That’s before the American Civil War began! (BY GLENN H. RAY, 88, of Minnesota!)
He was born in Cherryfield, Maine last into a wealthy family raising five children, three boys and two girls….all of whom I never met directly. But, my Grandfather Frank Ray was very well known later on even into my life born beginning in 1934.
This Cherryfield family was apparently very wealthy for they practiced primageniture, that is, the standard that the oldest male would receive the family’s wealth upon the death of the father. I think I was about ten years old when I first remembered the meaning of that word….living with my family and closely with a handful of my dad’s relatives who moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, all sharing countless stories of life from New England past.
Our American Civil War began in 1861 and concluded its warring in 1865.
When Grandpa Ray reached 17 years old in 1876 he moved by horseback to North Dakota. Somewhere in my house I have a stored picture postcard of him sitting on his horse next to a store at Chillicothe, Ohio…..on his way alone never to return East. For being in his wealthy family he was given the purchase of two thousand acres of land for clearing and farming about 20 miles from HOPE, NORTH DAKOTA!
His note to his home in Maine was….”MOTHER, I’M FINE, FRANK!”
Fifteen or so years later a family of five was moving from Wisconsin to property purchased a few miles from Grandpa Frank’s farm. Unfortunately on the way to “settle”, their carriages got stuck crossing the Sheyenne, River near by in North Dakota….(Not the Cheyenne elsewhere!) My Grandfather Frank gathered a neighbor or two to help him free the Wisconsin folk out of the swamp mud which took all day….the story in later life told. One of the gals, five or six years old rising from the mud and its troubles, Anna Williams, became Grandpa Ray’s wife fifteen years or so later.
They produced four boys in a row in Sherbrook County from 1892 to 1901, thus last year being my Dad, October 7, 1901. His sister Catherine who came later was very close to us in Minnesota later in life.
My Grandfather Frank died of throat cancer some time during the first World War. Grandma Ray who became a wonderful queen of the family moved to St. Paul during the Depression.
At the Republican Jewish Coalition’s meeting in Las Vegas yesterday, incoming Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced that he intends to kick Ilhan Omar off the House Foreign Relations Committee:
“We watch anti-Semitism grow, not just on our campuses, but we watched it grow In the halls of Congress,” McCarthy said….
“I promised you last year that as speaker she will no longer be on Foreign Affairs, and I’m keeping that promise,” he added, to cheers from the crowd, video posted to his Twitter shows.
Never let it be said that the GOP’s narrow takeover of the House will do no good.
UPDATE: I see that I was a day late. This morning, McCarthy added to the list:
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said on this week’s broadcast of FNC’s “Sunday Morning Futures” that he would keep his promise to bar Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and Adam Schiff (D-CA) from committees if elected Speaker of the House.
McCarthy said, “Yes, I will. I’ll keep that promise. One thing I have said from the very beginning is Eric Swalwell cannot get a security clearance in the public sector. Why would we ever give him a security clearance and the secrets to America?
Harsh, but fair.
So I will not allow him to be on Intel. You have Adam Schiff, who lied to the American public time and again. We will not allow him to be on the Intel committee either.
The congressional midterm elections are thankfully over.
Predictions of a red wave, including by yours truly, didn’t materialize. Instead, it was more of a pink trickle with the GOP flipping the House. The Senate is still up for grabs, with the best outcome for the GOP being a 50-50 split, depending on the Georgia run-off results.
Red wave predictions made sense at the time, given President Biden’s unpopularity and incompetence, leading to a declining America. This includes 40-year high inflation, a recession, open borders, energy shortages, supply chain disruptions, World War III simmering in Ukraine, and a woke culture ruining the lives of children and families.
By comparison, President Obama, in his first term midterm election in 2010, oversaw his party being shellacked. In those elections, Republicans gained seven Senate seats and 63 House seats. Obama presided over a better economy, was somewhat competent, and certainly more coherent and charismatic than Biden, yet if this year’s midterms were any referendum on Biden, he outshined Obama.
How did this happen? And in an eerily similar fashion to the 2020 elections. Has the Republican Party learned anything in the past few election cycles? Or have voters voiced their preference for personal and national decline over prosperity, choosing to make America weak rather than strong?
One obvious explanation is the election process. Republicans focus on winning votes while Democrats concentrate on gathering ballots. Joseph Stalin said, “It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes.”
There are quasi-legal ballot maneuvers including ballot-harvesting, mass mailings of ballots weeks or months before the actual election, extended counting, ranked voting, and similar election procedures enacted with Republican support or minimal resistance.
