Duck, Duck, Hypocrisy

In 2013, a NH State Rep from Nashua generated huge outrage when he killed some ducks with his car. 

WMUR all but had a sound truck parked out in front of his house. There were daily reports. 

https://patch.com/new-hampshire/nashua/state-rep-accused-of-running-down-resident-ducks-at-crowne-plaza

https://www.wmur.com/article/rep-david-campbell-pays-695-fine-for-hitting-ducks/5187267

It became a national story:
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/04/duckgate-the-best-political-scandal-of-the-year.html


There was even an investigation by the AG's office

https://www.nhpr.org/post/ag-no-charges-campbell-or-pappas-duck-incident#stream/0


And of course, there were the perpetually outraged libertea boys of granite grok:
https://granitegrok.com/blog/2013/12/representative-david-campbells-own-duck-dynasty

They were so incensed that they even referenced the hunting season for ducks:

Ducks are not in season for Nashua. The season for ducks was October 2 to November 3, and November 19 to December 15 for inland areas and October 4 to January 5, 2014 for the Coastal Zone. Nashua “ain’t” in the Coastal Zone. So the ducks were taken out of season.

That's what makes this latest legislative animal killing story so interesting. 

None of the outrage is present. Rep. James Spillane, shot a squirrel on his birdfeeder with a 50 caliber muzzleloader, and posted the result on social media. Apparently this was a manly thing to do, and he felt compelled to boast to his manly friends, about his manly squirrel killing act. 

https://www.unionleader.com/news/politics/state/deerfield-state-rep-booted-from-fish-game-committee-after-i/article_3358fdad-42ff-51e3-baaf-1833556824e9.html

Minority Leader Dick Hinch was infuriated. Not at the conduct of a member of his party, but at the removal of Spillane from Fish and Game:

"Removing Rep. Spillane from the Fish and Game committee for a minor infraction is heavy-handed and I'm disappointed that the Speaker chose to take this action," he said. 

It's unfortunate that the Speaker did not give Representative Spillane the opportunity for a face-to-face meeting to discuss the issue, or even a warning for that matter. In the future, will members of the Transportation Committee be removed for minor infractions such as a speeding ticket?"

Not a very good analogy, Dick. There's a big difference between a speeding ticket and shooting an animal out of season, posting a photo and bragging about it. 


Spillane was on the Fish and Game Committee at the NH House, which made all this just a little more embarrassing. *NOTE the link below contains the squirrel photo taken by Representative Squirrel Hunter. 

https://www.concordmonitor.com/State-Rep-Spillane-killer-of-a-squirrel-ousted-from-committee-26633533

We learned that there is such a thing as squirrel hunting season in NH, which made Spillane's conduct even worse for Fish and Game, where they spend time encouraging sportsmanlike conduct: 

The tweet prompted a complaint to the state Fish and Game Department, which sent officers to Spillane’s home to tell him he did not have the legal right to kill the squirrel outside the hunting season, which runs from Sept. 1 to Jan. 1. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/lawmaker-removed-from-committee-after-shooting-squirrel/2019/06/28/7ef46162-99df-11e9-9a16-dc551ea5a43b_story.html?utm_term=.10833199b899


The outrage machine, however, is strangely silent. 
In fact, those who were outraged in 2013 are now defending Rep. Squirrel Killer. Over at granitegrok the boys decided that Spillane getting kicked off Fish and Game was a violation of his free speech rights! Their 2013 concern for hunting season wasn't even mentioned. In fact, their poutrage was diversionary whattaboutism, concerning a host of other, non-related incidents. After all, something a legislator they hate said a few years ago is bound to be justification for a legislator they love to kill a squirrel. Or something like that. It surely couldn't be.....hypocrisy. 

https://granitegrok.com/blog/2019/06/nh-speaker-of-the-house-removes-state-rep-from-committee-for-expressing-free-speech#comment-4523356043

Oh, shucks. I forgot to mention that David Campbell was a Democrat and James "squirrel hunter" Spillane a Republican. Kinda looks like outrage in NH leans far to the right.  

The Latest Skirmish in the War on Women

As we get closer to the midterm elections, the rhetoric is ratcheting up. Americans for Prosperity (aka the Koch brothers) is continuing to run their ridiculous ads stating that Jeanne Shaheen cast THE DECIDING VOTE for Obamacare. In other states, the name is changed to fit the candidate the Kochs are working against. My question is this: why don’t the Koch brothers want non-wealthy Americans to have health insurance?

I’ve never been a fan of the Affordable Care Act. I was unhappy when single payer advocates weren’t even given a seat at the table when it was being discussed. I was unhappy there was no public option. I’m downright peeved that this mess was a project of the Heritage Foundation, something that all those who bark about “socialism” either don’t know or don’t care to acknowledge.

The ACA has meant the end of the pre-existing condition. That is an incredibly good thing. It has given young people the option of staying on their parents insurance longer. It has also meant that a lot of people who couldn’t afford insurance before are able to afford it now. The GOP rumblings of “free market solutions” ought to be met with derision. They had decades to create those solutions, and they never did. The only plan the Kochs and their acolytes have for the non-wealthy can be summed up in one word. Die.

The reasons we need a single payer system in this country were made clear in the recent Supreme Court decision on the Hobby Lobby case. Hobby Lobby is a family owned company. They have a chain of stores that sell craft supplies. They are apparently a religious family, and they were miffed that the ACA meant they were mandated to provide insurance to their female employees that covered all forms of birth control. It offended their religious sensibilities, they claimed, so they took it to SCOTUS, and the Roberts court, ever happy to rule against women, did so.

Prior to the ACA, Hobby Lobby stores offered insurance that covered the same forms of birth control that they suddenly got religion over when Obamacare came along. Remember all the people who wailed about putting the gummint between people and their doctors? They are now oddly silent at the ruling that puts employers between women and their doctors. After all, who better to make women’s health care decisions than purveyors of cheap craft supplies imported from China?

Good news for men though. Your erectile dysfunction drugs, penis pumps, and penile implants will continue to be covered by all forms of insurance. The religious do not want you to believe that your impotence is God’s will. God, it seems, is only intent on legislating the uterus.

There are a number of reasons we need single payer health care. The first is to eliminate employers from the equation. Health care should not be tied to employment. Health care should not be employer approved or supervised

Hot on the heels of the Hobby Lobby decision came the Wheaton decision, where a religious college in Illinois decided they didn’t want to fill out waiver forms for Obamacare that stipulated they were too religious to provide whore pills for their female students. Naturally the male members of the Supreme Court thought that was just fine. Now Gordon College in Massachusetts (a small, non-profit Christian school in Wenham, MA) has decided to seize the moment. They’ve signed on to a letter asking President Obama to exempt them from an executive order (that hasn’t been put into effect yet) banning discrimination in hiring on the basis of sexual orientation. Apparently nothing says, “we are followers of Jesus Christ” quite like discrimination.

I have written before that here in the US, we’ve stopped thinking about or planning for the future. In fact, our heels are dug in, and a great many of our leaders are working to turn the clock back, to an imaginary time of great happiness for them. The 1950’s. (Or for some, the 1800’s.) In the 1950’s women knew their place. They were at home, cooking, cleaning, caring for the kids, and voting the way their husbands told them to. They didn’t have many birth control options.  If they got pregnant and couldn’t afford another baby, they had back alley abortions and some of them died. Those who favor the 1800’s would prefer to go back to the days when women were essentially chattel. They couldn’t own property, sign contracts, vote, or have any legal voice in the lives of their children. They were the property of fathers, brothers, or husbands. A number of conservatives these days publicly yearn for the days when women couldn’t vote. David Barton the fauxhistorian claims that denying the vote to women kept families together. Ann Coulter doesn’t seem to understand that without suffragists, she’d be home birthin’ and scrubbin’.

