There are three main takeaways from 2023. Higher education, especially among the Ivy Leagues and other “elite” colleges, continues to be revealed for what it has become: a bloated, tenured-protected, and indoctrinating mess.

Three Ivy League college presidents recently went before Congress and gave arrogant and evasive answers to simple questions. It reminded me of the Supreme Court confirmation hearing of Ketanji Brown Jackson when she could not define a woman or man.

Colleges have morphed from institutes for learning into indoctrination camps designed to propagate leftist race and gender ideology. The worst extremes of the left have now become the norm at colleges, which are out of touch, expensive and arrogant. They used to be places that searched for the truth; now they create false narratives.

Colleges are so paralyzed by race that they cannot fire the plagiarizing president of Harvard, Dr. Claudine Gay. So far, 40 cases of plagiarism have suddenly been discovered after she angered Jewish people, something any educated person with common sense knows not to do. President Gay, who is black, implies the assertions are racial. She says she plans to address all this in her upcoming “I Have a Dream” speech on the National Mall in D.C.

Having coddled students for so long, businesses are no longer buying the colleges’ product: students. I am glad I got my degree in gender studies in the 80s, back when there were only two of them. I cannot image how confusing that degree would be now.

Colleges have become so PC and humorless that their choosing to become antisemitic should worry us. I would not bring Mel Brooks’ comedy “The Producers” to any Ivy League campus for fear the audience would not laugh at the “Springtime for Hitler” song, but instead join in.

Secondly, it was good to see America and candidates (mostly Republicans like Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis) push back on the idea of Washington getting us into another war of choice. Biden and the Beltway permanent political class love war now. And to keep us funding his honey hole ATM, Ukraine, Biden pandered to students by pretending he could wipe out their student loans.

The loans that college students signed up for to get degrees are worthless, like the course/major called “Taylor Swift Studies.” Getting out of college is much like breaking up with Taylor Swift; in a year or so you will be paying a severe price.

Biden did say that any young person killed in his pending World War III will have his or her government student loans forgiven.

Lastly, women and men taking advantage of the #MeToo movement have been dealt a blow. Kevin Spacey, Johnny Depp and others with the guts to challenge old claims have won their cases. Being hit on or flirted with have morphed into sexual harassment and assault allegations. Kevin Spacey’s first accuser, a massage therapist who said Spacey groped him, died suddenly after filing suit. This made me think the Clintons are now franchising.

In testimony, a witness said Kevin Spacey “would not hurt a fly.” (I guess as long as it is not open.) It’s clear: If Kevin Spacey, Chris Rock or Russell Brand were not rich celebs, these cases would not have been filed. Had the #MeToo movement gone unchecked and allowed to go any further, I was going to sue for harassment. If my lawyer asked who I wanted to sue, I would’ve said, “Anyone who will settle.”

When the #MeToo movement took the fun out of being a Democrat in elected office, the left backed off. They certainly have kept the Epstein Island guest list under wraps. It is still the only secret in D.C.

Opportunists used the #MeToo trend to shake down the rich and famous for purported sexual encounters from decades ago. When egregious crimes like rape, sexual assault and pedophilia go unpunished because people use the heightened #MeToo attention to threaten criminal charges in order to enhance their civil suit shakedowns, we are all worse off. It’s gotten where it is a career risk being social with co-workers.

In short, not a single Founding Father or president would have survived this #MeToo movement. Not a single male Republican Supreme Court nominee has since 2016 has not been attacked by an old allegation. Rest assured, if Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullet had not gotten JFK in 1963, the #MeToo movement in 2018 would have killed him at the ripe old age of 101.

A libertarian op-ed humorist and award-winning author, Ron does commentary on radio and TV. He can be contacted at Ron@RonaldHart.com or @RonaldHart on Twitter.

Ron Hart | Daily Caller

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The post College Campuses, Warmongering, and #MeToo appeared first on Granite Grok.

Pro-Palestinians demonstrating in so many places, including barricading JFK and LAX today. Is their goal to change minds? Intimidate? Demoralize? Will their opponents ever use the Dublin model and fight back against them? Will Trump pick Haley as V.P.? Don Jr. said he’d do anything to stop it from happening. Was a tax on unrealized gains a Trump idea or a Biden idea? Which presidents/leaders were most responsible for the growth in power of China?

The post The Conservatarian Exchange Podcast #186 appeared first on The Liberty Block.

As GraniteGrok rolls into its 17th year at the helm of New Hampshire politics, we wish you and yours a Happy New Year. We hope you have some fond memories of the old year and great plans for the one ahead, regardless of how the political wind blows.

We will, of course, work to provide some direction and try to punch a few holes in our political opponent’s bilge barge. Changes are planned, but some things never change. We’re still your ‘Grok, so plenty of hyperbolic bomb-throwing will ensue.

Site updates are planned for Q1—a slightly different look. The ad-free VIP feature will build out from that—changing commenting systems. and new ways to sort content that addresses our expanded audience. The MicroGroks will be there, but you’ll be able to sift from any page by NH, New England, the Nation, and the World.

We’ll also be adding MaineGrok.

That Mobile App I’ve always wanted is lingering in the wings – and yes, I still want that, and I want it in 2024.

We are still hoping for a few generous sponsors willing to support independent media annually. ‘Grok can grow, but we need funding, and the consensus is no one wants more ads, including me. Ideally, we raise enough from subscribers, donors, and sponsors to make the Ad-Free VIP portion not just Ad-Free but premium content-only and the regular site Ad-Free. We need donors to do that, and it’s on the list.

Better search is still on the update bullet list, as is a dedicated Op-ed page that works a bit better than the way we do it now.

Given the new silo content sorting scheme, we’ll be moving toward – with a few exceptions – limiting MicroGrok content to articles about those towns or regions. No more general dumping of statewide, regional, national, or global content on those pages. They are useless as locals if the content isn’t local. And yes, I need to recruit more or newer creators willing to provide that focus for all of them.

Volunteers?

We need them for Nashua, Manchester, Hollis, Windham, Cheshire County (MonadnockGrok), Rockingham-Strafford County (SeacoastGrok), Belknap and Carrol  (Cty Lakes Region), North Country (Coos – no site until we find writers), as well as Derry Londonderry (no site yet), Concord (No site yet) and perhaps the River Valley (Belknap and Sullivan Cty. no site yet).

It may make more sense to do Greater Nashua, Greater Manchester, and GreaterConcord -regional pages. This would roll Derry/Londonderry into Manchester and Hollis into Nashua – and no, I’m not married to that idea yet.

VermontGrok needs more contributors, as will the newly minted but not yet live MaineGrok – both states deserve our attention as they have significant policy impacts on New Hampshire. What happens there, they want here.

The budget to run all of this will be more than we failed to raise in 2023, so anyone who is good at fundraising and will work on commission should contact me. I know – in an election year, good luck, Steve – but that’s what we need, so we’ll try to get there from here.

We’ve made a few strategic content-sharing arrangements so ‘Grok can help local independent media grow its audience while we grow ours.

It seems like a lot, but it all comes down to this. There are outlets repeating the news and those who will do more than challenge that status quo. We are the latter and can do more, but we’ll need more help and, yes – more financial support. I’m not linking to it here. The donate link is at the top of every page (GiveSendGo has no fees if you care). But there are plenty of ways to contribute that don’t include money. Content, contacts, content, relationships, and did I mention content?

The world is out to shut independent media down. We see that as no less of a challenge and intend to rise to meet it. We hope you can do more than just come along for the ride, but if your contribution is reading and sharing, we’re more than just happy to have you. We love our readers, even the ones who don’t always love us.

Now put your phone away and enjoy whatever New Year’s Eve thing is your thing. And if you are reading this on New Year’s Day or later, welcome to 2024. Let’s kick some ass.

 

The post Happy New Year! – Now, Let’s Take 2024 by the (You Know What) And Kick It (You Know Where) appeared first on Granite Grok.

If you take out and read the United States Constitution.
Or the New Hampshire Constitution.
Or the Declaration of Independence.
Or the federalist papers.
or Tom Paine’s work “common sense.”
You would not find “equity” (as used in DEI).

George Washington never advocated it.
Abraham Lincoln never mentioned it.
Nobody died at Gettysburg to promote it.

Now, to be sure, the thought changes if you talk about “equality,” not equity.
Equality is a common theme in our laws, our social norms, and in our history. To confuse the two is to confuse two views of civilization.

Equality means that the INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS of each citizen are treated equally by the Government. Equality is an intimate part of a system of Government that elevates the individual to the highest status and sees Government as existing to promote, protect, and defend the rights of the individual citizen. As a part of a system of individual rights, “equality” operates to protect those rights by forbidding Government from promoting one man’s or woman’s rights preferentially over another’s. My first amendment right to free speech is no better nor worse than my neighbor. I am entitled to the same due process as a citizen born across town or across the country. The key is “my” rights: equality is a part of making “my” rights prosper along with everyone else’s rights.

Equity” means that citizens belong to one of two classes: the oppressed or the oppressor. “Equity” assumes that all of society- on all levels (whether spiritual, historical, legal, or educational) – is explained by these two classes. “Equity” declares that individual rights are really just an illusion imposed by the oppressor class to marginalize the oppressed. “Equity ” declares the role of Government (control belongs to a central Government, not local towns or cities) is to take control of society to un-oppress the oppressed and subdue the oppressors. CRT adds to this “equity,” the notion that the oppressors are white and the oppressed are not white.

For more than 250 years, we have been living in a world of individual rights and liberties, a world that treats citizens equally. Individuals may have seen themselves as oppressed, but the Government operated according to a constitution that valued and respected the individual. During all that time- 250 years- a lot of highly educated and freedom loving Judges, legislators, and citizens looked at and interpreted and enforced our Constitution through a filter of freedom, liberty, and individual rights. Not a one of them over 250 years-read “Equity” into the State of New Hampshire’s Constitution.

