In international politics, where nations often grapple with the constant specter of terrorism, Israel has chosen a direct and yet controversial path of targeted killings – as a strategy to combat terrorism. In doing so, it has emerged as a resolute defender of its citizens.

This tenacity that has given rise to such a strategic response has drawn both ire and admiration.

A recent example is the drone strike that killed three Palestinian gunmen who had just opened fire at a checkpoint in the northern West Bank. Now let us picture this scene: the north West Bank, a checkpoint shrouded in tension. Three Palestinian gunmen unleash a hail of bullets, their intent clear – to inflict carnage and sow fear among innocent civilians.

When confronted with the relentless menace of terrorism, hesitation is not a luxury afforded to nations that cherish the lives of their citizens. Unlike indiscriminate bombings or protracted military campaigns, targeted killings are surgical, precise, and calculated. It’s akin to a skilled surgeon removing a malignant tumor, leaving the healthy tissue untouched.

But in the realm of geopolitics, Israel often finds itself accused of wielding a blunt instrument when, in fact, its actions reflect the precision of a scalpel.

Often scrutinized and criticized, these actions find their bedrock in principle as old as humanity itself – self-defense. We say to those who would cast aspersions and question the morality of such activities: put yourselves in Israel’s shoes.

In a region where every sunrise brings the uncertainty of survival, hesitation is not a luxury. Imagine, for a moment, that your home is under perpetual threat, your loved one’s lives hanging in the balance each passing day.

Would you not demand resolute action to protect your family, community, and nation? This, therefore, is the very crucible in which Israel exists.

The arguments favoring targeted killings are not merely theoretical justifications but are rooted in the elemental right to self-defense. When terrorists, undeterred by borders or boundaries, hatch their nefarious schemes, Israel takes action. It is a preemptive strike, a calculated response to thwart impending doom. In the moral ledger, the balance is unequivocal. When confronted with the stark choice of allowing terrorist attacks to unfold or taking decisive action to stop them, Israel chooses life over death.

The words of the great philosopher Aristotle resonate here: “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality that guarantees the others.” Targeted killings, born of necessity, embody this courage, this unwavering commitment to safeguarding innocent lives.

Let us not tiptoe around the undeniable truth: targeted killings are a razor-sharp sword in Israel’s unyielding fight against terrorism.  Consider for a moment the irrefutable evidence before us. When key figures within terrorist organizations are removed, the result is nothing short of remarkable.

 

 

Now, let’s entertain an alternative scenario: a world where targeted killings are shelved in favor of passivity.

Picture Israel sitting idly by, waiting for tragedy to strike before taking action. It is a nightmarish vision where terrorists roam freely, plotting their next assault, knowing that retribution will not come knocking at their door. Thus, targeted killings embody precision and resolve.

Unlike other counter-terrorism strategies, targeted killings do not merely skim the surface; they plunge straight into the heart of terror networks. The consequence of such actions is not just punishment; it is deterrence. It dissuades potential terrorists, forcing them to reconsider their evil intentions.

Targeted killings are the surgical strike, the calculated response that weakens the very infrastructure of terror.

Let’s not beat around the bush or dive into groundless speculation; let’s face the harsh reality that targeted killings have unquestionably saved lives and simultaneously kept the specter of terrorism in check. The proof is right there for everyone to see.

Those convenient critiques seem to materialize with the swiftness of a desert sandstorm. Critics of targeted killings, with their lofty judgments and holier-than-thou proclamations, often conveniently ignore the genuine, very menacing threat that Israel grapples with daily.

Indeed, let us not shy away from the topic of civilian casualties. They exist, and they are undeniably tragic.

But here’s the harsh truth that some are reluctant to acknowledge: when terrorists purposefully use civilians as shields, who bears the true culpability? Is Israel striving to protect its citizens from impending doom, or are those who heartlessly manipulate innocent lives as pawns in their deadly game?

The answer is clear, like a beacon shining through the darkest night.

Yet, a twisted double standard prevails in the echo chambers of international discourse, where self-righteousness often drowns out reason. Israel’s right to defend itself is not just questioned; it is often called into question and scrutinized with an enthusiasm that borders on obsession.

Meanwhile, terrorists, the architects of violence and chaos, are granted sympathy. The real-world dangers that Israel confronts daily, the lurking specter of terrorism that shadows every step its citizens take, often go unnoticed. The weight of responsibility, the relentless burden of safeguarding lives, is borne by Israel alone. Israel’s struggle is not one of choice but of necessity.

Within this crucible of ceaseless turmoil, targeted killings assume the mantle of a reluctant necessity. When the halls of diplomacy echo with empty promises and the specter of terror continues to haunt Israel’s doorstep, what other recourse remains?

What would those who condemn targeted killings propose as an alternative when diplomacy falters, and terror persists? To sit idly by and hope for a change of heart among those who have sworn to destroy?

The effectiveness of targeted killings in the crucible of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a matter of conjecture but a glaring reality. They have disrupted terrorist networks, rendering them ineffective and decimating their leadership. They have thwarted attacks, preventing bloodshed and anguish.

The alternative – a world where terror reigns unchecked and innocent lives are sacrificed on the altar of diplomacy’s failures – is a vision too bleak to contemplate.

The path we have traversed is one marked by fervent conviction – a conviction that, while controversial, targeted killings have proven to be an indomitable strategy for Israel in the ceaseless struggle against terrorism.

The ethical concerns that cast a shadow over this tactic must be weighed against the imperative of self-defense – a moral imperative as old as time. When lives hang in the balance, the luxury of inaction withers away like a fleeting mirage.

In a world where the alternatives are stark – where passivity often results in tragedy, and diplomacy frequently stumbles in the face of violence – targeted killings offer a lifeline of hope. They are not born of cruelty but of necessity.

In the crucible of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, targeted killings have been both a sword and a shield – a means of defending against impending doom and a testament to unwavering commitment. So, let us not forget the world in which Israel lives – a world marred by threats and peril. Targeted killings are not a symbol of malevolence; they are a symbol of unwavering resolve. In a world riddled with violence, that resolve is, and will always be, Israel’s guiding light.

The post Examining the Efficacy and Controversies Surrounding Israel’s Strategic Approach appeared first on Granite Grok.

One common denominator that explains why previously successful societies implode is their descent into fantasies. A collective denial prevents even discussion of existential threats and their solutions.

Something like that is happening in the United States. Eight million illegal immigrants have entered the United States by the deliberate erasure of the southern border.

Apparently, the Biden administration sees some unstated advantage in destroying U.S. immigration law and welcoming in would-be new constituents.

Yet, the more the millions arrive, the more President Joe Biden and his Homeland Security director Alejandro Mayorkas flat out lie that “the border is secure.”

They both live in a world of make-believe, passed off to the American people as reality.

And the more the Americans are lied to that the border is secure, the more they poll —currently 77 percent — that it is not.

Biden apparently has reversed course and begun using the former pejorative “Bidenomics” as a term of pride.

He now praises this three-year effort to borrow $6-7 trillion, and spike interest rates threefold to 7% on home mortgages — even as prices on essentials like food and fuel have spiked 25-30% since he entered office.

The more that Biden brags about what he did to the economy, the more people poll — over 60% — dissatisfaction with his alternate reality of “Bidenomics.”

Do we remember the humiliation in August 2021 in Afghanistan?

The more retired Gen. Mark Milley, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Biden assured that the American military presence was stable, the more swiftly it crumbled and descended into the worst mass flight of an American army since Vietnam.

Consider natural gas and oil. The Biden administration waged war on both by canceling pipelines, drilling on federal lands and entire oil fields.

When the price soared and the 2022 midterms neared, Biden suddenly begged formerly shunned illiberal regimes like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela to pump all the hated oil they could to lower the price.

A desperate Biden drained much of the strategic petroleum reserve — he has yet to refill it — simply to lower the price of gasoline and thus win voters back to the Democratic Party.

When the midterms passed, Biden resumed his attack on once bad, then good, and now bad again fossil fuels — at least until the 2024 election.

Stranger still is the denial of the current crime wave in our major cities. Predators and thugs have turned once iconic downtowns into either war zones or ghost towns or both.

Smash-and-grab swarming of stores and matter-of-fact shoplifting are destroying commerce in our major cities.

Unsustainable stores either leave or shut down. Communities who vote for politicians who defund the police blame the stores for leaving — but not the criminals whose brazen thefts made it impossible to do business in the inner city.

Now modern-day pirates with impunity storm, sink and rob boats of all kinds in the Oakland marina and estuary.

Leftwing journalists and activists, and even Democratic politicians, who all supported defunding the police, now cannot escape the resulting street violence and unleashed murderous predations.

Everyone knows the culprit is the post-George Floyd effort — with Biden administration complicity — to defund the police, end cash bail, institutionalize catch-and-release of criminals and show more sympathy toward victimizers than victims.

Yet neither state nor local officials nor Biden himself even admits to a crime wave. The more the public is attacked and avoids major downtowns, the more it polls furor over the crime wave.

The more our officials, in gaslighting style, claim such alarm is all in our collective heads, the more they themselves are attacked by the very criminals their policies empowered.

Sometimes the fantasies extend to the trivial. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Penn, for months has dressed like an utter slob while on the Senate floor. As a gesture of approval, Democrats junked the dress code so he could wear his sloppy cut-offs and hoodie.

Americans were to assume his slovenly costume was normal apparel — and they were hypercritical for thinking otherwise.

Recently Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-NY, pulled a Senate fire alarm to disrupt and delay a vote on continuing the funding of the government. But he got caught on a Capitol surveillance video committing the crime.

