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Interesting article on Frank Luntz who I know only by his multiple appearances on Hannity (Fox News) or after debates of one type or another.  He (or the host) asks a focus group of ordinary folks of mixed political persuasions and either getting “hand raise” answers or “intensity dialing”.  Well, I haven’t seen much of him lately, and as this snippet from the Left leaning Atlantic shows, he is despairing of our future since his “claim to fame” is that he listens to people (before doing his political wordcrafting):

…It was what Luntz heard from the American people that scared him. They were contentious and argumentative. They didn’t listen to each other as they once had. They weren’t interested in hearing other points of view. They were divided one against the other, black vs. white, men vs. women, young vs. old, rich vs. poor. “They want to impose their opinions rather than express them,” is the way he describes what he saw. “And they’re picking up their leads from here in Washington.” Haven’t political disagreements always been contentious, I ask? “Not like this,” he says. “Not like this.” 

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Yet another sad story on the results of Obamacare on families.  Somewhere in here, I did a post where a single mom (grown daughter) had to buy a new policy as Obama & Sebelius decided that the healthcare policy that the Mom had was “junk”.  No, this Mom was not judged capable of picking a plan that was suitable and affordable for her – Progressives are convinced that none of us can choose wisely.  She wanted to continue to be self-responsible and self-supporting and in doing so, continue that self-esteem that “I can be independent, pay my own way, and be self-reliant”.  Obama & Sebelius’s policies decided otherwise – their “socialist Potemkin marketplace” immediately clapped her into the Government jail of Medicaid – one way in and no way out.  They took away her self-esteem by telling her that they know that she can no longer support herself and gave her only their option – Government healthcare.

Now, another story.  I’ve been writing for years about the school systems / teachers / Govt believing that your kids really do belong to them: feed them 3 squares a day in school (even when schools are closed), clothe them, provide daycare for them in school, provide healthcare clinics for them in school, and take them out of school for abortions if they feel one is needed.   Now on the flip side, the Obama Administration has jiggered the rules so that parents that want to take care of their kids and provide for their kids healthcare wise, can’t.  So these parents must “give up” their kids to the government (reformatted, emphasis mine):

…Zack is married with children and self-employed. That used to be a rough row to hoe for insurance purposes. Now it’s an impossible one.  In the past, Zack had somehow managed to insure his family under Washington’s stringent insurance requirement regime, which had chased away many insurers and bid up premiums. It was expensive to cover his family but he worked hard and they found a way.  Obamacare presented them with special difficulties. Zack thought he was going to have to pay several hundred dollars more a month for roughly the same level of coverage for him and his wife, before you even factored in the kids. They didn’t have the money for it.

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From President Obama’s weekly address:

Just a few days after Christmas, more than one million of our fellow Americans lost a vital economic lifeline – the temporary insurance that helps folks make ends meet while they look for a job. Republicans in Congress went home for the holidays and let that lifeline expire. And for many of their constituents who are unemployed through no fault of their own, that decision will leave them with no income at all.

This would be just more political gas except for one thing: “Fine for me but not for thee”.  I snicker with irony that these were words spoken from Washington, DC Hawaii while the President is on vacation himself – a rather expensive one to boo.  These are the words spoken either by the ironically clueless, the political tone-deaf, or from someone that doesn’t give a darn. 

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Once again, from Obama’s Weekly Address:

We make this promise to one another because it makes a difference to

in continuing his points about extending unemployment insurance benefit.

Sidenote: after 5 years, we have no one to blame except for him and the Democrats from the poor results of their economic policies.  So if Obama is making the pitch for yet again for an extension, isn’t that a self-indictment of his own failure?

Let’s get this straight – I didn’t make a promise to anyone about this and I bet you didn’t either.  Sure, I have a promise in my wedding vows to take care of my wife – and then, to my family.  Yes, I will help my friends – there is that implicit bond between friends to do just that.  But to make explicit promises to unknown people?  Hardly.

No, I see this utterance as being part & parcel of the Progressive “The political is personal, the personal is political“.

