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Hey Dems, control your attack dogs!

The warning of the Minneapolis Trump rally

By Dr, Larry Fedewa (October 13, 2019)

The contrast could not have been starker: 20,000 people inside and 25,000 people outside the Minneapolis Target Center on Thursday night, having a great time at a Trump rally compared to a few hundred angry protesters in the parking lot taunting police, breaking things, and burning confiscated property. The threat of further violence was thick in the air, particularly as the audience began to leave for home after the event. The fact that no one was hurt appears to have been due to the very visible presence of the police, who were out in force.

Political protest is one of the rights of all Americans. But violence in the name of free speech is NOT a right. The American Left seems to have trouble recognizing this fact. Nor do they recognize the rights of conservatives who also have the right to free speech, as witnessed by all the effective blocks of conservative speakers on U.S. campuses.

But what do the thought leaders of the Democrat Party have to do with violence in the streets? Most of the time, they weren’t even there. The answer is in their words. Namely, the apocalyptic tone of so many of their messages. A good example is the leader of their party, Nancy Pelosi, who speaks of this President as bringing about the “end of our democracy”, “violating the Constitution”, and the like. Talk about condemnation without a trial! She and her co-conspirators are condemning the President first and looking for evidence later.

Even more apocalyptic is the rhetoric of the radical wing of the party who are predicting the end of the world unless their insane recommendations for climate control are heeded. “Seven years left to sustain a habitable planet!” “Eliminate fossil fuels or die!” Their “Green America” agenda is packed with outlandish proposals.

All this rhetoric is bound to stir up extreme reactions. It is intended to. Fear can be a great motivator. It can also overcome logic, common sense and science. Witness the huge reaction of youths during their March 15, 2019 international strike for climate change.

It is also inciting to riot. The irresponsible talk by the leaders of the Democrat Party has let the genie of violence out of the bottle. It seems inevitable that protests like the one in Minneapolis  will evolve between now and November 3, 2020 into violence – UNLESS the rhetoric of the candidates and leaders of the Democrat Party cools off. Even then, it may be too late!

As usual, the Dems accuse the Right of committing the very sins the Left are in fact guilty of – whether they be conspiracy, corruption, or in this case violence. In Minneapolis, the supporters of the President were having an exciting but peaceful event. The protesters were the villains in the story – as they have been in so many demonstrations, riots and marches. The days of Martin Luther King, Jr. and non-violent protests are long gone.

The days of Antifa are here.

 

© Richfield Press, 2019. All Rights reserved.

It’s really not that complicated!

The deep state’s last stand (this term)

By Dr. Larry Fedewa (October 5,2019)

The Attorney General of the United States is investigating the nearly successful coup d’etat 2015-17 which attempted to overthrow the President of the United States. Since there is evidence of interaction between the American conspirators and several foreign countries, including the United Kingdom, Russia, Ukraine, China, Australia, and perhaps others, the AG asked the President to help him open doors in these countries.

The President then asked for this assistance during his telephone conversations with the leaders of these countries. As in any such conversations, the two leaders engage in some bargaining – some subtle and some explicit. Both assume that their conversations are protected by Executive Privilege from public disclosure.

On July 25, 2019 the President talked to the new President of the Ukraine government. It happens that the $400+ million military aid grant from the US to Ukraine has been held up since the spring, presumably because of the Ukrainian election and change of administrations.

It also happens that former Vice President Joseph Biden, now running for the Democrats’ presidential nomination, has long been mentioned as having used his position to shield his son, called Hunter Biden, from investigation by the Ukrainian government for corruption. Since there is evidence of Ukrainian input to the American conspiracy, the US President asked the Ukrainian President for his cooperation in finding out the truth behind this story.

The case was centered on the younger Biden being named a Board member of a Ukrainian energy company with a handsome stipend (now reported as $83,000 per month), simply and solely because of his last name. The senior Biden has even bragged on television about how he succeeded in threatening to withhold US military aid to Ukraine – fighting the Russians in Crimea at the time – unless the Ukrainian government fired a prosecutor who was investigating the company which was paying his son.

Did President Trump do something wrong as the Democrats alleged (before having read the transcript)? Perhaps he was not attentive enough to appearances – Mr. Trump is not known for subtlety. But a crime? Or a “high crime or misdemeanor” worthy of impeachment? That is pure fantasy. Since it comes right on the heels of the failure of the Mueller Report to provide a credible basis for impeachment, these charges seem to reflect a last-ditch effort to discredit the President sufficiently to prevent his reelection next year. That interpretation also would explain why the hurry. Time is running out before the presidential campaign hits high gear. With a Republican majority in the Senate, it is extremely unlikely that there would be the 67 votes necessary to convict a Republican President. The current effort is therefore best understood as part of the 2020 campaign.

There are many extraneous charges, arguments, and issues being raised regarding the identity of the whistleblower, the House Intelligence Committee procedures, the House protocols, subpoenas, executive privilege, the role of the President’s personal attorney, etc. But the fact remains that the intelligence community, initially led by Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan and DNI chief James Clapper, have a long history of attempting to sabotage this President.

So don’t be fooled: it’s not really that complicated.

 

© Richfield Press, 2019. All rights reserved.

 

Next steps to free market health care

A practical approach to progess

 

By Dr. Larry Fedewa (September 24, 2019)

One of Washington’s most respected experts on legislative advocacy, Dr. David Rehr, now a  Gorge Mason University professor, has recommended that we present a list of separable items in an integrated proposal to reform health care. The strategy is that we should be able  to get bipartisan support for some of our ideas and thus build a foundation for the larger reform. This is a sort of step-by-step approach to implementation.

Toward that end, we need to fill in some of the blanks in my overview (see www.DrLarryOnline.com) with numbers and data. So, the authors of the heavily researched book, Health Care is Killing Us: The Power of Disruptive Innovation to Create a System that Cares More and Costs Less (2019) (see Amazon Books), Drs. W. Terry Howell and Aaron Fausz, have volunteered to undertake this task.

“The Dr. Larry Show” on this Wednesday, October 2, 2019 at 7 pm, will feature their report on the following draft propositions (in increasing order of controversy):  Keep Reading

Free market health care: Summary

by Dr. Larry Fedewa (August 25, 2019)

Key Points:                                                                                                          

The goal of any new health care proposal must be to develop a patient-centered system. That is, a system which provides the patient the ultimate power to make his/her own medical decisions, which can be matters of life and death.

A secondary goal is to reduce the 2/3 of medical costs the US spends today ($3.5- $4 Trillion) thereby reducing the cost to the consumer.

The five major obstacles to these goals in today’s system are:

  1. A critical shortage of medical personnel
  2. Employers
  3. Federal Government
  4. State Governments
  5. Health insurance companies
  1. Solutions –Medical personnel shortage

U.S. Public Health Service offers full cost scholarships to medical, dental, paramedics, nursing and similar degrees to any qualified American student who is willing to serve a 2-year term in designated practices where critical needs exist.

  1. Solutions — Employers are relieved from all responsibilities for employee medical insurance.
  2. Solutions — Federal Government Actions:
  • Federal government sets limits on settlements for medical mishaps, ending need for “defensive medicine”.
  • Federal government declares medical insurance to be interstate commerce, subject only to federal regulation, with one set of rules governing all health insurance. Eliminating a major cost driver for health insurance.
  • Federal government maintains Medicare because of ethical and legal obligations.

4. Solutions — State Governments  

  • Oversight of standard business procedures governing organizations of private citizens designed to provide health insurance, whether church, credit union, cooperative, small business associations, neighborhood, or any other type of structure. This feature is the key to lowering health care costs by increasing competition for the patient dollar in the extended field offered by reduction of individual state requirements and the end to defensive medicine.
  • Management of a pool of funding for indigent patients based on a small per capita tax of each buyer of health insurance – critical component to universal coverage. Perhaps a restructured Medicaid without federal involvement.
  • State responsibilities limited to practitioner licensing for medical personnel and other specific responsibilities as indicated below

Solutions – Insurance companies   

  • There is still a place for insurance companies, albeit radically altered. The first factor to be considered is the new phenomenon of literally thousands of new organizations to emerge as the market for insurance carriers. This is a whole new opportunity for these firms — to seek out the new buyers, to develop new packages for buyers representing basically a new constituency – all anxious to maximize individual benefits to a much more vocal and demanding membership, and then to formalize the flexibility ceded to each member to choose treatments and decisions themselves rather than accepting bureaucratic stipulations blindly. Companies which cannot adjust to the new markets will not survive.
  • Another opportunity will also arise, namely the custody and deployment of medical savings accounts. One of the first trends may well be the simple transfer of the new payroll income from health insurance premiums no longer deducted from payroll to a medical savings account. The recipient of these deposits may well be in a new branch of financial management. And who better to do so with high credibility than your familiar insurance agent?

Finally, there will be some differences in how the average person deals with his or her health care, but not that many. The two most significant are 1) you will become the direct buyer of your own health care with the money you saved from your enhanced paycheck; 2) you will now be making the sometimes life and death decisions that now are made by budget-watching bureaucrats in the insurance companies or the government.

That’s it!

© Richfield Press, 2019. All rights reserved.

The Dr. Larry Show welcomes Dr. Ed Creagan

The Dr. Larry Show welcomes Dr. Ed!

They will discuss Dr. Larry’s column, “What a free market health care system might look like”, a  stunning proposal to convert  America’s ineffective health care to a patient-centered system by removing employers, governments and insurance  companies from patient care.

 

  https://bit.ly/2N9IN7s (60 minutes)

Edward Creagan, M.D. Emeritus Professor of Medical Oncology, Mayo Clinic Medical School at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota. Dr. Ed holds the chair as John and Roma Rouse Professor of Humanism in Medicine and is now Emeritus Professor of Humanism in Medicine and an Emeritus Consultant in Palliative Medicine. An award-winning author among many other honors, Dr. Ed was also named Outstanding Educator from the Mayo Clinic School of Continuing Medical Education and has received the Distinguished Mayo Clinician Award–Mayo Clinic’s highest honor.

 

Larry Fedewa, Ph.D. is a conservative commentator and radio talk show host on social and political issues. Former international technology executive, business owner and college president, he lives on an Arabian horse farm near Washington, D.C. Dr. Larry currently writes a weekly column for the Richfield Press, LLC, and hosts “The Dr. Larry Show”  on Wednesdays 7-8pm at
www.BatchelorNewsRadioNetwork (podcasts of recent shows on this website).

Note 1: Free market health care

ADD to Free market health care:
Before I outline  the new system, however, I would like to point out the there are only a few differences in the way the ordinary American will experience dealing with health care.
1) First, instead of having their health insurance premiums deducted from their paychecks, the average American will be responsible for paying these premiums themselves. The easiest way to handle that would a bank auto-pay.
2) The premiums will probably be cheaper than current payments because of the competition for you dollar.
3) You will pay your insurance premium through an organization of your choice — your credit union, church, town, neighborhood association, or a specialized medical insurance cooperative. Your medical insurance will NOT depend on your employment. It goes with you wherever you go.
4) When the medical bills do come due, they will be paid by your own medical insurance company and possibly  your own medical savings account.
5) Most important: the life and death decisions affecting your family will be made by YOU, not some nameless bureaucracy of the insurance industry or government.

What a Free Market Health Care System Might Look Like

By Dr. Larry Fedewa (August 10, 2019)

 

This week’s column is an edited reprint of a piece I wrote a couple of years ago when the backlash against “Obamacare” first inspired Republicans to talk about “repeal and replace”. Since they are still talking and since the Dems are now also talking about health care alternatives – especially a federal takeover of all health care – the topic remains open for new ideas. I have approached this subject from the perspective of a clean sheet of paper. Why try to build a system on the bones of a failed system, a system no one likes? Why not instead build a new system on a foundation of goals which everyone accepts and agrees with? This is  my answer to that question.

The starting point for a discussion of a national health care system should be setting our goals. I believe that American health care should be:

  1. High quality and state-of-the-art
  2. Available to all
  3. Affordable
  4. Abundant
  5. Well-funded

What are the principal obstacles to these goals? Keep Reading

A pie in the sky can hit you in the eye!

Let’s get practical! 

 

by Dr. Larry Fedewa (August 4, 2019)

If we thought that Hillary with all her baggage was about as sorry a candidate as the Democratic party could come up with, the current crop of aspirants is proving us wrong. This crop does not seem to have even a coherent message. They are angry, they fight each other, they see horror everywhere, they are advocating pie in the sky, and they hate Donald Trump. That’s about it.

Unless some superstar emerges from the shadows, or Mr. Trump flounders into a recession, it’s hard to see much of a contest in 2020. Not that the Republicans haven’t had their own streaks of weak candidates  — one winner in two out of six elections between 1992 and 2016. But so far it is difficult to take the people in the Democrat field seriously.

Eliminate fossil fuels in 10 years – when there is no comparable substitute? When the entire world depends on fossil fuels for survival? Even their statement of the problem is out of date. Nobody can look at the violent weather we have been experiencing and doubt that the climate is changing. But when has it ever not changed? As far back as records go there have been changes in the climate. What about the Ice Age? Keep Reading

The Age of Monochromatic Late-Night Humor [Reprinted from “PJ Media. March 25,2019”]

BY A.J. RICE MARCH 25, 2019

Comedian Jay Leno performs a standup routine at the RP Funding Center in Lakeland Fla. on Jan. 5, 2019. (AP Photo/Reinhold Matay

Late-night comedy has become the sound of left-hand clapping.

Steve Allen, Johnny Carson, and Jay Leno kept you awake by making you laugh. The tiresome political antics of today’s late-night dilettantes make you wish you’d gone to bed early.

It’s not a question so much of left or right as it is of having a bunch of one-track-minds. The punchline is always the same: Orange Man Bad, Orange Man Evil, Orange Man Crazy. Every night, all the time. As predictable as Pravda during the Brezhnev years — and just as amusing.

Jay Leno — who is funny — commented on badgering in the guise of “comedy” this month during an interview with Al Roker of NBC’s Today show.

“It’s different,” Leno said. “I don’t miss it. You know, everything now is, if people don’t like your politics, they — everyone has to know your politics.” Perhaps because today’s late-night hosts insist you know their politics.

Keep Reading

America First and Internationalism

Can these policies co-exist?                                    

By Dr. Larry Fedewa (July 14, 2019)

There has been a strain of missionary zeal in American foreign policy since the colonial days and it raises its head every once in a while even today. Perhaps it is the shadow of our Puritan heritage. On the one hand, the moral dilemma of slavery has poisoned our national conscience since the beginning and still haunts us today even after we suffered an estimated 650,000 casualties in the most costly war in our history in an effort to right this wrong. On the other hand, Americans have felt constrained to “save the world for democracy” through the foreign wars of the 20th century and the challenges of Islamic terrorism in our own time.

The belief that “America is the last, best hope for freedom”, as President Reagan put it, has formed one of the foundations of our foreign policy for the past 100 years. That belief carried us into two world wars and all the nearly constant stream of wars ever since in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. It has defined “America’s place in the world order” as the advocate and defender of personal freedom and at least some form of social justice. It has also established the USA as the underwriter of all these efforts in both blood and treasure. Keep Reading