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Steve MacDonald 
…then why has the number of Americans on food stamps increased by 3 million since this time last year and by more than 14 million since Barack Obama entered the White House?
There’s something to put on your resume.
“When I was President (pause) we created or saved (pause) a kajillion billion jobs (pause) but somehow (pause) put 14 million people on food stamps in the process.” (applause from adoring media, I mean Democrats–eh, same thing.)
How does that work?
…then why is the average duration of unemployment in this country close to an all-time record high?
With six million less jobs, thanks to Obama’s so-called recovery policies, should we be surprised that the average duration of unemployment is at or near a record high? If you pollute the employment market, making it inhospitable to job creation–lets call it Obamagenic Employment Cooling–you have fertilized the field for long term despair.
(Full size Graph on the jump.)
…then why are there 6 million less jobs in America today than there were before the recession started?
This is a serious problem. The people inside the blue bubbles and left wing ghettos can shout whatever number they want, but people are still out of work and underemployed. Their quality of life, and standard of living are in shambles. People who did not lose their jobs are trying to make stagnant or declining wages go further as inflation rises. Claiming the unemployment rate has dropped makes for a great sound bite, but it doesn’t pay the bills, and neither do government hand outs.
[Updated Below]
That 9:30 press conference, the one at which Zandra Rice Crispy Treats Hawkins (ZRCTH) was supposed to unleash the fury of over 100,000 signed petitions, started a little late. Something to do with the lack of actual press. As of 10:00 Zandra was still there, as the typical day’s traffic wandered in and out of the Legislative office Building, paying little or no attention to the tiny knot of people behind the podium.
We’ve begun the process of getting our hands on the ‘so-called’ 109,900 names and addresses from petitions ‘collected’ by the well funded out of state groups who dropped them on the New Hampshire Attorney General yesterday I have speculated on a few occasions that a super-majority of these will be from outside New Hampshire, but … Read more
Tomorrow, someone who relies entirely on out of state money, will present a pile of petitions, signed almost entirely with out of state signatures, to the New Hampshire Attorney General (AG), whom she will ask to investigate voter fraud in the Granite State.
Let me start out by thanking Zandra for the petition show she plans to put on tomorrow. She thinks she is going to make a statement about the need to prosecute voter fraud, James O’Keefe and Project Veritas specifically, but that is not the statement she will be making.
Please allow me to set the table.
The Vote Pump. Watch it.
In the virtual backrooms of GraniteGrok, we debate each other on the issues, candidates, and legislation of the day. And we often disagree on the particulars or specifics, discussing at length their relationship to first principles that we in fact share. In the midst of recent back and forth over HB 1658, which tries to disincentivize baby-makers from making any new ones while the state and taxpayers are paying the tab for the existing ones, something interesting occurred to me.
How likely is it that the Christian Socialists and the lefts welfare-watercarriers will spend more trying to stop HB 1658 than it would cost them to just pick up the difference in the form of contributions to these same mothers as private charities?
If you want to rub two sticks together around here, you have to go get a burn permit. So I leave my house in a 4000 pound (ish) SUV, drive 5 miles to the nearest Fire Station, and then hand the Fire-Fighter my ID. (If I was just doing something as unimportant as, say voting, they could just check my name off a list.)
He fills out a form, hands it to me, and reminds me not to burn before 5pm. I get back in my SUV, drive home and, at the appointed time, burn. There are very few variables to this formula, and almost any fire requires a permit. But unless you lose control of it, no one ever stops by to check on you, even if you use the permit to start the fire.
HB 1711 makes the bold assertion that some camp and cook fires, that you start on your property, should be permissible without all the four-play. And yet for some reason, it appears to have come out of committee as inexpedient to legislate? Why?
I read somewhere that within the movie industry there is a growing consensus that 3D movies are the future of the big screen experience. My initial reaction was that this is only true the way unemployment is the future of job growth in Obama’s America. Just because Nancy Pelosi says it is doesn’t make it so. ?
And the problems are related. Movies in 2D are already too expensive. 3D, which is the Mc Donald’s Drive-Thru cashiers equivalent of adding the apple pie to every order because there is no alternative, puts the big screen experience for the average American family out of reach. My response to that is to just stay home, and not just because you can’t get a lower ticket price if you bring your own 3D glasses. I have discovered what I like to call my Red Box mentality. It goes something like this.
In celebration of this historic occasion, having gone 1000 days without our Democrat majority Government passing a budget, we give you, The Heritage Foundation’s “1000 Days.”
In New Hampshire, Parents are not recognized, by themselves, as adequate driving instructors for children under age 18. State law requires new instruction through a certified drivers Ed course. As is the case in any such arrangement, the price for this instruction is not cheap, not even through the public school system. While I would … Read more
This started as a comment to Skips remarks on Neal Kurks bill HB 1658: ‘An act limiting Financial Assistance for mothers who have additional children while on Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). As usual, a few off the cuff remark exceeded the medium so I have promoted them here–and then some.
It should be interesting to see if the Democrats try to frame Rep Kurk, the sole sponsor of HB 1658, as another Republican Extremist. Ideologically he is a GOP moderate, his NHHRA ratings put him near the RINO category, and if anything he fits the Democrats Free Stater legislative profile (another left wing narrative) more than anything.
