ProgressOhio

From the Statehouse By Jennifer Garrison:

This week at the Statehouse, my colleagues and I were busy passing a number of important bills. One bill I introduced provides additional accountability to taxpayers for Ohio lawmakers.

Current law allows members of the General Assembly to receive a mileage reimbursement for one round trip a week from their home to the Statehouse when the legislature is in session.  

I introduced House Bill 394 to require members of the General Assembly actually travel to Columbus from their residence in order to receive reimbursement for that travel.

The vast majority of lawmakers understands and already follows this principal.  In fact I believe this is assumed in existing law.

However, times have changed.  Today some legislators own more than one house.  One they claim as their legal residence and one near Columbus where they stay most of the time.  The Ohio Supreme Court ruled in Senator Husted’s residency case that when residency is in dispute, a legislator’s permanent residence is the one to which they intend to return to upon retirement and where they are registered to vote.

So under existing law, a legislator can receive mileage reimbursement for the mileage from their legal residence to the Statehouse, but never actually make the trip.  I believe we need to tighten the law so taxpayers only reimburse legislators who actually are driving from their stated legal residence to the seat of government.

I sponsored HB 394 and joined my colleagues in voting “yes” on the bill as it passed out of the House with bipartisan support. The legislation now goes to the Senate for its consideration.

Race to the Top criticized by Husted
By Mike Mahoney, OEA Communications

Ohio is ideally placed to compete for $440 million in Race to the Top federal grant money, despite complaints by Sen. Jon Husted, the Republican candidate for Secretary of State. (See the Columbus Dispatch story).

This is part of an organized campaign by charter school advocates to undermine state applications for Race to the Top grants that focus on school improvement, especially in high-needs schools.

This, despite Ohio’s recognition as a trailblazer by the Education Commission of the States for the school transformation measures of House Bill 1 and the state’s growing success and reputation for school improvement, including a No. 5 ranking by Education Week.

Husted believes the state shouldn’t spend anything to communicate best practices and success stories so that school districts, parents, teachers and administrators can learn from others.

I’m not surprised. After Husted’s many votes for failing charter schools and against funding mainstream public schools, his criticism of Ohio’s work on Race to the Top sounds wide of the mark, perhaps even disingenuous and self-serving.

When you look at the record, no Ohio Republican Congressman supported President Obama’s stimulus aid to public schools, which has brought $2.8 billion into Ohio and saved nearly 12,000 jobs in K-12 and public colleges and universities. (See the official reporting on aid to education and jobs saved at the state’s recovery.ohio.gov web site.

If Sen. Husted and his allies truly want to help public schools excel in Ohio, they would vote for a state budget that supported local school districts.

Instead, he voted against education funding twice last year on budget roll calls that would have cost Ohio’s local schools $815 million to $2.3 billion. I don’t know how that would have helped Ohio students.

The Dispatch spotlighted Husted’s narrow criticism, and then its editorial criticized the Ohio Department of Education for not having any public meetings to discuss the Race to the Top grants.

In reality, the Race to the Top grant application is to accelerate the education reform measures passed as House Bill 1 last summer. Before those reforms went into effect, Governor Strickland had many public meetings on the substance of what Ohioans wanted in terms of reform and education for the 21st century, and you can still see all those sessions on-line at converstationoneducation.org.

What does Sen. Husted really want for Ohio education? You only have to look at Senate Bill 180, his proposed legislation:

• Lift the internet charter school moratorium
• Make value-added tests key for teacher licensure and evaluations
• But meanwhile, accelerate minimally trained Teach For America teachers into professional teaching licensure.

ODE reported 64% of charter schools were rated as failing in 2008, so the e-charter moratorium makes sense. Meanwhile, Ohio has toughened its standards for educator quality. Why Husted can say his vision matches Race to the Top is beyond me.

Last month, over 150 reporters came to cover a 600 person Tea Party event. Last week, 113 politicians showed up for a 100 person Tea Party rally in West Chester. Why? Because, fed by Fox and friends, our nation’s politics are as polarized and dogmatic as ever. While majorities pay lip service to bipartisianship, we are fascinated by purity on both sides of the aisle.

When you get to the top not because of the quality of your ideas or your record of service, but your driven snow levels of purity, hypocrisy is unavoidable. In the case of many Tea Partiers, Scott Brown prompted their first encounter with situational purity (a phrase I borrowed from a sharp Statehouse observer). Suddenly, supporting a pro-choice, pro-universal health care (for Massachusetts only, mind you) centerfold was all the rage.

