“Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me”  (John 14:6)

Apparently, with Govt as his God, Socialist Bernie decided that his secularism was going to trump a Christian that has been nominated for the Office of Management and Budget Deputy Director that had to come before him for confirmation.  He has decided that Christians, standing up for their faith in living and expressing it publicly, should not be permitted to serve (Apparently Bernie doesn’t seem to care much about the First Amendment’s “freedom of expression” nor of the Constitution’s Article VI that expressly prohibits any kind of religious litmus test for serving:

No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

Russell Vought is such a Christian and is an alum of Wheaton College – a small Evangelical Christian college that has a Statement of Faith which also included that Jesus is the Son of God, died for our sins on the Cross, and that only by accepting this sacrifice can one go to heaven. This is not secret stuff – it’s pretty much standard Christian orthodoxy.  As an Evangelical, I do believe that my theological faith matches up with it well but certainly put Sanders into orbit.

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Americans’ Net Worth Hits $94.8 Trillion, Up 1.4% in First Quarter of 2017

In the first quarter of 2017, Americans’ net worth hit $94.8 trillion, which was up 1.4 percent, the Associated Press reported. According to the Federal Reserve, stock and mutual fund portfolios increased by $1.3 trillion in value and home values were up $499 billion.

Before the recession, which began in December 2007, household net worth stood at about $66.5 trillion. Household net worth has greatly increased since then.  “Record-high stock prices are the primary driver of greater household wealth,” the article states. “The Dow Jones industrial average has more than tripled from its recession-era low of 6,547 to 21,174 on Wednesday.” “Yet just 10 percent of the U.S. population owns 80 percent of stock market wealth,” the article explains. “Meanwhile, middle-income households derive most of their wealth from their homes.”

We are a rich nation but to be sure, private debt is also sky high as well (about $12T).  What bothers me the most?

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PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 6/13/2017
CONTACT: Press@andysanborn.com

STATE SENATOR ANDY SANBORN ANNOUNCES RUN FOR CONGRESS
A proven conservative Republican who can win and keep the seat

BEDFORD, NH – State Senator Andy Sanborn (R – Bedford), Chairman of the Senate Ways and Means Committee, announced Tuesday that he will run for United States Congress in New Hampshire’s First Congressional District. His announcement video can be seen here.

A reluctant politician, Sanborn’s efforts in the legislature have been founded on not wanting to be like all the other politicians, but wanting to defend everyday people from the heavy hand of government and the political class.

“I’ve gained New Hampshire voters’ trust by listening to their real needs and working for them,” Sanborn said. “You can be a proven conservative and win if you deliver results that put people before politics. That’s what I’ve done.”

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The Declaration of Independence

…We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…

To secure and preserve these Rights – what other country was founded to protect Rights and the ideas surrounding those Rights?  The answer, plainly, is none ( in the case of many “passed” Communist countries that tried to profess the same, they turned out to be shallow if not outright false if you read their former Constitutions).

Frankly, Gillibrand is being true to her brand – Democrats/Socialists believe that Government has been instituted, since the time that German socialism infected America, strictly to “help” people by giving them things with the dirty little secret

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As Conservatives, we are used to knowing that the MSM is biased both on the news they report, the way they report it.  However, we generally only hear “oh, we are objective!” knowing full well they are lying through their keyboards.  That said, it has been clear that they have moved on from being the “who, what, where, when, and how” journalism to one of “The Narrative” – what is the end they wish to push and achieve and the articles are written to that standard.  We’ve suspected that for years but this last Prez election, they all seemingly dropped the facade and their red eyes blinked on – and many outwardly said as much.

John King of CNN (I’ve written about his anti-Republicanism non-objectiveness here) let it drop again over the John Comey testimony this week (emphasis mine):

While the Comey hearing into Russia was and remains a big story, CNN’s John King admitted Thursday afternoon that the media will not give much (if any) attention to Jim Comey stating that he was disturbed by then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch telling him in the midst of the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal that he should refer to it as “a matter,” not “an investigation.”

“A number of significant things. One, this won’t get much attention because it’s in the rearview mirror but a pretty damming account from Jim Comey there about Loretta Lynch, the former Attorney General in the Obama administration and her handling of the Clinton e-mail investigation. It won’t get much attention, but that was pretty damning,” King admitted.

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 A Professor at a Kansas College is leaving her post because a law permitting people to carry firearms on campus is taking effect.

A Wichita State University professor is resigning over a Kansas campus open-carry law that is set to take effect this summer.

“Clear, open, critical discussion cannot take place in an environment of threat and fear,” Deborah Ballard-Reisch wrote in a letter to University President John Bardo. “Guns on campus will make it that much more difficult for them to feel safe,” she wrote.

How long has Dr. Ballard-Reisch tolerated Diversity, Inclusive Excellence, and other Social Justice programs on campus? These curricula exist to prohibit ‘clear, open, critical discussion‘ by not just encouraging an “environment of threat and fear” but tolerating it.

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People like NH State Rep Katherine Rogers don’t believe that phrase “Good guys with guns stop bad guys” should ever exist, is really just “fake news”, part of a mythology that has to be put down, and never misses an opportunity to advance the cause of killing off the Second Amendment and Article 2A here in NH.  Unfortunately, real examples of that phrase actually do happen and I’ve posted a few here at the ‘Grok from time to time.  This one, however, is different; this time, it’s personal.

No, not me – this happened not once, not twice, but three times with The Eldest and I just heard his story this past week as we drove down to pick up the now elderly Saab from the garage.  They took place just after he finished his hitch with the Marines and came home.  A friend of his, female, was working the overnights at a local convenience store that, at the time, was the object of a number of robberies.  The Eldest has ALWAYS been very loyal and protective of his friends so knowing the manager well, he used to dub around the store doing little things (not an employee) to help out, especially in the coolers but always keeping an eye on his friend at the register.