Then there are seemingly illegal maneuvers, many outlined in Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary, 2,000 Mules. Funny how vote counting stopped on election night in swing districts, only to resume the next day with a winning Republican on election night replaced by a winning Democrat when the sun came up. Or voting machines mysteriously malfunctioning on Election Day in high GOP turnout precincts. For example, in this midterm, 48 percent of Maricopa County election centers suffered problems. Or random vote count spikes always favoring the Democrat candidate. Or phantom ballots and voters based on neglected voter rolls.
2022 was a repeat of 2020, with Republicans caught flat-footed once again, or else complicit in another “selection” rather than an “election.” Concepts like cleaning up the voter rolls, signature verification, same-day voting with few exceptions, paper ballots, and even consideration of a national holiday to eliminate the need for early voting, all seem to be lost on Republican lawmakers, preferring a system that Democrats take full advantage of and Republicans cannot even grasp, much less utilize to their advantage, leading to predictable outcomes.
Democrats are using modern oversized golf clubs and tennis rackets while Republicans are using the decades old tools of Gene Sarazen and Jack Kramer. Or an abacus rather than a calculator. If the GOP plays by old rules and doesn’t fix the system, elections really don’t matter, with the ruling class offering an electoral charade and a predetermined outcome, much like professional wrestling.
Another explanation is the messaging. Although messaging is about voting and Democrats are way beyond votes, concentrating on ballots, such that the message doesn’t really matter. Democrat candidates, hiding in their basements or avoiding debates, such as Joe Biden, Katie Hobbs, and John Fetterman, need not worry about a message if their political machines already have ballots firmly under control.
But where is the GOP messaging, like Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America”? Where was the simple, “Are you better off now than you were 2-4 years ago”? Simply saying that Biden and the Democrats are bad, vote for us instead, is hardly an inspiring message. Republicans need a story of reversing the decline, not simply slowing it down.
Where are Republican leaders? Former President Trump held myriad rallies while the Senate leader hid in his turtle shell, financially supporting RINOs and candidates of his and his donors’ choosing rather than honoring the wishes of GOP voters.
If this isn’t fixed, expect similar results in 2024, regardless of who the Republican presidential nominee is. Lousy messaging and a crooked election system is a recipe for a blue wave. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result.
The interesting bit is that Republicans expect a different result, which clearly hasn’t happened. Democrats are doing the same thing over and over but expecting a similar result, meaning they must be the sane party.
Lastly, the electorate has changed. Aside from being the party of the wealthy coastal elites, the Democrat party’s large new constituency is single, urban, educated, middle-aged women who view Republican candidates as a personification of their ex-husbands. Young people are all about their “rights” and validation of their woke virtue-signaling. Republicans need a message pointing out that safety and security depends on a strong economy, energy policy, law and order, and a secure national border.
This should not be difficult. According to Rasmussen Reports, only 28 percent of likely U.S. voters think the country is headed in the right direction. 57 percent see a depression ahead. And 57 percent, “believe it is likely that the outcome of some elections this year will be affected by cheating.”
Investigating the Biden crime family won’t be enough to win elections, either. But still a reckoning is necessary and long overdue as most Republicans are tired of our two-tiered justice system where Democrats skate and Republicans are investigated and imprisoned. Hopefully the GOP House can begin tilting Lady Justice’s scales back to neutral.
The bottom line is that if the electoral process is not fixed, delivering America fair and honest “elections” rather than these ruling class “selections,” any further discussion about candidates, messages, and whether Trump or DeSantis would make a better candidate for president become irrelevant. Both will lose in 2024 as their election night leads in swing states evaporate by morning after thousands of ballots suddenly materialize and no one is there to watch the vote counters.
If America’s electoral system is miraculously repaired, there is still the message, the GOP making the case for peace, safety, and prosperity in a convincing manner, as Ronald Reagan did in 1980. Otherwise, the most secure election in history will still leave the GOP short as voters stay home, tired of more hot air and broken campaign promises by what has been appropriately named, “the stupid party.” Let’s see if the Republican Party has finally woken up and learned something.
At the Federalist, Jordan Boyd offers up a proposed agenda for the new House of Representatives. The Republicans have won a majority. How great is still to be determined. Officially the count is 218, but Lauren Boebert’s opposition, Adam Frisch, conceded. If the certification matches the ballot count that would make the total 219, and they are still counting two districts in California in which the Republican candidates are leading so the count may be as high as 221.Certification of results in at least one county in Arizona are being held up pending examination of the voting machines, and other counties may follow. So the final totals the Republican majority are still not known.
