THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

From the Lexington Herald-Leader. This expose of GOP values is just too good to excerpt, here is the whole thing.

The health care debate sparked an uncharacteristic display of passion by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell last week, according to national news accounts.

Was the normally unruffled McConnell upset because 205,000 more Kentuckians lack health insurance now than in 1999?

No. As far as we know, McConnell has yet to say anything about recent census estimates that show the number of uninsured Kentuckians had increased to 682,000 last year, or 16 percent of the state's population.

McConnell was steamed (to use the New York Times' phrase) because his hometown insurance giant, Humana, was ordered by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to cease sending mailers to its Medicare customers warning of benefit cuts if Congress enacts proposed health care reforms.

The mailers also encouraged people to urge their representatives in Congress to support Medicare Advantage, a program that has been very profitable for Humana but unnecessarily costly to taxpayers.

McConnell sprang to Humana's defense, deploring what he called a "gag order" and threatening to hold up confirmation of appointees in the Department of Health and Human Services unless the order was rescinded. What's at stake, McConnell declared, is nothing less than the "core of the First Amendment's protection of speech."

We're sure this is just what the authors of the First Amendment and the Americans who died defending it had in mind: The freedom of a corporation to advance its own financial interests by propagandizing elderly customers, whose personal information it has only because the government is subsidizing it to insure them.

It's stirring, isn't it? Spine-tingling, really, to hear our senior senator defend the free speech rights of a corporation whose foundation and founder have pledged $1.5 million to his center at the University of Louisville. Humana's PAC and employees also constitute McConnell's seventh-largest contributor.

But then you'd expect nothing less from the man who patented the principle that "money is speech" and who has collected more than $3.2 million from health care interests over the last 20 years.

That kind of cash-inspired eloquence easily drowns out the cries of two-thirds of a million uninsured Kentuckians.