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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.

Gallup – Monday, Obama was at 39% approval

So, where does he rate with respect to other Presidents at the same spot during their tenure? GHW Bush: 71% Eisenhower: 70% Kennedy: 61% GW Bush: 60% Truman: 55% Ford: 53% Nixon: 49% Johnson: 48% Clinton: 46% Reagan: 44% Carter: 33% I guess Carter is still praying a little bit more…and it may be working: … Read more

Inconsequential – the US or the US Government?

A difference in how the word is used – and its target:

Gov. Rick Perry:

“I’ll work every day to make Washington, D.C. as inconsequential in your life as I can.”

Jay Nordlinger at The Corner:

A lot of Americans reject this view — Americans on both left and right. There is a segment of the Right that wants America to be small, quiet, closed, and inconsequential; much of the Left wants America to be socialist, or social-democratic, indistinct, and inconsequential. Then there are the others. The cliché is true: that the 2012 election is hugely important. Americans will be answering, in a way, “What kind of country are we going to have?”

The latter speaks of what some Americans wish for America, the former speaks what most Conservatives and Libertarians wish for our overgrown Federal Government. The latter is an appeasement and a choice to decline; the former is a choice to affirm the true strength of America: individual Americans and not its government or government programs (no matter what Obama thinks).

Some might think that I was rather harsh to the point of trashing Gov. Perry’s "same answer at Gov. Jon Huntsman’s illegal immigration answer – incomplete on purpose".   Too bad, but let’s have the discussion.  This ("..as inconsequential in your life…") is spot on, and is another way of stating what Nordlinger is saying: we refuse that inconsequential view of what the United States should become.

Once again, this election is going to be about two very divergent views of what the US will be:

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Such a BIG (ego) bus….

The Hill:

The country’s automakers should ditch their focus on SUVs and trucks in favor of smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles, President Obama said Monday.

“You can’t just make money on SUVs and trucks,” Obama said during a town hall forum in Cannon Falls, Minn. “There is a place for SUVs and trucks, but as gas prices keep on going up, you have got to understand the market. People are going to try to save money.”

Like King Canute, Obama thinks he can just utter the words and the Laws of Physics and Economics will bend to his whims. Remember his words, though, before his election: "We are five days from fundamentally transforming America".  With his control of the auto manufactures financially  (via loans, tax treatments, and bailouts, and control given to unions) coupled with the stranglehold he is putting on the oil companies and the use of our own energy  resources, he is transforming that industry.  With these new mileage standards, he is:

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Submission

From a couple of Facebook posts I did yesterday morning:

I DVR most of the political Sunday shows – am watching Meet The Press and I cannot believe how badly David Gregory is hectoring Michelle Bachman on her faith in God. He just can’t seem to understand that God IS important to most folks.

And taunting her with "would you appoint an atheist to your Admin"? Good grief

And it seems that the shows and liberal pundits covering for Obama have zeroed in on her stance on the Biblical relationship between husbands and wives:

Later, Gregory interrogated Bachmann about her religious views. After playing a clip of the congresswoman quoting the biblical instruction for wives to “submit” to their husbands, Gregory asked, “Is that your view of women in America?”

When Bachmann argued that “submission” meant “respect,” Gregory joked, “Congresswoman, I didn’t even have to check with my wife, and I know those two things aren’t equal.”

“Well in our house, it is,” Bachmann shot back.
(H/T: the Corner)

Now, I don’t exactly agree with her answer, but Gregory (and others) seem to be intent on bashing the religious faith of those that refuse to kowtow to liberal Political Correctness orthodoxy.  Here’s the reference for the basis of the kerfuffle: Ephesians 5:22

22 For wives, this means submit to your husbands as to the Lord.

Certainly, much as been made of this in our "everyone HAS to be equal" society – and it drives many Liberals and feminists absolutely crazy.  They see this automatically as "wife as doormat" or "back to the days of barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen".  They will not accept what is…

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Gov. Rick Perry: “We’re not angry,” he says. “We’re indignant.” Yeah, well, I may be about to be too.

The above quote is from The Corner for a post showing Gov. Rick Perry speaking in Iowa today.  "Indignant" is a good word describing the feeling of most TEA Partiers as he tries to be the third TEA Party candidate (with Herman Cain and Michelle Bachmann easily beating him to the punch to that honorific), he certainly uses the right word with the right nuance.  I do like the word.