Bowman whined that he got confused. He preposterously claimed by pulling the alarm he thought he was opening a door to go vote.

All of that was pure fantasy. The alarm was clearly marked. A sign in front of the door warned not to enter. And the door itself was placarded with cautions that any attempt to open it would set off emergency alarms.

No matter. Bowman assumed by calling his critics “Nazis” and using the race card, he could invent a virtual reality.

Despite our epidemic of fantasy, there remains reality.

And we will soon rediscover it all too soon.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.

Victor Davis Hanson | Daily Caller News Service

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.

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The post Our Establishment’s Alternate Realities appeared first on Granite Grok.

Our future mayor, Mike Soucy, has had a few meet-and-greet events in various parts of the city. I did not attend the Castro’s Backroom one as I don’t smoke, but I was at the first one, well-attended and hosted by Family Pizza in Ward 5.

This is a report on the most recent one yesterday at Chen Yang Li in Ward 2. To give some background, there is a lot of reliable local intel reports that Family Pizza is a routine Friday night watering hole for Attorney Bolton, the city attorney, and my opponent, Alderman Dowd, and their ilk.  Please see the many Grok pieces written by his perceived nemesis, Laurie Ortolano, who is being honored this month for doing things that are repugnant to Bolton.

People who are familiar with Laurie Ortolano’s RTK journey and various others are also familiar with MY litigation against the City, which was self-represented and “shepherded,” as Nurse Terese would say, by Laurie. On a sidenote, I encourage anyone without blind faith in their local assessor’s office to visit her amazingly constructed public service self-help site, good-gov.org. But back to the story.

I needed to get some more palm cards from Mike Soucy, and what better venue to accomplish that errand than to attend an event of his in my own zip code?  I got there a few minutes early and went inside, also with the intention to meet the owner and say that Lily Tang Williams says hi because they know each other, and I told her I would.  Mrs Soucy warmly greeted me while Mike was talking to supporters already seated in a reserved banquet area on the outskirts of the bar.  This restaurant has an open-concept architecture, and the football game was on the bar’s big-screen TVs.

Once Mike saw me, he greeted me and quietly mentioned that Attorney Bolton and his ilk, Mr Tabasco, were in the bar. Not wanting to be seen turning my head around like a careless passenger who just heard the driver say the police were following them, I played it cool.  There was a potted plant blocking my view as I was told to order my drink from the bar. (Drinks are not a campaign expense, and a mayoral candidate running on a pillar of transparency will point those things out despite it being common sense.)

I contemplated my approach to the not-so-busy bar that had an attentive barkeep.  Attorney Bolton and I have only seen each other once in person, and it was in court last May.  We did not make eye contact that day, plus his accomplice, Attorney Celia (you’re breaking my heart) Leonard, was standing next to him during the hearing, and I was dressed up for court.

I am otherwise a T-shirt and jeans person.  Hoping not to be recognized, I approached the bar from the side, pretending to be interested in the football game, even though I hate football and there was a long series of commercials playing.  The bartender prepared my drink, which seemed to take an eternity(perhaps only in my mind the same way a slow modem or a red light would) as Bolton was living rent-free in my head both then and while she went to the register made change from my $20.

When I picked up my change, left a tip, and collected the drink and my pocketbook, I turned 90 degrees to walk back to the banquet area and shifted my gaze in that direction, and I was taken by an unpleasant surprise! Alderman Dowd, my opponent, was seated next to Bolton, either having just entered from outside or returning from the restroom. Knowing darn well that it’s not “all bout me” as it was Mike Soucy’s event, I was able to refrain from taking the situation personally. However, whether or not Bolton recognized me at that point, Dowd was sure to say something. I acted casually and pretended to ignore them.

These two, or three if you count Tabasco, were spying on Mike Soucy, plain and simple. Of course, they will probably point out that Chen Yang Li is a public accommodation and they were paying customers there to watch the football game, but nobody that I know of has ever seen them there before. What a coincidence! Dowd will also point out that this is his constituency, Ward 2, but since when does he give a darn about restaurants that are NOT on Main St?  “Where’s Chen Yang Li’s Jersey barrier for outdoor dining?” said nobody.

Mike reformatted the event from a stump speech with following audience questions to more of a wedding reception-styled venue.  Attendees enjoyed a complimentary appetizer buffet while he visited each table for some light conversation.  Acts 17:26-28 points out that God has already chosen certain times and places if you will.

This impromptu and adaptive situation set up two things for me.  One of them was meeting Mr & Mrs Brown of Ward 2.  Not only were they fine people to talk to, but they let me place my sign in their yard, and they have an orange cat named Cheddar.  I am an unapologetic cat person, and I am building a collage of pictures called “Ward 2 Cats Against Alderman Dowd,” in which Cheddar is among the ones that need to be added.

The other thing was that the Browns and I were talking about the Ward 7 homeless camp that city hall is relocating from next to the Merrimack River to a controversial place somewhere between Bob’s Pizza and the bridge.  Anyway, Mike Soucy approached our table, and I told him how timely it was because were were talking about the homeless camp, and I asked if he planned to release a statement.  I encourage everyone, Nashua residents or not, to please sign this e-petition related to it.

Mike plans to attend the upcoming Wednesday event to discuss it, followed by a statement.

So, this story is really about spying and how emboldened the ruling class has become.  These things don’t happen overnight.  They are insidious.  And this behavior has been on full display many times.  Nashua’s ruling class thinks that we commoners are really stupid; let’s show them that we are not by showing up to vote and voting correctly!

 

The post Spying and How Emboldened the Ruling Class Has Become appeared first on Granite Grok.

On August 10, 1964, the United States Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. The resolution gave then-President Lyndon Johnson full authority to engage the North Vietnamese in an all-out war. That war lasted until the United States declared defeat and left Vietnam in April 1975.

The resolution was passed in response to an attack by North Vietnam on two American naval ships, the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy. The resolution was passed in direct response to perceived North Vietnamese aggression against American naval vessels.

Only one problem: the reported attack against the two naval ships never happened. In his book, FOG OF WAR, the then-defense Secretary Robert Macnamara admitted that the entire basis for going to war never happened.

Go back to Pearl Harbor. The entire country was shocked by the secret attack of the Japanese against the American Naval fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor. Numerous historians now contend that the Americans knew of the “surprise ” attack but chose to do nothing about it because they knew that only such an attack would motivate the American public to permit entry into the war in Europe and the Pacific.

Go back further to World War I: The Americans wanted no part of a European war. In truth, more Americans favored the Germans than the British but all favored neutrality. Then, the Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat. America entered the war.

Go forward to 9/11. I, like so many, remember the day and the event as if it were yesterday. I remember falling asleep the nite before on the sofa with the television on the Angels baseball game (I am a California refugee). I woke up to a screaming reporter with a live video showing the first of the Twin Towers on fire. I thought at first it was a movie, but then I realized it was live news. Just as I woke, I saw what most of the country saw-the second plane drove itself right into the second tower.

I, like most, was shocked, shocked in a way that has never happened before or since. I was glued to the news for the next several days and weeks. Reports came in regarding another plane that was trying to fly itself into the Pentagon but which was taken down by the passengers.

In response, the United States invaded Iraq.

Then, we invaded Afghanistan.

Questions began to arise: why are we invading Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11? Why did we spend trillions in Afghanistan when no evidence ever surfaced the Taliban had anything to do with 9/11?

Many years ago, a husband and wife team of college professors- Cloward and Picken- came up with a concept that has become the darling of the ruling class in Washington, D.C.

The duo studied “crisis” events and found a pattern: a crisis occurs; people become enraged and fearful and demand Government intervention; the government intervenes, and then a major change in policy occurs to change the “cause ” of the crisis and prevent it from happening again.

Cloward and Picken became rather famous when they published an article setting forth this discovery. They became even more famous darlings of the ruling class. They energetically advocated a simple thought: why should we wait for a crisis to happen?

If we want to cause a change of policy, why don’t we create the crisis that then leads to the change we want?

If a political group wants to change a policy, why not just create the “Crisis” and then allow the people to demand government intervention then the Government can swoop in and institute the policy they wanted anyway, empowered by the fear and anger they created from the crisis they initiated.

To my eye, every time the ruling class wants to institute a policy that only they benefit from, they seem to follow the Cloward and Picken model.

Climate change? No problem. Many times, have you heard the ruling class assert that unless we do as they say regarding carbon, food, cars, water heaters, etc, we will all die? They claim that the earth is dying because of our pollution. No matter what the scientists say to the contrary. The sky is falling, and we are going to die unless we get out of their way as they steal us blind and destroy everything ordinary Americans prize. It’s Cloward and Piven: to institute the policy and controls they want, they invent a crisis; the people out of fear and anger generated by the crisis, demand Government intervention; the Government does intervene and institute the policy they want.

Does this Cloward and Picken model not also apply to IRAQ?

To Afghanistan?

To the Gulf of Tonkin?

To Pearl Harbor?

It’s scary to me indeed, frightening- the thought that the Folks in Washington DC who run our government would follow Cloward and Picken. It’s frightening and scary because it seems to be at least in part supported by the evidence.

What is happening in ‘Israel” is horrible. It is truly a “crisis.”

People are being murdered in the streets for no good reason by crazed lunatics who are driven by hate and malice. But don’t despair because the ruling class never wastes a good “crisis.” The military-industrial complex makes huge fortunes off of the endless wars we engage in, and guess what- this crisis in Israel looks like it is going to save their day: it looks like the war we lost in Afghanistan and the war we are losing in Ukraine is going to get new life in the middle east.

