ProgressOhio

The Ohio Center for Progressive Leadership's 2010 New Leaders Program (NLP) application opened last week - this is a great opportunity for diverse young people to get training, coaching, mentoring and networking opportunities while pursuing a career in progressive political and policy change. The program is for 20-30 year olds with 0-2 years professional experience interested in social justice work.

Click here for more details on the program.

You can apply today, or nominate young, diverse leaders that are up and coming! The application deadline is May 2nd.

Training for the NLP will focus on core leadership skills from time management to fundraising, as well power analysis, progressive values and messaging, and more. This is a part-time program with components that will begin in June and go through September, and it is built for folks who are working full-time jobs. The cost for the program is only $100, and scholarships are available so that this is not an issue for anyone.

Read about past participants from 2008 and 2009, and contact Gavin Leonard at gleonard@progressiveleaders.org or 513 381-5680 with any questions.

Here's to growing the progressive movement!

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama has signed into law a package of tax breaks and spending designed to give the nation a jobs boost.

In a sunny Rose Garden ceremony, Obama said the legislation will help the private sector start hiring again.

It is the first of several jobs measures promised by Democrats this year. Obama called it essential but "but by no means enough."

Watch It:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Passage of health care reform could come down to just a few votes, and CONGRESSMAN STEVE DRIEHAUS could be the deciding vote - he needs to hear from you!

• Improve coverage for 394,000 residents with health insurance.

• Give tax credits and other assistance to up to 156,000 families and 13,800 small businesses to help them afford coverage.

• Improve Medicare for 93,000 beneficiaries, including closing the donut hole.

• Extend coverage to 44,000 uninsured residents.

• Guarantee that 10,300 residents with pre-existing conditions can obtain coverage.

• Protect 1,300 families from bankruptcy due to unaffordable health care costs.

• Allow 49,000 young adults to obtain coverage on their parents' insurance plans.

• Provide millions of dollars in new funding for 39 community health centers.

• Reduce the cost of uncompensated care for hospitals and other health care providers by $52 million annually.

ORP Deputy Communications Director Was At Tea Party Rally Where Parkinson's Victim was Mocked

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COLUMBUS - Ohio Republican Party Deputy Communications Director Megan Zaffini was at the Tea Party Rally on Monday that resulted in the bullying of a health care supporter with Parkinson's disease.

Rather than intervene, it appears Ms. Zaffini took pictures with her cell phone and tweeted excitedly about the event.

Yesterday, shocking video taken by a Columbus Dispatch reporter Doral Chenoweth made national news, showing Tea Party protestors mocking a seated counter-protestor with a sign indicating he has Parkinson's disease. They then proceed to hurl wadded up bills at him shouting, "I'll decide when to give you money!"

Watch It:

Yesterday on Hardball with Chris Matthews, Indiana Rep. Mike Pence denounced the mob mentality on display in the video.

"Kevin DeWine and the Ohio Republican Party need to denounce this behavior as Rep. Pence did yesterday," said Brian Rothenberg, Executive Director of ProgressOhio.

"ORP and any other political operatives should feel a duty to either stop such actions on site or denounce them. Ms. Zaffini instead took pictures and tweeted while a Parkinson's patient was bullied and berated, which is shameful."

Transcript:
Narrator: At one point a man who's sign said he has Parkinson's sat down in front of health care opponents.
Tea Partier #1: You're looking for a hand-out, you're in the wrong end of town. Nothing for free over here, you have to work for everything you get.
Tea Partier #2: I'll pay for this guy. Here you go. Start a pot. [Drops dollar bill on man, turns around, then walks back. Bends over, repeatedly jabs finger at man.] I'll decide when to give you money! Here's another one, here you go. [Throws wadded up bill at man.]
Crowd: You love a communist.
Tea Partier #2: No more hand-outs!

Full video from The Columbus Dispatch: http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/multimedia/video/video.html?video=949486

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the Democrats' revised health care bill will cost $940 billion over the next 10 years, a House Democratic source told CNN Thursday.

The bill cuts the deficit by $130 billion during that period of time, according to the source.

Ezra Klein notes that this means “more deficit reduction than either the House or Senate bill, and more coverage than the Senate bill.”

• It cuts the deficit by $1.2 trillion in the second ten years.

• It reduces annual growth in Medicare expenditures by 1.4 percentage points per year.

• Expands coverage to 32 million Americans.

A third Dem source exults that this is the “biggest deficit reduction measure in 25 years, since the 1993 Clinton budget.”

Yesterday, the Energy and Commerce Committee released an analysis on the impact of the new health insurance reform legislation on families, small businesses, seniors in Medicare, health care providers, and the uninsured in each of the 435 Congressional districts.

For instance, in Minority Leader Boehner’s district in Ohio, the legislation will:

Improve coverage for 427,000 residents with health insurance.

Give tax credits and other assistance to up to 161,000 families and 11,600 small businesses to help them afford coverage.

Improve Medicare for 99,000 beneficiaries, including closing the donut hole.

Extend coverage to 29,500 uninsured residents.

Guarantee that 8,800 residents with pre-existing conditions can obtain coverage.

Protect 1,400 families from bankruptcy due to unaffordable health care costs.

Allow 54,000 young adults to obtain coverage on their parents’ insurance plans.

Provide millions of dollars in new funding for 10 community health centers.

Reduce the cost of uncompensated care for hospitals and other health care providers by $28 million annually.

See how reform will impact your community»

Information on data sources»

You may have heard the good news by now - Congressman Dennis Kucinich has announced that while he still has reservations about the bill, he will vote YES on the upcoming health care reform vote!

His vote may be the vote that makes the difference and brings us another step toward victory.

Click here to say thank you

Like many of us, Rep. Kucinich would like to see more far-reaching reform than the legislation that is currently on the table.  But as he said in his statement today, ""I know I have to make a decision not on the bill as I would like to see it, but as it is." He pointed out that the bill will bring health care to 31 million Americans, noting that it would help many in his district.

We've set up several ways you can say THANK YOU to Representative Kucinich for doing the right thing.

RALLY

This will be a rally/honk and wave, then participants will walk to Kucinich's district office to thank him.
WHEN: Thursday, March 18, 11 AM
WHERE: Intersection of Ridge Rd and W. Ridgewood Dr, Parma, OH 44129
RSVP: Click here to let us know you're coming

CALL

Call Rep. Kucinich's office to say thank you.
Click here for the phone number and other information, and to let us know you've made the call.

WRITE

Write an online thank you note to Rep. Kucinich.
Click here to get started.

Like Rep. Kucinich, we know the bill is not everything we would like it to be, but it will:

• Stop insurance company abuses like denying care for pre-existing conditions
• Give your family and small business tax credits to afford good coverage
• Cover 31 million more people and save over 30,000 lives per year
• Kucinich's announcement today is great news for all of us.

Please join us as we say THANK YOU to Rep. Kucinich for taking us another step closer to quality, affordable health care for all Americans!

Ohio Tea Partiers Mock, Throw Things at Parkinson's Victim.

COLUMBUS - In a scene reminiscent of non-violent civil rights confrontations from the 1960s, Ohio Tea Partiers quickly turned ugly when facing off with health care advocates in front of Ohio Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy's office Tuesday.

In shocking video taken by a Columbus Dispatch reporter Doral Chenowith yesterday, Tea Party protestors mock a seated counter-protestor with a sign indicating he has Parkinson's disease. They then proceed to hurl wadded up bills at him shouting, "I'll decide when to give you money!"

Watch It:

Tea Partiers Mock Apparent Parkinson's Victim from Progress Ohio on Vimeo.

Tea Partier #1: You're looking for a hand-out, you're in the wrong end of town. Nothing for free over here, you have to work for everything you get.

Tea Partier #2: I'll pay for this guy. Here you go. Start a pot. [Drops dollar bill on man, turns around, then walks back. Bends over, repeatedly jabs finger at man.] I'll decide when to give you money! Here's another one, here you go. [Throws wadded up bill at man.]

Crowd: You love a communist.

Tea Partier #2: No more hand-outs!

The House Budget Committee passed reconciliation legislation to move comprehensive health insurance reform forward. During the markup, Democrats offered a number of motions to protect seniors, consumers and small businesses.

Ohio Republicans Jordan, Latta, and Austria, who serve on the Budget Committee, specifically opposed these provisions:

I was honored to join President Obama for a rally in Ohio yesterday. He made his case about why we need to pass health insurance reform as soon as possible, and I couldn't agree more.

On the flight back to Washington aboard Air Force One, I thought about how the same community center in Strongsville where the President spoke was a site for my mobile office when I served in the House. Ohioans would come to share their stories about the problems they confronted trying to get affordable health care, or navigating the hopelessly tangled insurance system.

We've been debating this issue for generations. We've seen the situation only worsen over the past decade. We've been debating this bill for over a year. Good ideas from both sides of the aisle have been incorporated into our reform plan, and now it's time to give it the up-or-down vote it deserves.

We cannot wait. Ohio families and small businesses cannot afford to wait.

As I listened to the President speak yesterday, I looked from face to face in the audience, and it struck me -- we're closer than ever to passing real reform. For Ohioans and Americans suffering under the status quo, relief cannot come soon enough.

The time has come. We must finish this job. The American people have been waiting decades for real reform, and it's long past time we delivered.

I'm so grateful for all your support and hard work throughout this process. Thanks for all you do, for Ohio and our country.

Sincerely,


-Sherrod

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• If you’re an American under the age of 65, there’s roughly a 50/50 chance that you will find yourself without coverage at some point in the next decade.[Source]

President Obama first highlighted this staggering figure in a weekly address from this past September and detailed how, in our broken health care system, losing insurance can happen to anyone.  At yesterday’s rally, the President reminded us of just how fragile the status quo really is:

Part of what makes this issue difficult is most of us do have health insurance, we still do.  And so -- and so we kind of feel like, well, I don’t know, it’s kind of working for me; I’m not worrying too much.  But what we have to understand is that what’s happened to Natoma, there but for the grace of God go any one of us.  Anybody here, if you lost your job right now and after the COBRA ran out …

So let’s just think about -- think about if you lost your job right now.  How many people here might have had a preexisting condition that would mean it’d be very hard to get health insurance on the individual market?  Think about if you wanted to change jobs.  Think about if you wanted to start your own business but you suddenly had to give up your health insurance on your job.  Think about what happens if a child of yours, heaven forbid, got diagnosed with something that made it hard for them to insure.

For so many people, it may not be a problem right now but it’s going to be a problem later, at any point.  And even if you’ve got good health insurance, what’s happening to your premiums?  What’s happening to your co-payments?  What’s happening to your deductible?  They’re all going up.  That’s money straight out of your pocket.

So the bottom line is this:  The status quo on health care is simply unsustainable. We can’t have -- we can’t have a system that works better for the insurance companies than it does for the American people.

The Costs of Failure: Economic Consequences of Failure to Enact Nixon, Carter, and Clinton Health Reforms

The growth in national health expenditures as a percentage of GDP and what we would have spent as a nation if effective measures to slow the growth in health expenditures by 1.5 percentage points a year had been adopted in 1975, 1980, and 1995:

In 1960, we spent 5.2 percent of GDP on health care, compared with the 3.8 percent of GDP median rate in all major industrialized nations. Today, we spend 17.7 percent—nearly twice the rate of 9 percent that is devoted to health care in other industrialized countries.

Ezra Klein:

These days, we spend a bit more than 17 percent of our GDP on health care. That comes out to more than $2.5 trillion. If we'd reformed the system in 1995, and our spending had slowed by 1.5 percentage points then, health care would only be 14.2 percent of GDP right now. If we'd followed Carter's schedule and moved in 1980, we'd be down to 11.5 percent of GDP. And Nixon's plan in 1975? A mere 10.75 percent of GDP, which as you can see on the graph, isn't that far from what Europe spends. The lesson is simple: The earlier you start, the more you save. And with each opportunity you miss, you lose years of accumulated savings.

An influential liberal advocacy group shifted gears and is getting behind President Obama's push for health care reform even though its membership believes it doesn't go far enough.

MoveOn.org is spending "six figures" on television commercials to run on national cable and called on its membership to back primary challengers to Democrats who vote against health care reform legislation.

For the past year, MoveOn.org advocated that a public option be included in the overhaul health care reform. But the leadership of the member driven organization took a poll of its membership last week to see if it wanted to support the president's push. And 83 percent of them did.

"Our members still totally believe that the public option is the best way to lower costs and make health care affordable," said Ilyse Hogue, spokeswoman for MovOn.org. "And at the same time they overwhelmingly believe that the president's plan is the best way to keep health care reform moving forward and this is a necessary step."

The MoveOn.org TV ad contains images of prominent historical figures including an image of the founding fathers, President Abraham Lincoln, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., President Franklin Roosevelt and President Lyndon Johnson.

"Throughout history, America has been blessed with heroic leaders - individuals who helped us to navigate between right and wrong," the announcer says in the ad.

Citing rising health care costs and the needs of the uninsured in the country, the ad continues "We need historic action. We need our leaders to fight for what's right."

The ad implores viewers to call their representatives in Congress and asks them "Which side of history will you be on?"

As for supporting primary challengers, MoveOn.org representatives noted that every vote is needed in the House to ensure health care reform passes.

"With the big vote happening as early as this Friday, Conservative Democrats need to know the stakes if they choose to side with Big Insurance over the voters on health care reform," MoveOn.org said in the e-mail.

Watch It:

Michelle Obama has landed another magazine cover – not for fashion, but for her Let’s Move! initiative.  The First Lady wrote the cover story for next week’s Newsweek.  The March 22nd magazine cover shows the First Lady with an apple and title “Feed Your Children Well: My Fight Against Childhood Obesity.”  

Her article touches on familiar themes from her recent speeches on the topic – centering on idea that adults, not kids, need to take charge of this problem.

For years, we've known about the epidemic of childhood obesity in America. We've heard the statistics—how one third of all kids in this country are either overweight or obese. We've seen the effects on how our kids feel, and how they feel about themselves. And we know the risks to their health and to our economy—the billions of dollars we spend each year treating obesity-related conditions like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.

But we also know that it wasn't always like this. Back when many of us were growing up, we led lives that kept most of us at a pretty healthy weight. We walked to school every day, ran around at recess and gym and for hours before dinner, and ate home-cooked meals that always seemed to have a vegetable on the plate.

And let's be honest with ourselves: our kids didn't do this to themselves. Our kids don't decide what's served in the school cafeteria or whether there's time for gym class or recess. Our kids don't choose to make food products with tons of sugar and sodium in supersize portions, and then have those products marketed to them everywhere they turn. And no matter how much they beg for fast food and candy, our kids shouldn't be the ones calling the shots at dinnertime. We're in charge. We make these decisions.

That's actually the good news—that we can decide to solve this problem. That's why we started Let's Move, a nationwide campaign with a single goal: to solve the problem of childhood obesity in a generation, so that children born today can reach adulthood at a healthy weight.

Attorney General Cordray was nominated for the honor by Empowering and Strengthening Ohio’s People (ESOP), a community organization specializing in housing counseling and foreclosure prevention. In his nomination of Cordray, ESOP Executive Director Mark Seifert wrote, “Mr. Cordray is the epitome of a state official fulfilling his mandate to protect Ohio residents. From January through December we saw Mr. Cordray’s unswerving dedication to achieving economic justice for the people of Ohio.”
 
Cordray thanked NCRC and ESOP for recognizing results achieved through the hard work of Attorney General’s Office staff. “It takes the collective efforts of our team to protect consumers and small businesses from shoddy work and unauthorized charges; to stand up for retirees whose pension funds were harmed by misdeeds on Wall Street; and to partner with housing counselors to cut down on the number of foreclosed and abandoned homes in our neighborhoods,” said Cordray. “For each Ohioan we are able to help, I’m grateful. I share this recognition with the people in my office who make it possible.”

The Pool Report:

Vice President Joe Biden praised Rep. Steve Driehaus for his support of last year's economic stimulus package at a fundraiser here for the freshman congressman Monday, but by and large steered clear of the topic of health care reform an issue where Driehaus may not be on board with Obama administration plans.

In front of about 500 supporters who had paid between $100 and $500 for a Driehaus fundraising luncheon at the downtown Westin Hotel, Biden predicted that, because of the economic stimulus package, "you are going to see us creating a net-plus jobs this quarter."

"We're not just creating jobs and putting paychecks in somebody's pocket,'' the vice president said in a 30-minute speech that began shortly before 2 p.m. "Every bit of this money gets pumped back into the economy."

Biden took some shots at Republican critics.

"I love these people who say you are trying to do too much,'' Biden said. "Tell that to the fellow who is out of work; tell that to the family that can no longer afford health insurance.

"I love these guys who think everything we do is a mistake but offer no tangible alternative,'' the vice president said.

Biden praised the work of freshman representative Driehaus, who up-ended seven-term congressman Steve Chabot in the 2008 election. Chabot is running again this year for the seat; and polls indicate that Driehaus faces a difficult re-election battle - one reason why the Obama White House dispatched the vice president to Cincinnati to help him raise money.

The vice president praised Driehaus for working to get federal funding to replace the Brent Spence Bridge over the Ohio River in Cincinnati, a 50-year bridge that has sees enormous daily traffic and has become structurally unsound.

   "He reached across the aisle; he reached across state lines; he reached across party lines to bring people together on this,'' Biden said. "that's the kind of work that encapsulates Steve Driehaus."

Driehaus told the Enquirer Monday he is undecided about the health care reform package that the Obama administration wants to move through Congress this week.  Driehaus is being pressured by both sides. Biden did not mention the legislation Monday.

Outside the West Hotel on Fountain Square, about 20 demonstrators stood waving signs - about half for the health care reform and about half against.

After the speech, the vice president's motorcade left downtown headed for the airport and a flight to Cleveland, where he is to appear at a fundraiser for Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland later today.