So in the previous posts, I have been explaining the first parts of what NH’s RSA 91-A, the Right To Know Law,  covers – definitions, who or what it can be “pointed” to, and what kind of meetings it covers. However, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy and I’m going to switch things up a bit given a tip I received last night. I do have to give the tipster a call a bit later on this morning (it’s only 8:30 am as I write this and I know the tipster is a night owl) and provide more of an update but it’s a great example to interwine with this series.

Thus, this is what I sent to the Franklin School District (SAU 18) this morning to the School Board members (emphasis mine):

—— Original Message ——
From: “Skip” <Skip@granitegrok.com>
To: tdow@gm.sau18.org; dcarrier@gm.sau18.org; dbrown@gm.sau18.org; ecote@gm.sau18.org; lcass@gm.sau18.org; ccormier@gm.sau18.org; cmartin@gm.sau18.org; pdoucette@gm.sau18.org; maube@gm.sau18.org
Sent: 12/27/2022 8:53:40 AM
Subject: RSA 91A Right To Know demand – the SAU 18 Library Card Catalog

Good morning,

Please find attached to this email my Right To Know concerning the District’s card catalog for its libraries. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact me

I have reproduced this RSA 91A demand below.

Thank you for your lawful response.

-Skip

Skip Murphy
Founder, co-owner
GraniteGrok.com | Skip@GraniteGrok.com
Dominating the political Bandwidth in New Hampshire

So note what I did:

I sent it, NOT to the Superintendent (a public employee) but to the governing body of the District.  In terms of an RSA 91-A dement, the School Board members are the Public Body referenced in RSA 91-A:1-a Definitions:

VI. ” Public body ” means any of the following:…
(d) Any legislative body, governing body, board, commission, committee, agency, or authority of any county, town, municipal corporation, school district, school administrative unit, chartered public school, or other political subdivision, or any committee, subcommittee, or subordinate body thereof, or advisory committee thereto.

After all, the School Board, when you reference other State Statutes, are in charge of EVERYTHING in a School District. Unfortunately, many having not bothered to read such statutes themselves, they get led into the “lull” that they are only responsible for setting budgets and policies and then they simply hand everything off to the “professionals” – in this case, the Superintendent”. Make no mistake, however, THEY are the responsible ones, like it or not and part of this process that I do is to ensure that they know it over the time that it takes to get them to Follow The Law.

I also emailed it to them. One does not have to formally send in a written hardcopy nor does it have to be notarized.  Emails are perfectly fine and acceptable form of communication. Now, there will be some Districts that demand that you use a “form email” on one of their website pages. I don’t care for it at all but they make it impossible to know what the School Board members’ email addresses are so you’re stuck in that regard (yet another tactic that School Boards use to not have to interact with the hoi polloi, I guess. It also generally means that the “email” will go to an employee first for “screening”.

I’ve had that done in the past and then find out that one or more of the School Board members who, once again, are supposed to be in charge. In that case, is it “School Board Members In Name Only” as “he who controls the communications controls the entity”?

Here is the Right To Know attached to the email. Although I have yet to go over the relevant parts of RSA 91-A, I have bolded the parts of my demand that directly tie back to the language of RSA 91-A as I prefer to not allow much, if any, “wiggle room”.  I’ll talk about THAT bit in subsequent posts. However, it all goes back to what you should have learned in elementary school when writing a story: Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How.

Oh, by the way? They can ask but the Public Body is not entitled to know the “Why” of the demand – and I’m not telling them now. Not yet if I do at all.

Pursuant to the Right to Know Law (RSA. 91-A:4 (I) ), I am demanding access, within 5 business days, to the below enumerated governmental records. Otherwise, if this cannot be fulfilled within that mandated window per RSA 91-A, please advise when the Responsive Records will be made available.

This request is for the Franklin/SAU 18 School District library “card catalog”. This is for any and all books located in the following:

• District-wide “main” library
• Each school within the District’s “main” library
• If a school has multiple “main” libraries (such as Brockton High, Brockton, MA)
• All classrooms with cataloged books that are tracked by the District.

The information for each Responsive Record shall include:

• Name of the book
• Name of the Author(s)
• Content Summary
• ISBN identification (or other such designated ID)
• Name of the School
• If a School has multiple libraries, a designation of which library is being referenced (in the case of Brockton High, the five libraries: Red, Azure/Blue, Green, Yellow, and the Science libraries)
• Name/designation of the Classroom within a School

Per RSA 91-A:4 IV(c) If you deny any portion of this request, please cite the specific exemption used to justify the denial to make each record, or part thereof, unavailable for inspection along with a brief explanation of how the exemption applies to the information withheld.

