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Each morning, Bill Scher and Terrance Heath serve up what progressives need to effect change on the kitchen-table issues families face: jobs, health care, green energy, financial reform, affordable education and retirement security.

MORNING MESSAGE: Challenge Congress To Act, and Obama to Fight, on Jobs

OurFuture.org's Isaiah J. Poole: "Today's unemployment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics will be closely watched for its political impact on the presidential race. But it is not the numbers that will be most consequential. What will determine whether President Obama will keep his job in November is whether he steps up his fight for our jobs and whether we as progressives step up our pressure on Congress, particularly the Republicans who have blocked virtually every major effort to revive the Main Street economy."

Obama Embraces Health Care While Romney Flips

Romney used to call his mandate a "tax," notes NYT: "As the Massachusetts governor and then as a presidential candidate, Mr. Romney spent the next six years describing in a variety of different ways the possible punishments for ignoring the Massachusetts mandate: as 'free-rider surcharges,' 'tax penalties,' 'tax incentives' and sometimes just as 'penalties.' But regardless of the terms he used, his intentions were clear: Massachusetts residents who chose not to buy health insurance would see their state income taxes go up."

Obama touts health care law on stump in Ohio. LAT: "'We will not go back to the days when insurance companies could discriminate against people just because they were sick,' he said. 'We're not going to tell 6 million young people who are now on their parents' health insurance plans that suddenly they don't have health insurance. We're not going to allow Medicare to be turned into a voucher system. Nobody should go bankrupt because they get sick. I'll work with anybody who wants to work with me to continue to improve our healthcare system and our healthcare laws. But the law I passed is here to stay.' As he spoke, campaign aides distributed literature listing the benefits of the law, defiantly stealing the label that Republicans have used to attack it. 'Because of Obamacare,' the list began."

"Crying woman thanks Obama for healthcare law at campaign stop" reports The Hill: "Obama spoke with Stephanie Miller, who was crying as he left the stage in Sandusky, Ohio, following a speech. Miller told reporters she recounted to Obama the story of her sister, Kelly Hines, who died from colon cancer because she didn’t have employer-provided coverage and couldn’t afford insurance on her own."

House GOP to vote to repeal Affordable Care Act … again. Politico: "…House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) vowed to hold a repeal vote the week of July 9 … House Republicans have tried before to repeal the law, but those efforts have died — as this one likely will — in the Democrat-controlled Senate."

Trade Enforcer v. Outsourcer

Obama files WTO complaint about Chinese car tariffs. WSJ: "Thursday’s move was the seventh WTO case the Obama administration has initiated against China, and the second this year … The U.S.’s latest move is in response to duties China imposed in December on U.S.-produced cars and SUVs with an engine capacity of at least 2.5 liters, which covers most vehicles midsize and larger."

NYT's Paul Krugman slams Romney's outsourcing record: "Consider one of Mr. Romney’s most famous remarks: 'Corporations are people, my friend.' When the audience jeered, he elaborated: 'Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people.' … But one of the main points of outsourcing is to ensure that as little as possible of what corporations earn goes into the pockets of the people who actually work for those corporations … outside contractors can hire cheap labor that isn’t represented by the union and can’t participate in the company health and retirement plans … if Bain got involved with your company, one way or another, the odds were pretty good that even if your job survived you ended up with lower pay and diminished benefits."

House GOP Targets Food Aid For Poor

House farm bill triples Senate food stamp cuts. Politico: "…a $16 billion-plus package that triples what the Senate approved and imposes tougher income and asset tests that will disqualify hundreds of thousands of working-class households now getting aid."

The food stamp program is not a crisis. CBPP's Stacy Dean: "…SNAP has expanded in recent years mostly because of the severe recession and because it does much better than it used to in reaching eligible people, especially the working poor. The number of SNAP participants has leveled off in the past few months, and … CBO projects that by 2019, SNAP costs will fall back to their 1995 level when measured as a share of the economy (the best way to tell whether a given program is affordable) without any changes to the program."

Breakfast Sides

How bad is the LIBOR scandal? Really bad, says TNR's Noam Scheiber: "…Barclays is saying that the Bank of England all-but explicitly advised it to lower its interest-rate reports to LIBOR, because otherwise people would get the impression that the bank was in lousy health, and that might create problems (via some kind of run) … Which is to say, in order to get corruption in your banking system, you don’t need literal corruption … You just need banks big enough so that the bureaucrats keeping an eye on them have nightmares about what happens if the banks fail. "

More GOPers reject Norquist tax pledge. HuffPost: "…underneath is the belief that being locked into a pledge to never support new revenues in a debt-reduction deal is unpalatable. Just 45 of 83 of the Republican National Congressional Committee's current crop of so-called Young Guns have signed the no-tax pledge this election season…"

"Pennsylvania Voter ID Law Threatens To Disenfranchise Nearly 10 Percent Of State's Voters" reports HuffPost: "…more than 758,000 registered voters in Pennsylvania have no driver's license -- a primary form of identification."

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