Post Mueller, what happens now ?

July 29th, 2019

The Mueller hearings were a huge disappointment to the Democrats, who were counting on scandal and impeachment to substitute for governing. Two leaders, Schiff and Nadler, seem unwilling to give up and try legislating. Schiff, who seems to most devoted to the Russia Hoax, has a darker side.

Schiff is the first Democrat since 1932 to represent the region.

He was an eloquent booster of McCain-Feingold campaign-finance legislation, seeking to put limits on some of the very expenditures that swamped his own race against former Rep. James Rogan, whom he beat by three percentage points.

(Limiting expenditures is a point Colbert needled him on. Colbert: “Isn’t that the equivalent of sleeping with a prostitute and then strangling her to hide your shame?” Schiff: “Well … I wouldn’t want to say it like that.”)

Rogan, of course was the target of massive Democrat fund raising to punish the House prosecutor for the Clinton impeachment.

That fawning “The Hill” tongue bath did not provide much for the “darker side.”

Nadler, another Clinton defender, has shed 60 pounds since his gastric bypass but he still looks about 100 pounds overweight. He is a little less strident than Schiff in public.

Where do they go from here ?

They get no help from Andrew McCarthy who demolishes their arguments.

Mueller’s anti-Trump staffers knew they were never going to be able to drive Trump from office by indicting him. The only plausible way to drive him from office was to prioritize, over all else, making the report public. Then, perhaps Congress would use it to impeach. At the very least, the 448 pages of uncharged conduct would wound Trump politically, helping lead to his defeat in 2020 — an enticing thought for someone who had, say, attended the Hillary Clinton “victory” party and expressed adulatory “awe” for acting AG (and fellow Obama holdover) Sally Yates when she insubordinately refused to enforce Trump’s border security order.

Of course, it wouldn’t be enough to get the report to Congress. The challenge was to get it there with the obstruction case still viable even though prosecutors knew they couldn’t get away with recommending an obstruction indictment. How to accomplish this? By pretending that the OLC guidance prevented prosecutors from even making a charging decision.

This resulted in the Ted Lieu question and Mueller’s answer which he had to retract after the break.

It is becoming more and more apparent that Mueller’s ‘assistant” prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann is the lead conspirator in the coup.

Weissmann is distinguished by his abysmal record as a corrupt prosecutor in several cases.

A lawyer representing whistleblowers referred Andrew Weissman to the Department of Justice’s Inspector General (IG) for “corrupt legal practices”.

Weissman is Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s lead investigator in the Russia-Trump probe. He is the former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York. That was Loretta Lynch’s territory. He rose through the ranks under Mueller’s stewardship.

In 2015, civil rights attorney David Schoen referred Weisman to the IG for his handling of a case targeting the Columbo crime family. Schoen said he is not a member of a political party and there is no political motivation.

Weissman was the lead attorney in the Persico trial and he withheld exculpatory evidence, a Brady violation. Schoen said he decided to revisit the nearly two-decade-long cases based on new witness information and “recent evidence that has come to light in the last several months.”

Weissman never told the defense that a prosecution witness, Gregory Scarpa Sr., was also working for years as an FBI informant. The underworld witness was nicknamed ‘Hannibal’ and the “Grim Reaper’ and committed over 100 murders.

The judge described AUSA Weissmann’s conduct as the “myopic withholding of information” and “reprehensible and subject, perhaps, to appropriate disciplinary measures,” according to the opinion obtained by investigative reporter Sara Carter.

He further distinguished himself with a rare Unanimous Supreme Court decision reversing his conviction of Arthur Anderson in the Enron case.

With a brief, pointed and unanimous opinion, the Supreme Court on Tuesday overturned Arthur Andersen’s conviction for shredding Enron accounting documents as that company was collapsing in one of the nation’s biggest corporate scandals.

The court held that the trial judge’s instructions to the jury failed to require the necessary proof that Andersen knew its actions were wrong.

