On Voting Republicans Out Of Office

Democrat tipped blogger about Republican lawmaker meeting with white nationalists
Reuters
By Jonathan Kaminsky 23 hours ago

Newly elected House Majority Whip Scalise speaks to the media as Speaker of the House Boehner listens on Capitol Hill in Washington
.

View photo
Newly elected House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) speaks to the media as Speaker of the House John …

By Jonathan Kaminsky

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - The campaign manager of a Democrat who challenged U.S. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana tipped off a blogger that the Republican lawmaker had spoken to a white supremacist group in 2002.

However, Democrat Gilda Reed did not expose the meeting during the 2008 special election for the House seat because she believed it would not sway the district’s conservative electorate.

“I felt strongly that it would not have walked,” Reed told Reuters on Wednesday. "I was running in a district with a lot of bigots."

She lost to Scalise by more than 50 points.

Reed's son and 2008 campaign manager, Robert Reed, alerted left-leaning blogger, Lamar White Jr., who broke the story that has caused turmoil for Scalise, the No. 3 Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives.

As Congress prepares to reconvene next week, Scalise, 49, has riled civil rights groups who demand he step aside for addressing the 2002 event hosted by the European-American Unity and Rights Organization, or EURO, founded by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

House Speaker John Boehner and other party leaders have supported Scalise.

The 2008 special election to replace Representative Bobby Jindal, who resigned to assume the Louisiana governorship, marked the beginning of Scalise's rapid ascension in Congress, where he is a leader in the Republican's conservative wing.

Scalise has apologized for attending the event and said he was unaware of the group's ideology.

Robert Reed said that shortly after his mother's defeat to Scalise, he informed the state Democratic Party of Scalise's participation in the EURO event. A party spokeswoman said the leadership had changed several times since 2008 and the current staff did not know what happened in 2008.

Robert Reed said he contacted the blogger about three weeks ago because of Scalise's rise to majority whip in June.

“I opened up my laptop and searched ‘Steve Scalise’ and ‘David Duke’ and within 35 seconds I found the Stormfront post,” said White, referring to a contemporaneous posting on a neo-Nazi website mentioning Scalise’s presence at the event.

A few days later, White found a second post from the same Stormfront user that again mentioned Scalise’s attendance at the EURO event. The second post convinced him that they were genuine, and not planted by political foes, White said.

White posted his story linking Scalise to the EURO event on Sunday.

(Reporting by Jonathan Kaminsky; Editing by Marilyn Thompson and Lisa Shumaker)

David Duke Returns to Haunt the Republican House Whip
Dec 29, 2014 11:23 PM CST
How infamous was the former Klan leader when Steve Scalise spoke to his group?

David Weigel

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2014-12-30/david-duke-returns-to-haunt-the-gop-house-whip
On the morning of Jan. 21, 2000, David Duke stood in a rented room at the National Press Club to announce his next act. It had been a few months since Duke tried and failed to win a congressional seat in Louisiana, and his own electoral career—which peaked when he got into 1991's runoff for governor of Louisiana—was over. His self-published doorstop of a memoir wasn't selling. Still, Duke had a brand, and adherents, and he was ready to organize them in the National Organization for European American Rights, or NOFEAR.

"Just as African Americans have the NAACP and Mexican Americans have La Raza, European Americans now have the National Organization for European American Rights, to actively defend their rights and heritage in the United States," said Duke in a press release. At the podium, he repeated himself: "European Americans must band together as a group the same way African Americans do, the same way other minorities do."

The "European-American" schtick was not new. Duke had spent his whole public life re-casting white supremacist politics as pro-white, "white rights" politics. Black people had their organization; why couldn't whites have theirs? "If you watch the media today," said Duke in a February 2000 speech, "it seems like there are no white people in need. Well, let me tell you, two-thirds of the poor people in this country are white."

“By 2002, everybody knew Duke was still the man he had claimed not to be.”
Erick Erickson

For the first few months of the organization's life, Duke transformed into a sort of bizarro Al Sharpton, offering his wisdom and healing when "European-Americans" were victimized. Then the FBI showed up at his door. In November 2000, Duke's home was raided by feds looking for evidence that Duke was using NOFEAR as a slush fund. Shortly thereafter, FBI agent Todd Cox signed an affidavit explaining the alleged Duke scheme.

"Your affiant has probable cause to believe that David Duke was engaged in a scheme and artifice to defraud using the United States Mail," Cox wrote, according to a report from New Orleans Times-Picayune reporter Michael Perlstein. "Duke received substantial sums from individuals in this manner. In truth, the majority of the money was not used for Duke's cause, but rather for his personal benefit including large sums of money used at gambling casinos in Mississippi, Nevada and Louisiana."

Duke wasn't around to take the rap. When the FBI raided his home, he was in Russia, spreading the white pride gospel. And yet, for a while, his rebranding really did seem to work. In 2001, NOFEAR got Virginia's Republican governor, Jim Gilmore, to proclaim May "European-American Heritage and History Month." The governor only tore up the proclamation when the AP called to ask if he knew who was behind NOFEAR. Duke returned to the United States and kept up his Civil Rights Leader act, and in June 2001, he changed NOFEAR's name to the European-American Unity and Rights Organization—a name with a fine acronym (EURO) and no copyright conflicts with a popular clothing brand. Still, in December 2002, he gave up. He confessed to mail fraud, and to bilking NOFEAR donors.

Why does any of this matter in 2014? Because over the weekend, the Louisiana blog CenLemar.com reported that House Majority Whip Steve Scalise spoke at a May 2002 EURO meeting, while serving as a state representative. The evidence of this had been sitting online for a decade, in a forum at the white supremacist site StormFront. Not until this December did the blogger point that out, or reporters confirm, with Scalise's office, that the speech happened.

"Those that attended the EURO conference in New Orleans will recall that Scalise was a speaker, offering his support for issues that are of concern to us," wrote a user named Alsace Hebert in a February 2004 forum post.

"A Republican such as Scalise can run in the district, state he will fight to end affirmative action, stop immigration, and fight crime," said another commenter, Lewis Sterling.

Today, in a full interview with the Times-Picayune's Julia O'Donoghue, Scalise plead ignorance of what EURO stood for and remembered no details from the event. (He surely would have noticed if he'd stuck around for Duke's video-conferenced speech, in which he speculated about Israel's role in the September 11 attacks.) "I was asked to speak all around the New Orleans region," he said. "I didn't know who all of these groups were and I detest any kind of hate group." He didn't remember the speech; Duke himself wasn't at the conference. "I had one person that was working for me. When someone called and asked me to speak, I would go." Rather like Van Jones did after his name was found on a 9/11 Truth petition, Scalise is insisting that the fringe fooled him into associating with beliefs he did not hold.

Duke's re-branding—his "European-American" group was founded 27 months before Scalise spoke, and re-named 11 months before he spoke—was obviously designed to sow confusion. Had David Duke asked Virginia to create a pro-white holiday, the governor would have safely tossed the request in the circular file. Because a "European American" organization asked for it, the governor was snookered.

But how infamous was the EURO conference? It depended what you read. At the start of 2002, the Anti-Defamation League listed the "National/International EURO Workshop on Civil Rights" on its calendar of "extremist events." Before the conference began, Gambit Weekly columnist Jeff Crouere reported that a baseball team was canceling its bookings at the hotel that would host the conference.

The Iowa Cubs will be playing the New Orleans Zephyrs from May 16-19, the same time frame as the EURO workshop. Originally, the Cubs were slated to stay at the same hotel as EURO participants. Normally, when playing the Zephyrs, the Iowa Cubs stay at the Best Western Landmark. Due to the controversial nature of EURO, the Cubs will move to a different hotel.

"We would just as soon stay away from a group that will create controversy," says Iowa Cubs general manager Sam Bernabe. The Best Western Landmark seems unhappy about the workshop as well. "

A contract to book this event was made some time ago, and it is our practice to fulfill our contractual obligations," a company spokesperson says.

"Our company does not share the views of this organization."

In the past, David Duke has held campaign events at the hotel, and "we have never had any trouble there," claims EURO national director Vincent Breeding.

The Iowa Cubs travel with 30 players and coaches, including six African Americans. "I'm glad we're staying away from it," says Cubs hitting coach Pat Listach. "I wouldn't have been comfortable staying there."

Scalise might have missed that edition of the newspaper. "It is my recollection that the group was not well established or very large," Crouere told me in an email. "It also did not receive much publicity in the local area, so I am not sure if most of the local political community was even aware of their conference. Of course everyone is familiar with the founder, but not this group or their meeting."

Perhaps Scalise also failed to check EURO's website, which was located at WhiteCivilRights.com. How'd he get to the conference, anyway? Duke, who has re-emerged from obscurity to talk to reporters, told the Washington Post's Robert Costa that the invitation came from his associates Howie Farrell and Kenny Knight. If Scalise didn't know who Howie Farrell was, he'd forgotten the name of Duke's campaign manager in his 1991 gubernatorial bid, one of the most infamous periods in Louisiana political history.

And it's hard to overstate how toxic Duke himself was in Louisiana. Every couple of years, he was re-emerging to taint Republicans. In 1995, Duke quietly sold his voter mailing list to the campaign of Republican gubernatorial candidate Mike Foster—who won. In 1996, Duke embarrassed the party by running for U.S. Senate and losing. In 1999, he did the same, beckoning yet another group of out-of-state journalists into Louisiana to cover him. Later that year, with Foster up for re-election, a grand jury probed the sale of the mailing list and Duke himself was called to testify. No Republican with ambition, as Scalise clearly was, wanted to get close to Duke.

"By 2002, everybody knew Duke was still the man he had claimed not to be," wrote RedState's Erick Erickson today. "The very GOP establishment now lining up behind Steve Scalise threw Chris McDaniel under the bus for speaking to a Sons of the Confederate Veterans event."

Indeed, Scalise was on the record attacking Duke for that 1999 race. "The novelty of David Duke has worn off,” Scalise told Roll Call's John Mercurio. “The voters in this district are smart enough to realize that they need to get behind someone who not only believes in the issues they care about, but also can get elected."

That phrase—"who not only believes in the issues they care about"—seemed innocuous enough at the time. In 2014, after Scalise has won five easy elections to the House (he took Governor Bobby Jindal's vacant seat in a 2008 special), it's being read as evidence that Scalise did not condemn Duke nearly enough. Duke is happy to pick up the ringing phone and link himself to Scalise; the whip is left arguing that he simply didn't pay enough attention, in 2002, to the name of the organization that Duke was using to unite white supremacists.

Meanwhile, the only people who know what Scalise said at EURO are deriding the media's sudden interest. "I remember that conference well," wrote Don Black, the founder of Stormfront, in a forum post. "Hard to believe it's been over twelve years. I won't comment on Scalise. But I will note the absolute hypocrisy of the anti-White establishment. David Duke had been elected to the Louisiana legislature in 1989, despite massive opposition from the local and national media/political establishment. He went on to win 60 percent of the White vote statewide in the 1990 U. S. Senate election and then in the 1991 gubernatorial race. I worked on all those campaigns, and other Louisiana politicians naturally wanted the Duke vote."

Scalise didn't need "the Duke vote." He won his Republican-leaning district easily; he won his congressional races with no less than 66 percent of the vote, and often much more. If his explanation is true, he failed to due diligence and make sure the conservative group he'd be talking taxes to in May 2002 had no connection to Louisiana's most infamous bigot. Just days before the new Congress takes office, he's being universally condemned or mocked by progressives. He's being derided by conservatives like Erickson, who want the establishment to play by the same "guilt by association" rules they assign to insurgents. And he's being defended by people who think the media is making up rules no politician should have to live by.

"The double standard of which supremacists we are allowed to tolerate is glaring," wrote conservative activist Charles C. Johnson in a series of tweets defending Scalise. "Why can politicians speak at black or Latin supremacist organizations but not white supremacist organizations?"

David Duke Says He Understands Why Scalise's Memory May Have Failed

Dec 30, 2014 8:38 AM CST

And he says he wouldn't vote for Scalise because the congressman “puts the interest of Israel over the interest of America.”

House Majority Whip Steve Scalise told a Louisiana newspaper on Monday that he didn't know he was talking to a white nationalist group when he made an appearance as a state lawmaker 12 years ago. David Duke, the one-time Ku Klux Klan leader and head of that group, says that's probably not true.

“It would seem likely he did know, but that doesn't mean that he did,” Duke, 64, said in a phone interview. “And if he had known, I can understand why his memory would fail him a little bit, because there is a McCarthyism today that is far more severe than anything of the McCarthy era.”

This new “McCarthyism,” Duke said, is an attempt to destroy politicians for circumstances out of their control. He said it is easier for a murderer to rehabilitate himself than for a politician “who uses the wrong word one time in a conversation 40 years ago” and is labeled a racist.