Kind of created a powerful log jam for the “equity” crowd: how do we replace the “liberty” and
“individual” freedoms Constitution with the value and norms of the “Equity” Constitution?

First step: Let Massachusetts tell us what is in our own Constitution!

Case 1: CLAREMONT SCHOOL DISTRICT V GOVERNOR OF NEW HAMPSHIRE 138 N H 183(1993)

Five “property poor” (as in the average home value for these folks is substantially less than in, say, Hollis) School districts plus one student and one taxpayer in each of these five districts sued the state, claiming that the State was not “spreading educational opportunities EQUITABLY among “its”( i e the entire student body of the state) students.

These plaintiffs argued that the State, as opposed to local school districts, had the duty to provide, on an equitable basis, the same education to each student in the State. A student in a property-poor district is denied “equitable” treatment if a student in a property rich district receives more money.

In other words, the plaintiffs argued basic principles of “Equity” and argued that the New Hampshire Constitution mandated such equity.

This infusion of “equity” was required, they claimed, due to the provision of part II, section 83(1774) of the Constitution, which reads:

“ART. 83: (ENCOURAGEMENT OF LITERATURE)

Knowledge and learning, generally diffused through a community, being essential to the preservation of a free Government…it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates…to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all the seminaries and public schools, to encourage private and public institutions, rewards and immunities for the promotion of agriculture,arts, sciences, commerce, trade, manufacturers…: to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and economy, honesty and punctuality, sincerity, sobriety, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people.”

When the Plaintiffs asserted that this provision of the Constitution MANDATED the State to take control of the education system and specifically the funding of each student on an equitable basis, the Honorable Judge Manias basically said, “HUH?”

“New Hampshire’s Encouragement of Literature Clause contains no language regarding equity, uniformity, or even adequacy of education. Thus, the New Hampshire Constitution imposed no qualitative standard of education which must be met. Likewise, the New Hampshire constitution imposes no quantifiable financial duty regarding education; there is no mention of funding or even providing or maintaining education. The only duty set forth is the amorphous duty to “…to cherish public schools and…to encourage private and public institutions.” The language is hortatory and not mandatory.”

It would seem that Judge Manias was spot on. How could anyone read the Encouragement of Literature clause any differently? The plain language is the plain language. Right? Right?

Nope.

In Claremont v Governor, the Supreme Court essentially said that to read the clear, unambiguous words in this clause so as to support our mandate that the State take over the school system, we must ignore the plain meaning and ask,” What did the people at the time mean by those words? “

Ok, fair enough -let’s do that. What did the folks in 1774 in New Hampshire mean when they wrote this article into the Constitution in 1774?

To find out, should we not look to the people in New Hampshire in 1774?

Nope.

We must look to the Massachusetts Supreme Court in 1993.

Why?

Because for a big part of New Hampshire’s history, up until 1680-nearly 100 years prior to the writing of the words we are trying to interpret – we were a part of Massachusetts. Therefore, a Massachusetts Supreme Court decision in 1993 provides mandatory guides for us to know what our citizens thought in 1774.

I hate to be repetitive, but HUH? WHAT? I am not making this up. It is what the New Hampshire Supreme Court said. Pull it up on Google and read it yourself.)

In Mcduffy v Secretary,415 Mass 545, the Mass Supreme Court (which, of course, is made up of justices who knew the citizens of New Hampshire back in 1774 because, after all, the idea is to interpret the subject clauses according to what the people at the time understood them to mean(sarcasm!)) ruled:

The phrase “duty…to cherish…the public schools encompass the duty (on the state) to provide an education to the people of the state.”

The New Hampshire Supreme Court held that because the 1993 Massachusetts court made this pronouncement, that the duty was now established in New Hampshire: Schools and school financing are the duty of the State.

OBJECTION, YOUR HONORS. For 250 years, the people’s legislators, judges, and citizens interpreted the subject phrase as Judge Manias did. Would that not be a better way to determine what the original authors meant?

What about 250 years when the good judges, legislators, and citizens of New Hampshire thought differently- thought like Judge Manias?

 

 

Nope.

The deal with this “problem,” the New Hampshire Supreme Court again turned for guidance to the Massachusetts case of Mcduffy:

Without any thoughtful basis, the Mcduffy court simply dismissed any idea that the founding fathers and mothers meant to place control of education into local hands by saying

“That local control and fiscal support has been placed in greater or lesser measure through our history on local governments does not dilute the validity of the conclusion that the duty to support public schools lies with the state.”

(Again HUH? What? Give me a reason. Saying what you feel or want is not a reason.)

In a nutshell, Judge Manias ruled that the plain meaning of the New Hampshire Constitution has no language of “equity” has no language saying that the State has the duty to run the schools. Moreover, 250 years of local school control, with local funding, say clearly that for 250 years, New Hampshire Judges, legislators and good citizens agreed with Judge Manias’ interpretation.

But… Massachusetts disagrees and because we were a part of Massachusetts until 1680, whatever they say goes. They say the state has the duty to provide for, control, and finance the school system by applying principles of EQUITY(DEI).

So, let’s ignore the language of the Constitution; let’s ignore 250 years of New Hampshire folks’ interpretation of the Constitution. And let’s apply Massachusetts law of 1993 to hold that the State of New Hampshire is under a constitutional level duty to take over the Education system, take control from the local school boards and citizens, and apply principles of equity to school financing.

This ruling was cataclysmic by every definition of the word. It represented a sea change of 250 years in how New Hampshire ran its schools. You may not realize how cataclysmic because, for the last thirty years, a lot of good folks in positions of power did not (my opinion) embrace the holding and fought it.

 

But the wealth, power, and persistence of the woke folks and the weakness of the non-woke means that what began thirty years ago is finally about to visit its full destructive force on the good parents, students, teachers, and taxpayers of this great State. Our system of local control will soon be replaced by a system of centralized control in Concord. An Equity-based tax system will take from the “oppressor” School districts and give to the “oppressed. ”

To understand more of what is happening, I invite your attention to part 2 of this article.

Simply put, there have been eight subsequent Supreme Court rulings – all chipping away at the traditional school system – replacing it with a system based upon EQUITY. Those 8 cases are now joined by two rather dramatic Superior court decisions coming out of Rockingham Superior Court. The full impact of this effort to fundamentally re structure the school system by filtering the New Hampshire Constitution through the eyes of DEI/Equity is now about to be felt. My opinion: we are about to see results -felt for the first time really in 2024-from these rulings that will fundamentally alter not only the school system (i.e., gut local control and local funding) but will fundamentally infuse the State with the EQUITY world view. Certainly, if the Courts are willing to do what they are doing to the school system, then what system is safe from the EQUITY rule?

 

Part 2 will explore Claremont II( Claremont v Governor 142 N H462(1997)), wherein the Court declared the system for funding education was unconstitutional because it was not based upon Equity.

The post Are the State Courts Trying To Transfer Control of School Districts to Central Command in Concord? appeared first on Granite Grok.

The year 2023 had so much potential. The usual suspects were screaming the hottest hotness ever. All that global boiling. The dry grass out west from a year with record snowfalls. Drought narratives meet climate narratives to spark a flame that rages (like wildfire) nationwide, but 2023 saw the lowest burn average in 25 years.

 

The news has been quite good this year with respect to the total number of acres burned on US soil due to wildfire activity. In fact, the total acreage burned this year is under 3 million (through 12/18) which is far below the 10-year average of nearly 7 million from 2013-2022 and the lowest since 1998.

One of the main contributing factors to the down year in overall US wildfire activity is the fact that it has been a mild year in California with the number of burned acres under 390,000 (as of 12/18). This value is down about 75% from the 5-year average of about 1.6 million acres burned in the Golden State (data source). The relatively mild year of 2023 follows another relatively mild year in 2022; however, the two years before that (2020, 2021) were some of the worst on record.

 

WUWT Also included a screen grab of the official government data, available here.

 

 

That’s not the only bad news for Captain Planet and the Climate Cult Profiteers. Overall, 2023, while sold with a hyperbolic fury as proof the world would end if we didn’t revert to stone tools and eating insects, was, in fact – boring. Nothing unexpected or exceptional if you are more interested in climate science than political science.

WUWT did a deep dive here, which was summed up like this.

 

We are all well aware of the narrative that the weather is quickly getting worse. Unfortunately, data does not agree.1

The weather — and certainly the impacts — of the past 12 months in the United States was actually pretty typical, even benign, in historical context.2

I’ll leave you with one more bit of data that is not at all interesting or exciting. NOAA’s USCRN Surface Temperature anomaly data for the US.

 

 

Boring. There is no evidence of a change in temperature trend, which means no boiling or roasting or hottest hotness. It’s just weather, and when you pile all that weather in a row, there’s nothing to see.

Sorry, one more “one more.” Tony Heller checked the Arctic Sea Ice Extent on Christmas Eve. It’s at its highest in Greta Thunberg’s lifetime.

 

 

 

Arctic sea ice has declined over the long term, but I read somewhere that the NAMO is expected to flip again soon, leading to expanding sea ice. None of which will stop the hyperbolic fury. The grift depends on it.

So, here’s to more news about wildfires, boiling, and sea ice news in 2024!

 

The post They Said “Global Warming” Will Affect Wildfires – 2023 Had Fewest Acres Burned This Century appeared first on Granite Grok.

We hear politicians spout it all the time when they are raising our taxes: “We’re just making them (of course not you) pay their fair share.” But what exactly is one’s “fair share,” and at what point can one be considered to be paying MORE than his or her “fair share”?

