In the second half of this audio clip from Monday’s PBS NewsHour, senior Utah senator Orrin Hatch rips apart the federal health care law. The gist of his argument is it’s too expensive. He says he’d love for everybody to have health coverage, but “they outta trash the bill and get rid of it” and come up with a bi-partisan bill.
[audio:http://newshour-tc.pbs.org/newshour/rss/media/2011/02/28/20110228_healthredo.mp3|titles=PBS NewsHour: Health care compromise]
Hatch says Utah’s health care [PDF link] is good, so maybe I should read up on how it compares to what we have here in Massachusetts, enacted into law by Mitt Romney, who has his own ties to Utah. If Hatch truly opposes government health care coverage, I assume he must not take advantage of it himself, as he is entitled to do as a United States senator.
Hey, this is great! Film historian Kevin Brownlow was on stage tonight with Francis Ford Coppola and (a very old) Eli Wallach. So I’m going to celebrate by posting part 13 of Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film, the documentary that Brownlow made with the late David Gill.
He had been working on the second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and he had a Columbia photographer [Don Hunstein] take a picture of him and Suze, walking arm and arm along West Fourth Street. [It was actually Jones Street.] “The cover’s the most important part of the album,” he told friends as he passed around advance printings of the album jacket. It shook up everyone. “She was the envy of every folk singer’s chick in the Village,” Terri Thai says. “It was a big ego trip being on a record jacket.” Some friends believe Dylan was deliberately trying to affect Suze’s ego, “to give her some of the taste of what he was getting, and to make his hold on her a little tighter,” one of them says.
Dylan, An Intimate Biography, by Anthony Scaduto, 1973, p. 157
One of the more important women in the history of music wasn’t a musician. Suze Rotolo is gone. I was fascinated by her when I read Anthony Scaduto’s Dylan biography in high school. She wasn’t a great beauty, but she was the right girl at the right time for Bob Dylan, and her influence was significant. But it’s curious how many of Dylan’s greatest non-protest songs from that period, and into his time with Joan Baez, seem to have an almost negative attitude towards women.
This is a great outtake shot from the photo session for the cover of Freewheelin’. I found it on old fashion is lovely fashion.
Federal taxes for the rich were cut, reducing distributions to states and, in turn, communities. Thanks to financial deregulation Wall Street defrauded everybody, further reducing tax revenues and clobbering pension funds, then Wall Street was bailed out by the American taxpayers. And now cops, firemen and teachers are being denounced for being greedy? Huh?
I live in Massachusetts, the leader in public sector pension fraud, especially in Boston. The fire department has been particularly rife with abuse. The most notorious case was the allegedly disabled firefighter who was into competitive bodybuiding. But the real abuses are at the top. Retired state senator Billy Boy Bulger is a smooth operator who really knows how to work the system. He’s the brother of crime boss James Whitey Bulger, who knows how to work the other side of the fence. One of the first things that Mitt Romney did as governor of Massachusetts was force Billy Bulger out as President of UMass, but there was nothing Romney could do about Bulger’s sweet pension. Later, Romney introduced a health care system that became the basis for what the Democrats enacted in Washington. Romney has a tendency to shift his stated position as it suits the moment, but he’s not corrupt and when push comes to shove he does what he knows is right — like Scott Brown, come to think of it. I had my doubts about Brown as senator, but he’s AOK.
Speaking of brothers taking all they can get, there are the Kochs, who have done an impressive job of building up the wealth that was left to them by their father. They’ve set their sights on Wisconsin, and it seems plausible that they intend to buy up the no-bid contracts for operating that state’s power plants, but they don’t want to employ public union workers, so Governor Walker is determined to bust the unions for them.
I’m not familiar with what Governor Daniels has done in Indiana, but I agree with what Brooks and Shields say here about Governor Walker. Mark Shields reminds us of the importance of the G.I. Bill after WWII. My father went to college on the G.I. Bill, and he met my mother there. After the war Joe Sinnott worked with his father at a cement factory for a few years. Joe’s thousands of fans have the G.I. Bill to thank for making it possible for him to attend the School of Visual Arts in New York.
Last weekend D.F. Rogers was in NYC, and he saw Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark, a musical that’s still in previews, but has been playing longer than many past Broadway shows.
Denro got a copy of the program book for me, and I’m flipping through it right now, and OUCH….! Paper cut. Darn, I dropped it on the floor. I’ll pick it up and OW!!! Hit my head on the desk.
So the reports are true. The Spider-Man show is dangerous!
