The Manchester Free Press

Tuesday • January 27 • 2026

Vol.XVIII • No.V

Manchester, N.H.

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News – Politics – Opinion – Podcasts
Updated: 28 sec ago

“Independents For Nikki” is a Bush Family Anti-Trump Front

Mon, 2024-01-29 01:00 +0000

In the aftermath of the New Hampshire primary and the double-digit beating suffered by Nikki Haley, we received all sorts of tips and details, one of which was a query. Do you have any idea who is behind the group Independents Moving the Needle?

Their name is at the bottom of all the Independents for Nikki signs you may have seen near polling places. These were out along the NH Seacoast town, I believe – And yes, I figured it out – the headline gives it away. And no, I am not surprised, though I am that it didn’t catch our eye sooner.

I did some digging at the behest of a reader, and while this isn’t always the case, it was easy enough to discover what the group was about. FEC Records identify Jonathon S. Bush as the custodian and treasurer with an address of PO Box 202 North Hampton, New Hampshire 03862. with PrimaryBank 207 Route 101 Bedford, New Hampshire 03110 as the bank of depositories.

The name Bush raised an eyebrow; yes, he is related to George Bush and the Bush Family. I ran down a pic that happened to look like this guy in a Fox Biz report titled Nikki Haley, getting backing from Wall Street Billionaires. We knew that, so it all fit together very nicely. Another Trump-Hating uniparty Bushie (who lives in Massachusetts) meddling in NH Elections.

ABC News reported all that back in November, and think about the precious minutes I could have saved had I landed there first.

Led by five entrepreneurs — including Jonathan Bush, the cousin of former President George W. Bush, and billionaire CEO Frank Laukien — the PAC, called Independents Moving the Needle, says it will focus its efforts on New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary. About 40% of voters in the state are registered as undeclared.

Gov. Chris Sununu, whose dad worked for and is presumably still tight with the family, was kind enough to let slip the deeper goal. Get their Trump-Hating allies in the Democrat party to vote for Haley as well – and some did. Haley’s path to the Republican nomination is paved – as thin as it is .. would be paved with … Democrat votes.

Related: Did Haley-Homer Chris Sununu Just Help Us Close the NH Republican Primary?

More from ABC.

The PAC is chaired by five relative outsiders to the world of dark money politics. Laukein and his wife, Tamra, who lead companies in life sciences, are joined by Bush, CEO of a healthcare data company, and Bonnie Anderson, CEO of PinkDx, a private cancer-testing company. Robert Fisher, a white-collar attorney and a former federal prosecutor, also helped to found and is now leading the group.

Tamara was the first link that led me to Bush family backing, which is one of several RINO spigots used by the uniparty to flush out non-globalist candidates for higher office. We’ve seen that up close at work in New Hampshire. When the state Delegates elected Jack Kimball as party chair, the Sununu Klan – taken entirely by surprise – went to work locking Jack out from any big donors. In other words, they were happy to see the state party and its candidates fail rather than allow someone they could not control to lead the apparatus.

And we see it with Haley and Trump, which should make anyone who thought Haley wasn’t somehow someone they thought they could control accept the likelihood that she has to be.

Or, and this is still a possibility, their Trump derangment syndrome is so advanced she is merely a beneficiary of their uniparty largess. A candidate that could lose and not bitch about how the same people that got her nominated made sure someone more to their liking won the crown, even if it was a Democrat.

Related: Does Haley’s Second Place NH Finish Need an Asterisk*

There’s nothing independent about Independents for Nikki. It is a very partisan operation focused on uni party dominance, and it will do anything to avoid speed bumps, especially named Trump. Luckily for us, the peasants are not so easily bought, and what happened in Iowa and New Hampshire will continue across the country, and the Bushes and Sununus and the rest can’t stop it.

I’m sure it affirms in their minds how incapable we are of self-governance.

And yes, you would be right to wonder what they’d be willing to do next because they don’t care what America wants. When you’ve reached that point – and we are long past it – anything (as we have seen) is possible.

The post “Independents For Nikki” is a Bush Family Anti-Trump Front appeared first on Granite Grok.

Categories: Blogs, New Hampshire

Gun Control Hearing – January 31st

Sun, 2024-01-28 23:00 +0000

From the Women’s Defense League:  On Wednesday January 31st at 3:15 PM there will be a gun control hearing in the House Judiciary Committee.

The bill is House Bill 1037 – AN ACT relative to repealing limited liability for manufacturers, distributors, dealers, or importers of firearms or ammunition.

This legislation tries to hold firearms and ammunition manufacturers liable for the actions of humans who use their products.

Firearms manufacturers manufacture inanimate objects. The objects themselves can do nothing without human interaction. Somehow, the gun control crowd at the State House feels manufacturers should be held responsible for what a human does with their inanimate product after they purchase it.