But the decision represents little more than a Pyrrhic victory for Andersen, which lost its clients after being indicted on obstruction of justice charges and has no chance of returning as a viable enterprise. The accounting firm has shrunk from 28,000 employees in the United States to a skeleton crew of 200, who are attending to the final details of closing down the partnership.

28,000 people lost their jobs. The prosecutor who hid evidence was Weissmann.

In the interview with Devin Nunes, Maria Bartiromo asks the ultimate question: “who was the mastermind” behind all of these intelligence operations?

Released FOIA documents into the special counsel team of Robert Mueller revealed the remarkable trail of the 2017 entrapment scheme conducted by prosecutor Andrew Weissmann to target George Papadopoulos.

Before digging into the details it is important to note this is a DOJ/FBI entrapment operation being conducted in 2017 by the special counsel; this is not prior to the 2016 election. The detail surrounds a series of events previously discussed {Go Deep} where George Papadopoulos was approached by a known CIA operative named Charles Tawil.

In 2017 George Papadopoulos and his wife Simona were approached in Greece by a known CIA/FBI operative, Charles Tawil. Mr. Tawil enlisted George as a business consultant, under the auspices of energy development interests, and invited him to Israel.

On June 8th, 2017, in Israel under very suspicious circumstances, where Papadopoulos felt very unnerved, Mr. Tawil hands him $10,000 in cash for future consultancy based on a $10k/month retainer.

This is a key part of the plot to destroy Trump. Read the whole thing. In fact, Papadopoulis’ book is a good place to start.

The 75th Anniversary of D Day.

June 6th, 2019

Today is the 75th anniversary of D Day. There are ceremonies honoring the men who landed that day. Few are left but about 170 did make it to the event. The President spoke and of course the leftist press is complaining.

How small he is! Small in spirit, in valor, in dignity, in statecraft, this American president who knows nothing of history and cares still less and now bestrides Europe with his family in tow like some tin-pot dictator with a terrified entourage.

To have Donald Trump — the bone-spur evader of the Vietnam draft, the coddler of autocrats, the would-be destroyer of the European Union, the pay-up-now denigrator of NATO, the apologist for the white supremacists of Charlottesville — commemorate the boys from Kansas City and St. Paul who gave their lives for freedom is to understand the word impostor. You can’t make a sculpture from rotten wood.

You can almost feel the spittle flying.

Ignoring the ankle biters, This is what the day is about

Bud's plane
That is my cousin, Bud Kerrison’s plane. He flew 50 missions as bombardier from North Africa.

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That is Bud home on leave before heading for Africa. That is me, age about five, saluting him.

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Here are the bluffs at Omaha Beach that troops had to get over somehow.

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Here is the top of that bluff. A long way up.

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Here is one of the German bunkers on the beach. They were angled to avoid exposure to shell hits from the ships supporting the invasion. The angle was arranged to provide the best aim at high tide, assuming that would be the time of the landing. The troops landed at low tide to better see the obstacles and that gave them a bit of shelter as the guns had trouble traversing that much. Of course the sea wall was at the zero spot.

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This is the bluff at Pont du Hoc where the rangers climbed to reach gun emplacements that Were empty. The guns had been moved inland.

Utah Beach did not have the bluff to climb but there were marshlands east of the beach. The airborne landings were to seize and hold the causeways across those marshes.

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Some of them landed in the town of Sante Mere Eglise and one, in particular, got his parachute caught on the church roof. The town maintains museums celebrating the events of June 6,. 1944.

Museum at Sante Mere Eglise

Here is one of those museums. Their collection is growing as dying veterans often leave memorabilia to the museums.

Memorial

These road markers are all over the area just inland from the beach. They commemorate men killed at this spot.

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And then, of course, there are the cemeteries.

Trump and the impeachment of Andrew Johnson

May 29th, 2019

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I think I see some similarities between the Democrats’ apparent efforts to try to impeach President Trump and the impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868.