“If he had known, I can understand why his memory would fail him a little bit.”
David Duke

Duke said Scalise was invited to speak to European-American Unity and Rights Organization, or EURO, in 2002 by Duke's former campaign manager, Kenny Knight. Duke said the name of the group, which he founded, was “innocuous.”

“I mean, 'EURO' definitely sounds like a human rights organization, which it was,” he said.

“It would seem to me that he would have realized that it was our group,” he said. “Because he knew Kenny. I mean, he knew me. But I can’t swear to it. When you're running around different places and talking to events you’re invited and you just see a name and you’ve got three or four others to do and you don’t have anyone to vet them, that’s possible.”

Knight couldn't immediately be reached for comment.

Duke said that he was horrified by the negative attention on Scalise, which he called a byproduct of a liberal media misrepresenting facts to portray white as racists. He said that media has fueled protests over police incidents in Ferguson, Mo., and New York City and that he had statistics showing white criminals were more likely to be shot by police in New York than black criminals.

He compared Scalise's speech to George W. Bush speaking to the NAACP during the 2000 presidential campaign. Duke said he wouldn't vote for Scalise because the congressman “puts the interest of Israel over the interest of America.” But Duke said he would retaliate against any “hypocrite”—including Republicans and Democrats who he said have quietly supported him in the past—who attempts to hurt Scalise because of the speech.

“If any of them, if they jump on this bandwagon, those who have asked for support from my camp—if they throw Scalise to the wolves in this thing as part of this lynch mob, you know, I promise I will go and absolutely out them because they are hypocrites,” he said.

[img]http:ww.westernjournalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/horns.jpg[/img]

Hey, **** head, what do you say to David Duke saying Scalise was there and knew who he was talking to?

I say, I don't listen to racists. It appears you do.

Bobsal, thanks for posting this. I try to bring this up every couple of months on the are jews stealing pals land site. Of course the jew lovers there scream like scalded monkeys and point out that I am a racist. The really sad thing is that our crooked politicians have been bought in various ways such as money directly into their pockets and voting blocks delivered to the crooked bastards. We, not me, are supporting a bloody minded despotic dictatorship who have taught its military to be a nazi like organization.

Children, Jews are not a race, either are Jew lovers. Also it is socially acceptable to hate both of them. Live it up. Fascists.

Former KKK Leader David Duke Threatens GOP Pols: Go After Scalise and I Will Out You As My Friend

December 31, 2014 | Posted by Nick Chiles
Tagged With: David Duke, former KKK grand wizard, rep. mia love, steve scalise of Louisiana
Steve Scalise

Rep. Steve Scalise

Former KKK Leader David Duke, who has re-emerged in the national headlines after it was revealed that House Majority Whip Steve Scalise spoke at a Duke white supremacist conference 12 years ago, has threatened other Republican politicians who are coming out against Scalise.

“Why is Scalise being singled out? I don’t know,” Duke said in an interview with fusion.net. “He was just going [to the EURO conference], obviously, to tell voters about some of his initiatives on some tax matters. That’s what it’s all about. And I think it’s insane, this whole process.”

Then Duke issued this threat to other Republicans who might be inclined to criticize the third highest ranking Republican in the House:

“If Scalise is going to be crucified — if Republicans want to throw Steve Scalise to the woods, then a lot of them better be looking over their shoulders,” Duke warned.

Duke’s group, called the European-American Unity and Rights Organization, is well-known to the Southern Poverty Law Center as a white nationalist hate group founded in 2000 by Duke, the controversial former Louisiana state representative.

Scalise’s appearance was first reported on Sunday by a Louisiana political blogger named Lamar White Jr., who found a number of posts on Stormfront, one of the original white supremacist websites, describing Scalise’s appearance at the 2002 EURO gathering

Scrambling to repair the damage as some members of Congress are calling for him to be demoted from Majority Whip, Scalise blamed his speaking appearance at the EURO conference on the fact that he only had one staff member—and he said he didn’t know the conference thrown by Duke, an extremely prominent figure in Scalise’s part of Louisiana, was a white supremacist conference.

But no one seems to be buying his story.

Mia Love, the former Utah mayor who is about to be sworn in as the only Black female Republican member of Congress, sounded disturbed by all the calls asking her to comment on Scalise.

“It is difficult for me to comment on Rep. Scalise’ speaking engagement from 12 years ago,” she said in a statement. “I have not spoken with him about that particular day. All I can say is that, from my experience, the majority whip has been extremely helpful to me and all of my colleagues.”

In his comments, Duke said that he is very well-connected with national politicians and said the depictions of him as racist are a product of the media’s “zionist” and “tribalist” mentality.

Duke said comments by politicians piling on Scalise is “all bullsh*t.” He said he’s shocked at the “insane” amount of attention he and Scalise are getting.

He said he’s “grown up” since his days as a Grand Wizard of the Klan. “And I know who the real racists are.”


Join us in our effort to change our world with Empowering Narratives. Share this empowering narrative on your social network of choice and ask others to do the same.

Well, having Jewish blood and Jewish friends, I am not anti-Semite. I am anti-Zionist. And while I believe that Israel was a construct of anti-Semitism in the west after WWII - the allies (US, UK, France) did not want to settle Jews into their countries and they didn't want to see them go behind the Iron Curtain. So they encouraged them to go to Palestine because there was nothing the Palestinians could do about it.

Israel is a reality. It isn't going away. And now its time to make Palestine a reality the Israelis can deny. Which won't happen as long as the US backs Israel unconditionally.

Jeb Bush Resigns as George W. Bush’s Brother
By Andy Borowitz

Email
Print

Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY JASON REED/REUTERS

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In the strongest sign to date that he intends to seek the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush has officially resigned his position as George W. Bush’s brother.

“No longer being related to his brother is a key step to clearing Jeb’s path to the nomination,” an aide said on New Year’s Day. “We expect his poll numbers to soar on this.”

According to the aide, the former Florida governor resigned his post as brother in a ten-minute phone call with George W. Bush, after which he blocked the former President’s phone number and e-mail address.

In an official statement, George W. Bush said that he “understands and supports” his former brother’s decision.

“If I were him, I would no longer be related to me either,” he said.

The Appalling Career of Michael Grimm
By Evan Ratliff



Michael Grimm’s pugnacious career in government service ended with a whimper on Monday night, with an after-hours statement announcing his resignation from Congress. It had been a week since Grimm, the Republican congressman from Staten Island, pleaded guilty to one charge in a twenty-count federal indictment for tax fraud and perjury. Outside the courthouse that day, he declared that he had no plans to step down. It was easy to imagine that Grimm would keep his word, if only because of the sheer volume of allegations that the congressman had already beaten back—including those recounted here in 2011, in which Grimm, while serving as an F.B.I. agent, was alleged to have pulled his gun in a Queen’s night club and instigated a racially charged incident (acts that he denied).

But step down he did, bringing an end to a congressional tenure consisting of equal parts bluster and farce. Grimm will probably be best remembered for his on-camera threat to throw a NY1 television reporter off of the Capitol Rotunda balcony after he’d dared to ask a question about the Justice Department investigation into Grimm’s fundraising. And no collection of Grimm’s greatest hits can leave out the interview in which he recited almost verbatim a speech from “A Few Good Men” as if it were his own. The Grimmest of Grimm moments occurred, however, during his 2012 campaign, when he publicly insinuated that political forces arrayed against him had broken into his office to gain access to computer files. The break-in turned out to be the work of a troubled teen-ager. The computers, police concluded, hadn’t been touched.

Grimm previously worked as an undercover F.B.I. agent, and he cited that fact repeatedly on the campaign trail—at one point drawing a rebuke from the bureau. In November, he won reëlection in the shadow of his federal indictment and a potential trial. While some Democrats accused him of shamefully holding his guilty plea until after Election Day, he may have done his constituents a favor by saving them from an opponent so inept that he earned more mockery than even the congressman himself. (“In Domenic Recchia, the Democrats have fielded a candidate so dumb, ill-informed, evasive and inarticulate that voting for a thuggish Republican who could wind up in a prison jumpsuit starts to make rational sense,” the Daily News observed in one of the most comically underwhelming endorsements ever published.) Now each party will have a new chance to field a less-bad-than-the-other-guy candidate in a special election.

Ultimately, though, Grimm’s plea and resignation will prove unsatisfying to anyone but political partisans. He has admitted to paying undocumented workers under the table as the owner of a Manhattan restaurant called Healthalicious, filing false tax returns to profit from it, and then lying about all of it to investigators. These are not trivialities, but the public will likely never obtain answers to more serious questions around Grimm’s conduct as an elected representative. In 2012, the Times reported extensively on hundreds of thousands of dollars Grimm raised from the followers of the New York City rabbi Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto, detailing allegations that Grimm advised contributors on how to exceed legal limits and that he collected donations in envelopes full of cash. (Pinto, in an absurdly complicated investigation spanning New York and Israel, later reportedly accused Grimm of blackmailing him.) By 2014, a federal investigation was underway, and one of Grimm’s campaign contributors (and former girlfriend), Diana Durand, was soon under indictment for using straw donors to exceed contribution limits. The U.S. Attorney’s office had assigned Assistant U.S. Attorney Todd Kaminsky, known for his success in public-corruption prosecutions, to Grimm’s investigation. But Kaminsky left the case in May to run for state assembly, Durand pleaded guilty without implicating Grimm, and no campaign-finance charges were ever brought against the congressman.

Federal prosecutors were left with the Healthalicious tax fraud, which, depending on one’s political affiliation, came off as either Capone-like in its catch-them-for-what-you-can-prove approach or evidence of the “political witch hunt” Grimm had invoked against the allegations all along.

Grimm has long made a habit of leaving such problematic connections in his wake, and then chalking up any accusations of impropriety to conspiracy. I first became interested in him while investigating one of his F.B.I. informants, a scam artist named Josef von Habsburg who helped lure a lawyer into a dubious sting operation. “I am an F.B.I. agent, I took an oath,” the then aspiring congressman railed at me when I asked him questions about his F.B.I. past, including the night-club incident. “You’re trying to do a chop job on me.” When I asked him why he left the F.B.I. when he did, just after having helped build a large and successful case against fraud on Wall Street, he said, “I was really at the top of my career. If I was gonna leave, leave at the top.” Later, the Times reported on Grimm’s post-F.B.I. business ties to a convicted fraudster and former F.B.I. agent in Texas, along with the campaign-finance questions and the allegations that Grimm’s partner in Healthalicious had connections to the Gambino crime family. “This attack is politically motivated,” Grimm responded.

Federal prosecutors have not made clear whether any of their investigations remain open. One former Assistant U.S. Attorney with whom I spoke—who did not have direct knowledge of the case—found it unlikely that Grimm would have taken any plea deal that didn’t include at least tacit agreement from prosecutors to no longer pursue such charges.

Grimm now faces a federal prison sentence of up to thirty-six months. Whether he ends up alongside the convicts he once took great pride in cornering will be left to U.S. District Court Judge Pamela Chen. What we do know is that Michael Grimm is a man who betrayed the laws he once made such a show of upholding.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/appalling-career-michael-grimm?intcid=mod-most-popular

How can you think Dubya was anything other than a disaster? He lead us into a disastrous illegal war in Iraq, the consequences of which will reverberate for generations. He is so stupid he did not even realise there was a difference between Shia and Sunni Moslems on the eve of invasion.

How could you elect someone so monumentally stupid to the highest office in the land? It simply beggars belief. I never liked Thatcher, but I never thought she was stupid.

W didn't have to be as smart as old iron pants, he had Dick Cheney to his thinking for him.

You really needed to be here for the 2000 election, Gore just didn't seem like he was serious about the job. Its the only election I didn't vote in for in more than twenty years.

W wasn't a bad governor, but then a Texas governor is the least powerful governor in the nation. He can only veto and call special sessions of the legislature which meets every two years.

Its about the big money brainwashing the population Izzy. When you own the majority of the news media its easy to elect who you want too.

Speaking of brainwashed:

At awkward time, Wisconsin's Walker faces GOP rift
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Republican Gov. Scott Walker has rolled over his Democratic opponents in Wisconsin, shutting down their allies in labor unions, turning back attempts to recall him and handily winning re-election in November.

But as he prepares for the possibility of taking his winning record into a campaign for president, Walker is running into trouble from an unexpected source: his own overwhelmingly Republican Legislature.

Walker, who's trying to polish an image of a governor who gets things done efficiently, is confronting lawmakers who want to flex their increased political power by wading into difficult issues, such as right-to-work legislation, to score major conservative victories.

The governor wants no part of it. He wants a buttoned-down agenda centered on the budget and tax cuts, done on a brisk campaign-friendly schedule, and is skirting big showdowns that could take months and bring hordes of protesters back into the streets in Madison, much like the turmoil of his first months in office. Walker enraged labor unions after taking office in 2011 by passing legislation that effectively ended public employee unions' bargaining rights, sparking weeks of demonstrations and a recall election that Walker survived.

full: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/d2d1e144d9114923899e8cd5c3c763e1/awkward-time-wisconsins-walker-faces-gop-rift