HB1279 – “AN ACT relative to voting rights of certain budget committee members”

From the text of the bill (actually, this is pretty much most of it):  1 Budget Committee Membership. Amend RSA 32:15, I(b) to read as follows:

(b) One member of the governing body of the municipality and, if the municipality is a town, one member of the school board of each school district wholly within the town and one [member] commissioner of each village district wholly within the town, all of whom shall be appointed by their respective boards to serve for a term of one year and until their successors are qualified. Each such member shall serve as a non-voting member and may be represented by an alternate member designated by the respective board, who shall, when sitting, have the same authority as the regular member.

While I was in Concord this week, I ran into ‘Grok, friend NH State Rep. Mark Warden, who is one of the sponsors of the bill and asked him “why the changes for SB2 Budget Committee?” since I have been an elected BudComm member in my hamlet for the past 6 years.  Note: never again will I do an interview in a stairwell – apologies for the poor audio – but that was the only place we could find with decent lighting and a lack of foot traffic):

I also had the chance last night to quickly interview fellow BudComm member, Kevin Leandro, as he had given testimony to Mark Warden’s House Committee:

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ID at The Dump

Your Vote Counts...even when someone else steals it
...even when someone else steals it

Not long ago Merrimack went to annual renewal of our dump decal.  You display it on your windshield so they know you are a resident.  It costs nothing to get the decal,   but according to the guy handing them out, the amount of savings more than covers the cost of doing this every year.   Quite a bit more.  He says that asking people to present an ID once a year to get a new sticker, saves the municipality a lot of money.

Not only was there fraud at a place where not too many people were thinking about it (at the town transfer station) but there was enough of it to make annual renewals an important disincentive against it.

Of course the cost of operating the transfer station is just one part of the town budget.

So how much could it cost a town if just anyone can walk into a polling place, get a ballot without any ID at all, and vote for or against issues, Warrants, and candidates that will affect local spending and inevitably the tax burden required to fund that spending?  More?  Millions more?

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US Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) – I keep appreciating how she is actually voting and talking.

As we have said before (and told her personally), Senator Kelly has been a pleasantly surprising voice and vote in the US Senate as she has been voting more conservatively than what we first believed she would.  I think this quick interview she did with Fox News shows how important the debt ceiling, the indebtedness this nation has descended to, is to her:

I don’t think that there is a sane person in NH or the rest of the country that would disagree with her.  Progressives that worship at the feet of Obama and hang on every syllable uttered from TOTUS?  They continue to believe in the magical money tree, financial pixie dust, and Hope (which, as any project manager will tell you, is never a solid plan for success).

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One man’s take on Obama’s SOTU speech (and not a good take either – we are in trouble)

I was still working on the video from Concord, so I did not live blog Obama.  However, I kept noticing the inconsistencies in what he was saying.  Sure, he talks a nice game, and if you are only partially listening, it sounded good.  If you are not politically aware, you might have thought the same.  However, I kept exclaiming to TMEW, over and over, “he just said said the opposite a moment ago”, “wait, he just said WHAT?”, or “Huh?  That makes no sense whatsover based on what he said 10 minutes ago!”.

Thus, when I found this guy, Clark Judge, over at Hugh Hewitt’s blog (reformatted it here), I just had to repost it to show how Obama (or his speech writers) has no clue what happens when you really do think about those inconsistencies:

It sounded like such a soft, even conservative speech.

But let me get this straight:

  1. banks will be punished (do I understand this right, by a committee headed by Eric Holder?) if their lending is too risky,
  2. and they will be required (by the same committee) to give more home loans (meaning, it must be, to people who would otherwise not qualify for the loans, or else the government would not have to be involved) at lower rates (which means rates that do not compensate them as much as the market says they need to be compensated for the risks they are taking, all of which sounds like a new edition of the policies that brought on the financial collapse),
  3. which must mean that they will have to pull back on risky lending someplace other than homes,
  4. the only place that most banks would be able to pull back on riskier customers would be loans to small and new businesses,
  5. but these are the businesses that have created just about all the jobs over the last 20 years and he said early in the speech he wants to encourage them,

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Warren Buffett’s Secretary Might Be a One Percenter

Has the sweet milk of Obama’s class warfare rhetoric taken another sour turn?  I’m talking about Warren Buffett’s secretary.  How could a woman who is only paid $60,000.00 per year (according to her boss) be able to afford two homes while somehow amassing enough annual wealth to put her in a tax bracket that doesn’t even exist for the top1%?

Is Warren Buffett's Secretary a One Percenter?
Is Warren Buffett's Secretary a One Percenter?

That’s the question posed in an editorial in yesterday’s Investors Business Daily: Is Buffett’s Secretary a One Percenter?

An ABC News report, for example, says she “pays a tax rate of 35.8%,” in contrast to Buffett’s 17.4%  The very top federal income tax bracket is 35%, not 35.8%, and that doesn’t kick in until a taxpayer has adjusted gross income above $379,150.

