Notable Quote – Jim DeMint on government crowding-out

What is happening to our country is enough to frustrate and depress even the most optimistic Americans. Many have simply checked out of the public debate altogether, and who can blame them? “Politics,” supposedly the art of achieving the highest common good for our Republic, has become a bludgeon to replace little platoons and individual … Read more

GrokTALK! March 8th, 2014 – the Videos!

GrokTALK!Steve, once again, has beat me in getting the audio up first (Groksters Steve, Mike, and I yak with NH State Rep. Pam Tucker, Candidate for the NH GOP Nomination for US Senate Karen Testerman, and former NH State Rep Kevin Avard.

Preshow – Pam comes in at 8:30 for her 9:30 slot – a bit early but just another chance to yak and get her laughing.  And then we get serious

Segment 1 – Rand Paul at CPAC – the importance of Liberty. Gov. Rick Perry’s red meat speech and he has shown Conservative principles work.  Progressive HAVE to use Personal Destruction to win & the Media buttresses them. The need for Steve’s Republican Repair Kit.  BradleyCare will transform New Hampshire.  Progressives hate Individuals, only see Oppression instead of the Possibility of Potential.  Government is Force; people are seeing it as “what can you give me”.  Freedom from Govt intrusion vs Freedom of necessity (or work).  Progressives are turning Government to be their own personal mugger.  CT gun owners no longer consenting to their govt – here in NH. Ex Post Facto? Bill of Attainder?

Segment 2 – 

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Paid The $5,000 Didn’t Admit Violation

I thought the Democrat Party would be rejoicing over the NH State Supreme Court decision last week?

Former Speaker Bill O’Brien filed a very easy to understand suit against Democrat Chair, Big Money Buckley, over primary election robo-calls Big Money Buckley starred in back in September of 2010.

The calls were classic Big Money Buckley, smarmy and sophomoric. The guy appears to have had a long, lonely personal life he can only fill with other people’s money for this type of stuff. We see it every election.

The robo-call was meant to make fun of O’Brien because he was on the Democrat and Republican primary ballots, the Dems not being able to find a candidate to oppose their biggest target, which is laughable in itself.

Saul Alinsky would be ashamed of the way Big Money Buckley tried to pull this off.

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Data Point – The welfare cliff

or: How the Government send the message to stay in the hammock instead of finding work Presented with little comment aside to note that when ‘work is punished‘ the demise of ‘opportunity’ will continue… The painful reality in America: for increasingly more it is now more lucrative – in the form of actual disposable income … Read more

WMUR CloseUP – some thoughts

WMURThere’s almost always something just to make a comment about and this week is no different as the first segment had NH State Senator John Reagan, Josiah Bartlett Public Policy Center’s Exec. Dir. Charlie Arlinghouse, and Republican political operative Jim Merrill.  Each had something that evoked a quick comment.

  • Reagan: Morse’s attempt was to extract a maximum of federal dollars to save the NH budget.  That was the plan – gather over $400 M in Federal dollars.
    • Right.  When in trouble, why is it that the Feds are the FIRST resort of refuge?  How about resetting of internal priorities instead of trying to be everything to all people and all issues?
    • Is the NH Budget in that bad a shape that the first thought is that the Federal Government’s “chains attached” actually palatable?
    • Money over independence?  It’s not like the State’s budget is overwhelmingly driven by “outside” money but geez…
    • I agree with Steve – instead of “moneygrubbing it back” into the State, how ’bout keeping it from leaving the in the first place?  When the $17 trillion debt finally accomplishes it “BOOM!”, isn’t it better to be unhooked as much as possible?
  • “We thank them when they’re right!”: Reagan said he changed his vote as he realized that instead of being a boon, this legislation ran counter to his Principles (and the Brits’ National Healthcare System debacles helped his decision as well).  BRAVO, Senator!
  • Arlinghouse- GOP was going to look for a compromise?

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192 Knee-Jerk ,Cell-Phone Banning Nannies

Nanny stateHB1360 (Relative to using certain electronic devices while driving) is HB1117’s cell phone ban twin, and 192 New Hampshire House reps voted in favor of it last week, even though there is no evidence it would make any difference–unless inconveniencing everyone, all the time, was the difference they were hoping to make.

NHTSA – Most crashes involve a relatively unique set of circumstances that make precise calculations of risk for engaging in different behaviors very difficult. Thus, the available research does not provide a definitive answer as to which behavior is riskier.

HB1360 is a confluence of intrusive ideas motivated by the Progressive desire to limit behavior, based–as is typical for knee-jerk liberals–on emotion and not evidence.

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But should it BE that way? Is it too late to change it?

