Justin's Political Corner

Former congressman Allen West has found a new home on Fox News, where he has been signed on as a contributor.

“Representative West’s congressional and military experience along with his fearless approach to voicing key issues will provide a valuable point of view to the FOX News lineup,” Fox News Vice President Bill Shine said in a statement. West served in the army before running for Congress in 2010.

h/t: WaPo

When Muslim-American organizations and activists concerned with Islamophobia woke up the day after the election, on November 7, they were elated. Key members of what had been dubbed the House Republican “Islamophobia caucus”had been voted out of office. These Tea Party-affiliated Republicans included Joe Walsh (R-IL), who had warned in August that Islamists were “trying to kill Americans every week” and were lurking in the Chicago suburbs, and Allen West (R-FL), who linked the entire religion of Islam to terrorism.

These fear-mongers won’t be able to spread their hysteria from the bully pulpit of a House seat any longer. But that doesn’t mean that the House Republican caucus has rid themselves of the scourge of anti-Muslim politicians who stoke that sentiment for political gain. On the contrary, the House Republican caucus remains the place where the ugly head of Islamophobia rests comfortably.

Here are five House Republicans who spread anti-Muslim sentiment routinely. Activists concerned with Islamophobia should watch these players in the year to come. The fight against Islamophobia in this country is far from over, and many members of the Republican Party remains wedded to that hateful ideology.

1. Michele Bachmann

This Minnesota Tea Party favorite catapulted herself into the spotlight again by hawking a wacky conspiracy theory first propagated by a former Reagan administration official and now chief Islamophobe. She narrowly won re-election in November despite spending twelve times as much as her opponent, Democrat Jim Graves.

Last summer, Bachmann garnered national attention when she and other Republicans alleged that the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian-based political movement that spread throughout the Middle East, had “penetrated” the U.S. government. Specifically, Bachmann singled out a prominent Muslim-American aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton named Huma Abedin as being part of the conspiracy. The Minnesota congresswoman made the allegations in letters sent to U.S. government officials.

The letter questioned whether there was “direct influence” on the intelligence community from “[Muslim] Brotherhood operatives.” And the letter also mentioned that Abedin has “family members” connected to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Needless to say, the allegations were bogus, and some Republican leaders blasted Bachmann for going on a witch hunt. “Accusations like this being thrown around are pretty dangerous,” said Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH).But other Republican officials backed up Bachmann. “Her concern was about the security of the country,” said Eric Cantor (R-VA).

Her letter to U.S. government officials made clear that Bachmann got her ideas from Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan aide and prominent neoconservative. Gaffney is a leading anti-Muslim activist in the U.S., and has produced a 10-part online series about the Muslim Brotherhood’s influence in the U.S. But the idea that the Muslim Brotherhood is plotting from within is a McCarthyite theory that casts aspersions on Muslim-Americans within the U.S. government. There is also no evidence to support the theory.

This summer 2012 episode was hardly the only iteration of Bachmann’s Islamophobia, though. In 2011, she stoked fear about sharia law—Islamic law—taking over U.S. courts.

2. Peter King

He may have lost his chairmanship of the Homeland Security committee due to party-imposed term-limits, but you can count on King stoking the flames of fear towards Islam next year. King, a Republican hailing from Long Island, used his post as chair of the House Homeland Security Committee to specifically target the problem of terrorism within the Muslim community—and nowhere else, despite right-wing extremism being on the rise. After serving for seven years, King is no longer the head of the committee, though he will remain a member.

King has a penchant for singling out Muslim-Americans. He held a total of five separate hearings on Islam and terrorism in the United States, ostensibly to focus on the threat of “homegrown” terrorism from Muslims.

His first hearing sparked the most controversy. Titled “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community’s Response,” it was based on King’s assumption that the Muslim community in the U.S. is prone to breeding extremists. In 2004, King claimed that “80%, 85% of the mosques in this country are controlled by Islamic fundamentalists.” Despite this claim becoming a right-wing meme, there was no evidence to back it up. In fact, as the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights pointed out in a letter to King before his first hearing, “experts have concluded that mosque attendance is a significant factor in the prevention of extremism.”

King courted even more controversy based on one of his star witnesses at the first hearing: Zuhdi Jasser, an activist who has become the right’s darling Muslim. Jasser is the head of a group called the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, which is funded by anti-Muslim figures like the right-wing Christian Foster Friess. Many Muslim organizations say that Jasser has little following among American Muslims. Jasser narrated an Islamophobic film put out by an Israeli-settler and neoconservative linked outfit called the Clarion Fund. The film, titled “The Third Jihad,” was shown to New York Police Department officers as training and claims that Muslim extremists are plotting from within to take over the U.S.

