No Honor Among Sleaze

Merriam Webster’s definition of the term honorable:

1. Deserving of respect or high regard

2. Entitled to honor or respect – used as a title for various government officials.

Now - an example of its use: The Honorable Robert Fisher wrote, “I’m going to say it—Rape isn’t an absolute bad, because the rapist I think probably likes it a lot.” So much honor!

By now you’ve heard about Representative Robert Fisher of Laconia, the young man who created a forum for pickup artists and men’s rights activists to share their disdain for women and discuss tactics for getting them into bed.

The governor, the speaker of the House, and the chair of the NH GOP have all asked him to resign. He has refused.  

There was a hearing of the House Legislative Administration Committee earlier this week, to hear testimony from Fisher and members of the public. The committee may opt to expel him from the House, censure him, or do nothing. My money is on nothing. Even though the House Republicans have a big scandal every year with some badly behaved individual, they show no sign of cleaning up the increasing mess their party has become. Their only interest is in ideology, and if they need to use perverts to get enough votes, then perverts they will find and run as candidates.

At the same the committee was timidly questioning Fisher, former Rep. Kyle Tasker (last year’s big scandal) was being sentenced in court for trying to lure a 14 year old to meet him for a sexual encounter.

Thanks to all this, some women who serve in the legislature have been speaking out about the way they are treated by the men in the majority party. It’s no surprise, really. Here’s a look at some men who are currently serving: Rep. Brian Stone of Northwood was arrested for violating a restraining order against his former girlfriend. Rep. James Spillane of Deerfield was arrested for assaulting his former wife.  Rep. Frank Sapareto from Derry assaulted his former girlfriend’s children in 2012. In 2017, he’s the Vice Chairman of the House Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee. Rep. Michael Brewster lost custody of his children, and harassed one of the state workers in the Child Support Unit so much that a restraining order was taken out against him. He violated it and was arrested. Senator Kevin Avard was arrested for violating a restraining order against his former wife.

Not only are these men elected, they are given leadership positions. And the House Republican women remain silent. Not a one of them has spoken out against Fisher. These women send a strong message through their silence. They’re saying that they don’t mind serving with mean who hate and fear women so much that they assault them. Fisher bemoaned the fact that because of statutory rape laws, “perfectly viable women under the age of 18” were not available to him. Kyle Tasker was on his way to rape a 14-year old girl. From their silence, one can only infer that the Republican women in the House are on board with this behavior. Silence = complicity.  

Republicans elected a president who boasted of grabbing women by their genitalia. It should come as no surprise that this has emboldened the Republican men of the NH legislature. They are so comfortable in their loathing for women and their certainty that they won’t be held accountable that they are fearless. There are no behaviors they won’t defend. There’s no honor among sleaze.

These are men fought hard to keep a law on the books that allows adult men to marry 13-year-old girls. These are men who fought hard to keep a law on the books that allows men to use the “I didn’t know she was underage” defense when caught trying to purchase sex from a minor. These same men are desperate to legislate women’s lives; from making their personal medical decisions to how their divorces are handled. In  2014 a bill was passed making domestic violence a crime. Three men voted against it: Representatives JR Hoell, Michael Sylvia, and Frank Sapareto. Why? Because abusers might lose their guns.

I’m not letting Democrats off the hook either. Robert Fisher handed them plutonium on a platter, and House leadership has failed to take advantage of it. If the parties were reversed in this situation, the Republican howls would be heard on Mars. No such howling has been heard in the hallways of the NH House coming from Democratic leadership.

In an effort to deflect attention from Fisher, Republican Rep. Victoria Sullivan launched a false equivalency witch-hunt against Democratic Rep. Sherry Frost. Minority leadership seems more inclined to sacrifice Frost than to rock the boat by defending her. It’s curious, really. Are they afraid the Republicans won’t like them?

Here’s the thing- they don’t like you already. You might as well fight back (for a change) and earn some respect from voters desperate for an opposition party.

Legislative Legerdemain

Every legislative session starts with most of our legislators displaying at least a modicum of dignity and good manners. Most years that doesn’t begin to break down until the last month or so when it’s time to concur or not concur on amended bills.