Inevitably, now that he is in the national spotlight, Brown will step on a landmine or two as he navigates trying to effectively represent his constituents while servicing the far right rhetoric that got him there. I suggest he call Pat Tiberi who just found out what sort of problems Tea Party pandering can get you into. It was revealed recently that although Tiberi was publicly railing against stimulus funds, he secretly fighting to bring home the pork for his district. In one article, Tiberi was recognized for his “refusal to participate” in earmarking and his spokesman commented:

"[Tiberi] feels there needs to be reform in the earmarking process. There needs to be more transparency and a more streamlined process when selecting earmarks. He felt like he couldn't help solve the problem by being part of the problem."

There is no right answer as to when a litmus test is appropriate or whether considering the body of a politician’s record is more appropriate. Are Tea Partiers committed to purity on all issues or will they settle for a candidate with a D grade from the Chamber of Commerce? What about liberals? Will ideological perfection remain the enemy of good governance?

For instance, what makes the litmus test of Jennifer Garrison’s positions on choice and DOMA different than, say, Ted Strickland or Richard Cordray’s views on guns or the death penalty?

Recently, Ohio Right to Life fought the Ohio House Speaker over whether to honor on the House floor a teenager who won the “politically sensitive” group’s essay contest. Would those very same free speech purists fight for Equality Ohio if they had a gay teenage essay contest winner recognized on the floor of the Senate?

Mike DeWine is hated by the Tea parties for joining the Gang of 12. (Although in reality, it is liberals who should be enraged for preserving a process that has stuck us with the filibuster and justices like Sam Alito.) In fact, DeWine is so reviled by the far-right, Tea Partiers sought out Delaware County Prosecutor David Yost to run against him in the Attorney General primary.

These days the Tea Party and Yost have a rockier relationship, thanks to the Ohio Republican Party which cleared the field for the hated Mike DeWine by luring Yost into an Auditor’s race against current-Tea Party pin-up Seth (Who?) Morgan.

But let’s turn the clock back to March 2009, when Yost spoke on the Statehouse steps at a Tea Party rally.

What we found is that absolute purity is a tough standard to live up to.

See for yourself:

While Tea Party Yost gets incensed at the thought of government spending increasing by 66% in a decade, Prosecutor Yost had no problem increasing his own government office’s budget by 65% in his first year in the office.

He didn’t stop there. Yost has been the Delaware County Prosecutor since 2003 and, in 6 years, his office’s budget grew to 2.5x Times the size it was under his predecessor. Or as Tea Party Yost might put it, “Over 10 times the rate of your paycheck going up, my office’s spending went up.”

Should the Delaware County Prosecutor be spending almost a million dollars a year more than in 2002? I can't say, but it’s hard imagining the man standing on the Statehouse steps making that case.

What it really comes down to for these want-to-be Tea Partiers is that government is too large – unless it’s their street that needs fixed, their child that needs health insurance, their district that needs earmarks or their office that needs to expand. Then it can’t be big enough. The real problems start when you try to explain that on the steps of the Statehouse.

[Links: The Delaware County Prosecutor office budget from the year before Yost took office, his first year in office after and last year.]

In yesterday’s New York Times, Congressional scholars Thomas Mann, Norm Ornstein and others explain the history of the reconciliation process – requiring a simple majority vote in the Senate – and discuss their views on using it to finalize health insurance reform legislation:

…would reconciliation represent an anomalous and dangerous power grab? The accompanying chart, which lists 15 major reconciliation bills passed by Congress since the process was first used in 1980, provides evidence for assessing that charge…

(click on above image, or here, for full chart)

The history is clear: While the use of reconciliation in this case — amending a bill that has already passed the Senate via cloture — is new, it is compatible with the law, Senate rules and the framers’ intent.

The deterioration of our politics is shown in today's coverage in the Newark Advocate of a town hall debate in Mt. Vernon joined by Congressman Zack Space's seven potential Republican challengers in this year's 18th district race.

Seven is usually a lucky number but with this bunch, the GOP appears stuck with a rather weak field at a time when Space, a two-term Democrat, has to overcome not only the conservative leanings of his sprawling, mostly rural district but also the bitter partisanship which has spilled out of the health care debate in Washington.

Space was reportedly invited to participate but wisely didn't, since he would have been cast as the pinata.  Naturally, all the GOP hopefuls argued that he (and his fellow Democrats) had to go.  But, as the Advocate reported it, their talking points were exceedingly shallow given the complexity of the issues before Congress right now.  http://www.newarkadvocate.com/article/20100307/NEWS01/3070337

Clutching for the Far Right, tea-party vote, all seven chimed in on a chorus of lament about big government and high taxes leading the nation to ruin.

