Steve MacDonald

Steve is a long-time New Hampshire resident, an award-winning blogger, and a member of the Board of Directors of The 603 Alliance and the National Heritage Center for Constitutional Studies. He is the owner of Grok Media LLC and the Managing Editor, Executive Editor, assistant editor, Editor, content curator, and more (yes, there's more) at GraniteGrok.com. Steve is also a former board member of the Republican Liberty Caucus of New Hampshire, the Republican Volunteer Coalition, and has worked for or with many state and local campaigns and grassroots groups, and is a past contributor to the Franklin Center for Public Policy.

The Push For More Taxes On Adult Beverages Continues…

whiskey-glass-280x300Tym Rourke, the person  most likely to coordinate the spending of the tax money, is advocating for more revenue, so that he might–we can only assume–help spend it. Rourke is the Chairman of the Governors Commission on Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Prevention, Intervention and Treatment in New Hampshire, and he insists that because New Hampshire sells so much damn alcohol, even profiting from its aggressive promotion, that the state has a moral obligation to offset any downsides here in New Hampshire.

What’s next, a tax on hammers to cover time lost to thumb related injuries, or taxing shower curtains to defer lost productivity due to bathing accidents?

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Extinguishing Tobacco Revenue In Our Lifetimes

photos-of-extinguished-cigarette - Tobacco taxes in danger thanks to ObamacareI told them.  If you want people to quit smoking, you had best not get used to the revenue from tobacco taxes.   Don’t count on it for anything if you want to extinguish smoking in our lifetime.  You know, make it history?  But what did New Hampshire Democrats do when Republicans tried to back away from tobacco by lowering the tax just one thin dime?  They snapped like addicts in withdrawal.  They got the Democrat DT’s and everything.

You can’t cut the tobacco tax.  We’re losing revenue.  We need that revenue.  I gotta have revvvaaaaannnooooo.  (Insert primal scream here.)

Their new plan?  Same as their old plan.  Raise the tax on a product they don’t want around to tax.  Yeah, that will fix the wagon (actually it wont) ….until January2014 when a provision in Obama-Care delivers the coup de gras.

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The Lesson From Phil Mickelson

Phil Mickelson made some observations about his taxes.   He said they were getting kind of high for his tastes and he might move from California to another state. The media got in their freight train and ran Phil over. So what is the lesson for all the other ‘Phil Mickelsons’ who are successful but live … Read more

As the Un-Aborted Celebrate Forty Years Of Aborting…

I have already observed, on several occasions, the professional lefts efforts to perpetrate a prevailing media narrative about the sorry state of higher education, the “crumbling” mental health apparatus and our inadequately funded alcohol awareness and treatment programs.  They are doing this to fertilize the budgetary soil for the necessary tax and spending increases required to (they would argue) help alleviate the growing injustice of under-educated, alcohol abusers, with a side order of mental health issues, that only an increase in state-managed taxpayer dollars can possibly resolve.

Well I am here to help.  With one wave of my blogging wand I will “educate” the people on how we can reduce the prevalence of “mental health issues” and “alcohol abuse” in the Granite State (or anywhere), without more spending or taxes, all the while mocking the motley cabal of un-aborted, specula-wielding, would-be-tax-increasing left-wing harpies and their policy-cuckolded camp followers, who have been celebrating four decades of “legally” clawing defenseless unborn children out of women’s wombs.

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Staphylococcus at NH Journal?

Has NH Journal developed a Staff Infection?
Has NH Journal developed a “Staff” Infection?

NH Journal appears to have developed the flesh eating variety of the “staph” infection, and it looks serious.  It has already claimed someone’s balls.

The castrated scribbler in question–see also “Staff Reporter”–has written a nifty little attack piece in which they observed that Jack Kimball had endorsed Andrew Hemingway for NH-GOP Chairman.

The endorsement is no surprise. Many of Kimball’s few remaining supporters – including Joe Barton, a man he called his “black opps guy” – have backed Hemingway for weeks.

Thank the Lord they quote John DiStaso in advance of that gem or we’d have to wonder if the NHJ mystery reporter was just making it up like that secret meeting that NH Journal invented back in late October with Kimball and some named “remaining followers.”  Once you start making news so you can report it, everyone has to question everything you publish, even when the by-line is from such a well known and respected journalist as Staff Reporter.

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So How’s that “Just Sign An Affidavit” Thing Working Out?

Voter ID required except when its not
Voter ID required except when its not

According to the Pew Research Center  5,424 voters lacking proper ID signed affidavits swearing they were New Hampshire residents eligible to vote under state law last November.

As of January 11, 2,266 of the postcards had been returned, and 211 letters were returned as undeliverable. The secretary of state’s office will look into each undeliverable letter, and if an explanation cannot be determined, a list of affidavits needing further investigation will be compiled and sent to the attorney general’s office.

I can provide at least one explanation and it’s called Voter Fraud.

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Bringing Civility to Concord….uh…..Not?

Democrats claimed they would bring civility to Concord but as Rick Olsen observed here, at the hearing for HB 135, the Democrat committee chair yelled at the people who had come to the hearing–because they applauded when they liked what they heard. “…We are forced to sit here and suffer through this…I am not going … Read more

AN ESSAY: Mark Levin & Andrew Hemingway? Or Mitt Romney & Jennifer Horn?

