Last week  Rep. Roy Blunt, in his role as a member of the Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, which has oversight of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), stood up for the interests of the big communications giants like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T – but to hear him tell it in his press release, he is going to the wall to fight against the “government takeover of the Internet”:

Just like last fall, this federal agency [i.e., the FCC] is trying to side-step our elected representatives in Congress. Once again, this unelected bureaucracy is ruling on an issue that will have a huge impact on the economy and the free flow of information throughout Missouri and across the country. Missourians don’t want more federal regulation of the Internet, they want transparency and freedom to innovate.

What Blunt is talking about is the move by the FCC Chairman, Julius Genachowski, to blunt the effect of the recent Appeals Court ruling, Comcast v. FCC , which found that the FCC lacked the authority to regulate broadband access as long as it is classified as an information service. The FCC does, however, have the authority to reclassify broadband access services as telecommunications services which it can legally regulate, and which Chairman Genachowski has decided to do, although in a very limited fashion.

This relatively narrow exercise of its authority will, nevertheless, permit the FCC to insure basic privacy for Internet users; require that Internet Service providers (ISPs) cannot discriminate in providing access to content that they dislike (such as political blogs, for instance); and require transparency from ISPs about the services they provide and their costs. It will also clear away obstacles that stood in the way of President Obama’s critical National Broadband Plan. Consequently, those of us who think that the Internet is too important to freedom of expression to be turned over to greedy telecoms who are only concerned abut their bottom line are delighted with this turn of events.

That Roy Blunt has chosen to characterize an unexceptional exercise of the FCC’s allocated powers as a “big-government” power grab on the part of an “unelected” official is proof enough that he and the corporate honchos who pay him have no real arguments against net neutrality. But never fear, the use of emotionally loaded doublespeak has worked well with the always volatile members of Blunt’s constituency – I doubt that we will find him worrying overmuch about the accuracy and truthfulness of his rhetoric anytime soon. How else could a man whose record of corruption led Public Citizen’s Congress Watch to to label him “unfit to lead” now try to pass himself off as a defender of the little guy?  

In spite of Chairman Genachowski’s recent announcement, the debate is not yet over. Corporate proxies like Blunt will do their best to spread industry misrepresentations while posturing as high-minded saviors of the Internet. I can assure you that Blunt’s press release was only one of the opening salvos. So, if you are not clear about what’s at stake, take a look at this video that briefly explains basic Net Neutrality:

Upon learning of Justice Steven’s upcoming retirement, Roy Blunt couldn’t wait to be the first little GOPer on the block to twitter about his fear of the big, bad activist judges who harbor a secret yearning to usurp legislative prerogatives:

Justice Stevens is retiring. Obama should nominate a judge who won’t legislate from the bench and will interpret the Constitution strictly.

So what exactly does “strict construction” of the Constitution mean to Blunt and others speakers of the special GOP lingo?  

Perhaps strict constructionism entailed using that dandy little tool, the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, to protect George W. Bush from the will of Florida voters?

Or perhaps the Roberts court was engaging in strict constructionism when it decided to use the Citizens United case to overturn decades of established precedent, and undo carefully crafted legislation in order to give reliably GOP-friendly corporations a new constitutional right to use their billions to influence electoral politics?

Could of fooled me both times – and a whole caboodle of legal experts as well.

So maybe what we learn here is that for Republicans who relearned English at Frank Luntz’ knee, strict constructionism is really just judicial activism that the GOP likes?

Rep. Todd Akin (R-2nd) reacted to the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) with predictable bile. He also tried to dredge up some some stale GOP health care hash, twittering on the eve of its passage:

Did you know that the healthcare bill included a marriage penalty? A married couple making $50,000/yr will have to pay $1,650 more per year for health insurance than an unmarried couple making the same amount.

Although this claim is old news, dating from the first of the year, Akin’s attempt to resurrect the meme indicates, sadly, that we may be hearing it repeated for awhile yet.