As a matter of fact, it may be a good way, in the near future, of describing my frame of mind – I had forgotten about the Gardisal episode of his Administration until it came up in Saturday’s Q&A. Essentially, it was a forcing of the then brand new HPV vaccine on young girls – for a sexually transmitted disease.  In effect, it told parents that Government didn’t trust them to protect their own children – and the implicit message to kids was "well, we know you’re gonna fool around – regardless of what your parents are teaching you".  Even though he did apologize for it on Saturday, it still was an imposition of Government between parents and their children and a diminution of the parents’ liberty.  

Well, from my post giving my opinion of the status of the race:

Shot at the Title (the Nomination):

  • Rick Perry (until he shows that he is not)

The above doesn’t help his cause.  And this won’t either: one of the things that I noticed during the Q&A was that Perry answered the illegal immigration question from the crowd the exact same way that Gov. Jon Huntsman did during the debate – strong on securing the border and then ending, full stop.  I thought that rather curious and odd.  I brought it up to a number of folks at the time and they thought it "different" too.

Now I know why.

 

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Theocracy? Couldn’t happen if we tried…

At last night’s Perry event at Pam Tucker’s, there was a lone protester with a sign that muttered something that he was opposed to establishing a theocracy.  You know, that kind of silly protest seems to be pretty much standard fare for anyone on the Right that shows any sign of religiosity.  After all, the … Read more

2012 Presidential Primary -The winnowing begins

Well, I got home late last nite and stayed up to get the video of Rick Perry up before going to bed (again, apologies for "the shakes" with the FlipCam, but again, I wasn’t anticipating getting any video in the first place).  Thus, I slept in late and missed the actual announcement of Gov. Tim … Read more

A “Walking School Bus”? A “Rolling Bike Train”? Good grief….

Leave it to the combination of Big Government and Edu-babble to make things FAR more complicated, FAR more expensive, and FAR more devoid of common sense.  I found this AP report over at the Concord Monitor:

NH gets $1 million for Safe Route to School

Ten New Hampshire communities are splitting almost $1 million to encourage children to walk and ride their bicycles to and from school.

The money comes from the Safe Routes to School Program and will be used for sidewalk construction, traffic calming measures and education programs.

Yeah: "to encourage children to walk and ride their bicycles to and from school." OK, my hair is grey which means that I’m old enough to remember walking to school – rode the bus for first elementary school (Huntington Elementary, through third grade), then walked or biked to the "new" elementary school (John F Kennedy Elementary in Brockton, MA) through sixth grade.  Then walked to South Jr. High (a mile) which was a stone’s throw from the first elementary school that I was bussed to, and then walked to Brockton High (almost a mile) until I got my license. Sun, rain, snow – unless it was REALLY bad, I walked.  Period.  That was how it was done (and no, it was not uphill both ways).  On sidewalks where possible, on the shoulder of roads where they were not.  And some trails through the woods that established themselves as kids figured out faster way to school / back home.

Yet, today we have to encourage our kids? 

Sidebar: This is the same malarky as it seems that some parents have no spine when their kids come home from school, plop themselves in front of the PC or game console, and the parents have no idea what to do.  The solution is easy: shut off the power, tell them to put their play clothes on and stay outside until supper time.  "GO PLAY!" were the last words I …

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Yet another biz calls it quits over regulation and goes Galt

So President Obama is pushing back that his Administration is only for "common sense" regulations – all 80,000 pages of them last year.  To date, while acknowledging (or is that ‘patronizing’?) that regulations can strangle businesses, he has refused to actually decrease the number of regulations.  Federal actions count and matter greatly – on small businesses:

Main Street Bank lends most of its money to small businesses and is earning decent profits. But the Kingwood, Texas, bank is about to get out of the banking business.

In an extreme example of the frustration felt by many bankers as regulators toughen their oversight of the nation’s financial institutions, Main Street’s chairman, Thomas Depping, is expected to announce Wednesday that the 27-year-old bank will surrender its banking charter and sell its four branches to a nearby bank.

Mr. Depping plans to set up a new lender that will operate beyond the reach of banking regulators—and the deposit-insurance safety net. Backed by the private investment firm of Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen, the company won’t be able to call itself a bank, but it will be able to do business the way Mr. Depping wants.

