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And the continued push for acceptance and assimilation of the Progressive value that is a 180: eternal victimhood.  From George Will comes the example (in talking about Detroit, emphasis mine):

Steven Rattner, who administered the bailout of part of the Detroit-based portion of America’s automobile industry, says, “Apart from voting in elections, the 700,000 remaining residents of the Motor City are no more responsible for Detroit’s problems than were the victims of Hurricane Sandy for theirs.” Congress, he says, should bail out Detroit because “America is just as much about aiding those less fortunate as it is about personal responsibility.”

There you have today’s liberalism: Human agency, hence responsibility, is denied. Apart from the pesky matter of “voting in elections” — apart from decades of voting to empower incompetents, scoundrels and criminals, and to mandate unionized rapacity — no one is responsible for anything. Popular sovereignty is a chimera because impersonal forces akin to hurricanes are sovereign.

And let’s add these bon mots from the President in saying that his poor relatives keep his kids “grounded”:

“Malia and Sasha have cousins who know what it’s like to struggle and know what it’s like to have to scrape by. They know that those kids are just as worthy as they are, they just haven’t had as much luck.”

Right – Obama’s family’s lofty position is simply due to dumb freaking luck.

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Yeah, I’m on pretty much on a lot of the Republican email list of import.  No, not all, but I seemingly end up on lots of them.  Including the NRCC – the National Republican Congressional Committee (tasked with protecting incumbents electorally and those new R candidates who have earned their stamp of approval)  which is pretty much in attack-dog mode against Carol Shea-Porter and Annie Kuster.  To be honest, if this is to be red meat stuff, it ought to at least pass the grill test (hmm, smells ok).  Methinks, however, if this kind of dribble is supposed to “activating the base”, well, I think they need a new chef:

On Medicare’s 48^th Anniversary, Carol Shea-Porter Continues to Oppose Plans to Save It

Shea-Porter opposed a balanced budget which would have preserved Medicare for future generations

WASHINGTON – Forty-eight years ago today, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed Medicare into law. How is Rep. Carol Shea-Porter celebrating this historic anniversary? By continually opposing plans that would balance the budget and preserve and protect Medicare for future generations.

And it goes on.  So with Immigration, Obamacare, the upcoming Continuing Resolution, failure of foreign policy, the hollowing out of our military, and more importantly, the state of our economy, this is what they choose to harp about?   So, I wrote a return “love message”:

Carol SIEU-Porter is certainly a problem.  However, another (and much greater) problem is that the Republican Leadership down there in DC are seemingly in great need of the GraniteGrok Republican Repair Kit:

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An abstraction from the Wall Street Journal (via Junk Science):

• Wind and solar make up 3.5% of America’s electrical generation
• Denmark gets 30% of its electrical generation from wind
• Germany gets 12% of its electrical generation from wind and solar

• Germany has used used $250 Billion to deploy to 12%

By 2020:

• Denmark wishes to push that percentage to 50%
• Germany wished to push their percentage to 35%

Result NOW?

• Germany and Denmark pay 300% MORE than the average American Citizen

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NH?  Not so shabby for all of the squabbling we hear from Democrats this legislation session – NH in 2009 was 18th best (Full rankings after the jump).

My Thoughts?  If NH Bridges were in as bad repair as the Democrats say they are, if they were such the high priority they screamed they were, the Dems would have stopped using them as a political club, completely take the funds from other places in the budget, and fixed the damn things NOW.

So, did they?  ‘Course not – it was (and will continue to be) simply something to extract more money from more citizens to grow more Government that more enhances their sense of self-esteem and self-worth (and yeah, some Repubs in there too).

(H/T: Reason Foundation via Heritage via Loyal Reader Steven)

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Grokster Steve has now introduced us to the first Republican caught in the ever-widening Voter Fraud net that has been cast: Debbie Romano.  I am glad he did as we don’t care what Party these vote thieves are from; Democrat, Republican, TEA Party, Libertarian Party, or independent.  Indeed, I watched as uber-Progressive Zandra Rice-Hawkins from Granite State Progress…

Sidenote:  Isn’t this hilarious?  Here she is, working to push the Democrat Progressive Neo-Feudalism upon the Live Free or Die State.  And while she is acting as an apologist for the voter fraud Democrats that are supported by out of State money, she wouldn’t even be able to do this if it wasn’t for the Progressive money airlifted into the state as if this was a latter day Berlin Airlift.  I still have no idea how she can keep a straight face…

…tried to paste Grant Bosse of NH Watchdog as being partisan in only talking about Democrats.  To his credit, his retort was that any Republican caught committing voter fraud should be held to the same standard – the Rule of Law.  We agree.

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When I put up these two posts, I forgot about this 2007 post about Bob Filner, Democrat Mayor of San Diego:

WJLA.com is reporting that California

Rep. Bob Filner is facing an assault and battery charge after an incident at Dulles Airport where he allegedly pushed an United Airlines bag claim employee…

.

