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.

Pass The American Jobs Act Now!!!

Congressman Louis Gohmert (R-TX) took care of business. He has filed the American Jobs Act, HR2911. it is anorexic by Democrat standards, weighing in at an awe inspiring two pages. And all it does is repeal the corporate income tax.

I’d Like To Give A Tax Cut To Public Sector Employees

As I understand it public sector employees pay taxes too. I’m quite sure I’ve heard that somewhere. So if they paid for their benefits and pensions right out of their paychecks, like most of the rest of us have to do. They’d automatically give themselves a tax cut.

Smoke Em or Eat Em

Cigarette Taxes up in smokeDemocrats thought they had something for a minute.  After the GOP majority reduced the cigarette tax the revenue didn’t shoot right up the next day.  It actually did not shoot up the first month either.  Naturally this made knees jerk all over the party headquarters and the muttering began about how decreasing the tax forced us to reduce valuable government services.  (Women, children, and public union employees hit hardest.)

The media permitted them their druthers, for good or ill, and it became a matter of public record that the NHDP had embarked on a nah-nah told you so PR campaign about taxing tobacco products.

Then tobacco revenues went up.  They went up 1.8 Million ahead of plan last month.  What was more important was that this increase ended what the NH House majority claims was a five year downward trend.  2011 minus five carry the tax deduction…well, since just about the time the democrat majority experiment began. (And hey, someone please call Rep Christine"Nostradamus" Hamm, D-Hopkinton, and rub it in her face.)

So why bring it up?  One  month, 1.8 million over plan, not that much really.  I mention it because Big Government.com just posted a piece that references data from the CDC and other sources on the ongoing futility of using cigarette taxes as a source of state revenue.  Smoking is still on the decrease, which is good.  I count myself among the legions of former smokers, though cost was not then a factor.  The number of cigarettes smoked per day is down, which is also good but reductive from a revenue perspective.  And a majority of cigarette tax increases never really produce the expected revenue.  This is partly due to the affects of taxation, and to some degree due (apparently) to smuggling.  High taxation and regulation lead to illegal behavior–which adds costs to deal with the "crime " created by them–so feel free to postulate the downsides yourselves; but raising taxes is no guarantee of more revenue, so I think it is time for another discussion about tobacco taxes, and why we need a long term plan to cut them until they are not taxed at all.

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Out of State Influence Gets ‘Republican’ Kevin Janvrin Elected.

Sitting atop their mountains of out of state money thNH Democrats are forever demagoging the issue (of outside influence). So I am waiting patiently for them to denounce the newly elected Republican House Rep from Rockingham county, Kevin Janvrin, who has finance reports just screaming extremist, outside influence.

What Would Democrats Do If Abortion Was Bad For Womens Health?

New Hampshire used to have a significant number of female state Senators, including 11 Democrat women, all on the take from the abortion PAC’s abortion PAC, Emily’s list.   Most of the rest of New Hampshire’s Democrat women suffer from a similar ailment, including Jeanne Shaheen, Carol Shea Porter, Anne McKluster and so on.  So they all defend abortion from conception to birth because, they are told to say, it essential to a woman’s health.  It is sometimes a woman’s reproductive health, but they have since changed it to just "women’s health". They also added ‘Freedom’ to "Reproductive," giving us the phrase reproductive freedom, which has nothing to do with reproducing and everything to do with not producing anything, something the observant among us will note is identical to their jobs programs and most, if not all, of the Democrats economic policies.

If you are a Democrat, destroying production is where it’s at.

This might explain these same un-aborted lumps of womb tissue toeing the Democrat party line on the environment.  (And of course environmental rights means they take something away from people.)  Each of these Democrat women, and damn near the entire Democrat partyAbortion hurts womensupport things like RGGI, cap and trade, and have no problem telling people who assume they live in a relatively free society what energy to use, what light bulbs to buy, what car to drive, how far to drive it, what fuel is best, that their breath is poison, and so on.  And they will insist that they are doing this for our own good, based on the slim chance that human activity might warm the earth a fraction, and on the even flimsier assumption that this small increase might not in fact be beneficial.

