Also on today’s menu:
Families Confront DOJ Over Unsolved Cases
Mother Dies Trying To Rescue Son At Franconia Falls
About That ‘Fascist’ Label For Trump
Belknap County Chief Deputy Sheriff and former Bristol police chief Jim McIntire is being credited with saving the life of an excavator operator whose equipment snagged a high-tension wire near the entrance of the county jail, pulling down a nearby utility pole and causing several wires to snap and fall to the ground.
Sheriff Bill Wright told the Laconia Daily Sun that he is drafting a lifesaving award in recognition of McIntire’s “efforts of keeping the excavator operator in the machine, despite others telling him to exit the machine” on August 10.
The excavator operator worked for R&B Services LLC of Sanbornton, a subcontractor working with the Bauen Corporation of Meredith in making improvements at the Belknap County Complex. R&B had rented the excavator and the employee was parking the excavator with its arm partially raised when it snagged the wires, resulting in them sparking and sending up smoke after falling to the ground.
Families Confront DOJ Over Unsolved Cases
Families of the victims of unsolved murders and missing persons gathered in the rain on August 15 to ask the Department of Justice to do a better job of communicating and solving the cases involving their loved ones. They included Valorie Haynes Alverez, the great-aunt of Trish Haynes, whose body was found in Grafton following her disappearance at age 26 in 2018. “People say if you want to get away with murder, go to New Hampshire,” she said.
Michael Garrity, director of communications at the Department of Justice, said in a news release that his office is respectfully listening to those families and continues to do so privately, and that the Attorney-General’s Office is working on the cases. “The Attorney-General remains ready and willing to have one-on-one or small-group conversations with impacted loved ones,” Garrity said.
He cited 2022 statistics showing that New Hampshire investigators and prosecutors solved 92.3% of the state’s homicides that year, compared to a national homicide clearance rate of 54.3%. New Hampshire’s 10-year average homicide clearance rate is 88.9%, compared to 59.9% nationally, Garrity said.
Mother Dies Trying To Rescue Son At Franconia Falls
The 44-year-old mother in a family of six from Lynn, Massachusetts, that had hiked with a friend from Salem, Massachusetts, to Franconia Falls on August 15 died after becoming trapped in the current after attempting to rescue a 10-year-old who had fallen into the water.
New Hampshire State Police Marine Patrol received a call about a person trapped at the falls on the East Branch of the Pemigewasset River and responded with members of the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department, Lincoln Fire Rescue, Lincoln Police and Linwood Ambulance. They learned that the family’s 10-year-old son had fallen into the water and other family members had entered the pools to assist. Two of them became trapped in the rocks, but the child was rescued.
They freed an 18-year-old male who had sustained injuries and transported him to Littleton Hospital, but the mother, trapped below the falls, was deceased. The names of those in the party are being withheld pending notification of next of kin.
About That ‘Fascist’ Label For Trump
Some have questioned the use of the term “fascist” to describe Donald Trump, saying that it demonstrates a political bias. I have been careful to avoid terms such as “Nazi” when speaking of the former president, despite his embrace of neo-nazis and other white supremacists in his quest for power. It was not until he revealed his disdain for the U.S. Constitution and the laws it created that I concluded that he has fully embraced fascism.
Robert Reich writes, “The philosopher Hannah Arendt has pointed out that the fascist leader fuses his identity with his followers, so that followers lose their capacities for independent thought. As the fascist leader takes over the factual, psychological, and moral premises of the world his followers inhabit, the followers relinquish their freedoms. They suspend critical judgment. They become automatons.”
He also points out, “Fascism stands for a coherent set of ideas different from — and more dangerous than — authoritarianism. To fight those ideas, it’s necessary to be aware of what they are and how they fit together.”
L.J. Schaffnit of Gilmanton, in a letter to the editor, writes, “[Trump] uses lies to turn the public against alternative sources of authority such as independent courts, legislative bodies, and law enforcement agencies. He is asking for personal loyalty to outweigh the rule of law. This unique style of bullying and fear-mongering are the bedrock of his insidious hate-filled mentality that pollutes logic and rejects reason — the strategy of an autocrat.”
Trump supporters say it is President Joe Biden Jr., not Trump, who is the fascist, because of the pandemic lockdown, his embrace of the Paris Climate Accords, the Iran nuclear deal, the withdrawal from Afghanistan (following the approximate timeline that Trump had set), support for student debt forgiveness, shutting down the Keystone pipeline and “a war on fossil fuels” to deal with climate change, and promoting domestic production of clean-energy products. That is not fascism, although his promotion of a “Governance Disinformation Board” came close to what Trump is doing to control what is perceived as true.
Biden has his problems, but he does not trample on minorities, promote hate, and despise the laws of the land, and he will never be a cult figure like our reality-TV candidate who epitomizes fascism. It is not political bias to identify what someone stands for.
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