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Heil Newt. First he wanted to fire Supreme Court justices that didn’t meet his political muster, now your average federal employee has to watch their back if we end up under a Gingrich presidency. Some interesting comments from Newt during Saturday’s debate in SC hosted by Mike Huckabee. (TPM):
Republican Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich suggested at a Fox News forum hosted by Mike Huckabee in South Carolina on Saturday that it would be a good idea to fire federal employees for being too liberal. Federal law, on the other hand, says Gingrich’s plan would be illegal.
“I think an intelligent conservative wants the right federal employees delivering the right services in a highly efficient way and then wants to get rid of those folks who are in fact wasteful, or those folks who are ideologically so far to the left, or those people who want to frankly dictate to the rest of us,” Gingrich said in response to a question from a federal employee at the forum (emphasis ours).
Um…wow. So we get a taste of Dictator Newt again. It’s too bad the purportedly intelligent candidate in the GOP Clown Car forgot that this kind of strongarm political witchhunting is illegal. The Office of Special Counsel would investigate.
Generally stated, § 2302(b) provides that a federal employee who has authority over personnel decisions may not:
(1) discriminate against an employee or applicant based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, handicapping condition, marital status, or political affiliation;
But, given the kind of political hijinks perpetrated under Bush II, Newt probably would sleep like a baby at night while lefty Fed employees were persecuted because of their political beliefs. This kind of pandering to the ultra con vote in South Carolina is completely off the rails. Does Newt really believe this is a mainstream position?
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Sometimes I almost want to see some of these people in the White House, just to see how badly they screw the pooch.
Judas F*ing priest! Is Newtie sporting a swastika armband under his jacket? Going back to loyalty oaths ala McCarthyism?
Every time this jowly, gelatinous, adulterous degenerate opens his piehole he shows how severely delusional he is! OMG what a maroon!
Hey, Chill folks! This is the Republican primary. All you need to know now is to stay out from behind the one who wins because he’s gonna do such a radical about-face that it might injure anyone who’s anywhere near him and being behind him could be fatal.
Dog whistles, dontcha love them?
Newt seems to have gone off the rails in the last 2 weeks and has said some truly absurd things. Would have to think that the R party is done with him when this is over – he doesn’t make them look good, if anything could.
I’m sure he would argue that “political affiliation” would mean voter registration with a party, and he is selecting people based on ideology – totally different. Some hack judge would rule that the “original intent” of the law was precisely that. Any light thrown on the situation would be deemed a “liberal witchhunt for partisan purposes”.
I imagine any ‘conservative’ jobless individuals are licking their chops. Just as they always want to lower taxes so that in the event THEY win the lottery their tax burden will be light, they imagine that the wholesale firing of lefties will open the job-gates for them and their progeny.
Newt has gone from being entertainment to potentially dangerous. He is the kind of moron who yells, “Fire!”, in a crowded rom, just to see how many people will trampled. With any reasonable luck, he will be like a July Fourth fireworks display and burn himself out in the low atmosphere. It would be nice to have a Gingrich silence follow the Bachman silence. Suppose we could be that lucky?
Presumably, Dubya fired all of Clinton’s Prosecutors and replaced them with Fundy Regent University Lawyers. Further, Dubya had them sign loyalty oaths (loyal to Dubya).
Obama, apparently kept them on, even though it is de rigueur to fire them and replace them with your own people.
Perhaps Newt is riffing off of this.
Who is really off the rails here?
Newt is just saying out loud what Bush the younger practiced, and what all “intelligent” conservatives, not to mention the firebrands, actually believe. Against the law? So what. Bipartisan acquiescence to torture, domestic surveillance and targeted murders were once beyond the pale, not to mention the constitution.
The fact a presidential candidate is calmly saying these things just demonstrate how far off the rails America itself has veered.
Newter is an execrable piece of shit. (Sorta like everyone presently trying to elbow their way to the front of the pack in SC.) Not that anyone here doesn’t already know that, but it always bears repeating. Further, I find it personally cathartic to (once again) publicly register my sentiments about this, um, execrable piece of shit.
Michele Obama to be a guest star on Nick Jr’s Teen Show i-Carly.
That makes me want to vote for more Oilbomber, Indefinite Detention without Trial or Habeus Corpus, Torture, Religious Pandering, Endless Wars, Ecological Destruction, Banksters and Social Security and Medicare Cuts.