Does that mean Bosanek is among the 0.4% of taxpayers whose income hits the top federal bracket? You know, the “1%” Obama and his pals always rail about?

Good question.

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Gay Weddings Debated. Why?

There’s nothing wrong with being gay. I have plenty of friends who are going to hell. —Stephen Colbert

HB 1264, sponsored by Representatives Jerry Bergevin of Manchester and Frank Sapareto of Derry met with a firestorm of opposition from the Gay Community along with religious and civil rights groups mouthpieces. The Union Leader intriguingly, made this a gay/straight issue through the context of their reporting, despite nothing in the bill making any direct (or even indirect) reference to any group respectively.

 

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Taxpayers On The ‘Rack’

Elective Surgery on the taxpayer dime? I have a question for progressives.  If a fetus is just a lump of tissue, isn’t abortion just another form of plastic surgery?

You can’t even find a Democrat willing to admit the procedure is not elective.  It’s woman’s choice, yes?

And if you’ve ever gotten an unwanted earful from some feminis, going on  about what pregnancy can do to a woman’s body,  appearance is a consideration.  That makes it cosmetic, yes?

So if  abortion is the elective, cosmetic, removal of unwanted tissue, and not the termination of a human life, why doesn’t the liberal super-state demand the wholesale taxpayer funding of liposuction, nose jobs, and breast implants?

Sorry, trick question.  If you are a public school teacher in Buffalo New York, boob jobs are already covered by taxpayer dollars.

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Sylvia Larsen – Zipper head

Not much left when it comes to tobacco taxes...I suppose you’ll want some context for that headline.  Back in December (12/9/2011) I explained why New Hampshire should continue lowering tobacco taxes.  I suggested we adopt some kind of schedule by which we would sunset tobacco taxes over the next decade based of the long term decline in sales.  Why, after all, would you risk the states ability to invest in anything, including the left’s rhetorical “neediest residents in their most desperate hours (or something),” using an unreliable source of revenue in decline?

OK, what I actually said was

“Only a progressive zipper-head would rely on more revenue from something they want to get rid of.  Increasing the tax on a declining market will only accelerate the unreliability of the revenue stream.  That  creates the opportunity for bigger budget holes that must then be filled on the fly.”

As if by magic, Sylvia Larsen, Democrat super-minoirty leader of the New Hampshire State Senate, in the face of declining unit sales, as fewer people smoke, after a decades long trend indicating that tobacco purchases will likely continue to decrease in the future, thinks we should increase our reliance on cigarette taxes in New Hampshire.

Zipper head. (doofus, goofball, goober, dunderhead, maroon, doh!) see note#2 below

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Are you in the Bubble? The Elite one, that is….

Certainly, those at Davos are the world Elite, globe-trotting to Switzerland to talk about the ills of the world and what they can do about it (or transform it) without truly understanding the root cause of the problem.  And if you want to know what I believe an Elite to be, well, here you go.  So, are you an Elite?  Is your life experience set you up to be one (regardless of your actual socioeconomic standing)?  I bumped into this post:

What the heck am I talking about?  I’m talking about my score on the 20-question “How Thick Is Your Bubble?” quiz.  (Try it: it only takes about 60 seconds.)

Still puzzled?  The quiz is connected with the appearance of Charles Murray’s new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, which will be published next Tuesday.  The book lays out Murray’s thesis that much of America’s upper middle class and upper class—a “cognitive elite”—exist in a bubble from the rest of the middle and working class.  A long excerpt appeared over the weekend in the Wall Street Journal:

For most of our nation’s history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world—for whites, anyway. . .  Americans love to see themselves this way. But there’s a problem: It’s not true anymore, and it has been progressively less true since the 1960s. . .

Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America’s core cultural institutions.

Take the quiz; my results after the jump.

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National School Choice Week – Support HB 1607, SB 372 & Our NH Legislators

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Smart Girl Politics Action

National School Choice Week – Support HB 1607, SB 372 & Our NH Legislators

Concord, NH – January 22-28, 2012 is National School Choice Week during which families and organizations across the country focus on improving access for all students to schools that best meet their educational needs, not just those located within their own municipal boundary.

At Smart Girl Politics, we believe we can:

“absolutely provide every child in this nation a world-class education, which will achieve far better results than our current system. But we need fresh, creative and innovation solutions designed and implemented at the state and local level. We do not need the Federal Government mandating a one-size-fits-all curriculum. We do not need more money, we have more than enough to do a far better job than we are doing. The answer is to empower teachers, families and communities to develop and implement creative and innovative education choices and solutions for the new century.”

And in New Hampshire, we are fortunate to have state legislators who believe and support these ideas. House Bill 1607, and its Senate companion, SB 372, will be introduced on January 23rd into the House Ways and Means, and January 24th into the Senate Education committees, respectively. Both would provide a tax credit for businesses that donate to educational scholarship funds and

“Allow maximum freedom to parents and independent schools to respond to and, without governmental control, provide for the educational needs of children.”