3. Mike McCaul

For the House Homeland Security Committee, it’s out with one Islamophobe as chief of the panel, and in with another. McCaul, a Republican hailing from Texas, has dutifully served alongside King on the committee. And now, he’s getting his chance to run it on his own.

Since King was forced out of the top spot due to party-imposed parameters, McCaul has been tapped to lead the Homeland Security Committee. McCaul’s history of Islamophobia shows why he will likely lead the committee similar to how King did.

And McCaul also runs around with the players behind the wave of Islamophobia that has swept the nation since 9/11. McCaul appeared on Frank Gaffney’s radio show last year—the same radio show where Gaffney has spread his toxic theories about sharia law and the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S. And McCaul didn’t bat an eye, or mutter any response, when Gaffney carried on about the “Muslim Brotherhood’s operations in the United States.” When he got a chance to speak, McCaul indulged in speculation about the “threat” of Hezbollah, the Lebanese armed group, in the Western Hemisphere—a threat for which there is little evidence for, according to PolitiFact.  

4. Louie Gohmert

This Texas Republican has promoted anti-Muslim sentiment too many times before. Gohmert was widely mocked for his August 2010 assertion that Middle Eastern terrorists were plotting new attacks on the U.S. by sending their pregnant wives to this country whose children “could be raised and coddled as future terrorists.” The phrase “terror babies” entered the political lexicon after Gohmert’s outlandish statements. Yet, as Mother Jones noted at the time, there’s not “a morsel of evidence to support Gohmert’s terror baby tale, which the congressman says he learned of from a woman on a plane while en route to the Middle East and from a retired FBI agent.”

The next year, Gohmert again made headlines with remarks about Islam and President Barack Obama. He suggested that Obama’s allegiances were with Islamic states instead of the U.S. “I know the president made the mistake one day of saying he had visited all 57 states, and I’m well aware that there are not 57 states in this country, although there are 57 members of OIC, the Islamic states in the world,” Gohmert said on the House floor. “Perhaps there was some confusion whether he’d been to all 57 Islamic states as opposed to all 50 U.S. states. But nonetheless, we have an obligation to the 50 American states, not the 57 Muslim, Islamic states…This administration [has been]  complicit in helping people who wants [sic] to destroy our country.”

5. Trent Franks

In recent years, Arizona Republican Trent Franks has taken to demonizing Muslim-Americans.

In 2009, Franks was one of four Republicans to call for an investigation of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s leading Muslim civil rights group and a favorite target of the Islamophobic right. The GOP members claimed an investigation was needed into whether CAIR was “spying” on Congressional offices in order to influence policy. The evidence for that charge was a 2007 CAIR memo that called for placing Muslim interns in key Congressional offices in order to influence policy on issues important to Muslim-Americans—something that every interest group does in Washington. As Glenn Greenwald pointed out at the time: “They stand accused of plotting to influence members of Congress and trying to help interns obtain positions in Congress in order to advance their political agenda.  That’s consistent with what virtually every political advocacy group in the nation does; it’s normally called activism and democracy.” But for House Republicans, Muslim-Americans working on Capitol Hill is a step down the road towards sharia law.

The House GOP members’ initial source for the entire CAIR debacle was a book titled Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America.

h/t: AlterNet

PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla.—Florida Republican Rep. Allen West conceded to Democratic challenger Patrick Murphy on Tuesday, two weeks after the Nov. 6 election.

West challenged the results that showed him about 2,000 votes short of Murphy in Florida’s 18th Congressional District but was unable to persuade local officials to grant him a full recount. He released a statement on Tuesday saying he plans to take “no further action to contest the outcome of this election.”

“For two weeks since Election Day, we have been working to ensure every vote is counted accurately and fairly. We have made progress towards that goal, thanks to the dedication of our supporters and their unrelenting efforts to protect the integrity of the democratic process,” West said in a statement. “While many questions remain unanswered, today I am announcing that I will take no further action to contest the outcome of this election.”

National news outlets called the race for Murphy on election night, but West refused to concede at the time.

h/t: Yahoo! News

Twitter’s wingnuts are screaming bloody murder at this writing after Florida’s St. Lucie County failed to finish their court-ordered recount by today’s noon deadline, prompting Patrick Murphy’s campaign to claim final victory over Rep. Allen West. 

