Updates on New Hampshire's Culture of Freedom

On Friday, August 9, NH Governor Chris Sununu vetoed 3 gun safety bills. From his veto statement:

New Hampshire is one of the safest states in the nation, and we have a long and proud tradition of responsible firearm stewardship. Our laws are well-crafted and fit our culture of responsible gun ownership and individual freedom. 

Later that evening,  in Derry, a 79 year old man shot and killed his wife.

Didn't  this guy know about the culture? 

In the wee hours of Monday, August 12, Dover police are investigating gunfire in a street confrontation.

Just a little individual freedom fire. Nothing to see here. 

The wee hours of Monday morning were busy. In Northwood, a man claims he shot at someone trying to break into his car. Shot 3 times and missed. The police searched the area, but didn't find anyone. 

Thursday, August 15, a responsible firearm steward barricaded himself in a house in Claremont for 9 hours. Hundreds of  shots fired, but no one was injured. 

Sunday, September 15, a good guy with a gun - a safety officer no less - wounded himself and another safety officer, at a shooting range in Keene.

On Sept. 20, a responsible gun owner barricaded himself in his house in Nashua for a few hours, before being shot by a cop and taken into custody.

A proponent of individual freedom shot off his gun in a men's room in a bar in Portsmouth on Sept. 20. 

On Sunday, Sept. 22, a traditional firearm steward from Rochester, NH, drove to Massachusetts, where he shot and killed a guy at a bar.  (Hey, at least he did it out of state). Turns out he wasn't actually a law abiding gun owner, but of course, no one knew that till he pulled the trigger. 

A double shooting in Concord, NH on the night of 
September 25. A woman was found laying on the ground in a parking lot, after being shot in the head. A man was dead, slumped against the car. She died at the hospital. There is no official confirmation, yet, but  I think we all know how this story unfolds. The responsible gun owner shot her first, then killed himself. 

Update: That's exactly what happened. Concord Monitor

On October 1, a pastor from a Pentecostal church (in Pelham) was shot and killed at his home in Londonderry.


October 18, a person was reported to have been found dead in a Jaffrey apartment in this very carefully reported story. There were two people, one dead inside, one outside in a car, and possible gunshot wounds. Since then, the story has been updated. Apparently the person who died was a high school student, as was the person outside in the car. The police believe that it was death by suicide. 


October 12, two people were shot at the same Pentecostal church in Pelham that was home to the pastor murdered two weeks ago. It's being reported that a man and a woman were shot at a wedding, by a man with a handgun. 

The story has been updated. The bishop performing the wedding ceremony was shot, as was the bride. It is difficult to imagine that this is unrelated to the death of the minister on October 1. 

On October 27, a responsible firearm steward in Nashua killed his wife, and then himself. NECN
All these guns that are supposed to be making us safer don't seem to be doing much for women. 


A guy in Chesterfield who shot up his neighborhood last year is refusing a competency exam, saying that they're trying to torture a confession out of him. Union Leader. I wonder why we don't charge guys like this with terrorism. 

On Saturday, November 9, a responsible NH gun owner displayed his idea of individual freedom by threatening a driver on I-95 in MA  with his gun.

NH Made History

Last week history was made in New Hampshire. The death penalty was repealed in our state, making NH the twenty-first state to enact a repeal.

To accomplish this, the legislature had to override Governor Sununu’s veto, by a two-thirds majority in both the House and the Senate. That it happened is a testimony to the kind of bipartisan coalition building that has been going on behind the scenes for years.

In 1998, a bill was introduced to expand the death penalty. Two state representatives, Cliff Below and Renny Cushing, took a different view, and introduced a floor amendment to abolish it altogether. Their amendment failed, but, so did the death penalty expansion bill. That was the beginning of the repeal movement.

The group that formed came to be known as the New Hampshire Coalition to abolish the Death Penalty. It included members from the faith community, police officers, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle, and family members of murder victims. They would spend the next twenty years speaking out, filing repeal bills, and building momentum.

As the years went on, the death penalty began to be repealed in other states. Groups like the Innocence Project were using DNA evidence to overturn wrongful convictions and getting people released from death row. The NH coalition brought some of those death row exonerees to testify before the NH legislature. The testimony over the years of Curtis McCarty, Kirk Bloodsworth, and Sabrina Butler had an impact on how legislators began to think about the death penalty. Granted, the way the NH statute was written made a wrongful conviction unlikely, but even having the death penalty made the state part of something that is increasingly regarded as barbaric. 

Governor Sununu’s reason for vetoing the repeal was that he was standing with law enforcement; that the death penalty offers them some sort of protection, and shows support for them. A more tangible means of support would be to ensure that our police officers have good pay, good benefits, and excellent training. They’d probably appreciate it if the NH GOP stopped trying to turn NH into a right to work state, too. Another show of support would be to tighten up our gun laws, but I’ll save that topic for another day.

