Nipples and Nonsense

It’s the start of the new year, and that means that the legislature will be back in session! The fun has already begun, with some of our NH Republicans covering our state with glory in the national media.

You may have read that a couple of male legislators made boobs of themselves over the horrifying thought of being subjected to the view of a female nipple. It seems that State Representative Josh Moore was so incensed at the idea, that he told a female state rep that any woman who was putting her nipple on view deserved to have it stared at or grabbed. This is especially fun because Josh is Ted Cruz’s “faith based outreach” director in NH. (Be sure to ask Josh or Ted whose nipple Jesus would grab.) The other offender was Representative Al Baldasaro, who also made crude remarks, but stopped short of justifying assault.

This all came about because last summer some women staged a “free the nipple” topless protest at Hampton Beach. This apparently was too much for the Patriarchal Police, so
a trio of male legislators filed a bill (HB 1525) to define the circumstances that comprise indecent exposure and lewdness.  

NH has some serious problems. We have the 11^th worst infrastructure in the United States. Our roads, bridges, dams, and water systems are in serious need of repair. We need telecommunications infrastructure. Young people are leaving the state in droves, because there are no jobs and no affordable housing. NH invests less than any other state does in higher education, so our college students have a tremendous debt load. We’re unwilling to raise sufficient funds to run the state as if it were a going concern, so all state agencies are insufficiently funded and don’t run properly. Our property taxes are some of the highest in the nation, and prevent young people from buying houses, and force old people to sell theirs.

The response of our legislature to the very serious problems our state faces? Nipples. Nonsense.

There are 8 bills attempting to eliminate abortion. Republican  men may not know diddly about planning future, but one thing they do know is that women can’t be trusted with their own bodies. There are 11 gun bills. There’s a constitutional amendment to try to ensure college students can’t vote here.  There’s a bill to require TANF recipients to be drug tested, another to dictate where SNAP benefits can be spent, and a resolution to encourage the governor and executive council to open their meetings with a prayer. Yeah, that’ll help. The legislature opens every session with a prayer, then they go on to do the best they can to ensure that the state’s poverty rate continues to rise.

Some of the bills are very familiar. Our legislators are not deterred by bills that fail to pass for decades – they just keep filing. There’s the usual attempt at defining “domicile” in ways that are aimed at preventing voting as opposed to encouraging it, this time in the form of a proposed amendment to our state constitution. Another constitutional amendment would require a 3/5 vote in the House to override any veto. We’ve heard these before.

HB 1629 would disqualify members of foreign terrorist groups from receiving public assistance. Is there a box that folks check off (yes or no) to notify the state that they’re members of a terrorist organization? HB 1542 would require drug testing of people receiving TANF benefits. This is one of Representative Don Leeman’s favorite hobbyhorses, brought back again. Kansas spent $40,000 on drug testing TANF recipients and got 11 positive test results. Mississippi spent $5,290 and got 2 positive test results. In a state that can’t afford to fix bridges, this seems like a bizarre use of funds, but hey, those poor folks aren’t going to demonize themselves.

HB 1115 stipulates that NH residents would only be required to obey our own state and federal laws. The laws of other states wouldn’t apply to us. This bill is sponsored by Rep. Frank Edelblut, a Republican who wants to be our governor. HB 1128 would designate the second week of September as Patriot Week. Because legislating patriotism makes it happen!

House Majority Leader Jack Flanagan is the lead sponsor of HB 1668, a bill that would create a registry for people convicted of heroin related offenses, and require the registration of those offenders. NH offers very little in the way of treatment for addicts. The GOP is determined to eliminate the NH Health Protection Program, (aka expanded Medicaid) which enables 40,000 low wage NH workers to access health insurance that they wouldn’t have otherwise. Insurance that covers treatment for addiction. Offering young people a future might be more helpful, (affordable education, good jobs, home ownership) but we’re not about to do that – so the only thing left is trying to prosecute our way out of a heroin epidemic. That it hasn’t worked yet is not a consideration.

Coming to us from the small gummint crowd is HB 1596, a bill aimed at changing the paperwork requirements for marriage. Representatives Itse, Hoell, Hill, and Ingbretson do not believe that the state should license anything, so they want to go forward into the past to the way things used to be, with couples filing a certificate of intent to marry, and then a certificate of marriage, which gives interested parties the opportunity to object to the marriage. I’m not making that up. It’s in the text. The text also only refers to couples that are comprised of a bride and a groom. It’s nice to see the same guys who moan and wail about gummint interference working hard to interfere in the personal lives of NH residents. Bravo, libetea dudes!

