Forsythe Resigns, Hinch Sings New Tune

Robert Forsythe in 2014


It was only yesterday that the story of NH State Rep. Robert Forsythe broke. He's been charged with felony domestic abuse for choking a pregnant partner. The whole sordid story of his arrest was reported by the Concord Monitor

This was the NH House Minority Leader's reaction to the arrest yesterday:

House Republican Leader Dick Hinch condemned the alleged behavior, saying “domestic violence and assault are unacceptable and wrong and have no place in our society,” but he stopped short of calling on Forsythe to resign.

“Rep. Forsythe is the only person who can put pen to paper, and sign a resignation letter,” Hinch said. “The people of Boscawen have the right to ask him to resign if they believe he can no longer represent them. They also have the ability to vote for alternative candidates, including write-ins, if they believe they no longer want Rep. Forsythe to represent them in Concord.”

I noted the difference in Hinch's reaction to the arrest of a fellow Republican and the arrest of a Democrat on domestic violence charges in a blog post yesterday.

Poor Hinch. After all that waffling, Governor Sununu came right out and called for Forsythe's resignation. 

Today, the Monitor reports that Forsythe has resigned:

In a phone call Wednesday, Forsythe, 38, said he had chosen to step down after consulting with fellow representatives and Rep. Dick Hinch, the House Republican Leader...

Hinch confirmed the resignation in his own statement Wednesday afternoon.

“I spoke with Rep. Forsythe this morning and encouraged him to resign from the House, which he has now done,” Hinch stated. “He faces very serious charges that he will need to answer to in a court of law. Domestic violence and assault are unacceptable and wrong and have no place in our society.”

What a difference a day makes, eh Hinchy?

Forsythe was running unopposed in his district. He told the Monitor that the charges against him won't hold up in court.  This isn't his first run-in with the law,  in 2019 he was charged with violating a protective order. Forsythe sponsored a bill this year which seems intended to weaken protective orders and protect abusers. It would excuse a defendant for violating an order if it could be proven that the plaintiff requested the contact. The bill was  killed by the House. It doesn't take Dick Tracy to see what that was all about. 

We know he has engaged in violence against women and he loves guns.  This is the kind of profile that should be taken with the utmost seriousness. It's the same profile of nearly every domestic terrorist/mass shooter. 

House Minority Leader Dick Hinch's first reaction was to protect him. Just as he attempted to protect Robert "Red Pill" Fisher. Hinch wasn't shy about demanding that State Rep. Sherry Frost should resign because she used the word "fuck" on her personal Facebook page. The difference? Frost is a Democrat. 

The NH GOP has a man problem. When training on domestic violence and harassment was mandated by leadership (the kind of training any professional has to go through in the workplace) a number of the Republican men (and one of the women) refused to go through the training. GOP legislators Kyle Tasker, Eric Schleien, and James Spillane have all been arrested on charges related to illegal conduct with women. Tasker is in prison, Schleien moved out of state, but Spillane, who was once arrested for trying to strangle his wife, is still a representative. 

Forsythe is gone. Dick Hinch should be ousted as well. His idea of leadership is covering for people who aren't fit to hold elected office. Protecting abusers should not be tolerated. It sure is hard to make a strong case for that though, given who is at the very top of the GOP ticket. 

National Drinking Buddy

There are five women running for president. I bring this up only because you may not be aware of it. There are a boatload of candidates, and the media is very focused on a very few of them, and none of the few have ovaries. 

If you Google, “shrill” and the names of any of the five female candidates, you’ll find abundant coverage of their degree of shrillness. Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, and Kamala Harris all seem to posses the average level of shrill that one would expect from a female candidate. Gillibrand is attractive but shrill. Amy Klobuchar is shrill and bitchy. Kamala Harris is just plain old shrill.  Elizabeth Warren has an advanced level of shrill, combined with her being polarizing and not likeable enough. Tulsi Gabbard is deemed “less shrill,” or “easy on the eye and ear.” Next, try Googling “shrill” and any male candidate’s name. You won’t find anything. Shrill is not an adjective ever applied to men. Shrill is being replaced. Polarizing is the new shrill, and it’s used in direct proportion to how much of a threat the woman’s candidacy is. The smarter the woman, the stronger the shrill.

Nearly everything written about the women candidates is very different from what is written about men. The women who have children are asked how they campaign and parent at the same time. No one ever asks Beto O’Rourke that question. After he lost his Senate bid in Texas, he went on a road trip by himself, leaving his wife at home with their three kids, and reporters breathlessly covered his naval gazing without asking how he could be on a road trip and parent at the same time. The media would have crucified a female candidate doing the same thing. It seems that still, in the United States of America in the year 2019, women are responsible for parenting. Men…not so much.

What if Donald Trump had been asked that question? He admits that he didn’t do the parenting his older kids, and it seems unlikely that he’s a fun dad, hanging out with Barron and bowling a few frames in the White House bowling alley, or kicking the soccer ball around on the South Lawn. Luckily for him, no one would ever ask him about his parenting. Our national default setting is male. Imagine a woman who looked like Steve Bannon  (as if she’d slept in an alley with a pint of muscatel) achieving his level of power and influence? 