The marriage penalty Akin refers to is  the mechanism the PPACA uses to structure progressive premiums for the ca. 17 million individuals who are now uninsured and who would be eligible for insurance subsidies through the exchanges. The Wall Street Journal picked up the story from a memo circulated by the GOP, printing two articles that provided a cover of credibility as the story went viral among the wingnutagencia – just google “health care marriage penalty” and you will get a gazillion hits from all the usual suspects.

Nancy Pelosi firmly rejected the contention that this structural inequity comprises a new marriage tax hidden in the Health Care Act, observing that:

…it is a new criticism of how the federal poverty level has been calculated for decades-under Republican and Democratic leadership alike. Under all federal income-related assistance programs, total assistance provided to two single people is greater than the total assistance provided to a married couple for the simple fact that two people living together have lower expenses than two people living separately.  (And the federal government assumes that single people are living separately and a married couple is living together.)  It is considered good stewardship of tax dollars to reflect actual costs.

…

So it turns out this myth is really focused on a small subset of Americans who are: 1) unmarried couples who are living together and then decide to get married; and 2) are among the 6 percent of Americans who are using the Exchange because they do not have access to employer-provided insurance or a program such as Medicare and Medicaid and who qualify for affordability credits.

Unfortunately, the WSJ wasn’t as inclined to run with Pelosi’s very clear exposition as they were with the original GOP assertions. Others, such as Igor Volsky of The Wonk Room, however, have noted the beneficial aspects of the scaled subsidies:

In fact, since the majority of the uninsured are not married and marrying lowers uninsurance rates, providing more subsidies to individuals is a better way of targeting affordability credits to those who need them most.

Both Peolosi and Volsky point out that Akin and his GOP cohorts have little moral ground to stand on, since their team’s proposals failed to do anything for the uninsured, married or unmarried. The PPACA, on the other hand, will, as Pelosi put it, actually help married individuals by “allowing coverage under a spouse’s plan, and more affordable rates per person under a family plan than individuals got when they were single.”

Of course, the enumeration of such benefits will no doubt fail to convince some of Akin’s hardcore supporters. Just consider this query and response on Akin’s facebook page:

[Comment 1] Did you know that the healthcare bill forbids insurance companies from denying coverage?

[Comment 2] I didn’t know that, but its another reason to be against the current bill–besides the blatant funding for abortion!

With intellects like these parsing features into bugs and insisting on discredited misinformation, Akin shouldn’t have to lie too strenuously in order to play his role in the ongoing Republican obstructionist soap opera.

Representatives of the Party of No and its supporters responded in one of two ways immediately after the passage of the Senate bill on Mondayhealth care reform law – with violent rhetorical excess, or with real violence. The first characterized the GOPers in congress who competed to outdo each other’s demagogic excesses in their efforts to portray this bill as an  “outrage” that threatens democracy. Their tantrums arguably helped whip up the second, more violent response on the part of their out-of-control Tea Party dupes. The result? Violence and threats of violence against Democrats who had refused to be intimidated by months of implied threat.

The latest beneficiary of the Republican efforts to fan the Tea Party frenzy is Rep. Russ Carnahan (D-3rd). A coffin that had earlier figured in a Tea Party protest was left on the lawn of Carnahan’s residence Tuesday night. Even KMOV reporter Matt Sczesny, who has seemed at times perhaps a little too friendly to the Tea Partiers to be considered objective (they certainly appreciate his coverage, at any rate), was moved to observe:

… the police were not involved, since it doesn’t appear there was any direct threat and the coffin was empty. However, one can only imagine what may be implied by leaving a coffin on a front lawn.  We all know that emotions have been running high over the health care reform debate, but this has to make you wonder where this debate is going.

Sczesny is correct – even though the Tea Party is claiming that they have been “smeared” by Carnahan and the coffin was simply part of a prayer vigil in which it symbolized the death of freedom. Viewed in the context of the the recent threats of violence, Carnahan, along with all sane Americans, should be concerned about where the delusional hysteria and bullyboy tactics of this group may take us.