As you are aware, in 2016, the New Hampshire Supreme Court ruled that a governmental body in possession of records is required to produce them in electronic media using standard common file formats: Green v. SAU #55, 168 N.H. 796, 801 (2016). Unless there is some reason that it is not reasonably practical to produce such, explain why it is not practical to comply.

Please also note, per RSA 91-A:4 III, III-a, and III-b, you are required to maintain the safety and accessibility of such responsive records. This also includes such responsive records (e.g., emails) which may have been deleted from respective Inboxes but are still available on the applicable email server or in your / email host backup system(s).

Please let me know when these records will be sent to me for inspection. You may email the responsive records to me at Skip@GraniteGrok.com. If the volume turns out to be substantial, I have already set up a Dropbox folder to use in uploading those responsive records.

Thank you for your lawful attention to this matter.

Sincerely,

Skip Murphy
GraniteGrok.com

So now you have a complete RTK for review and I’ll use it when discussing more of RSA 91-A.

And yes, the “5 business day clock” has already started ticking…

The post A Tutorial: How to Create a Right To Know to Hold Your Government Accountable – A Quick Practicum and Example appeared first on Granite Grok.

Coleman Hughs writes an excellent piece at The Free Press that addresses the matter of color blindness. Not the medical condition but the social, cultural, and political one.

Coleman’s topic is an upcoming SCOTUS decision on “race-based affirmative action in college admissions” and whether universities should be able to “see race,” which then evolves into the debate about the history of colorblind politics and culture and the current climate.

Not seeing race is the surest way, these days, to signal that you aren’t on the right side of this divide. Indeed, the term “color-blind” has become anathema to rightthink, and if you live in elite institutions—universities, corporate America, the mainstream media—the quickest way to demonstrate that you just don’t get it is to say, “I don’t see color” or “I was taught to treat everyone the same.”

Once considered a progressive attitude, color-blindness is now seen as backwards—a cheap surrender in the face of racism, at best; or a cover for deeply held racist beliefs, at worst.

The modern self-proclaimed anti-racists have made it clear that you can’t be white and innocent of racism. Past crimes are your crimes. Colorblindness as an idea is painted as a construct of right-wing think tanks.

Kimberlé Crenshaw has criticized the “color-blind view of civil rights” that she alleges “developed in the neoconservative ‘think tanks’ during the seventies.” George Lipsitz, a Black Studies professor at UC Santa Barbara, writes in Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness across the Disciplines, which he co-edited with Crenshaw, that color-blindness is part of a “long-standing historical whiteness protection program” associated with “indigenous dispossession, colonial conquest, slavery, segregation, and immigrant exclusion.”

He then explores the truth (read it all here),

Among the main goals of the Civil Rights Movement was the elimination of laws and policies that used the category of race in any way. In fact, that was the first demand made by the original March On Washington movement of the 1940s (which successfully pressured Franklin Roosevelt to integrate the defense industry). It was also the first argument made by the NAACP in their Brown vs. Board appellate brief. To paint color-blindness as a reactionary or racist idea—rather than a key goal of the Civil Rights Movement—requires ignoring the historical record.

But isn’t that the case with everything? The Left is constantly at war with history because it has a way of reminding us that what they advocate for is not in the best interests of the people, just the people in power.

This is no different, except that advocates use the sins of one form of slavery to entrap the descendants of slaves (and many who were not) in another. They are no different than the African kings or tribes who capture blacks to sell into slavery – human lives bartered for material wealth. Something is still practiced on the continent that these “scholars” and authors are doing right now with their book tours and lecture circuits. Selling out black Americans with the promise of equality if they advocate for an oppressive form of government where there can be none.

Colorblindness is the answer. It must therefore be their enemy because equality is not their endgame.

The post Colorblindness Is the Answer. It Must Therefore Be Their Enemy appeared first on Granite Grok.

Most people are familiar with the famous line from a newspaper editorial written more than 100 years ago. “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” is found in the published response to a letter sent by eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon.

She was having doubts about the existence of Santa Claus and penned a letter to the editor of The Sun, a prominent newspaper of the day. She wanted some assurance that Santa was real, and wrote, “Papa said if you see it in the Sun, it’s so.”

This timeless story is mainly about the spirit of Christmas and the resourcefulness of an inquisitive young girl. But the advice of Virginia’s father, the words that prompted her to write her letter, also offer some insight into how the public perceived the news media in those days. When he told her, “If you see it in the Sun, it’s so,” it revealed just how much trust he had in the press.

There were no national polls 100 years ago, but there’s no reason to believe that Americans distrusted the press back then. Like that father, most Americans likely believed everything reported in the papers. Newspapers, the only source of current events, were certainly more trusted than they are today.

According to an October Gallup poll, trust in mass media is now at a record low. The poll shows that between 1972 and 2022, those who had a great deal or fair amount of trust in mass media dropped from 68 to 34 percent.