• Newark businessman Beau Bromberg's solution was a cut in congressional pay.
• Mt. Vernon farmer and former State Ag Director Fred Dailey would cut social welfare programs.
• Thornville teacher/preacher Dave Daubenmire wants God-fearing folks to reject government aid.
• State Sen. Robert Gibbs, Lakeville, apologized for votes he made to build light rail and increase sales taxes.
• Former State Rep. Ron Hood, Ashville, declared himself "battle tested" and therefore electable.
• Dover pastor Hombre Liggett delared himself not battle tested and therefore electable.
• Ex-Zanesville Judge Jeanette Moll grabbed the flag as pro-gun, pro-life and pro-Constitution.

That's it, the face of the Republican Party in the 18th District: pro-gun, pro-life, pro-God and Constitution and opposed to any expansion (or even maintenance) of civil society through community taxation and/or government programs.

Compare these talking points to those raised by 18th District candidates in the spring of 2006, the last time there was this large a field of candidates in the district.

In April of that year, This Week - Licking County - asked each of the six candidates in the 18th for their views on the Iranian situation, health care reform and the future of Social Security.  With one exception, their answers showed serious thought by serious people.  Looking just at the health care responses:

• Space, a Dover attorney running for the first time, said reform should allow the government to negotiate with the industry to bring down Medicare costs and permit Americans to buy cheaper drugs in Canada. (Alas, neither provision is in the pending reform bill.)
• Rep. Bob Ney, the then-Republican incumbent, said legislation he introduced would extend tax credits to offset rising insurance premiums and "establish a safety net for the uninsured."  (Ney was forced to resign later that year -- and subsequently jailed - for corruption in the Abramoff scandal)
• Zanesville Republican James Harris, a financial analyst, backed tax-free private health accounts and well as importation of cheaper drugs from Canada.
• State School Board Member Jennifer Stewart, a Zanesville Democrat, would have reduced health costs by more use of generic drugs and local health care clinics as well as through government incentives to reduce patient co-pays.
• Chillicothe Mayor Joe Sulzer, a Democrat, wanted the government to negotiate lower Medicare drug prices and permit re-importation of cheaper drugs from Canada and Europe.
• Columbus property manager Ralph Applegate, a Democrat, was a tea-bagger before his time, but he at least admitted to being stumped by the problem: "I do not have an answer to that serious health-care question," he told the newspaper.  "Would you advise me, please?"

Four years later, Space is wrestling with how to vote on the Obama health care plan, Ney is out on parole and the other 2006 candidates in the district have evidently lost their ardor for serving in Congress (and who could blame them?).

Back in 2006, we were all overjoyed to be rid of Ney, whose junkets with and favors for the corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff rained shame on the GOP.  But considering the shallowness of the current Republican talking points, I have to admit a bit of Ney nostalgia is setting in.

Senior Senate GOP leadership aides have settled on a new strategy that, they hope, will stall or kill the Dem health reform push: They are going to use the arcane “Byrd rule” to try to bleed the reconciliation fix to death and ensure that it never passes.

Senior GOP aides have been studying the rule book in recent days, and they think they have a game plan. Here’s how they hope it will work.

At risk of oversimplification, the Byrd rule is designed to ensure that reconciliation is used to only make budgetary fixes, not policy ones, to existing legislation. Presuming the House passes the Senate bill, the House will then pass a reconciliation fix to the bill, after which the Senate will then try to pass that fix, too.

At this point Senate GOPers will repeatedly invoke the Byrd rule to ask the parliamentarian to strip individual provisions (ones fixing this or that in the original bill) out of the fix, on the grounds that they are policy fixes. If individual provisions are stripped, it would change the Senate’s version of the overall fix.

Unfortunately for the GOP, yesterday, Senator Byrd himself  defended use of reconciliation to apply the fixes that are expected to be necessary to the Senate Bill to satisfy the House.

Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), an “architect of the reconciliation process and a guardian of Senate procedure, has quietly defended the Democratic plan to use the fast-track parliamentary tactic to finish the health care reform bill,” POLITICO reports.

In a noteworthy boost for Democrats, Byrd wrote a letter to the editor in Thursday’s Charleston Daily Mail that it is appropriate to use reconciliation on measures that reduce the deficit — a standard that the package of fixes to the Senate health care bill could meet.

