In 2008 Brack Obama was elected president with almost 53% of the popular vote in an election with such a huge turnout (56.8%) that he won with “the most votes for a presidential candidate in American history.” He ran promising to fix our broken health care system.

In the fall of 2010 Republicans recaptured the House of representatives in an election in which 42% of the population turned out. The percentage of Americans voting for Republicans was, obviously, south of that 42%. Not much of a mandate for Republicans really.  

The GOP spent the last two years fighting health care reform tooth and nail, conducting a full-court press propaganda blitz, misrepresenting it in countless ways, and often lying about it outright – remember death panels? In spite of the media noise they generated, just recently, when Americans were polled about their perceptions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and were offered a full range of options so that those who disapprove of it were allowed to specify whether they do so because it doesn’t go far enough or because it does too much, only around 26% wanted it repealed.

Nevertheless, today the GOP-controlled House will vote to repeal the ACA. The repeal vote will go nowhere; it is a largely symbolic gesture meant to generate even more media smoke, but it will no doubt be followed by numerous efforts to chip away and nullify the essence of the ACA or defund it. The propaganda will continue. The only sure thing is that any changes that the GOP will attempt to enact will benefit the bottom line of their clients in the insurance industry in one way or another.

Eager to get in on the show, Missouri lawmakers yesterday held hearings on SR 27, a non-binding resolution calling on Attorney General Koster to join a frivolous lawsuit filed against the ACA by the Attorneys General of several other states. In spite of the 60 or so citizens who traveled to the capitol to testify in favor of the ACA, the nonbinding resolution passed out of the the Rules, Joint Rules, Resolutions and Ethics Committee by a 5-2 vote. Yay, Missouri. Once again our Republican-controlled legislature plays to the peanut gallery.  

As I contemplate this madness, I can’t help thinking about a woman I met at a a large, rambunctuous Tea Party meeting with one of Claire McCaskill’s staffers. The meeting had been organized by officials of Americans for Prosperity (AFP) to discuss the then incipient health care reform. She was one of the less shrill attendees, most of whom were shouting, hooting and waving their Gadsden flags or sporting overtly racialized, comic Obama posters throughout much of the meeting.

This woman carried a poster thanking her insurance company for the survival of her twin daughters who were also in attendance. She was friendly and open and when I complimented her on her daughters’ charming, matching outfits, she told me their story. They had survived serious birth complications because of excellent medical care made possible by the great insurance that her husband’s employer provided. She was attending the meeting because she feared that the heath care reform would destroy her access to that insurance. I wonder today if she is feeling all smug and full of achievement pleased when she reads about the efforts of our elected representatives to undo the ACA that she so vociferously opposed in the name of her “wonderful” insurance.  

I also thought of her late last fall as I went through the annual process of reconfirming the choice of insurance plan that my husband’s employer provides for us. When we came to St. Louis in 2002, we found that the level of insurance that we had come to take for granted was not on offer, although the plans were still more or less adequate. Over the past few years, though, that level of adequacy has started to erode. Co-pays on all plans have risen drastically, at one point vision coverage was withdrawn and then reinstated, and the amount that the insurance company will actually pay for ostensibly fully covered procedures has dwindled so that I am left completing payment (to “in-network” doctors, no less). This is not an isolated phenomenon; I have learned from former colleagues that my old employer is also cutting health benefits back in the same way.

Nor is this niggling retrenchment leading to efficient, economical care. To give you just one example, in the past, I have opted for physical therapy in place of expensive testing and surgery for back and other joint problems. I have found it to be an excellent alternative which is actually also much less costly than other approaches. This year when, after some minor surgery, my doctor recommended a fairly intense course of physical therapy, I had to refuse it because the hefty co-pays that had been newly instituted would have been prohibitive given the number of sessions the therapist thought I needed. In the past, my insurance paid in full for up to ten weeks of physical therapy. As a consequence of this change, meant to discourage frills and cut costs for my husband’s employer I am sure, I will not be requesting physical therapy as my first line of attack in the future – regardless of the fact that it would actually cost the insurance company less than other fully covered procedures.

I wonder how long my Tea Party mother and her family will enjoy the excellent insurance coverage that inspired her loyalty? Because the types of changes that I have experienced are on the way for most of us and will probably become more extreme if health care costs continue their vertiginous trajectory. And in spite of what some claim, they were well underway long before “Obamacare” was even thought of. The number of uninsured increased by 2.5 million in 2009. Just a few weeks ago, we learned that former Post-Dispatch employees who had taken early retirement buyouts were having the health care benefits they had been promised yanked away; such stories are becoming less and less uncommon (see, for instance, here and here).

This escalating erosion of our access to good health care is what we face if the GOP manages to return us to the former status quo, or, worse, amend the ACA to feed what Matthew Iglesias argues is already heavily subsidized “free market health care.” And yet the show goes on. Pragmatic responses to our problems are met with ideological catch-phrases and seriously misapplied labels – “socialistic” comes to mind. I am afraid that I think that Ezra Klein is perhaps somewhat naive when, speaking of the repeal effort, he says*:

I hope this is just a temporary partisan reaction to the specter of a major victory for President Obama and not a view into what the GOP does when faced with a problem where the solutio
ns don’t neatly fit their worldview.

These fools are long past the simple tantrums they threw when they lost their big showdown with the socialistic leftists who foisted this centrist, Republican-lite health care reform on us.

*Sentence ending revised somewhat for clarity.

When I moved to St. Louis, Jim Talent was still in the Senate. He seemed to be a prototypically white-bread, nice Republican boy, who went along with whatever the Bush administration required of him. He certainly didn’t seem to be particularly profound – which is why I’m so amazed to hear Missouri conservatives speak of him as an “intellectual powerhouse” – although perhaps that’s not so remarkable in a state that can send people like Vicky Hartzler and Billy Long to Washington. He did, after all, do time as a Fellow at The Heritage institute where they do make some pretense of having standards, and he’s certainly capable of stringing a couple of coherent thoughts together.

But perhaps I was misled by Talent’s bland persona. Perhaps he does have at least some sort of intellectual integrity capacity. The reason I say this is because of something I read in David Catanese’s column in Politico in which he speculates that Talent is backing away from Missouri’s 2012 Senatorial contest. Among the possible reasons he posits for Talent’s lack of enthusiasm for the race is the following (emphasis added):

It’s not that he doesn’t believe he couldn’t best Steelman in a primary — it’s whether taking up a bruising intra-party fight before a rough-and-tumble general election with Sen. Claire McCaskill would be worth the time, energy and resources.

“The primary bothers him. He saw how broke and battered [Kenny] Hulshof was in August and he doesn’t want to be forced to take positions out of the mainstream,” said another Missouri source who has had conversations with those close to Talent.

Does being forced to take positions out of the mainstream perhaps mean being forced to kowtow to obstreperous, intellectually vapid Tea Partiers – something that  Sarah Steelman, who is agressively campaigning for the nomination, seems more than willing to do? Does this intellectual powerhouse maybe see the Tea Party as a lose-lose proposition? First you lose your integrity, then you lose the general election.

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D) was shot point blank during a constituent meeting at a Safeway grocery store in Tucson, Arizona today. 40 year-old Giffords is Arizona’s first Jewish Congresswomen, and reports have been unclear as to whether she has expired, or is still undergoing surgery. This is a national tragedy and unprecedented as there has only been one member of Congress killed in the line of duty, Rep. Leo Ryan during the Jonestown mass-suicide and massacre in 1978.

As the details emerge from what was clearly a horrific scene in Tucson with many wounded, some interesting aspects regarding her most recent political opponent have surfaced.

Jane Hamsher, of FireDogLake blog wrote:

Giffords’ 2010 Congressional opponent Jesse Kelly held a June 12 gun event that was billed as follows on the Pima County Republican website:

“Get on Target for Victory in November Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office, Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly”

Like some other staunch tea party activists (Sarah Palin put a bulls-eye “logo” right on Giffords during the 2010 campaign), candidate Kelly utilized colorful political metaphors, like, “Get on Target…remove Gabrielle Giffords…shoot a fully automatic M16” — many cognitive linguists will tell you that connecting these words with the emotional intent to defeat, ruin, or destroy a political opponent can result in effectively communicating a violent call to arms.

As Drew Westen explains in his seminal work, “The Political Brain”,

“…when data clashed with desire, the political brain would somehow “reason” its way to the desired conclusions…Our hunch was that what passes for reasoning in politics is more often rationalization, motivated by efforts to reason to emotionally satisfying conclusions.”

In other words, people will morph, mangle, and manipulate sound data or facts right in front of their eyes, in order to reach the emotional high of “being right”.

With a fervor whipped up in a particular borderline individual, they might just as well transform candidate Jesse Kelly’s “M16 target shooting” message into something far more macabre.

This is why it is absolutely essential for candidates, elected officials, corporate officers — anyone in positions of leadership — to be absolutely resolute in communicating responsibly, and not playing upon the potentially fragile emotions of certain people in their audience.

My prayers are with Gabrielle, her NASA astronaut husband, Mark Kelly, and the rest of her family and friends.

Ann Wagner, who is running to replace Michael Steele as the  Chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC), just finished a successful stint as Roy Blunt’s campaign manager. As Hotflash noted in a comment to a blog post here at SMP, she has the gift of sounding mild and rational while speaking for a party that is rushing to walk on the wild side. Certainly, under her leadership, the Blunt campaign negotiated the Tea Party shoals while never abandoning the GOP corporate crew whose interests Blunt seems to put first and foremost.

The upcoming campaign for the RNC Chair could pose a serious challenge to her skills, however. In this context, I was struck by a comment Slate‘s David Weigel made about the benefits of his attendance at a FreedomWorks-Republican Conservative Caucus forum for RNC chair candidates:

As a way of seeing just how successful the Tea Party’s capture of the GOP has been, it was very useful. And it was even better as a gauge of how smart Republicans have become at 1) figuring that out and 2) figuring out what Tea Partiers want to hear.

Wagner already seems to be trying her best to exercise tact. In response to claims at the forum that the GOP owes it’s Nov. 2 victories to the Tea Party, she cautiously observed that “we have to reflect the true, independent nature of these Tea Parties that are out there.” Bunkum, but important bunkum for someone who wants to keep the squalling baby placated while they throw out the foul bathwater.  

I expect that Wagner’s performance will offer many such moments of rarefied amusement for those of us who appreciate a nuanced delivery. The GOP, after all, now has to cater to a chorus of crazies who, encouraged by the purposely vague Tea Party rhetoric, have crawled out of the woodwork where they have  hidden since the late 1950s.

Just this week, Judson Phillips, president of the Tea Party Nation, declared that voting should be restricted to property owners only. I know that these delusional fools think they have a private line to the Founders, but it will be incumbent on the likes of Wagner to steer them gently when they get their 18th century lines this badly crossed – which she just may be able to do. She did after all, get many of the  “we-the-people” contingent to toady for Roy Blunt in spite of the fact that he delivered some of his Tea Party friendly lines with all the conviction of a confirmed drunk at a prohibition rally.

According to FiredUp! Missouri:

The Missouri Baptist Convention’s Pathway editor Don Hinkle has [sic] appears to have thrown his support behind Jim Talent in a prospective GOP Senate primary, calling him “an intellectual powerhouse…regarded favorably by many Tea Partiers.”

Let’s see … an intellectual powerhouse regarded favorably by Tea Partiers? The juxtaposition of concepts may make my brain implode. Although, to be fair, I don’t doubt that Talent might be liked by the Teaple.  

According to the Washington Post, Carl Rove’s American Crossroads paid $4,120,921 to help buy Roy Blunt’s Senate seat. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, by comparison, pumped a measly $1,110,461 into Missouri to help their pal Roy. Nothing like buying a known commodity, I guess.

Of course Blunt also owes the Koch brothers a big debt; if their AFP hadn’t fanned the Tea Party bonfires, it would have been much rougher going. From one point of view, Blunt’s race was the proof of the pudding when it comes to the preferred way to use the Tea Party. Actual Tea Party candidates who won their primaries mostly crashed and burned (think Christine O’Donnell, Sharon Angle and Joe Miller), proving that there is actually a limit on how many Americans will tolerate pure stupidity; but the cadres did make excellent foot soldiers for the good ol’ boys of the corporate GOP and helped to create the required media narrative.

Addendum:  I forgot to add our own Ed Martin’s name to the list of defeated Tea Party candidates – perhaps because he always struck me as a more of a political opportunist using the Tea Party for camouflage than the real thing.  He not only crashed and burned, but he seems determined to make a total ass out of himself now that the damage is done.

Several commentators have recently remarked on the irony of Tea Partiers’ ostentatious flaunting of the Constitution at the same time that when they get down to specifics they and their congressional surrogates are more likely to want to trash the constitution than to preserve it. In order to construct a constitution more to their liking, various fringewing GOPers have proposed more than 42 constitutional amendments, not to mention extensive tinkering with existing amendments. They have proposed repealing the 17th Amendment (they prefer to have Senators appointed by state legislatures rather than stand for election); the 16th Amendment (which provides for direct taxation of income); “restoring” the 13th Amendment (the changes to the original Amendment were made to ban slavery); and changing parts of the 14th Amendment that permit definitions of citizenship that are worrisome for the anti-immigrant GOP.

