Once again, we see the hubris of planners and those that have never signed the front of a paycheck in companies that have low profit margins in low skilled worker industries (re: restaurants)(emphasis mine):

In June of last year, the Seattle city council passed a $15 minimum wage law to be phased in over time, with the first increase to $11 an hour taking effect on April 1, 2015. What effect will the eventual 58% increase in labor costs have on small businesses, including area restaurants? It’s too soon to tell for sure, but there is already some evidence that the recent minimum wage hike to $11 an hour, along with the pending increase of an additional $4 an hour by 2017 for some businesses, has started having a negative effect on restaurant jobs in the Seattle area.

Read more

If he’s not careful, his workers are going to end up like those in Seattle – what happened when a town in California raised it’s minimum wage (reformatted, emphasis mine):

Small businesses are already struggling to survive the spate of minimum wage increases to $15 per hour in parts of California.
Last month, the small Bay Area town of Emeryville, California, (population 10,000) decided to act as flag-bearer for raising the minimum wage in California, hiking its minimum wage to $14.44 per hour.  Even though businesses with less than 56 workers are exempt from the $14.44 rate and do not have to raise their wages to $15 until 2018, Vic Gumper, who owns Lanesplitter Pizza, with outlets in Berkeley, Oakland, Albany and Emeryville, decided not only to bite the bullet but swallow it, paying his workers $15 to $25 an hour while eschewing tips or raising prices.

This MUST have been a guy who knew “his numbers” – the important stats about his business that served as his indicators of “working?  not working?” as to whether he could BETTER the now mandatory minimum wage.  WHY else would he have gone whole hog (er, large special) in raising his labor costs?  Was he one of those mean, profit mongering, money greedy capitalists taking advantage of the help to line his own pockets? Umm….

Read more

And you have to wonder why people are agreeing with Trump for saying “screw political correctness” but I bet some SJW (Social Justice Warrior with an inflated sense of worth, an even bigger sized ego, and an inverse proportion sense of sense) will say that is hate speech as well.  And that is what they do – silencing the debate by guilting you any which way they can.  They never met my Mom – she was so good at it that I can now proudly say she inoculated me against them; they can’t hold a match to her (oh, would that be a climate change nano-aggression?).

And being politically correct takes as much time as it does a lack of brains – I did not know these were no longer good things:

• “Baa, Baa Black Sheep” is racist.
• M.A.s may be racist, postmasters too.Stephen Davis, master of Pierson College at Yale, says the word “master” in his title is severely upsetting some students and driving them off campus.
• Liking white meat is racist.
• Hoop skirts are racist.
• Lunch bags look racist.

Read more

From the article at the Union Leader (reformatted, emphasis mine):

Women go topless to send message of equality at Hampton Beach

To this ordinary schlub, it just seems that the feminist movement has lost its mind over the rather silly idea that parts of the female body can just be “declared” to be asexual just because they say to.  Sorry ladies, but it just doesn’t work that way.  Saying it:

Read more

Rarely do I repost an entire article little commentary – this will be one of those times as the content and style of the piece is such that it hangs altogether on its own.  To pull a snippet here or another one from there would be a slight to the author and I still haven’t figured out how to do that without spoiling it.  In order for Conservatives to understand what has happened to their country, our country, it is necessary to see the history that is not written down in many places.  While this is far from being a treatise, it is long and it is thorough.  You need to read it (emphasis mine) as it outlines the WHY of Democrat National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman-Shultz.

************

The Quiet Revolution: How the New Left Took Over the Democratic Party

By Scott S. Powell

Frustration with division and gridlock in Washington lead many Americans to impugn both political parties for the current broken and ineffective state of government. There is plenty of blame to go around, but below the surface there has been a quiet revolution going on in only one of the two parties — the Democratic Party — which is the main source of today’s irreconcilable division and moral confusion.

What’s remarkable is how the political and cultural center of American values has collapsed in the last two and a half decades with the Democratic Party having moved dramatically to the left. Recently, Democratic National Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz could not explain the difference between the modern Democratic Party platform and that of socialism, while at the same time gushing over the prospect of Socialist Bernie Sanders having a prominent place at the 2016 Democratic Party convention.

If people today could somehow be transported back to the time of Harry Truman and Jack Kennedy, they would swear those standard bearers were Republicans with little in common with today’s Democratic Party. 

Read more

The introduction of the hands-free electronic device ban in New Hampshire is an arbitrary assault on liberty. Readers of these pages will know why. There is no evidence that a ban can accomplish that for which it has been imposed; a reduction in collisions, injuries, and deaths.

So what! The law went in to effect July 1st and yesterday, the Union Leader published a front page story on the ban. What did we learn?

Read more

Prying documents out of school districts in New Hampshire is not like pulling teeth. It’s worse.

A recent example of this is the ongoing struggle for more transparency from Manchester city boards and committees. Contracts for the Superintendent, Asst. Super, and Business administrator for the Manchester School District were amended at the end of July but repeated attempts by the public or local media to obtain them went unfulfilled.

Was the Manchester Board of School Committee willing and ready to vote on them without a single taxpayer seeing a word of what was in those contracts?

Read more

Every week there is another offer in the mailbox for a free solar installation. Power your home. Pay zero to the power companies. Sell power back. It’s a Win-win-win (win-win…win). Or is it?

Columnist Sam Asano, writing in the Manchester Union Leader, pointed his flashlight at the offers and discovered something nasty.

The first and the largest issue the signing consumer faces is the fact that once the system gets installed, their residential property would be attached with a 20-year lien. Yes, it is a lien on the property itself, not just on the roof-top solar system. That means the house you are living in, and probably carrying some mortgage on, is now additionally burdened by a lien equal to the install price of the solar system.

Read more

During this weekend’s ‘Defending the American Dream Summit’ in Columbus, Ohio yours truly interviewed Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Avik Roy about Obamacare and Obamacare’s Medicaid Expansion. Roy has been on the forefront when it comes to discussing healthcare and Obamacare. During the Summit, Roy sat on a panel called Obamacare called “Sick yet?” Obamacare 2.0 – An Update on How Obamacare and its Medicaid Expansion is Affecting You.

Read more

This story from The Blaze is one where one guy, foreseeing what things could go wrong, prepared for a risk he judged rightly that came to be (emphasis mine, reformatted):

As wildfires blaze throughout Washington state, one man simply sat in his living room safe and sound as flames reaching up to 20 feet surrounded his home.  That’s because John Belles built his house, a concrete dome, specifically to withstand anything and everything nature could throw his way in Okanogan County.    According to KPTV-TV, the house hadn’t yet been tested by wildfire. But after the flames passed, the survivalist said there was no damage whatsoever to his home.

I take exception to the “survivalist” innuendo, for isn’t it a fact that anyone alive generally wants to continue to live (er, “survive”)? But it looked like he properly gauged his risk and got it right. He goes on with his recounting:

Read more

Are Ben and Jerry’s newest flavors Ayatollah Bail Out Brownie and Nuclear-Terrorist Nutty-Buddy?

This is Ben and Jerry—the co-founders of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream. We wrote you earlier this week and we’re writing one more time today to ask for your help to stop another disastrous, unnecessary Middle East war.

Right now we have an amazing opportunity to defend the Obama administration’s historic diplomatic deal to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons.

Read more