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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.

Email Doodlings – Assertion: “a threshold that I believe none of our recent wars has crossed”. Me: Really?

The Assertion that was made was in response what I posted here:

You asked the question as to whether we need to wait until American lives are lost to respond….To me, this means that there must be imminent danger—and that is a threshold that I believe none of our recent wars has crossed—and all other options should have been exhausted. Instead, our recent wars have been pre-emptive with no clear moral certainty that an attack was imminent.

Answer: Really??  Crossed a threshold?

  • Oil is in our self-interest, like it or not.  Gulf 1: Should Bush 1 NOT have rallied the world to throw Saddam out of Kuwait, especially when it looked like Saddam might be able to roll up the Saudis et al?  Just or not?
  • Gulf 2 – lots of UN resolutions were broken by Saddam.  More importantly, if you read the Congressional resolution (of more importance than the UN resolutions to be sure), there was a whole litany of things that they found against Saddam and gave Bush 2 approval for.  And yes, LOTS of countries still thought Saddam had WMDs and that they would be used against the West as he had done so against Iran and his own people.  And Saddam had almost a year and a half of warning to comply.  Just or not?
  • We gave the Taliban plenty of advance warning – give up those that you are sheltering that trained and attacked us.  Were there just reasons to go and eradicate the Taliban from Afghanistan?

My problem is that I believe that Ron Paul IS an isolationist on defense and not just a non-interventionist; and many believe likewise.  I also believe that…

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Guess the Political Party, given the bumper stickers!

Yes, this is a NH House legislator.  Those of you who are “NH political junkies” can probably decode the House Vanity plate and already know whose car this is.  For those of you who are not, the answer is after the jump.

   

The bumper stickers?  Revealing:

   

(H/T: loyal ‘Grok reader, Jean, who nailed this the day of the Right To Work override vote)

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Grok 2.0 – Still under Construction

Yeah, we’re up and then we’re down.  The ‘Grok has been getting hit from both hardware problems with balky disk drives and recalcitrant RAID controllers and some software issues from moving from our old blogging platform.  Dontcha just love Murphy’s Laws?? I think we need a healthy dose of boring for a while, but given … Read more

Putting up the proper firewall?

Drip, Drip, Drip, Attorney General Eric Holder.  For the most transparent Administration in history, the necessary FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests are showing, more and more,  what many Second Amendment Rights advocates feared – that the Obama Government used Fast and Furious as a tactic to get an outcome that was not possible via the legislative route – an increase of regulations on law abiding citizens to achieve an ideological outcome.  Using their own straw purchasing proxies, they spent boatloads of taxpayer funds to buy from dealers they told “Oh, don’t be worried” and let them “walk” into Mexico where the drug cartels snapped them up.

And the main reason d’etre for the operation (officially, anyways) was to track them and get the druggies? Er, no.

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Newt on the Left as presented by Occupy Wall Street

It fits – it is just a minute long so watch it.  Since Hayward reprised it, if you liked Reagan’s “Acts like Tarzan, dresses like Jane, smells like cheetah”, you get the idea: (H/T: Powerline) Note: Our new blogging platform is nice enough to show me drafts of stuff that I didn’t actually post…this is … Read more

That cell phone while driving post that Steve put up?

Steve wrote about the NTSB busybodies now wishing to go all Nanny State on us about texting while driving; I thought this just fit ever so well. Dig the micro car with the electrical plug, too. It is never enough for the Govt to just carry out something that many of us think is a … Read more

So, once again, an Occupier has made their well being the responsibility of others – who knew?

And trying to be unconstitutional to boot!  After all, isn’t that the aim of the Left?  After weakening one of the checks and balances that the Founders put into the Constitution (of Senators being elected by state legislators), and trying to weaken another (the Popular Vote movement to end-run the Electoral College), now one of the small unwashed wishes to go contra-Constitutional by allowing District of Columbia residents to vote. (Constitution specifically states that only residents of States can vote).

Now, one of the few of the Occupy Wall Street sites to have not been evacuated (which “nuance “of the word is left to the reader), is that in DC.  So why am I not surprised that one of them is trying for headlines (emphasis mine):

Several protesters, including an Occupy DC hunger striker, were arrested at a rally outside the Longworth House Office Building for D.C. voting rights Friday.

Hunger striker Adrian Parsons was arrested alongside another Occupy DC protester and D.C. Vote communications director James Jones, protesters said. The rally was intended to pressure lawmakers to support full voting rights for the District as well as legislative and budgetary autonomy.

…Meanwhile, one of four Occupy the Vote DC participating in hunger strikers dropped out this week. Kelly Mears, who hadn’t eaten in eight days, said on Twitter that he was experiencing medical issues that would have become grave if he continued the strike.

The strikers had pledged not to eat until D.C. got full voting rights.

Indeed – according to a linked report, “say they will refuse food and drink only water ‘until D.C. realizes democracy.’”  Now, here’s the deal:

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Email Doodlings – 2012 Presidential Primary – Yes, it gonna be a long month…

More meanderings from on this:

Despite the (still) prevailing hawkishness within the GOP, I feel that the tides are turning. Republicans are starting to understand that we are FLAT BROKE and we can’t financially sustain these wars. We are being bled dry just like the mujahedeen (al Queda) did to the Russians in Afghanistan.