In his editorial Byrd went so far as to say, "hyperbole about "imposing government control," acts of "disrespect to the American people" and "corruption" of Senate procedures resembles more the barkings from the nether regions of Glennbeckistan than the "sober and second thought" in response the Charleston Daily Mail.

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While Republicans are claiming the majority vote on health care reform President Obama called for yesterday constitutes ‘ramming through health care’, reconciliation is part of the normal legislative process—used 22 times over the last 30 years—16 times by Republican-led Senates. And nearly two-thirds of the time, Republican Presidents have signed reconciliation bills. As President Obama said yesterday:

We have debated this issue thoroughly, not just for the past year but for decades. Reform has already passed the House with a majority. It has already passed the Senate with a supermajority of 60 votes. And now it deserves the same kind of up or down vote that was cast on welfare reform, that was cast on the Children’s Health Insurance Program, that was used for COBRA health coverage for the unemployed, and, by the way, for both Bush tax cuts—all of which had to pass Congress with nothing more than a simple majority.

And as Speaker Pelosi pointed out in her weekly press conference today, the simple majority vote would not be used to reform the health care system—just to clear the small improvements to the comprehensive reform bill, which has already passed the Senate with a super-majority, and in a similar form in the House:

This is not about doing health care reform under reconciliation. This is about doing corrections to the Senate bill under reconciliation. The bulk of the bill, 75 to 80 percent of it, is already in the Senate bill. So this is about a small percentage of what is in there.

Welcome to Code Red. With the House now the last line of defense to stop a government takeover of healthcare, Project Code Red is your outlet for information about how Democrats are trying to ram through government-run healthcare - and how we can stop it.

We must lie as often and as loud as we possibly can!  Don't worry about the hypocrisy.  Lie right up until the bill passes before Easter.  Jesus will forgive you.  Karl Rove promises!

Rachel Maddow reviews some of the latest acts of Republican lying and hypocrisy as they freak out in desperation to block health reform. Senator Sherrod Brown discusses what further obstruction he expects the bill will face on the way to passage.

Watch Rachel Maddow with Sen. Sherrod Brown:

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

The Republican National Committee plans to raise money this election cycle through an aggressive campaign capitalizing on “fear” of President Barack Obama and a promise to "save the country from trending toward socialism."

The strategy was detailed in a confidential party fundraising presentation, obtained by POLITICO, which also outlines how “ego-driven” wealthy donors can be tapped with offers of access and “tchochkes.”

The presentation was delivered by RNC Finance Director Rob Bickhart to top donors and fundraisers at a party retreat in Boca Grande, Florida on February 18, a source at the gathering said.

In neat PowerPoint pages, it lifts the curtain on the often-cynical terms of political marketing, displaying an air of disdain for the party’s donors that is usually confined to the barroom conversations of political operatives.

The presentation explains the Republican fundraising in simple terms.

"What can you sell when you do not have the White House, the House, or the Senate...?" it asks.

The answer: "Save the country from trending toward Socialism!”

Manipulating donors with crude caricatures and playing on their fears is hardly unique to Republicans or to the RNC – Democrats raised millions off George W. Bush in similar terms – but rarely is it practiced in such cartoonish terms.

One page, headed “The Evil Empire,” pictures Obama as the Joker from Batman, while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leaders Harry Reid are depicted as Cruella DeVille and Scooby Doo, respectively.

Watch It:

 From the Diamondback, the Univeristy of Maryland's student newspaper:

 "The War on Women"

Drug war has disproportionate impact on females, SSDP panel says

With more than 2 million Americans in jail, a growing number of them women, four advocates yesterday pointed to the criminal justice system’s “prejudiced” and “insensitive” drug policy as the culprit in a panel at Stamp Student Union last night.

Since the 1990s, with the introduction of conspiracy law — which allow the government to prosecute individuals for their associations with drug offenders — the number of women in prison has skyrocketed. Women, who often are not directly involved in drug deals, are especially vulnerable to the laws, representatives from the Drug Policy Alliance, Americans for Safe Access and the Sentencing Project said.

“Women are held under the full weight of the crime, even if they haven’t seen, touched or distributed [drugs],” Drug Policy Alliance representative Jasmine Tyler said. “She answers the phone, uses the money to pay the bills, she may have went shopping.”

The panel said conspiracy laws, along with other drug policies, can result in girlfriends facing longer sentences than their drug king boyfriends, mothers losing custody of their children, low income families losing housing and welfare and a staggering amount of broken families.