There has been a lot of talk about how the death penalty repeal was, “politicized.” A broad, bipartisan coalition was responsible for the repeal. The governor was furious at the thought of his veto being overturned, and so he lobbied House Republicans relentlessly.

In the Trumpian political world every single issue boils down to one thing: winning. The greater good was left in the dust as we hurtled down the road to “owning the libs.” The idea that the veto would be overturned, by people voting with their deeply held beliefs in mind was apparently not worthy of respect – it was LOSING.

In the House, 35 legislators who had voted for repeal in April voted against overriding the veto in May. The governor succeeded in convincing those folks to value party over principle. In Carroll County he turned only one member, State Rep. William Marsh from Wolfeboro. Despite Sununu’s hard work, the House did override the veto, and a week later so did the Senate.

It is unfortunate that the repeal was politicized, and even more unfortunate that those doing the politicizing pointed the finger at those who did no such thing. If Governor Sununu had stood up and said that he was disappointed in the veto override, but he understood that this was a vote by legislators on deeply held principles, he would have looked positively heroic, and I would be writing a different column. 

NH made history. The news of the repeal traveled all over the world. It was refreshing to read international press on the NH legislature that wasn’t generated by a Republican dropping his gun or his pants. We left the company of countries like Afghanistan, China, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and Somalia where citizens are executed by the state. New Hampshire walked bravely into the 21^stCentury. We’ve become an example that other states are using in their repeal efforts.

I’m proud of my state. There are far too many people to acknowledge, so I’m going to pick two. State Representative Renny Cushing of Hampton has been a leader in the repeal effort for 20 years, along with Arnie Alpert of AFSC NH. Their work to repeal the death penalty has been tireless and inspiring. I’m fortunate to be able to call them both my friends. 

On dark days when we ask ourselves why good change takes so long, and begin to doubt that it can happen at all, let this vote remind us that the arc of the moral universe does indeed bend toward justice. 

If Nothing Is True

Webster’s defines truth as: the property (as of a statement) of being in accord with fact or reality.

In 2016, the Oxford Dictionary chose post-truth as the word of the year. Truth’s been taking a beating for the last few years. No longer are facts accepted, just because they exist. Today we are free to dismiss facts if we don’t like them, or if we find them inconvenient.

Science - the systematic building of organized, tested knowledge is dismissed by ideologues who don’t like the conclusions, or who have religious objections to them. Once ours was a country that enthusiastically taught and venerated science, but somewhere along the way, religious fundamentalists started chipping away at it, because of evolution, and then it became a bone of contention when it came to climate change. The fossil fuel companies didn’t care much for the idea that they might be part of the problem, and so they provided a lot of funding to spread the gospel of ain’t no such thing as climate change. The anti-vaxxer crowd tried to tell us that vaccines caused autism – something many still believe. Now all things scientific are in doubt, because we’ve allowed the lunatic fringe to turn education into something questionable and elitist.

History can either be ignored or rewritten. The legendary civil war battle site, “The River of Blood” is memorialized at a Trump golf Course. Who can forget the Bowling Green Massacre? We’ve also seen plenty of rewriting. The deification of Ronald Reagan was years in the making. It wasn’t successful enough to get him on Mt. Rushmore (or Mount Clay) but it was successful in diverting attention from Reagan’s role in the Iran Contra affair. Reagan planted the seeds of government mistrust that have flourished over the decades, and Republicans smile with pride about that. They should be worrying about what happens in a country where the government can no longer govern, the inequality divide is expanding, and there are nuclear weapons lying about.

News stories we don’t agree with are now handily dismissed as Fake News, thanks to our president. He’s desperate for attention, but unless that attention is fawning and slobbering, it is Fake. When I was a schoolgirl, we were encouraged to read differing points of view, and make up our own minds. What a waste of time that was! Easier to pick out what we like, what we’re comfortable with, or what doesn’t threaten us.

Yes, truth has been taking a beating.

We’ve certainly seen that writ large in New Hampshire. The Republican Party had control of the NH House for 150 years. When they lost that control in 2006, the rumors of “busloads of people from Massachusetts” voting in our elections began. It was a steady drumbeat for a decade. In 2016 those drums became Lambegs when gubernatorial candidate Chris Sununu went on a radio show in Boston to bray about voter fraud. Days later he won his election – in fact the GOP seized control of all branches of the state government, despite all that alleged voter fraud.

Shortly after Trump took office, he started whining about voter fraud in NH, thanks to Trump sycophant Sununu, who paved the way. Donald Trump, the sorest winner in US political history was miffed because even though he won the election, he didn’t win NH, and apparently he was entitled to.