But he has gotten a 100% rating from NARAL and as far as I can tell supports wide open access to contraceptives. So he’s all in on reproductive freedom, and fully embraces the lefts doctrine, right up to the point where it starts to cost taxpayers buckets of money–and then it stops. With great freedom comes great responsibility. Rep Kurk understands that sometimes people need help, but that we are not meant to be slaves to other peoples freedoms, including so called reproductive freedoms, and to that end we have HB 1658.
In the last election cycle almost everyone on the center right used “voting for bills without reading them” as a campaign cudgel. So I think it is safe to say that we have some expectation of accountability for what our elected officials put their name to.
When talking about Presidents, we have an equal interest in their having a full understanding of what they are signing into law and every right to hold them to account for everything they put their name to, even though they may not have written a single word of it.
Ron Paul’s name is on the newsletters. He may or may not have written them. He may or may not have read them. His campaign and his supporters do not think he should be held to task for their content. They have even gone so far as to suggest that their is some massive Republican conspiracy to discredit him.
Not long ago Merrimack went to annual renewal of our dump decal. You display it on your windshield so they know you are a resident. It costs nothing to get the decal, but according to the guy handing them out, the amount of savings more than covers the cost of doing this every year. Quite a bit more. He says that asking people to present an ID once a year to get a new sticker, saves the municipality a lot of money.
Not only was there fraud at a place where not too many people were thinking about it (at the town transfer station) but there was enough of it to make annual renewals an important disincentive against it.
Of course the cost of operating the transfer station is just one part of the town budget.
So how much could it cost a town if just anyone can walk into a polling place, get a ballot without any ID at all, and vote for or against issues, Warrants, and candidates that will affect local spending and inevitably the tax burden required to fund that spending? More? Millions more?
I suppose you’ll want some context for that headline. Back in December (12/9/2011) I explained why New Hampshire should continue lowering tobacco taxes. I suggested we adopt some kind of schedule by which we would sunset tobacco taxes over the next decade based of the long term decline in sales. Why, after all, would you risk the states ability to invest in anything, including the left’s rhetorical “neediest residents in their most desperate hours (or something),” using an unreliable source of revenue in decline?
OK, what I actually said was
“Only a progressive zipper-head would rely on more revenue from something they want to get rid of. Increasing the tax on a declining market will only accelerate the unreliability of the revenue stream. That creates the opportunity for bigger budget holes that must then be filled on the fly.”
As if by magic, Sylvia Larsen, Democrat super-minoirty leader of the New Hampshire State Senate, in the face of declining unit sales, as fewer people smoke, after a decades long trend indicating that tobacco purchases will likely continue to decrease in the future, thinks we should increase our reliance on cigarette taxes in New Hampshire.
Zipper head. (doofus, goofball, goober, dunderhead, maroon, doh!) see note#2 below
Has the sweet milk of Obama’s class warfare rhetoric taken another sour turn? I’m talking about Warren Buffett’s secretary. How could a woman who is only paid $60,000.00 per year (according to her boss) be able to afford two homes while somehow amassing enough annual wealth to put her in a tax bracket that doesn’t even exist for the top1%?
That’s the question posed in an editorial in yesterday’s Investors Business Daily: Is Buffett’s Secretary a One Percenter?
An ABC News report, for example, says she “pays a tax rate of 35.8%,” in contrast to Buffett’s 17.4% The very top federal income tax bracket is 35%, not 35.8%, and that doesn’t kick in until a taxpayer has adjusted gross income above $379,150.
Does that mean Bosanek is among the 0.4% of taxpayers whose income hits the top federal bracket? You know, the “1%” Obama and his pals always rail about?
Good question.
I have a question for progressives. If a fetus is just a lump of tissue, isn’t abortion just another form of plastic surgery?
You can’t even find a Democrat willing to admit the procedure is not elective. It’s woman’s choice, yes?
And if you’ve ever gotten an unwanted earful from some feminis, going on about what pregnancy can do to a woman’s body, appearance is a consideration. That makes it cosmetic, yes?
So if abortion is the elective, cosmetic, removal of unwanted tissue, and not the termination of a human life, why doesn’t the liberal super-state demand the wholesale taxpayer funding of liposuction, nose jobs, and breast implants?
Sorry, trick question. If you are a public school teacher in Buffalo New York, boob jobs are already covered by taxpayer dollars.
New Hampshire’s white tower liberals and their advocates in state government have been adamant about their policy on College students voting in the Granite State. While we have called this voter fraud, the Democrats insist that if you go to school here, then you should be able to vote here.
But are these “New Hampshire voters” getting screwed over by these same liberal establishment types? Are the same people who insist students should be able to claim residency for the purposes of voting for Democrat candidates, denying these students the same status when it comes to the cost of their education?
Using UNH as an example, the average New Hampshire voter who applied to attend the State school from someplace outside New Hampshire, shall not be denied their “right” to affect our elections, but must still pay 110% more per year in tuition than a New Hampshire “voter” who is defined by the university as domiciled inside the state for billing purposes. And the progressives think voter ID disenfranchises the poor?
Exposing the Granite State Fair Tax Coalition (GSFTC) as just another left wing front group for Christian Socialism and the Democrat party tax and spend agenda was easy. (Here, here, here, here, here, maybe here, here as well, and don’t forget here.)
But will it be any easier to unmask their newest facade? That’s right, the GSFTC is dead but not gone. It has been replaced by the exact same organization, all the same Liberal/Progressive players, but with a shiny new name. GSFTC is now Granite State Priorities (GSP).
How do I summarize this transition in a nut shell? Same old whore, new dress.