Boyd begins:
GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy already released an agenda he thinks Republicans should execute come 2023, but his legislative desires for a red House are too innocuous and unlikely to survive a Democrat Senate and presidency anyway.
“Innocuous” desires are not the only reason. Since the article was written, new information from Fankie Stockes of The National File suggests McCarthy has some explaining to do. His plan is innocuous, it seems, by design.
Ryan Salame, an executive at the now-crashed cryptocurrency outfit FTX, donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to funds controlled by McCarthy and allied groups that used that money to advance his candidacy as speaker.
Armed with corrupt FTX crypto money, Kevin McCarthy spent the 2022 midterms picking winners and losers, with his long-term speakership fantasies at the top of his agenda.
America First candidates and others who couldn’t be controlled by the establishment or, more importantly, couldn’t be bribed into supporting McCarthy for speaker, were sold down the river.
The seats they were fighting for were surrendered to Democrats, and conservatives “in the know” spoke of a “power-sharing” agreement between McCarthy and Democrat leadership, which now appears to be materializing.
Assuming, for the sake of discussion, Republicans can overcome McCarthy and his presumed uniparty aspirations, Boyd argues that the limitations on legislative ability and to keep the promises the party made to voters it must “punish the Biden bureaucracy and its Democrat allies for creating endless crises.”
Boyd’s agenda is the following, not necessarily in the order he ranked them:
Impeach Joe Biden
Impeach Merrick Garland. Impeachment is something McCarthy said earlier he would not want to start with. I hope he will change his mind, because I think it essential.
Defund the FBI
Disband the J6 Committee
Probe the Biden family business
Subpoena COVID Tyrants — Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, former CDC Director Robert Redfield “who lied about the origins, research, effects and mitigation of COVID-19.”(In this regard we have learned that the odious FTX crowdfunded studies “through TOGETHER Trial falsely claiming hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin weren’t effective Covid treatments.”)
Impeach Myorkas and others over failures to secure the border.
I’d add to his list an investigation of FTX and how the regulators and investment houses and media (which apparently also got FTX funds as they were acting as
touts for this Ponzi scheme) enabled this hustle which cost investors billions of dollars.
He has other suggestions as well, like drastically limiting federal spending, but let’s concentrate on the hearings for right now.
Apart from the fact that speaker-to-be McCarthy doesn’t seem inclined to proceed this way , a master propagandist, David Brock, has just announced that he has left his perch as head of Media Matters to mount a multi-million dollar campaign to undermine GOP investigations.
Now, his new group “Facts First USA” and the White House appear to be working together to hobble any investigation into the Biden regime’s rampant malfeasance. Together, they are reportedly assembling opposition research intended to cast Republicans conducting oversight as hypocrites, “pointing to those who defied subpoenas in the congressional investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.”
“The White House cannot be the sole nucleus for publicly responding to the onslaught of congressional investigations,” the memo reads. Brock said his group “intends to work with the White House where appropriate but will make our own judgments.”
Brock listed the likely chairs of key House committees as Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Judiciary; Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), Administration; James Comer, Oversight (R-Ky.); Michael Turner (R-Ohio), Intelligence; Cathy McMorris Rogers (R-Wash.), Energy and Commerce Committee; and Michael McCaul (R-Texas), Foreign Affairs Committee, and complained that they will use “their new perches” to “engage in wide-ranging investigations that serve political ends.”
Given how successfully the major media and the largest social media fora have buried anything critical of the president and his party, investigations will need very skillful and hard-hitting spokespersons to break through the information wall, especially given the long history of the media serving as Brock’s handmaids.
And let’s face it: most congressional hearings are little more than an opportunity for members to dash in, make cameo appearances for the home folks, and move out when the cameras are otherwise focused. You cannot conduct sensible hearings this way: Each important investigations committee should hire skilled litigation lawyers to conduct the committee hearing. Member active participation should be off camera — providing the designated questioner with relevant information and questions they find concerning of the witness. It’s a rare member of Congress who can do this — Trey Gowdy, Rand Paul, and Elise Stefanik come to mind as good interrogators, but better to have someone outside doing this, someone who can devote full time to the task. There is precedent for this. If you recall, Senator Mike Mansfield selected Sam Ervin to chair the Watergate hearings.
A couple of congressmen have already announced their intention to conduct investigative hearings, as is their wont, but if they don’t or won’t do it right, don’t bother.
MN Prager Discussion Group 