I am going to hate my self for doing it, but I couldn’t help myself at the time….(heh!) (edited slightly)

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That Jim Bender – still working to be part of the 1% that the Occupiers hate but keeps the rest of us employed & ups our quality of life: Ping4!

I met Jim Bender during the last election cycle as he was vying to be the Republican nominee to contest Paul Hodes to be the next US Senator from NH.  Well, didn’t quite turn out that way, as Kelly Ayotte took the nod and then beat Paul Hodes like an old washtub.  But, I gained a friendship with Jim, so things worked out on my end anyways.  Jim, being a serial entrepreneur, went back to prove his campaign promise: Jim for Jobs!  As I pointed out here, he’s putting his money (no hording it he!) where his mouth is and spending it to create a new product and new jobs.  His new company is Ping4:

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Word Cloud – GraniteGrok 2008

Here’s more of the old stuff that we were talking about back in 2008 (as opposed to 2007 first half and second half, and 2006):

And I thought that only Charlie Bass was proud to be a Progressive Republican…..

Well, to make the play here, take a gander at Mitt Romney’s self-declaration when he was running for a different elected position: Now, certainly people change over time, but is yet another showing of Mitt Romney’s willingness to be pragmatic (re: what has to be done to get elected?).  I understand “shading a position” depending … Read more

By the way, the reason why I’ve been absent here lately?

City slickers may be scratching their heads, but any rural person knows the phrase “gotta get the septic pumped”. Out here, there is no sewer system, so all grey and black water goes to a 1,000 gallon tank and then onward to a leach field for “further processing”. Well, given that the tank is buried … Read more

Email Doodlings – 2012 Presidential Primary – whose next?

Well, on yet another email thread I’m on, just before I decided to be a rock Fool, I got the question (else I would have posted earlier):

Tim, Johnson’s likely to run 3rd party, due to the media freeze-out.  Cain is now out.  So who’s left?  Or perhaps, who’s right?

What’s the Granite Grok crew going to do now? Skip?

Good question – what are we going to do? (edited slightly)

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Word Cloud – GraniteGrok 2007 (Jan – June)

Like I said here, in moving to our new platform, I had to export the whole database of the old ‘Grok.  Text clouds were not in vogue when we first started, so I’ve been spending some time chopping up the exports to be able to feed it into wordle.net to see what pops up as … Read more

EMail Doodlings – “How the can this movement support this insider?!?!?!?!?!” (Part 2)

Adding on to my previous post – a reposte to a response (lightly edited):

Obama is a dictator, not a traditional political President

Obama is the epitome of the Progressive end-game: The High Administrator of the Administrative State that should decide for us all what is best for us instead of the Founders’ vision that we are the sovereigns and not the State; in that, you are absolutely correct.

Yes, Obama will have to participate in at least two debates, if not three.  Simple Alinskyism – use his strength against him, which was his PREVIOUS speechifying and he didn’t do too badly in the Democrat debates.   But you also have to admit that McCain was AWFUL in the debates and in the campaigning in between them, he refused to put on the gloves and beat Obama to a pulp (indeed, methinks McCain took a dive).  If he REFUSES to debate, that will only exacerbate the meme HE has created that he is worthless without TOTUS.

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EMail Doodlings – “How the can this movement support this insider?!?!?!?!?!” (Part 1)

There is one very upset and confused guy on one of the email lists I’m on; a Libertarian TEA Party kind of guy, he JUST cannot for the life of him, understand why Newt Gingrich is surging so with Movement Conservatives.  And why TEA Partiers are flocking to Newt just is beyond his comprehension.  So, the above question uttered from his fingertips.  Never wishing to leave a challenge undone, I answered:  “A tool“.  Now, in many groups, that would be fightin’ words – in this case, merely “a tool with which to achieve an end”. And I wish, at the time, that I had thought of that two word answer.  Silly me, had to go and use a whole bunch more instead (H/T: Gallup for the chart) (lightly edited):

I will agree with you that beating Obama is not a done deal.  We all, as uber-political junkies know that because we know that a lot of effort is going to be done by the vast Left Wing / Union conspiracy in their GOTV (Get Out The Vote) efforts.  We all, from our lofty positions (heh!) known that many people are not really all that knowledgeable about ALL the issues and all of the nuances thereof, and will therefore , may well vote for Obama.  Again.

Being here in NH, I can tell you the overriding issue to Movement Conservatives and TEA Partiers is not to beat Obama right now but to beat Romney.  That is the near term issue that is forefront on every TEA Party / 9-12 / Conservative’s mind.  Five weeks to go.

The Libertarian part of the Republican Party has already…

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Word Cloud – GraniteGrok 2006

In the process of getting to ‘Grok 2.0 was extracting all of the old posts from the old site.  In the process, we learned that WP could only accept a maximized file size of 8MB for importing.  So, being that the file was a 47MB text file (just text and links – no images, no … Read more

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