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Rolling Stone – the aging paper of record for the 60s hipsters.  Now it  is advising the Millennials the generation already more narcissistic than the Boomers, by dint of the “self-esteem” movement in the culture and education, that they deserve more.  In fact, much more – not only should the obligatory “I merely attended my soccer team” gold statue but reforms that would have brought a smile to FDR (at the least – see his Second Bill of Rights) if not to Marx.  After all, it’s not YOUR fault that the “economy blows” – it’s somebody else’s fault and THEY are the ones that should be responsible for supporting you (i.e., nothing less than the stratagem of the furthering of the infantilizing of America.  It also shows a complete disdain to open up a history book to see how these five doozies have worked in reality.  So here is the premise:

Millennials have been especially hard-hit by the downturn, which is probably why so many people in this generation (like myself) regard capitalism with a level of suspicion that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. But that egalitarian impulse isn’t often accompanied by concrete proposals about how to get out of this catastrophe. Here are a few things we might want to start fighting for, pronto, if we want to grow old in a just, fair society, rather than the economic hellhole our parents have handed us.

Boo-hoo! First blamed – Parents (who still have to put up with you in our basements).  Now, the real problem is that set up by other P-word entities, like Progressive Politicians, and their Progressive Policies (“hey rube, we know better than you do what is best for you!”.  We haven’t seen truly free markets for almost 100 years – I would propose that the late 1890s was the start of true Government dismantling of laissez-faire private sector where private actors were able to make contracts for themselves and determine, for themselves, the conditions under which employment was offered, employment accepted, and trading between producers and consumers happened.  But the author’s premise is that a just and fair society must be managed and controlled by some outside entity?  And this can only happen when another P-word, Politics, gets involved.  And Politics is always to be judged as fair and just?  We all know THAT premise is silly and unfactual

1. Guaranteed Work for Everybody 

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“…it’s to make sure that Mike Priefer never holds a coaching position again in the NFL, and ideally never coaches at any level.“

That is what Chris Kluwe, gay marriage proponent and now former Minnesota Viking punter, is now desiring for his former coach at the Vikings.  That Priefer should no longer have a way to make a living and provide for his family – belittled, denigrated, stripped of any professional renumeration, no longer able to protect and provide for his family.  That the years spent in learning his craft and finally performing at the highest level of his chosen career should amount to nothing – simply for being against gay marriage.  Simply for disagreeing with Kluwe on this issue. It is not enough to seek an apology (in watching HRC and GLAAD for several years, apologies seemingly just mean “more abasement is required”).

This is Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty all over again –

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From whom do our Rights come from, God (or the Deity or Nature’s God) or those running Government?

The Framers of our Constitutional Republic reverently assumed the former along with the belief that if God has granted us our Rights, no man or assemblage of men can (or of more importance, should) revoke those Rights in their names alone.  Thus we are Free for there are boundaries in which our government must not cross.  If it is the former, then there are no Rights at all – merely “grants” from an all too ordinary Government from time to time.  And if that is so, we are not Free, for there is no boundaries at all, as Government (and the power greedy politicians and bureaucrats embedded in it) can arbitrarily to give at one point and then take away at another. 

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Well, it is the first of the New Year, and what many of us critics saw right from the get-go was going to happen, has happened.  But Progressives kept pooh-poohing it to the point of denial and outright lies – just like my US Senator Jeanne Shaheen as Steve pointed out.

Well, those Progressive seeds that were sown, with Shaheen being a head farmer, are now sprouting.  Congrats, Jeanne (and BFF Obama): meet a couple of examples of people who don’t have coverage, thanks to Obamacare (reformatted, emphasis mine):

Hospital staff in Northern Virginia are turning away sick people on a frigid Thursday morning because they can’t determine whether their Obamacare insurance plans are in effect.  Patients in a close-in DC suburb who think they’ve signed up for new insurance plans are struggling to show their December enrollments are in force, and health care administrators aren’t taking their word for it.

In place of quick service and painless billing, these Virginians are now facing the threat of sticker-shock that comes with bills they can’t afford.

‘They had no idea if my insurance was active or not!’ a coughing Maria Galvez told MailOnline outside the Inova Healthplex facility in the town of Springfield.   She was leaving the building without getting a needed chest x-ray.   ‘The people in there told me that since I didn’t have an insurance card, I would be billed for the whole cost of the x-ray,’ Galvez said, her young daughter in tow. ‘It’s not fair – you know, I signed up last week like I was supposed to.’

