As I posted here, it is clear that Scott Brown, rather than supporting more Conservative issues supported more Progressive ones:

sided with a Democratic majority on 22 percent of votes in his first year, ranking him seventh among all senators.  The next year, he voted with Democrats 46 percent of the time, trailing only Sen. Susan Collins of Maine. In 2012, he rose to the top of the list, siding with a Democratic majority close to 62 percent of the time

Which should give rise to the question: if I am voting for a Republican, am I getting a Republican?  If someone has an “R” after their name, are they a “good” Republican (which NH House Minority Gene Chandler holds to) simply because of that “R” designation? 

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Over at The Blaze is an interview they did with Col. Allen West (retired, former US Congressman) about his latest book “Guardian of the Republic: An American Ronin’s Journey to Faith, Family and Freedom.”.  This was a rather interesting question (emphasis mine in the answer):

We talk a lot about the growth of the state and the power it might usurp and abuse in the most extreme scenarios. Could you ever envision a time where the military or forces under control that are extra-military would ever turn its guns on U.S. citizens?

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The Daily Caller had what I consider to be a bit of a downer of a post.  You see, we at the ‘Grok don’t charge at all for the same thing – not even for travel expenses (emphasis mine, reformatted):

Breitbart News recently charged a Texas tea party group at least $7,000 to promote and cover the group’s rally, according to a tea party organizer involved in the planning.  On March 15, the group called Patriots Rally for Freedom held a rally in Martindale, Texas. In the lead-up to the event, organizers asked Breitbart News — which recently announced a “Texas bureau” — to cover the gathering.  But according to Ken Crow, the tea party activist and founder of TeaPartyCommunity.com who made the call to Breitbart, the site would only cover the event if the tea party group paid for it. Crow revealed the arrangement in an interview with ex-Breitbart News reporter Lee Stranahan, who posted the audio to Twitter Wednesday. Stranahan was recently fired by Breitbart.

“The big item that I really wanted was some promotion leading up to the event,” Crow told Stranahan this week.  Crow said that Dan Fleuette, the person he spoke with at Breitbart News, insisted that the media organization would need $11,000 to come and cover the event. In an interview with The Daily Caller’s Mirror blog Wednesday night, Crow said Fleuette eventually acquiesced to $7,000 plus travel expenses. But upon hearing the price, the women organizing the rally flipped out. “The girls are screaming, ‘WE DON’T HAVE SEVEN THOUSAND DOLLARS!’” Crow recalled.

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Funny, I don’t remember Scott Brown saying this at our meeting:  “I was the most bipartisan senator in the United States Senate.” (Scott Brown on Tuesday, March 18th, 2014 in a meeting with Republicans in Portsmouth, N.H.).  Remember these numbers: 22%, 46%, 62%.

Shaheen votes 99% with the Democrats, Brown votes 62% of the time with Democrats.  And he boasts about it?  Shades of “Monkey Business” (in another way) – he dared the Press / us to catch him?  Shaheen may be co-joined with Obama at the hips, waist, and shoulders but 62% would be more than just a shoulder bump from where I stand.  Hey Andy Leach – Did you know about this?  That Scott is openly creating his own oppo research and giving it out?

And you were worried about me videoing last Wednesday….how’s this going to play with the Conservatives in the Republican Party – unless your game plan was to write them out of consideration?  Scary proposition in an off-year primary when it is the Conservatives generally outvote the Independents and moderates.

Be careful of what you boast – somebody will take you up on it and they did!  From Politico (emphasis mine, reformatted

…”I was the most bipartisan senator in the United States Senate,” Brown said, according to a report published in The Portsmouth Herald. “I voted 50-50. So I worked with everybody. And here’s the problem, I was the most bipartisan senator.”

Well, I would certainly agree with that – that IS a problem.  Helping the opposition to 

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Inspired by Pete Da Tech Guy Ingemi, we here at Da Grok, bring you the NH Republican Senate primary Poison poll.

Why?

Because people who vote Republican, see also ‘Da Base,’ have shown a consistent willingness to stay home or to vote for someone other than the Republican, when the candidate they have been provided can’t be trusted to vote based on platform principles.  This, in turn, affects down ticket races, giving Democrats an opportunity to run the ship of state back into the rocks at every level of government.

The fact is….”Not being the Democrat,” it’s not enough.   The way a candidate votes matters.  Every vote matters.  So start thinking about that as we consider which of the GOP candidates currently vying to challenge Jeanne “Obama is so Dreamy” Shaheen is most likely to keep the base at home on election night 2014.

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Betsy’s Page is run by a charter school teacher and in the years I’ve been reading her (an “aggregator” sorta like an extended version of Instapundit, or Weekend Pundit‘s “Thoughts on a Sunday”).  Here is a part of today’s “page” that speaks to that the Freedom to Achieve also means the Responsibility to Work Harder / Longer:

A teacher at Success Academy in Harlem reports a question that tugs at the heartstrings from one of his students.

One seventh grader asked me, ‘Why are so many people mad at us if we are doing so well?’

Indeed.

These children work incredibly hard, and they’re proud of their success. No one, especially without knowledge of their situation or home life or personal effort, has the right to undermine their remarkable achievements.

There’s an excellent reason why Success Academy scholars do extraordinarily well on the state exams: We believe they can. We believe all children can succeed, no matter their socioeconomic circumstances.

Our critics do not share that belief.