During the last presidential campaign, many voters wished that Elizabeth Warren were running for president. Now that she is, she’s called shrill and polarizing. At a time when some of the male candidates don’t have anything resembling policy on their websites, Senator Warren has reams of policy. She’s described as “cold and not likeable.” The real problem may well be that she’s too smart, and too well prepared. For a good read on that, I recommend Alexandra Petri’s April 12 column in the Washington Post.

The media is a big part of the problem. Six corporations control 90 percent of the media. Men run those corporations. White male guests dominate the Sunday news shows. Men dominate talk radio. Men dominate commercial radio. (Non-profit radio is more balanced.) Women are allowed to be the sidekicks on obnoxious morning shows, but that’s about it. We hear a steady diet of male voices, and that brings with it a certain unconscious message about what voices are important. As an example, no women have shows on the local commercial radio station. It seems playing music does have boundaries. 

Candidate George W. Bush was sold to us as “the kind of guy you’d want to have a beer with.” The idea something like that was taken seriously as a qualification for the presidency is both horrifying and emblematic of the kind of low expectations we’re encouraged to have for our leaders. I don’t want a drinking buddy, I want a president. Men are presented as charismatic, while women never are. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that women are busy. They’re doing most of the parenting, cleaning, and they’re working. They are multi-tasking on a heroic level. I would like my president to be busy. The one we have now seems to have far too much time on his hands for television watching, golf playing, and tweeting out distinctly non-presidential messages on Twitter. 

Perhaps we should create the position of National Drinking Buddy, which be filled by the kind of guy you want to have a beer with. He’d be fun and charismatic, drinking beer and talking about boxers and briefs with his pleasant voice. He’d go around the country on a constant drinking buddy tour. That would free us up to elect a smart, multi-tasking woman to be president. 

published as an op-ed in the April 18, 2019 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper

NH Death Penalty Optics

Michael George Haddad

The last time the State of New Hampshire executed anyone was in 1939. For the last 20 years, there has been a bill every biennium to repeal the death penalty. In 2000, a repeal bill passed both houses and was vetoed by Governor Jeanne Shaheen. 

In 2019, there is an impressive bipartisan coalition supporting HB 455, a bill that would change the death penalty in NH to life without parole. It seems likely that the bill will pass in both the House and Senate. Governor Sununu has said that he will veto it. There could well be, for the first time in 20 years, enough support for repeal to override the governor’s veto.

I’ve written about the death penalty several times over the years. We know it is expensive – more expensive than life in prison. We know it is not a deterrent. We know that people of color are more likely to be sent to death row. We know that a great many people have been wrongly convicted, spent years on death row, and then exonerated. We also know that at least one innocent person has been wrongly murdered by the state, in the name of “justice.” Above all, we know…well, not all of we, but most of we know that the death penalty is not about justice. It is about vengeance.

As the old saying goes, we kill people to show them that killing is wrong. The state should not be in the business of killing its citizens.

A big public hearing resulted in hours of testimony this week. There was testimony from murder victim’s family members. There was testimony from people who were wrongly convicted and sent to death row.  There was also testimony from former US Senator Kelly Ayotte, who breezed in to emphasize how important it is that we kill Michael Addison, the only person on death row in NH. Ayotte the NH Attorney General vigorously pursued the death penalty case against Addison, and used it as a springboard to a single term in the Senate. 

Michael Addison was charged with killing Manchester Police Officer Michael Briggs in 2006. In 2006, a millionaire named John Brooks was convicted of capital murder for his role in hiring people to kill his former handyman, whom he believed had stolen from him. In New Hampshire, contract killing is a capital offense.  John Brooks was given two life sentences without parole. In 1997, Gordon E. Perry killed police officer Jeremy Charron in Epsom, NH. After pleading guilty to capital murder, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole. 

When repeal advocates talk about how the death penalty isn’t equally applied, this is exactly what they mean. Gordon E. Perry is white. John Brooks is rich and white. Michael Addison is black. John Brooks was convicted the same year as Addison, in the same state. Kelly Ayotte did not zealously pursue his case. Gordon Perry and Michael Addison both killed police officers. Only one is on death row. 

Our Governor has said that he will veto a repeal because he “stands with law enforcement.” Our governor stands with law enforcement when it’s convenient. Sununu’s first legislative priority after being elected to his first term was to eliminate concealed carry licenses for firearms. Law enforcement vigorously opposed that bill. Sununu didn’t listen to them, never mind stand with them. Governor Sununu is a Trump acolyte, and we know that Trump loves the death penalty. Even after the five young black men known as the Central Park Five were exonerated after falsely being convicted of the rape, assault, and attempted murder of jogger Trisha Mieli, Donald Trump continued to call for their executions.

Civilized countries don’t engage in execution. The United States is increasingly uncivilized, particularly in the area of race and religion. We don’t hear any discussion of how, exactly, the state will kill Michael Addison. The methods sanctioned by our state are hanging and lethal injection. Lethal injection drugs are no longer available. The countries that manufacture them don’t sell them to us any more, because they don’t believe in the death penalty. Will New Hampshire purchase other, questionable drugs? Or will New Hampshire rebuild the gallows that was dismantled at the state prison in 1994?