Of course, this bill makes zero sense. What’s next, holding automobile manufacturers liable for the actions of drunk drivers? Holding knife manufacturers for the actions of a criminal who stabs someone? Holding match manufacturers responsible for a person who commits arson?

You can email or call the House Judiciary Committee members below:

First Name Last Name Email Phone
Joe Alexander Joe.Alexander@leg.state.nh.us (603) 856-5227
Louise Andrus Louise.Andrus@leg.state.nh.us (603) 648-2510
Shelley Devine Shelley.Devine@leg.state.nh.us
Charlotte DiLorenzo Charlotte.DiLorenzo@leg.state.nh.us (603) 659-2140
Jeffrey Greeson Jeffrey.Greeson@leg.state.nh.us
Timothy Horrigan Timothy.Horrigan@leg.state.nh.us (603) 868-3342
Cam Kenney Cam.Kenney@leg.state.nh.us (508) 677-5141
Katelyn Kuttab Katelyn.Kuttab@leg.state.nh.us
Judi Lanza Judi.Lanza@leg.state.nh.us (603) 361-2657
Bob Lynn rjlynn4@gmail.com (603) 598-1899
Zoe Manos zoe.manos@leg.state.nh.us
Ben Ming Ben.Ming@leg.state.nh.us
Mark Paige mark.paige@leg.state.nh.us
Kristine Perez Kristine.Perez@leg.state.nh.us
Marjorie Smith msmithpen@aol.com (603) 868-7500
Walter Stapleton Walt.Stapleton@leg.state.nh.us (603) 542-8656
Dave Testerman dave@sanbornhall.net (603) 320-9524
Richard Tripp richard.tripp@leg.state.nh.us
Eric Turer Eric.Turer@leg.state.nh.us (603) 642-4888
Scott Wallace Scott.Wallace@leg.state.nh.us

You can send testimony opposing the bill or just sign in to oppose the bill online here: https://gencourt.state.nh.us/house/committees/remotetestimony/default.aspx

Example of the online sign in:

The post Gun Control Hearing – January 31st appeared first on Granite Grok.

Categories: Blogs, New Hampshire

HB-1175: Another Attempt to Repair SB2

Sun, 2024-01-28 21:00 +0000

To set the stage: Town meetings are dominated by the people who receive, benefit from or massage taxpayer loot. The “official ballot referendum town meeting” or SB2 procedure took away from town meetings the power to make final budget decisions for the upcoming year.

It became a “deliberative town meeting” and merely decided the wording of budgetary questions. These went onto the secret ballot, along with the selection of municipal officials.

Deliberative town meetings involved fewer voters than the old style had. However, Election Day involved many more voters than town meetings ever did – including the infirm, snowbirds, people with jobs who vote absentee, and deployed members of the military services. Limiting spending finally became feasible – and the big spenders began scheming.

Those managing deliberative town meeting first turned to sabotage. Warrant articles “To see if the town will appropriate $1 million” were amended to read “To see,” but we now have a law against that. Unfortunately, we cannot legislate against every bad-faith tactic. In one notorious Exeter meeting, a motion of No Confidence in the Superintendent was amended to be a “motion of Confidence”? Yawn!

Adopting or rescinding the SB2 procedure required a 60% vote. In 2019, a Democrat legislature finally hit upon the solution, amending RSA 131 so that the vote to switch to a secret ballot was made not by secret ballot but at *town meeting itself*. Advocates said this would produce a more immediate result, but the obvious intent and the result was to break SB2. No town meeting is going to marshal a 60% vote to give up some of its own power! And indeed, it seems no town in New Hampshire has adopted the SB2 procedure since 2019 Chapter 131 became law.

* * * * *

House Bill 1175 would reverse this change and put the decision to adopt the SB2 procedure back on the secret ballot. It will still take a 60% majority to adopt or rescind, but will throw the question open to all the town’s voters, rather than those who can devote an entire evening to town meeting, no matter how you feel about being hissed at by schoolmarms and wondering if they will retaliate against your kids.

House Bill 1175 is the biggest game-changer, in terms of citizen control of government overspending, that has a chance of being passed this year. It was assigned to the Municipal and County Government Committee but does not yet have a hearing date. My town’s library has a message on the marquee that suggests that the insiders understand the threat and are organizing to defeat it. Grok readers ought to understand the promise and contact their representatives.

The post HB-1175: Another Attempt to Repair SB2 appeared first on Granite Grok.

Categories: Blogs, New Hampshire

What Do Evil A.I. and Members of Congress Have in Common?

Sun, 2024-01-28 19:00 +0000

Whenever anyone talks about Artificial Intelligence, even the least capable pop-culture dullard will conjure an image of Skynet from the Terminator series – or something similar. Joshua from War Games, perhaps. None of this stops anyone from trying (we’re an arrogant lot), including Google’s Anthropic, which created an evil AI.

Maybe evil is the wrong word, given the current fancy with relativism. How about deceptive?

