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The effect of the media exemption is this. A press entity can spend an unlimited amount of their own money promoting, attacking, supporting, or opposing a candidate. They could even use the magic words; they can ad-vocate the election or defeat of a candidate in their broadcasts and publica-tions. Publications like the New York Times do this all the time. They use their corporate money to produce editorials and news stories, and then pub-licly distribute their views. Now, anybody who has that media exemption, including the bloggers, can do the same thing.

And here?s the good part. They can do all of this while their employees coordinate with the campaigns. We don?t call it this. We call the employees reporters or editorial writers, or we call them political cartoonists. But essentially, they are employees and they can coordinate with the campaign. They would call it covering the campaign. But essentially, it?s the same activity; activities that, if these people were employees of, say, Procter & Gamble, it would count as coordination. In other words, as long as the media are pursuing their journalistic function, for all practical pur-poses they are exempt from campaign finance laws.page 253 at http://www.chapman.edu/law/_files/publications/2008v11PDF.pdf

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Ernest Dumas writes this week about the tribute Republicans should pay to Frank Luntz, the message master whose sloganeering — from the disingenuous to the blatantly dishonest — has done everything from killing the estate tax to making evil out of health care legislation that's good for tens of millions of people.

"Cut Medicare." "Government takeover of health care." "Rationing." "Runaway debt." "Preserve the doctor-patient relationship."

Baloney all. But facts don't matter. It's what people think they hear. Dumas explains:

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The slogans describe nothing about the Affordable Care Act. Take the threat to seniors. The law makes no cuts in Medicare benefits. Instead, as you would expect a bunch of Democrats to do, it adds a laundry list of new assistance for seniors: lower prescription drug costs, free preventive-care screenings like mammograms and colonoscopies for the rest of your life, and bonuses for family doctors and nurse practitioners who treat the elderly at any age.

Yes, the law does phase out the huge taxpayer bonuses to insurance companies that since 2004 has guaranteed them big profits if they sell Medicare Advantage plans.

...Here is what the “government takeover of health care” amounts to: The government stops insurance companies from ending coverage when people get acute illnesses like cancer, prevents them from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, stops them from ending insurance for critically ill children and limits their profits and overhead to 15 or 20 percent of the premiums they collect. More than that and they must rebate the money to customers. Millions of rebate checks will go out next month and every August hereafter.

But, as Luntz had explained, facts don’t matter much.

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If Republicans seize the White House and Congress, they should name the Washington national airport for the man who was responsible. Let’s make it the Dr. Frank Luntz National Airport.
http://www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2012/07/17/republicans-s
hould-name-an-airport-for-frank-luntz

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