We should, perhaps, take a moment to consider this.  New Hampshire hasn’t conducted an execution since 1939. Will we bring the death penalty out of mothballs to kill a black man? Would we hang him? Tiny, white, New Hampshire proudly clings to the first in the nation presidential primary, despite rumblings from other states that we’re tiny, white, and clueless about the rest of the country. If the moral arguments against the death penalty don’t sway folks, perhaps the very real potential of losing that exalted primary status will. 

Published as an op-ed in the February 22, 2019 issue of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper 

Trickle Down Hate

The United States has always had a problem with racism. We’ve never been willing to tackle it head on, preferring to sweep it under the carpet and pretend that passing a law or two and paying annual homage to Dr. Martin Luther King is enough to take care of it.

Then along came Obama. In 2004, after three terms in the Illinois Senate, Obama ran for US Senate. He delivered a well received speech to the Democratic National Convention that same year.  In the interest of full disclosure, I was in Chicago on business that year, and heard him speak at a dinner I attended. He gave a fine speech – it was easy to see why there was so much buzz around him.

That was the year that birtherism was born. It’s been traced back to perennial candidate (and something of a vexatious litigant) Andy Martin, who has run for office in a number of states, including New Hampshire. Martin began the rumors about Obama – that he wasn’t born in the US, that he was a Muslim, and so on. Those rumors persisted over the years, but had nearly died down when along came Donald Trump who demanded to see Obama’s “long form” birth certificate in 2011, and birtherism kicked into high gear.

President Obama took it all in stride. He even made jokes about it. (He didn’t sit around in his underpants tweeting in a vituperative frenzy.) The Trump birtherism spread and deepened, and suddenly it was okay to be openly racist in public again, in a way that had been unacceptable since the sixties. The Trump administration has continually exacerbated that open racism.

We’ve seen violence against people of color, violence and bullying against children – including children right here in New Hampshire. The wall has served as fuel for a national tiki torch sized outpouring of racist outrage. Every day, Trump sends out malevolent rage tweets about caravans, invasions, and a crisis at the border. The reports from the border don’t bear any of this out. There is no crisis. Trump spent last weekend playing golf, which illustrates how serious this crisis is.


Given the rise in racist rhetoric, it shouldn’t surprise anyone to see it mirrored in the NH legislature. This year there are two anti-immigrant bills, one in the House and one in the Senate. House bill 232 requires state and local governments to comply with federal detainer requests and prohibits state and local government entities from adopting policies that prohibit, restrict, or discourage the enforcement of federal immigration law. (Republicans love local control….except that they really don’t.) This is an unpleasant bit of work, called the “anti-sanctuary act,” and sponsored by a variety of tea partiers and Free Staters.

HB 232 pales in comparison to Senate bill 317, which bills itself as “an act prohibiting sanctuary locations in New Hampshire.” From the statement of intent…”is necessary to protect our country from foreign and domestic terrorism, diminished prosperity caused by artificially low wages paid to those present in the United States in violation of our immigration laws, a disregard of the rule of law, the presence of foreign criminals, foreign persons participating in our elections, and strained local and state finances caused by a disproportionate participation of foreign welfare recipients…”

This is a load of codswallop. Domestic terrorism in this country is perpetuated by angry white men. Foreign terrorists aren’t behind mass shootings. The pinkos at the CATO institute found in 2018 that you were more likely to die from an animal attack than be killed by a foreign terrorist. There are no foreign persons participating in NH elections. That is a nasty bit of xenophobia aimed at perpetuating the GOP myth of voter fraud. The Republicans need to keep that myth alive, because it’s how they’ll continue to chip away at voting rights. As for foreign welfare recipients? More bunk. Undocumented people don’t have the documents needed to receive public assistance.

New Hampshire Republicans eliminated the state minimum wage, and have resisted every attempt to put one into place. Yet here they are, mouthing concerns about artificially low wages? These hypocrites have turned their backs on the plight of low wage workers for decades. 

Please read SB 317, and take notice of the sponsors. There is only one from Carroll County, State Senator Jeb Bradley. Jeb Bradley has long enjoyed an undeserved reputation as a moderate. These days, he’s a political windsock, flapping in the racist breeze generated by what the Republican Party has become in the era of Trump. Wealthy old white men like Senator Jeb don’t actually march with tiki torches. They write the inflammatory rhetoric that ratchets up the kind of anger that fuels the mob mentality and leads to violence.

No matter how you feel about the wall, you should be ashamed that our state senator put his name on this dishonest and shockingly xenophobic piece of legislation. 

Published as an op-ed in the February 8, 2019 edition of the Conway Daily Sun Newspaper 

More Guns and Grifters

Photo by Holly Ramer of AP 

As I predicted, the rabid gundamentalists got all worked up about the proposed rule change in the NH House that would prevent them from carrying their concealed firearms on the House floor, in the gallery, the cloakroom, and the anteroom. They would still be able to strap on as many weapons as they needed to feel safe leaving home, driving to Concord, and then walking the mean streets from their parking spot to the State House. They’d just be asked to lock up (in a storage unit provided at the State House) their firearm (s) while on the floor, in the gallery, the anteroom or the cloakroom. The 2-A crowd brought signs into the State House, which is not allowed. They meekly surrendered them, with no mention of first amendment rights. 