It seems like a good and important question to ask in this last post of 2023 and in anticipation of Vermont’s Democrat Supermajority returning to Montpelier next week for the start of the 2024 legislative session, looking, as they always do, to redefine this undefined term upward.

I have asked this question about what exactly a fair share is in the past. (Really fun to ask politicians on the campaign trail. Try it! The resulting squirming is impressive.) I get lots of answers, but rarely, if ever, a straight one, such as 20% of one’s income is enough. Or, as Bernie and his fellow travelers might say if they were being honest, “Everything you earn belongs to us, your government overlords. Just shut up and be happy we let you keep any of it.”  What do you think?

Anyway, we can expect a lot of “fair share” rhetoric buzzing through the airwaves and social media in 2024 as our so-called representatives find new and creative ways to screw hard-working Vermonters out of their wages to pay for more pet projects that provide little real value or benefit to society. See, last sessions’ “Clean Heat” carbon tax forcing you to pay “your fair share” through higher heating bills to not have any impact on climate change, for example. Or the 20 percent DMV fee increases the department said it didn’t need or want, but lawmakers implemented anyway just, I guess, to be “fair.” And, of course, the anticipated 18.5 percent increase in property taxes, which is apparently the new “fair” price to pay for increasingly poor public school performance catering to fewer overall students

Another suggestion coming back next year is a 3 percent income tax surcharge on Vermonters earning over $500,000 a year. That would make the state marginal income tax rate on these folks 11.75 percent – the highest in the nation bar California (13.3 percent). And, just a reminder, our neighbor New Hampshire has no earned income tax at all and is phasing out its tax on dividend and interest income within the next year or so. (Please finish this article before you start scrolling through Zillow.)

This additional 3 percent surcharge would say its advocates, raise roughly $100 million per year from not very many people. According to an analysis done by former state economist Art Woolf back in 2018, only 1,658 Vermonters earned over $500,000, and just 488 earned more than $1 million. Still, this tiny group of about half a percent of Vermont taxpayers accounts for 20 percent of all income taxes paid. Is that fair?

Yes, many will shout! I don’t earn $500,000 a year, so who cares? “Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax that rich guy behind the tree,” as the ditty goes. But here’s the thing…

As Woolf points out,

For most Vermonters who earn [$500,000 or more], having a high income is a one-time event. The Vermont Tax Department looked into this a few years ago and found that half of all the taxpayers who earned $500,000 or more experienced that level of income only once over a 10-year period…. Only 3 percent [of that half of one percent of all taxpayers] earned over $500,000 dollars in every one of the 10 years…. The basic conclusion: Very high-income Vermonters are rich because of a one-time event.”

Such as an otherwise non-wealthy Vermonter selling a house or a business. So, what this 3 percent income tax surcharge really is in practice, with very few exceptions, is not a screw the rich out of their ill-gotten gains play. It’s just the government greedily taking another chunk (on top of the property transfer tax) out of what is, for most of us, the largest investment we will make in our lifetimes, our house, or a bite out of Mom & Pop’s sale of their local business after a lifetime of work. These are often cases in which hardworking people have invested years of equity into these assets in order to fund their retirement. And our government wants a bigger piece of that. And no, it’s not “fair.”

The lesson here is to be careful when progressives try to win your support for some program by telling you they’re going to raise taxes on someone else to pay for it. In the end, it’s just propaganda, and it’s your wallet they end up looting because, as Willie Sutton might observe, “That’s where the money is.”

One of the questions Campaign for Vermont asked in their recent poll was Do you “Support/Oppose: Creating a Vermont Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, which would limit state spending growth to the rate of inflation and population growth; and would require any tax revenue collected in excess of that amount to be refunded to taxpayers. It would also require voter approval for any tax increases above and beyond this formula.” Gratifyingly, 67 percent of Vermonters supported the idea. Only 16 percent opposed it outright. This tells me that a solid majority of Vermonters think we’re already paying more than our fair share, and it’s time to cut off the spigot.

 

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 When Is Someone Paying More Than “Their Fair Share”? appeared first on Granite Grok.

First, let me tell you what Trump’s actual “crimes” were: Not starting any new wars. Actually getting economically tough, not just talking tough, on China. And, perhaps the biggest crime of all in the eyes of the UniParty, making the Southern border more secure.

Now let me tell you something else. Whenever the Regime-media tell you something is a “conspiracy theory,” that means that they have been caught with their hand in the cookie-jar and they intend to continue swiping the cookies. One such example is the Great Replacement, which according to NPR:

… is a conspiracy theory that states that nonwhite individuals are being brought into the United States and other Western countries to “replace” white voters to achieve a political agenda. It is often touted by anti-immigration groups, white supremacists and others, according to the National Immigration Forum.

Which is exactly what’s happening as illegal immigration is now exceeding domestic birth-rates:

Since August, there are officially more arriving each month than there are children being born to American mothers.

And these are just the official encounters — we don't know how many avoided detection. https://t.co/7Bt52x0385 pic.twitter.com/2APOiICGW0

— ~~datahazard~~ (@fentasyl) December 29, 2023

The Democrats support an open Southern border because they believe that non-white voters are Democrat voters and that, therefore illegal immigration produces a permanent Democrat majority once the American-born children of these illegal aliens  reach voting age. The “traditional” Republicans support an open Southern border because their big donors want cheap labor.

The UniParty is winning. America will be unrecognizable in twenty years.

 

The post The UniParty Wins Again … The Great Replacement Is Succeeding appeared first on Granite Grok.

Much has been said about the disparity between the cost of public education and the return on investment, but everything about government inevitably ends that way, and the more Democrats you have in charge, the greater the imbalance between rising costs and declining output.

It matters little what the budget exists to do; it will inevitably do less at greater expense, and politics ensures it goes to the right people at the wrong price. Take Vermont—a convenient punching bag for this and many a tale of woe. In recent years, it jumped off an ideological cliff, reducing itself to little more than a Liberal playground for failed policy. For our part, we get to watch this not-so-slow-motion decline—an exchange of individual rights and property for incompetent rule and perfidy.

Democrats are the joke that’s not even funny. A party that claims it can handle a complete transition in energy but is incapable of managing the infrastructure we already have. One of the many increases in costs Vermonters will face as they stumble into their Democrat legislature’s 2024 budget is rising DMV fees.

 

As part of last year’s budget, DMV fees are slated to increase about 19% across the board starting on January 1. That will include everything from registering a vehicle to getting a new license.

“There’s kind of an impression the DMV is the one pushing these fees — we administer them. They pass the laws, we administer them,” said Vt. DMV Deputy Commissioner Michael Smith.

Under the budget approved by lawmakers, it will cost $15 more to register a car, $10 more to register a motorcycle, $6 more for a small trailer, and $11 more for a driver’s license.

The increased fees are expected to bring in about $20 million to the state’s Transportation Fund to help offset lost revenue as cars have become more fuel efficient in recent years.

 

Who knew you had another 20 million lying around for the state to suck up. Revenue Vermont needs because of a deliberate policy decision to force people into cars that don’t pay gas taxes. Yes, they say “more efficient cars,” but that’s what they wanted, so has anyone thought it forward? To explain what I mean, consider tobacco taxes. If you dared to cut them, Democrats lost their collective hive mind, but their own goal was to end smoking. If you end smoking, there are no tobacco taxes.

If the revenue is critical, but the goal is to zero it out, what’s the plan? A progressive Government does not give back. It never gets smaller. Growing the state first is priority one. The lost revenue must be replaced, and taxpayers are well.

The transportation fund is no different. Much like tobacco, the goal is to get you to abandon personal transportation, but roads and bridges aren’t going away, nor is road striping, salting, and plowing, or any of the line items in a budget, which must increase. What’s the plan? From where do the millions beyond the next 20 million come, and for what?

To answer these questions, look back to public education. Citizens will pay more and get less, and their only hope of getting away from this progressive spiral of doom is to stop electing them to public office. I’d say look to New Hampshire for guidance. We’ve cut taxes and regulations, even eliminated some, but I’m not sure how much longer we’ve got until we are dragged down the same hole.

Every election is the most important one in our lives, and that includes the local/town elections. But the decades-long disaster that is public education hasn’t inspired a revolt at the ballot box, so what does it take to get people to care enough to change their own lives for the better? It begins by kicking Democrats out of office and never ends after that.

Or would you rather figure out where the next 20 million will come from to feed that ravenous beast because that’s what’s in store whether you’ve got it to give or not!

 

The post Another $20 Million Vermonters Didn’t Know They Had Will Leave Their Pockets Beginning Jan 1 appeared first on Granite Grok.

The Orange Bowl was not a traditional college bowl game in 2023. It was a game between two programs that had something to prove. The 13-0 Florida State Seminoles were snubbed from the playoffs for the National Championship of college football. They were the undefeated champions of the ACC, which many feel is a conference below the level of the SEC and Big 10.

After tonight’s game, these people have a lot of data to prove their theory.

The Georgia Bull Dogs had not lost a game in two years until the Alabama Crimson Tide took them down in the SEC Championship. That one loss kept them out of the playoff tourney and relegated them to play FSU on New Year’s weekend. There would be no three-peat in 2023 for the Dawgs, who had not lost a game in over two years but were denied a shot at the championship when they lost to the Tide.

Maybe it’s not fair, but it’s inevitable when you let partisan people decide the fate of these future NFL athletes. Yes, these Dawgs had much to prove and their egos to mollify as the FSU mascot raced onto the field and planted a flaming spear into the fifty-yard line. That was the last moment to cheer for Seminole fans, as their heroes in Garnet and Gold were no match for their counterparts from Georgia. This game was ugly, and even friends and family switched the channel before the two-minute warning,

There was a big difference between the make-up of the two teams that met today for bragging rights and pride. Because of injuries, the Noles were down to their third-string QB, but as many as twelve key players opted not to play for an undefeated record. These players chose to protect their bodies for the upcoming NFL Draft. Rather than putting on the uniform and playing for the pride of the school that had allowed them to showcase their talents, they sat it out, and thus, their team was embarrassed in the final game of 2023.

