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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.

Rightwingnews: Pre-Florida Conservative blogger Presidential Poll

John Hawkins over at RightWingNews does a lot of polling of Conservative blogsites and the ‘Grok as picked to participate in his latest one.  One day ahead of the Florida Presidential Primary, he wanted to know where over 250 bloggers stood on the remaining candidates:

Right Wing News polled more than 250 right-of-center bloggers on which candidate they’d support if the 2012 Republican primaries were today. The following 68 bloggers responded:

101 Dead Armadillos, Advice Goddess, Alarming News, Alexa Shrugged, All American Blogger, All That Is Necessary, American Glob, And Rightly So, Argghhhh!, Atlas Shrugs, Batesline, Betsy’s Page, Black and Right, Blonde Sagacity, Bookworm Room, Dodgeblogium, Don Surber, Dr. Helen, Election Projection, Fausta’s Blog, Fraters Libertas, Freeman Hunt, GraniteGrok, IMAO, Isaac Schrodinger, Jeremayakovka, Joanne Jacobs, John Hawkins, Left Coast Rebel, Likelihood of Confusion, Liz Mair, Mean Ol Meany, Melissa Clouthier, Midnight Blue, Milton Wolf, Moonbattery, Mount Virtus, Musing Minds, Neo-Neocon, Newmarks Door, Newsreal, Nice Deb, No Oil For Pacifists, Pal2pal, Pirates Cove, Political Mommentary, Politicalistas, Pundit Boy, Pursuing Holiness, Rightosphere, Russ. Just Russ, Smart Girl Politics, SondraK, Sunshine State Sarah, The Hedgehog Report, The Jawa Report, The Lotus Blog, The Next Right, The Pink Flamingo Bar & Grill, The Smallest Minority, The Sundries Shack, The TrogloPundit, This Ain’t Hell, WILLisms, Weapons of Mass Discussion, Wintery knight, YidwithLid, mountaineer musings

Here’s how the results broke down:

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Data Point: Reagan vs Obama

Over the first 10 quarters of each President’s recovery: Obama Reagan GDP 6% 15% Job creation 790,000 7,500,000 real disposable personal income 0.80% 5.40% No, neither President can actually create jobs or personal wealth; all they can really do is set the stage / create an environment in which they can be created by the … Read more

Notable Quote – Spike Lee

On being called the next Dr. Bill Cosby (noted black entertainer who berates the black community on it culture and on education issues): “I am from the pre-crack generation. When I was growing up, we never, ever, never ridiculed someone because they were a good student,” he said. “Your generation, they now equate intelligence with … Read more

Quick thought on a line from Obama’s political hack, David Axelrod

On Meet The Press, David Axelrod had this to say about Romney and Bain Capital: His philosophy suggests that his emphasis is on creating profit for himself and his partners and his investors and not creating jobs. Er, that would be right.  Socialists believe that the primary role of companies is to supply jobs.  Progressives … Read more

In Grafton County, does Laura Saffo want to be a police-state prosecutor?

Word has come to me that Laura Saffo, the elected Grafton County Attorney—who heads up the office that prosecutes all felonies in the county—has told confidants that she is “keeping an eye on the Freestaters” in Grafton County. Really. In the town of Grafton, where I have my residence, “Freestaters” are members of the volunteer … Read more

Of the things said at Thursday’s Presidential debate, Rick Santorum said the most important:

Thursday night’s GOP Presidential Debate in Florida was, for the most part, a Mitt-Newt mud fight with their hands tied behind them (re: all they could do was just roll in it).  Lots of dirt to spread around.  However, Rick Santorum made the most of it, and I believe finally was able to lay in a few good licks, especially on ObaneyCare.

But as far as I am concerned, he uttered the most important words of the evening:

When an audience member asked the candidates how their religious beliefs would affect their decisions as President, Santorum turned to the nation’s founding documents to reference the relationship between faith and governance:

“The Constitution is there to do one thing, protect God-given rights,” said Santorum. “That’s what makes America different than every other country in the world.”

“When you say ‘faith has nothing to do with it’– faith has everything to do with it,” Santorum went on to say over applause. “If our President believes that rights come to us from the state, everything government gives you, it can take away.

“The role of the government is to protect rights that cannot be taken away.”

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Why should taxpayers be paying for more babies? Who really is the selfish one in all this? Enter stage Right – HB1658

Before getting into the quick discussion of NH HB1658 (“limiting financial assistance for mothers who have additional children while receiving Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF).”) that some Conservative has introduced, how ’bout this for a table setting?  This went viral back in December and while it was shocking to see a single women with 15 kids by 3 “baby daddies”, what was worse was the attitude display by her:

“Somebody Needs to Pay For All My Children“

“Somebody needs to be held accountable, and they need to pay.”

