NH Senate Session 23 May

Senate session, 23 May.  Knocked off 17 bills on the Fast Track (consent) calendar with one quick voice vote.  Tackled 33 bills on the regular calendar. Took until 5 PM, even though we finally kicked half a dozen unlucky bills forward to next week’s session.  I didn’t get home until 7 PM.  Long day. 

    The Democrats passed four gun control bills on roll call votes, 13-10.  Democrat Fuller Clarke was absent, accounting or only 13 Democratic votes instead of the usual 14.  HB 109 demands a “universal background check” for all gun sales.  The “universal” check is some how different from the Instant Background Check that is current law.  HB 514 requires a three day waiting period between purchase and delivery of a gun.  That ought to kill off gun shows in New Hampshire.  And HB 564 allows local school committees to set up gun free zones and what ever else strikes their fancy.  Finally HB 696 which allows a judge to order confiscation of a citizen’s guns and ammunition upon a single complaint from just about any body, including live in girl friends.  No hearing, no pleading, and the government is under no obligation to return the seized firearms, ever.   Lesson: Democrats are the party of gun control.  If you want to keep your gun, vote a straight Republican ticket.  Contact governor Sununu and ask him to veto all three of these.   

   Then Democrats pushed thru a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) bill.  Retirees will get a 1.5% boost in their state pensions.  The $140 million cost will go onto local property taxes. 

    HB 628 will require some, a lot, they didn’t say, buildings to provide adult changing stations.  First I ever heard of that. Retro fit or new construction, didn’t say.  This “issue” should be dealt with by the state building code board. 

    HB 359 requires pharmacies to attach an orange sticker to all prescription bottles containing opioid.   The pharmacists are against the idea.  The prescribing doctor is supposed to inform his patients of opioid containing drugs.  Failure to do so is malpractice.  And the bright colored sticker will attract children looking for a high, thieves, and other problems.  Anyhow it passed on a roll call 21-1. 

   Bunch of other bills went thru, none of them very interesting. 

  And last of all we passed HB 706, the redistricting commission on a voice vote.  All ayes, no nays.  Like most voice votes.   This bill sets up a redistricting commission, even numbers of Democrats and Republicans, no elected officials, to draw new district maps after the 2020 census.   The commission is advisory, and the legislature can reject, redraw and otherwise do its own thing as the Constitution requires.  A lot of my constituents feel strongly about the Constitutional requirements.  In actual fact, the commission might do a better job that the Republicans did ten years ago up here.  Back then, they created a snake like district running from Franconia all the way to the Connecticut River, which was then held by a democrat, Rebecca Brown, for the next three elections.       

Congress is stalled out. And our New Hampshire delegation, Democrats all, ain't helping

I don't believe the Congress has passed much, other than the tax cut bill, since Trump got inaugurated.  They keep saying that passing anything, like immigration reform, would help Trump, and Democrats cannot stand that.  So they do nothing.   The only thing I can remember our congressional delegation doing is Anne Kuster voting against the Keystone XL pipeline.  With all here constituents needing furnace oil and gasoline to drive to work, she votes against a project that might lower the cost of both commodities.  Way to go Anne. 
   We need two new US reps and two new US Senators.  Steve Negron has declared against Anne Kuster.  Bill O'Brien was making noises about running for  Sheehan's Senate seat.  They need all the help we can give them.  

Is Socialism the same as the More Free Stuff party?

 Socialism is a polite word for Communism.  Karl Marx decried the capitalism of his time as exploitation of the workers.  Marx's solution was to have the government, Communist government, take ownership of all  the "means of production", basically the entire economy, and  to divvy up the proceeds of enterprises among all the workers.  Trouble was, after government take over, the enterprises stopped making money, and there was little or nothing to divvy up.  The revolutionary government of Russia in 1917 called themselves Communists and blackened the name of Communism so badly that future Communists decided to call themselves and their regimes Socialist rather than Communist.
   Today's  Democrats and/or Democratic Socialists are more interested in more free stuff than they are about government ownership of the means of production.  Or at least that's the way they talk.  We should remember that Communist or Socialist regimes inflict serious national poverty upon the nations stupid enough to embrace Communism or Socialism.  Examples are Venezuela, Cuba, and Russia.  So there will be little free stuff to hand out.
   Capitalism produces vast amounts of wealth and lifts countless people out of poverty.  Under capitalism all the means of production are owned and controlled by private individuals who operate them effectively.  The owners take a slice of the proceeds, in many cases a whacking big slice, but they produce  rivers of stuff, enough to fill our store shelves, and flood us with motor vehicles, aircraft, computers, gasoline, air conditioners, electronics, furnace oil, interstate highways, internet, and God only knows what else.  Better to have plenty of everything even if the owners get away with a great big slice. 
   You gotta wonder about those polls claiming that yuge numbers of people want "socialism".   What have our schools been teaching?

Silly talk about NH paid family leave bill. WMUR

We had Chuck Morse (Republican Senate minority leader) and Dan Feltes (Democratic Senate majority leader) on WMUR this morning.  They talked about the comprehensive family leave bill, which the Democrats passed and Governor Sununu vetoed.  Feltes was saying that we need the family leave bill to attract young workers to New Hampshire. 
   That's malarkey.  People decide to move into New Hampshire if they find, or think they can find, a good job, a better job than the one they have.  Then they consider housing costs (rents or house prices), taxes,  commuting time, and skiing, snowmobiling, ATV riding, hiking, climbing, fishing, and all the other outdoor activities that New Hampshire is famous for.   Few will get down to considering the presence or absence of paid family leave when deciding to come to New Hampshire.  Dan Feltes is flim flamming us on that one. 
   The bill the democrats passed, and the governor vetoed, (SB1) offered generous benefits, and a stiff income tax to pay for them.  The current economic boom, good times, came about from both federal and state tax cuts.  Adding a 1% (or more, a bureaucrat can raise it if he thinks the program needs more money)  undoes the good work that tax cuts have given us. 

NH Senate session 15 May

Senate session, Wednesday 15 May.  This was a long one.  Started at 10 AM and lasted until 5 PM.  We dealt with a lotta bills, most of them nit noi unimportant stuff.  We kicked things off by passing the Fast Track calendar with 17 bills on it with one quick voice vote, no debate.  Then we faced up to 51 bills on the regular calendar. 

   We killed HB 558 the plastic straw ban bill.  We amended HB 560, the plastic bag ban into something totally different.  After amendment HB560 didn’t say any thing about plastic or bags, but now requires cities and towns to report weight of trash dealt with to DES.  Guess my town will have to buy a scale. We stalled off HB 447 about school calendars by re-referring it to committee.  It would have allowed school boards to start school anytime they please which guts an earlier bill we passed that required schools to start after Labor Day.   I think starting school before Labor Day is child abuse, but teachers and administrators would start school in July if they thought they could get away with it. 

   We passed HB 446 on a voice vote.  This bill allows editing your birth certificate to remove “Male” or “Female” and replace it with “Other”.  We passed HB 669 that would do the same for NH driver’s licenses on a voice vote.

   That’s all the interesting bills.  The bulk of them are just not interesting enough to me to comment on them.  Twelve bills created study committees, which I think is a polite way of killing the issue. 

   And, we passed HB 280 making the red tailed hawk the state raptor.  Important issue that.  Apparently a bunch of 4^th graders proposed this bill four years ago.  Those kids are now in 8^th grade, and they were present for the vote on HB 280.  I think we taught them that it takes forever to get the NH legislature to anything. 

NH Senate Activity. 13 May

Ed Comm hearings, Tuesday, 13 May.  This was executive session day, no hearings.  We only had two bills to deal with.  HB 131 was an attempt to recover the Signum University degree granting authority.  We passed a bill in the Senate to grant degree granting authority to Signum back a month ago.  For some unclear reason the House killed it last week.  We tried to revive it by tacking the Signum bill onto HB 131 as a rider.  Ed committee chairman Senator Jay Kahn discouraged this scheme, saying the house would kill it.  He suggested we offer the Signum amendment as a floor amendment during senate session this week.  Well, that never happened, and Signum, an innovative way to gain a college degree is without NH support, even though the NH Dept of Ed thinks they are doing good.  Too bad. 

   Then we rehashed HB 226 which would grant teachers their “experienced educator” certificate after only three years of class room teaching, instead of the current five years.  We added a lot of verbiage to the bill, making it harder to figure out what it was doing.   Which is OK by me.  Three years of class room teaching is plenty.  In the Air Force we put teachers in front of classrooms after only three weeks of training.  And the Air Force teachers, just sergeants, pulled right off the flight line, with classes of rowdy teen aged airmen, did just fine.  I took some courses and the instructors were as good as, of better than, any teachers I ever had. 

Anyhow, Tuesday cleaned up the last Ed Comm bills.  No Ed Comm hearings next Tuesday. 

What to do about Facebook?

They have been selling user's data.  They don't keep anything confidential.  They have been kicking conservative posters off.  They are almost the only game in town.  So what to do?
1.  Do nothing.  If Facebook kicks you off, start a blog. 
2.  Use anti trust laws to break Facebook into two (or more) viable pieces.  This ought to create competition.  Conservatives black balled off of one piece can re apply to the other piece.  The two pieces ought to compete for advertising by lowering their rates. 
3.  Regulate.  Set up a commission of "impartial" members to lay down the law to Zuckerburg.  Will stir things up for a while.  Then Facebook will capture the regulators by taking them out to lunch, and other juicy things, and offering them cushy jobs with Facebook if they treat Facebook right.  Plus, real control of what Facebook actually does will remain in Zuckerborg's hands.  The regulators won't be able to tell if Facebook is doing what they are told to do or not. 
4.  Encourage a competitor to compete.  Probably not viable.  Facebook has occupied the market space and getting started against them probably is not possible. 
5. Something else? 

I started up a Facebook page to support my Senate campaign.  It got a lot of hits.  Like 150 for each time I posted.  I believe it did me a lot of good in the election.  I won after all.  I am still on Facebook.  They have not booted me, or even bitched to me. Yet.

Islamic terrorists have posted a lot of really disgusting and hateful stuff on Facebook.  I'm glad to hear Facebook is doing something about that.  At least that's what I hear, mostly from Facebook. I can believe as much of that as I please.  They claim that Russian trolls have used Facebook posts to influence the 2016 election.  Not sure if I believe that.  Putin, old KGB man, has good intel on America, and must have known that Hillary was his best bet.  Hillary isn't very smart, isn't very brave, and would never give Putin any trouble over Russian aggression anywhere.  Trump was (still is) a wild card.  Nobody knows what he will do next.  Putin knew all this well before the US election.  It is inconceivable to me that Putin wanted Trump to win.