Andrew Hemingway For NH GOP Chair!
Andrew Hemingway…
…and Mark Levin…

Strange juxtapositions, you say? Especially when talking about the the race for NH GOP chairman between Jennifer Horn, the “establishment” choice, and Andrew Hemingway, the “Movement Conservative” choice? No, I say, not at all. Levin/Hemingway on the one hand, and Horn/Romney on the other are emblematic of the state of the Republican Party today…both in New Hampshire and in the United States. It is separated—note that I did not say

…or Jennifer Horn…
…and Mitt Romney?

“divided,” “fractured,” or “split”; the word is chosen carefully—into two divergent “points of view.” On the two sides there are what might be called “the hard-corps, committed, Constitutionalist, activist, movement conservatives” on the one hand, and the…

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Notable Quote: NH House Rep John Burt

  “Why are we not working on the budget and new jobs for NH.  No the first thing they (NH Democrats) do is gun control for NH, raise the beer tax, vehicle registration fee increase of $30.00 to $50.00 per vehicle in your driveway, gas tax increase of 20%…”

Democrats and Taxes “Simplified.”

I posted this on Facebook yesterday.  It is a simplified look at Democrats and taxes.  I though I’d share it with the Grok audience. Rule #1 – Insist that we need more revenue so we must raise some taxes. Rule#2- Tell people that if they let you raise “these” taxes you will then cut “those” … Read more

The Ideological Left’s Equivalent of a Gold-Digging Trophy-Wife

Commuter Rail - The lefts ideological trophy wifeI’ve been blogging this subject for years because at every opportunity Democrats (and a handful of Republicans) resurrect the notion that running a commuter rail line into and or up through the Nashua-Concord corridor would be good for something.

That’s like saying “hey doc just leave the endoscope in my colon, that way the next time I need it, it will already be there.”

It is damn near the biggest waste of time and money we could imagine, destined to become nothing more than a fiscal albatross that bleeds us dry, and yet like some three-year old who relentlessly carpet bombs you in the ten-items-or-less aisle with ear-piercing screams until you relent and buy them that chocolate bar, the mass-transit zombies you thought you’d put down keep getting back up so they can eat your brains.

Commuter rail is as useless in New Hampshire as a one-legged man in an ass kicking contest and whose only possible value (and I use that word very loosely) is as the ideological lefts equivalent of a gold-digging trophy wife you can never divorce–that’s more expensive, and paid for by you whether you use it, need it, ever see it, or not

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Spending as A Percetage of GDP 1950 – 2010

A new study from the St. Louis Fed has provided us with this nifty graph. The Graph below shows spending by major categories as a percentage of GDP.  Some may find this surprising.

There are more charts at the link, also here at Hot Air.  Take particular note of the graphs on revenue and spending relative to GDP and Government Spending by category.  (Follow the link for those.)

You will also find  that since the new progressive era began (Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama) that mandatory government spending (as opposed to discretionary) appears to be our biggest driver of debt.  (Big Gubmint doin’ too much.)

spending as a percentage of gdp 1950-2010

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A Kool Aid Drinker By Any Other Name…(Or Should I say Another Name?)

For a very long time now, anyone who was all in for some idea, particularly the more wacky–OK, insane– ideas, was said to have drunk the Kool Aid®.   This phrase derives from Jim Jones and his People’s Temple, who were denied exile in Russia from their paranoid-delusional self-imposed exile on an “agricultural mission” in the … Read more

Ronald Reagan – Our First “Black” President

The Daily Tribune News  has an article from two years ago, written by Michael Reagan, former president Ronald Reagan’s son.  In it, he reminds us that Ronald Reagan did more economically for African Americans than our first ‘Black’ president.  And that in contrast to the lefts portrayal of Conservatives, and the media’s recycling of that narrative, Ronald Reagan wanted everyone do the best they could, and to succeed, regardless of where they came from, what they looked like, or who they voted for.

Before he was elected, in speech after speech, my father said that his economic plan would improve the lives of African-Americans. In a February 1977 CPAC address, he said, “The time has come for Republicans to say to black voters: ‘We offer principles that black Americans can and do support. We believe in jobs, real jobs; we believe in education that is really education; we believe in treating all Americans as individuals and not as stereotypes or voting blocs.'”

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Promises, Promises…

It’s time for another Obama Inauguration speech and if he keeps promises made in this one as well as he did the last….well, at least this time there is an actual shelf-life on the Obama Presidency as well. H/T Reason.TV, c/o Hot Air  

Competition Shooter Jessie Duff Takes Us To School

Nothing puts a debate about firearms into perspective like holes in sheet metal.  So here is professional shooter Jessie Duff showing us what kind of damage you can do with various weapons to make a point.  That the lefts caterwauling has no point. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=V2wBiG3LCx0   H/T Laura Rambeau Lee – Right-Reason.com

There are Thousands of Left Wing Ironies in the Naked City…This is Just One of Them.

Lucky 7 ?

If Governor Cuomo was Veruca Salt would it sound like this…”I want the stricter gun legislation  now Daddy!”

Well he got it, and the State of New York’s Blue-Print, fast tracked gun legislation is the poster child for the “we must do something now” crowd and exemplifies–unintentionally I might add–the kind of “equality” progressives believe they can legislate into existence. Sort of.

There is no exception in the New York Gun bill for New York’s finest meaning that no one, including law enforcement, may use or carry a magazine that holds more than seven rounds of ammunition.

Oops.

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