There was wailing, moaning, and gnashing of teeth from the gun fetishists. They NEED their weapons on them at all times! They might have to protect the women! The State House isn’t going to be a “soft” target – a gun free zone! Gundamentalist groups, the NRA, and ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council invented the concept of “constitutional carry” around 2012. Nowhere in the constitution does it say that you have the right to bring a concealed firearm into the NH House chamber. It’s also worth noting that Vermont had “constitutional carry” years before everyone else. Guess what you can’t do in Vermont? Bring a weapon in the State House.

Honest, curious people who read more than just propaganda are also aware that mass shooters don’t choose “gun free zones.” School shootings are done by people who had some connection to the school. There’s also the fact that 98% of mass shooters are white men, many of whom have a history of domestic abuse. Most of those shooters were “law abiding gun owners” up until the moment they started shooting their fellow humans.

The floor debate raged. Convicted gun felon, Representative Max Abramson (R. Free State) gave an impassioned speech about gun rights, the kind he doesn’t legally possess any longer. These are the people who want the rest of us to trust them with guns. The vote was 220-163 to ban guns from the House chamber. The response from the cultists was to shriek that they’d carry anyway, because rules don’t apply to them.

After the gun vote was a vote to add mandatory sexual harassment awareness training to the House rules. There have been a number of incidents in the legislature that have come to light in the MeToo era. Some involved payoffs, some involved cover-ups. There are many older men in the legislature who wail that it’s the women who are to blame – they can’t say anything any more without it being taken the wrong way!

Rather than take an opportunity to stop wailing and learn something, members of the libertea crowd became incensed at the thought that they should be expected to attend the kind of training they would be given no choice about attending in any professional workplace. Perhaps they don’t look at themselves as professionals. Perhaps they don’t see themselves as working.

Most amusing was the overlap. Many of the same people who were braying about the need to protect the wimminfolk refused to take the sexual harassment training. That’s right – they need to protect the women with guns – the same women who are lying about sexual harassment! (It would make for an interesting Venn diagram.) The House voted 284 – 92 in favor of the rule change. 

Governor Sununu is back in the news. There’s some very timid reporting going on about the way his first inaugural fund is being dispersed. Large amounts of it seem to have landed in his pockets, and those of a variety of family members and advisors. The Governor has refused to comply with Right to Know requests that those records be produced.  If it all sounds familiar, there’s good reason for that. Sununu was very clear in his first campaign that he is a strong Trump supporter. We know Trump used his inaugural fund as a slush fund to shovel money back into his own businesses, which means into the pockets of his family. Lesson learned. 

Why is this a concern? Where the money comes from and where it goes is always a concern when it comes to politicians. Transparency means accountability, and we should all want our politicians to be accountable. We should know exactly who the donors were, how much they gave, and where that money went, and where the remainder of the fund will go.

The Union Leader has done some surprisingly good reporting on this. Surprising only because of the UL’s history of being the media arm of the NH GOP. This reporting so incensed the governor, that a Union Leader reporter and photographer were denied entry into this year’s inaugural event. It appears our governor has learned another lesson from his mentor, Donald Trump.

“No power without accountability.”  Billy Bragg

I Believe Her

Brett Kavanaugh must have the most inept handlers in the history of handling. His story could have been spun as the mistakes made by a young man who had a troubled relationship with alcohol. A young man who realized he was in trouble, and changed his life, leaving him with profound regrets. He would apologize to anyone he had wronged, and added a tearful, personal apology to Dr. Ford. If he’d done all that, he’d be sitting next to Clarence Thomas right now. 

But he didn’t do that. Instead, he showed us the kind of rage that an entitled scion of privilege can summon up when he’s held accountable. Here’s a guy who has had (despite his protestations of working his butt off) everything in his life handed to him. The idea that he might not have this latest prize handed to him was so unacceptable that he had a tantrum on national television.

Imagine going to a job interview, where you shouted, cried, gulped water as if it were straight vodka, and talked obsessively about beer. Think you’d get hired?

Climb into the wayback machine with me and travel to July of 2009, when hearings were held on the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor. Senator Lindsey Graham expressed concerns about her judicial temperament. In a story by ABC news, he said, "She's a terror on the bench. She's temperamental, excitable, she seems angry. She's overall aggressive, not very judicial.”
Poor Judge Sotomayor. Who knew that the key to impressing Senator Graham was screaming, crying, and talking about beer? 

When women ask tough questions, they’re angry and aggressive. When men are denied what they feel entitled to, they have tantrums that are justified by other men. Women don’t get to have public hysterics and then get lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court.

At this point in time, our country is so dysfunctional that sides are being chosen. Either you believe Dr. Ford, or you think she’s lying. I asked a guy why the evil Democrats didn’t do this to Neil Gorsuch. His response? “They hadn’t thought of this tactic then.” It’s far more likely that Neil Gorsuch, though he may have traveled in similar elite circles of prep schools and fraternities, managed to avoid engaging in constant drunkenness and attempted rape.

What do we know about elite prep schools? We know that that rape culture was alive and well at St. Paul’s, Phillips Exeter, Horace Mann, and Milton Academy. We know that these future captains of industry, after being groomed at pervy prep go on to Ivy League colleges to finish their development. We know there’s a troubling culture at Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, and pretty much any school where there are fraternities.  

Donald Trump warns that it’s a very scary time for young men in America. Womp womp. It’s been a scary time in America for young women for forever.  In the US, 90% of adult rape victims are female. It is estimated that at least 63% of rapes are never reported. The percentage of false rape accusations are somewhere near 2%, and even that may be inflated. Remember, this warning comes from a man who was caught on camera boasting of his proclivity for sexually assaulting women.

