http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63D1Y020100414

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2017888120100401?type=GCA-HealthcareReform

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Here is a link to the NY Times article http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/22/health/policy/22health.html?hp.

Join DCFO members and 7,000 other volunteers at Servathon, the largest day of service in the DC region!  This year, DCFO will host 2 teams, one focused on the environment and the other focused on human services.

If you join the environment team, you’ll be cleaning a park, planting trees, or participating in a community cleanup.  If you join the human services team, you’ll be serving meals, painting a college-themed mural at a Boys and Girls Club, or assisting a transitional housing nonprofit.  This is a great opportunity to meet others while we strengthen our community.

There is a $25/person registration fee for Servathon that shares in the programming costs of the event (paint, ladders, brushes, etc) and includes your event t-shirt and an invitation to the Servathon “Come As You Are” after party.

We’ll be selecting our specific projects in late March.  And if we have 25 people on our team by March 17th, Greater DC Cares will print “DCFO” on our event t-shirts.  Register today and join our team in service!

Register today at www.servathon.org, select “Join a Team,” and select the appropriate DCFO team from the drop down menu.

Massachusetts was a wake up call for many of us and everyone wants to ensure that we do not see a repeat of this kind of loss in other key districts. Together, we identified a few key races that we think may be important to focus on, which we will investigate more over the next two weeks.

We are going to get back together on Tuesday, February 16 to look at the research that our teams have pulled together about these races and make plans for how we can best contribute to victory in those races.

We’ll let you know where the meeting will be soon — so stay tuned!

“This Democratic Congress is on a path to become one of the most productive since the Great Society 89th Congress in 1965-66, and Obama already has the most legislative success of any modern president — and that includes Ronald Reagan and Lyndon Johnson. The deep dysfunction of our politics may have produced public disdain, but it has also delivered record accomplishment.”

Among the accomplishments were the stimulus bill that helped prevent another depression, an expansion of children’s health insurance, oversight of the TARP funds, a law to allow the FDA to regulate tobacco, the largest land conservation bill in two decades, a credit card holders’ bill of rights, and defense appropriation reform.

He writes that significant losses for Democrats in the 2010 elections could end this productivity:

“If the midterm elections in November turn out to be more like 1994, when Democrats got hammered, than 1982, when Republicans suffered a less costly blow, the GOP will probably be emboldened to double down on its opposition to everything, trying to bring the Obama presidency to its knees on the way to 2012. That would mean real gridlock in the face of a serious crisis. Given the precarious coalitions in our otherwise dysfunctional politics, we could go quickly from one of the most productive Congresses in our lifetimes to the most obstructionist.”

Let’s get out there and make sure that doesn’t happen!

It sucks.

There are lots of reasons why we ended up where we are at. Personally, I’m happy to leave the blame game to the pundits.

What I do know is that we still have significant majorities in Congress — but those won’t remain long if we don’t start planning for this fall’s 2010 elections.

We need to pick 1 or 2 vulnerable Congressional districts nearby and start planning how to make a difference to ensure we win there in the fall.  Just imagine what will happen if we don’t.

Would you be willing to help develop a game plan for the 2010 elections?  The campaign is months away, but we need to start forming a game plan now.

Click here to sign up to join our team to plan for the 2010 elections in Virginia and elsewhere.

“Republican State Senator Scott Brown, who drives an old truck, channels voter skepticism more directly. Ignoring signs of improvement in the economy, he casts President Obama as the source of today’s problems, and would give the Republicans enough votes to block, under Senate rules, anything Obama wants to do. Affable in person, Brown nonetheless seeks to be a terminator, stopping the Democratic domestic agenda in its tracks.

In Massachusetts, the expected result of a Senate election is a Democratic victory, so Brown wins points for being different. He even entices voters to give him a try, noting that they can toss him out after three years.

Rarely has a pitch been more misleading. A vote for Brown is hardly a symbolic protest against congressional gridlock and the ways of Washington. It’s a vote for gridlock, in the form of endless Republican filibusters, and for the status quo in health care, climate change, and financial regulation. That’s what will happen if Brown gives the Republicans the additional vote they need to tie up the Senate.

Those are the real stakes in this campaign. It’s easy to find a provision in any major bill that gives one pause, and to brandish it as a reason to scuttle the whole thing. Blocking bills is easy; finding a politically acceptable response to complicated problems is hard.”