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.

Would You Suck Twice as Hard for Half as Much?

September 26, 2018August 30, 2011 Steve MacDonald

I appreciate it when democrats give you the rope with which to hang their half baked ideas. Take Mark Fernald for example. Mr. Fernald is a sometime New Hampshire Democrat candidate for this or that, and prominent member of the left wing Granite State Fair Tax Coalition (GSFTC). He recently (sorry, frequently) forwards partisan, left wing economic spin, to justify his pet obsession with rising taxes and class warfare.

This most recent email to the arm chair central planners in his fan base is just another in a string of left wing editorials that attempts to contrast democrat spending against that of our previous president. It is typical Fernald; an oranges to rotten apples comparison that uses incomplete data, wild assumptions (about Obama’s future affect in every case), misleading graphs, cherry picked data, and resulting percentages that stretch the fabric of reality so thin that you could easily pass into the alternate dimension in which Democrats and faeries dance widderershins around the deficit mound, as money appears out of nowhere to pay for whatever theirr tiny, narrow, Marxist minds can imagine.

donkey with hed up ass This particualr faerie story centers around three graphs from the Government Printing Office (GPO). Not the fed, the treasury, or even some fruit-loop left wing think tank, but the GPO. The GPO prints stuff, and answers to the Executive branch. So right out of the toy-box we have to question these partisan stills, presented as they are in a partisan manner, bearing guestimated facts and assumptions, with no basis in reality any greater than anything that has ever escaped Mr. Obama’s teleprompter; you do recall all the Obama the non-partisan, deficit cutting, cost reducing, globe saving, health care giving, unifying, auto company saving, mortgage rescuing, goodness? How about the transparent lobbyist-less, open to ideas, new tone, we need to work together Obama? No? You probably remember the we won, closed door, partisan, hate those bankers, Tea Partiers are terrorists, intimidation tactics, don’t interrupt my vacation, Arrest Ron Paul supporters, dozens of lobbyists, shadow cabinet, Attack Arizona, hunt down my enemies, anti-free speech, black panthers can scare away voters, give guns to Mexican drug lords, nohting is my fault Obama with the double action golf-club grip? Well his printing office is the source. Are we surprised it tries to make him look good?

So what can we glean that goes beyond the objective of showing your Republican friends that they are wrong about Obama? How about using facts to show that those Republicans are actually right?

What I Hate About Wal-Mart

September 26, 2018August 26, 2011 Steve MacDonald

It’s not one of those "angst at their humongous success" screeds, I’m just trying to figure out why it takes so damn long to get out of that place. So this is more about fundamentals of business. Because the retail giant, that’s how the media refers to them, has in fact added much needed efficiencies to the global distributions system. No argument there. They provide discounted items to hundreds of millions annually, making creature comforts and necessary every-day products attainable to a wider swath of the population than anyone. (And more efficiently than the Democrats beloved federal government, I might add.) And they employ an army larger than most armies–wage and benefit arguments aside–because when you have staggering, persistent, inflation and unemployment as we do in the Obama economy, still having a job to wake up to is like getting a raise every-single- day. Even if the government is making it worth less and less, every-single-day.

So what’s my beef (about Wal-Mart)?

I work in Amherst, New Hampshire and the Wal-Mart Super Store there is, if nothing else, convenient. It is convenient to get to, but not convenient to get out of, and there lies my "operational" complaint. No matter what time of day I am in there, 6am, lunchtime, afternoon, evening,…there are never, EVER, enough cashiers. Did I say never?

The average time spent standing in the check-out line at Wal-Mart is most certainly a reflection of their desire to charge less for some items, but can we possibly try to keep it under fifteen minutes? It takes me twice as long to get out as it does to do the actual shopping, most of which is spent walking from the entrance to whatever zip code the milk cooler is in and back. This is a problem.

Long check out lines. High average check. Cashier bagging everything….hope you are not in a hurry.

So what about the self-checkout? Great idea. I love it. Except that so does everyone else because the other lines are so damn long.

The latest trend at self-checkout, OK it is not the latest I’m just being timely, seems to be that people with fifty items or more also feel compelled to use it, as if this will actually take less time than standing in another line. These are of course the same people who have no idea how to use it, if that gives you some idea of where this is headed.

This is not like trying a new salad dressing at lunch, or a new look, or even a new vacation destination. This is serious. Other peoples lives are affected.

I’d Like To Thank New Hampshire’s Establishment Republicans

September 26, 2018August 24, 2011 Steve MacDonald

D Ttanks for the knife in the back espite the attitude and priorities of the more moderate-establishment (r)epublicans, and the snooty first family-checkbook wielding-GOP aristocracy in New Hampshire, the conservative/liberty movement shied away from running third party races in 2010. They did not split the party, or run as independents, though a few establishment (r)epublicans who lost their primaries did.

Instead, the liberty/conservative movement embraced shared interests and invested themselves in getting Republicans elected. They offered both time and money, worked sign-waves and phone banks, and helped hand the NHGOP super-majorities in the legislature, to win the entire executive council, two congressional seats, a US Senate seat, and the closest race for governor Comrade Lynch has yet seen.

