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A man who spent part of his childhood working as a janitor told Newt Gingrich on Wednesday that he was offended by the Republican presidential candidate's plan to put kids to work.

During an event at Georgetown University, Hector Cendejas called out the former House Speaker for his initiative to replace unionized janitors with children workers.

"Back in high school, I was a janitor in my own high school, which was a private school," Cendejas explained. "For me, it was embarrassing to be a janitor at my own high school because I was with the rich kids. I was poor. My mom was working super hard. I did not feel empowered by serving my classmates. Why not invest on these kids to work for law firms, hospitals and get paid to develop better skills?"

"Did you find it useful financially to earn the money?" Gingrich asked the man.

"I mean, I need to help my mom," Cendejas replied, adding that his parents were undocumented. "Thank God I had Georgetown to save my butt, you know? ... All my friends, they’re pregnant, they’re in gangs, in jail, and we did the same job, working as janitors. So for me, your remark was a little offensive towards me."

"I'm sorry if you were offended," Gingrich quipped. "Both of my daughters worked as janitors at the local Baptist Church and they earned the money and they didn't think it was demeaning, and they actually liked the idea that they earned their own money as kids, and they kept their own money because they thought work had inherent dignity."

"But they come from a wealthy family," Cendejas pointed out.

"That's not the point," the candidate shrugged. "You and I just disagree."

Gingrich first proposed replacing unionized janitors with children during a talk at Harvard's Kennedy School in November.

He later told a crowd in Iowa that poor children were basically lazy.

"Really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works so they have no habit of showing up on Monday," the Georgia Republican insisted. "They have no habit of staying all day, they have no habit of I do this and you give me cash, unless it is illegal."

Speaking to supporters in South Carolina in December, Gingrich suggested that children as young as five could get "an education in life" by working.

The candidate has actually put his idea in motion by getting business mogul Donald Trump to agree to employee at least 10 poor children as “apprentices.”

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Looks like Scott Walker's prank phone call may end up getting him in some trouble with their Government Accountability Board and his remarks about bringing in agent provocateurs to cause trouble at the rallies isn't sitting too well with the voters. Ed Schultz discussed Governor Walker's conversation with the fake Koch brother with The Nation's John Nichols who filled Ed in on some of the latest developments in Wisconsin.

NICHOLS: The governor’s not walking a fine line Ed. He tripped off the cliff. The fact of the matter is that Wisconsin has the toughest ethics laws in the nation. We pride ourselves on that. That goes back more than a hundred years to the progressive era with Bob La Follette. Those ethics laws require that an elected official keep faith with the people of Wisconsin. Those statements raise deep concerns here in Madison and around the state.

The former Attorney General of Wisconsin, Peg Lautenschlager told me tonight that she is in the reviewing this, of the transcript of this conversation, for several hours found what she determined to be multiple ethics, election law and labor law violations. And she will tomorrow morning suggest that the state Government Accountability Board begin to review those ethics violations.

Ed Schultz asked Nichols if the Republicans running the state would allow the investigation to go forward.

NICHOLS: The Government Accountability Board is an independent, non-partisan board, staffed by former judges who are elected in a non-partisan manner without any Republican or Democratic control.

Nichols wasn’t sure where the investigation would end up going and pointed out to Schultz that the residents of Wisconsin aren’t too happy with some of the other statements he made during the call as well.

NICHOLS: But second, there’s a moral component to this. People around Wisconsin are talking tonight about the fact that they brought their children to peaceful, very attractive and popular rallies in Madison and other communities and now they find out that their governor says that he considered sending agent provocateurs into those rallies to screw things up and cause trouble, perhaps to begin violence and he only decided not to do it, not because he’s worried for the people of his state, but because he was worried that it might not play well politically. That’s a very troubling thing to have a governor of an American state talking about.

It looks like the tactics being used by these Koch brother teabaggers are finally coming back to bit them.

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Apparently Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis' latest PSA (Public Service Announcement) has got the right wingers up in arms. As Media Matters noted, "Contrary to the suggestion made by some bloggers that the campaign and hotline were created solely for undocumented workers, they are aimed at all vulnerable workers, regardless of immigration status."

Fox's Greta Van Susteren and Stephen Moore just didn't understand how the Department of Labor might care that workers of any status might need to know their rights and pretended that this only applied to illegal immigrants rather than legal immigrants who may have employers exploiting them as well.

And of course Wall Street flack Stephen Moore is not in favor of employer sanctions because he doesn't think "we should turn our employers into immigration cops". Sorry Stephen, but it doesn't turn them into cops. What it should be doing is turning them into criminals if we want to take the harsh stance that the right wing does towards the workers coming here. Heaven forbid we might punish the employers who too often keep these workers as slaves even though slavery was supposed to be outlawed in the United States.

He is all in favor of letting that cheap labor come in though. Just as long as the border is secured first, their typical right wing talking point that does nothing to actually address the problem of why workers from Mexico are coming here in the first place.

How about this Stephen? How about we actually make sure that no one coming in is either kept as a slave or paid slave wages, we punish employers that exploit their workers and send them to jail when they violate our labor laws and we legalize marijuana so we're not using our tax dollars to fight Mexican drug cartels who are running drugs across our borders one way and guns from America the other way? And while we're at it, how about fixing those trade laws that destroyed all of the small farms in Mexico that has so many of them looking to the United States for work in the first place?

I would guess if we did those things our border security could probably handle what few people were still trying to cross the border illegally. As long as we want what amounts to the mob running the drugs and the continued exploitation of workers with no consequences for those that hire them all the border security in the world isn't going to fix this problem.

Hacks like Stephen Moore would rather protect the big commercial farms, the gun manufacturers, big pharma, WalMart, the hotel industry, the cotton industry and a host of businesses that don't want to see workers paid a fair wage, don't want to see marijuana legalized because it would cut into their profits and who are happy to exploit their workers as long as there are no meaningful penalties attached to that exploitation.

In the mean time the right wing zealots will continue to pit working class people against each other who should be on the same side of the issue that no one, no matter what country they're working in or coming from is paid slave wages for their labor, and they'll continue to do it by demonizing "the other" and fear mongering about things like terrorism and the evil illegal immigrants that are "infiltrating" our country while ignoring the businesses that are taking advantage of the workers and causing the problem in the first place.

If our pundit class at Fox and the Wall Street Journal dared to tell the truth about the actual problem with the rich exploiting the poor and that they have equal disdain for the "Real Americans" that they're happy to exploit and take advantage of for political purposes, that wingnut welfare check from Rupert Murdoch might get cut off, and we couldn't have that, now could we?