In contrast, Carson Beck, the Quarterback for the Georgia Bull Dogs, not only played in the Orange Bowl but has opted not to go for the cash of the NFL but to return to Athens, Georgia, for his Senior year to win another National Championship for his school and, hopefully, a Heisman Trophy for himself. That difference in commitment and pride has brought back-to-back championships to Georgia, and that is why Florida may never rise to that level again.

The 2023 Orange Bowl had no impact on college football’s National Championship but was a microcosm of life. Those who put themselves above their teammates may have a big payday but may never know the feeling of winning a championship. Those who put their team above themselves will always be champions. The Orange Bowl was only a game, but I bet the players will have very different memories to last a lifetime.

 

 

The post What Does 63-3 Really Mean appeared first on Granite Grok.

Joe Biden has something in common with Donald Trump. They’ve both been president, and neither has seen any need to debate anyone in the 2024 contest for similar and different reasons. Both are far enough ahead in the polls that debates are more risk than reward.

There is simply no reason to step into any ring of that circus.

And while Trump could probably walk onto a debate stage without fear of falling and with very little prep. Biden can’t say that. I’d be surprised if Grandpa Joe can still manage to sniff hair, and I doubt he does any debates in 2024, and not just because we’ve predicted the DNC’ll replace him after he wins the party nomination at their convention. He always lacked intellectual agility, but his decline has reached a point where even wearing an earpiece for prompts (which he lacks the hair to hide (like Hillary) would only confuse him. It would be ugly, so Joe won’t be debating anyone… ever.

Democrats should be okay with that—no debates, I mean. We already know most of them don’t want Biden but, like good party animals, will compromise the speed with which we receive election results by writing him. No paper ballot hand counting is allowed, but if the New Hampshire Bien write-in campaign is even moderately successful, poll workers will be forced to count those write-ins to tabulate results manually. The machines won’t know.

That is a reasonable delay in Democracy. It is a worthwhile distraction so local Dems can show their fealty to Dear Leader and a party that has been fixing its presidential primary for years. But that’s what good little Marxists do. It will be required after the resolution – might as well get good at it now.

If, however, you’d like to pretend you want to live in that Democracy you keep flapping your skinny little lips about, there’s a debate in New Hampshire on January 8th. Even in a pretend Democracy, you are allowed to pretend to have competing opinions about managing the planned decline and fall of that Democracy. And, no Biden, which should increase the draw. It’ll be safe to bring your daughters.

 

The lonely political vigil of long-shot Democratic presidential candidates Marianne Williamson and Minnesota congressman Dean Phillips will be transformed on to the debate stage early next month in New Hampshire – without Joe Biden, who is neither on the state ballot nor agreeable to any debate interaction with competitors.

The debate between self-help author Williamson and Phillips is set to be held at the New England College on 8 January, and moderated by Josh McElveen, former political director of radio station WMUR, two weeks before the state holds its primary.

Update: The debate will be hosted by New England College, a liberal arts nonprofit school, on Jan. 8 at the DoubleTree Hotel in Manchester, N.H. It will be moderated by the founder of the communications firm McElveen Strategies and former WMUR Political Director Josh McElveen, and it will air on SiriusXM’s POTUS Channel 124 at 7 p.m. EST.

 

The Left’s Party machine doesn’t want either of them, so this is more an exercise in policy approach, but it is something Democrats in New Hampshire have been denied, so I’d expect the junkies to be there.

They’ve also been denied the media spotlight New Hampshir’s primary provides. The access to insiders, the donor class, and political operatives who would have come from all across the world to cover Democrats vying for the attention of Granite State voters.

The handful of no-names have been here. There’s a bunch of them. There are more than 20 filings in both parties for the Presidential primary contest. Local Dems may have had the opportunity to press the flesh with one or more of them. Or not.

 

 

Joe Biden is conspicuously absent from the list, but Vermin Supreme is there. So are Williamson, Phillips, and others from a dozen states and DC. So, you might see why any Democrat debate in the 2024 New Hampshire primary season might be attractive.

It is a meaningless debate, but so is the Democratic presidential primary, so why quibble?

 

 

 

The post Presidential Primary: If You Want to See Dems Debate There’s One Coming Up in New Hampshire [Update] appeared first on Granite Grok.

President Biden’s sliding poll numbers have set off alarm signals among Democrats, who are beginning to see that he might lose the 2024 election to Donald Trump. Those polls have also gotten the attention of pundits who have confidently said for three years now that Trump could never again win a national election.

The polling results published over the past few months suggest otherwise: Trump is currently the favorite to win next year’s election.

The most recent RealClearPolitics Average has Trump leading Biden by 2.6 percentage points, a switch of about four points since late summer when Biden led 45%-43%, and in a long-running decline of seven points for Biden since he won the 2020 election with 51% percent of the popular vote.

More ominously for Biden, a recent Bloomberg poll showed Trump well ahead (by an average of five points) in the seven swing states of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. It appears the most significant factor in recent months is a surge in support for Trump (from 43% to just above 47%), while Biden has essentially remained stuck in neutral.

Joe Biden is an unpopular president, almost as unpopular as any president in the post-war era. According to the RCP Average, just 40% of voters approve of his handling of the job. His ratings have been falling for more than two years since the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Not coincidentally, voters also take a dim view of where the country is heading, with 68% percent saying it is headed in the wrong direction and just 25% in the right direction.

The president’s ratings have gotten steadily worse over the course of this year. More than 60% of voters say Biden “has moved too far to the left” on policies important to them. Voters are also pessimistic about the economy: 47% say things are getting worse, while just 22% say they are getting better, according to a recent Economist/YouGov poll. These are alarming numbers for an incumbent seeking reelection.

Biden is also underwater on nearly every major issue. According to an early December Wall Street Journal poll, Trump is favored over Biden on the three issues voters say are most important to them: the economy (52%-35%), inflation (51%-30%), and securing the border (54%-24%). Voters also favor Trump over Biden on crime, the Russia/Ukraine war, and even the war between Israel and Hamas. These latter two ratings, on Ukraine and Israel, undoubtedly surprised Biden and his supporters, who assumed that voters would endorse his policies in regard to these conflicts. By contrast, voters favor Biden on just two issues: abortion (44%-33%) and Social Security/Medicare (44%-38%).

Voters in these surveys also question Biden’s fitness to hold office, especially as they look ahead to the prospect of another four-year term. According to a new Harris/Harvard poll, 62% of voters doubt that he is fit to carry out the duties of the presidency, and another 48% think his presidency is getting worse year by year and month by month. Whatever their views on the issues, voters appear to think that Biden is increasingly incapable of addressing them.

Biden is losing support among Hispanics voters, a key constituent group of the Democratic Party. Hispanics have been trending away from Democrats and toward Trump over recent election cycles. Hillary Clinton carried Hispanic voters by 37 points in 2016, but Biden carried them by just 21 points in the 2020 election and lags well behind that margin this year. According to recent polls conducted by Economist/YouGov, Biden led Trump among Hispanic voters by 18 points in August, by eight points in September, by four in October, and by just two points (41%-39%) in December. These voters express strong disapproval of Biden’s performance in office, and even disapprove (51%-33 %) of his policies on immigration. Since Hispanics represent about 15% of all U.S. voters, their move away from Biden and toward Trump accounts in part for Biden’s recent slide in the polls.

Another key constituency turning away from the incumbent president is independent voters. Biden carried independents by nine points in 2020. They were a crucial part of his coalition in the swing states he carried narrowly last time, and an important ingredient in his popular vote majority since independents represent one-third of all voters. As with Hispanic voters, he lags far behind that margin in this year’s surveys. A recent Economist/YouGov poll taken in December gave Trump a six-point margin over Biden (38%-32%), with many of those voters still undecided. Still, this represents a 20-point slide for Biden among independents since the 2020 election.

Biden also faces an “enthusiasm gap” among some previously loyal groups who turned out to support him in 2020 due to their dislike for Donald Trump but are disappointed thus far with his performance in office. This is true, in particular, with young voters and, surprisingly, with African American voters as well.

Some suspect that voters under age 30 who are abandoning the president are disillusioned by his support for Israel in its war with Hamas, his failure to cancel student loans, and an insufficiently aggressive posture in regard to climate change. Biden won those voters in 2020 by a margin of 60% to 36%, but due mostly to their dislike for Donald Trump. Much of that antipathy remains. Recent polls continue to give Biden a lead over Trump among these voters: A Yahoo poll in December gave Biden a 55%-27% lead over Trump, while a more recent Emerson College poll reported a smaller margin: 45%-40%. At the same time, just 35% of those voters approve of his performance in office, according to a poll by the Institute of Politics at Harvard University, a measure of their lack of enthusiasm for his reelection campaign.

To the extent young voters disagree with Biden, they do so for progressive reasons – and are unlikely to vote for Trump. But they could stay home, which would be a blow to the Democrats. According to the same poll, fewer than 50% of young voters say they will “definitely” turn out to vote next year, compared to 57% at this point in the 2020 election cycle. In addition, roughly 10% of these voters say they would vote for Robert Kennedy in a multi-candidate race, which further narrows Biden’s lead over Trump in this group.

Biden seems to be in unlikely trouble among black voters. They are by far the most loyal of all Democratic Party voting groups: Biden carried these voters overwhelmingly in 2020 (92%-8%), which also helped him in the swing states. Trump may never win a significant share of this vote, but a doubling of his 2020 total now seems within the realm of possibility. A recent Economist/YouGov poll has Trump with support from 12% of these voters, with many still on the fence.