The Palm Beach Post reports that West’s supporters have charged into the St. Lucie election office screaming, “Count our votes!” West’s lawyers have raced to a judge’s office to demand an injunction against the state deadline. Numerous West supporters are claiming on Twitter that the county deliberately sabotaged a tabulation machine in order to miss the deadline. More on this later today as the story develops.

h/t: Joe.My.God

We were expecting conservatives to immediately blame their election defeats on voter fraud, and predictably their claims don’t have a leg to stand on. Yesterday, Buster Wilson of the American Family Association on AFA Today said that Rep. Allen West lost his campaign for re-election because of Democratic voter fraud, a point also made by AFA spokesman Bryan Fischer. Just like when Wilson thought he discovered Obama’s student ID proving he wasn’t born in the U.S. or exposed the militarization of the National Weather Service, Wilson now believes he uncovered massive voter fraud in Florida.

But Wilson’s claim, which is also touted on conservative sites like Townhall and WorldNetDaily, that a county in West’s district had “141 percent of registered voters voting” is not true.

The number Wilson points to is actually the percentage of “cards cast.” Since the ballot contains two cards, or the number of pages on the ballot, the voter turnout rate is approximately half of the cards cast [PDF].

UPDATE: Wilson’s colleague at AFA Sandy Rios also claimed on her radio show that the presidential election and West’s race were “stolen,” making the same exact false claim that in “Allen West’s congressional district, initially on the first count, I think 140 percent of the people registered to vote, voted.” Rios added that the overwhelming support Obama received in inner-city precincts is proof of fraud, even though such overwhelming margins are neither without precedent nor evidence of fraud.

h/t: Brian Tashman at RWW

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released an unexpectedly strong monthly jobs report on Friday, finding a dramatic drop in unemployment to 7.8 percent and revised the number of jobs added in July and August up from initial estimates. While for most Americans, the growing economy is good news, conservatives immediately expressed their skepticism in the jobs report’s credibility.

1) Minutes after the report was released, Jack Welch, who famously cooked General Electric’s accounting books when he was CEO, accused President Obama of manipulating the numbers to distract from his debate performance:

FNC and FBN’s Eric Bolling:

WOW Obama Labor Dept (7.8%)smarter than all 25 of Americas top Economists (8.2%est)..or something far more insideous 4p&5p FNC/DVR

— ericbolling (@ericbolling) October 5, 2012

FL-18 GOP candidate Allen West (R-FL):
 

In regards to today’s Jobs report—-I agree with former GE CEO Jack Welch, Chicago style politics is at work here…tinyurl.com/9rbommz

— Allen West (@AllenWest) October 5, 2012

h/t: Aviva Shen at Think Progress Economy

Democratic candidate Patrick Murphy struck back on Tuesday at Rep. Allen West (R-FL), after West ran an ad about Murphy’s arrest in 2003 bar-fight. In response, Murphy went after a key event for West in 2003 — when his military career was ended.

In a race that has possibly featured the most intensely negative ads of the cycle, this one is a doozy.

“You need the facts about Allen West in 2003,” the announcer says, in response to how West’s ad touted his own military service in that year. “West was criminally charged with violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice; found guilty of three counts of aggravated assault; and relieved of his command. The final Army report: West ‘performed illegal acts…merited court martial…faced 11 years in prison.’ Allen West: He just isn’t who he says he is.”

West fired a handgun next to the head of an Iraqi policeman during an interrogation, and after first having the officer beaten. West said this was done in order to stop an impending attack on his unit, but no evidence of such a plan was found based on the policeman’s coerced confession.

The incident did, however, help West gain notoriety with conservative activists, and to launch a political career that ultimately saw him elected to Congress in the 2010 Republican landslide.

h/t: Eric Kleefeld at TPM

Democrats and progressives are making a concerted effort to rid Congress of some of its biggest tea party stars, the Republicans whom Democrats dream about defeating when they go to bed at night.

Interviews with Democrats, progressives and Republicans this week suggest their efforts aren’t likely to break through across the board but there’s a real chance Democrats will erase a couple of faces off the tea party Mt. Rushmore come November.

