty much, it is a must – anything to better connect with voters.  One email that came in over the transom:

Read more

Well, NH Constitution Article 10 does provide for a Revolution, doesn’t it? Was HB617 the flashpoint? Part 1

[Art.] 10. [Right of Revolution.] Government being instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security, of the whole community, and not for the private interest or emolument of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought to reform the old, or establish a new government. The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.

June 2, 1784

Well, Article 10 is meant to be used by the Citizens when Government is judged to be oppresive and tyrannical – but it seems like it is fitting what is going on in the NH House.  We’ve written extensively about HB617 which will raise the gas tax on NH Citizens big time.  Our beef is not that Democrats initiated this but that Republicans, from the Party of Low Taxes / Limited Government, voted to support Higher Taxes that will support Bigger Government.  And TWO of the Republican Leadership team in the NH House voted for it: David Hess and Shawn Jasper.

Rightfully so, both have been taking heat – especially Shawn Jasper.  The grassroots House members are LIVID – and Jasper just keeps pouring gas on himself in fanning the flames.  How do I know?  Man, have I gotten emails.  Let’s review a few of them, shall we (warning – this may get longish):

Read more

Share to...
BufferCopyFlipboardHacker NewsLineLinkedInMastodonMessengerMixPinterestPrintRedditSMSTelegramTumblrVKWhatsAppXingYummly