I hope my thoughts are wrong. Maybe I am having them just because I am tired of all the wars and the killing and the atrocities. It’s a hard pill to swallow to think that world leaders create a “crisis”- a crisis that involves killing thousands of people and destroying whole countries- to advance some policy they think is good and necessary for their own power and control.

But think: the news folks want you to believe that the Israeli intelligence corps- Mossad- and the American intelligence corps were unaware of the presence in Gaza of 5000 to 7500 missiles aimed at Israel. They want us to believe that the Israeli army stationed on the border with Gaza- probably the most dangerous and active war zone border in the world- was asleep and had no sentries out to alert the troops to wake up and fight back. And they want us to believe that this attack by Hamas – a Pearl Harbor type of attack- should be a basis for Israel to go to war with Iran.

If Mossad and the Cia had alerted the Israelis of the attack they knew was coming and if the Israelis had been put on high alert, and if the Israeli forces attacked rather than surrendered, no “crisis” would have occurred, and Cloward and Piven’s strategy would have no legs. We would still hate Iran. But we would not be going to war.

My God- I cannot get it out of my head that Mossad and perhaps our own CIA knew all about the Hamas attack well before it occurred but decided to let it happen, even standing down the defense forces to allow the atrocities so that they would have the Cloward and Picken crisis they needed to do what they wanted to do all along-bomb Iran into the stone age.

One Israelite leader summarized all this very well- He proclaimed, ” This is Israel’s 9/11.”

Did he mean by that statement that this is Israel’s “false flag” designed to enrage the world into supporting Israel’s planned strike on Iran to end Iran’s nuclear program?

Israel and the United States have long stated that they would never let Iran get nuclear missiles. Netanyahu told the United Nation’s full assembly not so many years ago that Israel would use all means necessary-including military attack- to end Iran’s nuclear program. Is it possible that they feel that the time is now and made the decision to allow the attack from Hamas so that they would have their Cloward and Picken crisis that would make you and me and the Israeli public demand that Israel bombs Iran? Netanyahu said in a speech little heralded by the press that after he finishes Hamas and Hezbollah, he is going to take the war to Iran.

All I can say is that the world would be a much better place if Cloward and Piven had never been evil and or born.

 

The post Is This Attack by Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran a False Flag To Drag Us Into Yet Another War? appeared first on Granite Grok.

The traditional American view of people as Individuals REQUIRES swift justice. Instead, the Progressives see not individual criminals but Society as a whole being an entire group – which deserves to be punished.

…It is easy to tar opponents of gun control as “soft on crime.” It is easy to tar opponents of prohibition as “soft on abuse.” But in a strange sense, both gun control and prohibition grow out of softness. A system with the moral courage to harshly, swiftly, and surely punish violence would have little need of gun control. A system with the moral courage to harshly, swiftly, and surely punish abusers for stealing, trespassing, vandalizing, and defiling would have little need of prohibition.

In both cases, we haphazardly punish millions of innocents because we refuse to decisively punish thousands of clear-cut criminals.

-Bryan Caplan (Abusers Give Vice a Bad Name)

The many, in their eyes, are just as guilty as any of its individuals, so the many WILL be punished for the activities of a very few. There is no Justice in that and CERTAINLY no sense of mercy or propitiation, or forgiveness. Only “future guilt.”

CAplan’s remarks run a bit long, but I liked bits and thought you should take note:

 

• “…the typical user. Sure, they rarely experience severe personal blowback. But they normalize deviant behavior.
• …The difference between me and normal observers: I don’t consider extreme abusers or “addicts” to be victims. I consider them victimizers. They aren’t a symptom of a greater social problem. They are the greater social problem. Abusers have and continue to make evil choices. Granted, it logically possible to end up on Fentanyl Row through tremendously bad luck. Empirically, however, everything I’ve read on poverty convinces me that the root cause of such residence is almost invariably extraordinarily irresponsible behavior.

 

HT | Instapundit

The post If American Society Hadn’t Grown Soft, We Wouldn’t Have This Problem appeared first on Granite Grok.

First and foremost… there is A LOT of misinformation concerning this “closed primary” issue. The Resolution that passed by the membership at the NHGOP Annual Meeting on January 28, 2023 (Resolution #2, found on this page: https://nh.gop/2023-annual-meeting/) has nothing to do with the 90-day deadline to change your party affiliation before voting in the 2024 Presidential Primary Election (the deadline for that was October 6, 2023.)

https://www.doj.nh.gov/news/2023/20230918-deadline-party-affiliation-primary.htm

This Resolution requires independent voters who want to vote in the Republican primary to switch over 30 days before the primary date. The presidential primary date has NOT been chosen yet. Many states have closed or partially closed primaries for varying reasons (https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/state-primary-election-types.)

There are several reasons for closing our primaries, but in NH, here are some of the reasons why the majority of Republicans voted for the Resolution in January:

 

• The essential purpose of a party primary is to select the candidates who will run in the General Election under the party’s banner. Thus, candidates running in a partisan (i.e., political) General Election under a party banner (either R or D) should only be those actually selected in a primary by voters who are aligned with that party’s principles and who have registered as voters in that party.
• Integrity: Prevents outsiders (undeclared voters that are really Democrats) from attempting to influence the Republican primary selection process.
• Ideological Purity: This is a way to help ensure that the candidate selected is the closest one that adheres to the party’s ideological principles (those NH principles listed here: https://nh.gop/platform/.) Closing the primary helps prevent voters with significantly different views from hijacking a party’s nomination process.
• Informed Voters: People who are going to take the time and switch to the party to be able to vote in the Republican primary (they can switch back on their way out from the polls at which they just voted in the party primary) are typically more informed about what the party believes in, stands for, the party’s candidates, and the party’s primary issues, so closed primaries may lead to more informed voting decisions.
• Safeguarding Votes: Closing the primaries can reduce the likelihood of “party ransacking” that has taken place in NH for years. It is where voters from opposing parties (who hide as undeclared voters) participate in the Republican primary to influence the nomination of a weaker candidate. Recent news stories below verifying this:

 

https://www.nhpr.org/nh-news/2023-10-04/tug-of-war-over-independent-voters-heats-up-in-nh-primary

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/new-hampshire-democrats-weigh-whether-cross-vote-gop-primary-rcna118756

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/03/pro-christie-pac-new-hampshire-00119734

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/democratic-groups-spend-money-on-republican-primaries-to-nominate-less-appealing-opponents

 

Primaries in NH have not always been “open.” It has been reported, but unconfirmed, that former Secretary of State William Gardner claimed to have received a resolution (from which party is unclear) in which the primaries were declared open to undeclared voters.

It should be noted that if any such rule opening the primaries had been adopted through a by-law amendment, where is it in the NHGOP By-laws? The simple answer is NOWHERE! So, if such an action did, in fact, actually take place, it must have been by simple Resolution. The distinction is essential because a resolution only requires a majority vote to pass, while a by-law amendment requires a supermajority to pass.

See the responses to Chairman Ager’s statements in bold below:

Chairman Ager:

“After investigating applicable state law in consultation with the Secretary of State’s office, it was determined that the Resolution violated state law and could not be adopted. Specifically, the critical “30 day prior” provision of the Resolution violates RSA 654:7 a&b (same-day registration), and RSA 654:32/34 (change of registration).”

The role of Chairman Ager was to deliver the adopted Resolution to the NH Secretary of State (SOS), David Scanlan. His role was not to “investigate” anything. SOS Scanlon NEVER received the Resolution calling for the primaries to be closed from the Republican State Party. There has been ZERO communication to the voting members about this Resolution from Chairman Ager until yesterday, October 9, 2023, after many Republican committee voting members requested answers. In writing from SOS Scanlan, he confirms this:

“By statute the party chair is to notify the Secretary of State in writing if there is a change regarding which voters can participate in a party primary. I have not received any written communication in that regard.”

And, below, confirmed in state statute:

659:14 Special Provisions for State and Presidential Primary Elections.

 (https://www.gencourt.state.nh.us/rsa/html/LXIII/659/659-14.htm)

1. The secretary of state shall include on the voter instruction cards required by RSA 658:28 whether a party rule has been adopted which permits a person who is registered as an undeclared voter to vote in the party’s primary. The party chairman shall notify the secretary of state in writing prior to the filing period for state offices whether the party has adopted such a rule. This rule shall not be changed or rescinded by a party until the results of the primary have been announced, and any change or rescission shall be mailed to the secretary of state by the party chairman.

Chairman Ager:

“Presidential Primary campaigns have also been informed that there will be no change to our current First In The Nation Primary selection process and have been campaigning accordingly.”

Why would presidential primary campaigns be notified but not the NH Republican Party? When were those campaigns informed? Chairman Ager doesn’t have the authority to unilaterally ignore a resolution adopted by the membership body over eight months ago. Furthermore, he doesn’t control the NH presidential primary. 

Chairman Ager:

“My suggestion to the sponsors is to bring forth a By-Law Amendment that complies with State Law for consideration and critical analysis of the impact by the entire Committee.”

This Resolution was initially brought forward as a by-law; unfortunately, it was not done correctly or on time. The Resolution’s prime sponsor (Karen Testerman) was then told it needed to be submitted as a resolution, so it was changed appropriately. After reading the state statute above, it looks as if the correct process was still followed. Thus, it appears that a state committee member submitting a rule change in good faith has essentially been told to chase her tail by the “elites” at the top of the NHGOP.

Chairman Ager still has a couple of hours to submit the Resolution to SOS Scanlon. If there is a legal issue with the Resolution, the burden of proof is on the state to provide. Time is running out to follow through on what you were elected to do.