"The regulatory environment makes it very difficult to do what we do," says Mr. Depping, who last summer saw his bank hit with an enforcement order from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

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Yes, he cares about the wishes of “the little people”

The 22 SEALs that gave their lives for this country are heroes; he was their Commander-in-Chief.  If he had gone, and saluted alone, that would have been the correct honor due them. What he did and allowed, a photo op, was not it. The families asked for privacy under the current regulations – they should … Read more

Progressives: Never wasting a chance to force us all to be “better” (as opposed to persuasion)

OK, I admit it – this may not be a stellar post.  Am fighting a bit of writer’s block, I’ve finally determined that the only therapy for this is to start typing and what ever keys my fingertips tap will be it.  I appreciate your indulgence…

Homosexual marriage – the Progressives are always trying to force us to evolve to a higher state.  They self-righteously have decided that since they all are much smarter and more "moral" than the rest of us, they have the right to force their beliefs upon rest of us.  In this regard, ANY attempt to rebel against this forcing of an attitude is immediately met with screams of "anti-gay" or "homophobe" or "intolerance" or "anti-equality" simply for upholding the traditional definition that marriage is between a man and a woman.

I wrote a post on disagreeing with an implicit debasing of marriage (no, "what if you’re not compatible in bed") and listed what I thought were some requirements for a long lasting marriage.  Of COURSE, a comment came in that decided that I needed to be "re-edumacated":

So, will you be supporting marriage equality next year (or this fall) when the repeal bills are considered by the General Court?

Once again, never wasting an opportunity to go from Point A to Point … somewhere regardless of the original intent. Always the "push" and in seemingly every area of culture.  Including children.  After all, it was an NEA teacher speaking at a UN conference said:

We must teach our children at a very young age that the male, female and intersex comes with the presence of genitalia and no further expectation…The same could be true of our sexual orientation.  Homophobia exists when those stocked in the binary box of strictly hetero, find themselves slipping out of that role that religion and family promote.

A lot of people reacted very negatively to that – people expect schools to teach the basics of math, reading, writing, history, and the like and not be platforms for Progressives to view a their private platforms for social engineering.  How DARE Parents believe their that children are theirs to bring up according to their notions of morality – they are wrong and we will teach their children otherwise.

Given that penchant for Progressives to have quotas established for their special identity victim groups for everything, I was not surprised at the latest news earlier this week: a petition by Lair Scott at Change.org was demanding Sesame Street’s Bert and Ernie had to become gay simply because it fit their quota / agenda purposes:

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Data Points – Obama support is tanking

From Rassmussen: This is not an isolated one day event; he has been at this level all week.  The debt ceiling debate and the economy tanking has the spotlight on his policies.

Project Veritas – More Medicaid brought to you by James O’Keefe

I had previously posted one of Project Veritas‘s Medicaid exposure videos – where a Russian drug lord was all but successful in enrolling in Ohio’s Medicaid system.  In doing so, he showed that any pretense of safeguarding valuable taxpayer money was thrown to the four winds as seemingly, the more valuable metric of "one more … Read more

Guest Post by Mark Nadzan (candidate for Manchester Aldermen)

Mark was on GrokTALK! this past Saturday and mentioned that he had written an Op-Ed concerning a Union Leader Op-Ed by Gray Fitzgerald.  I said that I would have no problem in posting it as long as we could get a copy so that readers could see what he was opposing.  Well, this morning Mark sent it, so we’re posting it!

To the Editor:

Gray Fitzgerald’s opinion added to the sad state of class warfare that is escalating in our country.

Gray seems to be a Christian man.  He even acted as a pastor for a Unite Church of Christ.  We can all agree that Christ would want those with wealth to give to those less fortunate.  however, wouldn’t you agree that Jesus would not ask the rich to do so at the point of a Roman spear?

Yet Gray believes that government should force the rich to pay higher taxes in order to redistribute it to those they deem in need.  Furthermore, Gray states, "The logic of advocating a tax policy that transfers wealth to the multibillionaires … is incomprehensible.

Where is the transferring of money? Regardless of whether you agree with how they do it, the rich earn their money.  How do you "transfer to" someone their own money?  Is it not enough that the richest one percent that you want to vilify already pays 40 percent of the total federal income tax in the country?  I will not even broach the fact that almost 50 percent of citizens pay no income tax.

I close with a question regarding Gray’s referral to the "greed of the wealthiest". Which person is more greedy: one who would like to keep as much of his or her own money as possible, or one who want more of another person’s money?

Image of Fitzgerald’s letter after the jump.  Previously, Steve had penned a post as well – it is located here.

