Oh, little man. How powerful you must feel, using sarcasm and arrogance to belittle someone who wanted to get specifics from you on alleged inaccuracies to a report on the ProgressVA website. Such power you wield with those fighting words...

You see, ProgressVA published a report with a very specific list of all the different ways Virginia legislators are in the pocket of ALEC. It's quite thorough, but Mr. Speaker of the House Bill Howell seems to have had difficulty reading it accurately, which prompted ProgressVA representative Anna Scholl to ask him for specifics on where he saw inaccuracies.

As it turns out, he didn't really have anything to offer on the question of inaccuracy, but he seemed to object overall to the exposure of ALEC as a tool of the right that he's unafraid to wield at will. Perhaps it's these two bullet points that bothered him:

• Speaker William Howell is a member of ALEC's national leadership team. In 2009, he served as the group's national chairman. Howell's involvement with ALEC has transferred down to the state level: he has asked several of his colleagues to carry ALEC bills and approved the expenditure of taxpayer money to send his colleagues to ALEC conferences.

• Between 2001 and 2010, the Commonwealth of Virginia spent over $230,000 to send legislators to ALEC conferences in order to meet with corporate lobbyists behind closed doors.

At any rate, when he offered a "they did this and you didn't say anything" talking point in response to her very specific request for very specific inaccuracies, Ms. Scholl pressed, which caused him to say this, in front of the reporters present:

“I guess I’m not speaking in little enough words for you to understand."

Ms. Scholl didn't exactly cower before the Great and Powerful Speaker:

“I’m a smart girl ... I think words with multiple syllables would be just fine for me,’’

And still, I note that Speaker Howell did not actually name one single inaccuracy in her report. You know what happens when bullies are confronted with the truth? They get angry. And when they get angry, they start saying stupid things and swaggering as if they actually have power when really, they're just caught in their lies.

That's what happened here. Props to Ms. Scholl for staring him down.

[h/t Washington Post]

[Ed. note: We break into our countdown of top videos for a few notable videos of the past 24 hours]

Here we have Republican Newt Gingrich tearing up as he recalls times with his mother, who struggled with mental illness and died of cancer in 2003 - or - here we have Republican Newt Gingrich desperately trying to save his floundering campaign by crying a couple of days before voting starts. Your call.

"You'll get me all teary-eyed, Callista will tell you, I get teary-eyed every time we sing Christmas carols. My mother sang in the choir and loved singing in the choir," Gingrich said, referring to his wife, as he fought back tears.

"But I identify my mother with being happy, loving life, having a sense of joy in her friends, but what she introduced me to, is late in her life she ended up in a long-term-care facility. She had bipolar disease, and depression, and she gradually acquired some physical ailments, and that introduced me to the issue of long-term care, which I did with Bob Kerrey for three years, and that introduced me to the issue of Alzheimers, which I did with Bob Kerrey for three more years, and my whole emphasis on brain science comes indirectly from dealing with the real problems of real people in my family," the former House Speaker continued, at moments stopping to cry.

The audience sympathetically cheered for Gingrich as he spoke about his mother.

"I do policy much easier than I do personal," Gingrich joked.

Republican pollster Frank Luntz asked how his mother would react if she was at the event Friday, Gingrich said she would have been working the crowd.

"She'd be talking to all these people, and she'd be telling them how nice I was," Gingrich said to laughter.

[Video via TPM]

[ Photo via Flickr]

Newt Gingrich personally urged members of Congress to vote for a controversial Medicare expansion bill in 2003, confirm two GOP congressmen who were in the room.

Gingrich, who is running for president, has said he never lobbied members of Congress after he resigned as House speaker in 1998. But U.S. Rep. Jeff Flake and former congressman Butch Otter - now his state's governor - told The Des Moines Register this week that Gingrich met with on-the-fence Republicans to persuade them to vote for the prescription drug bill.

Flake and Otter, who have both endorsed Mitt Romney for president, said about 30 Republican House members were holding out against the bill in the fall of 2003 because they were concerned that the proposal would expand the federal deficit when Gingrich held a private meeting of Republican House members.

“He told us, ‘If you can’t pass this bill, you don’t deserve to govern as Republicans,’ ” said Flake, who represents an Arizona district. “…If that’s not lobbying, I don’t know what is.”

Otter said: “I can’t define lobbying, but as a Supreme Court justice once said about pornography, I know it when I see it. I felt we were being lobbied.”

Yes, it was the Republicans driving the clown car the last time that Congress screwed with Medicare. In case you don't recall, Medicare Part D was passed in 2003, and went into effect in 2006 leaving thousands of seniors without medication, and introduced us to the "doughnut hole." Trips to the pharmacy became a "nightmare" for seniors with new co-pays for previously free medications, mountains of time-consuming, mind-numbing paperwork to fill out even with staff especially trained to help navigate the mess.

Seniors enrolled in Medicare Part D plans pay 58 percent more for the most commonly prescribed drugs than Americans who buy their medications through health plans administered by the Department of Veterans Affairs, according to a 2007 report.

Under the 2003 Medicare prescription-drug law, the government is barred from harnessing the buying power of 22.5 million Americans - the number of people now receiving some kind of drug benefits under Medicare - to get a better deal on prescription medications.

For example, the cholesterol-lowering drug Zocor, the cost of a year's supply of 20 milligram tablets would be $1,485.96 under the cheapest Medicare Part D plan, compared to $127.44 under the VA.

$1,485.96...that's a lot of doughnut holes.

I'm fairly sure that this was a foregone conclusion, but I suspect that Cryin' John might have a lump or two in his throat before it was confirmed.

Following a bruising first two years as speaker and leader of House Republicans, 10 conservative lawmakers cast votes for someone other than Boehner during a roll call vote in the first hours of the new Congress. Several other conservative Republicans abstained from voting. Boehner received 220 votes of a total of 426 cast.

While Boehner won re-election to the speakership with the overwhelming support of the GOP, he also narrowly avoided the 16 total defections from fellow Republicans that would have triggered a second ballot of House lawmakers on electing a speaker. That would have been the first time a second ballot was needed since 1923, and a mild embarrassment for Boehner.

The biggest slap in the face? Three votes went to crazy tea party mouthpiece Allen West, who is no longer even in the House, having lost his seat to Patrick Murphy. After the fiscal "cliff" debacle, where it looked as if Boehner had lost control of his party, rumblings of challenging his speakership started getting leaked to the press. Eric Cantor, second in command of the House GOP, looked like the man most likely to shiv Boehner to take his place, but as NBC's Domenico Montanaro remarks, Cantor may have lost this battle, but he's playing a long game.

It isn’t a coup against Boehner. It shows that Boehner sees the light at the end of the tunnel of his career and would prefer to be more of a pragmatist and deal maker – but his conference won’t allow him to be that. That pragmatic streak is in the minority of the House GOP.

Cantor and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, on the other hand, are going to be around for a while, and if they want to be leaders of the conference in the House, perhaps even speaker, and want to have any political clout, they have to stand with the influential conservative base.

Cantor has stood with Boehner through much of this fight and others in the past year, and that’s because he cannot alienate Boehner allies. Many establishment conservative will still be around – and be a significant voting bloc – when Boehner retires, whenever that will be.