Part of that success was the tireless work of one Jack Kimball. After the primary, Jack wasn’t even running for anything, yet he was running everywhere for everyone, committed to getting the Republicans elected whether he agreed with all of their policy positions or not. His reward was the chairmanship of the State party, duly elected by the voting members. But a few weeks before that vote, then GOP chair Sununu, while ignoring his own pro-establishment and media bomb throwers, had this to say.

Sununu said he was “a little bit disappointed about some of the divisive comments that have been made by some of Jack’s supporters. That is not the way to bring the party together and it does Jack a disservice because it gives the impression that his support is coming from people who would rather divide than unite.

Chairman John Sununu, January of 2011 – Granite Status.

These are the words of someone convinced of their own supremacy. The establishment wins, and look, we were all about unity, so that the liberty movement–the losers, could continue to toe the party line and help us win landslide elections. The End.

Oops. That didn’t happen. What did happen is the bitter GOP Establishment lost and decided to take democracy and unity on a trip through the Orwellian reassignment machine.

Palin for President (?)

September 26, 2018August 21, 2011 Steve MacDonald

It seems obvious that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is going to announce her intention to run for the Republican nomination on September third, the three year anniversary of her accepting the nomination for Vice President. The pundits are lining up in agreement.

Starve A Union Save A Teacher

September 26, 2018August 20, 2011 Steve MacDonald

SEIU Union Thuggery The state has no right to come between the union and its workers right? Well I think I agree, because we now know how that works out.

Wisconsin Teachers no longer have their union dues deducted from their pay checks. They have to either sign up for automatic payments through their bank or write a check to the union each month. Given how the anti-Walker protests went, or at least how they were portrayed, this should not have been a problem for the union. You know, workers unite and all that Jazz? Well reality is quite a bit different from the media adaption of the Union talking points we saw on television. The Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC), the state education union, is laying off 40% of its staff in response to dwindling revenue. But why? What happened to workers unite? Where did all the union protesters go? Home to their own states is my guess.

Given the "choice" to support the Wisconsin education unions activities, many teachers have stopped paying dues and union staff have been laid off as a result. So Wisconsin’s teachers just gave 42 state union employees their walking papers because they would rather keep the money for themsleves than give it to the WEAC.

The union is blaming Governor Walker and the Republicans but for what? There’s no law against paying dues and the state is no longer coming between the union and its workers. Kyle Olson at Big Government brings home the bacon…

If the union has anyone to blame, it has to be its rank-and-file members. Teachers have apparently been slow to provide WEAC with bank account information for direct dues payments, despite the teams of “home visitors” that have been dispatched to pressure members over the summer.

That situation says more about the union than it does about Walker or state government. If teachers really supported their union, they would pay their dues. If they don’t support their union, should they be forced to be members and pay dues?

(…)The suspicion is that WEAC is really nothing more than a small group of radical leaders who have been forcing captive members to finance their agenda for years.

Big protest, and we had one similar in New Hampshire, but what were they really protesting?

While Everyone is Pissed Off at Rick Perry

September 26, 2018August 19, 2011 Steve MacDonald

Romney is not the presumptive winner, not because of Rick Perry, but because most Republicans really are still looking for a candidate they can get behind and Perry is the best high-profile “not Romney” candidate to come forward.

Where Your Other Facebook Friends Roam

September 26, 2018August 18, 2011 Steve MacDonald

Social Media is how we communicate these days and Facebook is currently the belle of the Ball. While spending 90 seconds on a web site is a good long stay, most Facebook users spend about 25 minutes wandering Zuckerberg’s conversational multi-sphere at any given time. How long that dominance lasts is anyone’s guess but for the time being, if you are networking, marketing, or just connecting with people you know (or looking for people you have not seen since Nixon–or maybe Clinton–was in the White House), odds are you have a Facebook account.

So are you connecting? The average user has a few hundred friends. Serious users peak around seven-hundred. And then there are the folks who get up past 800 and just blossom into the thousands. Whether you have thousands or hundreds, regardless of whether you are actually friends or just share an interest, odds are good you are missing or ignoring most of them, and they you. And it’s all your fault.

Do Students Like Re-Distribution or Not?

September 26, 2018August 17, 2011 Steve MacDonald

In what may well be the best independent video I have seen in a while, some savvy college students ask their peers (typical tax the rich types) if they would sign a petition. The plan? Redistribute GPA points from the high achievers so that other students can use them to pass classes they are doing poorly in.

The One You Feed

September 26, 2018August 16, 2011 Steve MacDonald

“My son, there is a battle between two wolves inside us all. One is Evil. It is anger, jealousy, greed, resentment, inferiority, lies, & ego. The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, humility, kindness, empathy, & truth.”

Jay Severin Returns to Boston Radio

September 26, 2018August 16, 2011 Steve MacDonald

People familiar with Severin will know he sells himself as a libertarian leaning right winger, which is in itself suspect if you spend any time listening, but his style and manner have a history of building a broad range of listeners.