The individuals, however, who ought to be most concerned are our putative Republican leaders who have been willing to play on the emotions of the looney tunes brigade for their own political purposes. As Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo observes about the recent spate of violence:

… this didn’t come from nowhere and it can’t be pawned off on a few cranks. Everything that’s happened over the last five days has grown from a pattern of incitement going back almost a year — wildly hyperbolic statements, coded appeals to menacing behavior, flippant jokes about bringing firearms to political events and all the rest.

We need to contact our Republican congressional representatives and demand that they take responsibility for inciting fear and anger among their more unstable constituents, and for implicitly indicating that violence might be justified whenever individuals fail to prevail politically. Not that they’ll ever own up to their role – already they are fishing around for ways to blame the victims – but they ought to hear that a few of us at least know just what they have been doing – and that we will do our best to make sure that that knowledge becomes a commonplace.

Addenda:  Ezra Klein gets it right while keeping a calm, civil tongue in his head.

Two recent posts over at FiredUp! strike me as telling. One draws our attention to Kit Bond’s assertion that the actions of our Democratic controlled congress to craft and pass health care insurance reform is comparable to suicide:

I think it may be more accurate to say they [i.e., Democrats] put red bandanas on their head, took a drink of sake, and went out on what I believe to be a Kamikaze mission.

The other posting describes Bond’s and Roy Blunt’s willingness to put their names to a hasty, Republican-sponsored measure designed to repeal the health care reform package lock-stock-and barrel. In view of today’s USAToday/Gallup poll that shows that Americans favor the reform bill 49% to 40% against, they and their buddies may have just blundered onto the Kamikaze plane by mistake – because that margin can only get better as their erstwhile followers begin to notice that the legislation did not bring about the Armageddon these fearless leaders have been frantically predicting.

Todd Akin’s official response to the health care reform victory is, as one might expect, shrill in the extreme. He has managed to jam almost every GOP screaming point into a few short paragraphs. Since the event that occasioned this vitriolic outburst is the passage of  what is actually very moderate legislation, it might be instructive to deconstruct his florid imagery in order to figure out what Republican rage is really all about:

“Today Americans are reacquainted with the danger of an arrogant all powerful government, a deadly enemy within, a clear and present danger in Washington.”

“Americans” in this context refers to Tea Partiers and corporations. “Arrogance” refers to the fact that the Democratic congress defied corporate initiated Tea Party tantrums and inept Republican legislative tactics in order to help the president fulfill one of the campaign promises that got him elected. “All powerful government” refers only to elected Democrats; when Republicans lie in order to force-march the country into deficit-busting wars, they are patriots. “A deadly enemy within” means that these same Democrats threaten a resurgent Republican hegemony, since they pose “a clear and present danger” to the GOP by revealing its sabre rattling to be nothing more than empty noise.

“In spite of nationwide opposition socialized medicine is being forced down our throats. That medicine is toxic to freedom. But freedom dies hard in America.”

Akin considers “nationwide opposition” to be the 43% of the respondents to a  recent CNN poll that disapprove of the health care reform because it is “too liberal” – although, if truth be told, many of those probably only disapprove because they have bought into the Republican misinformation campaign, and will no doubt be pleasantly surprised to find that the passage of Health Care reform has not, in fact, killed Blaine Luetkemeyer’s father. Akin clearly does not consider worthy of consideration the other 52% who approve of the legislation, or who think it is not liberal enough.  

“Socialized medicine” reflects the Republican tendency to characterize as socialism any effort to govern for the good of the people rather than corporations or cronies. Their use of the term reflects their inability to distinguish between (1) social welfare and social justice; and, (2)  the goal of social justice (or social welfare) and the means used to achieve it; hence any legislation that has a stated goal of securing social welfare or social justice is, ipso facto, socialist, communist, or even facist (which explains those pictures of Obama as Hitler, as well as Glenn Beck’s fear of almost all Christians).