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Evergreen State College has been SJW moonbat central for the past two weeks, where the inmates have taken over the asylum.

The public state college near Olympia has become a national caricature of intolerant campus liberalism in both The New York Times and Fox News. At least one professor has been harangued and classes disrupted by shouting mobs of students accusing the famously progressive campus of “systemic racism.”

That coverage apparently has incited anonymous threats of mass murder, resulting in the campus being closed for three days. In the critical last week of school, students have been deprived of learning by extremes on the left and right.

So “impressed” are the parents of potential future caricatures of liberal intolerance that Evergreen might be nevergreen. Enrollment has plummeted. The school is fighting for its life.

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Today, in a letter to the editor of New Hampshire Business Review, Peter J. Griffin, the NH Railroad Revitalization Association President, considers what at first appears to be a rhetorical question. “How will tourists get to New Hampshire?” How is this a problem?

Mr. Griffin bemoans the loss of days past when public transportation (trains) brought “tourists” into the Granite State.

I wanted to get to New Hampshire. I could not because there were little or no public transportation connections to New Hampshire tourist destinations, so I took the train to Rockport, Mass.- where I spent money.

That is how it remains. There is not a tourist destination in NH accessible from the Boston area by public transportation.

Not to belittle the larger point but how did New Hampshire manage to report 38.4 million tourist visits and $5.4 Billion dollars in revenue in 2015 without public transportation?

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Last night, by a 3-2 vote, the Candia School Board repealed a controversial Transgender Policy passed during the dark days of the Obama Administration, and it’s flirtation with threatening money for districts that did not comply with its wishes. A policy pushed on local school districts by the New Hampshire School Board Association.

Hadn’t you heard? That’s because no one is reporting this repeal except Rich Girard.

If you search the RSS feeds of local media, you find nothing.

If you Google it, you get links to old stories about the passage of the policy followed by Rich’s show page for the Girard at Large Radio Program.

AP? Google Alerts? Nope.

Freedom New Hampshire, the nationally funded group that ran a pressure campaign to get Candia board members to retain the policy has nothing to say about the vote as of lunchtime today.

Nothing.

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Ben Sasse On What The Republican Party Stands For: “I Don’t Know”

I hate almost all of the MSM, as any long term ‘Grok reader knows, as over the years I have blogged about specific instances of MSM bias against presenting news stories straight up without insipid (or gratuitous condescension) commentary slapping around half their readership (or better put, former readership).  But for the GOP to think that targeting the MSM is a great idea that will get voters to go “YES! I’LL VOTE REPUBLICAN” is about as idiotic as all get out (emphasis mine):

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…cast of known characters that decided, contra the NH GOP Platform, that shoving NH into the Obamacare morass via the Medicaid Expansion (Hey Jeb – thanks for the extra taxes!).  So once again, Govt has decided that it knows economics better than anyone and these self-righteous nitwits went for it.  I’m not waiting for my breath to get baited to see what Government will come up to fix what Government made worse.

I’m quite sure that I’ll be SO delighted – and in looking at this piece in the UL, I am not disappointed (reformatted, emphasis mine)

NH insurer seeks 30% rate hike

The second-largest insurer in the New Hampshire Obamacare market said his company has requested average rate hikes of 30 percent next year, blaming the increase on two provisions of the health care law — Medicaid expansion and federally imposed risk adjustments.  Minuteman Health Chief Executive Officer Tom Policelli disclosed the preliminary proposal in a newspaper interview on Monday. He said Medicaid-expansion customers, who don’t pay any premiums or deductibles, won’t feel any impact, and subsidized Exchange customers will feel very little.

Yep – this is exactly the Alinsky end-game: transfer of wealth from the Have’s to the Not-Have’s; glad to see that the NH elected officials in the House and Senate decided to play along with Alinsky and one of his top henchmen – Obama.  All your’s, boys and girls!

But wait, there’s MORE!

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BENEFIT to the use of carbon?  Sure is, even if you don’t think about it – turn on the lights, heating your home, driving your care, power for making things – but you never hear the Watermelon Environmentalists about how GOOD it can be for society (even if it is just that the planet is “greening” more and better as atmospheric CO2 rises).  I remember when the Obama Administration raised, seemingly just to fit their agenda, the “social cost of carbon” such that they could point to it and go “see!” in justifying their agenda of “decarbonizing” our society (and de-industrializing us at the same time). However, here’s a contrarian point of view / calculation that I bet is going to have some of the “Government must control us to survive” environmentalists (emphasis mine):

Until now, that is. Richard Tol, one of the world’s pre-eminent environmental economists, has produced a working paper entitled “The Private Benefit of Carbon and Its Social Cost.” Here’s the dynamite abstract:

The private benefit of carbon is the value, at the margin, of the energy services provided by the use of fossil fuels. It is the weighted average of the price of energy times the carbon dioxide emission coefficient, with energy used as weights. The private benefits is here estimated, for the first time, at $411/tCO2. The private benefit is lowest for coal use in industry and highest for residential electricity; it is lowest in Kazakhstan and highest in Norway. The private benefit of carbon is much higher than the social cost of carbon.

Yes, I’d say that $411 > $40.

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Apparently, neither former FBI director Comey nor the MSM know the difference between these two terms.

Computer hacking definition

Computer hacking refers to the practice of modifying or altering computer software and hardware to accomplish a goal that is considered to be outside of the creator’s original objective. The majority of hackers possess an advanced understanding of computer technology.

Phishing definition

Phishing is an e-mail fraud method in which the perpetrator sends out legitimate-looking email in an attempt to gather personal and financial information from recipients.

Russians did not hack our US elections. Russians did not direct or alter our elections.

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