Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) Backtracks After Telling Democratic Leaders To 'Get The Hell Out' Of The U.S.

The Huffington Post  Luke Johnson Posted: 1/31/12 11:12 AM ET

Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) is backing away from comments he made over the weekend telling Democratic leaders to "get the hell out of the United States of America."

"I don't get it. I mean, I don't understand what you're saying, you’re telling Obama and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to get out of the United States? Explain that." asked Soledad O'Brien Tuesday morning on CNN.

"No, Soledad, Soledad absolutely not. And you know that," said West. O'Brien interrupted him, saying that she didn't understand what he was saying.

"Well the thing is you should've listened to the entire speech," said West. "You didn't listen to the entire speech which talked about the contrast between the quality of opportunity which allowed a young man born in 1961 in the inner city of Atlanta, Georgia to now represent the highest-income zip code in the entire United States of America. That’s the America that I love, that’s the America that's dear to me."

West invited O'Brien to read the Federalist papers and the Constitution with him. O'Brien declined. Over the weekend, West said at a Lincoln Day Dinner for the Palm Beach County GOP, "We need to let President Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and my dear friend the chairman of the Democrat National Committee, we need to let them know that Florida ain't on the table." He added, "Take your message of equality of achievement, take your message of economic dependency, take your message of enslaving the entrepreneurial will and spirit of the American people somewhere else. You can take it to Europe, you can take it to the bottom of the sea, you can take it to the North Pole, but get the hell out of the United States of America."

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After cheers, West added, "Yeah I said 'hell.'" Bob Beckel on Fox News' "The Five" said Monday, "In my 30 years of politics, I have never heard anything more disgraceful in my life. I think Allen West owes an apology to a lot of people." West responded Tuesday on "Fox and Friends" by saying he thought Beckel owed him an apology.

The Florida congressman could face a difficult re-election in 2012, as his swing district could become more Democratic under a redistricting plan approved by a state House panel. West, however, has had strong fundraising -- he raised $1.75 million during the forth quarter of 2011, leaving him with $2.7 million in cash on hand.

WASHINGTON -- A liberal super PAC is set Monday to launch what it is billing as a multimillion dollar campaign to "Take Down the Tea Party Ten."

The effort by the progressive outfit CREDO aims to use the new big-spending super PAC model, which can accept unlimited donations, to back extensive local organizing and "education" aimed at defeating 10 members of Congress seen by the left as the worst of the worst.

"We're talking about some of the most odious members of Congress. Even for Republicans these guys are low," said Campaign Manager Matthew "Mudcat" Arnold in a statement.

"We're going to empower local activists to organize their friends and neighbors to lay out the truth about their representatives in the most basic terms," Arnold added. "They are anti-woman. They are anti-science. They are hypocritical, bigoted, and have said and done things that are downright crazy. They've done more to embarrass their constituents than they have to govern or work toward solutions. They are unfit for Congress, and we're going to help their constituents hold them accountable."

The first six lawmakers targeted by the group are Reps. Sean Duffy (R-Wis.), Steve King (R-Iowa), Allen West (R-Fla), Joe Walsh (R-Ill.), Frank Guinta (R-N.H.), and Chip Cravaack (R-Minn.). Four more will be chosen by CREDO's members.

Although super PACs can take unlimited donations, the group is boasting that, with 11,000 donors, it is much more a grassroots organization. The PAC plans to open offices in each of the targeted members' districts to work with people in the communities who already oppose the legislators. "We're taking the traditional super PAC model and turning it on its head -- to put power back in the hands of the people, instead of consolidating it in the hands of corporate executives and the ultra-wealthy," said Becky Bond, president of the CREDO super PAC. "Where Karl Rove and the Koch brothers can use shady money from a few hidden donors to fund a barrage of TV attack ads, this super PAC will empower local voters and our list of 2.5 million activists to build a grassroots campaign that is as hard hitting as it is progressive.

"Using innovative tactics, technology, and good, old fashioned grassroots organizing, we're going to kick some Tea Party congressmen out of office," Bond said.

