AFSCME responds to Newt Gingrich's contention that child labor laws are "truly stupid" and that school janitors should be fired and poor kids hired to clean up after their own classmates.

Newt likes to think of himself as a shrewd ideas guy. If his idea with this position on child labor was to get people talking about how stupid he is, he succeeded. And that may have been exactly the idea—when you're in the Republican grifting business, being talked about for any reason is better than being ignored, after all. What it wasn't was something a real presidential candidate would say.