In regard to the 14th Amendment specifically, Missourians worried about the hordes “swarming across our border,” in the words of Nevada Tea Partier Sharon Angle, in order to have “anchor babies,” will be happy to know that, according to analyses performed by the folks at ThinkProgress, almost all of our Missouri GOP House delegation have supported changes which would eliminate a guarantee of citizenship for individuals born in the U.S.  

Roy Blunt (R-07), Sam Graves (R-05), Todd Akin (R-02), Jo-Ann Emerson (R-08) are among the 130 Reublicans who support changes in the 14th Amendment.  If the GOP retakes the House they may actually get their way:  

Ending birthright citizenship is no idle belief in the GOP caucus. Rather, Republicans have been pushing this idea for nearly two decades, introducing 28 separate bills to eliminate birthright citizenship since 1995.

The people to whom our Missouri GOPers are pandering are the same people who welcomed the Obama presidency by stockpiling weapons in order to defend their hallowed 2nd amendment rights, though that poorly worded Amendment – or its current interpretation – may be the only part of the Constitution that they do respect. (The 10th Amendment and a few other sections might seem to enjoy the same status, but only if the Tea Party is allowed to interpret them according to their druthers, the possibility of which is still open to question.)

The other interesting fact about this near-universal support to prevent “anchor babies” from being conceived, is that these Missourians are willing to tinker with the constitution to fix a problem that doesn’t really exist. According to an article on RealClearPolitics:

… Pregnant Mexican women from border towns do commonly cross just to have a baby in the U.S. But their extended families have often straddled the border for a century or more. The women tend to be middle class, pre-pay the hospitals in cash and go home, though their children can someday return.  

A handful of tourists do the same, but the total of all these is minuscule. Significant are the 4 million children in 2008 with one or more unauthorized immigrant parents spread throughout the country, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Repeated studies, however, show that their parents came for jobs or to join family. The children were normal byproducts of life, and not an immigration strategy. The parents are not eligible for welfare or for citizenship until after the child turns 21.

Yesterday, in an NPR interview, retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor promoted an interactive Website, iCivics. Although it is intended as a tool to educate middle school students about government, it’s still worth a moment of time from those of us who left middle school many years ago.  

iCivics was developed, O’Connor says, because “few states make civics and government a requirement anymore.”  I can think of another big reason that tools like iCivics are sorely needed: The Tea Party. Consider the following:

— The Salem Missouri Tea Party Webpage identifies Tea partiers as, among other things, citizens who:

… believe in smaller government, & responsible government. We support the American Dream, & believe in upholding the Ideals as set forth in the Constitution of the United States of America.

— At one of the first local St. Louis appearances of the Tea Party, an AFP-brokered meeting between a representative of Senator Claire McCaskill and several hundred Tea Partiers, a young man who grandiloquently attacked health care on constitutional grounds was the biggest hit of the evening with the rambunctious crowd.  

Emphasis on the constitution is a common theme with Tea Partiers, although one suspects that few of those cheering when the constitution is rhetorically flourished, know much more about the document than, as we recently learned, many avowed Christians know about the teachings of their own churches. Stanford Law School’s Larry Krammer contends that the Tea Party understanding of the Constitution often tends toward “some loose, ill-informed version of originalism.”

One could argue that the Tea Partiers’ constitution also carries the burden of their anxiety and resentment in the face of social change. An NPR report on the subject observed that:

Tea Party members are often vague about exactly how their constitutional rights are being denied. But they all believe the federal government has expanded far beyond what the Constitution intended.

The same report later asserts that though Tea Party “constitutional arguments may sound abstract, they are grounded in something visceral,” and quotes a Columbia Law Professor whose polls of Tea Party supporters leads him to conclude more specifically that:

A lot of this taps into people’s objections to Obama personally – you know, we’ve had all kinds of constitutional arguments that have been raised against Obama,” he says, “whether you’re pointing to the birther movement, for example, or constitutional objections to individual policies.

The upshot of all this commotion is simply that the Constitution is our newest bone of contention. A retrograde political element is trying to appropriate the document to assuage their social angst, and if progressives want to hold the line against their encroachments, they need tools like those the iCivics Project provides. If we don’t want people jerking their knees in time to canned Tea Party (or any other party) noise about the constitution or any other government topic, we are responsible to see that they get sufficient information – and preferably from sources a little more unbiased than the Glenn Becks of fringedom who are rushing in to fill the vacuum we have allowed to develop.