This year the breakdown began early. As part of the House committee process, a member of the committee writes up a summary of a bill that is ready to go to the floor for a vote. It will explain what the intent of the bill is, explains any moving parts, the fiscal aspects and gives the committee’s recommendation. There may be a majority report, detailing why the majority of the committee supports or does not support the bill, and a minority report explaining why the minority does or does not believe it should pass. This write up is included in the House calendar. They are generally written with a neutral tone and language.

Not this year. Fellow calendar geeks undoubtedly noticed that a number of committee reports were written in either a sarcastic or self-righteous tone. This was an exceptional year in many respects. The NippleGate scandal was the result of Rep. Josh Moore opining on Twitter that a nipple bared in public was open for grabbing. Rep. Ken Weyler announced his opinion that giving public benefits to anyone practicing Islam is treason. Representative Kyle Tasker brought glory to the GOP when he was arrested at the place where he was supposed to be meeting a 14-year-old girl he’d been soliciting sex from on the internet. He met a cop, instead. More cops found his house full of drugs, and there is reportedly a list of his legislative customers, that may go public at some point. As someone once involved in the informal pharmaceutical trade, let me give ya’ll some advice. One thing you really want in a drug dealer is discretion. Don’t buy drugs from the guy who drops his gun in the State House and is always in the news for saying and doing obnoxious things.

As the legislature winds down, it’s time for shenanigans and deals. Any bill that was amended by either the House or Senate must go back to the body it originated from, where that body votes on whether to concur with the amended version, to non concur which kills the bill, or they can ask for a Committee of Conference. (CoC)

The language from dead or tabled bills can be tacked on to completely unrelated bills (a phenomenon known as the non-germane amendment) in an effort to sweeten the deal or twist arms. Some of the weirder examples include HB 636: relative to forfeiture of property; relative to the sale of premixed synthetic urine; establishing a grant program for high schools for heroin and opiate prevention education; and clarifying who may petition to adopt. Because when you think adoption, you think synthetic urine.

SB 495: relative to the health care premium contribution for retired state employees who are eligible for Medicare Parts A and B due to age or disability, relative to funding of retiree health benefits, making appropriations to the department of administrative services, and relative to the definition of a cigar bar. (One of these things is not like the other.) The goal is to give the other guys something they want, so that they’ll vote for your bill, even though they don’t like it. 

That’s how a bill written to fund the police standards and training council and purchase some state police cars (SB 527) was amended to include a provision about bi-weekly paychecks. The Senate tabled the original biweekly paycheck bill. In the legislature, tabling can also be defined as “saving for future leverage.” In this instance, money for cops and cop cars would not be approved by the anti-cop libertea crowd – but tack on the language from the biweekly paycheck bill that was written and sponsored by a number of libertea restaurant owners, and the cops might get their cruisers. This bill is still in the CoC.

Once in a CoC, the members have to unanimously agree to changes, and everyone has to sign off on the report. The report then goes back to the originating body for an official vote on whether to pass the whole thing or not. If it passes, it will eventually hit the governor’s desk.

Another fun aspect of the Committee of Conference process is that the members of the committee can be changed at any time, depending on the desired outcome.  For example, SB 4 is yet another attempt to solve the nonexistent problem of voter fraud. The bill will require a voter to live in the state for 30 days before being allowed to vote. This is almost certainly unconstitutional, but that does not deter the voter suppression crowd. Wasting money on court challenges just means less money to spend frivolously on things like roads and bridges. The House amended the bill to add some rather pompous language about the intentions of the 1974 Constitutional Convention and the meaning of the term domicile, and the Senate asked for a CoC. A dissenting Senator (Democrat) was replaced by a Republican Senator and suddenly there is agreement! Not because it’s a good or necessary bill, but because it’s partisan jiggery pokery.

Eight voter domicile bills were filed this year. There were 4 concealed carry bills. These are the priorities of the current legislature. They aren’t the priorities of the average voter, but they do reflect the mindset of the ideologues that currently populate the majority party.