From This Week With George Stephanopolous about Obama’s latest unilateral Unitary President proclamation changing Obamacare saying that if you have a plan you can now keep it for another two years

Sidenote: (to be repeated as often as the MSM brings up old news as well) You know, Bill Clinton’s wonderkid who now masquerades as a non-partisan “journalist”.  You may remember him as the Democrat tool that was the tip of the spear that brought the meme that Republicans want to ban access to contraceptives during the Republican Prez Primary Debates):

A snippet from the panel:

Jonathan Karl: What is means it that voters will not cancellations a month before the mid-terms. That’s the point here. That’s the biggest point.  It is politics, absolutely.  It’s no question.

Ann Navarro: Absolutely

Martha Raddatz (who has the definitive line): Certainly there’s politics in everything.  C’mon, We’re in Washington DC.

Right.  Sure, that may be true in DC but it never seemed to be that way everywhere else.   

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The poor

From Meet the Press with David Gregory was this exchange concerning a slight from a hard Left Democrat and a hard Right Democrat over the poor.  It was clear that the Democrat has a “sniffling” attitude that perpetuates the meme that Conservatives (and Republicans) hate the poor in a backhand slap against the just ended CPAC meeting.  I guess she’s never read “Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism” by then liberal Professor Arthur Brooks from Syracuse University.  A couple of comments from me afterwards (as well as in between).

Ralph Reed: People don’t care what you know until they know that you care (Jack Kemp) and the Republican Party has gotta do with Francis is doing with the Catholic Church. Francis is putting the poor, and care for the poor, and amelioration of the poverty where it belongs which is at the center of the Gospel. If people who are lower middle class are struggling, who are poor, and are wanting to climb that ladder of opportunity but are having a hard time grabbing that first rung? If they don’t think that Conservatives and republicans have a vision for the future that includes them? Their message will be badly damaged.

Rep Karen Reed (D-CA): I do think that if we look at Republican policies, if we look at the budgets over the last couple of years, there really isn’t anything there that says that we’re going to reach out to the middle class. I mean, in fact…

And this is where it starts…

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Emoting vs Accountability

Obamacare -Year of the SnakeThe Conventional Wisdom is that the Left loves to think with their hearts while Conservatives’ hearts are with their thinking.  Emotion vs reasoning.  As I said here, however, it seems that while the Democrats may have a show of caring and start lots of Government or Government reliant programs, they don’t want those self-same programs ever to be evaluated.  Those programs MUST work because, well, we just LOVE them!  We KNOW that they work because we feel good about ourselves from having created them.  Therefore, ANYone that criticized our intent must be a hater of whatever we tried to fix.

Facts, being stubborn things, seem not to matter.  And in this case, Mary Katherine Ham (of Hot Air via Betsy’s Page) takes the Obama Administration and its enablers to task for explicitly deciding not to collect the actual data that would tell folks “is this doing what it was originally meant to do” – get the uninsured covered (emphasis mine):

There is no clearer dereliction of duty for this law. They created an irresponsible reform behemoth, they failed to implement it responsibly, they spent irresponsible amounts of money building a bunch of exchanges that don’t work, and now they’re not even responsible enough to bother checking how much help or damage they’ve done with the most straightforward metric available.

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And Texans keep saying “Keep on acting the way you are, California”!

No room for small business to grow on the Obama PlantationIt is well known that the economy in Texas is going gang-busters compared to most of the country fueled (sorry, couldn’t resist) by new fossil fuel production.  I just had to laugh when TX Gov Perry made it known he had no problem in busting on New York and especially California: “low taxes and low regulations – we LIKE business”.  I have watched as blue state after blue state just makes it harder and harder to do what biz is supposed to do: “We have a right to your profits”.  So the Energy Companies are leaving (emphasis mine):

The recent decision by Occidental Petroleum to move its headquarters to Houston from Los Angeles, where it was founded over a half-century ago, confirms the futility and delusion embodied in California’s ultragreen energy policies. By embracing solar and wind as preferred sources of generating power, the state promotes an ever-widening gap between its declining middle- and working-class populations and a smaller, self-satisfied group of environmental campaigners and their corporate backers.

Talk to people who work in the fossil-fuel industry, and they tell you they feel ostracized and even hated; to be an oil firm in California is like being a pork producer in an ultra-Orthodox section of Jerusalem.

One top industry executive told me that many of his colleagues in California cringe at the prospect of being attacked by politicians and activists as something akin to war criminals. “I wouldn’t subject my kids to that environment,” the Gulf Coast-based oilman suggested.