You can check out all 812 potential bills filed thus far at www.gencourt.state.nh.us . On the right side of the page, you’ll see the section labeled “State Legislation Dashboard” where you can find all bills – the good, the bad, and the peculiar. Presidential primaries generate a lot of heat and noise, but what happens on the state level has the greatest impact on our lives. Make it your New Year’s resolution to pay more attention.

published as an op-ed in the Conway Daily Sun on January 8, 2012

Susan DeLemus: I've Never Been Involved in Politics

CNN aired a segment today where they spoke with some NH Trump supporters. 



This woman has a bit of a meltdown about the president - he gets on her teevee and LIES! She's never been involved in politics! 

Never involved,  except when Ted Cruz named DeLemus and her husband to his NH leadership team back in May. Did she ditch Ted for Trump? Did they break up? 




OOPS

This woman is NH State Representative Susan DeLemus. She's serving her second (nonconsecutive) term in the NH House. 

Representative DeLemus distinguished herself during her first term, by causing a scene at a ballot hearing. DeLemus is a birther, and not afraid to say so. 




It was also reported on in The Atlantic.  

Susan DeLemus isn't the only infamous member of her family. Husband Jerry DeLemus was head of security at Cliven (welfare moocher) Bundy's Ranch debacle. In fact, it was Jerry who sent spree killers Jerad and Amanda Miller on their way. Refused admission to Bundyville, they went to Las Vegas and killed 2 cops and a bystander. Here's Jerry trying to weasel out of any responsibility

Here's Jerry, complaining about Scott Brown "trompling" on the Constitution. It seems former US Senator Scott Brown is a trompler.  This calm, level-headed individual was running for Sheriff in Strafford County. He's an Oath Keeper, a 9/12'er, a Tea Partier, and a proponent of the Constitutional Sheriff's movement. 

Back in June, Jerry announced that he wanted to hold a "Draw Mohammed" contest, as reported here by the Southern Poverty Law Center.


CNN should be embarrassed. Even the most cursory google search would have turned up most of this. Now they're being mocked - and deservedly so. 



[Note: she may have been trying to say The Donald has never been involved in politics, she's so incoherent, it's hard to know. One thing is for sure, either way she meant it - she's lying!]

Cooking Manly Bacon with Ted Cruz

That laughter at the end is so disturbing.

Ideology Over Ethics

Remember the government shutdown of 2013? Ted Cruz and his fellow Tea Party types obstructed the appropriation of funds to run the government for the fiscal year 2014. They were all bunched up about the Affordable Care Act, and used it as their excuse to put some 800,000 federal employees out of work and leave a million others wondering when they’d ever see a paycheck. They also used it as an opportunity to puff up their manly chests.

This is why I tell you that elections have consequences. When we elect people who say they hate gummint to BE the gummint, then this is what we get. A bunch of aging adolescents more interested in chestal puffery than doing the serious work of governing.

One of the consequences of the shutdown came at the Federal Elections Commission (FEC). What is the FEC?

From the website: In 1975, Congress created the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to administer and enforce the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) - the statute that governs the financing of federal elections. The duties of the FEC, which is an independent regulatory agency, are to disclose campaign finance information, to enforce the provisions of the law such as the limits and prohibitions on contributions, and to oversee the public funding of Presidential elections.

The FEC came about as a direct result of Watergate. The FEC publicly discloses where the campaign money comes from and where it goes.

Because of the government shutdown, all 339 FEC agency employees were furloughed. Months earlier, an independent auditor warned that the FEC’s information systems were at high risk for infiltration. And infiltrated they were. Chinese hackers launched an attack shortly after the shutdown. They crashed all of the computer systems – the computers that had all that information about where the money comes from and where it goes. There was nothing to prevent this from happening. No one was on duty, thanks to the folks who brought us the shutdown.

The FEC has been systematically defunded. The agency’s funding has been flat for five years. They have fewer staff now than in the last 15 years – despite the explosion in political spending. The analysts who read disclosure reports to check for compliance have a near quarter of a million page backlog. There are over 250 unresolved enforcement cases.