There is a link on the House General Court website where you can check out the bills currently in Committees of Conference, and who the members of the committee currently are. A look at the bill’s docket will show any changes in the configuration of the committee.

Legerdemain is defined as “sleight of hand when performing conjuring tricks.” That’s what the end of the legislative session is all about.

Published as an oped in the May 27 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper 

Felonious Max Abramson Didn't Get the Memo

NH State Rep. Max Abramson (photo from Seacoastonline.com)

NH State Representative Max Abramson is a Republican from Seabrook. He's also a member of the Free State Project, the group of armed, libertarian/anarchist miscreants, who are moving to NH with the stated goal of taking over and dismantling the state government, then threatening secession. Since moving to NH, Abramson has distinguished himself by firing his gun at a party at his house in a residential neighborhood, which resulted in a felony conviction. He's also recently ingratiated himself with voters by coming to the defense of former House colleague Kyle Tasker, who was arrested for trying to arrange a sexual liason with a 14 year old girl over Facebook. 

This is from Abramson's personal FB page: 

Of course there is no such requirement, as anyone who bothered to do even a simple google search would discover. 

The libertarians who are invading our state love to tell us that they are all about live and let live - and live free or die. They support gay marriage! 

In The Economist  Free Staters try to take credit for the passing of NH's marriage equality law. What's especially amusing about this Economist piece is that Carol McGuire, whom they present as an FSP legislative darling, voted AGAINST marriage equality. 

One of the 101 Reasons to move to NH touted by the Free State Project is the fact that NH passed marriage equality. 

Apparently Felonious Max didn't get the memo that he's not supposed to be a public bigot. But hey, at least the FSP didn't kick him out of the FSP for publicly supporting a pedophile. At least not yet. As long as Max is in the legislature, he's useful to FSP, Inc. 

New, Corporate Free State Project Begins Cleaning House

Poor Ian Freeman.

Ian moved to NH in 2006, as part of the Free State Project. He bought a house and set up a studio for his radio show. In no time at all, he became the leader of the subset of the Free State Project cult, known as Free Keene.

He's relentlessly shilled for Free Keene and the Free State Project. He's also been a big embarrassment to the FSP. Any time there was an obnoxious story in the news about the FSP, it originated in Keene. The Free Keeners did a lot of embarrassing stuff. They drew penises on the sidewalks of Keene with chalk. They vandalized the war memorial. They pranced around with cameras, harassing meter readers. They smoked pot in the park every day at 4:20. SO edgy. They had topless protests. They were people with no visible means of support, who fed parking meters downtown and called their activism "work." Some of them kept getting arrested.

They weren't a good image. And Ian - well Ian's image was pretty tarnished. In 2010, on his radio show, he espoused the opinion that there doesn't need to be an age of consent for adults wanting to have sex with children.




There were grumblings about that over the years. I grumbled about it, here at my blog, in 2014.

Then came Kyle Tasker.  State Representative Kyle Tasker was arrested when he went to the meeting place he'd arranged over Facebook, for the purposes of having sex with a 14 year old girl.

Suddenly, sex with children is a topic of discussion in the state of NH. One of the first people to defend Kyle Tasker was Ian Freeman.  And again.

Ian wasn't the only Free Stater to defend Tasker in public. State Representative Max Abramson was quite vocal on social media and in the comment section at the Union Leader.

Meanwhile, the Free State Project has undergone a transformation. They're now officially a 501 (c)(3) non-profit. They were promoting a campaign for the last few years to "trigger the move." When the FSP reached the magic number of 20,000 signers, the trigger would be pulled (an apt analogy for the armed miscreants) and just like that they would suddenly appear.

The Free State Project began in 2001, when Jason Sorens wrote a rant about gathering like minded individuals to move to a state, take over and dismantle the government, then threaten to secede from the rest of the nation.  In 2001 they voted to move to NH.

Since then, the goalposts have shifted numerous times. They were all supposed to be here in 2006. Then they were all supposed to be here by 2010. It's 2016, and there are still fewer  than 2,000 of them here.