Rep. Joe Walsh - Illinois 08

Walsh is the liberals’ embodiment of the tea party freshman: brash, unpredictable and perhaps a little unhinged at times. He started out with anuphill climb after redistricting put him in a more Democratic district, and he didn’t do himself any favors when he decided to attack the war record of his Democratic opponent, Tammy Duckworth, who lost both legs in Iraq.

Polling has shown Duckworth with a significant lead, and progressives who’ve rallied around removing Walsh from office are feeling pretty confident. Republicans seem less so — The Hill reported Wednesday that the NRCC has not reserved any airtime to protect Walsh.

Rep. Steve King - Iowa 05

If Walsh is the progressive caricature of the tea party freshman, King is the progressives’ dream conservative veteran. Prone to eyebrow-raising statements and patron saint of causes liberals love to hate — like making English the official language — King is proudly incendiary. When Mitt Romney endorsed him on the trail in Iowa, Democrats went wild, stating that just standing near King made Romney more extreme.

King is facing Democratic nominee Christie Vilsack, wife of Obama Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, former Iowa first lady and big name in the Hawkeye State. Vilsack has proven an able fundraiser and she’s had an assist from progressive groups on the ground.

Rep. Michele Bachmann — Minnesota 06

Before she ran for president, Bachmann was a number one dream defeat for Democrats and progressives. When she ascended to the presidential stage this year she only made progressive disdain for her worse. Where to begin, they say when asked about her: Bachmann’s impromptu backing of anti-vaccination conspiracies or her crusade to rid the government of terrorist spieshidden in the U.S. government?

Bachmann faces her toughest congressional opponent in recent memory in Democrat Jim Graves, a wealthy businessman who made his fortune in the hotel business. Like Duckworth and Vilsack, Graves has help from progressives and the national party. Internal polling and Graves’ bio continues to give Democrats hope, though even usually optimistic progressive observers admit this is an unphill climb for the left. Bachmann’s as popular among elements of the hard right as she is detested among elements of the left, and she’s been able to leverage her national name to build up a large warchest. That said, the idea that Bachmann’s in real trouble this November is catching on among the mainstream media and Bachmann’s fundraising emails are starting to sound more desperate.

Rep. Allen West — Florida 18

In many ways, West is the male Bachmann. His national profile among conservatives is beyond reproach, while his standing among the left is something considerably short of that. Happiest in the spotlight, West is a tea party freshman who’s fond of comparing President Obama to a slave owner. Tea partiers absolutely love him, and there’s been talk that he could make a run for Senate down the road.

Progressives hope to put an end to his political rise before it starts by defeating him at the end of this first term. It looks like a tall order. Democrat Patrick Murphy, a young newcomer to politics who raised enough money to draw support from the national party, can still pull in the big names to help out in the high-profile race. Bill Clinton was in the district for Murphy just the other week. And Democrats and their allied super PACs are spending big, though the DCCC recently canceled a week of ads.

H/T: Evan McMorris-Santoro

WASHINGTON — Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) piled onto a right-wing push Wednesday to blame President Barack Obama for attacks on U.S. diplomatic posts in Libya and Egypt, even as many other leaders counseled caution and support for the democratic underpinnings of the Arab Spring.

“President Obama has clearly surpassed former President Jimmy Carter and his actions during the Iranian Embassy crisis, as the weakest and most ineffective person to ever occupy the White House,” West said. He did not mention that Obama’s watch has also seen the death of Osama bin Laden and scores of extra-judicial killings of terrorists in drone strikes.

Another House Republican, Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks, said the U.S. should cut off funding aimed at helping Libya transition to democracy since the people there don’t appreciate the help.

h/t: HuffPo

THE BIKE IS IMMACULATELY polished and gleaming in the late afternoon South Florida sun. A bald eagle in full squawk graces the gas tank, white stars checker the front fender, and a tattered red-and-white-stripe motif designed to evoke Old Glory covers the rest of the body. Any hint of grime or dust is purely aesthetic; 22 years in the military teach a man to clean up after his mess. The helmet sits right-side-up on the saddle and is adorned with two rows of jagged teeth and a bright red tongue, like the nose of an old Spitfire; two US Army logos; six bullet-hole decals; and, down at the bottom, the signature of its owner, who has just roared up: retired Lt. Colonel Allen B. West.

