Is there an ObamaCare Christmas surprise waiting in your Healthcare.gov enrollment stocking?  Rep Mark Meadows is reporting on one over at the Washington Times.

It seems CMS [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] is taking a page from Jonathan Gruber’s book; rather than allowing the “stupid” masses to make a decision on their own health plan, CMS has proposed a new rule that includes an overly reaching provision allowing CMS to re-enroll anyone who has not made the annual trek back to healthcare.gov in a cheaper plan of CMS’ choosing.

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Keene is run by Democrats, you can just tell… (From Boston.com)

KEENE, N.H. (AP) — Officials in a New Hampshire city want the organizers of an annual pumpkin festival to pay $90,000 in costs incurred after violent disturbances broke out this year.

WMUR-TV (http://bit.ly/1vjQbdr ) reports that city officials say additional security and overtime for police, fire and public works drove the total cost of the event to nearly $150,000.

So, drunken Keene State college hooligans wreck Keene and the Pumpkin Festival folks are to blame?

My recommended two-pronged response–if I were in charge of the Keene Pumpkin Festival–would be as follows.

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“In a paper published in the Journal of Quaternary Science, Esper et al. (2014) write that tree-ring chronologies of maximum latewood density (MXD) “are most suitable to reconstruct annually resolved summer temperature variations of the late Holocene.” And working with what they call “the world’s two longest MXD-based climate reconstructions” – those of Melvin et al. (2013) and Esper et al. (2012) – they combined portions of each to produce a new-and-improved summer temperature history for northern Europe that stretches all the way “from 17 BC to the present.” And what did they thereby learn?

As the international team of researchers from the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Greece, Sweden and Switzerland describes it, this history depicts “a long-term cooling trend of -0.30°C per 1,000 years over the Common Era in northern Europe” (see figure below). Most important of all, however, they note that their temperature reconstruction “has centennial-scale variations superimposed on this trend,” which indicate that “conditions during Medieval and Roman times were probably warmer than in the late 20th century,” when the previously-rising post-Little Ice Age mean global air temperature hit a ceiling of sorts above which it has yet to penetrate.”

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Here’s a holiday relevant question for our would-be Democrat masters.  If Renny Cushing’s California-like anti-Campus-sex legislation were to become law in New Hampshire would there be a Mistletoe ‘Rape’ Exclusion?  An executive action of a sort that permits what used to be a harmless kiss on the cheek of a person as they pass under (or near) the Phoradendron leucarpum.

You’d have to consider some sort of exception.  If a spontaneous act of Holiday cheer inspired a yule-induced smooch without the presence of a proper “flight plan” filed with the FAA (overseeing violations of personal air space) or paperwork presented in advance to Homeland (responsible for unauthorized ‘border crossings’), unsuspecting recipients (see also victims) could be inclined to charge them with sexual assault seeing as wing-nut Democrats had empowered them to think and do just that.

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Yesterday Seacoastonline posted a story about Democrats in New Hampshire who insist on pushing more gun control next legislative session. This is despite New Hampshire being the “Safest State in America” as well as being rated the state with the “Best Quality of Life” by the OECD for having the lowest crime rate in the country. These facts don’t matter to the deranged gun control crowd.

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Democrat House Rep Renny Cushing recently made news for proposing California-like sexual consent legislation that would place police (next to the IRS – thank you Obama-Care) in your bedroom.  Fore-play would be expanded to include teams of support staff bearing documents with a commensurate number of notaries to ensure that every aspect of intimate contact has been approved in triplicate prior to the act taking place.

Because that will never actually happen the bill might be more accurately portrayed as an open invitation for lawyers to engage in the post-coital legal-community equivalent of deforestation.  A sort of “his lawyer said, her lawyer said, the universities lawyers said” arrangement designed to divert time and taxpayer dollars into the pockets of the legal cartel which (coincidentally?) prefers to donate to Democrats like Cushing.  So it is wealth redistribution from the parents of special-snowflake and that thing she has accused of sexual assault converting the next several years-worth of tuition payments into donations for Democrat politicians.

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How would you like to take this news…

House Republicans are also likely to try to modify the state’s Medicaid expansion plan, through legislation or the budget process. The plan ends in 2016 if lawmakers don’t reauthorize it. Hassan has said she’ll veto any proposal to end the law, and Democratic House Minority Leader Steve Shurtleff said making the expansion permanent will be his caucus’s top priority.

“I can’t see someone taking away health care from people who really need it,” he said.

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On last night’s WMUR news came a spot on the NH House Rules Committee decision that those that have the ability to conceal carry firearms can now do so again.  Of course, a mix of Republican and Democrat legislators were asked about the results.  The Republicans, to no one’s surprise, were supportive of the decision.  Why not?  MOST (not all – those closer to the Progressive side do not) Republicans TRUST their fellow legislators (and constituents) to be responsible with their firearms even with the heated moments that will occur from time to time.

On the other hand, Democrat Minority Senate Minority Leader Jeff Wooburn shows the Liberal knee-jerk reaction that people must be

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Official House GOP caucus begins setting goals

De jure or de facto – the former does not necessarily mean reality. Be that as it may, it will mean that the Democrat appointed Speaker J’ass’per’s appointed Majority Leader’s caucus has decided what they are going to do “Among the goals”:

• “a balanced budget” – low hanging fruit (very low) as by law, they must.  Not a big deal.  The Big Deal will be in how Priorities will be set within that budget?  Will they be Open and Transparent and TELL us what is important and not, be explicit and name the Priorities from top to bottom, explicitly defining their definition of The Role Of Government, and THEN fund them?  Will the Democrat appointed Speaker have the cojones to do that – list the Priorities in other than Glittering Generalities?
• “reducing the size of government and regulations” – will they explicitly tell us by what measure they will be using to give us their baseline of the current size of Government, or punt and just do it after the fact (“look what we did!!”).  It will also be rather illuminating what is their starting number for “the size of regulations”.   Will the Democrat appointed Speaker have the cojones to do each -measure the size of Government first and enumerate the volume of detailed regulations other than Glittering Generalities?

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