P.O. Box 116, Tawas City, MI 48764  www.ioscorepublicans.org  e-mail: mail@ioscorepublicans.org 

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ELECTION NIGHT PARTY

On Tuesday, November 5, starting at about 8 p.m. we will have an election night party at the East Tawas Headquarters at 900 E. Bay Street, the Republican Headquarters.  We have cable TV hooked up to watch the returns.  We will have munchies and pop available.  BYOB.  If you would like to bring something, feel free to do so.  We will be watching the election returns and the party will continue until the last person wants to leave.  Because there is limited parking at the headquarters, you are welcome to park in the space by the road and in the Rudel driveway at 910 E. Bay St.  Please pull to the side so others can come and go.

As you come to the headquarters, please bring any Republican signs you see along the way.  We can return the signs to the candidates who want them.  We also save the wires for those who do not want their signs back.  We then give those wires to local candidates to help them with their campaigns. 

FEMA AN EVEN BIGGER DISASTER THAN THE STORMS
 THEMSELVES -- AND HOW IT CAN BE REPLACED
By Ned Barnett, October 5, 2024

This is more of a think piece than an article, so please stay with me here. It’s based on decades of public health and disaster management work I’ve been involved with during my career.

I first got involved in this while working as an executive at Lexington County Hospital, across the river from the state Capital of Columbia in South Carolina. I’ve had similar positions at other county and city hospitals, including such disaster areas as Flint, Michigan’s city hospital. In all cases, those hospitals were responsible for public health in the counties and cities they served.

At Lexington County Hospital, we were hit by Hurricane David – not just hit, but for roughly eight hours, the eye of the storm seemed to hover right on top of our hospital, which was in itself frightening.


Nowhere near as big as Helene, even a relatively mild hurricane like David is a monster storm. Until you’ve seen water blown into the hospital through the brick wall, you have no idea what a deluge coming at you at 85 miles per hour can do – let alone Helene’s 140 miles per hour winds – you really can’t appreciate the damage it can do. I do know that when David was approaching, I evacuated my family – my wife and infant son, but not our pet Sheltie, “Pumpkin” – into the hospital. This protected them – hospitals are built to withstand such winds and environmental violence – so I could focus on doing my job without worrying about their safety.

In this South Carolina community, the Army at nearby Fort Jackson provided helicopter emergency medivac – medical and evacuation services. This was great, real-life training for the Army helicopter and air-rescue crews, and it provided excellent med-evac services for our five-county region.


This got me involved in what the military have to offer in the realm of support services during a natural disaster. Later, I worked with a hospital in Jacksonville, on the North Carolina coast, and immediately adjacent to Marine Corps Camp LeJeune. During my time with them, both Hurricane Fran and Hurricane Floyd slammed into the North Carolina coast with winds of up to 137 and 122 miles per hour, respectively. The disaster rivaled Helene’s impact, but in a much smaller scale.

My point (and I do have one) is I’ve seen what’s involved in hurricane recovery, both short-term and long-term. Added to that, my father-in-law, John Lines, was the senior Civil Service employee at what is now the Department of Health and Human Services. This was before FEMA, when his agency responded to natural disasters. His job was to get on site fast and coordinate disaster recovery. I learned a lot from his after-action discussions over the family dinner table, lessons I later put into use when I had similar responsibilities, but on a city or county level. He was a rare breed – a career civil servant who actually cared about what he did and the lives he impacted, for good or ill. We need more like him.


But how does this impact Helene? Well, first, we just learned that the Biden-Harris administration diverted funds intended for hurricane disaster relief to help illegal aliens. Since we can count on having hurricanes each year, this was a Capital B “Bad” decision. Not because of mythical “global warming,” but because hurricanes are how the Atlantic interacts with large land masses. In the Pacific, most tropical cyclones are called “typhoons,” but in the Atlantic, they’re “hurricanes.”

The worst one on record – at least in terms of lost human life – is the monster that clobbered Galveston, Texas more than a century ago. They didn’t have cute names back then – it has gone down in history as the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900. This monster took between 8,000 and 12,000 lives – a more massive disaster than the San Francisco earthquake half a decade later, and far worse than Helene or even Katrina.


