Fear and Loathing Over Obamacare

Once again we see the loathsome "Obamacare" under fire with huge amounts of money being spent to fight it by conservative groups. Kaiser Health News reports that negative ads outnumber positive ads five to one, and an estimated $1 billion will be spend on advertising in the year leading up to the midterm elections as the Republicans once again plan to make an "issue" out of it.

Of course, it didn't help matters that the Obama administration chose to defer mandates another year, ostensibly to avoid making it an issue in the midterms. The news media pounced all over this, with many sources questioning the "Constitutionality" of the deferment. But, I think it is just an attempt to move away from the overhyped Snowden affair onto another hot button issue, as the Obama administration is perfectly within its rights to delay the mandates, especially if they found holes in the system, which they claim they did.

It seems the GOP will never accept the Affordable Care Act, with many "red states" continuing to fight it, leaving potentially millions of Americans out of the loop. All that money and effort would be better spent trying to clean up the Act so that it is more comprehensive and can't get so easily abused. But, until it fully kicks in, which won't be until 2015 now, there is no way of really knowing how effective the ACA will be.

Comments

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Searchers

You are invited to join us in a discussion of The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl. The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics' Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts. The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories. The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...

Dispatches from Vilnius

Search This Blog