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New Hampshire

Why you need to be ready to move to New Hampshire….

"The concept of ‘welfare’ has become an open, bottomless vessel into which every desire can be poured."

Is America a “welfare state”? No. It’s a “special interest state.”And James DeLong at the American Enterprise Institute has explained why in THIS ARTICLE. What it boils down to is that the permanent political class has gained permanent power in America, governing on behalf of ubiquitous and multifarious special interests, which increasingly exist solely to loot the public treasury. Worse yet, special interests have no regard to the long-term damages and ultimate destruction that their appetites engender. In short, the iron triangle of the permanent political class, the special interests, and the dependent voters who keep them in office will eventually destroy us. That’s because…

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So much Deception So Little Time

Skip is clearly on to something here.  Following his lead on the absence of an actual ofanh.com web site (even though all the local office email is tied to the fictitious ofanh.com)  I went on a digital  scavenger hunt.

Our neighbors to the south don’t have an ofama.com but they do have an ofama.org.  It hasn’t been updated since the year before HealthCare reform was forced into law.  But it does have a link to massforchange.org.  That leads to a Japanese site whose English translation makes it appear to be designed to help female sex workers find jobs.  (I guess that’s close enough.)

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Where Has The Other Senator Ayotte Gone?

Obama’s war on coal is netting some unusual suspects as supporters.  New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte, who indicates that she has a history of preventing outside meddling with policy of this nature, voted against a resolution that would have overturned the EPA’s utility MACT rule.

From her Web Site

Continuing New Hampshire’s tradition of protecting the state’s environment through commonsense policies, U.S. Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) announced today that she voted against a Senate measure that would weaken national Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) for power plants aimed at reducing emissions of toxic air pollutants such as mercury, arsenic and metals.

There are a lot of things that are bad for us, and even if you agree that the DC should do something, there are other factors to consider–unless you happen to be a stooge for the Democrat party and the Green movement in which case adding to the bureaucracy is always job number one.

This rule will add costs and threaten the coal industry, which just happens to be at the top of President Obama kill list.  It will probably result in job cuts to that sector, increase energy costs for everyone, and add more hoops and administrative costs, all borne by rate payers, in the midst of a stagnant economy, and for what?

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New Hampshire says No – HB 1701

This is one of those laws, just signed by the Governor, that makes me proud to live in New Hampshire.  It’s HB 1701. An Act prohibiting New Hampshire from entering into or enforcing reciprocal agreements with other states to deny rights and privileges  for non-payment of taxes  owed to another state. Excerpt: Under no circumstances … Read more

Andrew Manuse on WMUR

Andrew is the Executive Secretary of the RLCNH, the Republican Liberty Caucus of New Hampshire, and he sat down for a few minutes with WMUR’s James Pindell to talk about not running for office again, and the current state of the Republican Party in New Hampshire.  

How Will You Support Liberty and Freedom In New Hampshire?

The New Hampshire Republican State Committee is looking for new donors willing to set up recurring monthly donations of  $12.00/month anywhere from 2 to 12 months.  It’s called the Grassroots giver program and you can check it out here.   Or… If you feel like you would like to support Republicans in New Hampshire but you … Read more

When Progress Now Speaks – No One Should Listen

Zandra Rice Crispy-Treats Hawkins (ZRCTH) was on WGIR AM 610’s Political Roundtable the other morning with Andrew Manuse, Andrew in Studio, Zandra by phone–a strategic move that allowed her to suck up all of Andrew’s time because Andrew (in my opinion) was too polite to just talk over her.  And Suck she did. But she is trained to suck.  As the Progress Now sock puppet in New Hampshire she follows their plan to use whatever language is necessary to dupe the people in New Hampshire into embracing the Liberal/statist tax and spend agenda.

ProgressNow State Partners serve as non-stop, multi-issue advocacy organizations. Year-round, we promote progressive ideas and causes with creative earned media strategies, targeted email campaigns, and cutting-edge new media.

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Political campaigns are relatively short-lived; they come and they go, leaving little behind of lasting value. ProgressNow’s presence in our states never ends.

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ProgressNow State Partners excel in this area. Each ProgressNow State Partner organization has full-time staff who are experts in media communications, online campaigns, earned media and new media.

Put simply, ProgressNow (funded by progressive millionaires with more money than the Koch brothers) supports the state partners (like ZRCTH) and trains them to be experts in left wing propaganda tactics across all forms of media, with an emphasis on using local issues to advance national Democrat statist party goals.