Andrew Johnson was a “war Democrat,” meaning that he was a Democrat who supported the Union. He was Governor of the border state of Tennessee. Lincoln considered the border states critical in saving the Union.


“I hope to have God on my side,” Abraham Lincoln is reported to have said early in the war, “but I must have Kentucky.” Unlike most of his contemporaries, Lincoln hesitated to invoke divine sanction of human causes, but his wry comment unerringly acknowledged the critical importance of the border states to the Union cause. Following the attack on Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s call for troops in April 1861, public opinion in Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri was sharply divided and these states’ ultimate allegiance uncertain. The residents of the border were torn between their close cultural ties with the South, on the one hand, and their long tradition of Unionism and political moderation on the other.

In 1864, after Atlanta was taken by Sherman, Lincoln began to think about the situation after the war. He met with Sherman and Grant on March 28, 1865. He had two weeks to live. He talked to them about his plans for after the war ended. Sherman later described the conversation. Lincoln was ready for the post-war period and he told Sherman to assure the Confederate Governor of North Carolina that as soon as the army laid down its arms, all citizens would have their rights restored and the state government would resume civil measures de facto until Congress could make permanent arrangement.

In choosing Johnson as his VP in 1964, Lincoln was doing two things, he was supporting his argument that no state could secede from the Union. The radical Republicans like Stevens and Sumner had taken the position that states had “committed suicide” by seceding. There was even a movement at the Baltimore Convention to nominate someone else, like Fremont who had been the nominee in 1856. The other was allowing the Convention to choose the VP nominee. It did seat some delegations from states, like Tennessee, that were still the scene of fighting. Only South Carolina was excluded.

The Convention was actually assumed to be safe for a Hannibal Hamlin renomination. Instead it voted for Johnson by a large margin. The final ballot results were 494 for Johnson, 9 for Hamlin. Noah Brooks, a Lincoln intimate, later recounted a conversation in which Lincoln told him that there might be an advantage in having a War Democrat as VP. Others, including Ward Hill Lamon, later agreed that Lincoln preferred a border state nominee for VP.

An so, Andrew Johnson, a War Democrat, was elected to an office that no one ever considered as likely to become President. No one anticipated Lincoln’s assassination. However there was a significant segment of radical Republicans that wanted to punish the states that had seceded and those who had joined the Confederacy, contrary to Lincoln’s plans. He had intended to restore the local governments, pending Congressional action to restructure the state governments. The Convention was well before Atlanta fell to Sherman’s army and Lincoln was not convinced he would be re-elected. The War Democrat VP nominee would help with border states.

Johnson humiliated himself with his inauguration speech, at which he was suspected to be drunk. He may have been ill; Castel cited typhoid fever,[95] though Gordon-Reed notes that there is no independent evidence for that diagnosis

Six weeks later, Lincoln was assassinated. Johnson was not well prepared to assume the Presidency.

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The agriculture war.

May 11th, 2019

We are entering a period when the tariff controversy with China is getting serious.

The Wall Street Journal is worried.

A failure to break an impasse in talks in Washington on Friday opened a new phase in the trade fight after more than five months of back-and-forth negotiations. This time, some economists and analysts said, Beijing is taking stock of potential economic damage from higher tariffs.

The U.S. raised punitive tariffs to 25%, from 10%, for $200 billion in goods leaving China on Friday and thereafter. President Trump also ordered staff to begin the paperwork to impose levies on the more than $300 billion worth of everything else China sells to the U.S.

While Beijing has met previous volleys of tariffs from the U.S. by raising duties on American goods—and the government has promised to retaliate—it held its fire. Though China has more limited tariff options, since it imports fewer products from the U.S. than the other way around, the Chinese leadership is also constrained by an economy that is in a shaky recovery from a sharp slowdown.

There is talk of China boycotting US farm products. They tried it a year ago.

