Unlike Zandra Rice Hawkins, I don’t get paid by a group like Minnesota based ProgressNow (with big progressive ATM’s in Colorado and Nevada) to be a political activist.  Zandra is also and or has been paid to be a lobbyist, creator of victims of violence (she is anti-self defense), and as an all purpose 24/7 axe grinder for the progressive agenda, which is why ProgressNow funds and supports Granite State Progress in New Hampshire.

I’m just a taxpayer happy to even have a regular job (no raises since Obama was elected though, thank you Zandra), family, wife, kids, dog, yard, and so on.  I quite often miss or overlook things of a political nature that might be worthy of my attention.   I’m not sure this is worthy but it creates an opportunity to explore the topic of faux-outrage from the professional left.

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Some 40,000 longshoreman, the ILWU, have just quit the AFL-CIO.  They are pissed off and think the leadership screwed them by bowing to politIcal pressure to support the Patient Affordable Care legislation and everything that went with it, including the taxing of benefits.

So they are taking their toys and “going home.”  ILWU will run its own union pressure campaigns and intimidate people into supporting what they wanT, single payer healthcare.

That’s right.  The ILWU is mad because the members of this large untaxed union will have to pay taxes on benefits and they wont get socialist insurance inc.

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Common Core : Opposition is gaining steam, as more of us learn what it’s about and see the ugliness it brings to the American system of education; but more attention and action is required, before it’s too late…

It’s pretty well established that the quality of our kids’ education has degraded over the past few decades, in spite of the massive amount of money we throw at it.  Whether it be the cultural dominance of celebrity and sport over academics, general moral decay, lack of choice and competition, lack of teacher accountability, and/or the increased influence of unions, our schools are not what they used to be.

Yet, in classic and expected fashion, liberals constantly screech that we need to “spend more” on education (I guess Obama’s $93B stimulus wasn’t enough for them).

But while The Left gnash their teeth about low spending and The Right gnash their teeth about unions and high spending, top-down, intrusive, Federally-masterminded Common Core quietly gains ground, entrenching itself, with the goal of a complete takeover of education in America.

WARNING: The rest of this article will make your head explode…

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Some ice watchers who are committeed to observing and reporting the environmental affects of “climate change” on arctic ice ran into a bit of a problem.

Severe weather conditions hindered our early progress and now ice chokes the passage ahead.

Our ice router Victor has been very clear in what lies ahead. He writes, “Just to give you the danger of ice situation at the eastern Arctic, Eef Willems of “Tooluka” (NED) pulled out of the game and returning to Greenland. At many Eastern places of NWP locals have not seen this type ice conditions. Residents of Resolute say 20 years have not seen anything like. It’s, ice, ice and more ice. Larsen, Peel, Bellot, Regent and Barrow Strait are all choked. That is the only route to East. Already West Lancaster received -2C temperature expecting -7C on Tuesday with the snow.”

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The unions are deep pocketed advocates of the Democrat party.  The Democrat party likes to think of itself as the hip party of science and technology.  In reality, they are trapped in a post-progressive world-view that has been circling the drain for years.  That reality has not, however, ecouraged them to stop being either progressive, or stupid, or dragging us all down with them

Take the Union catalyzed “strike” of fast food workers in the People’s Republic of California (where weeds grows properly in the well prepared soil.)  The union worked with activists in the fast food industry to coordinate a walk out as a demonstration of their power.  That’s what a walk-out is.  You show your boss who the boss is.

Right.

All the unions and the mushy-skulled entry level workers at McDonald’s did was facilitate their own obsolescence.

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Discouraging is the word that immediately came to mind – do these Know-Nothings actually know what is in the US Constitution?  Or has pop culture, a skin-deep only knowledge of civics, and our failing educational system (and its corresponding curriculum turn away from teaching our history to the next generations) finally given us nincompoops?  Did the movement started by the SDS, whose members then went underground into our educational system, finally win the Cold War?  And have traditional American values and footings been scoured away?

Watching this, how can one think otherwise?

My only question: condoms, syringes, Internet, cars, jobs – all these (and I would hazard to guess, even more) things should be provided to these walking vacuum jars for free.  I only wish that a follow on question had been asked:

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Every enlistee into our Armed Services swears to this oath:

I, (NAME), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.

Every officer swears a similar oath, but with a significant difference:

I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.

The Constitution defense comes first for the enlistee – and the President’s & officers orders come second for the enlisted ranks.  But carefully reread the officers’ oath – there is NO explicit requirement to obey the President’s command (although it is implicit within our civilian control of the military philosophy via Article II, Section 2, Clause I of the Constitution).