That last remark: “I wouldn’t subject my kids to that environment”

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BradleyCare – it wasn’t just the NH State Committee’s saying this was horrible politics

House Republican Leader Comments on Senate Passage of SB413

I forgot to put this up in the aftermath of the Rogue Republicans ™ in the NH State Senate of implementing Obamacare’s Medicaid Expansion; from the House Republicans (who must feel that they got their knees cut out from underneath them just like we did, emphasis mine):

CONCORD – House Republican Leader Gene Chandler (R-Bartlett) offered the following statement in reaction to the State Senate vote on SB413, relative to access to health insurance coverage. The bill passed the Senate by a 18-5 vote The bill will likely be heard in the House Finance Committee on Monday.

House Republican Leader Gene Chandler (R-Bartlett)

“House Republicans aren’t convinced this bill is the right solution for New Hampshire. There are a number of Republican members who won’t vote for any program tied to the failed Obamacare law. There are concerns about how the state will be able to pay for this type of entitlement expansion in perpetuity and if that could lead to significant budget problems down the road. This type and scale of program represents the largest increase in spending New Hampshire has seen for some time, and it is dependent on funding from the federal government who can’t seem to keep many promises.”

“If New Hampshire does go down this road,

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GrokTALK! Live Streaming March 8th, 2014

This week our guests are NH House Rep and House Republican Alliance Co-Chair Pamela Tucker. Founder of Cornerstone Policy Research and Candidate for the US Senate – Karen Testerman.  And House Rep, and Candidate for the NH State Senate – Kevin Avard.   Live broadcast by Ustream

Update – NH College Republican Federation Chairman Jake Wagner resignation refusal

Jake Wagner with AxelrodAs I pointed out here, the Chair of the NH College Republicans, Jake Wagner, has been asked to resign for one simple reason:

He’s not in college.

He hasn’t been in college for quite some time but refuses to relinquish that which he should not have.  I guess this self-proclaimed “Radical RINO” (who doesn’t seem to support much of the Platform much)  has fallen for the last half of that old phrase ” go to get something done or be someone” (the latter meaning that they are more enamored with the title and being known by it.  Sad, really, to have only a title solely define one’s self-esteem or self-worth. That’s why I try to steer away from those folks; I’d rather be involved with folks that are trying to get something accomplished.

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Belknap County Convention – last budget meeting

To say that the Belknap County Convention’s budget meetings have been contentious is like calling a hunger crazed tiger a kitty cat.  Yelling, sulking, obstruction, power struggles, Liberals hating the Conservatives who were given the power by the people, Govt employees demanding more from the taxpayers, lawsuits by the Commissioners against the NH State Reps that make up the NH Belknap County Delegation, the minority Democrat Reps suing the Majority Republicans – who SAYS politics can’t be entertaining?

Problem is, I was able to go to very few of the meetings including the final one that a few folks really wanted me to video.  Fortunately, ‘Grok friend Rosemary was there and graciously allowed me to “borrow” the video for posting.  First part here, the rest after the jump:

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NH State Senator Repubs approved Obamacare’s Medicaid Expansion – The Fallout Begins

FIRST!  We applaud those that stood tall and voted against the Morse / Bradley Medicaid  Expansion bill: NH State Senator Andy Sanborn, NH State Senator John Reagan, NH State Senator Sam Cataldo, NH State Senator Sharon Carson, and NH State Senator Russell Prescott.

We’ve been writing for a while that we absolutely believe that if the NH State Senate Republicans were to pass Obamacare’s Medicaid Expansion, the Live Free or Die state will be no more.  No, we aren’t going to be physically absorbed by Massachusetts but our Live Free or Die philosophy will continue to die – that Individual  mattered most, that people were responsible for themselves and not on Government. That will now change due to the fecklessnes of the Rogue Republicans ™ that have abandoned pretty much every Plank in the Republican Platform.  Not limited but MORE government, not less but MORE taxes, not being able to be left alone but MORE intrusiveness, not less but MORE debt for our kids to pay off, and not more but LESS choice.  And we can thank NH State Senator Jeb Bradley, NH State Senator Nancy Stiles, NH State Senator Chuck Morse, and NH State Senator Bob Odell.  And their cohorts NH State Senator Jeannie Forrester, NH State Senator David Boutin, and NH State Senator Jim Rausch for it.  They believe this will enhance Republican chances in November.  Ha!  They were warned.  And now the backlash from the Grassroots has started.  From Jerry Delemus of the Rochester 9/12 who is longer willing to “settle” (emphasis mine):

This is what we get when we vote for the lesser of 2 evils. Evil! It was obvious what the traitors to Republican values were going to do and they did, vote with the Democrats just like the 28 in the House did [in DC  -Skip] on extending the debt ceiling.  Message from Establishment to everyone else and especially to conservatives, “we don’t like you and we don’t care one bit about the Republican party platform.”

So here’s a message to you Establishment, “we will not aide the Republican Establishment and we will leave blank any voting boxes for candidates we do not fully trust, no more lesser of 2 evils“.

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