We Now Know Obama’s 2012 Campaign Slogan

September 26, 2018August 16, 2011 Steve MacDonald

If you have heard any of the remarks on Obama’s Ditch-dodging–Blame Bus-Two Minutes Hate “listening tour” then you know exactly how the soon to be former President plans to spin the present circumstances.

Bernanke’s Bender

September 26, 2018August 16, 2011 Steve MacDonald

(Note:This arrived in my mail box unattributed, but I have discovered that it is from The Onion. I have edited any questionable language by replacing letters with asterisks. This image is not associated with the article at The Onion.)

SEWARD, NE—Claiming he wasn’t afraid to let everyone in attendance know about "the real mess we’re in," Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke reportedly got drunk Tuesday and told everyone at Elwood’s Corner Tavern about how absolutely f****d the U.S. economy actually is.

Bernanke, who sources confirmed was "totally sloshed," arrived at the drinking establishment at approximately 5:30 p.m., ensconced himself upon a bar stool, and consumed several bottles of Miller High Life and a half-dozen shots of whiskey while loudly proclaiming to any patron who would listen that the economic outlook was "pretty goddamned awful if you want the God’s honest truth."

"Look, they don’t want anyone except for the Washington, D.C. bigwigs to know how bad shit really is," said Bernanke, slurring his words as he spoke. "Mounting debt exacerbated—and not relieved—by unchecked consumption, spiraling interest rates, and the grim realities of an inevitable worldwide energy crisis are projected to leave our entire economy in the sh****r for, like, a generation, man, I’m telling you."

Laying Some Pipe

September 26, 2018August 15, 2011 Steve MacDonald

The Democrat controlled Senate had the opportunity to create jobs, generate growth, add some tax revenue, and did I say create jobs? But Harry Reid couldn’t bring himself to get the Keystone XL Pipeline project approved before the recess.

The Threat From Iran

September 26, 2018August 15, 2011 Steve MacDonald

The need to stop policing the world, a desire to avoid wars like that in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a consensus similar to Rep Paul’s, that Iran is not the threat the war-mongring neo-con’s make it out to be, all rise to the surface of the debate. But while it is reasonable to argue these points, does it make sense to use them as an excuse to keep our head in the sand about Iran for another four years while the suicidal mad man build nuclear weapons?

Did You Watch That New Reality TV Show Called ‘The Debate?’

September 26, 2018August 14, 2011 Steve MacDonald

I didn’t watch the GOP debate. I’m just not that into them. A debate is not a test of every candidates qualifications to lead. It is not even a place to hear a lucid oration on their policies. It is a stage on which lawyers or quick witted con men will look best, and the media is permitted to frame them. I’d rather watch paint dry.

To be fair, living in New Hampshire, and being a political blogger with a shiny "new media" by line attached, I not only have access to most if not all candidates, I am encouraged to have access. I get to press the flesh, write about them, even do live streamed or podcasted interviews with them; and I can develop a comfortable disinterest after twenty or thirty in-box invitation to meet "so-and-so" at "such-and-such" house party, picnic, monthly committee meeting, or fundraiser. Not everyone has that opportunity, in fact most people don’t, so call it a luxury of New Hampshire convenience, one that I do in fact cherish. Small state, big Primary, so debates can be viewed at a distance (even DVR’d), and oh yeah, the Patriots were on that night as well.

This is not to say I do not scroll through the reams of coverage and commentary afterwards. That is the convenience of modern advancements. DVR, Internet, Facebook, Google +, Blogosphere, and so on. Why kill it yourself when you can get it shrink wrapped on the cheap? Did I mention the Patriots were on that night?

I am also privy to a stream of inter-party, partisan remarks, from people whom I respect, about why their candidate won "Best in show." Social media, of which email is certainly a slower participant, provides me an almost endless series of fly-in-amber declarations from every choir. Articles, opinions, personal commentary, coffee, mouse click, and go. Information, observation, and opinion are in abundance, and I horde them in neat little virtual folders like a squirrel collects acorns for winter.

Not everything the social media funnel sends my way is ‘expert activist’ opinion. There are also novice interjections from folks who stumble out of the political hinterland every quadrennial without having left a proper trail of breadcrumbs from the last go-round. (Though the trail keeps getting shorter and soon, I suspect, the inauguration will be doubling as a campaign whistle-stop/fundraiser for the re-election.) In any regard, lacking the necessary cultural immersion, these electoral equivalents of the dead-beat dad, when discussing their observations about a presidential debate, can sound like Kelly Bundy describing the modularity theorem for elliptic curves.

GrokTalk! Saturday August 13, 2011

September 26, 2018August 13, 2011 Steve MacDonald

Grok Talk Goes mobile as we broadcast live from the Draft in Concord NH. They join us a GrokTV special event as we participate in Representative Dan Itse’s Class on the New Hampshire Constitution.

What’s Left Is Right – Should Obama Just Resign?

September 26, 2018August 13, 2011 Steve MacDonald

Admit it. It has crossed your mind. Obama should resign. Save us all the embarrassment of another stupid speech or the next pandering expose by the propaganda media. And just think of all the money the left would have to spend on a primary, instead of just shoving it all into Barry’s re-election cubby?