UPDATE: Heh – could this be Popcorn Time?  Seems like Hagel is claiming that he didn’t make the decision.  So, who did?

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Poor Chuckie – first he willingly, as the token bipartisan Republican, became Obama’s patsie to oversee the downsizing of the Department of Defense in compliance with Obama’s policy of Determined Weakness.  After all, the Left hates the idea that America is the lone superpower and blames much of the world’s ills on the US and its ability to project power.  So once again, as Obama continues to make our allies distrust us and our enemies laugh at us, we see that our military is less able to respond – to the point that if our interests are threatened (and Ron Paul should not fear, Obama is ensuring that we WILL have no offshore interests at all – until they start to come here), we will be unable to say “enough”.  Hagel is overseeing the process by which our forces will be as hollowed out as Western Europeans (which, I dryly note, that Obama is telling them they must up their military spending just as he is ramping ours downward.

And now, Chuckie is being made a patsie again in that the White House is saying, contra to what has been said before, that Hagel made the decision to release the Taliban Five:

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel – not President Obama – executed the administration’s final call to proceed with the prisoner exchange of five ranking Taliban detainees for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, administration officials told Congress today in a classified briefing today.

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It seems that the narrative of how Common Core came to be is now going off the rails.  Instead of the story that had it that it was a push outside of formal government processes, we now see that billionaire and tech mogul Bill Gates decided that money well placed at the right legislative times and to those at the right levers of powers basically hoodwinked people into thinking that this was an organic process.  Just the fact that it effectively came about out of nowhere should have had BS antennas whipping back almost fast enough to have liftoff that local control of education was to be superseded by a national agenda.  Now the smoking gun:

The pair of education advocates had a big idea, a new approach to transform every public-school classroom in America. By early 2008, many of the nation’s top politicians and education leaders had lined up in support.But that wasn’t enough. The duo needed money — tens of millions of dollars, at least — and they needed a champion who could overcome the politics that had thwarted every previous attempt to institute national standards.

So they turned to the richest man in the world.

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“Consistency breeds Trust yields Votes” – I have been saying that for months now, trying to impress upon the Establishment Republicans (aka, the “Republican Republicans for the sake of the Party” – RRFTSOTP) that simply running campaigns for the sake of winning is insufficient.  Rather, winning is merely a necessary pre-cursor – it is what happens afterwards that is important.  But many have not listened – they say the words but then do otherwise.  As frequent GraniteGrok readers know, my prime Object Lesson was Frank Guinta.  As in “you promised us in the TEA Party that cutting spending was your #1 priority and promise – but then failed to vote down the Continuing Resolutions that increased spending”.  That lack of Consistency of deed to spoken word caused enough of us to vote down his second run – and Carol Shea-Porter reclaimed the seat.  Sometimes a message has to be sent (and thankfully, her votes were overridden by a Republican majority).

Eric Cantor got blindsided in his primary tonite and many have mentioned Amnesty being the reason.  Well, yes, but not just that.  Is Amnesty for illegal aliens a Republican platform issue?  Not on your life – unless you are a US Chamber of Commerce Republican (like Cantor was – listening Kelly Ayotte??).  But what did Cantor in was in violating “Consistency breeds Trust yields Votes” – he failed that first fundamental virtue.  Like the NH GOP, he burned his brand amongst his voters – and like the NH GOP, didn’t know it until the counting was over (for him, now, for the NH GOP, 2012).  Why?  A lack of Consistency:

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I’ve been waiting a while to ask this.   Is Dan Innis a Faculty Lounge Democrat Plant sent to use a Republican wave election to ensure the left holds CD-1 in New Hampshire?

He was a registered Democrat.

He did give 500.00 dollars to Jackie Cilley,  she being the more extremist left wing Democrat in the 2012 primary race for governor.  And yes, that was on WMUR yesterday, and Pindell noted that Innis donated to Cilley a month before she even officially announced.  That means he donated to encourage her to run.   He encouraged an extreme left-wing, pro tax and spend, Progressive liberal Democrat to be the fiscal and political boss of the state of New Hampshire.

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You remember that VA Accountability Bill that flew through the US House with bi-partisan support?  It died in the US Senate, at the hands of Senator Bernie Sanders, Democrat Independent – VT.   Sanders chairs the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee.  The bill, a whopping 351 words long (words, not pages) would have made it possible to hold VA mangers accountable.  Sanders Killed it.

The legislation had already sailed through the House with bipartisan support. The American Legion and other vet groups backed it.

Sanders objected that he hadn’t read it. Rubio offered to wait while he did. Rubio could have held his breath. The bill is only 351 words long.

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I speak often about Weatherbell Analytics and Joe Bastardi’sSaturday Summary.  It’s a great place to learn about the weather and why you can expect certain things from your climate when you see patterns develop that are predictable and have nothing to do with CO2….sorry lefties.

Joe shows us the data, lots of data, charts, graphs, tells us what it means, and shows us the historical records and relates those to the events that happened then–which is how he is able to tell us what will probably happen now, when we see the same things repeating themselves.

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