Recent revelations demonstrating wide spread fraud among un-aborted members of the pro-anthropogenic climate science community have not deterred the lefts "experts" and line-toers alike, from continuing to insist we waste billions of other peoples dollars to prevent something that is not happening.   This may well have something to do with being on the receiving end of the "billions we are wasting" yet not a one of them thinks that a conflict of interest.  (See also "public sector unions support democrats" for a similar unresolved conflict.)

Proof that the IPCC report on which the bulk of this fraud is substantiated is nothing more than a collection of biased assumptions and wild guesses, collated by un-aborted, Eurotrash-socialist politicians, to advance a specific, destructive, high-tax-grow-government agenda, have not deterred them from emulating this policy path. 

And despite the mounting (actual) scientific evidence, that warming is natural and driven by factors other than un-aborted human activity, these same left-wing Democrats insist we should continue to take millions of dollars from hard working taxpayers every year so that they, their taxpayer-funded experts, and hordes of un-aborted-unaccountable bureaucrats, can finance policy to examine and correct the non-problem indefinitely.

Why?  Because they claim to be convinced that there is some slim risk, despite many unknowns and contradictory research, that this might cause harm to someone, somewhere, someday.  

But would they feel just as much of a commitment to save lives, specifically women’s lives, if we had more proof that abortions are detrimental to a woman’s health, and quite a bit more so than global warming?  This abortion thing is all about women’s health after all and we are talking about women protecting women’s health, and if that is true then health should come before abortion, yes? 

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Obama’s “Bride Of Stimulus” Speech

I wasn’t going to bother, but when you have a title like “Bride of Stimulus” you have to run with it. And that is exactly what that speech was. To quote every democrat’s greasy palm card from 2007/2008, what we have here is…”the same old failed polices of the past.” Or what I referred to on twitter as “same old whore new dress.”

New Hampshire Exceptional, Yet Again.

Stopping the spending and the out of control growth was and is exactly what you need and want from your US congress, but cannot yet achieve with a Democrat Senate and a Democrat President. And you will never get it as long as the left controls any those parts of your Federal government.

Left Wing Hyporcisy Must Die!

Closer to home we could have the New Hampshire Democrat Party Must Die. (I know for a fact they’ll never seriously object to the current game and as such the entire state party must be responsible for failing to do so until they all denounce it–their rules.) Terie Norelli, Sylvia Larsen, John Lynch, and Kathy Sullivan, all gore covered, relentless, brain eating, mindless …actually wait.

Old Establishment Scared…The Liberty Wing Needs To Double Down –

I just happen to know who thinks they are in charge. I know who pulled the levers that lead to the establishment coup. I’m just working out the details, putting the time line together. Chasing the money. It may take days or even weeks, but I’ll get it all worked out. and I will share it with you. I’m patient like that.

Lay Off Notice

To compensate for these increases,our prices would have to increase by about 10%. But since we cannot increase our prices right now due to the dismal state of the economy, we will have to lay off sixty of our employees instead.

How About We Name It After Justice Souter?

Justice David Souter secured his place in history when he voted to allow New London Connecticut to take private property and give to a private entity. This fundamental abuse of property rights, as offensive as it was, could only be compounded when the seized property was never even developed. People were forcibly removed from their homes, kicked off their land, and for what? How about The Justice David Souter Memorial….Dump.

Who Is Working America and Why Are They In My Mailbox?

Don’t throw away that mailer just yet. They spent a lot of money sending you that postage paid return envelope, and they probably spent a lot of money on the postage. And it would be a shame to waste that per-paid envelope. Maybe you should return those cards like they asked? Maybe let them know what you think?

A Tale of Two Cities: Detroit and Houston

GOOD READ below, from from National Review. You can subscribe to National Review HERE (I do; well worth it).