Now we’re dealing with the fallout from that bizarre pageant. Last year our legislature passed a ridiculous voter prevention bill. One of the provisions of that bill created a position for someone to play Nancy Drew and dig into the Mystery of the Unreturned Post Cards.

The person chosen for this new position is Orville “Bud” Fitch, who was an assistant AG, then left to work for Kelly Ayotte. A recent story by the excellent Mark Stern in Slate magazine provided some information about this new state employee. Mr. Fitch was resentful at being questioned, and provided little in the way of answers.  He refused to give Mark his job description, or describe how he’s going about doing it. Meanwhile, we’re paying for this – even though there is no proof of voter fraud.

At the same time, we have the audacity to wonder why there is political apathy among the young. They’ve learned that facts don’t matter. That justice is elusive for the non-wealthy. They can see that we have no interest in protecting the planet or their future. They have no hope of achieving the American Dream. And we have the audacity to wonder why there’s an opioid crisis. If nothing is true, nothing matters.

"Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle." Yale Prof. Tim Snyder

Published as an op-ed in the January 25 edition of the Conway Daily Sun 

Obstruction is Easy

In the process of crafting a budget for our state, first the Governor gives the legislature his or her budget. This year it was written by our new governor and his  budget advisor  Charlie Arlinghaus of the Josiah Bartlett Center, a far right wing think tank. The House Finance Committee then uses the governor’s budget as both a model and a jumping off point for creating their own version. At crossover, the budget goes to the Senate where they tinker with it, and then send it back. The differences are hammered out in a committee of conference where everyone works hard to ensure that there isn’t enough money to run the state as if it mattered, and then it’s done.

Not this year. This year, a cabal of obstructionists calling themselves the Freedom Caucus decided they didn’t like the budget. It spent too much money, they said. This cabal is comprised of legislators who are still angry that their leader, Bill O’Brien was defeated in his second bid to become Speaker, after what was widely acknowledged as a disastrous first term in that position. Even though O’Brien is no longer part of the legislature, he’s driving this bozo bus. This is the same O’Brien who, in 2013, gave a floor speech congratulating the House on the passage of what he called, “An O’Brien budget.” Minutes before, he’d actually voted against it.  

The Freedumb caucus is comprised of the same guys who want to make changes to the SNAP program that will cost the state more to administer, while saving no money, so you know they have the best interests of taxpayers at heart. These are the same guys who have been obstructing and delaying  at every opportunity since 2013.They’re libertarians, Free Staters, and Tea Partiers,  puffed up with manly pride that they’ve made a stand against Big Gummint Spending!

They refused to vote for the budget. The Democrats refused to vote for it, too, but not for the same reasons. The Democrats had some very modest (timid) additions they wanted to see added in. They offered to work out a compromise with Speaker Shawn Jasper, who rebuffed them half a dozen times.  Apparently he was unable to make a deal with the Freedumb caucus, even after he brought the governor in to yell at them, and so, for the first time ever, the House failed to send a budget to the Senate. This means that when the Senate comes up with a budget, the House will have no bargaining chips in the Committee of Conference. The one thing we can be sure of is that there won’t be enough money in this budget to run this state like a business, which is often presented as a goal.  The GOP should be incredibly embarrassed by this failure, yet none are brave enough to speak against the hostage taking actions by the O’Brienistas.

Obstruction is easy. The GOP has been specializing in it since 2009 when Obama took office. On the local level, we’ve had a Democrat in the corner office since one-term Republican Governor Craig Benson. As long as a Democrat held the executive power, the libertea branch of the GOP was free to obstruct anything and everything – and they certainly did, often just for the sake of doing it. With a Republican majority, there’s no one left for them to obstruct except each other.

Obstruction is easy. Governing is hard.

Passing ideological legislation is not governing. It’s easy when you have the majority. What is increasingly beyond the ability of the Republican Party is compromise, as this group illustrates so perfectly. Unless they get their way, they’re going to stomp their big boy feet and no one will get to use the playground swings.

As I’ve said before, this is what you get when you elect people who hate government to be the government.  

I’m often asked, “How do these people keep getting reelected?” Stories about what they do, how they behave, and how they vote are few and far between. This is a group of about 30 and most of them are men. Locally, this group includes Ed Comeau, Lino Avellani, and Glenn Cordelli. Ask yourselves why you keep electing them.

Then ask your other Republican representatives why they are silent. Ask them why you should keep voting for them, when party loyalty means more to them than their role as an elected representative of the people. Finally, ask them if they are a little ashamed that their party has been taken over by tantrum throwing toddlers.

Obstruction is easy. Governing is hard. 