The birth control pill changed everything. That and the decision in Roe v. Wade. Suddenly women had control over their own bodies! They were no longer hostage to their reproductive organs and the men in their lives. Naturally, this displeased a number of men. It still does. They’ve been trying for decades to turn the clock back, and eradicate any gains made by women. Pretending concern for life is one of the most hypocritical. The same men who rail against abortion are at the borders turning away buses filled with refugee children. The deeply religious folk at Hobby Lobby, Gordon College, and Wheaton aren’t filling buses, hitting up the ATM, and heading down to the border to care for those same children. The terrorists and “sidewalk counselors” who harangue women entering health clinics aren’t interested in caring for actual children. For all of these hypocrites, it’s all about imaginary fetuses. Imagine how much better children’s lives would be if the focus were on the born instead of the not even conceived? 

As for the ongoing war on women, the question is simple. Are women fully equal human beings with the same right to bodily autonomy and medical privacy as men? Yes or no? 

© sbruce 2014. Published as a biweekly op-ed in the Conway Daily Sun newspaper. 

h/t to patriotboy for GOP Jesus, and Mike Thompson for Blasphemy.

Feeling Bilous

Joe Kenney's candidate website is a sad and amateurish affair. It's rife with misspellings and almost completely lacking in punctuation - but what really strikes me is that Joe managed to trot out a picture of himself in uniform (of course) with the late Ray Burton - but there is not a single picture of Joe with his wife and kids on his site. Not a one. 

Hey family values guy - where's the family? 

We do know from the site that he has 16 (!) supporters. One of them is State Rep. Leon Rideout from Lancaster. Rep. Rideout is frequently bad tempered on Twitter, which he uses as a platform for shouting incomprehensibly at people. 

Here's an example. Pro-tip, Leon: Spelling your candidate's name wrong should never be an option.

Here's some incomprehensible shouting. Who is Sharon Smears? Why is he tweeting about her at me?  Why would any candidate want a supporter who behaves this way in public? 

The Sharon Smears nonsense tweet was in response to my tweeting out this picture:

Is there anyone here who thinks that Joe Kenney (or Leon Rideout for that matter) defended Ray Burton in 2004, when Bass, Bradley, Sununu, and Gregg were howling for him to resign over the Seidensticker business?  The chorus of "Ray wouldn't do this" by this passel of hypocrites ought to make us all feel a little bilious. 


Speaking of hypocrites Ray Wieczorek endorsed Joe Kenney, while waxing on about how no one can replace Ray. This is the same Wieczorek who called for Burton's resignation in 2004. These people are absolutely incapable of shame. 

Free Staters Love Small Gummint....Except When They Don't

                                                    (Just a meme - not O'Flaherty.)


Our friends from the Free State Project claim to worship at the altar of small gummint. They claim to believe that gummint shouldn't be involved in our personal lives.

It's completely consistent that Free State legislators Tim O'Flaherty and Carol McGuire sponsored a bill to repeal the crime of adultery: HB 1125 . It's an old, outdated crime that's still on the NH books.

The bill comes out of the Children and Family Law Committee with a 15-0 recommendation that the entire house should pass the bill.

Quickly we veer off into the land of inconsistent, with HB 1218. Rep. O'Flaherty is the only sponsor of this bill  - one that redefines the "acts" that constitute the crime of adultery.

From the bill:

645:3 Adultery. A person is guilty of a class B misdemeanor if, being a married person, he or she engages in sexual intercourse with another not his or her spouse or, being unmarried, engages in sexual intercourse with another known by him or her to be married. In this section, “sexual intercourse” shall include anal penetration.

This bill doesn't seem to fall into the "gummint should stay out of our personal lives" belief system that our Free Stater brethren claim to adhere to. 

I'm guessing that this is a BIG IRONY move on the part of O'Flaherty. He's gonna teach us statists a lesson by making a mockery of the system. Former (one-term) Representative Seth Cohn made an amendment to a bill to repeal marriage equality that would have banned left handed people from getting married. Cohn's move was aimed at getting national attention for himself. O'Flaherty (coached by Cohn) wants to make a mockery of the system that he hates being part of. 





Rather than do any actual work to get support for the repeal bill, O'Flaherty filed two bills - the better to waste the taxpayer's dollars, and the time of his colleagues.

O'Flaherty  admits it "turns his stomach" to be a part of the legislature. If he had even an iota of integrity, he'd resign at once.


