Can anyone count?

By Jerry McConnell
Either this current government Administration has no one who knows how to tell the truth, including its leader, or it has no one with a degree even as high as a high school graduate who can do math correctly. As reported by NewsMax.com on November 19, 2009, the GAO stated on this date that there are too many errors to know how many jobs have been created.
In spite of report after report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) showing that there has been no significant move to increase jobs, everyone speaking for the Administration including its leader, keeps insisting and trumpeting all sorts of lofty numbers and not only for jobs created but insidiously including a phantom new level of “jobs saved”; what is that?
To arrive at that figure do they take the total number of jobs in which people are employed, then subtract the total number of jobs which have been lost, and the balance becomes the number of “jobs saved”? To me, this represents just what this Administration thinks of the mentalities of the people of this country; to wit: “The people don’t know how to count, so they’ll believe anything. After all, they elected us didn’t they”?
Newsmax.com also reported that “the Administration Internet website Recovery.gov is working on errors that appeared to show hundreds of millions of stimulus dollars were spent in nonexistent congressional districts, as reported by the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board. Arizona's page, for example, showed the state's 52nd, 15th, and 86th congressional districts received hundreds of thousands of dollars in stimulus money, according to CNN affiliate KNXV. However, no such districts exist in Arizona, which has only eight congressional districts.”
One has to wonder how many jobs were reported as gained or “saved” in those non-existent congressional districts. Apparently truth and/or good records are not important as long as they show something to cloud the overall picture of Administrative ineptness.
Since when does a government put up obscenely high numbers of tax dollars to just give away to any big business that says it is hurting and losing jobs, in order to create jobs and then in a Machiavellian way take the number of jobs that are still in existence and call them “jobs saved”? Why the slight of hand, now-you-see-‘em, now-you-don’t, routine? Don’t they remember Abe Lincoln’s admonishment: “You can fool some of the people, some of the time; but you can’t fool ALL of the people, ALL of the time?” They must think that all of us have ACORNS for brains as do many of their followers.
What ever happened to good old American honesty? Oh, I forgot; this is not a good old American Administration, so we should not expect honesty; and they won’t disappoint us. Even our Congress has caught that fever and has lied so much about health care, climate voodooism, and labor union shenanigans that they can no longer recognize the truth. It has become as routine as three-day work weeks that were promised to be up to two more days during the campaign for election in 2006.
This collection of tax cheats and anti-Americans in Congress and the Administration is without question the absolute worst bunch of misfits ever assembled to run this country. If EVER there was a more compelling argument for TERM LIMITS, I never heard it. Today the percentage of millionaires, who were not even close to that prior to getting elected to Congress, is higher than it has ever been and probably exceeds businesses and banking institutions. And the greater number of these who have become excessively wealthy on government salaries, plus whatever other means, fall among the ranks of the liberal Democrats.
In 2010, we have a chance to return to the original concept of the founding fathers of honesty in government and turn these greedy profiteers out on their backsides; then elect only those who promise to support those two words that strike fear into the hearts of the liberals, - TERM LIMITS

Jerry McConnell is a long time New Hampshire resident, a Marine veteren of Iwo Jima, and a published novelist. He resides in Hampton New Hampshire

9-1-1 spells "Mom"

---by Micheal

Here are three articles of evidence that the Nanny State is not just a conspiracy perpetrated by some shadowy ruling elite. The Nanny State is also being demanded by our increasingly stupid popular culture. Here are three examples:

Don't Like Your Food? Call 911! -- March 4th, 2009, FoxNews. A 27 year-old Florida woman calls 911 three times because she did not get the Chicken McNuggets that she ordered at a local McDonalds. She placed her order for a 10 piece McNuggets. After she had paid, she found out they were out of nuggets. The manager did not want to give her a refund, and she did not want anything else as a substitute. What to do? Call 911. "This is an emergency. She (the manager) wants to give me a McDouble, but I don't want one."

Scared of the Wild World? Call 911 -- October 25th, 2009, MSNBC. Two men and their sons are hiking in the Grand Canyon. They took with them an emergency locator beacon. In the span of three days, they pressed the "save me!" button three times, sending rescue crews and helicopters in to find them. The "emergency"? They hadn't packed enough water and got thirsty. They drank from a stream and thought the water tasted "salty." What to do? Call 911!

Life's Not Fair? Call 911 -- November 18, 2009, Cnet News. A 15 year-old boy is disciplined by his parents. They took away his Xbox. The boy asks the police if his parents have a legal right to confiscate his toy. A cruiser is dispatched to the family home to resolve the crisis before it explodes. Those mean people took away your toy! What to do? Call 911!

Common Denominator? -- Increasingly, average citizens of this country are turning to the Nanny State to be their moms (or dads). Instead of the Florida woman calling her mom to complain about McDonalds' service or ask advice, she calls for state emergency services. Heaven forbid that someone was trying to call in about a heart attack or a house on fire. We're talkin' Nuggets here! Apparently it was asking far too much that this woman sort out her life-wrinkles herself. Reason with the manager? Take the stupid McDouble and shut up? All options.

But no. The police had to go be her dad. They also told her to buck up and stop bothering them.

The canyon hikers were ill-prepared for a real trek through the wild. Not only did they not have enough of the right supplies, they did not have enough common sense to not go where they were clueless. They could have called their moms and dads and sought some advice on whether to make such a trip, and if so, what to bring. You might think that the first emergency call was enough to convince the noobs that they were out of their element and should maybe just go back to the safety of home.

But no. They kept hiking and called for emergency rescue two more times. The helicopter crew had to play "dad" and take them home.

The bratty gameboy considers his mom and dad to be some sort of accidental room mates and not parents. The kid assumes he has some Constitutional Right to play video games 24/7. Where's the ACLU on this? What to do? Call 911! God forbid that someone's house could be getting robbed, or a drunk driver crashing into things. We're talkin' video games here! This is an emergency. Apparently the kid had not thought to reflect on what his parents were trying to tell him, or learn a life lesson from a disciplinary action. All good options.

But no. He calls the police as if his civil rights had been violated. To their credit, the officers told the kid that his parents did have a right to control his gaming and stop bothering them. What a shock that must have been.

If and when the Great Nanny State becomes a reality, it may not be because some evil ruling elite has forced it upon us. It may well come about because our stupid populace demanded it. We are becoming a people who demand services from our state. We've abdicated doing things for ourselves. We want to stay frozen in childhood where we can shout "MOM!" when something upsets us. It's just that now, we spell MOM, 9-1-1.

Here's a thought.

By Jerry McConnell

Senator Richard Durbin, D-IL, the 2nd highest ranking Democrat in the U. S. Senate spoke on the evening TV news about how wonderful it is going to be to bring the Guantanamo prisoners of war to the United States for their trials and possible imprisonment. He emphasized that his great state of Illinois, the state with all those "different" politicians (my comment, not his) would be very happy to have them reside there.

As he spoke I had a very strong bipartisan wave come across me and felt I should show this very high ranking liberal Democrat that as a very low ranking conservative that I could support his plea for these wonderful Islamic, peace-loving prisoners to reside in his state while they were in this country; if, in fact, we MUST do it at all as the president insists.

Please know that this endorsement of Durbin's heart-felt plea to house these prisoners in the great state of Illinois, and hopefully in the pristine city of Chicago home of the country's "different" politicians, is not an approval of bringing them anywhere within 500 miles of our borders. No, I feel that Gitmo, as Guantanamo is known, is an ideal place which has been completely renovated and designed as a virtual shrine for an Islamic peace teaching vista, and I would prefer that they remain there. But president Obama feels that the integration of these gentle, pleasant, clean-cut, souls would be good for the United States.

So in the interests of bipartisanship I pass this along and ask each and every one to agree that if these prisoners MUST come to this country and there is no way of stopping it, then allow them ALL to be housed in Illinois, under the caretaker status of Senator Richard Durbin, the Majority Whip of the United States Senate.

I feel sure that the other 49 states will be happy to allow their share of any of these prisoners to be taken care of by the great and wonderful state of Illinois and Senator Durbin.

So let this message go to all of our wonderful United States for approval from the residents therein to give up the honor and privilege of housing these people in deference to the State of Illinois in the interests of bipartisanship.

All those in agreement are asked to show their name and state below and pass it on to as many people as you know within your own state and on to friends in other states with the hope that the last State will be those generous Illinoisians.

Jerry McConnell,

Jerry McConnell is a long time New Hampshire resident, a Marine veteren of Iwo Jima, and a published novelist. He resides in Hampton New Hampshire

Time to eat the dog.

By Mark Brighten and Ramona Charland
We are a truly blessed nation. The bountiful nature of this blessing is very easy to quantify. It is not done in quarterly reports or gross national product. The amount of blessing is directly proportional to the amount of navel gazing that a society does.

Every morning there are those who get out of bed and immediately stick their index fingers into their navels and starting whirling them about. Within a half hour they are stunned to realize that their bellybuttons are sore and they continue whirling, hoping to find the reason.

The latest objects of navel gazing are global warming and its cousin, sustainability. We never have been able to embrace the concept of human induced global warming as the beginning of the end. We are beginning to envy our early 17th century forbearers. They only had to worry about malnutrition, rickets, scurvy and hideous wasting deaths. All of which are a minor inconvenience when put up against a global warming lecture delivered by Al Gore.

But sustainability is interesting. In the interest of full disclosure, we ourselves have embraced this latest form of navel gazing wholeheartedly. The geek rating of sustainability is very high and we are self-admitted geeks. In addition we have assumed the necessary level of guilt to carry us through.

We are as green as green can be. We soak our clothes in baking soda on Friday and then walk them down to the Piscataqua's edge on Saturday and beat them on rocks. We bathe only on Saturday nights in anticipation of Sunday services. We have painted the roof of our house white, compost our toilet paper and turned off our central heat. On our 80-by-50-foot patch of prime Portsmouth real estate we grow sufficient crops for all our food and for weaving cloth. Like the Amish, we have reverted to horse and buggy, minus the horse. Some of the aforementioned cloth we have made into a sail and go about shopping on windy days.

Our carbon footprint is so low that we would embarrass a gnat, or so we thought. A new book has completely turned our world on end. Victoria University professors Brenda and Robert Vale have a book out called "Time to Eat the Dog." The basic premise is that pets, dogs in particular, have a rather large carbon pawprint. "The eco-pawprint of a dog is twice that of a 4.6-litre Land Cruiser driven 10,000 kilometers (6,214 miles) a year," according to these researchers. Since the typical American drives about 12,000 miles per year, this means one dog equals one SUV.

Upon reading this, our guilt level rose and the conflicted feelings began. We have a dog — all 24 pounds of her. We saw her picture in the paper as "Pet off the Week," drove to the Stratham shelter and fell in love. She was a Katrina survivor and had been in and out of kennels for 18 months, from Alabama through Ohio and then Stratham. Who could resist those eyes? We took her home and for three years she has resided contentedly with us. Now we find that we are guilty of perpetuating an ecological disaster.

Everywhere you turn in Portsmouth you will see an SUV with a golden lab in it. These profligates are doubly sinning. If our average-sized dog is equivalent to an SUV, these golden labs must be the same as a Sherman tank. And what does that say for the Newfie or Rottweiler? Are they equivalent to a Saturn rocket? Or perhaps they are equal to the size of Al Gore's SUV fleet and personal jet? In their defense, we would suggest that either type, at least, is far less somniferous than one of Al Gore's speeches.

Dogs are not the only ones on the hook. Cats apparently do as much eco-damage as a Volkswagen Golf. The villainous hamster takes up as much eco room as half a plasma TV. And just to raise the guilt level even more, the average human in a developed nation wreaks the havoc of six dogs.

Professors Vale and Vale are not actually advocating serving Fido for Thanksgiving. Annihilating the canine world to save some rare newt that no one has ever met defies all logic and is just plain stupid, but we can think of any number of activists who have already chosen the newt over humans. What passes for serious thought among true believers must now include canis familiaris along with humans as modern-day scurvy, rickets and wasting death for the planet. Another point of view, however, is that true believers are sucking sanity out of the planet and putting it at the mercy of a plague of hysteria. It's a working hypothesis.

We have reconsidered this carbon footprint thing. We are turning the heat back on and Fido stays.

Mark Brighton and Ramona Charland are residents of Portsmouth.

Business taxes hurt the economy.

By John Stephen
At the tax summit held by the New Hampshire Legislature last week, one critical nugget stood out. Scott Hodge, president of the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, offered tremendous caution about our business tax climate.

With New Hampshire's high 8.5 percent business profits tax coupled with a business enterprise tax, our state has one of the highest business taxes in the nation. This, in part, results in nearly 16 percent of our workforce working out of state, the third highest rate nationally.

Our low personal taxes are bringing people here to live, but our high business taxes are forcing people to work elsewhere. If we want a thriving economy with robust job growth to match our outstanding quality of life, we must get our business tax structure to look more like how we tax people: as little as possible.

While we learned at last week's tax summit that we need to cut business taxes to jumpstart our economy, it was this week's spending summit that we must focus on to make reducing taxes a reality. As Gov. Meldrim Thomson said over 30 years ago, "Low taxes are the result of low spending."

We can't have a serious discussion about cutting business taxes until we are prepared to do the hard work to cut spending and make New Hampshire government run efficiently.

Traveling across the country, I have had the opportunity to see what does and doesn't work. New Hampshire is falling behind every day as other states zoom by us, implementing best practices taken from the private sector, while our state government sits idle and maintains the status quo.

We need to employ a culture of change where we start treating taxpayer money as we would our own. For example, we need to stop tying the hands of our state department heads by requiring that they submit budgets that keep doing things exactly the same way we have always done them. This leads to the "tyranny of custom" that ruins new ideas. We should require them to use their knowledge and experience and come forward with good ideas to save money for the taxpayers through the budget process.

We also need to follow the lead of 43 other states and give New Hampshire's governor line-item veto authority to cut wasteful spending and make budgets more efficient. At the same time, we should take the lead of Louisiana and put all state expenditures online, so people can see exactly where their tax dollars are going.

Other states, like New York and Wisconsin, have moved to consolidate business functions, like human resources, finance and purchasing, while New Hampshire continues to operate inefficiently. Texas and Oregon have become leaders in bringing Medicaid costs down by implementing aggressive managed care for beneficiaries, while we have kept an outdated fee-for-service model. Indiana has created a balanced scorecard approach to management to set program benchmarks and eliminate services that can't produce results; we have done nothing but give taxpayers more government, regardless of how effective it is.

These are critical steps that could save hundreds of millions of dollars and allow us to give tax relief to New Hampshire companies that would let them grow and create jobs, which are so critical in today's economy.

If we could just play catch-up with the rest of the states, we would be able to get out of this recession faster and better than our neighbors. If New Hampshire could then take the next step and become a leader in state innovation, we would be the envy of the country in growth.

John Stephen was the Commissioner of Health and Human Services from 2003 to 2007.