The three reasons:  the Missouri Tea Party, Phyllis Schlafly and Joe the Plumber. I don’t normally advocate arguments based on an appeal to authority, but in this case the temptation to argue negatively based on an appeal to (anti?) authority is just too strong. Doesn’t the fact that the Tea Party, Phyllis Schlafly and Joe the Plumber have jumped into the fray against the “Puppy Mill Cruelty Prevention Act” (Proposition B) make you want to run out and vote for it immediately?

Animal cruelty is not a liberal or conservative issue per se. Many good, conservative Republicans in my neighborhood signed the petition to get Prop. B on the ballot. However, the anti-Prop. B lobbying efforts on the part of the Tea Party and the two media personalities is more or less predictable. The Tea Party, for instance, seems so worked up that a new group in Mexico, Mo. will devote it’s first meeting to figuring out how they can fight Prop. B. One can only imagine what frothing displays we will be gifted  with if they manage to get their bad-tempered act together.

The Tea Party involvement is easy to explain. The organization formed to fight Prop B, the misnamed Alliance for Truth (they claim that anti-animal cruelty activists “don’t like animals”), for lack of a better tack, is pushing all kinds of far-fetched conspiracy stories – catnip for Tea Party paranoia.

The Alliance has managed to distort the simple and straightforward provisions of Prop. 6 into a “radical” plot that reaches into (where else?) the White House. According to Alliance for Truth spokesperson, Anita Andrews, the main instigator of this plot is the Humane Society of the Unitd States (HSUS) which:

… seeks only to raise the cost of breeding dogs, making it ever-more difficult for middle-class American families to be dog-owners.”

[…]

Andrews  also explained that Cass Sunstein, “one of the biggest animal rights activists,” and President Obama’s Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, is tied to the Humane Society, and is helping them give Obama “a punch list” of the animals rights activists’ agenda.

It would take its own separate post to go into all that’s wrong with this little gem.

The involvement of Joe the Plumber requires no explanation beyond the fact that taking up the fight against Prop. B offers one more avenue for expanding his fifteen minutes of fame. This explanation also helps us understand his incoherent, over-the-top statement on the Alliance for Truth site, which proclaims Prop. B proponents to be:

…cowardly hiding behind animal cruelty, lying to our citizens and taking our constitutional rights away – one state at a time.

Ahhh! The constitutional right to be cruel abuse animals! I knew there had to be a constitutional issue in there somewhere. Since Prop B doesn’t involve the federal government, but simply a state deciding for itself about whether or not it wants to allow longstanding abuses to continue, the constitutional card loses some of the old Tea Party punch. But never fear, it does its job with the target audience; all you have to do is repeat the word “constitutional” enough and they end up drooling on the rug.

Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, of course, opposes government regulation on principle. The weakness of this position in cases like that of Missouri’s scandalous puppy mill industry is revealed by her tactics.  Instead of principled arguments about regulation, even poor, old, hardline Phyllis is reduced to advocating conspiracy theories to make her opposition to anti-cruelty legislation palatable:

HSUS has attacked modern livestock production practices in several other states and, while the first battle in Missouri is targeted to dog breeders, this is the precursor to subsequent fight involving our Missouri farm families

Can’t these bozos get it through their heads that this legislation deals exclusively with dog breeders, and that it has been proposed because the puppy mill industry has been a blight on Missouri’s reputation for years? Any legislation, for good or ill, directed at other livestock will have to be passed or defeated on its own terms.

Read the provisions of Prop.B yourself. They are straightforward and describe minimal improvements in the welfare of dogs used for large-scale breeding purposes. TPM quotes Humane Society spokesperson Michael Markarian who summarizes Prop. B  as follows:

This measure would provide common sense standards for the care of dogs,” he told TPM, including sufficient food and clean water, vet care, regular exercise, and adequate rest between breeding cycles, among other things. Markarian said the measure only applies to “commercial dog breeding facilities” that have more than 10 breeding females who they use for “producing puppies for the pet trade.

If conforming to these very basic requirements would bankrupt a breeder, as some have argued, then that breeder should not be in the business in the first place. We don’t condone forced child labor because paying adults a living wage would bankrupt the manufacturer – do we?

It should tell us something when the opponents of proposed legislation resort to manufacturing non-existent conspiracies, imagining impossible constitutional encroachments, and projecting their own dishonest agendas on a clear-as-water initiative. The “slippery slope” argument that gets them so worked up has always been a loser that has hurt “us” more than “them.” In this case it will only serve to perpetuate unnecessary animal suffering.

Tea Party photo by Sage Ross from Wikimedia Commons; Joe the Plumber photo from Wikimedia Commons.