About

Hi everyone.   There are days until Election Day, Tuesday, November 6, 2012.

I'm Dean Rubine, and I live in Lee, NH. I'm starting this blog 38 days before election day in order to provide information in the race for the US House seat for the First District of New Hampshire. The race is a rematch of the 2010 race, between the Democrat Carol Shea-Porter and the Republican incumbent Frank Guinta.

I'm registered as Undeclared, but as this blog will surely reflect, I'm a Democrat.  I've been commenting on various sites in favor of former Representative Shea-Porter and against Representative Guinta.  I plan to use this blog to collect and expand on my various comments. While I'm at it I hope to comment on other races, from the president on down to the very local.

I've never really been much of an activist, though I was a Pro-Choice escort back in the 1980s. Back then the pro-lifers would stand outside Planned Parenthood clinics, and harass any woman who looked like she was going to go in.  They of course assumed she was going in for an abortion, and would shout things like "it's a baby" while shoving signs with pictures of bloody fetuses in the poor woman's face.  Of course most of the women were going in for contraceptive services or other health matters, but that hardly made it less scary.   The protesters were a fringe group back then.  Now they seem to be the mainstream of the Republican party.  Abortion and, incredibly, contraception have become topical again this year, with Republicans taking a remarkably extreme position.   Hopefully I can touch on women's health care issues in this blog.

Last year I got active because of issues with our local school board. Tea Partiers had taken over the board, and were rather mindlessly firing administrators and cutting costs with pretty much the sole goal of cutting taxes.  My wife discovered a twitter account of one of the school board members that was full of bigotry and birtherism.   She publicized these tweets, getting lots of local (and some national) attention.  I did my part my with my blog ORCSDcleanslate.org.   With the help of lots of great folks in the community, we were very successful, managing to get all four board seats up for election (out of seven seats total) filled with our candidates, in the process getting rid of the evil tweeter and the chairman who supported him.  They made it pretty easy.   Mainly, I just reminded people of the tweets, of the two judges that ruled the board violated the New Hampshire Right To Know Law multiple times, and that taxes were going up anyway.

It occurs to me that the US congress isn't all that different from the Oyster River School Board.   Though they claim to have lowering debt as a goal, the Republican House seems mostly interested in cutting spending to give tax cuts to the already wealthy.   The Ryan budget passed 4/15/11 by its own accounting increases debt until at least 2040.  But those tax cuts come right away.

Just as our school board resorted to secret meetings and secret ballots in violation of NH law, the GOP House members have found a number of less than ethical means to obtain and retain their seats.   In 2010 our own Rep. Guinta claims to have lent his campaign $355,000 of his own money.   When it was pointed out to him that he failed to disclose anything near this amount in his disclosure forms while mayor and now as a house candidate, he claimed it was "an inadvertent oversight."   This time around he's making robocalls where he claims to be the challenger running against "Congresswoman Shea-Porter ... to end the broken culture of Washington."

So I'm hoping to do my part by doing more or less the same thing I did in the school board race.   I'm going to lay the facts out as I see them, which links to references to back them up.  I'm going to   allow unmoderated comments.   I want the voter who goes looking for information of the Guinta / Shea-Porter contest to see both sides.

I've heard Rep. Guinta say that he's always going to comport himself in a way that he'd be OK with his children seeing on TV.    That seems a pretty good standard, and I'm going try to uphold the same standard of decorum here.   I'll delete comments with foul language, unrelated spam, racism, and similar things I wouldn't want anyone's children to see.  I certainly will not delete a comment simply because I disagree.   At ORCSDcleanslate.org I don't think I have had to delete a comment, and I'm hopeful that I won't have to delete anything here either.

If a commenter persuades me I'm wrong about something, I'll correct the main text of the post so as not to deliberately leave misinformation.   In cases where I make significant corrections, I'll leave an indication in the post or a comment that a change has been made.   I'm going to feel free to make additions, correct typos and improve my writing without comment.

Disclaimer:  The opinions expressed in this blog are solely my own.  They do not represent the views of my employers.   They do not claim to be the views of any group or organization of which I'm a member.    They do not necessarily represent the views of Carol Shea-Porter or her campaign.   I've met Carol Shea-Porter.  I  like Carol Shea-Porter.  My wife and I have given money to Carol Shea-Porter's campaign.   I know some of Carol Shea-Porter's staff.  Nonetheless, the content of this blog is my responsibility alone.