So how did that work out?

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Balloons and The Law That Almost Was

Balloon Bill HB 62 didn't pass but if it had...A special Interest story recently reported that a Balloon intentionally released in Michigan had landed in Bedford New Hampshire.  If we ignore the warm and fuzzy Bedford Boy Scout Troop members (who found the balloon) meet Michigan Girl Scout Troop (that released it), and jump in our way-back machine to New Hampshire circa 2007/2008, had HB 62 become law, someone in Michigan would owe the State of New Hampshire a $250.00 fine for littering.

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The NH Democrat’s Dishonesty About Tobacco

On 6-6-12 I provided an update on the state of tobacco tax revenue in New Hampshire.  Buried in that post were some observations about how hypocritical and dishonest Democrats in the Granite state are about tobacco and their obsession with taxing it.  A hypocrisy they themselves may not even grasp.  So I wanted to excerpt that portion separately with a few minor edits.  Here it is.

Democrats complained publicly and often about lower tobacco revenue after the tax was first lowered.  But isn’t that the point of the tax?  To lower consumption and therefore revenue?  To end a practice many in government, and more so in the nanny wing, argue adds to the long term cost borne by the public?  Is that not the goal?  To make smoking history?

And we know that raising the tax reduces consumption, and lowers traffic into New Hampshire to buy tobacco (and anything else) because we’ve seen it happen.  So less tobacco revenue always had to be the goal for Democrats if they are being even remotely honest about it.   This means that at some point New Hampshire was going to have to look someplace else for that revenue–or  were NH Democrats planning on increasing the tax per pack on the last smoker to $30 million (or whatever it is) to make up for everyone else who had quit at their urging?

Do you see how stupid that logic is?

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Do Seat Belt Laws Make A Difference?

Do Seat Belt Laws make a difference?Not much appeals to me this morning so I took thirty minutes to do an unscientific survey of NHTSA state motor vehicle fatality data for the northeast.  (Wow, Steve–that sounds exciting.)  I wanted to see if Seat Belt Laws had any measured affect on deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT).

First off, I wear a seat belt, and would not drive without it, but I have never advocated for any state law mandating it nor would I.  And after sifting through the data for ten Northeastern (ish) states I doubt I ever will.

For purposes of the review I looked at Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware.  I wanted ten regional states with a mix of rural urban conditions and similar weather–ie, some snow, and that had seat belt laws.  (All but New Hampshire if I am not mistaken.)  I then looked at the last five years for which we have data (2006-2010) and averaged total fatalities per million VMT.  The results?  Seat belt laws don’t matter all that much.  People will use restraints or not regardless of laws–New Hampshire, for example, has no law but still manages a decent voluntary participation rate.

So what about the numbers?

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As a Public Service We Present…The Republican Repair Kit

In New Hampshire it is time to announce your plans to run for public office this November.  We’d like to encourage every good Conservative and Libertarian with the time and inclination to consider running for the New Hampshire House, Senate, or any elected office.

Now you may say to yourself, you know what, we’ll probably have a bunch of Republicans running, and there are plenty running for re-election…I’m not sure there’s room for me?  Well the Grok is here to help you work that out.  We want you to look at who is running for election, and re-election, and ask yourself if they could use a Republican Repair kit (available on the jump).

If the answer is yes, you should run for office.  And then you should contact us so we can interview you and post it here.  Don’t wait too long to decide.  Your state needs you.  We still have a lot of work left to do.

Note: They wont all need the Repair kit….but a few of them probably do…and we all know who they are.

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“Oh Crap” Sayeth the NH Left, Tobacco Revenue Over Projection….Again.

Do we look too young to be...smoking? NH Tobacco revenu up againNothing makes me smile like watching another left wing New Hampshire Democrat  narrative go up in smoke.  Which narrative, you ask, there are so many to choose from?   Why, the one about how irresponsible it was to cut the tobacco tax and how it would never stimulate enough other forms of cross border commerce to make up the difference.  A notion that is not just backwards, it runs counter to the entire concept of the New Hampshire advantage.

So right out of the gate, the Democrats had no where to run on this issue–not that they didn’t try–and now things are looking bad for their tobacco tax narrative.

