RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/direct-primary-care-solution-americas-health-care-woes/
It could free us from insurance domination of health care.

Austin — “the live music capital of the world” — is a lovably “weird” city and home to many musicians and artists. Willie Nelson, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Townes Van Zandt, and Janis Joplin all called it home at one time or another. Great venues like Antone’s, the Broken Spoke, and Stubb’s kept the music scene alive for years, and as it continues to evolve, they serve as storied reminders of what has always made Austin great — a vibrant arts scene.

When I was in law school at the University of Texas, I remember rushing to buy the 2-CD KHYI set each year for the best music of the day. But I also recall that the proceeds from the sale of the set went to providing health insurance for artists. This was a way people in the arts community looked after one another.

Unfortunately, while the creative community remains alive in Austin, the rising cost of housing, driven both by demand and by property taxes, and the skyrocketing cost of health care are crushing many of the artists who live gig to gig and paycheck to paycheck. Since 2013, insurance premiums have gone up more than 60 percent across the board, while private-market premiums have doubled and even tripled. While Washington “leaders” dither and waste time, some creative doctors are using a fast-growing direct-primary-care (DPC) model that may well save the day.

“METSI Care,” a recently opened DPC clinic on 6th Street in East Austin, is built on the model of the black-bag doctor. In this model, you pay a doctor for health care at a reasonable monthly fee and the doctor provides the services directly, rather than insurance (or government) bureaucrats telling you what you get, or what’s “in network.” The two doctors running METSI when I visited are focusing their care — in part based on personal interest and passion — on those in the music, entertainment, technology, and service industries. While they are targeting artists, it is important to note their doors are open to all who knock.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-is-no-time-to-go-wobbly-on-capitalism-11582739248?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Ms. Haley served as governor of South Carolina, 2011-17, and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, 2017-18. This op-ed is adapted from a speech she delivered Wednesday to the Hudson Institute.

There’s an important debate happening in America right now, a competition among three distinct views of the world. The first view is held by those who think capitalism is the best and fairest economic system the world has ever seen. The second is held by those who think socialism is the answer to a host of problems from climate change to inequality. Then there are those who are pushing a watered-down or hyphenated capitalism, which is the slow path to socialism.

Mark me down as a capitalist. I grew up in South Carolina as the daughter of Indian immigrants. My mom started a small business selling clothes and gifts. She worked hard and showed my brothers, my sister and me what it meant to live the American dream. The U.S. is a country where people can find jobs that match their talents and passions. America has lifted up more people and unleashed more prosperity than any other country in human history.

In 1800, you were lucky if you lived to be 40. A third of children didn’t live past 5. Since then, the U.S. has become an industrialized nation. Average real income per person has soared by 4,000% since 1800. Medical breakthroughs mean Americans live much longer. In 1820, 94% of the world lived in extreme poverty, earning less than $1.90 a day, adjusted for purchasing power. Today that figure is closer to 10%. Because of capitalism, the world is cleaner, healthier and wealthier than ever.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/68823-death-by-a-thousand-progressives-2020-02-26

Pete Buttigieg is encouraging a nine-year-old boy to “come out the closet” on the stage of a presidential campaign. Hip Hop rapper YG targeted a conservative young man and threw him out of his concert because he would not say, “F— Donald Trump!” Two young Trump supporters were run off the road by a car because of their Trump flags on their bikes. To top it off liberal style, there are rumors that the tarnished Hillary Clinton is being courted as a VP candidate for Bloomberg. Sigh.

If America is to be destroyed it will not explode from outside, but implode from the inside. Hence the phrase “death by a thousand progressives.” America as we know it is being threatened by communism, socialism, and Marxism during this election year. Over a century ago, President Abraham Lincoln had this to say about the potential downfall of America:

At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

https://nypost.com/2020/02/25/ilhan-omars-appalling-collusion-with-turkeys-tyrant/

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s mandate defined “collusion” as “links and/or coordination” with foreign powers. Democrats and their media allies tried and failed to hang the charge around President Trump’s neck. But one of their own darlings, Rep. Ilhan Omar, has inarguably colluded with an unsavory Islamist regime: Turkey’s.

In fall 2017, Omar, then a state representative, attended a closed meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. According to a report since deleted from a Somali-language periodical, Omar and the Islamist strongman discussed “issues involving Omar’s native Somalia and issues for Somalis in Minnesota. … The meeting ended with Erdogan asking Omar to voice her support for Turkey.”

A month later, Omar would take to Twitter to praise Turkey for providing airlifts for Somalis injured in a Mogadishu truck bombing.

Given recent concerns over foreign influence, one might ask: Why was this state representative meeting with the leader of an increasingly anti-American regime? With what authority was she negotiating Turkish-Somali relations or any foreign-relations matters?

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/25/nunes-house-republicans-are-mulling-criminal-referrals-against-mueller-prosecutors/

House Republicans are prepared to send criminal referrals to the Justice Department alleging that some of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecutors purposefully misled the courts and Congress.

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told investigative journalist John Solomon that his team found glaring evidence of deception while scouring documents recently released by the FBI, including witness reports known as 302s.

“We’re now going through these 302s, and we’re going to be making criminal referrals on the Mueller dossier team, the people that put this Mueller report together,” Nunes said during an interview on the John Solomon Reports podcast.

In one instance, Mueller’s deputies seem to have distorted FBI interview memos of key figure George Papadopoulos, concluding wrongly that he was trying to thwart or frustrate the investigation’s efforts to question Mifsud, when the 302 show that he was actually trying to be helpful.

According to the sentencing memo signed by [Aaron] Zelinsky and fellow Mueller prosecutors Jeannie Rhee and Andrew Goldstein: Papadopoulos’ “lies undermined investigators’ ability to challenge the Professor or potentially detain or arrest him while he was still in the United States. The government understands that the Professor left the United States on February 11, 2017 and he has not returned to the United States since then.”

But FBI 302 reports detailing agents’ interviews with Papadopoulos show that he had in fact supplied information that would have enabled investigators to challenge or potentially detain or arrest Mifsud while he was in the United States.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/gray-matter-deficient-americans/

The billionaires and bureaucrats depend on the skilled workers they mock — and that makes them more than a little uneasy.

F ormer New York mayor and multibillionaire Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, four years ago at Oxford, England, dismissed farming, ancient and modern. He lectured that agriculture was little more than the rote labor of dropping seeds into the ground and watching corn sprout — easy, mindless, automatic.

“I could teach anybody,” Bloomberg pontificated, “even people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer.”

He contrasted such supposedly unintelligent labor of the past (and present) with the “skill set” of the current “information economy” that requires “how to think and analyze.” In this new economy, he said, “you have to have a lot more gray matter.”

Gray matter?

For all his later denials and efforts to contextualize those remarks, Bloomberg seems to see both ancient and modern agriculture, and farmers, as either unskilled or not very smart, as if the genetically inferior gravitate to muscular labor far from the “skill sets” of those like Mike Bloomberg. He certainly has no idea about either the sophistication of ancient agriculture or the high-tech savvy of contemporary farmers — much less just how difficult it is, and always was, to produce food, much less that history is so often the story of mass famine rather than bounty and plenty.

Bloomberg’s apparent dismissal of rural people might seem odd, given that Democrats profess allegiance with the working classes and muscular labor. But, in fact, his disdain is perversely logical and indeed predictable.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/25/did-obamas-doj-leak-michael-flynns-russia-phone-call-to-set-him-up/

Did the Department of Justice leak or arrange the leak of Michael Flynn’s call with Sergey Kislyak to get around the FBI’s efforts to keep secret the investigation of Flynn?

One of the great mysteries of the Trump-Russia saga that remains unsolved three years later, or at least uncharged, is who leaked Gen. Michael Flynn’s calls with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

As incoming national security advisor, Flynn spoke with numerous foreign officials in the lead-up to inauguration. This included a conversation with Kislyak on Dec. 29, 2016 in which they discussed, among other things, measures taken by the Obama administration (also on Dec. 29) to expel Russian agents and levy financial penalties in response to Russia’s “malicious cyber-enabled activities” relating to the 2016 election.

Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly responded to these sanctions the next day. He declined to escalate the situation, promised there would be no retaliatory expulsions, and said he would “take further steps towards restoring Russia-U.S. relations.” According to the Statement of Offense filed in Flynn’s criminal case, on Dec. 31, Kislyak “called Flynn and informed him that Russia had chosen not to retaliate in response to Flynn’s request.”

Meanwhile, President Obama’s Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) staff wondered why Putin didn’t retaliate. Andrew McCabe, who was serving as the FBI’s deputy director at the time, maintains that the PDB staff requested information on Putin’s response. The intelligence community answered. It turns out they had information on Flynn’s calls with Kislyak.

McCabe wrote that he shared this information with FBI Director James Comey, who passed it on to director of national intelligence James Clapper. It was Clapper who informed President Obama. The Department of Justice had this information as well. In his book, “The Threat,” McCabe noted that “at Justice, one question arose: Was this a violation of the Logan Act?”