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.

New Hampshire Democrat Party Ad – Mostly False…According to Politifact

(reposted)

Let me state upfront that most ‘Fact-checkers,’ those of leftish media entities in particular, are not much different than so-called ‘non-partisan’ groups set up by Democrats.  They exist to mislead people by reinforcing a progressive narrative.  So I provide these observations about this report with a large grain of salt, even though ( in this case) it tends to favor my potions on the issues presented.

PolitiFact has awarded a recent New Hampshire Democrat Party Ad with the distinction of being ‘Mostly False.‘  This would be important if not for the fact that almost everything Democrats actually believe is false to begin with, but let’s play along and see why, in this case, “mostly” proves both PolitiFact and myself correct.

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Candidate Maggie Hassan To Get Clinton Endorsement…

Imagine welcoming the political endorsement of a perjurer and accused serial sex offender?  Well that’s what Maggie Hassan has done.  She is pleased as punch to have the endorsement of former President William Jefferson Clinton of the Lewinsky, cigar, bimbo eruptions, depends on what “is” is fame. Seacoast Online has the goods. “This (endorsement) signifies … Read more

A Spec of Common Sense in McAllen Texas

McAllen Texas- City shelves the plastic bag banMcAllen Texas rests in the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas, right along the border with Mexico.  And for now, at least, McAllen is not hopping on the plastic bag ban train to nowhere.

If you have not been following my recent (bizarre and persistent) interest in this annoy environmental stupidity, towns and cities all over the US are banning what are called “single use” plastic grocery bags (which my family re-uses for all kinds of things so single use is misleading).    The Los Angels California bag ban was what caught my attention–and Lord knows if those moon-bats are on board with it something must be wrong; and there was, or actually is something very wrong.   See “What could go wrong?“, ‘Reusable bags spread norovirus’,  and “Reusable bags may be worse for the Environment.”

Unfortunately,  most of the discussion about bag bans is one-sided.  Or should I say left-sided.

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Some Cool “Ice-T” on A Hot Summer Day

Rapper Ice-T is standing up for the second amendment. “The right to bear arms is because that’s the last form of defense against tyranny. Not to hunt. It’s to protect yourself from the police.” No government can complete it’s path to tyranny, soft, smiley-faced, or hard boiled, while the public remains lawfully armed.  The right … Read more

RLCNH Releases Endorsements & Recommendations for 2012

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: July 24, 2012
Media Contact: Carolyn McKinney, chairman, RLCNH, 603-769-4264, chair@rlcnh.org

RLCNH RELEASES SESSION SCORECARD, USES BOLD VOTING RECORD STANDARD TO ENDORSE INCUMBENTS
In Order to Ensure Best Republicans Win Primaries, RLCNH Introduces New ‘Recommended’ Candidate Level

CONCORD, N.H.—With the premiere of its Legislative Scorecard that rates representatives and senators on their faithfulness to conservative values, the Republican Liberty Caucus of New Hampshire is setting a new bar for incumbents that will hold them accountable to the only political direction that will ensure liberty and prosperity in New Hampshire.

“The RLCNH intends to drive the agenda for the Republican Party in the coming years, and our new scorecard will be one of the tools that we use for this end,” said Carolyn McKinney, chairman of the Republican Liberty Caucus of New Hampshire. “While we still intend to promote the best outcome for Republican primary elections by recommending candidates who perform well on our incumbent scorecard or candidate survey, we will only endorse and actively support candidates who have truly exhibited a strong commitment to the principles that make our state and country great. Our endorsements will be reserved for the best of the best.”

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Mark Fernald Needs New Material for His Income Tax Arguments

Mark Fernald Wants an Income taxMark Fernald wants New Hampshire to have an income tax before he dies.  It appears to be one of his deepest desires.  So desperate is this need that he is willing to reuse debunked rhetoric to ensure he is not prohibited from having the chance to get one.

Yesterday, over at Windham Patch, Fernald had the income tax equivalent of a recurring rash as “Fair Share class warfare” sores rose up from the page in his opposition to CACR 13.  CACR 13 is a Sttate constitutional amendment that would ban New Hampshire from taxing personal income.  But such a prohibition for Mr. Fernald would be akin to the death of the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia to Dead Heads.  “Well now what do we do with all our free time.”  So Mr. Fernald has gone on the offensive (as in, to offend).

We have a tax system that is made by and for the top 1 percent. The households in New Hampshire with the highest incomes – the 1 percent with incomes $480,000 and up – on average pay just over 2 percent of their incomes in state and local tax. The folks in the middle, on average, pay about 6 percent. The lowest income people have the highest tax burden. They pay, on average, over 8 percent of their income in state and local tax.

I’ve been over this deception more than once, but I am more than happy to revisit it every time Mark wants to bring it up–which will be often between now and Noveber.

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You have to build something else First…

How about those roads and bridges?  How did we get those? Tax dollars. Well where’d those tax dollars come from? Taxpayers Where’d the taxpayers get the money for the government to tax in the first place? Jobs and commerce Where’d those jobs and commerce come from? Someone started a business, exchanged their product or service … Read more

James E. Holmes Ties to Occupy San Diego? [Updated]

(Updated- Word has it this not a picture of Holmes being carried away as indicated.  We happily fall back on the “reported to be’s” and “ifs,” and are hurriedly filling out applications for employment opportunities at ABC news where the money and research are better funded but the reporting is not much better than this … Read more

Playing Catch-up on Winning The Future…or Whatever It’s Called This Month

Win The Future SputnikWe realize that some of you are just too busy to keep up with all the things going on in the political world and to be honest, so are we.   And when it comes to having a president named Obama every day is some kind of crisis and more often than not, it’s his mouth that has created it.  So it is often necessary, when the opportunity presents itself, too stop and take a quick look back, to see what was happening in the other rings of the circus that we missed.

Enter Ed Morrissey and Hot Air, where they take the time to  chronicle all the Obama-nonsense and let readers vote on which of the many choices is by far the dumbest thing that came out of DEar Leaders mouth that given week.

This weeks walk away winner with 93% of the vote so far is “If you’ve got a business. you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

Obama, having never built anything himself might not be the best judge, but then that is what makes this so precious.

So it this kind of wisdom that has been captured and while there are now 150 weeks worth of winners–and all the entrants in between–I’ve grabbed the ones from 2012 as a prime, with links, for your Sunday evening enjoyment.

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Armed People Present? More Safety for All.

Two pro-self-defense State Reps.: Jenn Coffey and...

In the wake of the mass murder tragedy at an Aurora, Colorado movie theater yesterday—and the immediate effort of the Mainstream Media to link it to the Tea Party movement—it is worth remembering that More Guns Means Less Crime.

For instance, when a would-be mass murderer shot his way into a packed church in Colorado during a Sunday service in 2007…

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Guest Post by Scott Morales- “Atrocity, Mass Murder, Mayhem? It’s the Tea Party!”

GraniteGrok is proud to introduce Scott Morales to our pages.  He is a regular contributor over at Merrimack Patch but we liked his work so much we’ve invited him to share some of it here at GraniteGrok.

-Steve

Atrocity, Mass Murder, Mayhem? It’s the Tea Party!

Is it really surprising that ABC jumped to Tea Party accusations, immediately tying them to the movie theater shooting in Colorado? Maybe to some. I mean, anyone not living in a left wing bubble can easily discern some characteristics of the pathetic psycho who opened fire during a Batman movie and place them on the political spectrum, but they do not do so. Most people do not and will not see this atrocity as a political statement or it being motivated by the crushing burden of Obamanomics, but the brilliant, perspicacious rogues that occupy the left will and do see this through the smudged, greasy lense of politics. This is because most don’t think in terms of politics, but the left does. So what is the motivation for those who do place all things on the political spectrum? What compelled ABC’s Brian Ross to insert the Tea Party into the story? Steve pointed to one possibility in this case, but I think it goes deeper.

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Obama Fail Spotlight: I Will Go Line By Line to Remove Wasteful Earmarks…

If you missed this post, there is a link to a blog that is compiling 1001 reasons to vote against Obama. There are at least 600 reasons so far.  But as I reviewed the first 100, which I included in my linked post, I came across a classic Obamaism that deserved special attention.

The promise to go line by line through legislation before signing it, to remove wasteful earmarks.  Of course his first major piece of spending legislation was the stimulus, and what wasn’t for public sector union bailouts was wasteful earmarks.

So Mr. Obama was either lying or he is not very good at reading legislation (A common problem for Democrats, or so I hear).

“Candidate Barack Obama publicly promises to go “line by line” through legislation to remove wasteful earmarks.”

  • Obama stimulus gave $200,000 to teach Siberian lawmakers how to engage Russian policy makers in Moscow.
  • Stimulus funding of $250,000 went to bug storage for an insect museum at North Carolina State University that gets 44 visitors a year.
  • Gave $500,000 to put microchips in recycling bins to check up on the recycling efforts of senior citizens.
  • $5 million to create a geothermal energy system for the Oak Ridge City Center shopping mall in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
  • $9.38 million to renovate a century-old train depot in Lancaster County, Pa., that has not been used for three decades.

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Federal Mandate Drives Up School Lunch Prices in Merrimack NH

Public school-cafeteria; Fed mandate forces parents to pay more for lunches than they costWho says there is no such thing as a free lunch?  Well it wont be just Merrimack, New Hampshire.  The Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act of 2010 Federal mandate essentially implemented price controls everywhere School lunch is served to fund free lunch, based on federal guidelines, decided on for everyone, by a few hundred Democrats, in Washington DC, in the historically significant later part of 2010.

The Democrat Congress put the USDA on point for this program, and empowered them to manage the new federal programs under the premise that it can eliminate hunger and improve nutrition.  But at the end of the day this is little more than Federal meddling, income redistribution (again), and  using the promise of federal grants and support  to turn your public school lunch program into  a taxpayer powered soup kitchen.

And not just any soup kitchen.  A soup kitchen that has to jump through hoops if it wants to please the Federal Bureaucrats empowered to decide who is worthy of what handouts and if local taxpayers must pony up to meet the federal requirements.

One of those requirements is that schools start charging students (parents) more for each lunch purchased (during a recession),  to satisfy the mandated price defined by the legislation, regardless of how much the lunch actually costs.  Yes, the Feds are telling local school districts across the Fruited Plain what they must charge for a school lunch; whatever cost reimbursement amount the feds are willing to provide for a free lunch, regardless of what it costs us to sell a lunch to a paying student.

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Will NH Democrats Drool At Developments In France?

Francois Hollande Socialist leader of FranceFrance’s golden age passed long ago, and thanks to the French is doomed never to return.

The New Socialist dominant government has set right to work doing something New Hampshire Democrats did (to a lesser extent) when they had complete control of our state government.  Right out of the gate the French Socialists are raising taxes.  But not just any taxes.   €7.2 Billion in one off taxes on wealthy households and big corporations…because the country continues to spend more than its  economy can come up with.  Sound familiar?  Their debt is at 90% of GDP.

What else sounds familiar?  How about wealthy households and corporations leaving France to escape confiscatory taxation?

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Endorsement: Andy Sanborn for New Hampshire State Senate District 9

There are fundamental problems with the way the New Hampshire government conducts its business, from the glut of agencies, the redundancy, inefficiency that has grown over the years, and the inability to coordinate information that was built into the system, not out of forethought or malice, but simply because that is how disparate empires grow … Read more

As Morally Repugnant as The Healthcare Plantation or How About Economic Collapse?

Statton Rice of Wolfboro finds it morally repugnant that someone might object to legal plunder to advance the Democrat Health care agenda.  In a  recent editorial (Concord Monitor) Rice wheels out the moral outrage in an attack on RLCNH chairman Carolyn McKinney.   Here is the closing paragraph.

Apparently, McKinney does not realize that there are citizens in this state who can’t eat, heat their home, drive to work, pay for child care and also buy a “free market” health insurance policy. There is something morally repugnant in her plan to deny health insurance to these citizens in order to express her dislike for the Affordable Care Act and the man who signed it into law. At least, she shouldn’t brag about it.

Note to Statton Rice.  The only way they would not be able to eat is if they tried to sign up for food stamps from NH HHS without the required picture ID.

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