And there’s a political slant to the poll. It tells us that Democrats who had a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media dropped from 74 to 70 percent during that period, while Republican trust dropped from 68 to 14 percent during the same time frame.

That comes as no surprise. Liberal bias in the media today overwhelmingly favors Democrats. Most of what is written in mainstream media supports the Democrat position.

Those in the media may dispute that, but the numbers don’t lie. Over recent years, those journalists who identify as Democrat vastly outnumber the ones who call themselves Republican.

And there’s tangible evidence suggesting that mainstream media regularly puts liberal causes before objective reporting.

Just before the 2020 presidential election, the New York Post broke the deeply troubling story suggesting that then-presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, were involved in some unethical, perhaps illegal dealings with America’s adversaries. The Post had acquired a copy of the hard drive from Hunter’s laptop computer and used its contents to support the story. It was a credible scandal that would have caused irreparable damage to the Biden campaign. In fact, it was later revealed that one in six Biden voters would have changed their vote if only they had known about the scandal.

But they simply didn’t know about it because the mainstream and social media suppressed the story for months, labeling it “Russian disinformation.”

Here’s another example.

Those attuned to the immigration crisis on our southern border have been mystified by the lack of widespread outrage. How could a U.S. President, the man most responsible for the security of our country, simply ignore our immigration laws, and submit to a veritable invasion by millions of unidentified foreign citizens?

A recent poll by the Harvard Center for American Political Studies/Harris indicates that 64 percent of Americans agree that the number of illegal border crossings has increased during the Biden Administration, but more than half of the respondents believe the number of illegal crossings to be less than 500 thousand per year. The actual number is estimated at more than two million each year.

There can only be one reason why so many see the border crisis as nothing more than a “challenge” left by the previous administration, rather than the humanitarian catastrophe and national security threat that it is. They are oblivious to the truth because the Democrats and the mainstream media don’t want them to see the truth.

Our news media once had a noble purpose. It’s the reason freedom of the press is guaranteed in the First Amendment to our Constitution. They were intended to act as sentinels – guardians of our liberty. They’re supposed to expose government corruption – not to act as tools of propaganda for either political party.

Virginia O’Hanlon, her father, and the Sun are long gone. Today’s news media are no longer the guardians of liberty they were intended to be. Instead, they’ve become tools of the Democrat Party and purveyors of ignorance.

The post How the Mainstream Media Dispenses Ignorance for the Democrat Party appeared first on Granite Grok.

As Europe fights to keep warm this winter, going so far as to burn coal to keep the lights on, the reached from reality EU bureaucrats approved a new carbon tax on the old energy (heating and motor fuels), part of which will fund conversions to the new energy that isn’t working.

EU legislators agreed early on Sunday (18 December) to introduce a carbon price on buildings and road transport fuels, with a new €87-billion social climate fund established in parallel to cushion the impact on households and help them invest in green solutions.

The new carbon price will apply to petrol, diesel and heating fuels such as natural gas whose climate warming emissions have continued to rise over the years despite attempts to decarbonise.

By “decarbonise,” they mean offshore the carbon to places like China, where all the “green” stuff will be manufactured using dirty coal, oil, and whatever else you need to burn to make modern living possible. And China will be doing just that. Advancing technology, infrastructure, and its military using the currency of “western” democracies committed to backward-engineering your lifestyle.

There are (of course) exceptions.

Agriculture and fisheries won’t have to pay the extra carbon cost because they are “sensitive” sectors, Liese admitted. Trains running on diesel are also out of the scope of the system and won’t see their carbon emissions taxed as a result.

The new scheme will entail higher prices at the pump: up to 10.5 cents for a litre of petrol and 12 cents for diesel, according to a study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research.

Heating fuels like gas, heating oil and coal will see their prices increase as well, to the detriment of poorer EU member states, which rely more heavily on dirty fossil heaters.

This is how you will be made to pay for an energy transition that doesn’t work, isn’t green, and that you do not want.

What’s next? A new tax on bread, cereals, and meats to fund your transition to bugs and leaves? With exceptions. No one responsible for running the government will be expected to live that way. And yes, you’d expect protests. And yes, the new carbon tax has been framed the same way.

Do you remember the yellow vest protests? They began in France when it proposed a gasoline tax. For months, citizens protested and started fires until France backed off to end the unrest. I’ve no clue if the tax reappeared, but the problem did not go unrecognized with regard to the new EU tax.

Last year, the chairman of the European Parliament warned lawmakers the tax could trigger political protests, Euractiv reported, noting that lawmakers have since advanced an €87 billion “Social Climate Fund” in a bid to help Europeans finance their personal shift away from fossil fuels.