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 “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Mediaite:

[Jeffrey] Toobin responded that the court seems to be saying that “we give freedom of speech to people that engage in hateful speech, and so we have to give freedom of speech to people who want to give to political campaigns.” On the other hand, he noted, the dissenting justices basically said “that is all a bunch of nonsense” and that “speech is not money.” But they were defeated by a 5-to-4 margin.

The Bill of Rights was not a vehicle by which Government “gives” us Rights at all

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In the brand new category of “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up With A High Speed Computer,” the former police thug and now select thug in Atkinson, Phil Consentino, complains:

“I wish they’d leave me the Hell alone,” Consentino said.

That is a quote by the loser of so many suits against the Town of Atkinson it is hardly worth mentioning any longer, except that Atkinson pays – NOT the Thug.  What is worth mentioning is the Consentino Circle of Power that enables this abuser of female employees in the Town Hall to exist.

Chief among the enablers is what serves as the local Atkinson , NH paper, the Lawrence Eagle Tribune, which does puff piece after puff piece supporting this creep.

They let this thug complain about the very public release of an eight page sexual harassment complaint to the NH Human Rights Commission which resulted in a $100,000.00 (Not $50,000) out of court settlement the Town paid to an employee Consentino was after.

The Lawrence Eagle Tribune has a copy of that complaint with all the details and they will not even ask the basic questions one would normally associate with a real newspaper.

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Democrats hate it when people not employed by the state have firearms.  New Hampshire Democrats are no different.  Every policy decision on guns leads toward the accumulation of force in the hands of bureaucrats and lawmakers at the expense of regular citizens.  (See also: peasants.)  So you’d think that a story about a state Senator, an elected official by-passing the very same enhanced background check system on which Progressives everywhere wish to model their own incremental advance toward a force monopoly,  would be ample fuel for that particular ideological fire?

Where is the outrage, the press releases, the sound-bites from progressives policy wonks, politicians, and talking heads?  Why hasn’t CNN or MSNBC given the story of a gun-running elected official even a sliver of a fraction of the attention paid to a few bright orange road-cones on bridge in New Jersey?

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This past Wednesday nite, fellow Grokster Mike and his lovely bride Mar-Mar opened up their home and brought in their friends and family to meet Scott Brown (if you haven’t heard, he may or may not run for US Senator from NH but at least is in the exploratory phase – much to the relief of NH GOP Chair Jennifer Horn and all of the NH GOP Committees to which he’s been sending money).  Now I was rather surprised when Mike said he had done so but his stated goal was to hear all of the candidates (or possible ones) and to give his friends and neighbors an opportunity to hear what they had to say.  By the time Scott had arrived, well, it was clear that there was a mix of folks at Mike’s; certainly there were those I see all the time but there was also more than a few folks I had never met ending up with a full house.

It was clear that even though we had never met, he knew who I was and his demeanor changed  – I guess that Andy Leach (former Sununu aide-de-camp, former NH GOP Exec. Dir (who remembers that I did not take “no” for an answer and finally got him in a ‘Grok micro-interview), Kelly Ayotte aide-de-camp, and now working for Scott Brown). I am imagining that he “advised” Scott as he immediately wagged his finger in my face and made it clear that there was to be NO video recording.  Sure, I did make the anti-argument, that I do this kind of activity so that those that cannot be there in person would be able to hear his message: unadulterated, unedited (except for time – attention spans and all) and that if ANYTHING got abstracted out, the ENTIRE video gets posted (I was doing that before Project Veritas was doing that) so that the complete context would be seen and heard.

No dice.  It was clear that he is not happy with bloggers – even as Mike and Mar-Mar were standing there with their GraniteGrok shirts on.  Sure,

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Democrat promises are not much different from everyone elses lies.  Yes, ObamaCare is the biggest example, and there is Benghazi, among others.  But I’m more interested in this whole income (in)equality thing.

Remember the Lilly Ledbetter act?  Carol Shea-Porter and Jeanne Shaheen promoted this legislation as the solution to workplace wage equality.  The DCCC even included it in their annual Ruin Thanksgiving Talking points in 2010.  Lilly Ledbetter “restored” the rights of women and other workers to challenge unfair pay and to close the so-called wage gap.  They already had that right but doesn’t it sound so much better with some liberal angst and drivel poured over the top?

In a January 22nd, 2009 Press release Senator Shaheen wrote.

The Act ensures that all Americans are paid the same wage regardless of their age, gender, race or ethnicity.

That was five years ago and every year since then, Shaheen has celebrated the anniversary of ‘ensuring that all Americans are paid the same wage‘ by taking credit for it while observing that there is still more work to be done.

But if you fixed it you wouldn’t have to bring it back up.  If you didn’t fix it, what did that legislation actually “ensure” and who really benefited from it?

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The spin to make 7 million so-called sign ups appear like a major embrace of ObamaCare is, as with all things Democrat, deceptive.  We don’t really know the true numbers.  We also do not know how many people have a policy or if they have made a single payment.  Then there’s the eggs they had to break to make their omelette.

ObamaCare has kicked at least 6 million people off the plan they liked and were told they could keep.  It created an immediate need for at least 6 million people.  So yes, most of those 7 millions “new enrollees” come from the forcibly uninsured.  People driven into the government monopoly by the mandate itself.

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Tom Steyer must be ecstatic.  He can now donate the max limit to every Democrat from here to his Environmental Nirvana and it’s not illegal.  But then so can everyone else.  That would be because SCOTUS just struck down the aggregate limit on total donations by an individual to all candidates on free speech grounds.

It is a modern reality.  You need to spend money in 21st century America to reach enough people to have your voice heard.

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