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Not really a great foundation for a long lasting marriage…

TMEW and I just celebrated our thirtieth wedding anniversary so I think that we might have a bit of experience of what makes a marriage work, mostly.  And yes, mostly can be the operative word as sometimes marriages hit spots when they don’t work for one reason or another.  Arguments, fiscal issues, relationship problems, work demands, and health situations (not to mention kids) are all the common ones – and sometimes, uncommon manifestations of each and if you have the same last name as I, Murphy’s Laws can often have them pop up several at a like the carny Whack-a-Mole game.  

Yet, when we realized that we were "meant to be", what I heard at lunch time (as TMEW was parsing through "her" programs that had been DVR’d) on one of those "Entertainment Celebrity worship programs" just had my jaw dropping:

"You gotta live together and you have to sleep together [before the wedding]," Coco tells me, "If you don’t sleep together, what if you’re not compatible in bed or you don’t like what they do?"

Look, that’s not to say that sex is isn’t important or that physical attraction doesn’t play into the calculus, but if that is what you are going to base a marriage on, well, I posit it will be rather unlikely that you will see #30.  I may be old fashioned (certainly I come at this from a conservative Evangelical perspective) but doing a "trial run" was never something we even contemplated.

While it may differ from couple to couple, here’s what I have trained myself to keep forefront:

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“We didn’t have the green thing back in my day.”

From a reader: The clerk responded, "That’s our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment." He was right — our generation didn’t have the green thing in its day. Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the … Read more

Hey, John Hawkins is a turncoat!

‘Grok friend John Hawkins has lost his marbles – why, just LOOK at his latest Townhall column: The Top 5 Ways The Tea Partiers Are Ruining America If it wasn’t for those darn Tea Partiers, we’d already be in Obamatopia with unicorn-powered cars and an economy driven to new heights by unity, hope, and most … Read more

Fun in the Sun! Family Cookout – 8/20, 11am – 4pm

    Proceeds to benefit Americans for Prosperity, a grassroots movement of over 1.8 million nationwide who advocate and promote limited government, lower taxes, and more freedom.  But, this is not a political event, it is a FAMILY event so bring the kids and grandkids for a fun time in the sun!  For more information … Read more

Heh! “Iowans pick corn, New Hampshire picks Presidents”

Heh! A Slap in the Face, Craig?  Really?  Iowans have THAT thin of a skin?

I have been fortunate to have been asked to be a part of Tony Katz’s "The Conversation" (here and here) the last couple of months to yak about the 2012 Republican Presidential Primary to represent NH’s viewpoint.  Joining me has been Craig Robinson, founder and Editor-in-chief of the The Iowan Republican, for the perspective of Iowans.

Well, it seems that Craig got a bit cranky (heh!) over the fact that Gov. Rick "Is he in or is he gonna be on the sideline?" Perry is announcing (maybe?) his intentions at the RedState Gathering on Saturday:

Texas Governor Rick Perry’s decision to announce his candidacy in South Carolina at the same time the Iowa Straw Poll is taking place in Ames is not only a slap in the face to Republican voters in Iowa, but it also is disrespectful to the Iowa GOP and the other candidates seeking the nomination.

The move makes it obvious that Governor Perry either doesn’t understand the Iowa caucuses or doesn’t respect the role that Iowa plays in the nominating process.  We shouldn’t be surprised.  The candidate he endorsed for president in 2008, Rudy Giuliani, never could figure out Iowa either.

The road map to the nomination for Perry is very simple.  If he wins Iowa and South Carolina, he’s probably the nominee.  His decision to announce his candidacy in a manner that attempts to pull some of the spotlight away from Ames and the Iowa caucuses will not sit well with Iowa activists.

I beg to differ (but with a smile and not a whine, for while we in NH are taciturn outside, we’re rather mischievous inside)!  The path to the nomination lies NOT lie with Iowa but with New Hampshire (but I readily admit that Iowa has great corn for Orville Redenbacher, though)  And frankly, if Gov. Perry wants to schmooze with Erick Erickson and the other RedStaters, and then head straight to NH well, we’re dandy with that. We are, after all, clearly comfortable with our role as The First in the Nation Primary State, where the people are as solid as the granite rock we stand on (as opposed to that Iowan corn that sways in even the gentlest breeze).  We know that the candidates have spent a LOT of time here and are only visiting you folks, Craig, for just the littlest time but then they’ll be right back here to spend weeks with us (and Mom loved me more too!)! 

Further, I’m rather doubtful that ANY of the other candidates are sitting in the corners of their respective hotel rooms, misty eyed…

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