The world’s biggest oilseed processor just confirmed one of the soybean market’s biggest fears: China has essentially stopped buying U.S. supplies amid the brewing trade war.

“Whatever they’re buying is non-U.S.,” Bunge Ltd. Chief Executive Officer Soren Schroder said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “They’re buying beans in Canada, in Brazil, mostly Brazil, but very deliberately not buying anything from the U.S.”

In a move that caught many in U.S. agriculture by surprise, China last month announced planned tariffs on American shipments of soybeans.

The boycott failed.

“China has to resume purchases of U.S. soybeans,” Oil World said in its latest newsletter. “The South American supply shortage will make it necessary for China, in our opinion, to import 15 million tonnes of U.S. soybeans in October 2018/March 2019, even if the current trade war is not resolved.”

China may not be in good shape to handle a trade war.

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Vote Fraud will be the deciding factor in 2020.

April 23rd, 2019

The Democrat Party has been perfecting their techniques of voter fraud for many years. In 1960, the presidential election was determined by vote fraud in Chicago and Texas. Chicago has a long history of stolen elections. It is a joke to many Chicago residents but Chicago determines Illinois’ electoral votes.

Chicago is famous for its history of people voting from the grave and for helping President John F. Kennedy “steal” the 1960 election. (JFK beat Richard Nixon by 9,000 votes in Illinois by capturing what some considered a suspiciously high 450,000 advantage in Cook County.)

Officials insist voter fraud has largely disappeared in Chicago, but Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, has said voter fraud and “horrendous” things happen in Chicago.

The city’s election history is even crazier than most people realize, though, with Republican feuds leading to homes being bombed and names being stolen from tombstones just to get extra votes for the “Democratic Machine.”

Texas was just as bad in the days when it was run by Democrats. San Antonio was particularly famous as a corrupt fief of George Parr, a political boss. Lyndon Johnson used his influence with that boss to win the Senate election of 1948 and the presidential election of 1960.

A study of Lyndon B. Johnson provides new evidence that the 36th President stole his first election to the United States Senate, in 1948.

It has been alleged for years that Johnson captured his Senate seat through fraud, but Mr. Caro goes into great detail to tell how the future President overcame a 20,000-vote deficit to achieve his famous 87-vote victory in the 1948 Democratic runoff primary against a former Governor, Coke Stevenson. A South Texas political boss, George Parr, had manufactured thousands of votes, Mr. Caro found.

In 1960, Lyndon proved his worth again. Those problems have also fueled continuing scholarly interest in the 1960 presidential election because of the difficulty in determining whether Kennedy really won through honest means or corrupt ones.

Scholarly analysis of the question of how Kennedy won has focused, quite rightly, on administration of the electoral process in two crucial states: Illinois and Texas. Kennedy ultimately was credited with the electoral votes of both, which gave him victory in the Electoral College tally. The problem with answering the question of how he prevailed there is twofold in nature. In Illinois, the most recent and fair-minded study (Kallina’s Kennedy v. Nixon) concludes that sufficient evidence does not exist to determine whether Chicago’s Democratic machine stole more votes there than Republicans did downstate. Texas presents a different kind of problem. A system of free and fair elections in the modern sense had not yet taken hold on the ground there in 1960. Voter fraud was fairly common, safeguards to prevent it were few, and 1960 was no different in those respects. Thus, the most dispassionate analysis of this issue from the perspective of fifty years later is that we will never know whether Kennedy really “won,” in the sense of what result an entirely honest and effective administration of the electoral process in Illinois and Texas would have produced on Election Day in 1960.

Now, we face another at-risk election. The most recent vote fraud methods include The “Motor Voter Act,” passed by a 1993 Democrat Congress and signed by Bill Clinton and which included voter registration with driver’s license renewal. No proof of citizenship is required and states like California have now legalized drivers’ licenses for illegals, facilitating non-citizen voting. In 2018, some precincts in California had 114% voter turnout, reminiscent of Philadelphia. Also, 11 California counties have more registered voters than citizens.

Judicial Watch says 11 counties in California are in violation of a section of the National Voter Registration Act that requires states to do a “reasonable list maintenance” of voter registration lists.

To support its argument, it compares population numbers in the 2011-2015 U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey to California’s registered voters — which combines those on active and inactive voter lists. By that calculation, 11 counties have more total registered voters than adults over the age of 18.

“In our experience, these kinds of registration rates indicate a failure to comply with the voter list maintenance requirements of the NVRA,” the letter says, adding that such inaccuracies undermine public confidence in the electoral process.

Naturally, the California Attorney General denied this and accused Judicial Watch of “Voter Suppression.”

Other attempts at validation of voter registration, this time in Texas, resulted in harassment and attempted prosecution of those trying to control vote fraud.

Engelbrecht said shortly after founding and leading True to Vote and King Street Patriots, she was visited by law enforcement agencies and Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), even though outside of filing their tax returns, she and her husband never dealt with any government agency in nearly two decades of running their small business.

“We had never been audited. We had never been investigated, but all that changed upon submitting applications for the non-profit statuses of True the Vote and King Street,” she told the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee.

“Since that filing in 2010, my private businesses, my nonprofit organizations, my family and I have been subjected to more than 15 instances of audit or inquiry by federal agencies,” she added.

That, of course, was when Obama was president. Elijah Cummings is the Congressman who is attempting to obtain President Trump’s and his family’s financial records for a fishing expedition.

The latest method, which is related to the increasing use of mail-in ballots, is called “ballot harvesting” or Vote Harvesting”

In Orange County alone, where every House seat went Democratic, “the number of Election Day vote-by-mail dropoffs was unprecedented — over 250,000,” Fred Whitaker, chairman of the county Republican Party, said in a note to supporters. “This is a direct result of ballot harvesting allowed under California law for the first time. That directly caused the switch from being ahead on election night to losing two weeks later.”

The voting system in California is so bad that a Democrat in California’s 21st district who was down by 6.4% on election night ended up winning three weeks later.

The Democrats don’t even hide their blatant voter fraud anymore – they just pass laws to make election fixing legal and the Republican party just sits back and allows it.

How does it work? Absentee ballots used to be available to those who would be unable to vote in person on election day. This has changed. Some states have 100% “mail-in” balloting. All votes are by mail and there is no way to verify if the voter is the one who fills out the ballot. A variation on this is for a “volunteer” to visit homes of voters and “offer to carry the ballot to the polling place.” If the “Volunteer” happens to be a Democrat activist who visits only homes with Democrat registration, 100% voter turnout for Democrats is assured. There are even a few instances where the “Volunteer” visits a home where a Democrat voter resides along with a Republican voter or two. The “Volunteer” accepts the Democrat ballot but not the others. Worse, the “Volunteer” might accept all the ballots but discard the ones from “the wrong party.”

This method relies on the “Motor Voter Law,” which registers low interest or illegal voters, then the passage of 100% “mail-in” ballot laws. The 2018 election was a test run of the method and it worked like a charm in Orange County CA and in Phoenix AZ, where late votes defeated Martha McSally in the Senate race. It will be ready for 2020 and Republicans had better be prepared.

The Mueller Report

April 19th, 2019

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The Mueller report was released to the public with sections redacted that apply to possible future prosecutions or Grand Jury proceedings. Naturally, this created a firestorm among Democrats hopefuls. Ans conspiracy theorists on the Left.

The actual volumes (There are two) are here.

Useful analysis is here on volume 2, which seems to be very subjective.

Another opinion.

In this sense: At its heart, the Trump-Russia probe was about one question: Did the Trump campaign conspire, coordinate, or collude with Russia to influence the 2016 election? Mueller has concluded that did not happen.

Everything else in the Trump-Russia affair flowed from that one question. Paul Manafort’s shady finances would not have come under investigation were it not for that question. Carter Page would not have been wiretapped were it not for that question. Michael Flynn would not have been interviewed by the FBI were it not for that question. Zillions of hours on cable TV would not have been expended on Trump-Russia were it not for that question. And in the largest sense, there would have been no Mueller investigation were it not for that question.

A more complete analysis is here.

On page 323 of the report, the special counsel acknowledges that he is aware of the origin of the Russia hoax because he quotes the president’s Aug. 24, 2018, tweet asking Attorney General Jeff Sessions to investigate FBI Director James Comey, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, FBI agent Peter Strzok, Justice Department lawyer Lisa Page, DOJ official Bruce Ohr, and Christopher Steele and “his phony and corrupt Dossier.” But somehow neither Sessions, nor Mueller, nor anyone else has been able to put 2 + 2 together and come up with the correct answer.

Why did the investigation not end there ?

The fact that there is no mention of Steele at all in Volume 1 of the report (which covers Russian interference in the 2016 election) is shocking since it was his unverified dossier that promoted the lie that the Russians had control of Trump because they possessed compromising material on the real estate tycoon. Steele’s participation with Russian sources is the most direct evidence of Russian interference in the election, but Mueller showed no interest in it because it implicated Democrats.

Steele and his “dossier” was the reason for the FISA warrants. Oh well.

Volume 2 (which covers obstruction) does on page 235 acknowledge Steele’s existence as the source of what even Mueller calls the “unverified allegations” published by BuzzFeed in January 2017. It also notes on pages 239 and 240 that Director Comey briefed President-elect Trump on the phony dossier on Jan. 6, 2017, and that the briefing was subsequently leaked to the public.

Moreover, page 246 acknowledges that the president wanted the FBI to investigate Steele’s allegations on Jan. 27, 2017, but that Comey talked him out of it.

Can’t have that. It would ruin the story.

Most telling perhaps is that there is no direct reference to GPS Fusion in the entire report other than that anonymous reference by Corallo to “the firm that produced the Steele reporting.” Nor for that matter is there any reference to the Perkins Coie law firm that was the go-between that hired GPS Fusion on behalf of the DNC to generate the phony Steele dossier.

The story will continues with lies instead of facts,

The key to the Russia hoax was the CIA’s hostility to Michael Flynn

April 4th, 2019

I am more and more coming around to the opinion of David Goldman and Michael Ledeen.

The Russia hoax was aimed at Michael Flynn and his role as a Trump advisor.

It was all about General Flynn. I think it began on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, when Flynn changed the way we did intelligence against the likes of Zarqawi, bin Laden, the Taliban, and their allies.

General Flynn saw that our battlefield intelligence was too slow. We collected information from the Middle East and sent it back to Washington, where men with stars on their shoulders and others at the civilian intel agencies chewed it over, decided what to do, and sent instructions back to the war zone. By the time all that happened, the battlefield had changed. Flynn short-circuited this cumbersome bureaucratic procedure and moved the whole enterprise to the war itself. The new methods were light years faster. Intel went to local analysts, new actions were ordered from men on the battlefield (Flynn famously didn’t care about rank or status) and the war shifted in our favor.

I read Dakota Meyer’s book. He was denied permission to accompany his Civil Affairs unit into an Afghan village because he was being punished for shooting at Taliban tribesmen firing mortar rounds into his base camp. The reason ? They were “not in uniform.” The ROE of the Obama administration saved his life as the unit he should have been with was ambushed and killed. He made attempts to rescue them, resulting in his award the Medal of Honor.

On 8 September 2009, near the village of Ganjgal, Meyer learned that three Marines and a Navy Corpsman, who were members of Meyer’s squad and his friends, were missing after being ambushed by a group of insurgents. Under enemy fire, Meyer entered an area known to be inhabited by insurgents and eventually found the four missing servicemen dead and stripped of their weapons, body armor and radios. There he saw a Taliban fighter trying to take the bodies. The fighter tackled Meyer, and after a brief scuffle, Meyer grabbed a baseball-sized rock and beat the fighter to death.[8] With the help of Afghan soldiers, he moved the bodies to a safer area where they could be extracted.[9] During his search, Meyer “personally evacuated 12 friendly wounded and provided cover for another 24 Marines and soldiers to escape likely death at the hands of a numerically superior and determined foe.”

In his account of the battle in his book, he relates how it took hours to get permission for artillery to respond to the ambush.

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Some thoughts on what reform in healthcare would look like.

April 1st, 2019

I have previously posted some articles on the French healthcare system, which is the best in Europe.

Here is an article on the French system.

The French citizen or resident joins Caisse Nationale d’Assurance Maladie deTravailleurs Salariés (CNAMTS)—health insurance organisation for salaried workers. That covers about 80% of the population now and it pays 80% (often more like 70%) of a fee schedule for the doctor visit although specialists are allowed to charge more. French doctors are divided for payment and fee schedule purposes into three “sectors” after 1980. Sector 1 doctors agreed to abide by the fee schedule established in 1960, modified for inflaton and technological changes. They are mostly primary care doctors although some had waivers from the fee schedule prior to 1971 because they were more experienced or had great reputations. Few are still practicing. Sector 2 doctors could set their own fees but reimbursement was still determined by the fee schedule. These two categories correspond roughly to Medicare assignment in the US. If you accept assignment, you agree to accept Medicare payment as the full payment (or 80% of it plus the Medi-Gap payment).

The French have private insurance companies that provide what we call “Medi-Gap policies for Medicare. Theirs cover everyone.

It seems unlikely to me that Democrats would accept a health plan that allowed balance billing, which is the only way to control costs, short of pure rationing. The French basically provide a fee schedule that is the same for everyone but which allows doctors to charge more if the patient is willing to pay. For example, I called the office of a new internist last week to schedule an appointment. The clerk required that I submit all my insurance information, not my health status, and the doctor would decide if he would see me. If he is that busy, perhaps he could justify charging more.

Here is another article from that series explaining the French system.

French primary care physicians are paid less than American but medical school in France does not require a college degree and is free. I suspect that system might be more attractive in the US than many realize.

Unfortunately, such a radical reform is unlikely. There are other options under consideration.

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From Russia to healthcare in one day.

March 30th, 2019

Last Friday, the Mueller report was submitted to the DOJ. Monday, left wing media saw ratings collapse.

What next ? Why Healthcare, of course.

Obamacare, which is a form of expanded Medicaid, costs too much and provides too little care (high deductibles) unless you are a Medicaid recipient. It was designed to shift costs to the insured from the poor. It also was a gift to certain sectors of the healthcare industry. Ted Kennedy criticized healthcare as a “cottage industry” with lots of independent doctors doing their own thing as small businesspeople. That is why doctors have traditionally been conservative. Obamacare changed that. Healthcare is now an industry with doctors mostly on salary and controlled by administrators.

I talked to a young ophthalmologist last week, who had treated a mild eye disorder. He told me he moved to Tucson to work at U of Arizona medical center, which used to be called “UMC” by everybody in Arizona. He explained that the UMC administrators had gotten deeply into debt installing a new “Electronic Health Record” system and sold the UMC to Banner Health. This is a chain that runs the former UMC and has seen an exodus of university faculty physicians. Even my barber noticed. He told me several weeks ago that his surgeon, who had operated on him, got tired of constantly being told he only had 15 minutes to see each patient and left for the VA. The ophthalmologist was disappointed as he had looked forward to working at the academic center.

Traditionally, administrators hated doctors. We made their lives more difficult by advocating for patients. I once told an administrator that if the hospital did not reduce the markup on pacemakers, I would testify for the patient if they sued him for the balance of the bill. They didn’t like it but knew I could go elsewhere,and take my patients there. If I had been an employee, I would not have that choice. Several years ago, I explained how we started a trauma center in our hospital. Since then, the hospital has been sold to a non-profit run by nuns. The surgical group that ran the trauma center for 35 years was fired two years ago. They had declined to sell the group to the hospital. They were replaced by six female surgeons no one had ever heard of and who had never applied for privileges at the hospital or been evaluated by the Surgery Department. No one knew anything about them except one member of this new group had applied for a job at the trauma group and been turned down.

There were a few comments about some less satisfactory results on trauma cases but that has quickly gotten quiet.

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My mother

March 24th, 2019

My mother had a pretty interesting life. Her father was born in 1849.

Joe Mileham2

Here he is with his sister, Anna, at about the age of five or so. This is from a Daguerreotype, which was printed on a copper plate that looked like glass.

Invented by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and introduced worldwide in 1839,[4][5][6] daguerreotype was almost completely superseded by 1860 with new, less expensive processes yielding more readily viewable images. In the late 20th century, there was a revival of daguerreotypy by a small number of photographers interested in making artistic use of early photographic processes.

To make the image, a daguerrotypist would polish a sheet of silver-plated copper to a mirror finish, treat it with fumes that made its surface light sensitive, expose it in a camera for as long as was judged to be necessary, which could be as little as a few seconds for brightly sunlit subjects or much longer with less intense lighting; make the resulting latent image on it visible by fuming it with mercury vapor; remove its sensitivity to light by liquid chemical treatment, rinse and dry it, then seal the easily marred result behind glass in a protective enclosure.

The image is on a mirror-like silver surface, normally kept under glass, and will appear either positive or negative, depending on the angle at which it is viewed, how it is lit and whether a light or dark background is being reflected in the metal. The darkest areas of the image are simply bare silver; lighter areas have a microscopically fine light-scattering texture. The surface is very delicate, and even the lightest wiping can permanently scuff it. Some tarnish around the edges is normal.

So the method was only ten years old when that image was made.

Joseph Mileham sr (1)

Here he is as an adult, acting in a play. There is an amazing likeness to his grandson, Arthur G Kerrison, who served in World War II.

Bud, Marion and Mike

There is Arthur G, also known as “Bud,” a common nickname for a junior in those days. He is holding me up between him and his sister Marian. Another sister, Ruth, often known in the family as “Little Ruth” since mother lived with them until 1926 and was often considered an older sister.Ruth was born in 1916 when mother was 18 years old. Marian was born in 1917 so they were not that far apart in age. Ruth and Marian would later function as babysitters for me as they were 22 and 23 when I was born.

My mother’s mother was born in Canada and her birth name was “Bridget,” which she did not like and changed to “Della” while in school.

Della Mileham

This is her photo as an adult and probably not long before she died in 1926.

She and Joseph Mileham met in Aurora Illinois where she was working and living in a rooming house owned by Joseph’s sister Anna.

They married and mother was born as the fourth child, and third surviving child, 18 months before her father died of pneumonia.

Mother 18 mo-color

Here she is as an infant, probably around the time her father died.

Her sister is here.

peg and art (1)

She is quite young and her husband Art is with her.

Her brother, Joseph Jr is here with his wife Marie.

Joe and Maria Mileham

Mother at 18.

mom (1)

Mother272

Here she is in 1925 at age 27 with two boy friends on vacation at Lake Delevan.

In 1926, her mother and brother both died. She traveled to California to stay with relatives and remained until 1929.

Ruth and Merle

Here she is dressed as a typical flapper with her cousin, Merle McHenry. She returned to Chicago after 1929 as the McHenrys were hit hard by the Depression.

She married my father in 1937 and I was born in 1938.

Here she is with her sister and brother-in-law and with her niece Marian.

Kerrisons (1)

That would be around the 1960s. And here she is at her 100th birthday.

100th birthday

She lived a full life in three centuries. Born in 1898 and died in 2001.