So, let’s get this straight: for over eight months since the adoption of the Resolution by a majority of the members of the NHGOP state committee, Ager sat back and did nothing to implement the Resolution or to try to obtain a ruling on its efficacy from the Courts which could rule on whether it could take effect or whether it conflicted with existing state laws.

But putting aside the technical arguments over whether the Resolution was proper or not- assume for argument’s sake that it was not. Secretary of State Scanlan has stated in writing that he cannot produce any prior written notice from the party giving the required notice of adoption of a party rule to “open” its primaries to Undeclared voters. Since RSA 659:14 provides the only mechanism for opening the primaries (by the giving of written notice from the chair of the party to the SOS of the adoption of an opening rule- silent on whether it must be by Resolution or by by-law amendment), in the absence of any writing from the NHGOP advising the SOS of the adoption of an “open” primary rule, logic dictates that the primary must be “closed”- namely voters registered as Undeclared cannot lawfully vote in a GOP primary.

The fact that the primaries have been conducted improperly on an “open” basis for many years does not change the fact that the law is the law and should be applied as written.

Signed,

Many concerned state party members.

The post Response and Clarification to Chairman Ager About Our Closed Primary Resolution appeared first on Granite Grok.

Democrat Rep Marjorie Smith has drafted legislation to legalize medically assisted dying in New Hampshire. In its current form (10 pages), it reads like boilerplate camel nose under the tent- assisted suicide, except that by law, you’re not allowed to call it that.

It’s not assisted suicide, but it is.

The bill includes protections for everyone involved and details an extensive list of rules for qualifications, including mental capacity and a terminal condition with six or fewer months to live. If you wanted to step onto the slippery slope, this is what you’d use to do that. Legislation focused on end-of-life care (compassion) with many guardrails that can, over time, be taken down as they have in every State or country where Medically Assisted Dying has become law.

Mechanically, it appears thought out, but so were all its predecessors, from whom I assume this draft was derived. As such, it will inevitably suffer mission creep like its older relatives.

I have a few textual objections beyond my standing opposition to the politicization of the practice in general. Section 14 prohibits listing the cause of death as anything but the underlying condition. The second objection (same section), as noted above, is the prohibition against designating this death as assisted suicide – an affectation that, in years to come, could protect the State from having to accept its role in the rising number of deaths resulting from the inevitable widening of permissions that may result in the state assisting people toward “medically assisted suicide.”

In Section 10 Prohibited Acts, Part C, 5, makes it a felony to coerce or exert undue influence on a qualified individual to prevent them from requesting or self-administering a terminal prescription. Part C, 4, rightly prohibits trying to convince them, but item 5, to my reading, could be misconstrued. Loved ones who object are likely to do so in a manner that could be mistaken for a violation. Neither undue influence nor coercion for the purpose of the legislation is defined, leaving it open to abuse, not that describing it would not do the same.

Related: Slippery Meet Slope: Doctors in The Netherlands Are Euthanizing People with Autism

If legal, the “patient” has rights, many of the outlined, but this point seems legally dubious.

Another significant issue arises in the proposed preamble, which the author, Rep Smith, is not sure should be included. If you’d like my opinion, Marjorie, and I know you don’t, try reading it in the context of your political party’s approach to Informed Consent and privacy rights during the pandemic. You’ll likely throw the whole thing out to avoid looking like the steaming pile of hypocrisy this represents.

Check this out, and make sure you are not drinking any liquids that you might snort out your nose.

 

 

Important for the topic at hand, but can you imagine how different March 2020 onward would have been if this was the guiding principle of patient rights and privacy in the Granite State? I was giggling the whole read-through, followed by a more sober thought. How many people were victims of medically assisted suicide (sorry) dying as a result of nothing in this preamble having any weight in those circumstances?

It makes for a stunning contrast.

This is a draft bill and not typically for public consumption, but someone who had seen several of my Slippery Slope pieces thought I’d be interested in having a look. A scanned copy awaits you below if you feel inclined to skim it.

Related: Slippery Meet Slope: When the State Decides That it is in Your Best Interest to Die

I would like to remind you (again) that this draft law makes clear that this is not “assisted suicide. It is medically assisted dying. The Acronym for that is MAD, as in MAD Marjorie’s Assisted Suicide Bill (Yes, I’m hoping that name sticks). It may also be referred to as Medical Assistance in Dying or MAiD. Medically assisted dying also happens when you die unintentionally at a hospital or because of a doctor’s treatment or protocol or refusal to provide one that might work.

We should also consider a libertarian perspective – the right to die. It might be a kindness to allow someone to kill themselves because of a terminal diagnosis to avoid prolonged suffering. There is room for that, but not in a proto-socialized healthcare system run by oligarchs pining for a government-run monopoly. That’s the slippery slope. When The State defines the rules, measured by state employees acting as therapists (or even doctors), things can go downhill quickly.

Break the hospital and health insurance cartels’ stranglehold on care in New Hampshire. Incentivize private practice and off-label use of licensed drugs. Open Let patients and doctors accept plans from out of state. All of this can inspire competition, improve quality, lower costs, and optimize outcomes.

Reduce government interference with limited licensing oversight. The State should follow up on complaints or take notes if a patient files a malpractice suit. Fraud or misconduct should include the risk of criminal prosecution. Otherwise, get the hell out of the way.

And yes, I understand that NH State Senators will need to find a new source of endless funding for campaigns if we break up the Hospital and insurance cartels and that this additions loop will make reform impossible. But the current professional political trajectory of what passes for care presents too high a risk to life if you legalize assisted suicide.

Vermont has Death Tourism. They have telehealth death tourism. We don’t need this, even if we could trust the healthcare cartels and the politicians, which we can’t. The Netherlands, Hawaii, Oregon, and Canada (In Quebec, you can pre-order death by doctor if ruled incompetent), and not long from now Vermont, have proven that. Remember, “Governments, especially ones that believe they should manage everything, tend to create the misery assisted suicide will inevitably relieve.”

Kill MAD Marjorie’s Assisted Suicide Bill. It is too much to risk.

 

This is only a draft and not the final bill to be considered.

NH Marjorie Smith Draft Assisted Suicide Bill

 

The post Draft Legislation Would Put New Hampshire on the Slippery Slope of Medically Assisted Death appeared first on Granite Grok.

Someone commenting at GraniteGrok as Doyle shared some thoughts under an article by Ed Mosca, titled,  ‘Maggie Hassan Supports Nazis.’

The actual Nazis were ended in 1945. Maybe rather than use a stupid word like that you may want to be surprisingly accurate and call them national socialists. Of course then your BFF Putin is at the top of that particular list so there’s that. In 2019 Zelensky ran on an anti corruption platform and if you were interested in the truth had been making head way in that area until your BFF Putin criminally invaded the Ukraine again. Don’t forget 2014 or else I may believe you have a closet affection for the Kenyan. So even in the midst of this war Zelensky has been routing out corruption in his oh so copious spare time. I’m not sure what drives so called conservatives like yourself to be so willing to enslave an entire people at the tender mercies of you BFF Putin because you sadly believe Ukraine is some kind of epi-center of world corruption, it clearly is not. Washington DC and the USA make Ukraine look like amateurs as do many other places in the world. Sadly you have been given Ukraine as a freebie and sadly believe that if Ukraine were gone somehow much that is evil in the world would be gone and somehow the Biden crime syndicate’s money machine would dry up…you can not be that delusional. Please explain really why you hate Ukraine in rational terms and not hand waving glib rhetoric….you cannot. You are aiding and abetting Putin’s dictatorship and putting your head in the sand ala Neville Chamberlin win net the same result, the war you obviously seek. Never give a totalitarian a cheap victory if you can, I know to logical for you to understand, you’re just that stupid.

 

First, as I commented, this is a perfect example of Alinsky – pick a target, freeze it, polarize it. Extra rations for you after the Revolution, Comrade.

Putin!  Putin!  Putin!  Putin!  Putin!  Putin!  Putin!  Putin!  Putin!  Putin!  Putin!  Putin!  Putin!  Putin!  Putin!  Putin!  Putin!  Putin!  Putin!  Putin!  Putin!  Putin!  Putin!  Putin!  Putin!  Putin!  Putin!  Putin!  Putin!  Putin!  Putin!  Putin! 

Second, ignoring a vast amount of history – both recent and not – Doyle pretends that all this happened in a vacuum; NATO’s relentless expansion towards Russia was done despite promises not to do so.  So some information and, you know, historical information on that:

Ukraine-Russia: Look… SQUIRREL! – Granite Grok

And lastly, the Nazis were defeated.  And are no more.  A relic of the past.  Gone.  Erased from history.

O-kay… PULL!

 

https://granitegrok.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Nazis-in-Ukraine.mp4

 

And what’s with the guy with the American flag on his uniform doing the Nazi salute at about 2:00?

 

The post No Nazis in Ukraine? appeared first on Granite Grok.

Do you believe in miracles? How I became a library trustee was a modern-day miracle in my town of Raymond NH. It all started when a homeschool-dad named Mike Drago who is now a state representative spoke to me about the children’s section of our library.

Since I used our town library as a homeschool Mom for many years, I was interested in checking things out. My kids were older, and I hadn’t been there in a while. New folks were in positions that other people in town had been in for many years and had since retired.

I was glad to meet the new librarians and the director. About a year ago, I started asking some questions. I started going to every trustee meeting, which was being held mostly on Thursdays at 3:30 p.m. The times and places seemed to vary. Evidently, no other citizens had been to these meetings for quite a while.

