The House has spoken on expanded gambling…voting “no” on a casino bill that was a huge priority for the Senate and the Governor.  Meanwhile, Senators crunched their budget numbers, and debated the House’s proposal to raise taxes on gasoline and cigarettes.  And a University of New Hampshire logo re-design…has some UNH students upset. 

Guests

Dean Spiliotes – Civic Scholar in the School of Arts and Sciences at Southern New Hampshire University and author of the website NHPoliticalCapital.com

Memorial Day Weekend is late for trees to unfurl tiny, tender pale green leaves. Yet trees growing at the highest altitudes of our State's White Mountain National Forest are among the last to leaf-out each spring.

Hikers are familiar with a curious phenomenon only conspicuous in late spring and again during autumn foliage season: faint diagonal stripes - like a barber pole - appear on forested flanks of many White Mountain peaks.

New Hampshire’s Senate has joined the House of Representatives and voted to ratchet down the cap on carbon dioxide restrictions under the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI. Because of the historic rise of cleaner burning natural gas, it’s been easy for  carbon dioxide RGGI’s existing caps. So earlier this year, the RGGI board asked the member states to lower those caps by 45 percent.

A day after the New Hampshire House voted down a Senate-backed gambling bill, it was the upper chamber’s turn to weigh in on some key House legislation.

And there may have been some tit-for-tat.

The GOP majority quickly snuffed a House bill calling for a $0.20 increase in the tobacco tax.

Republicans did much the same with an effort to reinstitute a state minimum wage, and a bill that would have added $0.12 to the state’s gas tax over three years.

The democratically-controlled NH House voted yesterday to kill a bill authorizing a casino with as many as 5000 slot machines and 150 table games. The vote is blow to Governor Maggie Hassan, who lobbied hard for the bill.  As NHPR’s Josh Rogers reports, the 199-164 vote was consistent with the house’s longstanding opposition to casino gambling, but may strain its relations with the state Senate, which had backed the plan by a supermajority.

The New Hampshire Senate passed a medical marijuana bill 18-6 Thursday after changing a few key elements that were in the original House bill.

Compiled and written by Tova Cohen of Franconia.

The newsletter typically announces events in the next week. The calendar shows you events in the coming months.

AMERICAN VETERANS TRAVELING TRIBUTE AND MEMORIAL WALL, NORTH HAVERHILL

The state Senate has rejected a proposal to increase the state’s gas tax.

The bill had already passed the House, and would have increased the tax by 12 cents, or 67 percent.

Republican Senator Jeb Bradley said such an increase would hurt families that are already financially stressed.

“A 12 cent increase in the gas tax is a large increase in the gas tax, and it will hurt the very people that we are sent here to protect.”

The Senate voted 18-6 to indefinitely postpone the measure.

At the time of his capture in 2011, James “Whitey” Bulger  was wanted for 19 murders, extortion and loan sharking committed during his reign over Boston’s Irish mob between the 1970s and 1995. During 16 years on the lam, Whitey became the subject of myth; characterized alternately as a “good bad guy”, and, in Martin Scorsese’s 2006 film, The Departed, a venal sociopath.

Shelley Murphy and Kevin Cullen, a pair of Boston Globe journalists have drawn on 25 years of reporting to create a more complete and nuanced portrait of the restless boy from the Boston projects who became the most wanted fugitive of his generation. Tonight, Murphy and Cullen will be at the Red River Theatre for a screening of The Departed and at a pre-screening reception and talk.

Tristan Omand, a Manchester based singer-songwriter tells stories of America’s rough edges, his songs tend towards characters who’ve been kicked around by life, their surfaces hardened by  booze, women, and lives spent on the road. Last week Tristan came in to play a few songs in Studio D and talk about the characters and stories in his songs.