But, Trigger the Move was good PR. They got tons of publicity, and one thing Free Staters love is publicity. Even the mainstream media began showing up at their big events like Porcfest and Liberty Forum. President Carla Gericke was a relentless media hound. She sued the town of Weare. She shrieked and sobbed at the City of Concord when they wanted to buy a Bearcat armored vehicle. She was a necessary figurehead for the FSP, given that libertarian groups are populated by mostly men, and those men are of a somewhat misogynistic persuasion. Having a very visible female figure at the helm was a way of eliminating the discussion of libertarian misogyny.

Carla Gericke, former FSP President 

The move was triggered. And suddenly everything changed. Carla was kicked upstairs, and given a position on the board. Her image wasn't right for the new improved FSP. Millionaire businessman and NH-come-lately, Matt Phillips is the new president of the FSP. He moved to NH in 2014. Matt was an intern at the CATO Institute with Jason Sorens. The Koch funded CATO institute. Also on the board are Aaron Day - an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, businessman Rich Goldman, scientist and management consultant Séamas Ó Scalaidhe, and Jason Sorens who is currently on faculty at Dartmouth. He moved to NH in 2013. There are two women on the board: Carla Gericke and Jody Underwood. Mrs. Underwood is a farmer in Croyden, and likes to dance! Carla likes cooking, hiking, and yoga! 

It seems that the FSP is triggering an entirely different sort of move - a move away from scruffy potheads and sidewalk chalkers - a move toward business suit wearing legitimacy. They don't want to be labeled as "fringe" or "cult" any longer. Nope, they're going full on libertarian corporate. The irony is delicious. 

Carla Gericke, Jason Sorens, and Matt Phillips 

Back to Ian Freeman. Adult men advocating sex with children is not respectable or legitimate. The reaction to Kyle Tasker's attempts to solicit sex with 14 year old girls horrified most residents of our state. It happened at the same time the FSP is making their bid toward becoming FSP Inc. Ian's been an embarrassment for years, and suddenly, they have the means to ditch him. The FSP announced that they were severing ties with Ian's media empire, and that he was not welcome to appear at FSP events. He resigned from the FSP shortly thereafter. And right after all that, the FBI raided the Church of the Free Load and took a boatload of computers and electronic devices.  The new story in the media is that Ian was expelled from the FSP, just as his buddy Chris Cantwell was expelled a few years ago. Both of them were victims of political expedience. Cantwell started making noise about how he thought killing police officers was a wonderful thing at the very same time Carla Gericke started shrieking in public about the Concord Bearcat. The Concord police chief called the FSP potential domestic terrorists on his application. The LAST thing they needed was for the media to discover that Cantwell was proving the chief right. So, they made a big public show of expelling him. Ian became a liability long ago - he just provided the FSP with an opportunity at exactly the right time, thanks to Kyle Tasker. I suspect we'll see more FSP house cleaning in the weeks and months ahead. 

I can't help but feel badly for Ian. He's worked hard to put the FSP on the map for the last 10 years. He's been used and very publicly
cast aside by the very people he worked with and trusted. 

Updates on the Delusional

Last week, the NH House had a marathon 2-day voting session that dealt with 500 bills. The sessions began at 9 am. On Thursday (day 2) afternoon the Sergeant–at-Arms was instructed to lock everyone in, in order to keep a quorum. The House sessions are live-streamed, so I was able to watch some of the evening sessions. A stranger to NH would never have realized that NH has serious infrastructure problems, including 300+ bridges on the red list for structural impairments. They would never have known that our tax system is a disaster, causing young people to flee our state, because they can’t afford to buy houses – and old people to flee the state, because they can’t afford to keep their houses. That stranger would have thought that guns and abortion were the most pressing issues in our state.

There were a dozen abortion related bills. Not one of them was written by anyone with even a scrid of medical competency, but all were written by men. These are men who bray about the “nanny state” when it comes to their own lives. Nanny state good for women. By far, the most disturbing speaker was Rep. Warren Groen from Rochester. Readers may recall Groen from the red tailed hawk incident last year. He was the one who felt compelled to give 4^th graders visiting the legislature a lesson in abortion from the House floor. Listening to him describe abortion, even with flat affect, it seemed that for him, this is a near pornographic turn on. It was disturbing.