Through this process, I and some other parents and adults were instrumental in making sure the board followed the rules, like making sure the meetings were posted properly and making sure the minutes and agendas were publicly posted. We also were also instrumental in getting the meetings videotaped and added to our town cable station. This helped to ensure that other patrons and taxpayers had better access to information and discussions with the library trustee board and director.

Several citizens came to meetings and asked lots of questions about the current policies. Mostly the adults were concerned that the books contained in the children’s room were free of adult topics and content not suitable for children like sex and gender identity. Last March, we were able to vote on Article 42, which states:

 

 

We also voted in a conservative trustee who beat out an incumbent who had held the seat for 20 years. However, she had to resign soon after due to health problems, and this left an open seat. The RSA states that the board of selectmen will step in and appoint a trustee in this situation until the next election.

In the midst of all of this, our town was going through some serious struggles with our select board. We had a 3-2 battle going on. I knew I would lose the vote unless there were a miracle. I went to several selectman meetings from April to June to ask for their vote as trustee. Many citizens wrote letters to the board on my behalf.

During this time, 2 of the 3 selectmen that I knew would vote against me resigned their posts, and the night the vote was taken for trustee, I won 2-1 to be appointed. This was truly a modern-day miracle!

To some people, this may be trivial, I mean, who really goes to the library anyway? Well, to me, this is bigger than the situation itself. It proves to me that when you do something, it matters. When you try, you can make a difference. When you want to do something positive, you can see things happen that you didn’t expect… for the better.

Taking a spot in town government is the way that we can make a difference. My goal is not to focus on the negative things that we don’t want but to focus on the vast amount of positive things that we should be doing. We need better phonics books in the libraries. We need to make reading a priority, not social agendas at the library! We need to make reading and learning attractive and stop using the “free” (taxpayer-funded) resources at the library as a conduit for false ideas that there are more than two genders and other such nonsense.

Children should be excited to live, grow, and learn. There is so much to learn and so many interesting topics. They don’t need to be exposed to sexual Ideas and social agendas that adults want to push on them while they are innocent and impressionable. Make the libraries safe again. Get involved where you can to protect the children and help them learn new and exciting things.

This article does not cover all the questions we asked and debates we spent hours and hours in. This is the short of it. Unfortunately, the conservatives have not been paying attention, and the “weeds” have grown, and if we want to see the “weeds” cut down and good fruit growing, we will have to step in and do something. Otherwise, we will keep paying for the very thing we don’t want. Our kids, meaning our own flesh and blood, as well as the children who will be our future. If we don’t do anything, we have no business complaining. Please get involved. Don’t just keep watching and cringing. If you are reading this, you need to step up. Look around, no one else is doing it. It’s your time.

 

The post How I Became a Conservative Library Trustee appeared first on Granite Grok.

This past week’s discussion in the Renewable Energy Standard Working Group, charged with drafting legislation to be considered by the General Assembly during the 2024 legislative session, highlighted some serious problems with Vermont’s energy policies, both philosophical and practical.

At its core, “renewable” energy in our state is a scam designed to enrich politically connected special interests.

In the first of several revealing topics of conversation within the group, Chris Pearson, a former senator from Burlington now works for the Sierra Club, went into detail about how the sale/trading of renewable energy credits (RECs) – basically an indulgences scheme that allows carbon emitters to pay to swap their “dirty” energy for someone else’ “clean” energy — is really just, to use his term, a “shell game” allowing certain actors both public and private to mislead the public.

“Vermonters will celebrate, ‘Hey, our grid is 100% renewable!’” said Pearson, “[But] as long as we maintain RECs this is a total fiction… Vermonters would be surprised to hear both the headline that our grid is 100% renewable and we’re burning fossil fuels into Vermont because it turns out on a spreadsheet somewhere we’re buying renewable attributes from somewhere else so we can keep the fossil fuels going to supplement our power. That is weird! That is strange and it lacks integrity….”

“At some point,” Pearson concluded, “we’ve got to end this fiction…. Just generally, I think we do ourselves and this debate a great disservice if we don’t at least try to acknowledge the shell game that goes on when we allow RECs.”

The argument in favor of the REC system is that it can be manipulated in such a way as to lower the electric bills for customers in, for example, Burlington by some estimates as much as 25%. These accounting gimmicks accomplish nothing from a genuine environmental standpoint, but it does provide cover to politicians, activists, and suppliers who want to appear to the public as if they’re actually doing something “green” without making their constituents or customers actually pay the price.

While Pearson’s protestations against RECs can be taken as a true believer’s sincere desire for honest accounting, the policy of getting rid of RECs has another motivating repercussion. If Vermont power suppliers are prohibited from buying RECs from other states, it will force them to purchase more – and require others to build more – renewable energy locally. And this is what a lot of big money donors from the Vermont renewable energy business sector are really after – laws that force Vermonters to buy more and more of their products despite a near total lack of actual demand for them.

To this point, Ken Nolan, General Manager of Vermont Public Power Supply Authority (VPPSA), described how the Renewable Energy Standard (“REZ”) creates this corrupt false market based on special interest politics and crony corporatism at the expense of consumers.

“VPPSA only buys power that has Vermont Tier 1 RECs attached to it. Before the REZ, we would buy what we call system power. It could be natural gas, oil, we didn’t care. Now that the REZ is in place, that contract has to say coming with Vermont Tier 1 RECs. Has to say it is supplying what we want for generation types and locations…. The policy decisions and the conversations that are happening are very directly pushing utilities to make certain decisions and avoid others…. The question is, who do we want to win? It’s what it comes back to. When you put solar or put a particular generation type that drives us to do business with the people who own those companies and pushes us away from folks who don’t own them.”

What Nolan is describing here – ie driving business to “the people who own those companies” — is the blatant pay-to-play political crony corruption that underlies our energy policy at the expense of Vermont citizens.

First of all, the fact that the question, “who do we want to win,” is even being asked by a group that is writing legislation should be a major red flag. It’s not government’s role to pick winners and losers in the marketplace. Those decisions belong to We the People.

But the question is being asked here and it does have an answer. Winners: wind and solar developers who are major donors to the Democrat and Progressive parties and their candidates. Losers: those who may supply better, cheaper, more reliable electricity but don’t support those politicians. Also losers: Vermonters who buy electricity.

The policy decisions and the conversations Nolan refers to are happening in this very committee, and are being driven by people with clear financial conflicts of interest and connections to “the people who own those companies”, as described in detail in my previous article, Conflicts of Interest in the Renewable Standards Working Group.

 

Rob Roper is a freelance writer with 20 years of experience in Vermont politics, including three years of service as chair of the Vermont Republican Party and nine years as President of the Ethan Allen Institute, Vermont’s free-market think tank. He is also a regular contributor to VermontGrok.

The post Renewable Energy Standard: A “Shell Game” of “Picking Winners & Losers” appeared first on Granite Grok.

As of the time that I am writing this (Columbus Day, Monday, October 9, 10:00 AM), the “President” of the United States still has said NOTHING about the attack by Hamas on Israel.

I am talking about the real President, the de-facto President, the man behind the scenes pulling the puppet strings of the imposter/figurehead Joe Biden. I am talking about Barack Obama.

I think that Obama thinks that, in the long run, the attack by Hamas is a good thing. I can imagine him telling his coterie that the attack will get Israel off its “high horse” and force them to make, in his view, the necessary concessions for peace. Concessions that will inevitably lead to the destruction of Israel.

Indeed, I think that Obama thinks that the carnage is inconsequential not only in the … that is, his … grand scheme of things, but also in terms of Israel and Palestinians. That is, he believes that even after the Hamas attack, Israel has done worse to those Palestinians than the terrorism of Hamas, the PLO, and Hezbollah has to Israel.

I think that Americans, even Americans who voted against Obama, cannot get their heads around what Obama really is. He is a man who hated and still hates … yes, hates … America. And was and remains committed to “transforming” America into a fully socialist country and making up for all the wrong that he believes America has done both internally and externally.

 

The post The President’s Silence On Hamas Is Deafening appeared first on Granite Grok.

Some will find the following clip beneath contempt, but most of those people are impossible to please when it comes to whatever comes out of this man’s mouth.

You could say you’ve heard worse from better, and that may or may not be true, but taken in context, the man is not wrong. The US abandoned billions of dollars in equipment in Afghanistan, knowing it would end up in the hands of China, Iran, and anyone else who wanted it. Talk about a national security threat.

Equipment and munitions are rumored to be in the hands of Hamas fighters attacking Israel. Another win for Biden. He hates Israel and loves the Mullahs and their Islamic regime (who hate Israel), resulting in dead women and children.

Biden even gave the Mullahs in Iran 6 billion to help them buy some US hardware from the Taliban to attack Israel. We are funding two bird killers with one large taxpayer-backed stone if you like.

Which gets us to this.

Note: there is a brief dead spot in the middle of the audio; nothing is lost in translation.

Language Warning

 

Trump RE: Equipment left to Taliban

“Milley said it’d be cheaper to leave all of our equipment behind in Afghanistan, instead of flying it back. That’s when I knew he was a fucking idiot!” pic.twitter.com/gZUPQ3lbhv

— ProudArmyBrat (@leslibless) October 8, 2023

 

He’s not wrong.

The post Trump: “That’s When I Knew He Was a F*cking Idiot!” appeared first on Granite Grok.

It has been thirty years since that October 1993 week in Somalia when Mike Durant saw what hell looked like. A Black Hawk helicopter pilot, Durant, was shot down during the battle for Mogadishu. All the members of his crew were dead.

A rescue team moved him away from the aircraft and placed him next to a wall. But now they, too, were all dead. Durant had a broken leg, a broken back and was out of ammunition when a horde of Somalis descended upon him, intent on beating him to death. Already suffering a bullet wound, Durant helplessly endured the blows. A Somali fighter smashed Durant’s face and broke Mike’s nose and eye socket with what Mike first thought was a club. Then, to his horror, Durant realized he was being beaten to death with the severed arm of one of his comrades. He knew his death was imminent, and then he heard a gunshot.

BERLIN BOY

Fifty years ago, Mike Durant boarded a ski bus in Berlin to head north on Route 16 and then west on Route 26 with dozens of other youngsters to ski at the Wilderness Ski Area in Dixville Notch.

“I loved skiing,” Durant recalled to me over the telephone. “I loved the snow. Like so many other North Country boys, I also loved getting out into the woods and hunting. And yes, I also played hockey.”
That Durant played hockey was no surprise, Berlin then being “Hockey-Town USA.”

As that ski bus headed for the slopes, Durant’s friends in adjacent seats surely had no inkling that in 1993 their buddy’s face would be the first one featured simultaneously on the covers of TIME, NEWSWEEK, and U.S. NEWS AND WORLD REPORT. That bruised and bloodied face became the face of an American military encounter that would change the country and the world—the first battle with Al Qaeda.

AMERICAN HOSTAGE

The gunshot was meant to quiet, not to kill. A Somali leader with some authority felt that Durant had more value as a hostage/prisoner than as a corpse. Dirt was thrown into Durant’s face, and a rag was stuffed down his throat. His agony became excruciating when his captors kicked his broken bones, and then he realized was “being carried aloft on the thundering wave of a mosh pit from hell.”

It was October 3, and Durant would face 11 days of agonizing captivity as followers of Somali warlord Mohamed Farah Aideed stared down the United States. They used Durant as a pawn so tribal fighters could seek concessions from an American superpower caught up in an unexpectedly brutal urban battleground. Durant was confined to a small room to be interrogated and indoctrinated by select Somalis who knew some English. His wounds were not treated, but he was given water and allowed to live as negotiations continued between Somalis and Americans.

Though the Americans did not know Durant’s location and could not rescue him, they knew he was alive. Helicopters flew over Mogadishu with loudspeakers blaring: “Mike Durant! We will not leave without you!”

The messages gave Durant hope, but he knew he was dying from his wounds and was running out of time.

“If you guys are preparing a rescue mission, you’d better hurry,” Durant thought. “Or else you’ll be rescuing a corpse.”

The pain worsened by the hour as Durant suffered in the brutal African heat. When he could, he’d drift off into a semi-sleep and dream of skiing at Wilderness and of white Christmases in New Hampshire—and then awaken to his agonizing reality.

It never snows in Mogadishu.

DREAMS OF FLYING

Durant’s father was a sergeant in the N.H. National Guard and Mike always respected the military. After a pilot named Joe Brigham took Durant for a flight over Mt. Washington, Mike dreamed of becoming an army pilot. He enlisted after graduating from Berlin High School in 1979. He survived basic training and follow-on schools and eventually flight school. After earning his wings he was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky and soon qualified for The United States Army’s elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne), also known as the Night Stalkers. Durant’s career took him to Korea, Panama, and the Persian Gulf for Operation Desert Storm.

During that 1991 conflict, Durant flew missions deep into Iraq, looking for SCUD missiles, eventually finding a site and firing it up. He also experienced the pain of losing comrades.

“Flying in combat is an adventure,” recalled Durant. “But when you lose people, it brings you back to reality, and you remember how so many pay the ultimate price in war.”

SURVIVAL

Durant’s best-selling 2003 book “In the Company of Heroes” provided material for this piece. It chronicled his Somali ordeal.

“October 9, 1993. On my seventh day as a prisoner of war, I found religion …. Literally …”

Durant’s captors allowed a “Care Package” to be delivered to him, and among its items was a Bible. Not only did Durant draw inspiration from certain passages, but he wrote coded notes in special places, thinking that his captors would let him keep the Holy Book after his release and the notes might prove invaluable in piecing things together later on.

Negotiations continued while Durant lay a prisoner, and American officials conveyed to Aideed’s people that very, very, very bad things would happen to all of them if Durant didn’t survive. Finally, on October 14, with the help of the International Red Cross, the Granite Stater and his Bible were placed on a stretcher and transported to an exchange point where he was reunited with his countrymen.

Mike Durant had escaped from hell.

A HUMANITARIAN MISSION

American involvement in Somalia came about during the last days of the Bush 41 Administration in December of 1992. The country had descended into lawless chaos, which, combined with famine, meant that tens of thousands were dying of starvation. Because competing warlords prevented food and humanitarian assistance from getting to the starving people, American military forces embarked upon Operation Restore Hope to secure food distribution points and routes. The mission evolved during 1993, as forces from the U.S. and elsewhere were inevitably drawn into the internecine fighting. The Clinton administration significantly increased the American military presence in Somalia, and eventually, the Americans were seen as opponents to Aideed, the most prominent warlord. Food distribution was threatened, and both sides took casualties. Eventually, a major mission was planned for October 3 to capture Aideed and his top lieutenants. While many of the targeted individuals were indeed captured, the mission was disrupted when a Black Hawk helicopter was shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade. Later, Durant’s helicopter was also shot down. The battle resulted in 18 American deaths, with 80 wounded. Estimates of Somali casualties range from 1,500 to 2,000.

BACK TO AMERICA

Given the severity of his wounds and injuries, Durant’s rehabilitation took a long time, but he still dreamed of flying again. He was told that the prospect of rejoining the Night Stalkers in a flight status was doubtful, but he persevered. In 1995 he ran the Marine Corps Marathon to prove his fitness, and eventually, he again flew Black Hawks.

In 2001, Durant retired from the Army and married Lisa DesRoches, the widow of a helicopter pilot who was killed on a training mission. The two worked together to raise six children. They moved to Huntsville, Alabama, where Mike ran his own company, Pinnacle Solutions, an engineering and training services business that developed flight simulators and the like. Durant received the “2013 Vetrepreneur Award” for his company’s efforts on behalf of veterans. Pinnacle Solutions grew steadily and, at one time, employed almost 100 people.

During the phone conversation, Durant explained that the events from October 1993 remain with him. He spoke candidly about American policies and policymakers, from the Somalian conflict to the Afghanistan War.

“Looking back, I wish that the Clinton administration would have been more responsive to the requests they received from the leaders on the ground in Somalia,” said Durant. “Three things in particular would have made us more successful. An aircraft carrier would have been a huge plus. As it was, we were sleeping 50 yards from the bad guys on the ground. Requested AC-130 gunships would have come in handy on Oct. 3 and 4. And even General Powell requested we have tanks and armored vehicles, which were never delivered—which is why we suffered so many casualties.”

Secretary of Defense Les Aspin took the fall. He resigned in December of 1993 and died in 1995.

“I met Secretary Aspin at a memorial ceremony at Fort Bragg,” said Durant. “He could see the consequences of his decision-making on the faces of the families there. I think it contributed to his death.”

Meeting the families of Gary Gordon and Randy Shughart was especially poignant for Durant. The two soldiers were Delta Force operators who jumped from a helicopter to try to protect Durant and the crash site. Both were killed, and each received the Congressional Medal of Honor.

“When I first saw Gary and Randy, I thought I’d been saved,” recalled Durant. It was the greatest feeling. Then I realized it was only those two, against hundreds of Somalis. They never had a chance.”

Durant treasures a letter he received from Randy’s widow, Stephanie, which thanked him for giving Randy’s death a purpose. “I can look at you and see that his efforts were not in vain … Because of your bravery and refusal to be captured, I can sleep at night.”

Durant likens the Somali experience to the Vietnam experience in that American forces were hamstrung by politics. He added that he’d been asked repeatedly about the 2012 Benghazi fiasco, where four Americans died in Libya.

“Benghazi was like Somalia in that our people didn’t get the support they deserved, and they paid for it with their lives.”

Naturally, Durant watched Ridley Scott’s movie “Black Hawk Down.” Actor Ron Eldard played Durant in the movie.

“Ron seemed like a good guy,” recalled Durant, who met many cast members. “Although he really didn’t look, talk, or act like me. They mostly seemed like good guys, although Jeremy Piven was an ass.”

Piven played Cliff Wolcott, the pilot of the first Black Hawk shot down.

TODAY

Today, Mike and Lisa Durant live in Madison, Alabama. In 2022, he was a candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama. After taking an early lead in the GOP primary competition, he eventually finished third.

The Durants’ kids are now grown up. The youngest, Michael, was an ice hockey player.
In Alabama?

“Yep,” said Durant. “We have ice in Alabama. And Michael was on a travel team, decisively engaged in ice hockey operations. The problem was that the trips could be long ones. Like 7 ½ hour drives to Columbus, Ohio.”
Durant often thinks of New Hampshire and savors his visits “home.”

“I was always excited to see the Red Sox in the World Series,” said Durant. “Of course. But it broke my heart when Wilderness Ski Area closed.”

Durant occasionally returned to the Granite State to play in the Concord Black Ice Pond Hockey Tournament at White’s Park.

How did he do?

“Well, I’m proud to say that one year my team was the ‘Over-40 B-Division’ champs,” said Durant.

You can take the man out of Hockey Town, but you can’t take Hockey Town out of the man!

 

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We have the results of our poll, and they are this. It is not a compelling point of interest. However, among those who did check in and voiced their preference, Donald Trump had a slight lead over Jim Jordan (whom Trump endorsed).

Trump corraled 44.83% of the vote, followed by Jordan with 34.48%. Fewer than 30 readers cast a vote.

 

[Original published 7 Oct 2023]

Shortly after Kevin McCarthy had to hand over the gavel, Troy Nehls, a Republican from Texas, nominated Donald Trump as Speaker of the US House of Representatives. I didn’t think Trump would want the job or could get it.

But Trump teased us with the prospect before he endorsed Jim Jordan for the job. I’m sure it was all in good fun, by which I mean something to make the Libs snap like twigs for the next 24-48 hours while the Demedia ranted about the prospect.

I’m not sure any of that happened, but no matter what you think about The Donald, he knows how to tweak the producers at MSNC and CNN. I can see him looking at his phone, turning to whoever happens to be in the room, an almost child-like joy in his eyes, as he says, “Watch this.”

I’m not advocating Trump for Speaker, and he’s not asking anyone to make him Speaker. He’s got eyes for another trip around the Oval Office. But we’re not afraid to present a position for debate to see what shakes out. It doesn’t have to be ours; it just has to be and be honest. Trump as Speaker would be so much fun to watch.

I’ve included announced and potential names for the gig. Not all of them will run, but for whom would you vote if they did? Feel free to elaborate in the comments, including adding your suggestions below.

The Poll ends Sunday at midnight.

 

This poll is no longer accepting votes

Who Would You Choose for Speaker of the US House?

• Donald Trump
• Jim Jordan (Ohio)
• Steve Scalise (Louisiana)
• Kevin Hern (Oklahoma)
• Elise Stefanik, New York
• Byron Donalds, Florida

Vote

 

The post Poll: Trump for Speaker of the US House … ? [Results] appeared first on Granite Grok.

Israel is thought to have the most sophisticated systems in the world for protecting their homeland and people. The Iron Dome defies the imagination with the ease and precision it can intercept thousands of incoming missiles.

Their intelligence network is the gold standard; they usually know what their enemies think before the thoughts become reality. The protection they incorporate at all of its schools is without question of the presence of armed guards. Israel’s border and buffer zone is usually impenetrable until Friday night. The Gaza attack on Israel is an intelligence and military failure of epic proportions as the actions of Gaza and Iran are compared to our 9-11 and Pearl Harbor. This is not just a day or weekend of violence. This begins an all-out war as we wait to see who is involved and where it will be fought. Israel is prepared to protect itself, and once it recovers from the shock and surprise of this attack, it will unleash fury on those responsible.

This region’s battle over land and religion goes back to Biblical times. This battle will be a clash of two cultures and powers. Israel has been on guard, protecting its existence since it was created after World War II, and they have built a sophisticated and powerful military. Hamas and Iran are a collection of tribes. They have no conscience and will commit atrocities as they scream “Death to Israel and America.”

The question on everyone’s mind is who else will get involved. Will other countries in the Middle East stay out of the conflict, or will they choose sides and further inflame the tensions in the region? Just this week, Saudi Arabia and Israel reported they were close to a historic peace agreement. The world was excited about the possibility of these two perennial enemies finally shaking hands in peace, and that may now be in jeopardy. The feckless United Nations will meet this week to discuss this weekend’s happenings. It is a dog and pony show, as the international body is powerless and no longer significant. The appointment of Ali Bahreini, Ambassador of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Permanent Representative to the United Nations, to chair the 2023 United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) Social Forum is nothing more than a slap in the face given the human rights situation of most Iranians.

What I meant by the title is how vital a defined and secure border is to a sovereign country. The reinforced border between Israel and Gaza is considered one of the most secure in the world. Yet, it was not enough to keep the terrorist gangs from breaching it in over twenty locations—the breakdown in border security hints at collusion between some Israeli military and the Hamas terrorists. To parallel this Middle East situation with our border, we have collusion between the cartels and the Democrats. Israel knows exactly who came across their border. We have no idea who comes across ours.

It will be interesting to see how our relationship with Israel draws us into the fight. Biden and Blinkin have indicated our full support-“full stop,” as our eloquent President said. The Progressive Democrats, namely Omar and Cortez, have already called for a cease fire. They may as well pledge their support for Gaza. The anti-Semitic feelings of the Radical Left came through in their comments. Again, even when one of our most important allies is attacked, we cannot unite in our support. It is a sad observation of where we are as a divided country.

The post Border Lessons From Israel appeared first on Granite Grok.

Electric Vehicles are already impossible to make without coal. You can’t make steel without it, and there are only so many parts you can replace with polymers. Mining, moving, and processing copper, cobalt, building frames, and axels – it can’t be done. And now, Panasonic’s new EV battery plant has another coal-related problem.

 

In accordance with the Biden regime’s ongoing efforts to force all Americans into an EV, Panasonic has built a $4 billion EV battery factory in the small Kansas City exurb of De Soto.

Local media reports state that the factory will require anywhere from 200 to 250 megawatts of electricity to function. This is roughly the amount of power needed to keep the lights on in a small city.

On track to receive a whopping $6.8 billion from fake president Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, Panasonic is proving once again that in order to create “clean” energy, you have to burn a lot of “dirty” energy, rendering it a pointless endeavor.

The amount of energy the new Panasonic EV battery facility needs is so high, in fact, that a representative from Evergy, the public utility serving the factory, testified before the Kansas City Corporation Commission that there are serious “near-term challenges from a resource adequacy perspective.”

 

A nuclear power plant could handle that just fine, but … those aren’t allowed.

 

“A 15-pound lithium-ion battery holds about the same amount of energy as a pound of oil. To make that battery requires 7,000 pounds of rock and dirt to get the minerals that go into that battery,” reports Cowboy State Daily. “The average EV battery weighs around 1,000 pounds.”

“All of that mining and factory processing produces a lot more carbon dioxide emissions than a gas-powered car, so EVs have to be driven around 50,000 to 60,000 miles before there’s a net reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.”

 

It isn’t easy being green!

 

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The big problems in SAU16/Exeter started with closing down schools during COVID. Parents were left begging district administrators and school board members to reopen the schools and make masks optional. Unfortunately, they were ignored, and the Governor had to step in and force them to reopen.

Then, there was the push to force Critical Race Theory on students. The district website was full of CRT-related propaganda. After hiring the DEIJ Director, parents could see the shift away from focusing on quality academics to more of a radical political agenda that would be aimed at their children.

All of this was reflected in lower proficiency scores among the student population. This district used to be one of the most admired districts in the state, but that was changing– SAU16 was spiraling downward.

How many families were they willing to lose?
Parents began organizing in order to open up a Charter School that was focused on quality academics. Some families chose to move, some chose to send their children to better schools.

SAU 16’s political agenda even extended to the removal of Columbus Day from the school calendar. Much of the agenda to remove Columbus Day has come from hate organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. Who made this decision in SAU16? Why did they remove Columbus Day? Did they do any kind of extensive research on Columbus, or are they following the trendy political narrative that distorts actual historical facts? Political agendas seem to rule this district now.

Finally, SAU16 was committed to indoctrinating students into the Critical Race Theory or anti-racist mindset. This ideology has been pushed by CRT radicals like Ibram X. Kendi for many years. After promoting this hate-filled ideology as “anti-racist,” many people can now see that it actually encourages racial discrimination. The New York Times even published an op-ed entitled “Antiracism Was Never the Right Answer.”  Now, they tell the truth about CRT. Will the anti-racists involved in our public schools finally admit the truth? I wouldn’t hold my breath; many of the people dividing our children make a lot of money peddling hate and division.

It appears that it took the collapse of Kendi’s Boston University Center for Antiracist Research, which offered no meaningful research from the $50 million in donations, to finally get people to admit that his ideology teaches children how to hate.  Kendi himself says, “the only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination.”   SAU16 was on its way to teaching children to hate based on race. It was more about pushing a hate-filled narrative versus anything worthwhile, like improving academic outcomes. The DEIJ scam is now getting the scrutiny it deserves. What did they do to help with the achievement of black children who deserve so much more than what these public schools are now offering?

How much money has been wasted in this district on political agendas, and ignoring parents, while students were denied a quality academic education that could open doors for them in the future?

District administrators and board members owe SAU16 families a big apology for what they’ve done to destroy their reputation. They can never repair the academic damage they’ve done to the children who’ve come through this public school system.  They should be doing everything to separate from this latest political fad and refocus on academic excellence for all of their students.

Kendi’s toxic ideology was a perverse goal of racial equity. It meant lowering standards to achieve equal outcomes by racial groups. That’s essentially what happened after they hired David Ryan as their Superintendent. Now that he’s left, nothing has really changed. Parents have to fight to be heard but continue to be ignored. Where is any meaningful changes that will uplift the academics in the district?

DEIJ, CRT, and political agendas continue to dominate the district at the expense of academic excellence.  A good leader would develop a strategy to achieve equal opportunity for all students and a pathway that prioritizes responsibility over equity and anti-racism.

It’s time for parents to start demanding better from school administrators and board members.

 

The post More Proof SAU16/Exeter is Failing Their Students and Community appeared first on Granite Grok.

There was a time when Iowa attracted people and politicians who would show up and party like it was in 1959. The residents would then, after close to a year of this, gather in barns or local veterans halls (or wherever) and raise a hand for a candidate of their choice.

By the end of that day, each party would announce whom they’d prefer as a nominee for the office of the president of the United States (whether that was who they picked or not). I guess you could see why enthusiasm for what happens in Iowa has waned in recent years. Then, in 2020, it took days for the Lefties to decide which Democrat had won, which, to me, sounds like how every election works these days.

Am I wrong?