Houston, We Have a Solution 
A tale of two cities 
BY MARIO LOYOLA 

On a warm Saturday evening in June 1943, crowds were relaxing on Belle Isle, a retreat slightly larger than New York’s Central Park nestled in the Detroit River, which separates Canada and the United States. Belle Isle’s landscapes and structures were a showcase of great American architecture: Frederick Law Olmsted, Albert Kahn, and Cass Gilbert all were represented. Its botanical garden, yacht club, memorial fountain, golf course, and opulent marble lighthouse offered a serene testament to the grandeur of Detroit. 

Exactly what started the riots that night, we’ll never know for sure. There seems to have been a confrontation between a white sailor’s girlfriend and a black man, which led to a brawl. As contradictory rumors raced through the city, the conflagration spread. By the time federal forces intervened to impose law and order three days later, dozens of people had been killed, mostly blacks, and millions of dollars of property destroyed, mostly in the poor, black, inner-city neighborhood of Paradise Valley. 

Detroit’s fall can be traced to the race riots of 1943, though many decades of prosperity and achievement still lay ahead. The rise and fall of Detroit is history on an epic scale: Favored by fortune at first, then plowed under its wheel, the city has had a lot of bad luck. But as Oscar Wilde lamented as he languished in Reading Gaol near the end of his life: “I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand. . . . Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still.” 

Houston had suffered race riots, too, during World War I, but fortune would smile on it for most of the 20th century….

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NH Democrats Still Want To Limit Free Speech

What price for speech?In the waning days of New Hampshire’s leftist experiment of 2007-2010, in the months leading up to the crackling heat of the 2010 election, the Democrat-lead state legislature attempted to pass the Sullivan/Hassan speech intimidation amendment attached to NH HB1459 .

This kitchen-table Frankenstein was strung together by Democrat party Committee creature Kathy “Lawsuit” Sullivan and then Democrat state Senator Maggie “The Red” Hassan, from dead bits of left wing jack-booted policy dreams.  The goal was to quickly replace the gag that the Supreme Courts Citizens United v. FEC ruling had removed.  They would require businesses to get permission to engage in political speech if they intended to spend over a certain sum.

Assigning government regulated speech limitations based on some arbitrary, government defined value was hardly the worst of it. The democrats also wanted to empower third parties to intimidate political speech for them as well.  Anyone with the money and time could file a lawsuit against any business that it thought could have violated the law.  This would give every out of state funded left wing non-profit the ability to pay its left wing, democrat supporting lawyers, to cast a chilling anti-speech pall across the New Hampshire Landscape.   Fear of litigation would instantaneously exclude thousands of voices from the political debate simply because they could not risk the time and expense of being sued, even erroneously, should they fail to dot all the I’s and cross all the T’s.

From square one this was a partisan, prejudicial and intentionally unconstitutional act.

Government can do nothing without first denying someone of their legally earned income, so this bill established that it was acceptable for 51% of those doing the taxing to define what constituted free speech.  When that happens free speech is no longer a protected right, it is a legislated privilege regulated by a democratic mobocracy.  It no longer mattered that every business pays some kind of tax, in most cases dozens of them, to finance government. It did not matter that the right to free association can take the form of a business or group that might have an interest in it’s relationship to how government exercises power in their name.  All that mattered to New Hampshire Democrats was that free speech continues to be a barrier to their political success, and if they could silence any class of persons they could find a way to silence any dissenter they chose.

Ask yourself, which party is forever trying to limit free speech and the answer is Democrats?  The war on business, the fairness doctrine, the war on new media and Fox news.  The insults and slurs hurled at the TEA party.  These are all efforts to intimidate or limit speech to which the left objects.  They have no interest in fairness or equality of message.  They seek to control the message.

The New Hampshire Democrat effort to complicate, regulate, and even intimidate anyone out of having free reign to speak about how or how often they are taxed, about how those taxes are used, and to actually sanction random intimidation by entities outside the government, should have immediately disqualified them from every holding another elected office.  We came just a few votes shy of passing a bill that Governor Lynch said he was prepared to sign.