As we know, the NH Republican party has been hijacked by a roiling mix of Tea Partiers, Free Staters, and John Birchers. The results of this takeover are increasingly obvious, as we see in the events of the last two weeks. State Representative Kyle Tasker, a Republican from Nottingham, was arrested recently for trying to solicit sex from a 14 year old over the internet. The 14 year old proved to be a cop. Tasker sent her texts to set up a meeting while he was at a committee hearing. He served on the Child and Family Law committee. His house was full of drugs and guns, and he was armed when he went to meet up with the 14 year old. Would he have forced himself on her at gunpoint? We will never know. Most of his colleagues in the legislature were appalled by his actions, but Rep. Max Abramson, a Free Stater from Seabrook has repeatedly insisted that Tasker was set up. One wonders how the voters in Abramson’s district feel about his public defense of a 30 year old man trying to arrange sex with a 14 year old. Before he could be expelled, Tasker resigned. There were plenty of warning signs that he was a loose cannon, but they were ignored, and now everyone claims horrified surprise.

Next, Jerry DeLemus, (former GOP candidate for “Constitutional Sheriff”) from Rochester, was arrested by the feds for his role in the Bundy ranch debacle.  It seems the feds didn’t take kindly to a bunch of armed yahoos pointing their weapons at law enforcement, and finally decided to prosecute. There is much bleating from his supporters about “federal land grabs.” Cliven Bundy is a moocher who wasn’t paying the extraordinarily low grazing fees he is assessed for allowing his cattle to graze on public lands. That was the issue and it had nothing to do with land grabs, or Jerry DeLemus, for that matter. He seized the opportunity to ride out to the Bundy ranch with his sniper rifle, which he stopped to have sighted along the way. We are now expected to believe he was there as a “peacemaker.” There are 9 federal charges against DeLemus, who also went out to the Bundy occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Sanctuary in Oregon. Where there are guns and cameras, there is Jerry DeLemus. His wife, Susan, is a state representative, who recently was in the news for referring to Pope Francis as “the anti-Christ.” Rochester.

Republican State Representative Don Leeman of Rochester (where else?) moved out of the ward that elected him to the legislature, in December. He went back to the House in January and told no one. On February 9, he voted in the NH primary – in his old district – the one he didn’t live in any more. That was noticed. An inquiry began. The House Legislative Administration committee found that he didn’t live in his district any longer; therefore he wasn’t qualified to be a representative any longer. Leeman sauntered in with a note from his new landlord, saying he was moving back into the district he’d vacated months earlier, and Speaker Jasper allowed him to stay. This is the very same Republican Party that continually howls about voter fraud. Yet (as we’ve seen before) when one of their own commits it they get whiplash looking the other way. The Union Leader congratulated Leeman on keeping his seat. The NH Republican Party has forfeited the right to ever say another word about voter fraud in this state.

There are signs of an attempt by residents of some towns to stem the tide of reactionary politics. The towns of Rollinsford, Bow, and Dunbarton all voted against eliminating town meeting in favor of SB2. Rollinsford and Dunbarton both voted against a tax cap. Dunbarton voted to hire a part time clerk. Last year they eliminated the position, and everyone in town got a hard lesson in the reality that there’s a lot more to the job of the town clerk than motor vehicle registrations. My favorite town meeting story this year comes from Dunbarton, where a state legislator was running unopposed for the position of town moderator. The town had a candidate’s night on the Saturday before town meeting. The candidate appeared with his sidearm attached. A voter asked if he’d be moderating with a gun, and he said he always wears it. The people in attendance decided they did not want a moderator at the podium with a gun, so they drafted another candidate, and launched a write-in campaign. The write-in candidate won. JR Hoell lost while running unopposed.

As for what’s going on nationally – President Trump is certainly what we deserve, though I don’t think we’re going to like it very much.

published as an op-ed in the March 18 issue of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper