“In Washington, President Obama and his administration and some of the friends we have over there like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are more worried about growing government than they are about growing jobs,” McCollum said. Sink, he added, “believes that the public should hold Tallahassee accountable for creating jobs. Jobs shouldn’t created by government, whether it’s the state or federal. Jobs are created by small businesses.”

McCollum also got a standing ovation when he repeated his pledge to use his position as AG to sue the federal government if Congress approves a health care overhaul that includes a requirement for individuals to purchase insurance.

FORT LAUDERDALE — Venturing outside their traditional milieu of tax-and-spending protests, about a dozen Tea Party activists and sympathizers stood at a street corner today to call for the ouster of Senate Majority Leader and amateur racial dialect theorist Harry Reid.

The event, billed as a “rally” Monday night and then bumped down to “news conference” status this afternoon, seemed to fall outside the South Florida Tea Party organization’s stated mission of promoting “three core values of fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government and free markets.”

Not exactly, organizers said.

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Reid

Senate Majority Leader Reid, D-Nev., is in apology mode this week after a new book revealed he had commented approvingly on then-candidate Barack Obama’s prospects as a “light-skinned” African-American “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

Republicans have blasted Reid and called for him to to step down from his leadership position while Democrats have generally circled the wagons in support of Reid.

Retired Lt. Col. Allen West, a black Republican running for a Palm Beach-Broward congressional seat, called Reid’s remarks “disgusting, despicable, and unacceptable. They are representative of how intellectual elite liberals do indeed speak of black Americans in their closed private spaces.”

But Debra Robinson, Palm Beach County’s only black school board member, said “I don’t see why it’s such an issue…I think that what he said was correct. My problem was he used the word ‘Negro,’ which is a bit outdated.”

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Craft

Craft is running as a “moderate and independent voice” in a district that voted for Republican John McCain in 2008. So he raised some eyebrows in the fall when he said he supported the House health care bill. That bill passed on a 220-to-215 vote in which most Dems from McCain districts voted no.

Now that the Senate has also passed a bill, there’s talk of scrapping the traditional conference and jettisoning Obama’s oft-repeated 2008 pledge to have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN.

Craft issued a statement Wednesday calling for a bipartisan solution on health care. Read it after the jump….

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