Month: March 2015

Categories
Music Music Features

Rockin’ Down Under

CREDIT: Jamie Harmon

The Oblivians traveled to Australia earlier this month for the first time since forming more than two decades ago. While the band has played in Europe and Japan, Australia seemed out of reach until a couple of years ago when the band’s booking agent starting laying the groundwork for American bands to make the trip down under. After he caught up on some much needed rest, we talked to Eric Friedl of the Oblivians to find out more about their latest trip, the bands they played with, and trying to find time to relax while on a grueling tour.

Flyer: You guys have strong fan bases in Europe and Australia, but how did the trip and tour get set up?

Eric Friedl: A lot of the guys from the Onyas had been bugging us about coming to Australia, but it just never really seemed possible. You never really know what you’re getting into when you travel that far from home, but our booking agent has been over there a few times and she seems to have set up a home base for some of her bands. We have a lot of friends in Australia, and it was kind of a Goner Fest reunion in a lot of ways. Seeing everyone who’s traveled all that way to the USA to watch us play really hammered home how far people travel to come to Goner Fest.

I know the Oblivians played Japan a couple of times, but was this everyone’s first time in Australia?

Yep. A long time ago we were looking at going to Australia, but we had better connections in Japan with Guitar Wolf at the time, so it made sense for us to go play over there. We thought we could swing by Australia on the way to Japan but those countries seem a lot closer when you’re just looking at a map.

What was the travel situation like? How did you all feel when you finally got there?

I think it takes like 16 hours to get to Sydney and the trip takes a bunch out of you. We slept most of the way, which was good since we didn’t get much sleep for the rest of the tour. I’m looking forward to some severe jet lag in the next couple of days because it takes a while for your body to realize it’s doing something completely different. We were all pretty exhausted by the end of the tour, not just from the shows but more from the jet lag.

You guys got to play with some really great Australian bands, some of which your music has influenced. Which show was your favorite?

We gave our booking agent a list of bands we wanted to play with ahead of time, so that helped. We figured if we were going to travel all the way there we might as well play with some of our favorite Australian bands. Everybody was great; we didn’t see a bad band the whole time. We got to play with Feedtime twice, which was incredible, the Ausmuteants and Low Life were also great.

The first Feedtime set we saw was just completely unbeatable, so mean and so nasty, and they were following Low Life, who are also really good. Feedtime just leveled the place. It was like the apocalypse. We knew we weren’t going to come close to following their performance, so it made it pretty easy to get up there and play.

How were the music scenes in Australia different from what you’ve experienced playing shows in Europe and the US?

It was a lot different. Sydney had a younger, more aggressive crowd, and Melbourne was mostly an older reserved crowd, but they were also older people who are into really good stuff. It was awesome to get to play the Golden Plains festival. So many festivals suck to play, but this was one was amazingly cool. The number one rule of the festival was don’t be a dickhead, which was kind of weird because most of the time that’s what festivals are for. There were about 6,000 people at Golden Plains festival just hanging out, and it was probably one of the biggest shows we’ve ever played.

Did you have time to be a tourist or were you too busy playing shows?

We got to the beach twice, but we didn’t have time to do much, no surfing or anything like that. We had radio shows, solo shows, and then two shows a day for about half the dates. All the travel time also kept us pretty busy. We got up to see Mikey Young from Eddy Current Suppression Ring; he lives a couple hours north of Melbourne. We saw some kangaroos hanging out in the park and that was pretty cool.

As a record store owner and collector, how big of a priority was trying to go shopping for vinyl?

I only got to a couple of shops but Greg [Cartwright] got to a lot more. Besides some foreign pressings, I didn’t really buy anything, but Greg can dig up records anywhere.

What other kinds of culture shock did you experience?

We did notice that there are like 10 million kinds of chicken parmesan in Australia, and everyone is very conscious of free range everything there. They serve you portions that are basically twice American size, but other than that it was pretty standard. We didn’t eat kangaroo or anything too wild.

What do the Oblivians have going on for the rest of the year? Are you going to tackle any other new places?

We are doing a run up through Chicago and Cleveland at the end of May – that’s our next little jaunt.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Attendees Flock to Board Games at MidSouthCon

CREDIT: Alexandra Pusateri

From the number of anime and comic book characters wandering around the Hilton Hotel in East Memphis, it’s obvious MidSouthCon 33 is underway. Last weekend’s convention was the fifth the hotel has hosted, so the staff is used to the scene.