Prediction: Seth Cohn will comment within an hour of this blog going online.

Related: Rep. Against Big Gummint Until She Is For It


UPDATE


Rep. O'Flaherty's expanded adultery bill was soundly voted down. Curious that he didn't mention oral sex, isn't it? Free Staters are so male-centric it wouldn't occur to them to think about/include women. 

Rep. O'Flaherty's bill repealing NH's antique adultery statute did pass. 

Someone must have duct taped Seth Cohn to a chair.

Hypocrisy on a Platter: Fun in Fosters

On August 24,  Fosters published an opinion piece by Ashley Pratte, the Executive Director of Cornerstone Policy Research. From Ms. Pratte's scattered, confusing, and somewhat dishonest opus:

In recent weeks there has been discussion around the topic of abortion as well as female objectification when recent sexting scandals were brought to light.

It is important to note that I myself am a single, twenty-four year old woman involved in activism in New Hampshire. On a regular basis I am subject to constant criticism because of my pro-life views.

I think I speak on behalf of all women when I say enough is enough. We need to stand up for ourselves and not be degrading to one another. While as females we may hold a variety of different opinions and beliefs there is one thing that binds us all and that is our gender. If we ever hope to be respected by men we must first respect ourselves.

Last week a known blogger here in the Granite State found it necessary to tweet the following, “@ashpratte @demchairs at least they won’t hit you. Or leer at your boobs. Or call you a “vagina”. They aren’t republican men after all.” Not only do I find this tweet to be horribly offensive but it depicts the culture that we are living in. Women are constantly the subject of degradation especially those in the political arena. 

Oh, some naughty blogger offended poor Ashley. 

That would be me. Fosters generously agreed to give me space, and they've just published  my rebuttal  to the horribly offended Ms. Pratte. Some highlights:

In April Rep. Peter Hansen of Amherst became world famous for calling women “vagina’s” (his grammatical error) in an internal NH House email. I tweeted Pratte to ask if this was an example of family values, since Hansen has a high rating on the Cornerstone legislative report card. No response.

In July, Representatives Jordan Ulery and Gary Hopper came under fire for their internal House emails, which included a cheesecake picture of a nubile young woman. There was no reason for the picture to be included, other than the reason that all women are familiar with — the one that involves drool. Both Ulery and Hopper have high Cornerstone ratings. I tweeted Ms. Pratte to ask about her silence on the subject. No response.

On Aug. 5, we learned that a Republican Super Pac registered in Nashua was hosting a video game called Slap Hillary. What could be funnier than slapping women? This is certainly a novel way of showing respect to a former First Lady, US Senator, and Secretary of State. This was an opportunity for Ms. Pratte to express her concerns about respect for women. She didn’t take it. 

On Aug. 6, in an attempt at snark, Ms. Pratte tweeted out, “What an exciting new follow @DemChairs.” For those not conversant in twitspeak, that means that DemChairs had just opted to follow Pratte on Twitter. My “horrifying and offensive” tweet was in response to that. I tweeted “At least they won’t hit you. Or leer at your boobs, or call you a “vagina” They aren’t Republican men after all.”

I combined those three incidents of disrespect that Pratte had intentionally ignored into one tweet. “Hit you” was a reference to Slap Hillary. “Stare at your boobs” referred to Ulery and Hopper’s soft-core porn, and “call you a vagina” was a direct reference to Rep. Hansen. All are items she’d gotten tweets from me about, which makes her slow ride to horribly offended seem a bit contrived.

It is difficult to take Pratte’s finger waving about respect seriously. She is saying is that in order to show her proper respect as a woman, I must refrain from commenting as she ignores GOP men who are degrading women. She wants me to ignore her hypocrisy. 

Sadly for Miss Ashley, that is a thing I cannot do. 

I mentioned dishonesty. At the end of Ms. Pratte's op-ed, she gives a big shout out to Cornerstone, yet fails to mention her connection to the organization. She's the Executive Director. 

In making this a big public thing, Ms. Pratte has succeeded in exposing her poor reading and writing skills, and put her hypocrisy on a platter for all of us to admire. 

Thanks, Ashley!