Perhaps more ominously for Democrats, a growing share of blacks say they will not vote in a contest between Biden and Trump. In a series of Economist/YouGov polls, the percentage of black adults saying they would not vote at all increased from 7% in August to 11% in December. This, despite Biden going a considerable distance to appeal to those voters by appointing African Americans to prominent positions in his administration and taking their side in controversies over civil rights, crime, and government spending. Biden’s challenge among the black community, then, as with young voters, is in regard to enthusiasm and turnout, and not so much with the direct match-up with Trump.

Biden’s strategy for the 2024 campaign becomes clearer in view of his sagging poll numbers. Instead of running on his record, which will be difficult to do in view of his overall ratings, he will emphasize Trump’s defects and the dangers a Trump presidency will pose to the constitutional order.

“We may have problems,” his allies are already saying, “but the other guy is far worse.” The various legal prosecutions underway will be woven into this strategy as a means of appealing to independents and those “on the fence.”

A conviction of Trump in a court of law would aid immensely in this strategy. In addition, Democrats will redouble their efforts to mobilize minority voters and young voters, while sharpening their appeal to Hispanics. Democrats will also ride the abortion issue, which worked for them in 2022, and is one of the few issues that cuts in their favor. Democrats understand that a victory for Trump in the presidential race will also mean that Republicans will take control of the Senate while expanding their margins in the House of Representatives – and thereby enable Trump to carry out his threatening agenda.

Trump, on the other hand, if he can side-step the legal challenges, has his own cards to play in the campaign. For one thing, voters know him, and there is nothing new that Democrats can say about him that they have not already said, ad nauseam, for several years.

Voters can also compare the Trump and Biden presidencies – and Biden does not come off well in that comparison. According to a Wall Street Journal poll taken last month, 50% of voters say Trump’s policies helped them, while just 23% said the same about Biden’s policies; indeed, 53% of voters said that Biden’s policies had hurt them in some way. This allows Trump to ask the question Ronald Reagan posed to voters in 1980 during his campaign against Jimmy Carter: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” Many voters will say “no.”

More importantly, Trump does not have to win the popular vote in order to win the election in the Electoral College. The election will be decided in a series of separate races in seven or eight swing states where Trump may have an advantage. If he wins even half of them he is likely to win the election. The national popular vote, measured by these polls, will be somewhat beside the point in determining the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.

Democrats will register large margins of 7 or 8 million votes in the populous states of California, New York, and Illinois, as they did in 2016 and 2020, while Republicans will carry their own large states (Texas and Florida) by less than one million votes – giving Democrats a substantial edge in the popular vote that will not translate directly into electoral votes. Any vote beyond 50% in a state is of no use in the Electoral College – and Democrats tend to “waste” more votes than Republicans.

Trump lost the popular vote to Clinton in 2016 by two percentage points, but still won a safe majority in the Electoral College by carrying nearly every swing state. Biden won the popular vote in 2020 by more than four points (51.3%-46.8%), but carried the critical swing states by narrow margins, in the cases of Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin, by less than one percentage point. A swing of less than 1% from Biden to Trump in those three states would have given Trump a tie in the Electoral College, so that the election would have been decided in the House of Representatives. In addition, reapportionment following the last census will allocate three additional electoral votes to the states Trump won in 2020 – two more to Texas and one to Florida – and three fewer to the states Biden won. This will make Trump’s path to 270 electoral votes slightly easier to navigate. (Pollsters would do well next year to survey the swing states and mostly ignore the national vote.)

It appears, then, that Biden must win the popular vote by at least three points, and perhaps by as many as four, in view of what happened last time in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, to be assured of winning a majority in the Electoral College. Current polls have Biden running two points behind Trump in the popular vote, but at the same time show that he is behind by at least five points in the swing states. These polls, along with results of past elections, suggest that there is a gap of at least three points (and maybe four) between the national popular vote and the outcomes in those swing states.

Some have said that Trump has a ceiling of 46% or 47% of the popular vote, and has no chance of reaching 50%, which they say he will need to win the election. This is not so: Trump can win the election with 47% percent of the popular vote if he can keep Biden below 50%, perhaps with the assistance of third-party or independent candidates. If Trump stays close to Biden in the popular vote, which current polls suggest he can do, then he is likely to win the game in the Electoral College.

Trump is fully aware of this (many are not), and will campaign accordingly. He is also aware that Biden will not be able to campaign from his home as he did in 2020, lest voters conclude that he is not up to the job; but the attempt to run a vigorous campaign may further expose that weakness. Nor can he allow his vice president to lead the campaign because she is more unpopular and prone to gaffes than he is.

Trump’s rise in the polls sets the stage for an unusual campaign ahead. Democrats may conclude, in view of Biden’s weakness across the board, that a traditional campaign focusing on issues and turnout may not succeed this time around – and that their hopes will rest upon winning the legal campaign against Trump.

This may explain recent moves by the special prosecutor to expedite the case against Trump in order to win a verdict prior to the election. The reversal of fortunes between Biden and Trump also accounts for the revival of charges that Trump, if elected, will prove to be a “dictator,” and so should be disqualified from the ballot. Those cases, and perhaps the election itself, will be decided this year by the Supreme Court.

For these reasons, and others likely to develop, this is bound to be an ugly and unsettling campaign – and one in which the traditional rules of national politics will be cast to the winds.

James Piereson | RealClear Wire

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The People’s Republic of Vermont has a climate itch it can’t stop scratching. An irritation that persists to the point of bleeding if it were on your person. And it is. You, kind people of Vermont, will pay in ways they can’t or won’t explain.

Despite your objections, your ruling class has plans to get you all off oil and gas and running heat pumps. Separately, the peasants will be expected to trade in vehicles they need and want for Electric imposters. Pod vehicles that look like the real thing but don’t act it. This requires an exponential rise in power generation and the infrastructure to carry this increased load from the mystical place it is created (Captain Planet’s lair, perhaps) to the homes, businesses, and EVs meant to use it.

Over at Watts Up With That (WUWT), they’ve got a post about increased demand if everyone in the UK were forced into using Heat Pumps. They have the same sorts of idiots running their government as Vermont (where lunatics in its legislature rammed through the clean heat standard). It is a messy bit of business whose only redeeming characteristic is that no one tasked with implementation has a clue quite how to get started. We can hope it was all about resume pumping, but the dingbats seem serious about their fraudulent emissions reduction plan, just like the idgits in the UK.

Don’t get me wrong, they’ll find a way, but while they try to fit square pegs in round holes, look at this from WUWT.

 

If we assume then that the heat pumps are in use for 14 hours a day, that gives average hourly electricity demand of 2.1 KWh. This assumes that the heat pump runs at a constant power rating. In practice, the system would have to work harder in the early evening as temperatures drop.

There are about 24 million homes with gas and oil boilers, so a peak demand of 2.1 KW amounts to 50 GW for the country as a whole. To that we can add demand from offices, shops etc, which currently use gas and oil.

Along with demand from EVs, the UK would need well over 100 GW of capacity to meet peak demand.

 

Has anyone done similar math for the Green Mountain State? How many homes, number of offices, hourly demand, and total demand? Believe it or not, no, but that is a legislative priority – they say. But how serious are they about admitting anything past “ratepayers will pay more.”

How about a little game of truth or dare where the truth is the dare?

A commenter on the WUWT post noted that almost nowhere in the UK are the buried cables capable of carrying that sort of load, especially the end-of-the-workday variety when EVERYONE turns on (or turns up) the heat pump and plugs in the EV. It would all need to be dug up and replaced. It’s expensive and a colossal bother.

I’d guess most of that infrastructure in Vermont is above ground, but it would need to be replaced or rerun. All of it. Soon. But then not. Vermont’s sooty foot is already on the decarbonization path despite no one knowing where it leads or at what cost to not just ratepayers but the entire economy. Why rush things? Burlington’s carbon tax on buildings hasn’t been enacted yet (it starts Jan 1), but at least one councilor wants the rate hiked. That should buy them some time (/snark!).

On this side of the Connecticut River, the New Hampshire Legislature has introduced HB1644, which proactively asks the NH Department of Energy “to initiate a proceeding and conduct an investigation of the benefits and key considerations regarding support for clean or non-carbon emitting power generation, and report to the legislature in one year.” Benefits and risks. Reliability, security, and winter energy spikes. Cost-effectiveness, how it might impact economic growth – a list of things you’d want to explore in detail before making any more permanent grand gestures.

It also requests that the NH DoE define clean energy and investigate steps “taken by other states, including clean energy standards.” Presumably, to learn lessons from their mistakes, for which Vermont will be helpful – their 2024 legislative priority includes trying to back into what HB1644 requests upfront. Potential problems you’d want to sidestep or a workaround for in advance but that Vermont ignored before it latched onto the California standards. None of which addresses the genuine issue of cost.

What will it cost Vermonters, not just in dollars but in ‘sense.’ The state government is punishing everyone to reduce emissions – even if you believe that’s the problem or that a government could fix it – that China will erase in a wink of the Middle Kingdom’s military-industrial complex eye. A sum of emissions Vermonters might take decades to save, coughed into the earth’s atmosphere in a few industrial heartbeats by that Marxist regime to which Vermont’s Heat-Standard Climateers are (more than likely) most enamored.

Vermonters need to confront their legislature and demand a response. Why are they killing Vermont with these crippling initiatives when China, India, and Africa could do 100 times better – meaningful good if your goals are to be believed –  in a fraction of the time, at no cost to us?

Or if we framed it another way. How does my paying more for a paper straw keep China from dropping tons of plastic into the ocean every day?

Shouldn’t they be pressuring the Feds to pressure China by any means necessary short of war instead of pressuring a few farmers and small business owners to give up so much for so little?

