For years I have blogged about internal governance (self-restraint) vs external governance (laws and regulations) and how we are drifting from the former to the latter as a society.  Freedom requires self-restraint and self-imposed responsibility – the hard work of a Free Person.  All we seem to hear is about “I know my Rights!” – seldom do we hear “…and my Responsiblity”.  With the Progressive insistence that Rights are from Government are are “positive” (as opposed to being from Natural Law simply by being human and that “negative Rights” keep Government from intruding on us), we now see the new reality of “It is your responsibility to provide for my Rights” – what a perversion of Freedom and Liberty!  Our second President-  John Adams:

Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

At the same time,Progressive movement has been doing all it can to remove that “character governor” for decades – an absence of morality, of absolute values, that one should keep themselves under control.  They call us in the TEA Party “governmental anarchists” – yet they are pleased as punch in creating a “societal anarchy”. Are we now starting to see the end game? From “Knock-Out” at the individual level to the “Knock-Out” at the top, we are seeing the “do it if it feels good” amorality of the 60s now coming to full fruition: “if I want something, and if I want it now, I WANT IT NOW and I will take it from you or hurt you as long as I feel good about it”.  I can commit violence if it amuses me.  I can take your property with no regrets if I can give it to someone else.  And Laws are just guidelines on a whim.

From my co-New Hampshireite, Mark Steyn’s weekend column at the Orange County Register (emphasis mine, reformatted):

…“No justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous,” wrote Lewis – and, likewise, no law can prevent a thug punching an old lady to the ground if the thug is minded to. “A society’s first line of defense is not the law but customs, traditions, and moral values,” wrote Professor Walter Williams a few years ago.

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Grokster Steve is wondering if the vampire of NH Medicaid Expansion (part of Obamacare) will rise again; in reading it, I went to the SeacoastOnline link:

…”This has nothing to do with problems happening nationally with the ACA marketplace,” Sherman said. “As a physician, I’m concerned for patients and residents of the state.”

No, not the website.  However, if one looks into the actual law itself, this is like complaining that door lock needs some WD-40 when the only way the car is going to work is on the flatbed of a singlepayer Government system – by design.  Once again, much of the “success” (and remember, Progressives are HAPPY to have more and more people attached to the government teat like piglets to the Mama sow) of Obamacare was predicated on the need for the States to all expand their Medicaid roles.

But I also note his last phrase – “and residents of the state.”  Sorry, but when do Democrats ever really show “compassion” towards taxpayers and say”enough is enough; we’ll leave their hard earned money with their families”?  It’s always SO easy to be compassionate when using other peoples’ money, isn’t it?

I wonder if he is like my doctor the last time I saw him; he was all in favor of Obamacare but had a sign at the receptionist’s desk:

We are not accepting any new Medicaid patients at this time

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This has produced a whole set of conservative punditry essentially lecturing Obama on things like, “Obama, don’t you realize that confiscatory taxation does not produce economic growth?” “Oh, Obama, don’t you realize that by blocking oil drilling in America you aren’t going to create jobs?” “Oh, Obama, may we advise you that Assad, the dictator of Syria, or the Mullah’s in Iran are not our friends?” “Obama, you should wake up to the fact that if we slash our own nuclear weapons this will not inspire the Iranians to do the same.”

Obama subscribes to an ideology that aims to reduce America’s influence in the world. He wants to cut America down to size. He doesn’t want America to be number one. He would be perfectly happy if we were number 18 or number 37.

Why does Obama want to reduce America’s footprint in the world? Because he believes we’ve been stepping on the world. This is his ideology. What Obama really wants to do is redistribute power globally. He would like to see many countries on the world stage – Brazil, India, China, Russia, all vying for power. No single superpower calling the shots.

 – Dinesh D’Souza, author, director

I agree with this.

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When I first was an elected Budget Committee, I was aghast at how much money we spent on ” XXXXX Association of YYY” – each department seemed to belong to two or more associations based on the different levels of government (e.g., NH Association of Fire Chiefs, New England Association of Librarians, American Association of Town Clerks, International Association of Police Chiefs).  It wouldn’t be just ONE Association, but if they belonged to one, they belonged to what seemed to be every level of a possible association.  To boot, each department head also seemed to have their Association dues paid for as well.

In toto, it was not a small amount of money.  Near the end of my Vice-Chairmanship term, I started to ask a most important question:

If the town didn’t pay for it, based on the value you keep telling us, you’d pay for this out of your own pocket, right?