“Forced down our throats” (alternatively, the ubiquitous “crammed down our throats”) is Republican speak for the democratic process that has led to health care reform, including the decision to finally ignore Republican obstructionism. The goal of the phrase is to make relatively straightforward and commonplace legislative processes seem far more unpalatable than they really are.

“Freedom” is a fluid concept on the right. It usually means minimal or no taxes –  often without cutting social services fringewingers themselves find useful, although there are a few more sophisticated souls who understand it in the Friedmanesque  sense of untrammeled capitalism, the “nature red in tooth and claw” of the Social Darwinists revisited, this time from a macroeconomic rather than a biological perspective. In this sense, Akin is correct that “freedom dies hard in America.” The nasty, obstructionist mess that the GOP helped orchestrate during the past year bears witness to the fact that this type of ersatz “freedom” is indeed resilient, especially when liberally fertilized with money from health care industries that really, really love the freedom to run roughshod over the rest of us.*

“I do not believe that the majority of Americans will submit passively to the gold chains of socialism.” True patriots choose the bright light and fresh air of freedom where people can dare to dream- to succeed or fail.”

In this exhortation to action, Akin is calling for the Tea Party dupes to continue with their rabid displays in order to give him cover as he continues to work against their and our best interests. To create the emotional tenor that gets these babies revving their engines, he sets up an opposition in which health care reform is equated with passivity and slavery, while the advocates of unregulated market “freedom” and their corporate beneficiaries, the very folks responsible for our broken health care delivery system, are associated with words like “patriot,” “bright light,” “fresh air,” and the fulfillment of striving.

“I have confidence that freedom will rise from the ashes of socialism and that this nation under God will have a rebirth of liberty and a government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

In this final trope Akin brings into play themes that will recur as Republicans attempt to use health care legislation as a lever to undo Democrats in the next election. In one grand, if rather derivative swoop, he dresses anti-health care forces in both Godly and constitutional garb. Sadly, substituting rhetoric for reasoned argument does not create a well-fitting garment, but rather one that will have to be discarded sooner or later.

Akin’s agitprop language is far from original. The words may differ slightly, “totalitarian” substituted for “socialistic,” for example, but most members of the Grand Old Party are expressing nearly identical sentiments. The Republican obstructionist message serves the same goal: getting the GOP back into power. Representative Jo Ann Emerson said it far more succinctly than Akin when she helped egg on the Tea Party thugs over the weekend, joining three other Gopers  on a balcony waving  signs reading “Kill” “The” “Bill.”  What she was really saying, of course, is “I’ll do anything, no matter how depraved, to stay in Washington.”

*The text of this sentence has been edited slightly.

 

As you take in all the political ads that will be coming your way in the next few weeks, stories about the “biggest tax increase ever,” “job-killing health care,” “job-killing energy taxes,” etc. ad nauseum, keep this little gem in mind (from the “The Secret Lives of Big Pharma’s ‘Thought Leaders’” via Ezra Klein):

In the early 1970s, a group of medical researchers decided to study an unusual question. How would a medical audience respond to a lecture that was completely devoid of content, yet delivered with authority by a convincing phony? To find out, the authors hired a distinguished-looking actor and gave him the name Dr. Myron L. Fox. They fabricated an impressive CV for Dr. Fox and billed him as an expert in mathematics and human behavior. Finally, they provided him with a fake lecture composed largely of impressive-sounding gibberish, and had him deliver the lecture wearing a white coat to three medical audiences under the title “Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education.” At the end of the lecture, the audience members filled out a questionnaire.

The responses were overwhelmingly positive. The audience members described Dr. Fox as “extremely articulate” and “captivating.” One said he delivered “a very dramatic presentation.” After one lecture, 90 percent of the audience members said they had found the lecture by Dr. Fox “stimulating.” Over all, almost every member of every audience loved Dr. Fox’s lecture.

Isn’t this type of persuasion exactly the art Frank Luntz taught the Republicans – and what the Bush machine perfected?  Of course, it helps when you’ve got the telegenic Fox News bobble-heads incessantly repeating the focus group tested messages.