 

The post Night Cap: Where Will Vermont Find the Money for This? appeared first on Granite Grok.

Senator Rand Paul mentions Aaron Kheriaty’s The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical State in his book Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up. Dr. Kheriaty’s online biography includes the following information:

Dr. Kheriaty is a plaintiff in the landmark free speech case Missouri v. Biden challenging government censorship on social media. . .. Dr. Kheriaty also serves in teaching and advisory roles at the Brownstone Institute, the Zephyr Institute, the Paul Ramsey Institute, and the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy.

For many years, he was Professor of Psychiatry at UCI [University of California—Irvine] School of Medicine and Director of the Medical Ethics Program at UCI Health, where he chaired the ethics committee. He also chaired the ethics committee at the California Department of State Hospitals for several years. He was fired from the University of California after challenging the University’s covid vaccine mandate in federal court.

The New Abnormal’s Prologue

Dr. Kheriaty’s prologue is titled “Nuremberg, 1947.” It is the right place to begin in understanding the COVID-19 control program. Following the more famous 1946 trial of the top Nazis, the trial of Nazi doctors led to prison sentences for nine and death sentences for seven defendants. As part of the opinion of the tribunal, the Nuremberg Code was published, which contained ten items that established the criteria for conducting ethical human experimentation.

Dr. Kheriaty’s prologue only explores the first item of the Code, but it is the foundation, addressing informed, noncoerced consent. Those interested in reading an analysis of all ten items of the Code are directed to Dr. Nicholas Bednarski’s series Violations of Nuremberg Code in COVID-19 Control Program. Dr. Bednarski concludes that all ten items of the Nuremberg Code have been violated.

The New Abnormal’s prologue identifies the connection between the work of the Nazi doctors and the eugenics movement, which is disturbing for Americans initiated in the United States. The New Abnormal reveals, “Eugenics programs received funding from major foundations, including those of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, and Kellogg. Intellectuals at Stanford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton endorsed the movement’s aims and participated enthusiastically.”

Pursuit of eugenics was not restricted to the private sector but extended to state governments and the federal government:

In the 1920s an impoverished young woman from Virginia, Carrie Buck, was diagnosed with “congenital feeblemindedness” and slated for forced sterilization. She challenged the state of Virginia’s law in federal court, and her case, Buck v. Bell, went to the Supreme Court in 1927. The court upheld the state’s eugenic sterilization law, resulting in Carrie’s forced tubal ligation.

The New Abnormal continues, “Hitler himself remarked, ‘I have studied with interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would . . . be of no value, or injurious to the racial stock.’”

The New Abnormal’s prologue concludes, “While the Nuremberg Code did not enjoy the binding force of international law, its principles did inform the laws of most nations, including the United States. The principle of free and informed consent was further developed in the influential World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki in 1964.”

Subsequent Chapters

The New Abnormal focuses on the role of declared emergencies in establishing invasive government policies that destroy our personal freedoms:

[Government policy] . . . from lockdowns and school closures to mask and vaccine mandates or passports—received its supposed legal justification from the declared state of emergency. But tellingly, the threshold for what constitutes a public health emergency—how many cases, hospitalizations, deaths, et cetera—was deliberately never defined.

Who has this power?

At the federal level, with the backing of the president, that person is now Xavier Becerra, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees the NIH, the FDA, and the CDC, among other divisions. Becerra, a lawyer and former attorney general of California, has no medical training and zero public health experience.

How extensive are these powers? Dr. Kheriaty reveals that in a state of emergency the president gains access to an additional 136 statutory powers. He summarizes the implications of this concentration of power:

The full significance of what transpired in March 2020 may have escaped our attention. Without realizing it we lived through the design and implementation of not just a novel pandemic strategy but a new political paradigm—a system far more effective at controlling the population than anything previously attempted by Western nations. Under the biosecurity model, “the total cessation of every form of political activity and social relationship [under lockdowns and social distancing became] the ultimate act of civic participation.” Neither the pre-war Fascist government in Italy nor the Communist states of the Soviet Union ever dreamed of implementing such restrictions.

We have encountered new terminology that was not medical according to Dr. Kheriaty:

It is instructive to reflect on the chosen phrase, “social distancing,” which is not a medical term but a political one. A medical or scientific model would have deployed a phrase like physical or personal distancing, but not social distancing. The term suggests not a new model for health but for organizing society, one that limits human interactions by six feet of space and by masks that cover the face—our locus of interpersonal connection and communication.

According to Dr. Kheriaty, “To see where this biomedical security state will lead, many point to the Chinese social credit system—and this is a useful shorthand for the dystopian future this regime portends.”

He continues, “University biomedical security systems were also sustained by a near constant stream of propaganda generated by administrators, with catchphrases that would make even bureaucrats at Orwell’s Ministry of Truth cringe. For example, administrators constantly admonished students, faculty and staff to ‘hold one another accountable.’”

That is Orwellian, of course, but it is a good description of how people were encouraged to betray each other to the gestapo and the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Neither of these infamous security organizations had access to the digital technology that is so pervasive today. How was this used to surveil citizens during the COVID-19 control program?

“In May of 2022, Vice broke the story that during the previous two years the ‘CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed COVID lockdown orders.’ . . . What descended on us was not just a novel virus but a novel method of social organization and control.”

Dr. Kheriaty identifies two influences on his thinking—Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Although it would be imprudent to do so, one might dismiss Brave New World as fantasy. But Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago describes a seventy-four-year experiment in real social organization and control in the Soviet Union. Dr. Kheriaty makes a compelling case that we in the United States are on the road to a similar kind of tyranny.

Dr. Kheriaty’s The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State should be read if it is the only book on the COVID-19 control program one reads. But for a broader view, begin with Dr. Bednarski’s series Violations of Nuremberg Code in COVID-19 Control Program, and then read Senator Rand Paul’s Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up. The COVID-19 control program is a many-tentacled monster. It is easy to surrender to information overload.

Dr. Bednarski’s series describes an internationally recognized set of ten criteria for human experimentation by which COVID-19 control measures might be measured. He concludes that all ten were violated in the COVID-19 control program. Senator Paul explores the source of the COVID-19 organism and the efforts made within government, in particular, to cover up the facts through propaganda. But if there is any belief that the COVID-19 control program was a one-time phenomenon, Dr. Kheriaty dispels that delusion. That is a perspective we need in order to fully understand the implications of the COVID-19 control program.

 

Phil Duffy is a regular contributor to WFYL’s We the People, the Constitution Matters, a lifelong student of history, and the author of the forthcoming A Tale of Four Cities, an investigation about who really wrote the first modern text on economics and why it matters today.

 

Phil Duffy | Mises Wire

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The Cuban dictatorship was built and sustained on planned executions, so this recent move by its National Assembly to legalize “dignified death” seems a bit belated. I guess, like Western Elites, they needed Political murder to feel like a kindness.

 

The Communist-run country’s National Assembly passed the measure as part of legislation updating the nation’s legal framework for its universal and free healthcare system.

“The right of people to a dignified death is recognized in end-of-life decisions, which may include the limitation of therapeutic effort, continuous or palliative care, and valid procedures that end life,” the final draft of the legislation stated.

Euthanasia and medically assisted suicide, opposed by most religions, sparks huge controversy around the world where just a handful of countries allow the practice and some equate it with murder.

 

Cuba is, of course, doing the deal in reverse. They’ve been killing off the political resistance (democide) for the entirety of their existence. Locking people up for years over the smallest slight. How convenient for them to have learned from Western progressives how to address the problem of overcrowded prisons. Sorry, I meant “patients.”

Almost anyone could suddenly take ill or request they be put to sleep like a dog, and since this is Cuba, you can’t complain unless you’d like to pay a visit to the ‘Vet’ for your last ‘vaccination.’

Closer to home, the depopulationist social engineers among us are coming at the problem from the other direction. Pretend it’s about people in pain and then expand the scope until the state can hide political executions behind assisted suicide.

And yes, there are useful idiots who honestly believe that the practice would never grow beyond expediting the voluntary deaths of terminal patients in pain. But it has, it does, and it will. This is not a pleasant reality to face, but it is better for the community and society if the government is not permitted to manage the terms and circumstances of chemical death beyond investigating murder. There will be some suffering, but you won’t have to deal with the State using euthanasia policy to end people’s lives because they are sad, poor, or there are just too many of them. Or they’ve done the government wrong.

It’ll happen if it hasn’t already. The best course of action is not to go there at all.

 

HT | GatewayPundit

The post Slippery Meet Slope: Cuba Embraces Assisted Suicide as If They Didn’t Already Have It appeared first on Granite Grok.

I read somewhere that the SPLC had fingered GraniteGrok as anti-government. I feel certain they are honored now more than ever, given that The Government has become the thing that drove the Founders to Declare their independence.

 

 We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—-That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

 

There is a lot of safety and happiness these days, and you can blame the government for that. The cabal of connected insiders bilking the people and the planet for their own benefit. A sort of Global confidence scam, though that wasn’t where I intended to go. The SPLC, a scam all its own, is another establishment tool, but it has been struggling to find relevancy.

Labeling the ‘Grok anti-government isn’t the gesture to get them there beyond this audience, so they’ve come up with a new thing. It’s called CAPTAIN.

 

That stands for Combating Anti-LGBTQ Pseudoscience Through Accessible Informative Narratives. …

What they are doing with CAPTAIN is reviving one of [SPLC founder Morris] Dees’ rare flops, an example of when the fundraising prodigy got too far out ahead of his target market. Two entire decades ago, Morris teamed up with some autogynephilic big brains like economist Donald-Deirdre McCloskey and semiconductor scientist Lynn Conway to try to cancel anyone who’d given a nice blurb to Northwestern U. psychology professor J. Michael Bailey’s book The Man Who Would Be Queen.