However, because there is so much more population in coastal areas today, and so much built-up cities to be destroyed, Katrina is odds-on the king of the monsters, the Godzilla of American hurricanes. But Helene is far and away the worst hurricane to do so much inland damage in the 21st Century.

We can count on these murderous Atlantic mega-storms occurring every year, and if diverting funds from American disaster relief to support in high style millions of people who don’t belong here isn’t a crime, it should be. This makes diversion of funds on a massive scale away from hurricane relief an even bigger crime.


Which brings us back to FEMA and Helene. FEMA exists to help American citizens and legal residents survive and recover from emergencies, natural or man-made. FEMA was called into action after 9/11, just as they were called into action after each hurricane since the agency’s inception. Overall, with a few exceptions, they have botched each disaster recovery effort, caring more about bureaucratic red tape than they do for the human lives they are saving … or losing. Certainly, after both hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, they should have been ready.

Between disasters, FEMA is mocked, the fodder of stand-up comedians. But there is a parallel between FEMA and another, far more effective, disaster-relief agency.

Soldiers, sailors, airmen, spacemen and Marines joke about their modern replacement for the venerable C-Ration known as the MRE – three lies in one: Meals, Ready, to Eat. In the same way, FEMA is several lies in one: Federal – no lie there; Emergency – that’s what they are called on to handle, not to deal with a manageable tidal wave of illegal immigrants; Management, an oxymoron when it comes to almost anything “federal,” and agency, a neutral term that means everything and nothing. FEMA doesn’t exist to help the influx of illegals. It exists to help Americans recover from natural and man-made disasters. In a perfect world, FEMA and its bureaucrats would be essential, efficient and effective. But there’s nothing perfect in Washington, and this agency is worse than most.

But if not FEMA, then who? What civilian, volunteer or military service is more capable of handling disasters than FEMA?

Well, how about the U.S. military – the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Space Force? They have the resources to deal with invasions of other countries, of helping the locals to rebuild after the war has moved on. They also have a long and noble history of disaster relief here in the United States. For example: In late 1929, the coastal city of Tacoma, Washington had a massive power failure. Hospitals were blacked out, lives were at stake. The naval aircraft carrier USS Lexington (CV-2) – at that time the largest warship on earth – tied up at Baker Dock and, for a month, the ship’s turbines were used to create electricity that was piped into Tacoma.

There are books written about how the military has helped civilians survive and recover from disasters, in the U.S. and abroad.

While not a war-fighting skill per se, this is a skill set that the military has continued to keep razor-sharp. Because the military can never predict when or where it will need to deploy a half-million troops from America to the Persian Gulf, as it did in Desert Shield, it maintains stocks of in-good-condition gear needed to support such a force. They have tons of MREs – those much-maligned but rather tasty and certainly convenient Meals, Ready to Eat. They have tents, clothing for all climates, medical supplies, fuel storage blivets and everything else needed for half a million or more personnel to deploy, ready to kick ass and take names. Plus they have massive cargo planes and tactical heavy-lift helicopters, all ready to fly this gear – and the men and women who operate that gear – half-way around the world on a moment’s notice.

Surely, they can muster huge amounts of survival supplies within the United States on little more than a moment’s notice, especially given the advance warning any hurricane provides.

Imagine if, instead of sunning it on the beach in Delaware, President Biden – or his alter ego, Vice President Harris – had convened a national security meeting in the White House, then ordered the military to execute Plan Delta Bravo (they have contingency plans for everything, including this). Within hours, the first flights of heavy-lift C-5M Galaxy and C-17 Globemaster IIIs could be ferrying supplies and experts to staging fields, where C-130J Hercules tactical transports would be winging their way toward the disaster areas most in need. Those massive planes would then disgorge the relief supplies and the troops assigned to getting the food, potable water, shelter, fuel and other necessities to suffering Americans.

Along with the mounds of supplies and skilled operators who know how to deploy them to maximum benefit, a group of logistics wizards with incredibly sophisticated computer systems would be setting up to direct each pallet of supplies from each plane to where it is most needed.

I cannot overstate this – these men and women are wizards who routinely work miracles. A supply sergeant from the Second World War – or even the Korea or Vietnam era – would be stunned at how efficient and effective these would be.