The catchphrase is in that quote. To help finance. I’m not familiar with the EU’s finances, but it’s a great big, mostly unaccountable room full of progressives coming up with ways to spend other people’s money. Their thinking is no different than any other room full of lefties. Spend first, find funding later.

The Transporation Climate Initiative’s heyday, short as it was, got enthusiasts primed for its potential to plug budget holes. Sure, they’d spend a few bucks on the green dream of lowering transportation emissions. Offshore emissions to second and third-world countries with atrocious human rights records in exchange for the mining of rare earth metals needed to play this game of make-believe. But some or most of it will eventually disappear down the budget rabbit hole through the laundromat and back out the other side – always finding a way into their campaign contributions.

Net-Zero is pilfering pockets for political power, not any other sort. And while Europeans have accepted a widening range of tyrannies raising the price of gas is a sore spot. Perhaps that is why they post-dated the abuse to 2027. Everyone will have been distracted by a laundry list of the next big thing and forgotten about the laundromat the EU promised to build in 2022.

The post You Will Be Made to Pay for an Energy Transition That Doesn’t Work, Isn’t Green, and That You Do Not Want. appeared first on Granite Grok.

There is reality, and then there is the created perception. There is what we can see and hear, and there is the fog and the gaslighting that most people see through the lens of the mainstream media. The Right sees Kamala Harris as a major disappointment as Vice President and has failed at every task she has been assigned. As we close out year two of the Biden-Harris White House, the media is portraying the first Black, Southeast Asian, and Female Vice President as misunderstood, misrepresented, and performing ably in her role as second in command for the United States of America. Are we witnessing the start of the media’s effort to elevate Kamala Harris to the top spot in 2024? God help us if that is true.

It is typical for the media to produce softball-filled interviews of the President and Vice President as we close out the year. That is if the team in the White House is Democrat. The msm feels it is their role to make the American people feel good about who is in charge as we turn the page on a new year. This task is challenging as they put a wrap on 2022 because the country is not in a good place because of the failures of the current team in the White House. And so the spin begins.

Kamala Harris sat down with three Left-leaning media outlets this month; the Washington Post, Vanity Fair, and NPR. They all did their best to make the Vice President a victim of misinformation from the Right and someone who has cracked many glass ceilings and is a more than capable second in command to President Joe Biden. Their efforts show an incredible use of smoke and mirrors.

Washington Post opinion piece, editorial board member and MSNBC host Jonathan Capehart said that Harris has “ably fulfilled” her role alongside President Biden, with a record that shows she is better than her portrayal in the media. Capehart went on to list the successes of the VP’s many overseas trips and how she showed strength as a woman in light of the overturning of Roe v. Wade. He also cited the misconception that the many departures of Harris’ staff were a reflection of her competence.

Vanity Fair, a long-time mouthpiece for the Democrats, published a piece by far-Left writer Molly Jong-Fast titled “Kamala Harris, A Very Turbulent Year in America, and the Challenge of Being First.” Jong-Fast portrayed Harris as a victim, saying, “perhaps it’s a function of the world we all inhabit, but the female vice president is way friendlier and more accommodating than a man in her position would ever be.” I am unsure what accommodating has to do with conveying someone’s level of competence or lack thereof.

Much of the piece discussed abortion rights and women in leadership. But the article also touched on immigration, which Jong-Fast described as a “favorite cudgel” by Republicans against the Biden administration. The author apparently shares the Administration’s view that the Right exaggerates the disastrous crisis at our Southern Border.

And finally, there is the NPR White House correspondent Asma Khalid’s piece. The publicly funded network should be neutral but fails miserably and is always Left-leaning. This piece lacked any semblance of hard-hitting journalism, as evidenced by this softball effort: “By definition, this feels like a tough job. I mean, you are someone’s No. 2 by definition. Do you feel like you found your own lane? And I’m curious what the toughest aspect for you has been these last couple of years?” Khalid asked Harris during the interview.

This White House is in a precarious position as the country looks toward 2024. Biden’s numbers continue to show disfavor by the American voters, and his continued slide mentally makes a second run for office improbable. The Biden team and msm continue to say he is mentally and physically fit for the job, but his actions and missteps paint quite a different picture. The Democrats have to devise a Plan B, and abandoning Harris would prove how disastrous this duo has been for the country. Convincing America that Kamala Harris is able and ready to step up and become the first Black, Southeast Asian, and female President is their only plan.

And so, the gaslighting begins. Trying to take a woman who is unlikeable and incompetent and convince America that she is the person to lead us in the future should be an impossible task. These three pieces may be the preface of more to come, and if so, we are witnessing the start of our first media-choreographed Presidential election. That is if you do not count Barack Obama.

The post Stop Kamala Now, Before the Media Elects Her President appeared first on Granite Grok.