The issue –  Obama has said:

1. Over and over again, he has dismissed the idea that he needs Congress (“If Congress does not act, I will…”)
2. I have the authority to commit the United States to war in Syria
3. Let the Congress and vote and decide this issue
4. If the Congress decides “No!”, I will still order military action in Syria

Are we about to see if, like many elected officials that say the words but do not Honor Their Oaths, if our military will be the focus of Obama’s latest attack on the words and the spirit of the Constitution?  What will the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the General Officer Corp, the senior and junior officers, and the SNCOs and NCOs do when put, BY OBAMA’S ACTION ON SYRIA, on the question of “What will I do?”

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Yeah, just a random thought.

Oh, I’m quite sure that this iteration of Burning Man got planned – you don’t have 68,000 people in one area, even in the desert, and have it look this orderly.  One also has to keep in mind that these folks, um, don’t always follow the same drummers the rest of us do: artsy types of folks, anarchists, folks that just like to DO things that others, well, would be scared to do.  Counter-culture is a decent catch-all phrase but never having been there myself, I bet it doesn’t capture the gestalt of it.

But it shows that perhaps the over, over emphasis by the Smart People thinking that they must control everything and plan everything because we ordinary schlubs just can’t get it right.  We need their beneficence in living our lives (hmm, see a pattern from me lately?  Maybe I’d fit in there…).  Perhaps some zoning could be useful, but all I see from my vantage point in NH is that these folks never seem to ask themselves a most important question: “When is enough, enough?  Why do you think that you folks are the Smart People that should be practicing, not zoning and basic code regulation, but actively doing social engineering for the rest of us?”

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The short answer is yes, it looks like an OFA Campaigner did register to vote, and then voted in the 2012 general election from the home of a Sr Assistant New Hampshire AG.  Some context?  Happy to provide it.

We recently introduced you to Melissa Shohet.  Melissa went to High School in Hawaii, has been interning for a Democrat US Senator from Hawaii in 2013, Mazie Hirono, in DC.   She also worked on Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s campaign in Virginia this year, and will likely be heading back to College at McGill University in Canada where she attends.  I dn’t think she has graduated yet.

There is at least one other McGill Student or former student who worked for OFA in NH (follow the Link above for more on him) but other than that thin link to a college in Canada, Melissa is not tied in any way to NH, nor ever would appear to have a reson to stay in NH, which makes her temporary domicile situation a bit dicier given recent declarations by the NH AG’s office about out of state voters and…domicile at Martha’s Motel in Portsmouth.

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The US has its terrorism threat levels with which we are all familiar; other governments have other ways of putting it:

The English are feeling the pinch in relation to recent events in Syria and have therefore raised their security level from “Miffed” to “Peeved.” Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet again to “Irritated” or even “A Bit Cross.” The English have not been “A Bit Cross” since the blitz in 1940 when tea supplies nearly ran out. Terrorists have been re-categorized from “Tiresome” to “A Bloody Nuisance.” The last time the British issued a “Bloody Nuisance” warning level was in 1588, when threatened by the Spanish Armada.

The Scots have raised their threat level from “Pissed Off” to “Let’s get the  Bastards.” They don’t have any other levels. This is the reason they have been used on the front line of the British army for the last 300 years.

The French government announced yesterday that it has raised its terror alert level from “Run” to “Hide.” The only two higher levels in France are “Collaborate” and “Surrender.” The rise was precipitated by a recent fire that destroyed France ‘s white flag factory, effectively paralyzing the country’s military capability.

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Don Boudreax, Professor of economics and blogger at Cafe Hayek flips a standard question on its head and pulls it inside-out sideways:

Last night and this morning your news anchors introduced your report on D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray’s ambivalence toward the pending “living-wage” bill with this question: “Will the District force large retailers to pay their workers more?”

A more illuminating introduction would be “Will the District force low-skilled workers to demand wages that make many of these workers unprofitable to employ?”

The SEIU is the union that is principly behind the Fast Food Strikes held all over the country yesterday and the impetus behind the question.  Frankly, while the leadership there is pretty much all in the tank for Obama and would more at home in a Communist regime (“Workers Unite!  Death to the 1% (or at least force them to downsize to a single bedroom condo)), they are not stupid.  There is no way that those strikers are going to get $15 / hour.  The short term goal is, with the confirmation of Obama’s newest Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez, is to begin to shape the battlefield for “wage reform” and “work rules” – here is his “supportive fire“:

 Perez said job creation is a focus and that he views the Labor Department as “the quarterback in the workforce system,” bringing together workers, businesses and labor unions to build a “demand-driven” workforce that has the skills needed to meet employer needs.

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