Michael McAuliff covers politics and Congress for The Huffington Post. Talk to him on Facebook.

Dana Rohrabacher Gets a Smackdown From Real Time Panel

The lesson the Barack Obama presidency should teach Democrats is the Republican Party has only a glancing relationship to the truth and they will continue to lie on camera as often as possible until their lies become conventional wisdom. That's why so many conservatives believe that President Obama has raised taxes, wants to take away their guns (by pretending he doesn't) and initiated the bank bailout.

It works incredibly well. But you have to know your audience. If you spout off factually untrue slams against Obama on Fox News, no one will argue with you. In fact, it conforms with their agenda of misinforming their audience.

But you don't want to try that on a show like Real Time with Bill Maher, because the audience and sometimes the other panel guests will call you out. Case in point: Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) who chuckles like it's common knowledge that Obama wants to "gut" the military. But fellow guests Kennedy (no liberal, she, although she's clearly not grown out of her annoying MTV schtick), Martin Bashir and host Bill Maher quickly demanded some badly needed fact-checking. Not that it made an impact on Rohrabacher:

Maher, co-panelists Kennedy from Reason TV, MSNBC’s Martin Bashir and even the audience joined in to collectively chastise the California Republican for his blatantly false claim. “That’s absolutely not true,” Kennedy said, later adding, “I love the military. I like my SEALs groomed and ready to go but you have to tell the truth.” “Can I give you the facts?” Maher asked Rohrabacher. “So far every budget Obama has had  increased military spending,” he said. “This year they’re asking a reduction from $531 billion to $525 billion, 1.6 percent. You mean our freedom is in trouble because of that 1.6 percent?” Maher later added, “How paranoid do you have to be to say that this guy is gutting our military?”

Does it surprise you to know that the truth (which is clearly kryptonite to the conservative mind) is that military spending has increased every year of the Obama presidency and all they've done is ask to reduce the rate of growth of spending? And to put not too fine a point on it, but those mandated cuts to defense that allegedly will happen because of the failure of the super committee to put together a deal, which in and of itself was a cowardly avoidance of the larger Congress (of which Rohrabacher is a member) to DO THEIR JOBS.

FMR. (R) Speaker Newt Gingrich Blames His Poor Debate Performance On Romney

Posted: 29 Jan 2012 07:00 PM PST

It's a sign of a self-actualized, mature adult to accept responsibility for one's failings, attempt to correct them and to acknowledge the lessons learned. Then there's Newt Gingrich.

Never to be mistaken as a self-actualized, mature adult, Newt Gingrich has already blamed his philandering on his great love for his country. So is it little wonder that when he flops in his one purported skill that will allow him to beat Obama--debating--it is someone else's fault? Mr Gingrich learned from Saul D. Alinsky his mentor.

[Guest host Jake] Tapper noted that both of Gingrich’s surges in the polls were thanks to his powerful debate performances, and asked him what happened during both debates last week, where many analysts thought Romney came out much stronger and helped himself get back into the lead in Florida. Gingrich conceded he did not do his best at the debates, but had an explanation all ready.

“I was amazed. I’m standing next to a guy who has the most blatantly dishonest answers I can remember in any presidential race in my lifetime… I don’t know how you can debate someone with civility if they’re prepared to say things that are factually false.”

Gimme a break. You can dish it out but you can't take it, Newt. Like all big bullies, Gingrich is bluster with nothing behind it, folding like a house of cards when someone is able to push back.

*This* is the GOP's last, great hope for besting Obama in a debate? Hehehehehe...thanks, GOP.

How Newt Gingrich Crippled Congress

Alex Seitz-Wald 

January 30, 2012  

Alex Seitz-Wald

Alex Seitz-Wald is the Assistant Editor of ThinkProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action...

How much Americans hate Congress has become cliché. Congress’s approval rating is at an all-time low, and it’s not hard to see why: the institution is broken. Plenty of structural forces have contributed to Congress’s dysfunction: the increasing flow of money in politics, the emergence of the 24/7 cable news cycle, the increasing polarization of the electorate. But perhaps no single person bears as much responsibility as Newt Gingrich.