Throngs of costumed characters move through the hallways, navigating to panels and events. Two rooms in particular — besides the suite featuring free snacks and drinks — remain full: The board and tabletop gaming rooms feature tables, chairs, and a wall of board and card games available to attendees.

Kyle Wayne LaCroix sits with two other players organizing “Everyone is John,” a tabletop role-playing game that skews into the ridiculous. He has led the game the past three years at MidSouthCon. Each player acts like a voice in the head of a man named John, attempting to accomplish goals such as beating a world record for most jellybeans eaten or assassinating a mayor.

“It’s sort of competitive,” LaCroix said. “They bid to possess John and get him to do things. The skills are super esoteric, like ‘make string into interesting shapes’ or ‘quilting.’ Just generally useless things that the player makes up.”

Alexandra Pusateri

A MidSouthCon attendee.

MidSouthCon has reported an increase in its attendance numbers every year.

“I think there’s been a rise in deeper board games, but that feeling could be exaggerated by my ignorance of them until I started going to things like MidSouthCon,” LaCroix said. “It was just a place to experience it for the first time and have fun with it. I think cons like this and the internet are helping these sorts of things get more popular.”

Matthew Perry, a convention veteran of 15 years, organized a different type of game, one that thrusts players into a whodunit scenario. In “Ultimate Werewolf,” each player is a villager, but at night, some may be holding a secret. They could be witches or werewolves trying to kill off other villagers or impede them from figuring out who the killer werewolf is.

“The whole concept of the game is the paranoia aspect, proving if you are good and [capable of] keeping the village alive,” Perry said.

Perry’s game, which he has organized for eight MidSouthCons, had more than 48 players during his sessions — held just after midnight, perfect for a game like Ultimate Werewolf. Tabletop and board games at MidSouthCon, like Ultimate Werewolf, bring out a lot of players who may not have heard about them, but that’s a good thing, Perry said.

“Cons introduce new players into an environment where it’s user-friendly,” he said. “It brings in a lot of new blood, especially those who have never been to a con before. It really opens up that dialogue, and 95 percent of the time those people come back next year. And they remember the games they played. They start getting into it.”

Categories
News The Fly-By

New Handheld Speed Guns for MPD Proposed to City Council

In the midst of Tennessee legislators’ attempt to ban red-light and speeding cameras, a company wants to provide Memphis Police officers with handheld speed guns to help suppress accidents and fatalities.

Last Tuesday, St. Louis-based firm Automated Transportation Enforcement Solutions (ATES): Traffic Solutions presented a proposal to city council’s Public Safety Committee regarding its LIDAR speed guns.

The devices would allow Memphis Police Department (MPD) officers to use a speed detector boasting a laser, camera, and automated ticketing device. Officers would be able to shoot the license plates of speeding drivers — even in areas with heavily congested traffic — and store their information. This would lower the amount of drivers that officers have to pursue and manually issue a citation.

“I don’t see this as anything other than a public safety enhancement of the MPD,” said John Baine, vice president of marketing for ATES: Traffic Solutions. “It’s not impersonal, like a pole in the ground that says a metal mass is speeding. It gives the officers discretion and opportunity.”

If approved, the LIDAR guns would possibly be targeted for use in areas with high pedestrian activity, such as school zones, construction zones, and parks.

Before moving forward on the proposal, the city council plans on getting feedback from the MPD, specifically, whether they think the devices could help their public safety efforts.

Baine said the city would not be charged for the speed guns. Around 60 percent of proceeds from the speeding tickets would go to the city. The exact amount is uncertain.

The indeterminate split is something that didn’t sit well with Councilman Berlin Boyd.

“[We would be] depending on this company to pay the city a certain dollar amount that’s unknown,” Boyd said. “In business, there are certain things that you should come prepared for. If you’re making a presentation, people want to know cost, if there will be any ultimate gains or benefits, and how much money we will receive from the actual ticket.”

According to City Court Clerk Thomas Long’s office, since November 2009, red-light camera citations have produced more than $10.8 million in revenue. Of that amount, the city of Memphis received 40 percent.

Tennessee is one of several states where legislators have proposed bills to outlaw traffic cameras. A compromise version of the Tennessee Freedom From Traffic Cameras Act passed out of the Senate Transportation Committee last Wednesday. It’s tentatively slated for vote by the full Senate Thursday.

The bill would extend yellow signal times to six seconds at intersections with cameras. Speeding tickets would only be issued for driving 15 miles or more over the posted speed limit.

Senate Minority Leader Lee Harris, who is a co-sponsor of the bill, said red-light cameras cause more safety problems than they reduce.

Harris said he’s not opposed to city law enforcement receiving new handheld speed guns but thinks deploying more officers in the community is a better way to deal with public safety issues.

“If you want to promote more public safety on your street, hire more police officers,” Harris said. “I don’t have any problem with making sure our officers have all the tools available, including cameras, to do their job. The point is, let’s put it in the hands of police officers and not an out-of-state company whose legal duty is to make as much money as possible.”

Categories
News News Feature

One Man, One Vote

I must admit that there are times when President Barack Obama’s willingness to spontaneously comment on everything from his NCAA basketball tournament picks to his opinion about the antics of rapper Kanye West seems to dilute the stature of the highest elected office in the land.

But, last week in another “Obama Unplugged” session, the chief executive did provide valuable food for thought in advancing the idea of instituting mandatory voting as “a solution to the influence of big money on politics.” His remarks were inspired by his emotional trip to Selma, Alabama, in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the fateful march that became the catalyst for the eventual enactment of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The president noted: “It would be transformative if everybody voted.”

As you would expect in today’s sordid political climate, reactions to his idea dutifully formed along political lines. Among the most vacuous of responses was the one from Republican presidential hopeful, Marco Rubio, who alleged that a voter’s decision to skip an election is “a form of free speech protected by the First Amendment.”

Too bad Thomas Jefferson and the rest of the country’s founding fathers aren’t around to hear Rubio’s unique interpretation of their intentions. Then again, considering the pathetic 20 percent or less voter turnouts Memphis and Shelby County have been experiencing in recent elections, maybe the Floridian has a point. There’s certainly a lot of “free speech” being exercised in these parts.

Despite Rubio’s wind-in-the-willows opinion, mandatory voting is already a reality in many countries, including Australia, Brazil, and Mexico. Why couldn’t such a system work in the land of the free and the home of the brave?

In recent years, partisan voter-suppression laws have been instituted in various states under the guise of alleged voter fraud, few of which have ever been substantiated. While the majority of the general public agrees with requiring state photo voter IDs, younger and minority voters argue it’s a selective tool for discrimination. For older, mostly African-American voters, photo IDs are seen as an effort to turn back the clock to Jim Crow restrictions, such as those in Alabama, where potential black voters were once rejected at the polls because they failed to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar or the number of bubbles on a wet bar of soap.

Why not rid ourselves of all these often racist practices to deter minority voters by using taxpayer rolls. Older citizens who don’t have photo IDs would be able to vote based on the taxes they’ve paid. Those who’ve served in the military should be automatic qualifiers. Restrictions on ex-felons who served their time for crimes not related to voter infractions should also be loosened. If you have the desire to cast a ballot, it should be made as easy as possible to do so.

The alternative path is what we’re on right now: High-powered financial interests and lobbyists are dictating how our elections are decided. Those same factions are influencing the make up of state legislative bodies. Without having to identify themselves, they spend millions of dollars in campaign ads for their chosen candidates.

We’ll continue to watch voter interest fade. Local election commissions will continue to be forced to spend taxpayer money to stage elections with miniscule turnouts. Racial polarization will only grow as the vital tenets of the once celebrated Voting Rights Act are eroded by the United States Supreme Court, which recently overturned a 2013 decision favorable to previously unconstitutional voter ID practices in Texas.

We are on the precipice of losing our democracy and what was gained through blood and tears in places like Selma. Too many of us remain passive as our country slowly drifts away from the inspired concept of one man, one vote. Voting, historically the most transformative tool for change in America, must be protected.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Go Ape Zip Line & Treetop Adventure Course Fun for the Fainthearted

One thing was certain; I was not coming down.

My knees quivered. My stomach flipped. Fear rose in my throat. Did they have some kind of bucket truck that could lower me safely and comfortably to the forest floor? Nope. Even though I wanted to, I was not coming down, not like that.

Friday was media day at the brand new Go Ape Zip Line & Treetop Adventure course at Shelby Farms Park. It’s a beautiful overhead ropes course that blends perfectly into the forest around Pine Lake. I willingly signed up for media day and I was representing The Memphis Flyer. But, no, I was not coming down. 