I probably asked that over 30 times over a few years (and they were always incensed when I did).  Only once did I get an affirmative answer – it was only worth it to these folks if someone else was paying the freight. Yes, that’s right – “free money” to them.  Another example is our “sidewalk to nowhere” – with a whole lot of decades to have made the decision to have paid for it ourselves if it had been that important, it was never built.  Well, not until $300,000 of YOUR Federal tax monies came to my town.  Once again, the moral is that unless someone else was paying for it, it just wasn’t near the real priority list.  So let me ask the same question of our NH House and Senate elected officials:

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“I don’t believe people should be able to own guns,”—President Barack H. Obama (Then Professor of law in Chicago speaking to John Lott)

In case anyone should still have doubts that our sitting President is a charlatan, one needs only to look to his activities over the past year.

In the aftermath of the Washington D.C. Navy Yard shooting, President Obama turned the memorial service into a political platform for his gun control agenda. He cites the UK and Australia as examples of what America should consider for tighter gun control measures.    

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NY Observer

We received the letter in the mail a couple months ago. The good people at Regence Bluecross Blueshield were pleased to inform us that due to Obamacare our current low-monthly premium, comically-high deductible medical policy would no longer exist come January 1, 2014. Pleased, because a new and better plan would be offered in its place. Old monthly premium: $578 for a family of four (non-smoking, helmet-wearing, and paternally snipped). New premium: $1,123. A 94% increase.

Inalienable rights require no reference to gender, age, religion, race, none of that.    We have long passed the point in our society where invoking these things for any kind of leverage is anything more than the work of Rake’s, Mountebanks, and Charlatans.

Opportunity in modern America also exists for anyone willing to seek it out.  It exists to a degree now that the number one barrier to opportunity is no longer race, gender, age, or religion, it is government meddling.

And “success,” the place opportunity leaves open to all of us, could care less where you came from or what you look like.  You could be any size, shape, color, be from anywhere, and as long as you are willing to seek opportunity and pick yourself back up when you invariably fail (again and again before you find it), success will wait for you.

So if none of that matters is there one common denominator when it comes to success?  Yes there is.

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I am now at the age that I actually would enjoy being in his class – it is a lot of fun to “wind up” this kinds of nutcases (emphasis mine, reformatted):

Noel Ignatiev, a professor at Massachusetts College of Art, has for years advocated the total elimination of Caucasians.  During his final lecture before retirement last Monday, he told his white male students “you don’t deserve to live. You are a cancer, you’re a disease.”:

NOEL IGNATIEV: If you are a white male, you don’t deserve to live. You are a cancer, you’re a disease, white males have never contributed anything positive to the world! They only murder, exploit and oppress non-whites! At least a white woman can have sex with a black man and make a brown baby but what can a white male do? He’s good for nothing. Slavery, genocides against aboriginal peoples and massive land confiscation, the inquisition, the holocaust, white males are all to blame! You maintain your white male privilege only by oppressing, discriminating against and enslaving others!

I don’t even know where to start on this –

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This week on GrokTALK! our guests are…Milwaukee’s number one black Conservative talk show host – Earl hall; The author of ‘Gun Control in the Third Reich‘ and a leading national expert on Second Amendment rights – Stephen Halbrook; and New Hampshire Native, Talk Show host, and political ‘navigator’ – Jeff Chidester.

Listen Here

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Download or listen to the full podcast here

Individual segment players and download links available on the jump

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A letter was sent to a New Hampshire House Reps last week to “encourage” them to vote for Medicaid Expansion.   I made mention of it earlier in the week in a post with some commentary on the letter, from Bill O’Brien, but I wanted to point out one part of it in particular.

“More importantly, vote this down and I’ll make your life a living Hell.”

That is a direct quote from the  letter filled top to bottom with left wing talking points (see also, lies and distortions) on this specific legislation and New Hampshire Medicaid expansion.  It was either written for or provided by someone in Democrat Party leadership to intimidate representatives into voting the way Democrats wanted…or else.

I guess we could call it, “Bringing civility back to Concord, or else !”

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Steve has part of it right:

This is about Reid helping Obama add additional liberal judges to the DC Circuit court, guaranteeing a policy advantage in perpetuity.

Certainly that forms a bulwark that will protect Obama’s legislative agenda – any lower court appeals has to run through it.  The Supreme Court gets a whole lot harder to get to and I believe that will bottle up a lot of suits that could be overturned.  Thus, “fundamentally transforming” the judicial system to skew, not just Liberal but as far Left as possible has become much easier.  How best to continue onward to a post-Constitutional Republic than by having judges making rules that will be making us Constitutionalists’s eyes squirt blood when we compare those rulings against traditional Constitutional values.  For example, what Obama’s pronouncement that the Senate was not in session simply on his say so in terms of NLRB appointments?  And then put his Union buddies on the NLRB and crowded out the opposition – he packed that Administrative entity.

And that is the greater and much more serious problem.

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