(H/T: Weasel Zippers)  The Welfare State gone crazy?  No, it hasn’t.  What is shown here is the actual logical endgame of the Liberal philosophy that allows bad behavior to continue under the guise of “she needs help”. Yes, indeed she does – but not the type I think she requires (think: a humungous dose of traditional morality).  Yes, those children are in a bad situation – no doubt about that.  However in this case,  the Liberal philosophy that places personal sexual / libertine behavior off limits for discussion is shown for the fraud it really is – and the result is now clear that it places lots of children at risk.  Tell me, Libs – how is this result showing “we care more than Conservatives”? There are Progressives that hold the State should not become involved in the intimate life of that woman (except when it is a minor female child – then they have no problem involving Govt in abortions without Parental Notification), but here’s the rub – they have no problem in having the State pay for the consequences of that philosophy.

Except they also expect us all to just pay for the cost of their failed policy. And that is where NH HB1658 comes in.

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Notable Quote – Thomas Babington Macaulay

“He conceives that the business of the magistrate is not merely to see that the persons and property of the people are secure from attack, but that he ought to be a jack-of-all-trades, architect, engineer, schoolmaster, merchant, theologian, a Lady Bountiful in every parish, a Paul Pry in every house, spying, eavesdropping, relieving, admonishing, spending … Read more

HB1279 – “AN ACT relative to voting rights of certain budget committee members”

From the text of the bill (actually, this is pretty much most of it):  1 Budget Committee Membership. Amend RSA 32:15, I(b) to read as follows:

(b) One member of the governing body of the municipality and, if the municipality is a town, one member of the school board of each school district wholly within the town and one [member] commissioner of each village district wholly within the town, all of whom shall be appointed by their respective boards to serve for a term of one year and until their successors are qualified. Each such member shall serve as a non-voting member and may be represented by an alternate member designated by the respective board, who shall, when sitting, have the same authority as the regular member.

While I was in Concord this week, I ran into ‘Grok, friend NH State Rep. Mark Warden, who is one of the sponsors of the bill and asked him “why the changes for SB2 Budget Committee?” since I have been an elected BudComm member in my hamlet for the past 6 years.  Note: never again will I do an interview in a stairwell – apologies for the poor audio – but that was the only place we could find with decent lighting and a lack of foot traffic):

I also had the chance last night to quickly interview fellow BudComm member, Kevin Leandro, as he had given testimony to Mark Warden’s House Committee:

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US Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) – I keep appreciating how she is actually voting and talking.

As we have said before (and told her personally), Senator Kelly has been a pleasantly surprising voice and vote in the US Senate as she has been voting more conservatively than what we first believed she would.  I think this quick interview she did with Fox News shows how important the debt ceiling, the indebtedness this nation has descended to, is to her:

I don’t think that there is a sane person in NH or the rest of the country that would disagree with her.  Progressives that worship at the feet of Obama and hang on every syllable uttered from TOTUS?  They continue to believe in the magical money tree, financial pixie dust, and Hope (which, as any project manager will tell you, is never a solid plan for success).

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Are you in the Bubble? The Elite one, that is….

Certainly, those at Davos are the world Elite, globe-trotting to Switzerland to talk about the ills of the world and what they can do about it (or transform it) without truly understanding the root cause of the problem.  And if you want to know what I believe an Elite to be, well, here you go.  So, are you an Elite?  Is your life experience set you up to be one (regardless of your actual socioeconomic standing)?  I bumped into this post:

What the heck am I talking about?  I’m talking about my score on the 20-question “How Thick Is Your Bubble?” quiz.  (Try it: it only takes about 60 seconds.)

Still puzzled?  The quiz is connected with the appearance of Charles Murray’s new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, which will be published next Tuesday.  The book lays out Murray’s thesis that much of America’s upper middle class and upper class—a “cognitive elite”—exist in a bubble from the rest of the middle and working class.  A long excerpt appeared over the weekend in the Wall Street Journal:

For most of our nation’s history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world—for whites, anyway. . .  Americans love to see themselves this way. But there’s a problem: It’s not true anymore, and it has been progressively less true since the 1960s. . .

Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America’s core cultural institutions.

Take the quiz; my results after the jump.

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GrokTV Event-NH Senate hearing: Voter ID / SB318 – Testimony from other advocacy groups

Committee hearings are just that – be they of the NH Senate or NH House (or your local government) – the committee members are there to listen.  Sure, they may have already made their decisions, but they owe it to their constituents to sit, listen patiently, and question those offering testimony.

  • David Scanlan, NH Deputy Secretary of State – in opposition
  • Patricia Piechuh (City and Town Clerks Association) – in opposition
  • NH House Representative Perry spoke – in opposition
  • Melissa Madden (America Votes) – in opposition
  • Thomas Bazinski Jr – in opposition
  • Harriet Cady – in favor

David Scanlan, NH Deputy Secretary of State speaking in opposition to the bill:

Patricia Piechuh, President of the City and Town Clerks Association speaking in opposition to the bill:

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GrokTV Event-NH Senate hearing: Voter ID / SB318 – Skip Murphy

OK, I’m touting my own horn here.  Sure, I am in favor of a Voter ID bill that requires a picture ID.  Given the two bills, I think I would favor SB289 over SB318.  Yes, the latter tries to cover more areas but I think that SB289 is more tightly focused on the major issue … Read more

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