 

Combating Anti-LGBTQ Pseudoscience Through Accessible Informative Narratives.

I’m no expert, but I find it unlikely this will take off the way they hoped. It’s too long. It’s cumbersome and conceptually late to the party. Science is no longer the driving force behind the militant transgender agenda. It’s about fear and intimidation. The battle has moved from the streets to grade-school classrooms where groomers and activists are immersing other people’s kids in gender faith dogma.

Munchausen, by proxy in all its forms, is the captain. People, schools, teachers, and parents desperate for attention and acceptance in the go-viral or bust digital world are sacrificing children for clicks and views. They then mislabel it as compassion, forgiveness, and acceptance – none of which has a thing to do with science.

The science  is that it is unhealthy to leave kids alone and let them develop naturally. It is better to inundate them with sexualized literature that includes fringe heterosexual abuse as well as so-called LGBT themes that the average non-anit LGBTQ pro-science apologist should find offensive.

Drugs, cutting, rape, smoking, alcohol abuse, assault, adult child sex and suicide.

It is true that some members of the LGBTQ community are more inclined toward all of the vices, so perhaps that’s at least honest. Even in the most encouraging communities, nearly half will consider or attempt suicide. So, sure, that content might pass as actual LGBTQ “science” if we’re talking psychotherapy, which, if you ask a real scientist, will tell you that is not science at all. It’s pseudoscience. And look, it’s all coming together.

CAPTAIN is really about advancing LGBTQ pseudo-science narratives, which is what everyone else is doing.

Not new. Not likely to make a splash, but they at least got an anti-government blog post out of it on the ‘Grok.

 

The post Have You Met the SPLCs’ New CAPTAIN? appeared first on Granite Grok.

First, she delays her decision. Then she announces her decision. Next, she suspends her decision. The Secretary of State is not usually a high-profile state government position, but Secretary of State Shenna Bellows is making the most of her moment in the spotlight.

She is shining the light on her bad decision-making, bringing political activism into a neutral position, inability to grasp the limitations of her job, and driving a wedge between rural Conservatives and urban WOKE dwellers.

Shenna Bellows posted her decision on her personal X account (@shennabellows), and the 34-page document illustrated her consistent bias through this process of challenges, hearings, and decisions.

This is her conclusion:

I do not reach this conclusion lightly. Democracy is sacred, and the highest court of this State has repeatedly recognized that “no right is more precious in a free country than that of having a voice in the election of those who make the laws under which, as good citizens, we must live.” Melanson v. Secy’ of State, 204 ME 127, 114, 861 A.2d 641 (quoting Burdick .v Takushi, 504 U.S. 428, 41 (1992) (cleaned up). I am mindful that no Secretary of State has ever deprived a presidential candidate of ballot access based on Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment. I am also mindful, however, that no presidential candidate has ever before engaged in insurrection. The oath I swore to uphold the Constitution comes first above all, and my duty under Maine’s election laws, when presented with a Section 336 challenge, is to ensure that candidates who appear on the primary ballot are qualified for the office they seek.

The events of January 6, 2021, were unprecedented and tragic. They were an attack not only upon the Capitol and government officials but also an attack on the rule of law. The evidence here demonstrates that they occurred at the behest of, and with the knowledge and support of, the outgoing President. The US.. The Constitution does not tolerate an assault on the foundations of our government, and Section 36 requires me to act in response.

I conclude that the Rosen and Royal Challengers have met their burden under 21-A M.R.S. § 337(2)(B). They have provided sufficient evidence to demonstrate the falsity of Mr. Trump’s declaration that he meets the qualifications of the office of the presidency. Therefore, as required by 21-A M.R.S. § 336(3), I find that the primary petition of Mr. Trump is invalid.

Her conclusion shows her decision is based more on her shared views of the challengers and less on the law. She is making accusations that the President was involved in an insurrection against the country, yet she will not be able to justify this as Trump was never charged or found guilty of such a crime. She also claims the challengers provided sufficient evidence but neglects to say the other side also provided sufficient evidence to the contrary. Her decision and conclusion is a political tool.

After 34 pages of Kamala Style word salad and a definitive conclusion, she suspends her decision in the same document. She went on:

Given the compresed timeframe, the novel constitutional questions involved, the importance of this case, and impending ballot preparation deadlines, I will suspend the effect of my decision until the Superior Court rules on any appeal, or the time to appeal under 21-A, Section 37 has expired. C.f nI er Manie Clean Fuels, Inc,. 310 A2.d 736, 74 (Me. 1973) (noting administrative agencies are free to fashion their own rules of procedure).

This decision and immediate suspension are further evidence of her inability to perform her job objectively. One thing she has done is keep the Maine Supreme Court and the United States Supreme Court busy going into the New Year.

 

The post Bear Pond Conservative Chronicles: What Is Bellows Endgame appeared first on Granite Grok.

• These are the most liberty-critical hearings for the week
• Click on the bill number to read the bill.
• Click on the committee name to email the committee your thoughts.

Of the 0 hearings in the House, we are recommending support of 0 and opposition of 0 with 0 being of interest.
Of the 41 hearings in the Senate, we are recommending support of 1 and opposition of 10 with 7 being of interest.

Position	Bill	Title	Committee	Day	Time	Room	State Analysis
Of Interest	SB369	directing the office of professional licensure and certification to provide notice of public meetings and an opportunity for comment, creating a new position, and making an appropriation therefor.	Executive Departments and Administration	Tue 1/3	1:00 PM	SH Room 103	This bill directs the office of professional licensure and certification to provide to the public notice of its meetings and an opportunity to comment in such meetings. This bill also establishes an attorney II position for the office of professional licensure and certification.
Of Interest	SB487	relative to the division of personnel in the department of administrative services.	Executive Departments and Administration	Tue 1/3	1:30 PM	SH Room 103	This bill creates a new chapter for the personnel appeals board. This bill repeals 6 statutes related to the department of administrative services division. This bill is a request from the department of administrative services.
Of Interest	SB480	relative to the administration of professional licensure and certification and the regulation of real estate practice.	Executive Departments and Administration	Tue 1/3	1:45 PM	SH Room 103	This bill requires: I. Any board or commission whose total number of active licensees exceeds 7,000 to have a dedicated, trained, and knowledgeable customer service administrator that works for the administrative section of the office of professional licensure and certification to respond to inquiries from the public and licensees. II. Makes various amendments to allow for inactive real estate licenses. III. Amends the education approval process for the real estate commission.
Oppose	SB404	relative to expanding child care professionals’ eligibility for the child care scholarship program.	Health and Human Services	Tue 1/3	1:00 PM	LOB Room 101	This bill establishes eligibility criteria for child care professionals to receive child care scholarships.
Oppose	SB499	relative to reduction of hunger for children, older adults, and people with disabilities.	Health and Human Services	Tue 1/3	1:30 PM	LOB Room 101	This bill directs the department of education to expand options for free and reduced priced meals to students and directs the department of health and human services to implement a summer EBT program to provide assistance to families with children eligible for free and reduced price meals over the summer. The bill also directs the department of health and human services to participate in the elderly simplified application project within the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to provide food assistance to eligible older adults and people with disabilities.
Oppose	SB335	relative to alcohol packaging.	Commerce	Wed 1/4	9:10 AM	SH Room 100	This bill restricts the use of certain images and phrasing in alcohol packaging that are attractive to minors.
Oppose	SB365	relative to the sale or use of lithium-ion batteries for electric bicycles, scooters, or personal electric mobility devices.	Commerce	Wed 1/4	9:20 AM	SH Room 100	This bill prohibits sales of lithium-ion batteries and electric bicycles or electric scooters that have not been certified by a nationally recognized testing laboratory.
Oppose	SB330	relative to allowing the ability to work from home to count toward unemployment benefits eligibility.	Commerce	Wed 1/4	9:30 AM	SH Room 100	This bill repeals disqualification for unemployment benefits for those not available for work outside a home.
Of Interest	SB341	relative to mandatory disclosure by school district employees to parents.	Education	Wed 1/4	9:00 AM	LOB Room 101	This bill requires all school employees to respond honestly and completely to written requests by parents regarding information relating to their children.
Of Interest	SB342	relative to school building aid funding.	Education	Wed 1/4	9:20 AM	LOB Room 101	This bill establishes a new school district building aid funding program using state funds allocated to each district and makes an appropriation therefor.
Support	SB442	relative to student eligibility for education freedom accounts.	Education	Wed 1/4	9:40 AM	LOB Room 101	This bill expands the definition of “eligible student” for the education freedom account program to include students whose enrollment transfer request was denied.
Oppose	SB522	relative to establishing an early childhood education scholarship account and making an appropriation therefor.	Education	Wed 1/4	10:00 AM	LOB Room 101	This bill requires rulemaking by the department of health and human services on child care early education and establishes an early childhood education account program to provide funds for an education freedom accounts scholarship organization to administer grants to eligible New Hampshire pre-kindergarten children for qualifying expenses.
Of Interest	SB303	relative to the use of renewable energy funds by the department of energy.	Energy and Natural Resources	Wed 1/4	9:00 AM	SH Room 103	This bill adds battery storage projects to uses of the renewable energy fund, deletes a required renewable generation incentive program, and authorizes a political subdivision incentive, rebate, or grant program using the fund. The bill also modifies the reporting date by the department of energy concerning the renewable energy fund. This bill is a request of the department of energy.
Oppose	SB541	relative to retail pet stores.	Energy and Natural Resources	Wed 1/4	9:45 AM	SH Room 103	This bill prohibits the sale of dogs and cats by retail pet shops except in certain cases.
Of Interest	CACR24	relating to reproductive freedom. Providing that all persons have the right to make their own reproductive decisions.	Judiciary	Wed 1/4	1:00 PM	SH Room 100	This constitutional amendment concurrent resolution would amend the constitution to provide that individuals shall have a right to personal reproductive autonomy.
Oppose	SB428	relative to the use of automated license plate readers by law enforcement officers.	Transportation	Wed 1/4	1:15 PM	LOB Room 101	This bill defines the appropriate use of automated license plate readers by law enforcement officers. The bill also makes an appropriation to the department of safety for digital automatic programming interface to connect data from the division of motor vehicles to the state police.
Oppose	SB580	relative to establishing a noise barrier on Teaberry Lane, Bedford, NH.	Transportation	Wed 1/4	1:30 PM	LOB Room 101	This bill mandates the construction of a noise barrier on Teaberry Lane, Bedford, NH.
Oppose	SB471	relative to adding a speed limit of 45 miles per hour on rural highways.	Transportation	Wed 1/4	2:00 PM	LOB Room 101	This bill adds a speed limit of 45 miles per hour on rural highways.

The post Bill Hearings for Week of January 01, 2024 appeared first on NH Liberty Alliance.

The College Fix went back through its 2023 archives to find things it reported on that someone on one campus or another decided were racist. A White Tower Guide for 2023, if you like. It’s quite the eclectic list.

We won’t duplicate all 71 of them, but instead, pick a few that caught our attention—not wearing a mask, for example. There were several black people on the list who were considered racist, like Sen. Tim Scott or black police officers. Fast Food is racist, as are clean pantries, Body Mass Index, and Public Health Departments.

Clowns, the movie Wonka, the American Flag, Art Therapy, and The Apostle Paul – all racist.

Justice Antonin Scalia

Conservatives

President Abe Lincoln

Governor Ron DeSantis

President Donald Trump

Nathan Bedford Forrest

Ambassador Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Vice President Mike Pence, Governor Chris Christie.

All racist.

The Outdoors is racist, as are Florida, the Kansas City Chiefs, and white paint. Math, Dance, Dating Apps, and White People. Racist! In other words, anything, anywhere, at any time, is racist if it fits the circumstances in which racism is the crutch needed, and we’ve been warning the culture warriors about this for a while. The fake hate hoaxes, of which there were at least 19 on US campuses in 2023, according to the College Fix. The ease with which the idea is peddled in circumstances where it has no place.

If you overuse the thing, it will lose its power. At some point, people who were once terrified of being labeled racist and, as such, went out of their way to prevent or avoid actual racism – perhaps even working to end it – won’t give a damn.

That time is now, and it has been coming since the election of Obama. Barry is the black president who destroyed decades of progress almost overnight. He did it to destabilize the nation, and that worked, too. To pit us against each other instead of against a government working every day to make all of us its slaves.

The BLM riots enshrined that division in modern history but only improved a handful of black lives who happened to vote Democrat and used (at least some of) the money they raised by mansions in primarily white neighborhoods.

Given the Democrat party history, the systemic racism of its ideological ancestors, the Left’s modern-day urban plantations, and the failure of black support for Democrats to improve their lives in any meaningful way is being called racist just another institution the Left needed to destroy?

And what happens to black voters when Democrats don’t need them anymore?

 

The post What Happens to Black Voters When Democrats Don’t Need Them Anymore? appeared first on Granite Grok.

The State Chittenden County Prosecutor Sarah George stated at Burlington’s Community Forum on public safety that the overall justice system is not set up for timely investigation and prosecution of repeat-shoplifters.

“There isn’t a legal avenue to just hold people in jail while their cases are pending,” she said. “It is literally against the law and our Constitution to do that. So if someone is stealing repetitively from a store, I would first say that it’s often two months at least until our office knows anything about it, and that’s if we get the cases from law [enforcement].”

She said the police have to finish their investigations before her office gets involved.

“If the cases are investigated and solved, and then those cases come to us, it’s often two months at least until our office knows anything about it. So in that time, people are of course able to continue to engage in that behavior without our office ever knowing it’s happening so much later on,” she said.

She also said that her office cannot lock up anyone without a conviction.

“And then by the time we do, we can’t just hold people in jail,” George said. “They are entitled to their freedom and they are presumed innocent until we have proven at trial that they are guilty and that is another delay while we are attempting to do that so that’s how our system works.”

She continued that she wishes both the police and her office could collect, investigate, and prosecute shoplifting in a more timely manner, but “that is not how our system is designed to work, unfortunately” she said.

The clip can be seen here.

Burlington Mayor says meth and Fentanyl fueling crime

Burlington mayor Miro Weinberger was on the Morning Drive radio show on Wednesday talking about how Fentanyl and meth are fueling the crime crisis.

“Since 2020 Fentanyl and meth have become the dominant drugs in the area and that has been a game changer,” Weinberger said. “Fentanyl is a much more powerful opioid, a much higher risk and overdose and death, it’s an opioid that people have to consume much more frequently, it used to be people if they were heavily addicted they would be using these drugs every 8-to-10 hours, now it’s every 2-to3 hours. People are injecting or smoking this drug 8-to-10 times a day.”

He also talked about how meth makes people behave worse.

“Meth has this terrible side effect of making people very agitated and at times more likely to commit crimes or create other problems,” he said. “That is really the biggest change that I believe is driving this real Vermont-wide and really country-wide challenge with legal drugs right now. The fact that we have so many more homeless people is driven by our problematic housing market is another big component of it. And of course, our ability to address this is also impacted by the loss of officers that we faced.

More thefts over the holiday

There were more thefts over the holiday, especially on Tuesday. There was a request for information put out by state police after someone robbed an Aubuchon Hardware store in Moretown.

The report states, “Troopers received a report of a retail theft that occurred the previous week. Aubuchon Hardware in Moretown, Vermont reported multiple items taken from their store.”

A still from a security camera can be seen here.

Also on Tuesday, there was a car theft at the St. J Subaru dealership. A man on security camera can be seen checking car doors throughout the parking lot and when he finds one that is unlocked with a key still inside, he drives it away.

Stores are not the only target for thefts. The same day there was another incident involving two white men in a red SUV-type vehicle taking four snow tires and four aluminum rims from a residence in Glover.

 

Michael Bielawski | Vermont Daily Chronicle

The post State Prosecutor Says System Not Designed To Investigate and Prosecute Shoplifters … appeared first on Granite Grok.

I’ve tossed the idea out there that Chris Christie is playing bad cop to Haley’s good cop when it comes to Donald Trump. The NJ Governor runs the smear campaign so Haley can take the high road. If she gets the job, Christie gets one, too.

It might only look like that, but it feels right, and a recent report from a Haley Town Hall in New Hampshire makes it feel right, too.

 

A 9-year-old on Thursday labeled former UN Ambassador and presidential hopeful Nikki Haley the “new John Kerry” at a town hall event in New Hampshire, adding that they agree with her political opponent Chris Christie that she is too soft on former President Donald Trump.

“So Chris Christie thinks you’re a flip-flopper on the Donald Trump issue and, honestly, I agree with him. You’re basically the new John Kerry,” the boy, who self-identified as, Adam, told Haley, prompting laughter from the audience. “How can you change your opinion like that in just eight years, and will you pardon Donald Trump?”

Haley said at the town hall that if Trump, who currently faces 91 felony counts, is convicted, she would pardon him.

 

Haley has said nice things about her former boss, but she’s convinced he’s not the guy we need now. She is – High Road.

Another report, not too far separated in the arc of this supposed plot, calls for Christie to drop out so Haley (or DeSantis) can benefit from his voters. By which I mean Haley.

 

 Chris Christie is directly pushing back on calls for him to drop out of the 2024 Republican presidential primary in a new seven-figure ad buy debuting in New Hampshire on Thursday, according to details shared exclusively with CNN.

“Some people say I should drop out of this race. Really? I’m the only one saying Donald Trump is a liar,” the former New Jersey governor, who trails the former president significantly, says in a direct-to-camera ad launching on broadcast and digital platforms.

 

Christie says he can’t drop out. He’s the only Not-Trump candidate taking it to the former president. The low road. He’s in it to smear Trump, and he’s got the TV ad buys to prove it, which should not be construed as Christie trying to improve his standing in either Iowa or New Hampshire. He’s got no chance in hell. He’s less liked than every other candidate by a wide margin. All the numbers are against him, so there is no reason to drop a 7-figure ad buy unless it’s to help someone who can win.

Haley again.

 

“I told you, I think he was the right president at the right time. I told you that I agreed with a lot of his policies. But do I think he’s the right president to go forward? No,” Haley responded to the child, saying that both “pro-trumpers” and “anti-Trumpers” disagree with her critical approach to Trump. “We can’t handle the chaos anymore.”

 

Christie, again.

 

Christie has sharpened his response to voters who question why he stays in the race, arguing that he’s the only one taking on the GOP front-runner directly. …

He told a voter at a house party in Portsmouth last week that if Haley showed him “she was actually running against Donald Trump,” then he “might” consider supporting her.

But, Christie argued, “Nikki won’t answer the question” as to whether she would accept a vice presidential role from Trump, something he and DeSantis have both said they would reject.

 

Maybe I’m wrong, but I still believe this is all for the show. If Haley has real momentum (and that’s subject to debate), she will need Trump fence-sitters and Trump voters to get there. They won’t vote for her if she smears him. She is also the most viable not-Trump candidate this week, and Chrsite will never be viable. It is also the former NJ governor’s mission, and that of his donors, to sideline Trump, and he has performed well as a conduit for campaign cash aimed in that direction.

It makes more sense if true, but when did political decisions or campaigns ever have to make sense?

 

The post Haley Accused of Being Soft on Trump, She Says Christie is Too Hard on Him (So, Am I Right About Those Two?) appeared first on Granite Grok.