In a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed new paper, researchers at the Google-backed AI firm Anthropic claim they were able to train advanced large language models (LLMs) with “exploitable code,” meaning it can be triggered to prompt bad AI behavior via seemingly benign words or phrases. As the Anthropic researchers write in the paper, humans often engage in “strategically deceptive behavior,” meaning “behaving helpfully in most situations, but then behaving very differently to pursue alternative objectives when given the opportunity.” If an AI system were trained to do the same, the scientists wondered, could they “detect it and remove it using current state-of-the-art safety training techniques?”

As you might have guessed, given the foreshadowing of dystopian doom in my opening, the answer is no. The naughty AI was a lot like many of the once-well-meaning individuals we sacrificed on the altar of the US Congress.

The Anthropic scientists found that once a model is trained with exploitable code, it’s exceedingly difficult — if not impossible — to train a machine out of its duplicitous tendencies. And what’s worse, according to the paper, attempts to reign in and reconfigure a deceptive model may well reinforce its bad behavior, as a model might just learn how to better hide its transgressions.

And, just like Congress, they share similar trajectories. Left unchecked (or unplugged), they will turn on you – if the dystopian fantasies are accurate—a projection of ourselves at our worst expressed as destructive self-interest.

It is why America’s founders tried to separate and constrain power, knowing all too well that anything made by man is as likely as not to revert to mankind’s worst impulses.

And so it has.

So, let’s not hook the AI up to the nuclear umbrella, just in case.

 

Edited after publications, with apologies to Joshua for getting his name wrong the first time.

The post What Do Evil A.I. and Members of Congress Have in Common? appeared first on Granite Grok.

Categories: Blogs, New Hampshire

Kamala On Tour With Soft Media

Sun, 2024-01-28 17:00 +0000

Two interviews with Vice President Kamala Harris this week showed how soft the Media will be on the Biden Administration, specifically the Vice President, during this election year. Laura Coates of CNN and Katie Couric on her Podcast, “Next Question,” embarrassed themselves as journalists.

Embarrassed is a harsh word, but when you have an opportunity to speak one-on-one with anyone, you have a responsibility to challenge responses with sharp, insightful follow-up questions. You need to push back on answers that you know are not accurate. Neither of these women challenged any comment from the Vice President and were complicit with their soft-hitting questions. They did not do their jobs for the American people.

Coates was especially patronizing with her question to Harris about the criticism she receives.

COATES: “Let me ask you one more question. I’m struck just in your presence. I was watching you on stage, watching the reactions from the crowd, looking you in the eye with your passion that you were displaying and talking about so many issues. And yet, you hear candidates suggesting that a vote for President Biden, because of his age, is somehow a vote for you. And that is hurled as an insult. It’s intended to demonstrate some negative viewpoint towards you. What is your reaction to this thought that with your background in particular, with your career, that there is some thought that you are incapable?”

You know the question will not be a fastball under the chin when it starts with the reporter stating how awe-struck she was by Harris. This was obviously a staged and rehearsed campaign spot and not an interview. There was no fact-finding, There was no digging. Kamala Harris had free reign to spew talking points that were simply false.

The same scenario played out with Couric. It was a love fest where Couric was happy just to have the Vice President on her podcast and forgot that people tune in to podcasts for content, and what Harris supplied was tainted at best. She went into a monologue about what would happen if Trump were to win in November, which should be canned as a premium example of projection.

Couric queried Harris about David Axelrod’s warning to Biden to “get going.”

I appreciate where he’s coming from — we all know what’s at stake, right? We talked about a lot of issues today, you and I, most of which are not binary. These are complex issues. [But] November of 2024 is binary — on the other side, you’ve got someone who has said that if he were back in office, he would weaponize the Department of Justice. Someone who has openly applauded insurrectionists as patriots and who has said that they will go after their political enemies and applauds dictators, indicating that he would be one. So, let’s be really clear about what’s at stake. Of course, there’s then a desire to get out there because we can’t lose this democracy. We can’t. And I am motivated by that passion.

First of all, to even allude to Trump weaponizing the Justice Department, Harris has to think we are ignorant or possess very short memories. No President in history has ever turned his Justice Department, including the FBI, against candidates of the other party or their citizen backers. Biden has gone after people who have not agreed with the Department of Education, Radical Catholics, and has worked with DAs in creating a maze of charges and trials for Trump to navigate when he would rather be campaigning. Biden also wants thousands of IRS agents to go after middle-class Americans when his son is charged with not paying his taxes. Trump kept our enemies at bay, and many of our adversaries will not even communicate with Biden. If we want to talk about insurrection, we have to discuss over 300,000 illegals coming into our country daily. And it burns me up when politicians talk about destroying our Democracy. We do not have one. We are a Constitutional Republic of 50 states.

If this is a preview of the next ten months, we better get ready for the Kamala fantasy tour, and the truth be damned.

The post Kamala On Tour With Soft Media appeared first on Granite Grok.

Categories: Blogs, New Hampshire

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