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.

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Dylan in America

Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan. Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose. Looks like only yesterday. Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.

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, noting the gro

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

Dispatches from Vilnius

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