That’s why it took so long for the FEC to determine that Frank Guinta had broken campaign finance laws with his magic bank account and five years of ever changing lies. That’s why Frank Guinta was elected twice, in the face of those lies. We watched him stand in front of television cameras and accuse Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter of being a liar. There is no accountability or penalty for that kind of blatant dishonesty, far from it. The O’Brien rump caucus has lined up in support of Guinta. They never cared for him before, but now they figure if gummint says Frank is bad than Frank is good. We saw it in the responses to the Teletalk question “Should Frank Guinta Resign?” A number of people said no, because HILLARY. Ideology over ethics. Ideology over intellect.

Regulatory failures happen over and over. The environmental agencies that are supposed to look out for us have been pillaged and underfunded. The Upper Big Branch Coal Mine in Kentucky exploded and caused the death of 29 miners. This was after over a decade of safety violations that should have closed the mine down. The Deepwater Horizon offshore oil drilling platform exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and spewing oil into the ocean for 87 days. The Deepwater Horizon had a spotty inspection record. None of the safety mechanisms in place to prevent the explosion or the oil spill worked.

This is what happens when we take away the funding and the fangs of the regulatory agencies. Corporations do not police themselves. They will do anything to avoid paying for their mistakes, especially those that require a huge cleanup. Their interest is in making money, and the occasional environmental disaster shouldn’t be allowed to interfere with that pursuit.

Very few politicians regulate themselves.  With the influx of money generated by the Citizens United decision (because free speech is mighty expensive) involved in the political process, we should all be concerned about the intentional (for what else can it be?) dismantling of the FEC.

It’s easy to dismiss the concerns about money as a federal elections issue. Trickle down economics has been an abysmal failure, but trickle down campaign money is proving quite successful. As we all know, the NH House is populated with 400 “volunteer” legislators. They earn a stipend of $100 a year and mileage reimbursement for their service. It used to be that a run for the NH House meant raising somewhere between $500 and $1000. Candidates needed signs and handouts for voters. Those days are over, as we learned during a recent special election for the NH House, in Rockingham District 32.

The special election was needed because the guy who was elected went to work for Frank Guinta (KARMA!) before he was ever sworn in. Former State Rep. Maureen Mann was uncontested in the Democratic primary. The GOP primary came down to two college students. One was arrested for violating a protective order shortly before the election. The other candidate, Yvonne Dean-Bailey, won the primary. Miss Dean-Bailey is a student at Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts. She’s one of the angry young libertea Republicans given special attention because she puts the rare female face on that brand of ideology.

Miss Dean-Bailey’s campaign for the NH House was amazingly well funded. She was the beneficiary of over $10,000 in PAC money alone. A young libertarian millionaire from Texas has a PAC that provided over $4,000 for mailings. He has no ties to NH. He is, however, more than willing to help buy a fellow ideologue a seat in a volunteer legislature.

Special interests expect a return on their investment. We should be concerned about that on every single level of our government. We need regulatory agencies to police those who lack integrity, but have plenty of cash. Pay to play is not democracy.

If there was one decision I would overrule, it would be Citizens United. I think the notion that we have all the democracy that money can buy strays so far from what our democracy is supposed to be. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

This was published as an op-ed in the May 29, 2015 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper.  

Cruzin' For Unlimited Cash

Ted Cruz was busy in NH over the weekend. At one event he was working hard to ensure that a  three year old grows up to become a Democrat. 

Cruz thinks there should be no limits  on political cash: 

Unlimited political cash would give rank-and-file conservative activists greater sway in picking their representatives, including the president..

So people who don't have lots of money would benefit from not having lots of money? Huh? 

Cruz, a first-term senator who represents Texas, said deep-pocketed donors should have the same rights to write giant campaign checks as voters have to put signs in their front yards. Both, Cruz said, were an example of political speech, and he added that “money absolutely can be speech”.

Because everybody knows that folks who put signs in their yards have exactly the same clout as big donors! 

Pass the Popcorn

The candidates are coming! The candidates are coming! The next presidential election is three years away, but already the fringe hopefuls are coming out of the woodwork to visit NH to test the waters. Or cast the maple leaves.  (Note to candidates: careful with maple syrup. Ask Rick Perry.) Or maybe just to fatten their PAC funds. In any case, it’s time to make a fresh batch of popcorn and settle in to take a look at the first round of  hopefuls who have no chance of reaching the White House.

Former Florida Congressman Allen West will be the keynote speaker at the Nashua Republican Committee’s annual “Steak Out” fundraiser in August. West is a big favorite of the Tea Party crowd. West is indeed a colorful character, so much so that he lost his GOP seat in Florida, of all places, to a Democrat. These days, he’s a paid commenter at Fox News. He recently told Sean Hannity that we should elect someone who has been “called” to be president. Voices in his head? God? Wrong number? Stay tuned.