In each locale, the National Guard could be federalized and delegated to the regular troops on the ground to get them where they need to go. While all of this is happening, both fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters would be using sophisticated FLIR – Forward-Looking Infrared – scanners, which can spot the warmth of a living human being even buried in mud and muck, and start identifying survivors in need of rescue, which can be done by the Army’s, Navy’s and Air Force’s fleet of para-rescue helicopters.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg they could deliver. Almost every ground-pounder and every aviator will have a role to play, rescuing Americans and helping to restore essential services, from clean water to electricity. The military must do all this when the tip of the spear goes into battle, and for them, a Helene-level hurricane is just a useful “live-fire” training exercise. It’s all for real, except the part about fighting and defeating the enemy. Here the enemy is Mother Nature herself.

Once all the lives have been saved, once essential services have been restored, once life is poised toward getting back to some measure of normalcy, then FEMA can come in. Even if most of their funds have been diverted to helping illegal aliens instead of American citizens and legal residents, by the time they take over, all they’ll really need is a good broom, and maybe a mop.

Of course, all of this is too obvious for the Biden/Harris administration. They believe that anything worth doing is worth mucking up beyond human belief. But once the lives are saved and the clean-up has begun, there will be little else for them to do – which is about all they’re capable of.

Ned Barnett, in addition to a long career in primarily entrepreneurial public health – and who testified twice before Congress on National Health Policy – is the author of 40 published books, soon to be 41. Many of these focused on the business side of healthcare – or the business side of writing and publishing books. However, 17 were ghost-written for others and more than a dozen are novels. Barnett has worked on three Presidential campaigns, beginning with Ford in 1976. Working at the state level, he managed news media relations and campaign strategy. Currently, Barnett helps other writers to get their books out of their heads and onto bookstore shelves. His wife, Lynn, is a gifted book editor.

He can be reached at Ned Barnett, Not Ed Press, 420 N. Nellis Blvd., A3-289, Las Vegas, NV 89110 – nedbarnett51@gmail.com – 702-561-1167

THE 2020 THEFT SAVED THE COUNTRY

By John Conlin, October 9, 2024 

Self-professed radio guru Jessie Kelly recently did a show discussing the reality that, often, what seems like a win in life can turn out to be a loss, and what seems like a loss can turn out to be a win.

I was thinking about this regarding the uproar from the vice-presidential debate question to JD Vance whether he thought Trump lost in 2020.

First, let’s state the obvious… of course, Trump won in 2020. The statistics are overwhelming. Leftists often try to use statistics to “prove” racial discrimination in all sorts of situations. For some reason, they don’t seem to have the same desires and statistical certitude regarding the overwhelming statistical evidence that Trump won.

Combine this with the truckload of obvious -- and unexplainable -- shenanigans across many states and it is clear the rightful winner was Trump.

And in all honesty, it still pisses me off that this was done in what was once the freest, greatest country the world has ever seen. And worse yet, so many -- on both the Right and Left -- were okay with it. Anything to keep that monster Trump out of office. 

So, at first glance, this looks like -- and felt like -- a significant loss for the right and conservatism. Upon their taking office -- and in this situation, it really was taking office -- Biden and company immediately set out to undo basically everything Trump had done. If Trump’s fingerprints were on it, it needed to be killed. Again, this looks like a loss.

But was it? If Trump’s win had been acknowledged, he would have been President for the last 3.5 years. A whole lot of bad things in this country and across the globe wouldn’t have happened. But they did.

But these actions and their results have acted as a catalyst for real change. Looking back, we will see this stolen election as the nadir, a profound inflection point in this country’s -- and the world’s -- politics.

We have discovered corruption and institutional rot that permeate our government and society. And this time, the evidence is so overwhelming it is impossible to ignore or write off as right-wing fever dreams.

The blatant politicization of the DoJ, FBI, CIA, IRS, military, judiciary, etc. -- really almost every aspect of the federal government -- has been laid bare for all to see. For many of these folks, the concept of equal justice under the law is something they discarded long ago. Many states are as bad or worse.

For years, DEI has been destroying institutions and companies across the board. That is ending now.