From the NH Legislative Handbook:

 Members should at all times conduct themselves in a way that exhibits the utmost respect for their elected office, their constituents and the people of the State of New Hampshire.


published as an op-ed in the April 14 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper

Empire in Decline

This isn’t what I set out to write. It isn’t what I originally wrote.

But - the world as we know it has just changed a great deal, and I feel a duty to write about that. 

This election is about anger. The anger is real. I believe it is misplaced, but that really doesn’t matter now. The angry people have spoken, and the rest of the nation and the rest of the world will be living with the consequences for a long time to come.

Some social media snapshots from friends around the world:

From the UK: “World leaders are in shock. Apparently, Marine LePen is the only politician outside the US who has congratulated Trump, which is unprecedented.”

From Australia: “Come on, it's pretty funny that the USA has elected a clown, an actual one with makeup and wig, to govern. If you don't laugh you will go mad.”

From the UK: “Welcome to the Brexit Club, America.”

From Panama: “On several levels, it's the end of an era for the USA. Geopolitics and economics are generally forces for continuity, but in case you haven't noticed, the United States is not the power it was. Other countries' leaders and people who shift money to and fro around the world surely notice.”

From Australia:

“So it's looking like Donald Trump will be the president of the USA. What does that say about a political system that endorses a candidate like this lunatic? It is ok to be a bully? It's perfectly fine to be a misogynist? To be racist? To be a billionaire and not pay any tax? It's no problem at all to be a liar? It's ok to deceive people with conspiracy theories and manipulate opinions with empty statements that cannot be substantiated? To my American friends who I know did not vote for Trump. I'm so very sorry.”

Sorry, world. The US has just officially become a rogue nation.

The recriminations have begun. The Clinton supporters are blaming the third party voters. The third party voters are (in some cases) blaming the DNC for misreading the political climate. The Democratic Party has moved so far to the right since 2000, that they’re no longer the friend of the working stiff, in a year when it was terribly important to be that friend.

Republicans are not friends of the working class, either – they just have better PR. People with stagnant incomes hear “tax cuts” and they think that will mean more money for them. They do not understand that those cuts will be for the wealthy. People heard Trump talk about bringing manufacturing jobs back to this country. That was a cruel message to people who badly need good paying jobs. Manufacturing is never coming back. Trump’s own products are manufactured overseas. We’re a nation and a world on the verge of big economic changes, and we’ve chosen an ill-informed carnival barker to lead us into the future.

As a nation, we’ve never gotten past racism. We tried a few times, but it’s not over. As a nation, we have never confronted our misogyny. We just elected a guy who has said awful things about women, and admitted to assaulting them. A man who says we need to build a wall to keep out Mexicans. He mocked a reporter with disabilities. He was cheered on by angry people who applauded him for “telling it like it is.”

That’s what we do here. When the economy is lousy for us, when we are fearful for our future, we blame THOSE PEOPLE. Whoever they are. The politics of hate, anger, and fear have won the day. What do we tell our girl children about what just happened here?

The media deserves a great deal of blame for this – but not the kind that we began to see at the end of Trump’s campaign. Men showing up at Trump events with t-shirts suggesting that lynching reporters was a good idea isn’t funny. Somewhere along the way the second amendment has become the only one that matters to a large segment of the population.

Nowhere is that truer than NH, where the politics of guns and pledges have won the day. NH has just chosen another Sununu to govern our state. Jumping on the Trump train worked for him. We can now look forward to 2 years of businessman Chris Sununu telling us why it’s a mistake to invest in our own state. He’ll be aided and abetted by the great visionaries of our legislature, whose idea of the future is firmly planted in 1952. 

Guns aren’t going to fix our roads and bridges – and neither is our new state government. Instead, the demonizing of the poor is likely to be ramped up, along with MOAR GUNZ, less access to health care, business tax cuts, MOAR GUNZ, right to work, eliminating bodily autonomy for women, and plenty of other stupid that has yet to reveal itself.

As I write this, the US Senate race between Kelly Ayotte and Maggie Hassan is still undecided. Congresswoman Ann Kuster kept her seat, despite a last minute surge of support for challenger Jim Lawrence. Carol Shea-Porter was reelected in the first district, despite the best efforts of the independent candidate. He might have swayed the election to Guinta, had it not been for the rats. That was just a bridge too far (and too bizarre) for many people. New Hampshire did manage to fend off some of the damage that was done in the rest of the country.

There are some bright spots in the darkness. In Las Cruces, NM, a young woman I met at a conference in 2012 was just elected to her state legislature. Angelica Rubio describes her campaign as being “built on a foundation of community and inclusion, speaking to values that unite us all.”

We need more of this.

Published as an op-ed in the November 11 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper.