Tomorrow, Retire Dick Lugar

I really do adore Peggy Noonan. I respect her opinion and I love her writing. I take issue with her support of Richard Lugar, however.

Peggy Noonan writes that Indiana should “save the old guy. He has value.” She also says Washington needs grown ups and “we need mature folk involved in our governance, people for whom not everything is new.”

With respect, Mr. Lugar has no more value. He and his cohorts have given all the value to China.

Richard Lugar has been in Washington since January of 1977. I was one. The federal debt was approximately $650 billion. The federal debt now surpasses $15 trillion. And you know what? The grown ups did it. The grown ups, the mature folks, the adults in the room were the ones who did it. Richard Lugar was complicit in this catastrophic balance sheet. He rarely stood in the way of an increase in debt, an increase in spending, a bridge to nowhere, and a future to bankruptcy.

While Richard Lugar was joining the other grown ups in raiding the treasury for pet projects, Richard Mourdock was first in the private sector, then became Indiana’s State Treasurer. He fought the Obama Administration’s GM bankruptcy. He fought the Obama Administration on Obamacare. He helped Indiana balance its books.

The two men are both adults. Richard Mourdock’s parents are both World War II veterans. Yes, his father and his mother. He knows what sacrifice is like. He knows what hard work is like. And he knows that just as his parents quite literally fought for a better world, he must too.

In Washington, “adult” is the term of art for the men and women who reach across the aisle. They cut deals. They save face. They make government work. In their zeal to make government work, the perverse reverse has happened. We now work for the government. We sustain the leviathan. Our children’s children’s children will pay off the debt Richard Lugar helped incur.

I’d prefer it if we stopped sending his ilk to Washington to keep incurring debts for my children and grand children in the name of being grown up.

Depends on which period of 'history' and are you talking about the Crown claiming territories or the Virginia House of Burgesses making similar claims ~

One of the difficulties in these claims are the previous Spanish D-marks, or boundaries. Although most folks imagine the Brits claimed the Ohio Valley on the basis of their defeat of the French in the French & Indian War, the French hadn't really made a full claim of anything South of the St. Joseph River. They claimed almost all of what is now Michigan, but the most they had over on the other side of Lake Michigan were a few fellows wandering about stealing furs from Indians.

You had to go all the way up to about Alexandria Minnesota to find the Southern boundary of the line D-Marked by Spain, and that takes off to the NW to 55 degrees North. The idea was France got the watershed of the Hudson Bay but before a boundary could be marked someone had to do a baseline, and that was the baseline. The Russian/Spanish boundary was decided later as having an existence at 54'40" N all the way East to that point at the line drawn NW from Alexandria. The Eastern boundary of Alaska was decided some years later.

So, back to the NW territory ~ the OHio Valley South of the Lakes didn't really get outside of Spanish "authority", if not "Claim" until the UNited States won the Revolutionary War. Spain was our ally. They seemed to give that territory up. VIrginia rustled up some old claims they may have made and also hopped onto MIchigan, and Everything North to the Lakes and West to the Mississippi.

I guess that satisfied the Spanish ~ I've found numerous Lower Midwest counties where the first guy to prove a patent for land was a Spaniard. So I gather they stuck around and waited on civilization to come their way ~ then got their claim to land regularized.

LOts of them ran trading posts for sales to Indians and early pioneers (traders, miners, fur traders, horse breeders, meat packers, etc.).

There was a lot of stuff going on in that area before Dan Boone cut the Wilderness Trail.

NOw, when did all of that get appeneded to Lee county? I found one ref a long time ago that described the entire claim, and it was part of the more or less "non functioning fictitious but draw it on a map" Lee County. It must have itself been pulled out of Botetourt, or vice versa, but the OLD NORTHWEST TERRITORY never existed as any sort of entity until the USA sent out surveyors to run a couple of Meridians. One of them runs just East Champain Illinois through the town of Arcola ~ which, coincidentally, looks to have been a very old townsite in the middle of a 1000 arpent site that'd already been surveyed before American surveyors got there ~ they were able to meld it into the new survey because it was on the meridian they had put in.

1000 arpents is pretty much the standard size for a Spanish land grant. Dan Boone had one in Missouri in fact.

I think credit for creating "the Northwest Territor" has to be given to Americans and not Brits. But you might have more information on that.

The French "colony" at New Orleans is a special case. It passed back and forth from France to Spain several times ~ the locals were not above sailing North on the Mississippi and claiming things. Louis XIV had a sawmill at Louisville in fact ~ they cut hardwood for furniture that Boulle later turned into some of the world's most expensive furniture. Nobody bothered the French there, but their explorations of the area and French settlements like Terre Haute, Vincinnes, Versailles, Henryville and so on don't give much support to the idea that France actually claimed the whole Lower Midwest ~ more like the Spanish tolerated them and it kept out the Brits.

It wasn't exactly "few white people", but rather "few English or French speaking white people". There were a plentitude of fellows from nations in what we can call "The Hapsburg Empire" (which interestingly enough included the Dutch speaking folks in what is now Northern Belgium).

The Hapsburg interests were in the practice of hiring all sorts of fellows from just anywhere to DO STUFF, so they show up, so it's not just Spaniards wandering around out there.

The landscape is littered with Spanish mills, mines, cabins, special breeds of animals ~ all leftover from the 1500s and 1600s ~ just not visible to us because we never bothered to look ~ our English language text books having failed to tip us off!

Now about how things get named Botetourt/Lee/Augusta ~ long before those rather large territories got identified as such on an official map approved by a governing body they were KNOWN to somebody and you can run into references to them apparently out of synch. I don't worry about it too much, particularly since we all use CURRENT nomenclature to discuss past locations of interest.

Currently I'm on the track of the maps made by Jefferson's father ~ that guy went everywhere! Jefferson came up with his own plans for dividing up what we know as THE OLD NORTHWEST as well as the Central South ~ some of those lines in that map are worth examining closely. They all show up later as countylines or even some parts of state lines. All of that work had to have been done in the Colonial period ~ when the Brits were supposedly restricting movement into new territories and the Spanish were a threat.

So, were they older Spanish surveys? It's pretty obvious Dan Boone had access to such materials, so where are they?

"It wasn't exactly "few white people", but rather "few English or French speaking white people"."

Effectively what I meant.

"The landscape is littered with Spanish mills, mines, cabins, special breeds of animals ~ all leftover from the 1500s and 1600s ~ just not visible to us because we never bothered to look ~ our English language text books having failed to tip us off!"

I don't know how many of those Spanish items were present within those areas we were discussing (i.e. OH, IN, etc). Obviously more out west or near coastal areas or rivers.

"Currently I'm on the track of the maps made by Jefferson's father ~ that guy went everywhere! Jefferson came up with his own plans for dividing up what we know as THE OLD NORTHWEST as well as the Central South ~ some of those lines in that map are worth examining closely. They all show up later as countylines or even some parts of state lines. All of that work had to have been done in the Colonial period ~ when the Brits were supposedly restricting movement into new territories and the Spanish were a threat."

"So, were they older Spanish surveys? It's pretty obvious Dan Boone had access to such materials, so where are they?"

The documents ? I don't know. Probably in museums if they exist. I believe that Jefferson or his contemporaries wanted everything nice and neatly drawn up on the surveys, no doubt. They likely would've done so (if they didn't) in dividing up such townships or other such measures clear to the Pacific. Interesting to note, though, that those townships ultimately didn't quite take in the South as they ended up doing in places like, say, IL, IN, MI, WI where almost everything is neatly divided into squares.

The Souf' had plantations ~ roughly the same concept as a Spanish land grant but bigger, and not neatly laid out like 1000 arpents.

I was looking at that map on FR yesterday that showed the percentage of Catholics, by county, throughout the country. It's fairly instructive ~ but there are non-urban pockets of Catholics in areas South of the Ohio ~ could be older Spanish sponsored areas of settlement.

Again, back in the 1500/1600 period you could dump a lot of people into an area of the country and they'd simply be invisible to us today because there were no defined urban areas ~ not even villages. Every now and then somebody will dig down 6 inches and find one of those segmented pieces from a classic Spanish grinding wheel ~ and they'll set it up at the end of their driveway. Next time I'm in Indiana I'm going to do some checking into a piece of land across from my great aunt's house where there were reported such segments ~ but currently they are covered with dirt or my aunt hauled them to the barn to buttress the foundation. Her home is so old her husband's ancestor who settled there had to wait years for government to show up to register his property. His wife was Iroquois ~ so it's some time in the 1700s.

Just a guess those grinding facilities were set up to do the hard labor of breaking ore AND grinding corn to make mash to distill into alcohol ~ the magic medicine of its day.

He can’t run as an independent if he loses the GOP primary, but could he run as a Democrat if the rat party decided he was their best chance?
(I’m certain Lugar would be agreeable.)

But the DemocRATS would risk dividing their party if they did that. After all the DemocRATS are having their own primary today to pick their nominee. They would have to ditch their duly elected primary winner to allow the man that candidate had intended to run against in the general election have the DemocRAT nomination. Furthermore, wouldn't the DemocRATS want to have a candidate who is young enough potentially could server 3 or more terms instead of an octogenarian? The fact that this election could be for an open seat means that they have the best chance in 36 years to pick up this seat in November.

Furthermore, wouldn't the DemocRATS want to have a candidate who is young enough potentially could server 3 or more terms instead of an octogenarian?

That's a good point, but then again, didn't the rats in New Jersey prop up a fossil in his coffin to run for the senate when their original nominee was seen as a loser? That corpse is still there, still in the senate. About the same time, in New York, the presumptive Democrat nominee was thrown under the bus so Hillary! could run. The rats will put up grieving widows (Carnahan for example), total nincompoops (Patsy Murray, for example) or anybody else they think will give them the best chance to WIN.

If they think they have an improved chance to WIN with Lugar, they'll go that way. In a heartbeat. (I couldn't even name the rat primary candidates.)

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