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Notable Quote – Dr. Thomas L. Krannawiter

In the Progressive view, the ends of government cannot be limited to protecting natural rights, because nature supplies no rights, and positive rights created by government change over time. Thus limited government is replaced with government of unlimited power and scope, what some political scientists call the administrative state. Rejecting natural justice, the liberal mind … Read more

Is It Time To End The Injustice of Out Of State Tuition in NH?

Students voting - but do they really live here?New Hampshire’s white tower liberals and their advocates in state government have been adamant about their policy on College students voting in the Granite State.  While we have called this voter fraud, the Democrats insist that if you go to school here, then you should be able to vote here.

But are these “New Hampshire voters” getting screwed over by these same liberal establishment types?  Are the same people who insist students  should be able to claim residency for the purposes of voting for Democrat candidates, denying these students the same status when it comes to the cost of their education?

Using UNH as an example, the average New Hampshire voter who applied to attend the State school from someplace outside New Hampshire, shall not be denied their “right” to affect our elections, but must still pay 110% more per year in tuition than a New Hampshire “voter” who is defined by the university as domiciled inside the state for billing purposes.  And the progressives think voter ID disenfranchises the poor?

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Guess who is leading the media parade? Yeah, he lives in that White House…

I am just going to keep saying this, and saying this, and saying this while the Presidential campaign is ongoing: Will the Press be willing to do that investigative homework?  Or, will this still hold true: After all, at the Washington Press Corp Dinner where Obama let this loose: “Most of you all covered me… … Read more

Why Has The Granite State Fair Tax Coalition Changed Its Name?

GSFTC has a new name- Granite State Prioroites- I mean Pick PocketsExposing the Granite State Fair Tax Coalition (GSFTC) as just another left wing front group for Christian Socialism and the Democrat party tax and spend agenda was easy. (Here, here, here, here, here, maybe here,  here as well, and don’t forget here.)

But will it be any easier to unmask their newest facade?  That’s right, the GSFTC is dead but not gone.  It has been replaced by the exact same organization, all the same Liberal/Progressive players, but with a shiny new name.  GSFTC is now Granite State Priorities (GSP).

How do I summarize this transition in a nut shell?  Same old whore, new dress.

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Notable Quote – Gov. Mitch Daniels

“The President’s grand experiment in trickle-down government has held back rather than sped economic recovery. He seems to sincerely believe we can build a middle class out of government jobs paid for with borrowed dollars. In fact, it works the other way: a government as big and bossy as this one is maintained on the … Read more

OK, here is my definition of what an “Elite” is

I love these meaningless labels you people employ to scare people. “Elite” why not “effete” why not “European minded”? Does an “elite” have lots of money, or is an “elite” just overeducated? Can you be a capitalist and an “elite” or are they mutually exclusive? Do you have to have travelled abroad to be an “elite” or can you be house bound and be elite as well? Please, go ahead and define an elite for me. Is Warren Buffet an “elite”? The Koch brothers support the NYC Ballet and Opera. That sounds pretty elite to me. Are they the “elite”?

-jklml

I normally just let these things stay in the comment area, but I’ve decided to break my informal guideline.  The above is the comment left on my post here pontificating that the Davos Elitist founder wants to scrap capitalism.  He demanded I give him a definition, so I have:

For the most part, we use “Elite” in two different ways.  When talking about people that just exude excellence in what they do (e.g., Navy Seals, top rated artists, pundits like Krauthammer and Steyn), they are at the elite levels of what they do.

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Again,Elites are trying to get rid of Capitalism – but we can see it is not an economics system problem but a problem of morality

Every year, the Elites of the political, economic, and cultural worlds gather in Davos, Switzerland to talk about global ‘stuff’ – what’s trending, what’s wrong, and their global ways of fixing them what they believe is wrong – for the betterment of us all.  Hate to keep sounding like a broken record but even with the caveat that I will never be as successful as they have been, sometimes things to have to be pointed out.  Here’s what Davos founder Klaus Schwab said:

“We have a general morality gap, we are over-leveraged, we have neglected to invest in the future, we have undermined social coherence, and we are in danger of completely losing the confidence of future generations,” said Klaus Schwab, host and founder of the annual World Economic Forum.

“Solving problems in the context of outdated and crumbling models will only dig us deeper into the hole.

“We are in an era of profound change that urgently requires new ways of thinking instead of more business-as-usual,” the 73-year-old said, adding that “capitalism in its current form, has no place in the world around us.”

I am oft criticized by those that don’t like that I keep things black and white; I rather think that I’m bringing things down to basic principles.  In this case, it’s necessary.

Let’s pull it apart (and who’s this “we” bit, kimosabe?):

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