Also on today’s menu:
Great North Woods Towns Worried About Forest Economy
Board Of Education Ponders Embracing Propaganda
Ohio Rejects Change In Constitutional Amendment Process
“One more indictment and I think this election is over,” former president Donald Trump said to booming cheers during his visit to a packed gymnasium at Windham High School on August 8. That could be true, but not in the way he and his supporters think.
It is true that Trump has raised millions of dollars from supporters who disregard his increasingly blatant criminal actions — most recently threatening witnesses and prosecutors who are attempting to hold him accountable for his behavior. (“IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I'M COMING AFTER YOU!”) MAGA Republicans are happy to ignore Trump’s criminality and instead focus on “crooked” Joe Biden, whom Trump called a “compromised candidate” who personally has brought “bogus made-up accusations” against him. In truth, the president has remained out of the fray, allowing independent prosecutors and Republicans who worked with Trump to use Trump’s own words and actions to prove his guilt.
In addition to deflecting attention to Biden’s alleged criminal behavior, columnist Joyce Vance notes that “Trump’s strategy is delay. Three days here, four days there, and pretty soon you’re past the election. This sort of bad-faith argumentation will only get them so far. At some point, Judge Tanya Chutkan is going to have to decide where her line in the sand is and what she’s going to do to convey to Trump who’s running the show now. If she doesn’t, he’ll continue to make a mockery of the criminal justice system, and she doesn’t give off the aura of a judge who’s okay with that. For now, she has set her hearing for Friday. She told the lawyers to give her a couple of possible times between tomorrow and Friday, and Trump’s lawyers, predictably, responded with Monday. We’ll learn her reaction on Friday.”
Great North Woods Towns Worried About Forest Economy
Executive Councilor Joe Kenney (R-Wakefield) told a crowd gathered at the Pittsburg Fire Station on August 8 that Bluesource Sustainable, a large logging company that manages the state’s largest block of land, plans to reduce its harvest by 50 percent because the market for carbon credits is offering a higher price.
“Obviously it’s a market decision,” Kenney said. Bluesource Sustainable holds more than 1.2 million acres of forest land across the country.
Charles Levesque of Innovative Resource Solutions told Pittsburg officials that the new model to manage forests is to not cut trees, but instead to sell the credits to not cut. That decision has a massive impact on the region’s forest products economy, the natural habitat of the Great North Woods, and the tax base for Pittsburg, Clarksville, and Stewartstown.
Margaret Machinist, who manages the forest easement for the New Hampshire Division of Forests and Lands, said the Attorney General’s Office is looking into the state’s rights as it pertains to the contract and its forest management plan. The state paid $45 million 20 years ago to protect the land, with a focus on forest management which includes timber harvesting as a means of providing a diverse wildlife habitat. The Governor’s office also has asked for a review of the situation.
The easement was intended to protect the traditional uses of the land, including the timber harvests that help the local economy. Levesque noted, however, that RSA:79 which governs the timber tax, allows communities to recoup that tax income if it is lost to something like carbon credits.
Board Of Education Ponders Embracing Propaganda
The New Hampshire Board of Education plans to decide on August 10 whether to allow the non-profit PragerU Kids program into the state to help fulfill the state’s financial literacy graduation requirement. If approved, the program would be available under the Department of Education’s Learn Everywhere Program.
Founded by conservative talk radio host Dennis Prager, the pseudo-educational program offers videos featuring conservative pundits and activists, along with Republican National Committee members, to teach “American Values” rather than the “Woke agendas … infiltrating classrooms, culture, and social media.” The program has been criticized for promoting misleading views on climate change, slavery and racism, immigration, the history of fascism, and LGBTQ matters.
Francesca Tripodi, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said of the program, “It’s very important to recognize that these are not educational videos. These videos are very explicitly created to get people to think a certain way ... and the goal of PragerU is to advance a conservative agenda.” As an example, one video features an animated young Polish girl comparing taking a stand against green energy with fighting Nazi oppression.
Marissa Streit, chief executive officer of PragerU, said, “The grand vision is that parents on the weekends will sit with their kids and watch our videos and order our books and order our magazines and have really great conversations with their families that can be supplemented with the work that’s being done in school.”
Ohio Rejects Change In Constitutional Amendment Process
The national media are portraying Ohio’s vote defeating a change in the threshold for passing a constitutional amendment as a victory for democracy, but requiring a supermajority to make a major change in a state’s constitution is not only reasonable but completely logical. New Hampshire already requires a 60 percent majority in the legislature and two-thirds majority on the popular ballot to change its constitution.
Ohio provides the best example of why a simple majority is problematic. Since 1913, voters have adopted 127 constitutional amendments out of the 227 proposed. All it takes is for one political party to support a change to put it in place over the objections of the second party. As Mike Curtin, a former democratic member of the Ohio House of Representatives from 2013 to 2016, put it, raising that threshold to 60 percent would require both parties’ agreement.
“Proposed amendments that get more than 60% of the votes usually have the support of both parties and don’t have any organized opposition,” the Ohio Capital Journal quoted Curtin as saying. Should that not be the case? Otherwise, either party with a majority at the time could pass and rescind articles.
That does not mean that the measure to raise the bar to 60 percent is not without political motivation. The press is correct in pointing out that the reasons Republicans supported the increase is to make it harder for voters to pass a constitutional amendment protecting abortions. The vote defeating the change was largely aimed at ensuring an easy victory for the abortion amendment in November.
Democrats should keep in mind that preserving the simple majority threshold also makes it easier for Republicans to adopt amendments Democrats may not agree with. It’s not just New Hampshire pride that makes us appreciate the Granite State’s high threshold for amending the state constitution.
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