Steve MacDonald

Jeanne Shaheen made a big show of releasing her tax returns, but I’m not all that impressed.  Shaheen is a one-percenter who has been in the US Senate for almost six yeas now.  Comfort is not an issue.   She will never have to think about her cable bill, or electric bill, or what she must manage to keep food on the table.  These will never be concerns for Jeanne Shaheen.  This makes the exclusion of certain fiscal facts related to her tenure in the US Senate, unacceptable.

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Every year hundreds of thousands of ’rounds’ of fireworks are discharged in New Hampshire–or elsewhere after having been purchased in New Hampshire–by regular folk hoping to make their celebration special.  You can hear them in your neighborhoods, sometimes well past 10 or 11 pm, all through July, and quite often throughout the year.

Fireworks can give any party a kick in the pants and New Hampshire still has its advantage: You can buy and use a wide range of them in the Granite State that are illegal in every state that surrounds us.

This year, as is the case every year, someone gets hurt using fireworks, and like clockwork, someone comes out and says we could have prevented that if we had banned them.  If we ban them now….

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The lead story on my digital copy of the New Hampshire Union Leader is…”NH Traffic Death Take Sharp Decline.”

We’re on track to have a record low number of traffic related fatalities for New Hampshire for 2014.  That would be the total number of actual deaths without regard to the kinds of factors the National Transportation Safety folks use like per million Vehicle Miles Travelled.  We could have 80 deaths and still have more deaths per VMT, if there was significantly less estimated road traffic, though that seems unlikely.

All this without the impending implementation of the unenforceable and inane electronic devices (cell phone ban) bill the Governor…did not apparently sign into law yet?

According to the General Court Bill Status HB 1360 is not yet chaptered law.  Did someone cling to it?  Does that matter?

Opportunity Knocks.  Could the busy-body Knee-Jerk Progresssives see this as an opportunity to jerk their knees back the other way?

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There is no clearer indication that the false outrage over the Hobby Lobby verdict isn’t getting the rhetorical job done than a bunch of Democrats writing a Bill they know will never pass to fix what they were too afraid to put in the original ACA to begin with.

Knowing it would never pass with an abortion mandate the Democrats left one out of the Affordable Care Act–promising it was not going to be some sort of abortion mandate–even though they left enough loopholes in it to make getting there from here as easy as a “The Secretary Shall.”

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In the second segment of yesterday’s GrokTALK!, Matt Murphy from Citizens for a Strong New Hampshire was opining on the mysteries of SB120, the NH Incumbent protection Act.  SB120 would skew speech rights in favor of politicians (just search SB120 on the Grok for ample details if you are unfamiliar).  He was wondering why the bill had not gone to the Governor’s desk.  Why was it still sitting in NH Democrat House Speaker Terie Norelli’s Office.

I know why, and had I remembered I’d have suggested it at the time.

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We see these quality of life polls often, the most recent from CNBC, but regardless of the source, New Hampshire is always well ranked.  Being in the top three is not uncommon. The two who seem to beat us?  Vermont is always number two, and Hawaii is always number one.

I can’t speak to their methodology – being ‘insured’ seems to weigh heavy on their calculus–some folks just pay cash or choose to pay as they go which means they are pro-choise when it comes to health insurance.  You’d expect that to get you bonus points but it does not.  And Vermont, which is more free when it comes to gun ownership than New Hampshire, consistently beats us, so favoring wildly socialist schemes must simply have more weight than choice (including gun choice) unless it is the choice to not see a pregnancy to term.

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File under ‘Nuance.’

Rumor has it the Lambert campaign may have taken issue with my calling their poll a push poll, twice.  Or was it three times?  A push poll would be illegal.

If it were to go to court, they might have a case, but quite often it is a matter of envelopes being pushed, or matters of nuance. And while my original “push” implied that the poll was pushing voters toward his opponent, the followup suggests language that paves a path, so to speak.

I’m not suggesting that their push poll is the illegal variety, not necessarily, just that it meets a likely definition in principle if not under statute.

Is this the sort of thing you’d like to see in your congressman?

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