It’s mid-April and momentarily West, the Republican congressman from Florida’s 22nd District—an imaginatively carved Tetris piece stretching from West Palm Beach to the outskirts of Fort Lauderdale—will take the stage at the Palm Beach County Tax Day Tea Party in Wellington. He’ll call the tax on tanning salons enshrined in the Affordable Care Act “racist,” the president “an abject failure,” and, directing his assembled battalion’s attention to a small group of placard-bearing liberal protesters, ruminate on his sanity: “They say Allen West is the craziest person that ever set foot on the House floor! Let me tell you who’s the craziest person to truly ever set foot on the House floor. That’s President Barack Hussein Obama.”

SINCE THUMPING DEMOCRATIC REP. Ron Klein at the polls in 2010, West has taken dead aim at the lily-livered sissies he believes are running America into the ground—and the Islamic extremists he’s convinced are poised to seize control. He has suggested that Democratic leaders—whom he calls “chicken men“—”get the hell out of the United States of America”; considers drivers with Obama bumper stickers “a threat to the gene pool”; and says black Democrats are trying to keep his fellow African Americans “on the plantation”—and he’s the “modern-day Harriet Tubman” helping them to escape.

Of the 94 freshman congressmen who came to Washington in January 2011, none captured the id of the tea party movement—and the ire of the left—as perfectly as West, an Army veteran who retired in 2004 after firing his gun, Jack Bauer-style, past the head of an uncooperative Iraqi detainee. Reborn as a conservative icon, he is the torch carrier for a political culture and a region where, more than anyplace else in the country, radical Islam is the existential threat lurking around every corner.

LET’S GET THIS OUT OF THE WAY: Allen West does not regret a single Red-baiting, Obama-hating thing that he’s said during his career in political office. “I’m not like the president,” he snipes. We’re in the lobby of the Palm Beach Synagogue, a pastel-colored building squarely in the middle of an upscale, palm-tree-lined community, where a man’s affluence is measured by the height of his hedges.

West, wearing a green camouflage yarmulke and the same leather Rolling Thunder vest, has just held forth in the sanctuary for 45 minutes on debt and taxation and radical Islam, sprinkled, here and there, with token Westisms like “Katie, bar the door!” I was told by his staff we’d have a few minutes to chat after the event, but now he’ll have to keep it short because he needs to take a leak.

“My parents raised me very conservatively, and I think that’s what you have to understand,” he says when I ask about his upbringing. “That’s what you have to understand”—it’s a phrase West uses a lot, usually followed by a discourse on the Koran (he says every American should read it) or the Progressive Era.

He grew up in a middle-class household in Atlanta, the son of a World War II veteran. His parents, Herman and Elizabeth, were both Democrats, but with a conservative bent. They taught him to read the stock index in the Journal-Constitution and to scorn the thought of a handout. “The Democrat party was once upon a time a very conservative group,” he says. West is uncompromising, right down to his grammar. Every sentence is a proxy war in the larger struggle between patriots and the “people in this world that just have to have their butts kicked,” and as a consequence he never—never—gives the Democratic Party the dignity of an adjective.

By the time he was assigned to a base 20 miles north of Baghdad in 2003, Lt. Colonel West had command of 650 troops; he was tasked with making inroads with the locals. “There I’d be, an inner-city kid from Atlanta sitting on the floor like Lawrence of Arabia, with 30 Arab sheiks,” he later told the New York Times. That August, West received intelligence about a potential plot on his life. A week later, the convoy he was scheduled to be traveling in was ambushed. A few days after that, West arrested an Iraqi policeman, Yehiya Kadoori Hamoodi, who he believed had inside knowledge of the plot.

In testimony at an Army hearing that November, West would state that he had watched four of his subordinates beat the detainee, delivering blows to Hamoodi’s chest and legs. Finally, he stepped in. West took the detainee outside, pulled out his 9 mm, instructed Hamoodi to place his head in a barrel full of sand, and fired into the barrel. The detainee screamed, called for Allah, and started to talk. But the house Hamoodi suggested searching yielded no leads; he was released 45 days later and was never charged with a crime.

The high-profile case effectively ended West’s military career. He avoided a court-martial but was ordered to pay a $5,000 fine and was banished to the rear in a noncombat role. West didn’t regret a thing: “If it’s about the lives of my soldiers at stake, I’d go through hell with a gasoline can.”

FORT LAUDERDALE, DECEMBER 30, 2008—for South Florida’s anti-Muslim activists, this was their Lexington and Concord. It came in the middle of the Israeli conflict in Gaza, and a group of Muslim, pro-Palestinian demonstrators held a protest across the street from a smaller band of Israel supporters. “It was the day that the jihad was uncovered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida,” says Tom Trento, founder of the United West, a group dedicated to exposing radical Islam in the United States and Europe. And it was also the day that West, who had just lost his first congressional race against Klein, solidified himself as a hero of the cause. “I don’t know if you’ve seen the video,” Trento says.