On Tuesday night, at a reassurance rally in Mississippi, Trump mocked Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who testified that a drunken Brett Kavanaugh attempted to rape her. This is the president of the United States, a position we once believed should involve dignity and statesmanship.

This sends a message to your daughters - that when they are raped or assaulted, they will not be believed. It sends a message to your sons – that it’s okay. Boys will be boys, and that means that white boys get to rape girls without fear of reprisal. The dull witted men who wonder why she didn’t report it are the reason that she didn’t. Girls and women who report are seldom believed and frequently harassed. Only one in every thousand rapes ends in jail time.

Brett Kavanaugh is a lawyer who has never tried a case. He was one of Kenneth Starr’s Clinton sheet sniffers. GW Bush put him on the bench to reward his years of partisan service at the White House. His testimony before the Judiciary Committee was unquestioningly partisan (and self pitying), which calls into question his future ability to be impartial. We’ve already seen his lack of self-control. This is a privileged white guy failing upward. It will mean that 20% of the Supreme Court is comprised of sex offenders. It will also mean the Court no longer has legitimacy.  

If you think you don’t know anyone who has been raped, it means they don’t trust you enough to tell you.

The 24-hour sexual assault hotline: 1-800-277-5570. 

This was published as an op-ed in the October 5, 2018 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper

Check out  I Believe Her  by Emma's Revolution 

                                     I believe her. I am her. 

Pandering

A year ago, we watched the #MeToo movement begin to unfold. Women, who had been raped, molested, harassed, or perhaps all of the above began to speak truth to power. They began telling their stories in public. The response was sometimes predictable, the usual “why didn’t she speak up before now?” Some of you men learned what women have always known – that speaking out against powerful men can destroy careers, ruin reputations, and lead to harassment and threats. 

It takes a great deal of courage to speak up, to take action against a powerful man. At the beginning of August, NH State Senator Jeff Woodburn was arrested on charges of domestic violence.  Woodburn was the Senate minority leader, a rising star in the Democratic Party; a powerful man. 

There were immediate calls for Woodburn’s resignation. He refused to resign, though he did step down as minority leader. He declared his intention to fight the charges. He deserves his day in court. So does the victim. Disclaimer: I know the victim.

We should honor the concept of “innocent until proven guilty,” or at least strive to. Regrettably, most of us don’t, and that brings us back to “why don’t women come forward?” Since this story broke, a number of NH media outlets, including the Conway Daily Sun have chosen to print the name of the victim. As a result, she has been subject to endless harassment, by phone, by email, in social media and even in mainstream media.

Some of that has come from reporters who really ought to know better. Reporters who ought to be respectful enough to take no for an answer, especially after putting her name out there. Some of it has come from individuals involved with politics in Coos County. Mayor Paul Grenier of Berlin has stated publicly that Woodburn is the “real” victim in this case. This is a shocking public statement from an elected official. Grenier should resign, immediately. In the event of a guilty finding, he’ll wish like hell that he had. 

This is why women don’t come forward - because they will be subject to the kind of harassment that this woman is experiencing. I’m disappointed in the papers that chose not to respect the victim’s privacy. No one should be subjected to public shaming and endless streams of vituperative emails because they chose to press charges against a powerful man. 

Moving on. Tuesday, September 11 is the date of the NH state primary elections. The state elections may not be as sexy as national elections, but they’re more important. The people we send to Concord make decisions that impact our lives every single day. 

This past year, the Republican majority attempted to pass a school voucher bill that would have taken our tax dollars out of the public school system, laundered them through “freedom” accounts, and passed them on to private schools, home schools, or religious schools. This would have caused a huge increase in property taxes, which is why Representative Neal Kurk, Chair of the House Finance Committee, and certainly no pinko liberal, came out against it. The governor and his allies engaged in some tactical legerdemain in the hopes that if the legislature voted on the bill enough times, they’d eventually get the result they wanted. They failed – but nothing bad ever dies. It comes back, year after year. Right to work has been coming back for over 30 years.

The voucher bill will be back. Right to Work will be back. The effort to eliminate child labor laws will be back. The ongoing effort to restrict voting rights will continue. There will be more bills intended to rob women of the right to control their own bodies. NH has some serious problems. We have housing problems, a lack of affordable day care, high energy costs, and infrastructure problems. (Water, roads, bridges, dams, telecom) 

The northern part of the state is treated like an afterthought at every opportunity. Legislators in Concord tend to think that the state stops at Lake Winnipesaukee, and that everything above it must be Canada. The North Country perpetuates that point of view by sending rubber stamp Republicans to Concord, who choose party loyalty over their constituents. 

A recent letter of support for a Congressional candidate in this paper was a rare instance of GOP honesty. He didn’t even attempt to tout the record of the former state senator, or pretend that Sanborn will represent voters. He wants you to vote for a serial harasser so that he can provide access to Trump for Governor Sununu. No pretense, just blatant pandering to power. 

Speaking of access, this is your chance to vote for a governor who isn’t a Trump loyalist. (Loyalty to Trump should be an immediate disqualifier for any candidate.) We hear about the booming NH economy, but it hasn’t migrated north. Why? Ask a pledge taking panderer. Then vote for candidates who will fight for the future of the North Country. 