 In the wake of President Obama’s remarks about racism in the US, West was quick to say he’d never experienced any such thing as a boy in inner city Atlanta, because HIS parents brought him up to be respectful. His respectful nature fails when it comes to women. In 2011 he called colleague Debbie Wasserman Schultz, “despicable, vile, and not a lady.” Before being elected to Congress, West was a monthly contributing writer to a biker magazine that regularly featured misogynistic material, including one article asking readers to imagine having sex with the aforementioned Congresswoman. Other pieces referred to women as “oral relief stations.” If Allen West were coming toward my car, I would lock the doors post haste.

West was forced to retire from the Army after he admitted to watching his men beat an Iraqi policeman that West suspected of planning an ambush. West fired a gun near the man’s head to scare him into divulging the details of the alleged ambush. There weren’t any. There was no plot, as all investigations revealed, despite West’s claims that his actions saved lives. Far from being repentant, he campaigned on being proud of his actions. In some circles, torture and detainee abuse is something to be proud of, along with Islamophobia.

That leads us to noted Islamophobe, Congressman Peter King of NY, who will be speaking to the Carroll County Republicans in August, and the Strafford County GOP in September. King is considering a run for president because he wants to push a national dialogue about the need for a more robust national security. Given that we are currently shoveling 58% of our federal discretionary budget at the Dept. of Defense, one wonders how much more robusticity we can afford. Rep. King was the Chair of the House Homeland Security Committee. The Dept. of Homeland Security is one of two cabinet level federal agencies that are unable to pass an audit. The other is the Pentagon.  

King was quite annoyed with Senator Aqua Buddha’s recent filibuster on drone strikes, calling it a “trivial and unimportant debate.” King also recently called for the prosecution of journalists who report on classified information. He doesn’t seem to think that we have the right to know about the US surveillance programs that came to light thanks to Edward Snowden. King would like to make sure that you don’t sully your pretty little head with any knowledge of what kind of things the government is up to in your name.

Tea Partier Senator Ted Cruz of Texas is coming to headline a NH GOP fundraiser in late August. He’s also going to be the keynote speaker at a Florida Tea Party event hosted by the Koch Bros. funded group Americans for Prosperity.

Cruz was elected to the Senate last year. This is the first time he’s held office. Cruz was born in Canada to a father who was a Cuban citizen and an American mother. There are some questions as to whether he’s eligible to be president on those grounds. The rest of us have other questions about his eligibility.

Cruz is a proponent of the Tea Party/John Bircher tin foil hat brigade on the issue of Agenda 21. Cruz thinks it’s a plot by George Soros who is leading the UN to eliminate golf courses, grazing pastures, and paved roads. Senator Cruz apparently slumbered through 2008, and thinks that turning the Social Security Fund over to Wall Street is a good idea. He also believes that Sharia law is an “enormous problem” in the United States, despite a lack of any evidence that this is so. It’s GOP standard issue Islamophobia.

Cruz is definitely a big bagful of nuts. He recently said that marriage equality would lead to hate speech laws and the imprisonment of pastors who support traditional marriage. Again, there’s no evidence that any group is moving toward any such thing – but a lack of fact or evidence doesn’t seem to deter the folks on the far right.

NH GOP Chair Jennifer Horn calls Cruz, “one of the most principled and exciting new leaders in the Republican Party.” This is the same Jennifer Horn who has also said that the philosophy of the Free State Project “is something that’s right in line with the Republican Party.” The Free State Project is a group of libertarian anarcho-capitalists moving to NH with the goal of taking over the state, dismantling state government, and threatening to secede. They’re hoping to move 20,000 of their fellow Rand worshippers to NH in time to swing the 2016 election. As people in some towns and counties (notably Carroll, Strafford, and Belknap) can attest, they’re already doing some very real damage. In a video of a panel discussion of Free State office holders, Rep. Mark Warden said, “The Republican Party asked Carol McGuire (also of the FSP) to recruit more FSP candidates.”

The NH GOP has obviously learned nothing from their last round of electoral defeats, and has every intention of continuing to merge with the fringiest of the fringe. This first round of presidential wannabes are straight from the Mad Hatter’s table.

Pass the popcorn. 


© 2013 sbruce
published as a bi-weekly column in the Conway Daily Sun newspaper