I’d climbed a wet rope ladder and stood on a wet, wooden platform that ringed the tree trunk. My job, then, was to unhook two safety ropes (tipped with heavy, red and blue carabiners) that attached me to the rope ladder and hook them to a red safety line that attached me to the tree. My hands shook, clacking the carabiners loudly, embarrassingly. I wasn’t that high up, but I knew taller trees were coming, and I have a bad track record with heights.

To calm myself, I listened to the rain patter softly on the canopy. Then I looked down and remembered Texas. A decade ago, I collapsed while high inside the dome of the Texas State Capitol building. I got close to the fourth-floor overlook and my legs quivered, stopped working, and I just sat down. 

Then I came back to the present and looked down at the grinning faces of Go Ape staffers and other media types. Suddenly, the native machismo of my rural Southern upbringing took over. No, I was not coming down, by god, not like that. I took a deep breath, gritted my teeth, and wobbled across a one-foot beam suspended between two trees. Then I attached myself to the zip line, and sailed about 20 feet, scooting to a stop on a ramp of soft mulch. Alright, that was fun. 

Station two (there are six) required climbing a 40-foot ladder up a tree. At that height, remembering to attach my safety lines came easy. I waddled around another treetop platform, clipped on to a dangling rope, lowered the weight of my beer-and-fried-chicken-loving body onto it, and swung Tarzan-style to a net ladder 40 feet away. As I climbed the ladder up and over to the next tree, I wished I had done more push-ups in the past two years. Or one.

I stared at the path of the next zip line — right over the smooth waters of Pine Lake. I clipped in, now trusting myself and the equipment, and let fly. Cool air whipped around my face. The cable buzzed and whined as I sailed across the quiet lake. 

From somewhere deep inside came a long and involuntarily whoop of joy. At the ramp, I spurred the mulch landing strip and came to rest with a thud. Breathing heavily, the only words I could think of were “holy shit.”

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Jimmy Dean at TheatreWorks

Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean wasn’t on director Marler Stone’s to-do list. The popular Memphis-area actor and director wanted to try his hand with Enemy of the People, Henrik Ibsen’s jaundiced drama about corruption in a spa town whose entire economy is threatened by a contaminated water supply. Stone took his ambitious plan to the New Moon Theatre Company, thinking it would be a perfect fit for the TheatreWorks-based troupe well known for embracing difficult material and breathing new life into neglected classics. But New Moon likes to surprise, and things didn’t turn out quite the way Stone had planned.

“The board had elected to do Jimmy Dean,” he says, admitting he wasn’t all that familiar with Ed Graczyk’s 1976 melodrama about the Disciples of James Dean, an all-girl fan club hopelessly devoted to the Rebel Without a Cause actor. “At first, I told the cast this was a heavy drama and we wouldn’t be holding for laughs. Last week, I told them we’d be holding for laughs,” Stone says, allowing that he’s developed an appreciation for the humor and an affection for the play, originally staged on Broadway by filmmaker Robert Altman, who went on to make the 1982 film version.

Hoping to better understand the script, Stone contacted Graczyk, who related a story about the time he visited Marfa, Texas, where James Dean shot his last film, Giant. There the playwright saw the decaying remains of the set. Shortly thereafter, the play’s title came to him fully formed in a dream.

“We’re going to be doing the play exactly the way he wants it done,” says Stone, who would have had a much harder time bonding with Ibsen who died in 1906.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Benefits for Joyce Cobb and Bobby Memphis

Everybody loves Joyce Cobb, the Memphis jazz singer, WEVL DJ, and sometime actress who was recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Cobb’s longtime bandmate, multi-instrumentalist Hank Sable is ready to take that love to the next level. “I’ll tell you what I think,” he says. “I think Memphis would be better off if we made Joyce mayor of the city. She represents the best of who we are. When she sings there’s no black or white or anything else.”

Joyce Cobb

Sable, who’s played violin and guitar with Cobb’s band for 10 years, is just one of the many artists scheduled to perform at a benefit show at Boscos Squared on Sunday, March 29th. The event will include an open bar and food, a silent auction, and music performed by the Stax Academy, members of Cobb’s band past and present, and a long list of friends and musical collaborators.

And, even if you’re not a Memphis music aficionado, chances are you’ve seen Bobby Memphis (aka Bobby Jordan). Long before there were bike lanes in Memphis, Jordan, a cycling enthusiast who’s played bass and sung with bands like the Mudflaps and the Great Indoorsmen, could be seen pushing pedals all over town. Jordan was hospitalized after suffering a heart infection that lead to a stroke, and benefits have been scheduled in both Memphis and Nashville.

The Memphis benefit is Monday, March 30th, at Lafayette’s Music Room featuring performances by Amy LaVere and Will Sexton, Susan Marshall, the Bluff City Backsliders, and Papa Tops West Coast Turnaround. The show starts at 6 p.m. There is no cover charge, but donations are being accepted.

Categories
Music Music Features

Every Time I Die Live at the Hi-Tone

It might seem like you picked up a copy of the Flyer from 2004, but Every Time I Die really is playing the Hi-Tone next Monday. The metal core band from Buffalo, New York, started playing in 1998 and made it to Warped Tour-size success after 2001’s Hot Damn! And 2005’s Gutter Phenomenon. Every Time I Die were torchbearers of mid-2000s metal core, alongside bands like Norma Jean, Atreyu, and Evergreen Terrace.

When metal core took the country by storm, Memphis was no exception, and hundreds of kids spilled out of the suburbs and into venues like the Skate Park of Memphis, The Caravan, and The Riot to support the bands coming through town. While it might not have been the coolest chapter in Memphis music history, the metal core scene in Memphis was huge, with multiple promoters and venues building a strong foundation to make Memphis one of the premier places for groups of guys in questionably tight pants to come play.

Every Time I Die

When the Memphis metal core scene was at its peak, locals So She Sang and Nights Like These got dibs on all the good shows. Nights Like These would later go on to sign to major indie label Victory Records and release two acclaimed albums, a testament to the strength of the scene they came from. So She Sang has reappeared for a live show now and again, but the band has mainly been a recording project for the past few years. The band posted a new song on the internet in February, but then announced that this show will be their last. The show is all ages, and starts early, so plan accordingly.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant (March 26, 2015)

CREDIT: Reuters | Lee Celano

Reuters | Lee Celano

Robert Durst

HBO struck gold with the six-part documentary, The Jinx:
The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst. Especially during the jaw-dropping finale, when the alleged triple-murderer was heard off-camera, muttering to himself into a hot microphone what sounded like a confession. Durst’s arrest the day after the show’s finale created such white-hot news coverage that I don’t think I’d be revealing any secrets to offer a short synopsis. Durst is the estranged heir to one of the richest real-estate firms in New York, which manages 1 World Trade Center, among other high-rent properties. His personal wealth is estimated at $100 million. In 1982, Durst’s first wife disappeared and her body was never found. Though suspected of murder, Durst remained free until the investigation was reopened in 2000.

The day before Durst’s closest confidant was to be interviewed about the case by prosecutors in Los Angeles, she was found murdered execution-style in her home. Fleeing to Galveston, Texas, Durst rented a $300-a-month room and disguised himself as a mute woman.

In 2001, Durst was arrested for killing his 71-year-old neighbor and dismembering the corpse, which he placed in several garbage bags and scattered in Galveston Bay. Celebrity attorney Dick DeGuerin, who not-so-successfully represented David Koresh during the Waco standoff, admitted that Durst cut up the body, but said that it was postmortem, after a struggle over a gun. The jury decided that Durst acted in self-defense when the gun went off, so the slicing and dicing was moot, and he got off. They never found the head.

Durst agreed to take part in hours of interviews with filmmaker Andrew Jarecki, ostensibly to deflect blame and set the record straight. In the series’ final episode, after being confronted with damning evidence, Durst retired to the men’s room, forgetting he was still wearing a live microphone and said, “There it is. I’m caught. What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.” The day after the final episode aired, Durst was arrested in a New Orleans hotel with $40,000 in cash, a loaded revolver, his passport and original birth certificate, an over-the-head latex mask, and five ounces of pot.

He will most assuredly be arraigned in Los Angeles for murder, so if you enjoyed the documentary, just wait until the trial. Some of the greatest entertainment L.A. produces comes from their live broadcasts of criminal trials. Look at what they’ve given us over the years: O.J. Simpson, the Menendez brothers, the cops who beat Rodney King, Phil Spector, and Dr. Conrad Murray. But the Robert Durst show will be the trial of this early century. This will be too salacious not to televise.

HBO’s ratings were far too good not to continue this series. We know that we live in a violent country and that there are killers who walk among us — some of them mass murderers. The Durst case took over three decades to unravel, which proves that justice is sometimes late in arriving, but you never know when it will come knocking at your door.

The authorities already know the identities of some others who have committed terrible atrocities, and yet they walk free. Their names are Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Rice, and Tenet. They met in secrecy, concocting a story to sell to the American people about why the Iraq War was absolutely necessary on the pretense of weapons of mass destruction, a term of their own invention.

They invaded and occupied a nation that had not harmed us, then sent over the U.S. Viceroy, “Jerry” Bremer, who disbanded the Iraqi army and barred former members of Saddam’s political party from government, thus throwing hundreds of thousands of men out of work. These two dumbass decisions led directly to insurgency, chaos, sectarian civil war, and the birth of ISIS. The cost of the Iraq War is immeasurable in both dollars and human lives. So where are all the warmongers now? They’re all wealthy and serve on corporate boards and think tanks. Some are professors at prestigious universities. Bremer lives in Vermont, painting rural landscapes while dabbling in French cuisine. Cheney made a fortune in “blind trust” stocks from no-bid contracts to Halliburton and its subsidiaries. The rest advise the current Republican Party. No one but Cheney’s flunky, Scooter Libby, ever faced criminal charges concerning the war, but rumblings about legal recourse have been growing louder across the globe.

In 2012, the Malaysian War Crimes Tribunal convicted Bush, Cheney, and six others in absentia for war crimes. Torture victims told of mistreatment by U.S. soldiers and contractors who used some of the same practices that Japanese were executed for after WWII. Transcripts of the trial were sent to the International Criminal Court, which may never act, but the Durst case proved there’s no statute of limitations on atrocities.

Then, when justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream, I know of a cozy, tropical prison down in Cuba that’s just perfect for detaining war criminals. Imagine the ratings if they televised that trial.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Guess What? Insure Tennessee is Back and on a Roll

Rep. Larry Miller, House Sponsor of Insure Tennessee revival

Who’d a’ thunk it? Governor Bill Haslam’s Insure Tennessee proposal for accepting federal Medicaid expansion funding under the Affordable Care Act, theoretically buried in February by an adverse vote on an ad hoc state Senate committee, has risen, Lazarus-like, and is up and moving again.

Senate Joint Resolution 93, substantially the same measure that was voted down 7-4 in a special session by a specially constituted Health and Welfare Committee (and mothballed thereafter, apparently for good) has passed two hurdles this week on its way back to consideration.

On Monday, a Senate Health and Welfare subcommittee on TennCare approved the measure, which contained some relatively minor tweaks, by a 3-2 vote, and on Wednesday, the regular Senate Health Committee voted for the resolution 6-2. Tellingly, perhaps, one of the Aye votes this time came from Senator Rusty Crowe (R-Johnson City), who had voted no on it during the abortive special session.

“The vote shows that there is a growing sentiment in favor of Insure Tennessee here in the legislature, and if we break through a few procedural hurdles, we will be in a position to do something that polls show the people of Tennessee want,” Senator Jeff Yarbro (D-Nashville) told the Flyer Wednesday night.

Yarbro is a prime sponsor of SJR 93, along with Republican Senators Doug Overbey (R-Maryville) and Richard Briggs (R-Knoxville).

Meanwhile, over in the House, Rep. Larry Miller (D-Memphis) put the House version of the measure, HJR 90 on notice in the Insurance and Banking Subcommittee but had it rolled (deferred) to next week, pending further action in the Senate. Miller took his action before he learned of the Senate Health Committee’s 6-2 vote. Upon learning of it, he professed to be all the more optimistic that Insure Tennessee has new life.

SJR 93 is due for consideration next week by the Senate Commerce and Labor Committee, where it will face the strictest test since its sudden and unexpected revival this week. That committee is chaired by Senator Jack Johnson (R-Franklin), one of the Senate’s most conservative members, and there are more than a few other Republican hardliners on it who would not be expected to favor a measure that can be associated with Obamacare, the GOP’s word for the Affordable Care Act.

Even should the measure receive a negative committee vote there, however, proponents of Insure Tennessee are beginning to question whether a resolution, as against a bill outright, can actually be derailed by a single committee vote, and are wondering out loud if a bill passed last year requiring legislative approval of Medicaid expansion actually applies prohibitively to an executive action by the Governor.