This is not something we can forget.  It defines the character of everyone who voted for it, sanctioned it, or supported it.  This thinking permeates everything about their grasp of your relationship to government.  They still think this way, and they will continue to argue in support of it, even though their actual justifications for it, are fatally flawed.

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RGG-Die!

I’ve had a thing or two to say about RGGI.  Just drop my name and ‘RGGI’ into a search engine and start counting.  If you start reading you will notice a trend.  RGGI, the Regional Greenhouse Gas initiative, is a broad based tax or fee on all energy and all persons who use it.  This tax could increase without anyone every holding a vote, or having a hearing. It was passed by the Democrat majority legislature with that in mind, during New Hampshire’s political experimentation years (democrats were left in charge of everything), and signed by then-and-God-only-knows-why-he-is-still-Governor John Lynch.

(I never call RGGI Reggie, by the way.  This makes me think of Reggie Mantle from The Archie’s, which makes me think of Veronica Lodge, who was kind of hot in a post-pre-pubescent animated sort of a way, which might explain my fondness for dark haired women, but probably not.   Maybe Isis from the Shazam Isis power hour, or how about Wonder Woman?  Did I mention that I don’t call it Reggie?)Reggies revenge

RGGI’s proponents claimed it would be good for the environment, which was only true if the "environment" was one littered with taxpayer financed slush funds whose purposes were as ephemeral as the lefts idea of rights or  justice.  And Carbon trading to reduce emissions was already a well known lie that ten years of cap and trade in Europe had already proved demonstrably false.  If we just assume the folks who claim to be the smartest people in every room had to know this–being so damn smart–then this was obviously meant to be yet another large slush fund to be raided by current and future Democrat majorities, all but for two fortuitous events that got in the way of pay day.

First, the left’s nationwide social engineering experiment with housing rights collapsed the economy before the program got up to steam, making the RGGI carbon credits worth progressively less until they are now almost completely worthless.  Second, we voted the left-wingers out of office for a ruinous spending agenda and their chronic inability to balance the books despite scores of new taxes and fees, and laying siege to every pile of money within view, public or private.

We wont even get into the left wing law firms that lined up to manage the grants and the distribution of funds for approved projects, or the list of Democrat friendly recipients.

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A Typical Day In Mr. Buckley’s Neighborhood

These folks have all insisted, in one way or another, that things like unemployment, food stamps, even destruction of public and private property, are good for the economy. So using their metrics, these are things Democrats should not complain about unless they are actually bad for the economy.

Your Vote Is Worth Millions- Maybe You’d Like To Protect it?

SB 129 is coming up for a veto override vote in the New Hampshire Senate in the next week or so. (The Union leader referred to it as SB 189, this morning, which is incorrect.) SB 129 would require ID to vote in New Hampshire. It would afford the same protection to your vote as it does to dozens of other things you need an ID for.

Go Ahead Punk. Film that Police officer.

a citizen’s right to film government officials, including law enforcement officers, in the discharge of their duties in a public place is a basic, vital, and well-established liberty safeguarded by the First Amendment.”

It’s Not Easy Being Green…

In a profanity strewn diatribe before the Aspen Institute, Gore said mean things about scientists who must be on the payroll of some arch-nemesis bent on brainwashing everyone into letting the evil genius destroy the planet. This, as opposed to all the “scientists” (economists, journalists, confidence men) who have been hiding the decline or crowding out dissent to keep the billions in taxpayer dollars rolling in to keep them “on message.”

Republikinz-R -Stoopid?

Michelle Malkin discusses the lefts age old narrative about Republicans being dumb, and the recent attacks on Rick Perry. The obvious comparison, and she says it herself, “Dumb compared to who?” Great point. We’ve got more University economic egg-heads roaming the White House than you can shake a ruler at and yet they have to the last come up with nothing but a series of failed polices that have a) failed to meet any of their own genius exclamations and expectations and b) made things worse. It’s fun all the way through so take six minutes out of your morning and watch Malkin work.

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