Trento is referring to the shaky footage he shot. In it, you can hear him muttering periodically that things aren’t looking good. After an imam leads the demonstrators in their evening prayers, some of the younger Muslim men cross the street to confront the counterprotesters. Trento was bracing for violence. “And then, out of the shadows, there comes Allen West,” he says. West joined forces with a handful of police officers and, like a modern-day Charles Martel, pushed back the Muslim demonstrators.

There’s Walid Phares, a leading scholar of “stealth jihad” and a onetime political adviser to a Lebanese Christian paramilitary group, who taught Trento at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton (and currently advises Mitt Romney on foreign policy). Joe Kaufman, a friend of West’s who runs the anti-Islam group Americans Against Hate, lives in Broward County; Joyce Kaufman (no relation), a local conservative radio host, campaigned against the grocery chain Publix for including the Islamic New Year in its wall calendar and was—briefly—tapped by West to be his chief of staff. Citizens for National Security, based out of Boca, works to raise awareness of Islamic propaganda in school textbooks, among other places. (In 2011, West invited the group to Capitol Hill, where its leaders announced they had a list of 6,000 members of the Muslim Brotherhood currently living in the United States but could not release it due to security concerns.) Reverend O’Neal Dozier, a black pastor who’s a GOP fixture, preaches out of a Pompano Beach church where West has spoken from the pulpit; Dozier’s claim to fame, at least as far as Islam is concerned, came in 2006, when he protested the construction of an Islamic center by handing out comic strips attacking the Muslim faith. The list goes on.

WEST DIDN’T JUST ride the tea party’s wave in 2010—in many respects, he is the movement’s political avatar. Three years ago, West’s second congressional campaign was catapulted forward at a tea party rally where he captured activists’ hearts with one of his trademark fiery (critics would say unhinged) speeches aligning their cause with that of the American Revolution. “As a great man said in December 1776: ‘These are the times that try men’s souls. When the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will in this crisis shrink from his duties.’ If you’re here to shrink away from the duties, there’s a door—get out,” he told activists during his last campaign. “But if you’re here to stand up, to get your musket, to fix your bayonet, and to charge into the ranks, you are my brother and sister in this fight.”

PATRICK ERIN MURPHY, the 29-year-old vice president of an environmental cleanup firm, would like nothing more than to make West a congressional has-been.

He “really just spews hatred,” the political novice who’s running against West says when we meet at his Palm Beach Gardens campaign headquarters in April. “He has no problem lying. He has no problem distorting the truth. There’s no place for that in our country.”

“And,” he adds, “the latest one about the progressive caucus being communists—you can’t say something like that and not expect consequences.” Palm Beach Democrats have adopted West’s jabs as a badge of honor, literally; volunteers at the opening of Murphy’s campaign office wrote “communist” on their name tags and addressed each other as “comrade.” “I never saw so many communists in the same room,” Murphy joked to supporters.

It will be a close race, though money won’t be an issue for West. One benefit of regularly accusing the opposition of high treason is that it opens up wallets across the country. He had $3.3 million on hand after the first quarter, an enormous sum for a House race. Murphy, meanwhile, has so far banked nearly $2 million—more than almost any other Democratic House challenger in the country.

h/t: Tim Murphy at Mother Jones

WASHINGTON — Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) is raising money off the fact that she is running a campaign against five children — well, at least five adults behaving like children — in her bid for re-election.

In a Tuesday campaign email to supporters, Wasserman Schultz said her re-election boils down to a choice between her record of fighting to protect children versus “a bunch of radical Republicans who prefer to act like children.”

“Actually, sorry. That’s insulting to children,” she says. “I know my own kids would never Photoshop someone into a dog collar like one of my opponents did to me.”

Wasserman Schultz, who is also chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, was referring to one of her Republican challengers, Ozzie DeFaria, who called her President Barack Obama’s “attack dog” and depicted her in a studded dog collar on his website.

The five Republicans running for Wasserman Schultz’s seat are DeFaria, Joe Kaufman, Karen Harrington, Juan Eliel Garcia and Gineen Bresso. Kaufman, for one, recently made news after he accidentally shot himself.

h/t: HuffPost