[snip]

.

Filner, a Democrat from California, allegedly attempted to enter an employees-only area on Sunday night.

Naturally, there was a problem with his luggage, and the lawmaker was too much in a rush to follow the same procedure everyone else has to abide by. No, instead he tangles with some poor airport worker who was undoubtedly simply doing his job. Several witnessessaid they heard Filner yell “You can’t stop me,” before pushing aside the employee and refusing to leave the office.

and it goes on .  So, not only does he hate women, #WarOnWomen, but hates airline workers.  But I am confused – how the heck did this get out into the news?  I mean did the MSM fall down on doing their job (which is not to report on Democrats behaving badly)?  Right from the Journalist Horse’s Mouth comes this about their treatment of Bob Filner.  Big Journalism links to San Diego’s Doug Curlee about how the SD Press has treated (or NOT treated) Filner (emphasis mine, reformatted):

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Radley Balko has a new book, Rise of the Warrior Cop, out after years of reporting on “police acting badly” (especially SWAT teams) concerning the militarization of police forces.  Armored up, weaponed up, techniques that rival some elite military groups.  Look, there IS a need for SWAT teams, and yes, it is dangerous,  but when you see stories on an almost daily (or weekly) basis that police / SWAT teams have gone into the wrong house, destroyed private property, killed beloved pets, there is a problem across the country and here in NH.

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From the files of CNHT – the organization that has been laboring in the vineyard of Voter Fraud for decades as it has been toiling on behalf of local taxpayer organizations all of over the State of NH.    For those that say that there is no voter fraud, here is a report from Dartmouth back in 2003 leading to the conclusion that political operatives have indeed been driving truckloads of “mobile domiciled” students through the large loopholes in NH Election Law. Voter Fraud did not start with the embarrassment of our Election officials by the Project Veritas crew – they only shined a large flashlight on it.

Once again I posit it – have both Democrat and Republican Elites colluded to sweep this under the rug when running the Secretary of State or Attorney General to protect NH’s status of the First In The Nation Primary State?  Rule #1 in politics – get the bad news out quickly and Rule #2 – fix it.  Rule #1 has been avoided and certainly the Dems have been trying to keep Rule #2 from being implemented. While we have been concentrating on those that have not complied with the intent of “domicile” law here in NH, here is another perspective.

Below – emphasis mine.

********************

Records Reveal Possible Voter Fraud

Wednesday, February 5, 2003

by Michael Ellis

After the 2000 election, close to two hundred students at Marquette University in Wisconsin admitted to voting multiple times in a survey by the campus newspaper. In St. Louis, Missouri, there are more people registered to vote in the city than there are residents, by a margin of thousands. On college campuses, the danger of illegal voting is real, given that students living on campus can easily claim and show proof of two residences. With the absence of a national database of voters, fraud can cross state lines, as out-of-state students register and vote by absentee in their home states and in person in their adopted states, with no one the wiser. Committing such a crime in New Hampshire would be relatively easy to do, given the state’s policy of allowing new voters to register on the day of the election, instead of in advance as is customary elsewhere. While nothing so egregious as voting several times has yet been uncovered at Dartmouth, voter fraud of a less severe nature may have occurred in the past year’s elections.

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Heh!  We Groksters can pop up almost anywhere and at anytime and Grokster Don was at the PBVRC event (unbeknownest to Jim). Since Jim was on GrokTALK! yesterday, and with the Pemi-Baker talk as well, it seems that Jim would like some “clarification time” – we can do that!  Here is his first attempt in clarification:

Hi, Skip

RE: My Favorite Immigration Bill

Here is the substance of an email I sent out earlier today to folks at the Pemi-Baker GOP event and for distribution. Please post or comment. I’ve copied Paul Mirski because the subject involves the relative powers of courts and legislatures.

Thanks to the suggestions of Don Ewing, a GOP voter at the event, I dug into the issue of whether people born of illegal immigrants on US soil (“anchor babies”) are automatically US citizens.

I have concluded that — under the 14th Amendment (which reads in part, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”) — Congress has the power to define the term “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.

As a result, I have endorsed a House bill, the Birthright Citizenship Bill of 2013, which defines the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” as applying to persons born in the US if at least one parent was either a U.S. citizen or a national, a lawful permanent resident immigrant, or an immigrant performing active service in the U.S. military.

Background:

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NSA Constitutional Breach

National Intelligence Director James Clapper has publicly acknowledged that the National Security Agency collects and stores private communications data (excepting content) from Verizon and other carriers involving hundreds of millions of ordinary American citizens. This has been ongoing since at least 2006.

Whistleblower and former AT&T technician Mark Klein has provided unrebutted evidence forming a key basis for litigation filed in 2008 charging that NSA has installed a “listening room” at AT&T’s San Francisco data communications hub (and likely a dozen or more additional such hubs around the US) from which NSA can route all phone and Internet traffic in realtime to its facilities for storage and data mining. This July, the court finally rejected the Obama Administration’s “state secrets” defense, ruling that the case may be litigated under the procedures of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

For the likely purpose of storing and mining this massive stream of past and realtime data, NSA is building a $2 billion data warehouse north of Provo, Utah, slated for completion later this year. Indicating its immensity, this facility will consume 65 megawatts of power and 1.7 million gallons of cooling water per day.

Constitutional breach

The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution reads:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The framers included this provision in our Bill of Rights because British soldiers had been routinely issuing “general warrants,” allowing groundless searches of Colonists private homes.

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There is a joke in the software industry:

Why is a consultant like a seagull?

They both fly in, caw a lot, drop a load, and then fly off – and bring a whole flock back with them.

DBV – is it legal? And if so, is it moral? And does YOUR vote count if the State Or, to use that word that Progressives oft use –  “fair” (and I use that in the traditional meaning – not as Progressives wish to redefine this word as well)?  Especially in relation to voters who live here, work here, and depend that others like them to make the decisions that affect them via their elected representatives?  Yet, they already have been betrayed by the Law and by those they elected to make that Law.  In NH’s Deputy Secretary of State David Scanlan’s own words (emphasis mine):

In general terms, unrelated to the allegations against Fuller Clark, Scanlan said voter fraud “is a significant crime.”

Problem is, over the last few years, his office has done diddly squat.  Ditto the Attorney General’s.

He also said state law allows a person to move to the state one day, with the intention of staying in New Hampshire and registering to vote the next day, then moving out-of-state the third day because of a life change.

A life change.  As in, perhaps, “my work here is done!” ?

But if someone moves solely to vote, he said, “that’s something completely different.

Which speaks to intent.  The intent to win for “your side”?  The intent to to make the other side lose?  Simply a “means”, as Alinsky Progressives believe, “to obtain the greater good” which for them, results in “The Bigger the Government, the smaller the citizen”.  Screw over the actual inhabitants of that particular State by ‘stealing’ a vote?  Meh – merely that a few eggs got cracked, merely some are collateral damage to “Lean Forward” in progressing The Collective.  Onward Workers!  Your Paradise awaits!

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This iconic picture of firefighters raising the stars and stripes in the rubble of Ground Zero was nearly excluded from the 9/11 Memorial Museum — because it was “rah-rah” American, a new book says.

Michael Shulan, the museum’s creative director, was among staffers who considered the Tom Franklin photograph too kitschy and “rah-rah America,” according to “Battle for Ground Zero” (St. Martin’s Press) by Elizabeth Greenspan, out next month.

“I really believe that the way America will look best, the way we can really do best, is to not be Americans so vigilantly and so vehemently,” Shulan said.

Sad, that.  We have been the greatest country in the world’s history and have most often been an agent for good than for bad.  I certainly disagree with this seemingly ‘blame America Firster”; I would hazard a guess that he’s of the same opinion as Obama – that America should not have the pre-eminence that it has historically had and still has.  The question to be asked, with Obama’s Determined Weakness strategy now in full bore, what will be left at the end of his term?  Will we have any social or financial capital left to pick ourselves up?  Or will the debt that Obama and the Democrats (with assists from Republicans), along with Obamacare and the other dependency programs that have been ridden hard lately (e.g., more people on food stamps than are earning a wage; the U6 unemployment rate approaching 15% (underemployed and those that have given up completely / no longer eligible for unemployment), forcing companies to be arms of the Government and crushed under more and more regulations instead of the wealth creators they should be.

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This week, both in posts and on GrokTALK!, I seem to be mentioning “language definition”.  Or, to be more precise, language REdefinition – especially by those on the Left in order to move a political agenda ahead.  They use common words and frequent phrases in what “seems” to be normal parlance – unless you listen and analyze their usage carefully.  “Abortion is “womens reproductive health”, “asking them to pay a little more” really means “The Democracy Mob is here to legislatively take your money – there is no asking”, and “judgementalism” simply means “how DARE you hold me accountable for my actions!”.

We’ve all heard about “food insecurity” – another manufactured crisis in which the Left defines this as “well, in the last year, if you had ANY concern about getting a meal during this past year, you are food insecure”.  Heck, that’s happened to me before – arrive late at an airport at night after a cross country flight and I have had “food insecurity” – as in “is there anyplace open here to get a meal before my next leg?”.  After all (to use another example of redefinition), if being Transgender is solely a manifestation of how one feels on a particular day with respect to school kids deciding which bathroom, locker room, or athletic team they will participate on (re: the “California Bathroom Bill”, or even the NH Bathroom Bill that was barely defeated a few years ago) – I may be a physical male but I’m opening that ladies room door right now.  After all, the end result of this perverse language redefinition will end up as “who are YOU to interpret or malign MY intentions?” and when applied to law and policy, it will come down to a Wonderland type definition: “a word means what I want it to mean – at least right now.  ‘Cause I can change my mind later and mean it to be something else later.”

As the AP is trying to do here.

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