As it stands, Iowa has other issues that Democrats in Iowa, much like New Hampshire, failed or just refused to address. Their party’s obsession with color before content, for example. A trend we can only assume will evolve – as progressive things are wont to do – to punishing states that don’t leave the genderizer on full both day and night to crank out transvestite candidates or those who’ve had their private bits removed.  Men pretending to be women, and so on, who will claim to be suicidal if you don’t nominate them.

In due course, but Iowa has more problems today than it can handle.

Iowa used to be important to Democrats. Iowa has more corn than pigs, and corn begets ethanol, which begot an influential lobby about which the Electric Car bugaboo party could care less. Cars that don’t use motor fuels don’t need those fuels contaminated with ethanol from Iowa.

Corn can still find a home in cancer-causing sweeteners (High Fructose Corn Syrup) as well as regular corn syrup or corn oil, with some left for sale as corn—the vegetable. But if Dems don’t have any use for liquid fuel, what happens to the 52,000 jobs and 7.2 BIllion dollars ethanol generates (52% of the corn in Iowa ends up ethanol)?

That would be up to Republicans, who didn’t change their caucus. It’s January 15th. But what about those Democrats?

 

Iowa Democrats will be able to register to receive a presidential preference card in the mail starting November 1. Those cards will start being mailed out on January 12, 2024, and the last day to request one will be February 19. The state party will release results on March 5, which is also the last day that voters can mail their cards.

Iowa Democrats will also hold in-person caucuses on January 15, the same day that Iowa Republicans will gather, but those meetings only be used to conduct party business, not to vote for president.

 

Voting for the nominee is not party business. Not this time. The DNC has kicked Iowa Dems in their caucus, bumping the results from the front of the line to Super Tuesday. Sixteen live primaries plus reading off whoever the party wants to win Iowa. That’s like taking your State Party front man/woman/whatever and tossing them into the chorus where they don’t even get to perform. Someone reads some results compiled from mail-in cards, which, as we all know, are subject to fraud. Just ask Jimmy Carter or the rest of the Western World. No one else elects anyone like that becasue – and there is some consensus – it is not secure, and never shall it be.

As for Iowa Corn vs. the Dem’s EV future, sure, the price will collapse, but if that’s what ails you, sell it to poor countries who can’t grow anything on the land ruined by China’s monopoly on third-world rare earth metals mined to make battery packs for EV that don’t need ethanol – the motor fuel of a future with no fuel.

Or you can sell your land to a billionaire. He’ll leave it fallow until he can score a giant taxpayer-subsidized contract to cover it with wind turbines or solar panels that’ll make electricity that much more unaffordable, but the Iowans can then fight the illegals for “green jobs” swabbing the dirt of the solar arrays or picking up dead birds beneath the unrecyclable but environmentally conscious “windmills.”

Who knows. One day, not long-form now, when Iowa has been transformed by the progressive utopians into a green energy parking lot, the Democrats will put you back at the front of the line. You can be the first state to pretend you get to pick the Democrat nominee for president, which, if we’re honest, is what you’ve been doing.

Hey, is the postage prepaid on those presidential preference cards or do you have to pay for that too?

 

The post The DNC Just Kicked Iowa in the ‘Caucus’ appeared first on Granite Grok.

Imagine, if you will, a government funded by user fees instead of by taxes.

Are you being defended? The defense department can send you a bill for that. Is Congress doing something for you? It can send you a bill for that.

The nice thing about approaching things this way is that if Congress is doing something that you don’t want it to do (like invading Iraq, or giving money to solar energy companies, or sending retirement checks to millionaires), or that it shouldn’t be doing, or that doesn’t benefit you, or that it’s totally screwed up, then you don’t pay.

With user fees, you know exactly what you’re paying for.

Could you imagine taking your car to be fixed and being handed an un-itemized bill, so you don’t know whether you’re being charged for parts, labor, or work that they did on other people’s cars, or beer and pizza for after-work parties, or anything else?

Or could you imagine getting a bill from a local garage that you’ve never used, demanding that you pay for work done on cars owned by people you don’t know? No one would stand for it. But that’s basically how taxes work.

Where government user fees are concerned, they can’t be more than a typical person can afford to pay. That places a cap on what can be spent. This is the argument for uniform taxes in the Federalist Papers:  They have natural limits that do not apply to progressive taxes or even so-called ‘flat’ taxes.

You can’t just decide to spend a bunch of money and then figure out who can afford to pay how much for the total, which is basically how taxes work.

But if the government is merely enforcing contracts, punishing crimes (as opposed to sins and vices), and repelling invasions — in other words, protecting the rights of the people, as opposed to ‘protecting’ the people — how much would that really cost?

By hiding what’s going on, and by divorcing collection from spending, taxes encourage the government to expand into all kinds of areas where it has no business doing anything. That leads directly to the ability of wealthy and well-connected people to make use of government to pursue their goals using force instead of persuasion.

This is to say, taxes amplify, rather than reduce, coercion and undermine, rather than enhance, equality before the law.

Except uniform taxes, which work this way:  Here’s the total bill, T, for what the government is doing. There are N people in the country (or the state or the town), so your share of the bill is T/N.

This is like a user fee, with a lot of individual fees wrapped up into one payment.

Of course, if the total bill includes subsidies to particular businesses or industries or payments to particular classes of people, then it’s not a user fee at all.  It’s just a hidden form of wealth redistribution:  Do a favor to someone, while passing the cost along to everyone.

That’s why each person would have to get not just a number (‘Here’s what you owe’), but an itemized bill (‘Here’s what we did for you, personally’), on which individual amounts could be challenged (‘No, I didn’t really benefit from spending $500 million on training Syrian rebels, or from spending $200 thousand on sports at our local schools’).

The federal government alone is on track to spend about $6.9 trillion next year. With a uniform tax, they’d be sending everyone a bill for $6,900,000,000,000/330,000,000, which is just shy of $21,000. And that’s every person. A family of four would get a bill for $84,000.

Imagine, if you will, the kind of reaction that would generate and the kinds of changes that would ensue. Better yet, try imagining ever getting to that point in the first place if taxes were uniform, i.e., if government was funded with user fees. It couldn’t happen. Taxes made it possible.

But what about essential spending, like defense?  The defense budget is around $800 billion.  Divide the cost by the population, and everyone gets a bill for about $2400.  That’s steep but payable — and it includes a lot of things that aren’t, strictly speaking, about ‘defending’ anything but jobs.

Of course, most of what government does isn’t like defense. It’s mostly telling some people that they must do things or can’t do things;  taking property from some people to give it to others; and so on. Most of what government does benefits one group at the expense of everyone else — or as Tommy Shelby put it, deliberately makes things better for some people by deliberately making them worse for other people.

And this is all possible because we’ve been conditioned to think that majority approval by a group of a few hundred people in one city somehow represents ‘the decisions of the whole’.  But to follow the decisions of the whole, government shouldn’t be able to do anything without, say, 95% approval.

Imagine, if you will, a country where no new law (or expenditure) could be authorized without support from 95% of the entire memberships of the House and Senate, or their state-level equivalents; and where any existing law could be repealed with 5% support from the same.

We’d still have laws against directly harming persons and property.  We’d still have laws against theft, robbery fraud, and breach of contract.

But we wouldn’t have laws enforcing tribal preferences regarding things like marriage, self-medication, voluntary exchanges of goods and services, unpopular forms of entertainment, and so on.  We wouldn’t have laws that redistribute wealth from the people who earned it to other people who are believed, by a small number of elected officials and unelected bureaucrats, to deserve it.  We wouldn’t be authorizing the use of our armed forces to police the world and try to remake other countries in our own image.  And so on.

If we took seriously the idea that government should follow the decisions of the whole, rather than the decisions of a plurality, the government would be at least two orders of magnitude smaller than it is.  And it would be at least an approximation to the government that we were promised in the Declaration of Independence:  One that protects our rights, and derives its just powers from our consent.

Imagine, if you will, having a government like that.

 

The post Imagine, if you will… appeared first on Granite Grok.

Resolution To Restrict The Primaries To Registered Republicans (Resolution #2) proposed by Karen Testerman was passed at the January 28, 2023 Annual Meeting. It resolved that:

We want to thank NHGOP Chairman Chris Ager for this Contribution – Please direct yours to Editor@GraniteGrok.com.
You can review our ‘Op-Ed Guidelines‘ on the FAQ Page.

“1. The Republican State Committee adopts the rule that only voters who register as Republicans 30 days prior to the primary election day may receive and mark a Republican ballot for the primary election;”

I take the views of the State Committee very seriously, and my first order of business after being elected on 28 January 2023 was to visit the Secretary of State’s office to determine how this Resolution could be implemented.

After investigating applicable state law in consultation with the Secretary of State’s office, it was determined that the resolution violated state law and could not be adopted. Specifically, the critical “30 day prior” provision of the resolution violates RSA 654:7 a&b (same-day registration), and RSA 654:32/34 (change of registration).

I informed the prime sponsor of the Resolution and Executive Board of the problem at my first meeting as Chairman on February 6th.

Presidential Primary campaigns have also been informed that there will be no change to our current First In The Nation Primary selection process and have been campaigning accordingly.

The next opportunity to address this issue is January 13, 2024, at our next Annual Meeting.  If a legal by-law was adopted, it could be in force for the 2024 State primary. My suggestion to the sponsors is to bring forth a By-Law Amendment that complies with State Law for consideration and critical analysis of the impact by the entire Committee.  I will help sponsors through the process as desired to ensure the activity meets the required standards.

My primary purpose is to help get Republicans elected and represent the views of the State Committee.

 

Chris Ager
Chairman, NHGOP
chrisager@nhrsc.com

The post Why The Current Closed Primary Resolution Cannot be Adopted appeared first on Granite Grok.