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Governor Martin O’Malley Rallies NH Democrats…

Remember when New Hampshire Governor John Lynch slithered off in secret to  Tim Gill’s secret Gay-millionaire-democrat-donor confab known as Political OutGiving?  He wasn’t fundraising, so he said, but ended up with around $100,000.00 in contributions from the attendees (He got the rest of his 2010 campaign cash from Unions and his own bank account).  Well the only other Governor at that same event was Maryland’s Martin O’Malley.

Governor O’Malley probably wasn’t there to “fund-raise” either but given that he was reportedly on the fence about Gay Marriage, and the Gay lobby was pushing hard for a Gay Marriage bill in Maryland, and Governor John Lynch–who was against Gay Marriage before he was bought off by outside money and intimidated by the state party to be for it–the presence of this Democrat couple at the secret Chicago Millionaire Gay donor-confab seemed hardly serendipitous.

Nor does this seem coincidental–the choice of Governor Martin O’Malley to speak to the New Hampshire State Democrat Party convention last Saturday.

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There’s No Justice In It At All

Having laid out the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute as a think-tank puppet for the advancement of taxation and the Democrat parties social and economic justice agenda in New Hampshire, I felt compelled to follow that up with an addendum on the deeper evil that lay beneath the facade of a “well meaning” left wing policy group.

First, the terms Social and Economic justice are redundant.  They are the same thing.  The redistribution of money by the state through tax policy for some random, current notion of social justice is economic justice and vice-cersa.  You can’t have one lie without the other.  And as Jonah Goldberg points out in Tyranny of Clichés,  Social Justice as a concept can result in dangerously misleading nonsense.  On the matter of the injustice of high unemployment (for example) he asks..,

“..who is being unjust?  The employers who cannot afford more workers?  The consumers who refuse to create enough demand to justify more workers?  The government for not taxing innocent parties to pay for labor that isn’t needed and that they did not vote for?  Social Justice assumes rights–social rights, economic rights, etc.–that cannot be enforced.”

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The New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Instutite Doesn’t Like CACR 6 or CACR 13

Why would we give a damn what Jeff McLynch–Executive Director of the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute–thinks about Republican efforts to push CACR 6 and CACR 13?  It’s a great question.

CACR 6  is a constitutional amendment that would require a 3/5 vote of the legislature to pass any new taxes.  CACR 13 would change the state constitution to prohibit a personal income tax.

Jeff McLynch is “concerned, but Jeff McLynch is a Democrat, the former State Policy Director at the Soros/left wing funded Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP)–which pushed for an income tax in the Granite state (see also here), and Jeff is also an avid Obama supporter.

The New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute he runs is the New Hampshire chapter of the State Fiscal Analysis Initiative, which is a state by state project of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP).  CBPP is a left wing group that promotes the Democrat parties social and economic justice agenda through budget based think tanks and policy organizations with support from the cranky Progressives over at the Bookings Institute and deep pocketed left wing foundations like Ford, Rockefeller and George Soros’ Open Society Institute. So Jeff isn’t working too far out of his known circle of “friends.”

So if you have not yet connected the dots, NHFPI looks all smart and sophisticated but it is really just another socialist/Democrat front group, using the cover of  a welfare-state based (we’re the ones who really care) tax-and-spend-budget policy agenda (Social and Economic Justice) to advocate for the progressive creep of bigger government and the higher and broader revenue streams needed to fund it.

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Remembering Democrat Rule Part 2

If New Hampshire Democrats were ever again allowed to run the State legislature we already know the first thing they would do.  They would overestimate revenue to justify spending for the purpose of driving us into a broad based tax.  They did it during a recession, with unemployment skyrocketing, embarking on one of the most massive modern day expansions of New Hampshire state government.  What’s to stop them doing it again under any other condition?  Republicans.  Barring that, nothing.  It’s who they are.

Spending was and always is the Democrats first priority and Governor Lynch’s most recent budget was just another example.  Even without a Democrat legislature he wanted to spend 4.731 billion on General and Education funds, almost 300 million more than the current Republican Budget; a budget 6% less than that of Governor Lynch; a Republican budget that is almost exactly in line with actual revenue.  (That means it spent what they estimated they would take in.)

But left unchecked by Republicans Democrat Governor Lynch would have got his budget and then some, and added another 300 million dollar hole that the taxpayers of New Hampshire would have had to fill because there wasn’t another $300 million plus to spend without raising some more taxes in this lousy economy.

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