Kind of like Gingrich.
Possibly even worse than what “Newt” said is the fact that the other leaders in the party he is a major national figurehead in have issued a single public denunciation of his statement that he would fire public employees who hold liberal political views.
Even worse than the lack of response from his party includes the fact that such an utterly extremist and over-the-top statement from a major party political candidate will generate absolutely no mass media controversy whatsoever.
(Hint: “Newt’s” threat would include the majority of the K-university public teachers and professors in America, among many, many, many other people.)
TOO LATE, we’ve already resigned in Good Conscience!
Added note: “Newt” is saying these things because he has good reason to believe that they will appeal greatly to the Republican party’s core voters …
… this tells you really all you need to know about serious Republican voters, they are a very serious under-studied threat to modern society freedoms and culture.
Sorry, but what happened to all of the people in the justice department that the Bush administration hired illegally? You know the ones who had to essentially take an oath to be a radical conservative.
As far as I know, NONE of them were ever fired.
Why would Sumner Redstone, Rupert Murdoch, and Les Moonves make a flap about this?
All they want are Deregulation, Tax Cuts and Fat Gubmint Contracts for their MIC Sponsors (so they can afford their commercial ad rates).
Yep, still living in the 1800s. One of Grant’s biggest fights while he was president was pushing through civil service reform which protected against exactly what Newt wants to do.
Is his PhD from Regents University like Goodling’s JD?
It’s surprising how many versions of disqualification they can come up with as a group.
Yet none of them adopts all of it up front, and I think we spend too much time lumping them together instead of considering the overall GOP strategy. It has been dumbed down more than ever before.
GOP care is taken to appeal selectively to racism, or rightist antisocial versions of libertarianism, or suppressing voting rights (economic or racist motives there), or constraining labor’s participation in a free market system, etc. It’s a complicated matrix to serve, and I doubt any conservative voter could have all of those ailments at once. One or two would suffice. So that’s why there have been so many GOP contenders for so long, and each will throw in an appealing bon bon occasionally.
Simply one or two of the contenders doing all of this at once would be ridden out on a rail. Instead, each assumes a toxic task or two. The danger for them is the level of savage attacks each has to pursue, which undermines any endorsement later.
We end up with a spectrum among the GOP hopefuls structured to titallate a variety of right-of-center voters, corral and consolidate them later. It’s like skimming a few beads of fat off of the broth at a time, with numerous swipes of the ladle. It’s a mindless process in the real world, but a science in politics.
Book Salon up with Dylan Ratigan’s Greedy Bastards: How We Can Stop Corporate Communists, Banksters, and Other Vampires from Sucking America Dry hosted by William Black
No kidding. It’s why he picked a fight with the NAACP, then started visiting AME churches in South Carolina: He wants coverage of himself getting attacked by those Angry Black Persons to be aired by the local SC media as a backhanded way of telling the (mostly white and bigoted) GOP base there that he’s their guy.
I’d go back even farther and invoke the Alien and Sedition Acts. That’s where Newt wants to take us.
And that is yet another reason why I won’t vote for Obama this November.
Gee, all the jobs the government created for the last 3years are on the line. They must have all been Government jobs, what a bummer!
“The Office of Special Counsel would investigate.”
No, it wouldn’t; no, it didn’t.
Notoriously, Scott Bloch, W’s Director of the Office of Special Counsel, threw away complaints of improper bias, discrimination, etc. that were inconvenient and discarded rules protecting whistleblowers, GLBT people, etc. that he found inconvenient, and even when he pleaded guilty to charges of criminal obstruction, Eric Holder’s Justice Department strove mightily to keep him from serving jail time.
Frankly, when it comes to contempt for the rule of law, we are now in the third term of George W. Bush, and I’m not that excited about a fourth term.
On a lighter note, while working at my board yesterday I jotted a note which struck me as humorous at the time. Sewage is in fact composed of approx. 99% water and 1% solids. So Newt being in the 1% makes him, well you know. Just thought they should know the 99% has figured out what they are.
They want Romney. Newt scares Murdoch
Didn’t the Republican Right encourage the assasination of President Garfield because he was too Liberal? Is this the kind of firing Newt is talking about? Preaching hate til others eliminate them?