This was published as an op-ed in the September 7, 2018 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper 

Petty Tyrants

Once upon a time, we valued oratory. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is considered the best speech given by a US president, followed by JFK’s inaugural speech. Alas, those days are behind us. In  2018, presidential oratory comes to us over the social media platform Twitter, in 280 characters or less. What will the Trump Presidential Library look like?

 This week, Donald Trump launched a tweet referring to former staffer Omarosa Manigault-Newman as a dog.  Ms. Manigault-Newman is African American. Imagine the response if President Obama had referred to a white woman as a dog?  Trump managed to hit the racist and misogynist dog whistles in a single tweet. I wonder how we’ll ever come back from this presidency, if we can, or even if we should.

We have a president who has said horrible things about women throughout his arrogant, white guy life. We’ve all seen the Access Hollywood tape where he boasts of grabbing women by their private parts. On The Apprentice, he routinely referred to deaf actress Marlee Matlin as retarded. He told Howard Stern that his own daughter was a real piece of a**. When his third wife was giving birth to his fifth child, what was he doing? Stormy Daniels. This is not a man who has any respect for women, including the women in his own family, yet Republican women still support him. The closest I can come to an explanation is that he pisses off the people they hate. What they don’t seem to grasp is that he hates them, too.

There’s a lot of that going around. NH State Senator Jeff Woodburn (a Democrat) was recently arrested and charged with domestic violence. He’s refused to resign, and his name will be on the ballot in November. Imagine the trial, and how that will reflect on our state. Also refusing to resign is State Representative Eric Schleien, (a Republican) who is going to trial for molesting a teenaged girl. The judge in the case refused a plea deal, because he wants Schleien to serve some time in jail. 

At the beginning of August, the NH House released files of State House harassment complaints received since January, in response to right-to-know requests made by various media outlets.  The complaints are made to the House Chief of Staff, Terry Pfaff, who is also in charge of investigating them. One complaint was filed by a House staffer, who reported that a male lawmaker had a pattern of abusive behavior, referring to her as “the old bat,” or “the granny in the corner.” He told another legislator (in front of her) that, “she hates men.” We now know that this complaint was made against State Representative Dan Eaton, a Democrat serving his 14^thterm. Eaton claimed it was good-natured banter. The woman felt otherwise. Witnesses found his behavior “immature.” Representative Eaton is 62. There was an investigation, it was recommended Eaton go to training, which he said he’d consider doing. No word on whether he actually did. State House staffers are not members of the state employees union, so they are reluctant to come forward, knowing they could be fired in retaliation. 

In another instance, a female legislator reported that a male legislator stood in front of her while she was seated in Rep’s Hall and made an “offensive pelvic gyration” in front of her. Representatives are squished in like sardines, and getting in and out of their seats and out of the rows is challenging. Apparently too challenging for the third grade boys disguised as adult men in our legislature, unable to comport themselves with dignity. 

These complaints should not be investigated internally. An outside agency should be retained for these investigations, so that there can be no question of political motives or retaliation. Even then, there will be no consequences. There are no ethical standards with any teeth. There are no disciplinary measures that can be taken, short of expulsion, which never happens. The prevailing attitude is always, “let the voters decide.” These are the same voters who aren’t going to learn about the behavior of their legislators unless it becomes a national story. The only real avenue available to a victim of ongoing harassment is legal action. 

Abusive and harassing behavior toward women has always been lurking behind the scenes, but thanks to Trump, it’s back on the main stage. It’s behavior that is not confined to a particular party. It’s behavior related to power.  Abigail Adams reminded her husband in 1776, “All men would be tyrants if they could.” Not much has changed since the all male Constitution was written.

Imagine what the US Constitution might look like if women had been included in the process.  Would President Trump have been possible if women had been (or were now) regarded as equal?

If you’re weary of petty tyrants who can’t even get out of a chair without pelvic gyrations, change the power dynamic, and vote for women. 

Published as an op-ed in the August 18, 2018 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper

Rope, Tree, Journalist

This year (so far) 53 journalists have been killed around the world. Eleven have been killed in Afghanistan, one in Syria, seven in the US, five in India, four in Yemen, six in Columbia, six in Mexico, two in Brazil, one in Liberia, one in Iraq, one in Pakistan, two in the Philippines, and one in Nicaragua.  Last year 46 journalists were killed, worldwide. The International Federation of Journalists promotes a free press and keeps track of journalists who are  killed in every country. 

Every Friday, this newspaper asks a question, and readers are encouraged to call in with answers, that are then published on the following Tuesday. The question asked last week was: “Do you feel the political climate in America puts journalists’ lives at risk?” The answers were troubling. Most blamed journalists for the current violent climate. In other words, if journalists are killed, it’s their own fault. It’s the old “she was asking for it, dressed like that” justification applied to reporters.

The Capital Gazette in Annapolis seems like a good community paper, the kind of paper any metro area would be proud of. An angry, unbalanced guy was mad that the paper covered a 2011 court case where he pleaded guilty to harassing a former high school classmate. Like most mass shooters, he was a misogynist. He began stalking her online in 2009. Her lawyer called it the worst case of stalking he’d ever seen.  Jarrod Ramos harassed the lawyer and members of his family. Ramos went on to try to sue the woman for perjury, and tried to sue the paper for defamation. After his suit was dismissed in 2013, he turned to making verbal threats against the paper, the publisher, and various reporters. Last year he legally bought the gun he used to kill 5 people. It took him a long time to take action. Did the president calling the press “enemies of the people” set him off? We’ll probably never know. It sure didn’t help. 

The Tele-Talk responses illustrated how desperately we need to teach media literacy in school. Many people don’t know the difference between a reporter and an opinion columnist. (I am an opinion columnist. I am not a reporter.) These days news someone doesn’t like is “fake” or “lies.” Over 30 years ago the radical right began to undermine the press, beginning with Rush Limbaugh and his howls about “the liberal media.” His propaganda worked brilliantly. Soon right wing radio sprouted across the land, and the war on truth began in earnest.

The slow, painful death of the newspaper hurts our communities and our nation. Since the beginning of the United States, newspapers and other print media kept us informed. They weren’t known for being fair and balanced back then, either. (Read some of Ben Franklin’s work.) The undermining began in earnest with the election of Barack Obama, which spawned a cottage industry of stories about his fake birth certificate, his fake Social Security number, Michelle Obama really being a man, and so on. It’s become so ubiquitous that now any new story that you don’t like is labeled as fake news. 

No news source can be all things to all people. Readers are going to see stories in newspapers that tick them off. Coverage of arrests and court cases is an area fraught with peril. It’s a sure bet that someone involved with a case, especially a case related to violence against another is going to get mad about the way it’s covered. That’s always been true.

The difference now is that after 30 years of intentional undermining, the mad are even madder, and the current political climate has given them permission to not only threaten violence, but to accept it as being justified. In 2016, tee shirts reading, “Rope, Tree, Journalist: Some Assembly Required” began appearing at Trump rallies. It’s just a joke, you say. Tell that to the five dead people at the Capital Gazette.

Many of us who put words out in public are familiar with death threats. There are many, many unstable people out there with guns, which is why the Tele-Talk responses were so disturbing. Angry, unstable guys with guns and defamation suits are not as unusual as one might think, and there’s no way of knowing whether they’ll come calling with a gun or not. So far, as a nation, we seem content to ignore warning signs. The signs were certainly there in the case of Jarrod Ramos. It seems we’d rather ensure the right of a guy like Ramos to purchase a firearm than ensure the right of others to keep on living.

This nation used to pride itself on a free press. We used to venerate the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Somewhere along the way, we decided the Second Amendment was more important, and that if we didn’t like the practitioners of the First, we could use the Second to eliminate them. This, dear readers, is not what democracy looks like. 

Published as an op-ed in the July 6 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper.

This is the Tele-Talk column that got me thinking. 

It Is Who We Are

(Rob Rogers cartoon)



 As I watch the horrifying human rights violation unfolding in my country, where children are being taken from their parents and sent to various locations around the country, I keep hearing, “This is not who we are.” That, unfortunately, isn’t true. It’s exactly who we are. It is who we’ve always been. 

A number of our founders owned slaves, and they wrote a founding document that counted those slaves as three-fifths of a person. From the very beginning, the US was okay with white people owning non-white people. The plantation system allowed those white owners to abuse the non-white slaves.  Eventually slavery ended, but the long-term effects continue to resonate in this country where black men are shot by police, without reprisal. 

Beginning in the late 1800’s Indigenous American children were forcibly taken from their parents and sent to boarding schools where they were given European style haircuts, European style names, and were forbidden to speak their native languages. There are many documented cases of sexual, physical, and psychological abuse that took place in those schools. Children were taken from their families and communities and tortured. Sound familiar?

In June of 1954, the US began what was charmingly referred to as “Operation Wetback.” This resulted in the arrests of over 100,000 people in a two month period, and as many as a million were affected during the life of the program.

We’ve always had a tortured relationship with Mexico. The US has interfered mightily in the political affairs of South America. We have always relied on undocumented workers to do the work we don’t want to do ourselves. Undocumented workers built Trump’s hotels. Undocumented workers clean our houses, care for our children, mow our lawns, and work in our meat packing factories, our hotels, our farms, and vineyards. And despite all that, we have nothing but contempt for these people who do all this work at considerably lower wages than white people would command.

The mythology sprung up that undocumented workers are taking jobs away from “real” Americans. (Real = white.) There hasn’t been a flood of white workers moving to California to pick lettuce. White Americans aren’t lining up at hotels to scrub bathrooms. The myth was useful though, because it allowed for the perpetuation of anger against all brown people. That anger simmered for decades, but reached full boil when Barack Obama was elected president. The ideological divide also became an ugly racial divide, which allowed the far right to blame Obama for inciting their racism.

For years we heard that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States, he was born in Kenya. One of the loudest, crudest proponents of that belief is now the president of the United States. Trump has always been a racist. In the 1970’s, Trump the landlord fought against complying with the Fair Housing Act. He took out ads urging the death penalty for the black and Latino teenagers who became known as the Central Park Five, who were accused of raping a white women. A decade after they’d been exonerated by DNA evidence, Trump continued to insist they were guilty. 

Trump began his run for the presidency calling Mexicans criminals and rapists. He’s surrounded himself with white nationalists like advisor Stephen Miller, the architect of family separation at the border. Like Jeff Sessions, career racist.

That has led us to this place, where we have children being kidnapped by the US government at the border. We’ve seen footage of boys in repurposed Walmarts. What we haven’t seen is footage of wherever it is they take the girls and the babies. We don’t see where they take the girls and the babies, because that doesn’t fit in with the propaganda. Trump and Sessions talk about MS-13 all the time, to create the illusion that every brown person who crosses the border to escape from the hell their own country has become is a burgeoning gang member and criminal. Even the most hardened member of the Trump cult would have a hard time selling that story over footage of toddlers crying for their mothers. 

A nation that proudly declares itself Christian is allowing this to happen. A party that pretends to be pro-life is encouraging the torture of children.

The rest of the world is watching us in horror. The United States, is engaging in a massive human rights violation and no one dares step in because we have a lot of nuclear weapons, and our president is an angry, unpredictable toddler who lacks impulse control. The country that liberated concentration camps in WWII is now building them, right here at home.

It’s been an interesting experiment, the United States. We had a lot of lofty goals. Could we rise above now, and give voice to our what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature? I wish I thought we would. Racism has broken us. It is who we are. It is who we’ve always been. 

published as an op-ed in the June 22 edition of the Conway Daily Sun 

RIP, NH Primary

It’s been quite a week in New Hampshire. An armed man went into the ICU at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center and shot and killed his mother. There was an attempted armed robbery at a bank in downtown Concord. The investigation into the attempted lynching of an 8-year-old biracial boy in Claremont continues. The Pence Kobach Fraud Commission met in NH to continue in their attempt to legitimize their bogus claims of widespread voter fraud.  

The meeting of the commission was held at St. Anselm’s College, a private, religious school. Former US Senator Judd Gregg helped St. Anselm’s obtain $15 million in federal funding to renovate the building that became the school’s Institute of Politics. The executive director of the Institute of Politics is Neal Levesque, who worked for former Congressman Charles Bass for 12 years. A In other words: a public, allegedly non-partisan commission met at a private, religious, rather partisan school.

Two months ago, I wrote that Kobach was under investigation for violating the Hatch Act, using his role in the commission as part of his 2018 campaign for governor of Kansas. That investigation continues. Since then, we’ve also learned that not only is Kobach the Secretary of State for Kansas, he’s also moonlighting as a paid columnist for Breitbart News. Breitbart being a far right “news” outfit run by Steve Bannon, the recently expelled advisor to President Trump. Breitbart’s ties to white supremacists resulted in them losing 90% of their advertisers between April and June of 2017.

This is the publication that pays Kris Kobach to write a column. A Kobach column in Breitbart was part of the misinformation packet handed out at the meeting of the Fraud Commission. Testifying before the Voter Fraud Commission in NH were 12 white men. There were no women. No people of color. No town clerks or supervisors of the checklist participated in this fact-free extravaganza.

As soon as Donald Trump was elected president, he began to whine about voter fraud. He won the election through the Electoral College. That he failed to win the popular vote has been a terrible blow to his overweening, childlike ego. Trump is the bestest, smartest, most wonderful person ever, and that every person in the United States didn’t vote for him can only mean one thing – fraud.

NH Governor Chris Sununu paved the way for this by bleating about “busloads of voters from Massachusetts” on the Howie Carr radio show, days before the election. Chris Sununu did not attend the fraud side show – how could he? His father, the disgraced philatelist, was ensconced on the dais. No one asked him how all that fraud impacted his son’s election. No one asked him why his family wants to sabotage NH elections.

Sununu-the-younger has had to walk back his claims of voter fraud, given that he was elected. The Republicans would have us believe that the fraud was confined to only two races – the presidential race and the US Senate race. We’re being asked to believe that people came to NH to fraudulently vote for only two candidates. In that same election, Republican Chris Sununu was elected, and the Republican Party now controls the entire state government. We’re also being asked to believe that THOSE votes weren’t fraud.

You can’t have it both ways.

One of the ideas suggested by a witness testifying before the Fraud Commission, was doing background checks on voters. The kind of background checks that are so bitterly opposed by NH gundamentalists. These are the kinds of contortions that the far right will engage in to try to ensure they stay in power. Another suggestion is raising the voting age; to ensure college students don’t vote. It seems the GOP platform has little appeal to young voters, so rather than do the hard work of recruiting, they’d prefer to just eliminate young voters.

NH Secretary of State, Bill Gardner is part of the Sham Commission. In recent years he’s become the tool of those claiming voter fraud, chosen to give them bipartisan credibility. Gardner has been in office since 1976. After a long career in public service, he has besmirched his legacy of defending the first in the nation primary by legitimizing this charade.

What should offend every one of us is the damage being done to our elections by this commission. This craven nonsense is an insult to every town clerk, every moderator, the supervisors of the checklist, the ballot clerks, and every volunteer that is part of our election process – a process that has been working just fine for hundreds of years. That the majority party has chosen to perpetuate this circus tells us that they’ve abandoned any integrity they may have once had.

I’ve long said that when NH loses the first in the nation primary, it will be because of the GOP. Say goodbye, NH. It’s all over now but the shouting.

This was published as an op-ed in the September 15, 2017 edition of the Conway Daily Sun  newspaper