Yesterday was the inauguration ceremony at the state house and a number of other scheduled festive events to ring in the new administrations. After doing some promotional chalkings around the perimeter of the building, I headed inside and met with other independent media personalities visiting town from Keene. When we discovered a line outside of the governor’s office, we were struck with the urge to file in.
A staffer noticed our rolling videocameras and informed us that the line was for a photograph with governor Maggie Hassan, but that she would not have time to dedicate to a videotaped interview. Darryl, Kate, and James decided to find other items to film, while I perused the posters featuring the event’s corporate sponsors, which included everything from New Hampshire businesses to pharmaceutical multinationals.
It was a very rushed encounter, as most happenings with lines tend to be. I quickly asked after handing off my rolling camera and being flashed by still cameras, “Will you be doing anything to decrease New Hampshire’s dependence on the United States federal government?”
“Uh, well, I think that’s something we’ll all talk about, thanks.”
I picked up a cheesecake item and walked to the house chamber to listen to a colorful choir. Outside of the office, the line to see the new state president grew. In the lobby, chocolate bears were being distributed. It was a statist synthesis of Christmas and Easter, and there was free stuff to go around.
Today’s Union Leader coverage includes these choice words from Kathy Sullivan, the current national New Hampshire Democratic Committeewoman:
Democratic National Committeewoman Kathy Sullivan said that while she could not speak for Chase, the lawmaker is entitled to her opinion, “just as the Free Staters are entitled to their opinions.”
Sullivan said Free Staters have a variety of opinions on various topics, but must “contend with” opinions sometimes expressed by leaders in favor of secession, even though not all Free Staters support secession.
Sullivan said that if Free Staters run for office they should “disclose that they are part of that organized effort,” but she said she disagrees with the idea of trying to keep anyone from moving into the state.
“Would I prefer that more people of my political persuasion, who support strong public education, for instance, move into the state? Yes, but that’s not what our democracy is,” Sullivan said. “Walls don’t work.”
She said she was not surprised Limbaugh picked up on the matter, but added, “Maybe everyone on either side needs to calm down and talk to each other.”
Hmm, sounds like Kathy isn’t calling for Rep. Chase’s head… but you know she would be, if a Republican had said “Hey, let’s limit the freedoms that progressives value (or blacks, gays, unions, women, or really insert any group here), so they won’t be welcome here in NH.”
Oh right: Kathy Sullivan, then NH Democrat Chairwoman, in 2003, nearly 10 years ago.
That sound you are hearing: the hypocrite alarm going off…
Kathy Sullivan is a Manchester attorney and a member of the Democratic National Committee. She was chairman of the NH Democratic Party from 1999-2007… and she says wants us all to sit down and calmly talk now. Well, let’s see:
“First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.” – Mahatma Gandhi
Get a clue. Free State Project participants are NOT “conservative”, nor are they “liberal”. We love liberty.
The Free Staters that I know all support ending the insane war on drugs. They are LGBT-friendly (or actually LGBT). They are anti-war. Are those “conservative” positions?
If you love liberty, meaning the freedom to live your life as you wish, so long as you don’t harm others, then you should join the Free State Project. However, if you’re a “conservative” that wants to control people’s sex lives or what they put in their bodies, then you won’t fit in. You should stay where you are.
On this first day of the New Year, I was motivated to do something I don’t normally, and that is contacting federal ‘representatives’. A website linked on my Facebook feed made it as easy as customizing a form letter to address three congressman and the president. The letter called for the immediate closing of the US Department of Defense’s School of the Americas, also known as WHINSEC, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. WHINSEC is a training facility in Fort Benning, Georgia where primarily Latin American militants loyal to US foreign policy demands are instructed in tactics of controlling and killing. You don’t often (or ever) hear the four politicians who received my message discussing the collateral damage and crimes attributed to graduates of the school, which made it the most fitting way to frame a new year, while talking heads babble on about fiscal cliffs. For more on legislative and other actions to take against the School of the Americas, check out soawatch.org.
I’ve been working on a project to release my raw videos from the NATO Summit protests in Chicago and recently created an introduction segment. The videos will be released first as single videos featuring an entire day’s footage to Fr33manTVraw. From the single large video, a trimmed cut will be produced with audio commentary and released on the FreeConcordTV youtube channel. After creating the intro, I found that it worked very well as a trailer for the footage to come. It features video from both myself and other videographers, with channels cited in the video description.
Yesterday I called in to Keene’s open-phones local news show, Talkback, after the main host, Cynthia Georgina suggested jail telephone systems were too expensive. She didn’t understand why such an expense was necessary where jails are ‘supposed to be punishment’.
In the program, we were only able to touch on a few aspects of her belief, when there’s so much that could be said about that mentality. People who are not affected by jails can fail to recognize the unnecessary strain on human life created by conditions of caging. In the nation that has 25% of the world’s institutionalized inmates, it is still easy to ignore the plight of others when they are removed from sight and mind.
Because Cynthia was specifying jails, she was endorsing punishment of people held for either misdemeanor convictions (facing a penalty of under a year of incarceration) or those being detained pending trial. Detention pending trial could simply mean one is too poor to afford bail, or that they were in violation of any number of stringent bail conditions. When I brought up that New Hampshire jails are occupied by a large number of individuals convicted of driving infractions, Cynthia was surprised, unaware of the mandatory minimum prison sentence written into state law for those designated habitual offenders. (more…)
It was a very rushed encounter, as most happenings with lines tend to be. I quickly asked after handing off my rolling camera and being flashed by still cameras, “Will you be doing anything to decrease New Hampshire’s dependence on the United States federal government?”