Institutions of supposed “higher” education have revealed themselves to be little more than dumbing-down indoctrination centers. Much of public K-12 education has been shown to be the same. The school choice movement is now unstoppable.

I used to think the Great Replacement theory was a crazy idea, but I’ve seen it in action. What other reason could there be for inviting tens of millions of the world’s illiterate poor to cross our now nonexistent borders to come feast on our social safety nets paid for by Americans? It is clear that American citizens are second-class entities in their own country -- illegals come before them at every turn. This is undeniable.

The stolen election and its aftermath helped show this to millions. The same is true throughout Europe. We would never have gotten here without the stolen election.

These institutions were this way before, but this period has removed all doubt. And before one can begin to address an illness, one must first accept the reality of the disease. We have done that. 

The path forward won’t be a straight one. It will probably involve a lot of “2 steps forward, 1 step back,” but we have bottomed out. The future might look far different than today, but history will show this was the high water mark for socialism, communism, big government, gender insanity, and a whole lot more.

And we owe this awakening to the “loss” of a stolen election, which is turning out to be a wonderous win.

Compare what would have been the second term for Trump 45 versus Trump, the 47th President of the United States. If he had been acknowledged as the winner, his administration would have continued to be hamstrung by the various pukes -- RINOs, uniparty members, and just those intent on sabotage - who populated his administration from the VP on down. 

This will not be the case with Trump 47. Those folks are long gone, and this time, they will not be invited back. Trump and his cohorts are far sharper, far more prepared, and far more intellectually ready.

Vance versus Pence? Not even a contest. It will be the same across his administration.

Look at the new coalitions being formed this very moment. Minorities and the working class are embracing Trump like never before. Those who were once enemies have joined hands because their eyes have been opened by the results of this stolen election. It is truly a glorious thing.

47 will be orders of magnitude more impactful and successful than second-term 45 would have ever been! Here and across the globe.

I laugh every time I think of that. Second-term 45 would have been successful, but 47 will be that on jet fuel. The impact Trump and his administration will have will exceed any before him. This is one of the reasons they want to kill him. And Trump isn’t the end; he’s just the beginning. This is a generational transformation that is just starting and it is now unstoppable.

So, thanks for a stolen election. Whether it’s “what goes around, comes around” or FAFO, this administration and its stolen election have sealed their fate -- and it is not a pretty one. Sometimes, what seems to be a loss turns out to be a win.

Thank you, God!

John Conlin is an expert in organizational design and change. He is also founder and President of E.I.C. Enterprises. He has been published in American Greatness, The Federalist, The Daily Caller, American Thinker, Houston Chronicle, Denver Post, and Public Square Magazine among others.

SUNRISE SIDE REPUBLICAN WOMEN'S CLUB.

The Sunrise Side Republican Club holds monthly meetings on the 4th Tuesday of the month.  The location and speaker will be announced for each meeting.  Unless otherwise stated, the lunch will be at 11:30 a.m.

The officers are:  Jane Hayward, President, 989-739-3126, Roxanne Rosenfeld, Vice President, 989-362-1259, Amy Merrick, Secretary, 989-747-0479 and Mary Riley, Treasurer, 989-305-6302.

The SSRWC next meeting will be the Annual Picnic at Robert C. Bolen Memorial Park in East Tawas at 6 pm on Wed. July 17, 2024.

 You can send correspondence to Mary Annette Riley, 1300 E. Lincoln, East Tawas, MI 48730.  

Official Call to the Iosco County Convention.  There shall be a meeting of the duly elected Precinct Delegates and the At-Large Delegates to the County Convention at 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday, November 12, 2024 at Maureen Rudel's Home at 910 E. Bay St., East Tawas, MI 48730.

The purpose of this meeting shall be to elect our Executive Committee and for the Executive Committee to elect officers for the county party.  Vacancies for Precinct Delegates may be appointed.      

Only Precinct Delegates elected at the August 6, 2024 Primary Election, the last recent Republican nominees for County and State Legislative offices and Precinct Delegates seated on a permanent basis will be allowed to vote at this convention.
David L. Chandler, Chair, Iosco County Republican Executive Committee

MEETING -- November 9, 2024
Maureen Rudel's House, 910 E. Bay St., East Tawas

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