…A similar situation frustrated Mary, an African-American woman small businesswoman who asked MailOnline not to publish her last name. She was leaving the Inova Alexandria Hospital in Alexandria, Virginia with two family members.

‘I had chest pains last night, and they took me in the emergency room,’ Mary said. ‘They told me they were going to admit me, but when I told them I hadn’t heard from my insurance company since I signed up, they changed their tune.’

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“The irony is that Obama has said he is going to dedicate himself and the rest of his time in office to fighting inequality,” Krauthammer said. “He actually created the greatest inequality.” The president’s policies of having low interests rates and having the fed pump money into the economy have caused the rich to get richer, Krauthammer said. “That’s why you get the mass discontent in the sense of the economy improving.”

“He is the cause and now he is going to redeem us from the misery that he has contributed to,” Krauthammer added.

Obama is simply employing Marxist class hate and class envy – promising with his “words” to “help” the middle class even as his actual policies are destroying it – leaving only the very poor and the very rich.  Let’s also add in, to items that Krauthammer lists,  the stagnation of the economy that his policies have wrought (rotted?  Could be either) with 10s of thousands of new laws and regulations (chiefly in the areas of paperwork, energy regulation, and job crushing Obamacare).  Two more features – in which Jr. Partner Republicans have a part: 

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Two different countries, two different people; both calling something either Patriotic or anti-Patriotic:

1. Already there are high-profile cases of rich people who’ve left — movie star Gerard Depardieu and France’s richest man, Bernard Arnault of Louis Vuitton, to name but two. And France’s highly prized soccer champions are now vowing to go on strike.  Hollande calls them traitors.
2. Though young people will be forced to pay more under Obamacare, she pushed them to enroll on the exchanges.   “I made my kids sign up because I just said, ‘This is your patriotic duty,’” she said.

The first would be French Prime Minister Francois Hollande who seemingly believes that Patriotism is measured by total abject acceptance of the State taking most of the fruits of one’s labor.   The second would be NBC’s chief medical editor Dr. Nancy Snyderman (who really wants a single payer system in the US; a complete healthcare takeover by the Government) who has no problem in conflating signing up for a Government program as Patriotic.

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I guess we scare them.

Well, I read Susan’s post earlier today and decided to saunter over to Blue Hampshire to read Mike Hoefer’s post – Seeking Editorial Lead (reformatted, emphasis mine):

I’ve been an absentee landlord for sometime and do not see that changing in the year ahead. Blue Hampshire’s founding predates Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. and those tools have diversified the “New Media” space for NH political news and allowed politicians and politicos easy, direct publishing abilities without the need for a central hub. I believe there are still some interesting digital opportunities for Blue Hampshire if there was someone(s) to help drive the day-to-day editorial of the site. I think it would be a very interesting opportunity for a NH college student(s) majoring in journalism to get some real world experience (in a state that has national impact) to their resume.

Uh, that would include us as well as far as opening the doors – blogging WAS the New Shiny Object. Heck, it was just Doug and I at the ‘Grok’s beginning but our traffic always has been larger (with a couple of exceptions).  Even now, our few authors still outproduce and out-traffic BH’s – even with that whole “community of diarists”.  I don’t quite understand why Mike needs help: they’ve always been “a collective” effort (or as they called it, “a community”) and they can’t find one person to step up and lead?  Or can it only be successful if this “alternative” happens?

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Really?

Is it truly the position of Government Employees that NH Parents are WRONG in not having perfect strangers to be forced to feed their kids?

Well, the answer is right in the first sentence of the article (mostly)- it is always about the Benjamins:

The rates of children who qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches has ballooned over a decade. Yet area school officials say there are more eligible families who don’t apply for the program, which not only provides access to meals but also qualifies schools for federal grants and additional state money.

The percentage of students in New Hampshire who are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches grew by 66 percent over 10 years. As of October 2012, 46,659, or 27.3 percent, of New Hampshire public school students in grades 1 through 12 qualified for the program, up from 16.4 percent in 2002.

Poverty has not grown that fast in NH to account for that level of growth – I saw this in Gilford, which is a rather well off town, and what I kept hearing from the School officials (despite the low poverty rate in town).  And it was always “where else to get more money from somewhere else”.  Of course, it was always “for the children”.

It continues to disturb me that I continue to see an attitude by 

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