“I spent 16 years building a majority in the House for the first time since 1954,” Gingrich said during NBC’s Florida GOP debate Monday night, referring to the Republican takeover of the House in 1994. Over those sixteen years of personal and partisan striving, Gingrich invented or perfected many of the things that Americans dislike most about Congress. “I think I am a transformational figure,” Gingrich said before the 1994 election. “I am trying to effect a change so large that the people who would be hurt by the change, the liberal Democratic machine” will fight it, Gingrich explained.

There is no greater pathology in today’s Congress than obstructionism, from Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) refusal to raise the debt ceiling in July to Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) taking disaster relief funds for Hurricane Irene hostage. Both parties have long used Congress’s procedural rules to promote legislation they favor, but Gingrich created something new. “There is the assumption—pioneered by Newt Gingrich himself, as early as the 1970s—that the minority wins when Congress accomplishes less,” Representative Steny Hoyer (D-MD), the number-two Democrat in the House, explained in a 2009 speech at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. “Gingrich’s proposition, and maybe accurately, was that as long as…our party cooperate[s] with Democrats and get[s] 20 or 30 percent of what we want and they get to say they solved the problem and had a bipartisan bill, there’s no incentive for the American people to change leadership,” Hoyer told the Washington Post after the speech. “To some degree, he was proven right in 1994.”

In many ways, the obstructionist minority that Hoyer faced two years ago was following a playbook written by Gingrich over a decade earlier. Gingrich, in fact, took the debt ceiling hostage fifteen years before Boehner did, demanding huge, partisan cuts. In that case, the GOP backed down after President Clinton vetoed their spending bills and Moody’s warned of a credit downgrade. When Boehner refused to raise the debt ceiling, the threat of default lowered the US’s credit rating and was resolved by an complicated process involving a “supercommittee” and a two-step raising of the debt limit over a year. And it was Gingrich who, in one of his first acts as Speaker, patented the practice of refusing to approve disaster relief funds if they weren’t offset with spending cuts. Gingrich even held out after the Oklahoma City bombing later that year, prompting the Philadelphia Daily News to write, “Even Newt Gingrich must lose a little sleep at the idea of making political hay out of the mini-civil war that struck Oklahoma City.”

Of course, Gingrich’s greatest act of obstructionist brinkmanship was the 1995 and 1996 government shutdowns. Thanks to his refusal to concede on spending on social services, the government closed for five days in 1995, longer than the previous eight government shutdowns, and for a whopping twenty-one days a year later—the longest shutdown in history. Thanks to Gingrich’s obstinacy, health and welfare services for veterans were curtailed, Social Security checks were delayed, tens of thousands of visa applications went unprocessed and “numerous sectors of the economy” we negatively impacted, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Then there’s perhaps the most universally reviled practice of Congress: earmarking. Spending on earmarks doubled during Gingrich’s reign as Speaker, rising from $7.8 billion in 1994 to $14.5 billion in 1997. “Speaker Gingrich set in motion the largest explosion of earmarks in the history of Congress,” said Tom Schatz of the conservative group Citizens Against Government Waste. The pork binge was part of a Machiavellian plot to use taxpayer dollars to help Republicans get reelected, as Gingrich himself laid out in a 1996 policy memo titled, “Proposed Principles for Analyzing Each Appropriations Bill.” The memo instructed the chairmen of House Appropriation subcommittees to ask themselves if there are “any Republican members” who “need a specific district item in the bill.” This apparently included Gingrich himself, as Cobb County, Georgia, which the Speaker represented, received more federal dollars per resident than any other suburban county in the country in 1995,except for Arlington, Virginia, home of the Pentagon and other federal agencies, and Brevard County, Florida, home to Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center.

This partisan earmarking has led Representative Jeff Flake (R-AZ), a longtime anti-earmark crusader who has endorsed Mitt Romney, to dub Gingrich “the father of contemporary earmarking. ” Senator John McCain (R-AZ) went even further on a Romney campaign conference call Wednesday, saying that Gingrich’s plan to “distribute these earmarks led directly to the Abramoff scandal, Congressman Bob Ney going to jail and the corruption that I saw with my own eyes.”

Meanwhile, Gingrich was busy creating the climate of nearly nihilistic partisanship that reigns today. In May of 1988, against the wishes of the more moderate GOP leadership, Gingrich brought ethics charges against then-Democratic Speaker Jim Wright relating to a book deal. “This was very much Newt’s initiative,” John Pitney, a professor at Claremont McKenna College who has studied Gingrich for years, told The Nation. Gingrich successfully forced Wright to resign “and that really, for the first time, kind of politicized the entire ethics process,” Larry Evans, a government professor at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, told NPR in December. Ten years later, Gingrich was brought down by a similarly politically charged ethics process, when he was fined $300,000 for flouting tax laws with a tax-exempt college class that Democrats charged was actually political propaganda.

Before Wright, Gingrich tussled with another Democratic speaker and made a name for himself by exploiting the media and the new medium of C-SPAN. Gingrich was sworn in to his first term just a few months before C-SPANwent on the air in 1979, and as an ambitious freshman, he quickly realized the network’s potential. He and a small cadre of young Republicans he led pilloried then-Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill and other Democratic lawmakers nightly with personal attacks, no matter how unfair, like when he accused the Speaker of putting “communist propaganda” in the Speaker’s lobby.

O’Neill was so irritated by Gingrich’s speeches that he once ordered the House cameras to pan across the empty House chamber to expose that Gingrich was speaking to no one but the cameras, and called Gingrich’s exploits “the lowest thing that I’ve ever seen in my 32 years in Congress. Gingrich fired back that O’Neil was coming “all too close to resembling a McCarthyism of the Left.” The resulting the two-hour exchange, which was covered on every broadcast news outlet that night, made Gingrich into a national hero for conservatives and a villain to liberals.

It was the “moment that made Gingrich,” as Pitney wrote on his blog, and set the mold of punching up in the media that ambitious upstart firebrands like Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN) would follow for years to come.”If you’re not in the Washington Post every day, you might as well not exist,” Gingrich told Newsweek in the late 80s.

With his newfound fame and a small army of fiery conservative lawmakers behind him—the so-called Conservative Opportunity Society Gingrich created formed in 1983—Gingrich set out to remake the GOP. He narrowly won an election to be House minority whip in 1989 over a more moderate Republican from Illinois and with this official position, he ventured to “build a much more aggressive, activist party,” as he put it. He beefed up the party’s fundraising and recruiting operations to get more Republicans elected and hired pollster Frank Luntz to manage the party’s messaging. Five years later, Gingrich led a wave of fifty-four new Republicans into the House and was elected Speaker.

Of course, Gingrich’s greatest act of punching up would have to wait until he was Speaker, when he exploited Congressional power to impeach President Clinton for having an affair while he himself was having an affair with his current wife Callista. When Univision correspondent Jorge Ramos asked Gingrich about this hypocrisy Wednesday, Gingrich replied, “No, I criticized President Clinton for lying under oath in front of a federal judge, committing perjury—which is a felony for which normal people go to jail.” But as Clinton’s overwhelming popularity today attests, Gingrich’s crusade lacked merit and was plainly political. “Their efforts have succeeded only in turning a serious constitutional process into a partisan process that demeaned both the House and the Senate and became a painful ordeal for the entire country,” Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) said at the time.

Just as important, but often overlooked today, is the way in which Gingrich centralized power in party leadership. Progressive Democrats, frustrated with Southern conservative Democrats’ controlling committee chairmanships, started this trend in 1970s, Pitney said, but Gingrich consolidated power in himself to an unprecedented degree by making it so the Speaker could appoint key committee chairmanships. This allowed him to tightly control the agenda and sideline dissident factions in his party in a way that every Speaker since has exploited. “There was a lot of heightened partisanship on both sides, but Gingrich was very vivid, was very much a part of this process” of polarization, Pitney told The Nation.

In another structural change that persists to this day, Gingrich shortened the Congressional workweek to three days in order to maximize fundraising opportunities and provide more contact with constituents. But this also cut down on the amount of time lawmakers spent together in Washington where they could make personal connections across the aisle.

All together, Gingrich’s emphasis on partisan warfare über alles sped the demise of the comity that is essential to the functioning of Congress. If the parties refuse to work together, little can be achieved without super-majorities. It was Gingrich who made winning, rather than good governance, the chief currency of success. Earlier this month, James Lardner laid out in this magazine a proposal to roll back much of Gingrich’s work and fix Congress—but now Gingrich is campaigning to takeover another branch of government. One can only imagine the damage he might inflict there.

Alex Seitz-Wald 

January 30, 2012  

Gov. Nikki Haley Goes Full Anti-Union in State of the State Address

The anti-union part begins at 21:13

South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley (SC) used her annual state of the state speech to launch an all-out assault on unions and working families. In defense of pro-corporate, pro-1 percent policies, she blamed all the ills of the state, seemingly, on unions. Her claims about the importance to business of attacking unions are belied by the available research, but her campaign contributors aren't interested in facts, just anti-union propaganda.

The most relevant portion of the speech:

Finally, I love that we are one of the least unionized states in the country. It is an economic development tool unlike any other. Our companies in South Carolina understand that they are only as good as those who work for them, and they take care of their employees. The people of South Carolina have a strong work ethic, they value loyalty, and they take tremendous pride in the quality of their work. We don’t have unions in South Carolina because we don’t need unions in South Carolina. However, as we saw with the assault from the NLRB, the unions don’t understand that. They will do everything they can to invade our state and drive a wedge between our workers and our employers. We can’t have that.

Unions thrive in the dark. Secrecy is their greatest ally, sunlight their most potent adversary. We can and we will do more to protect South Carolina businesses by shining that light on every action the unions take. With the help and support of Chairman Bill Sandifer and Director Catherine Templeton we will create a competitive playing field for the companies that choose to call our state home. We will require unions to tell the people of South Carolina how much money they are making on our backs, which politicians they are funding, and how much they are paying themselves. We will protect the right of every private and public citizen to refuse to join a union, and, by Executive Order, I will make it clear that our state will not subsidize striking workers by paying them unemployment benefits. And we’ll make the unions understand full well that they are not needed, not wanted, and not welcome in the State of South Carolina.

There are so many lies and twisted comments about unions in that passage it's hard to even take the speech seriously. Except that Haley is the governor of South Carolina and she has many allies in the Republican Party that not only take these things as gospel truth, but are willing to do just about anything to weaken unions. Erin McKee, in a letter to the editor of the Post and Courier does a better job than I could of taking down Haley's comments:

Unions are needed in South Carolina. Union members are the only workers protected from at-will employment. Union members want to work with management to make their companies safe, have a contract that everyone can understand, have a grievance procedure (like due process) and protect workers.

Unions are the anti-theft device for workers. Is our state better off with low-wage jobs and no benefits? What will that do to our tax base over time, what will that do to our children, what will that do to our middle class? When labor was strong so was our middle class. What will happen to small businesses when people don't make enough money to shop? Do we really want the big business world to take over and have more companies keeping wages so low that the workers need public assistance while they make record profits?

Gov. Haley chose a union facility to have her inauguration. She works in a Statehouse painted by the Painters Union, gets her mail from the United States Postal Service, which has the Postal Workers Union, the National Letter Carriers, the Mail Handlers Union. Most of what she buys more than likely came through the Port of Charleston, where the International Longshoremen's Association handles cargo. She likely uses AT&T which has the Communications Workers of America union.

UPS workers who deliver packages to her office are represented by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The power she consumes is provided from SCE&G whose workers are represented by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Some of our very large companies like Kapstone, Mead Westvaco, Bowater, and International Paper are union as are our firefighters and lots of our construction workers.

The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers did the solar panel job at Boeing in the heat of the summer. Many in our wonderful symphony in Charleston are members of the American Federation of Musicians. We've got union members at our military bases and VA hospitals. Gov. Haley should be representing everyone in South Carolina including union members.

Well said.