“Women and youth are the new populations that are being targeted,” Tyler said. “The men are gone and the rate of women in jail is skyrocketing. This is the next population to exploit.”

Read the rest here.

Washington, DC—U.S. Representative Mary Jo Kilroy (OH-15) released the following statement on Senator Jim Bunning’s (R-KY) blocking of unemployment insurance coverage for over one million Americans.  According to Fox News, since some states don't cut unemployment benefits checks in advance, some people will fail to receive payments until Congress takes action:

“A  lone Republican Senator and Washington insider blocked unemployment coverage for over a million Americans.  This is unfair to central Ohioans and Americans who cannot find jobs.  Playing political games with people’s lives is not something anyone should be allowed to do.

“I applaud Senator Bunning’s Democratic and Republican colleagues who have tried to convince their fellow Senator that what he was doing was just plain wrong and I hope he listens to them before it is too late for those he has chosen to harm with his bizarre tactics.”

WASHINGTON, D.C. - U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) received the Major General Charles Dick Award for Legislative Excellence Award from the Ohio National Guard Association in Columbus on Saturday. Brown discussed his efforts to ensure that the Ohio National Guard has superior equipment and facilities for training and that all Guards members have increased benefits and improved health care.

The award is presented to an elected official who has made outstanding contributions in support of the Ohio National Guard.

"Senator Brown has been a champion for the Soldiers and Airmen of the Ohio National Guard for almost two decades," said Maj. Gen. Gregory L. Wayt, Ohio adjutant general. "On behalf of the almost 17,000 members of the Ohio National Guard, we honor him for his staunch support of our organization."

Retired Brig. Gen. Robert L. Lawson, executive director of the Ohio National Guard Association said Sen. Brown "has developed a very strong personal relationship with the Ohio National Guard and we are proud to present him with this recognition."

Brown is also working with the Department of Defense and the National Guard Bureau to ensure that critical missions and jobs remain in Ohio.

"Senator Brown affords the National Guard the opportunity to become part of the larger debate on issues of importance to our Soldiers and Airmen at times when our input can have the greatest impact," said Wayt.

It looks like Big Pharma is ready to take in a lot of money...

From Aude Sapere:

As the thinking world is learning the H1N1 scare was just that, a big scare. We know now that this was a contrived plot launched by the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control to help mitigate the huge amount of money big pharma invested into this spurious vaccine, which on the front end funded weak academic research and padded a few of those Post hole Diddlers pockets.

Now it looks like the those same Post hole Diddlers want a little bit more money. At the moment they are working to make the flu vaccine mandatory for all Americans, even those between the ages of 16 to 49 years. Think about how much money the academic community and big pharma will make off of this scam when you consider there is 304,059,724 people living in the US.

Watch It:

This letter to the editor appeared recently in the Boston Globe.

REPRESENTATIVE STEPHEN Lynch (my congressman) writes in a Feb. 17 op-ed that the United States must preserve the rights of Afghan women by avoiding any reconciliation with the Taliban (“The price of appeasing the Taliban’’).

But the warlord-dominated regime that the United States currently supports in Kabul has brought nothing but disaster for Afghan women. Eight years after the US military intervention in Afghanistan, Afghan women still die in childbirth more than women in any other country, women’s life expectancy is one of the lowest in the world (about 42 years), and UNICEF has just announced that Afghanistan has replaced Sierra Leone as the worst place in the world for a child to be born today.

Lynch must not use Afghan women as a cover for continued US occupation of their country. He should vote to deny funds for the Afghanistan war, to bring all the troops home and end the bloodshed. Afghan women’s struggle for rights will be a long one, but it cannot be waged by our military. Let’s get out of their way.

Cole Harrison
Roslindale
The writer is the organizer of a task force on Afghanistan in association with United for Justice with Peace, a coalition of more than 100 Boston-area groups.

The Republican Party is "a wholly owned subsidiary of the insurance industry," Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) charged on the House floor. When Republican Rep. Dan Lungren (Calif.) objected to the accusation and took the extraordinary step of asking that Weiner's "words be taken down," Weiner pushed back.

"You really don't want to go here, Mr. Lungren," Weiner said. Asking that words be taken down is a move on the House floor that is rarely made and carries great weight.

Weiner, after a pause, asked to have his words withdrawn and said he'd substitute new ones. "Make no mistake about it. Every single Republican I have ever met in my entire life is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the insurance industry," Weiner clarified.

Somehow, that failed to satisfy Lungren, who asked that those too be taken down. After a long pause, before the chair ruled, Lungren withdrew his request.

Watch It: