Category Archives: Newt Gingrich

February 18, 2013 · 6:23 AM

Gingrich: Republicans Will Oppose Any Immigration Plan Backed By Obama Because They Hate Obama

Someone dragged Newt Gingrich from behind the woodwork to give his opinion on immigration issues.  This time, there might even be a modicum of truth to what he’s saying…

Think Progress

During an appearance on ABC’s This Week on Sunday, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) admitted that Republicans are likely to oppose any immigration reform proposal introduced by President Obama because they personally dislike the Commander-in-Chief.

“An Obama plan led and driven by Obama in this atmosphere with the level of hostility towards the president and the way he goads the hostility I think is very hard to imagine that bill, that his bill is going to pass the House,” Gingrich said. “I think that negotiated with a Senate immigration bill that has to have bipartisan support could actually get to the president’s desk.”

The Senate-backed framework for immigration reform, which enhances security on the border and includes a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, shares many similarities with Obama’s own proposal, though the president has repeatedly said that if Congress fails to make progress, he will introduce his own reform legislation.

That plan, obtained by USA Today, “mirrors many provisions of the bipartisan 2007 bill” spearheaded by Ted Kennedy and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and would allow unauthorized immigrants “to become legal permanent residents within eight years.” “The plan also would provide for more security funding and require business owners to check the immigration status of new hires within four years,” the paper reports.

Despite its bipartisan nature, the draft proposal was immediately panned by Republicans. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) — a member of the Senate group working towards producing comprehensive legislation — called it “dead on arrival,” while Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) said it demonstrated that Obama is “looking for a partisan advantage and not a bipartisan solution.”

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June 15, 2012 · 12:30 AM

Gingrich: Elections ‘rigged’ for the rich

Former U.S. House Speaker and GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said elections are rigged for the wealthy.

What surprises me about Newt Gingrich’s statement is the fact that a politician on Gingrich’s level would admit that the election is rigged for the rich…period.

Alanta Journal Constitution

Elections are “rigged” for the rich, according to former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Gingrich, talking to the Rev. Al Sharpton on the minister’s MSNBC television show Tuesday, said campaign finance rules should be changed to allow any American to donate any amount of after-tax personal income they want to give a candidate as long as the donation is reported “every night on the Internet.”

Gingrich, who sought the GOP nomination before dropping out of the race last month, was asked about his Florida primary loss to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney just after beating Romney in South Carolina. Sharpton suggested Gingrich would have won Florida had Romney not outspent him by millions of dollars and if Gingrich had not been the target of relentless attack ads.

Gingrich agreed with Sharpton and used New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg as an example of how difficult it is to win elections in which a very wealthy person is a rival. He said Bloomberg, a billionaire, has spent “an extraordinary amount of personal money to buy the mayor’s office for the third time.”

“It’s very hard to compete with a billionaire if they get to spend all the money they want and the middle-class candidate’s raising money in $2,500 units,” Gingrich told Sharpton. “So, I think the current system is rigged, frankly, in favor of the wealthy.” Individuals are limited to $2,500 donations in federal campaigns.

The former Georgia congressman said reforming how campaigns are financed would help reduce negative attack ads and increase accountability.

“You would have more accountability and middle-class candidates could balance off rich candidates,” Gingrich told Sharpton.

According to Bankrate.com, an analysis of Gingrich’s latest financial disclosure forms shows his net worth (excluding his primary home) is between $6.7 million and $30.1 million.

Last month, Forbes magazine placed Gingrich, a former congressman from Georgia, at the top of its list of “America’s Most Indebted Politicians,” saying he left the GOP race for the White House on May 2 owing campaign consultants and vendors $4.3 million.

Forbes said more than $1 million of the debt was for private jet service and $271,775.58 was to Gingrich himself for travel expenses.

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April 13, 2012 · 4:17 PM

Newt Gingrich ‘teetering on the edge of becoming a laughingstock,’ jumps off

(Caricature by DonkeyHotey)

In my opinion, Newt Gingrich has always been a laughingstock…

Daily Kos

If you ever had any doubt about Newt Gingrich’s talent for grift, doubt no more:

Desperate times in the Newt Gingrich camp have called for desperate measures.Scrambling to dig himself out of a $4.5 million hole, the former House speaker has resorted to renting his presidential campaign’s most valuable asset – its donor list – for as much as $26,000-a-pop.

The initial thrust of the linked article is the political risk involved in diluting the donor list of a campaign that’s still technically active.

But I just wanted to point out that a while back, the Gingrich campaign was paying Gingrich himself, to rent his donor list.

Funny, too, that Gingrich, who’s famously insisted that his “campaign” make stops at his personal bucket list of zoos and museums along the way, has according to his spokesman, loaned the campaign “thousands, primarily toward travel and lodging expenses.” But you’ll all be relieved to know that “the campaign intends to reimburse” the loans.

Whew! And here I thought Newt was going to have to pay the expenses of his personal travel and private jet rental himself! Thank God his broke-ass campaign is going to do it! By renting out the list it paid him to buy.

You see how that works? Gingrich spends years running variations on his “Entrepreneur of the Year” scheme, then sets up a “presidential campaign” whose job it is to raise money to buy the product of the previous schemes.

Nice!

Actually, Politico’s lengthy piece does a respectable job of taking you down all the side streets and seamy alleyways of Newt, Inc. I recommend it, and not just for salacious nuggets like this one:

Campaign insiders attribute the problems partly to Gingrich and his wife Callista’s, asserting that the couple was unwilling to downgrade from private jets and security details even as the campaign floundered. Insiders say Callista Gingrich required an entourage of at least two staffers – including one who dressed in an elephant costumeto promote her children’s book – and a contracted security guard who followed her even on non-campaign trips.

Not that I could resist including it, of course.

As an added bonus, though, let me include this link, for yet another deep dive into the Gingrich grift legacy: Newt Gingrich Leaves 30-Year Trail Of Debts, Lawsuits And Bankruptcies In His Wake

Seriously. If you learn the history (and what “historian” would discourage you from doing that?), you’ll see there’s no “teetering” here. Gingrich took a flying leap off the laughingstock cliff years ago. If I had to pin it down, I’d say it dates from, oh, let’s say, the time he was forced from the nation’s third highest Constitutional office under a cloud of… well, pretty much exactly this same thing.

Keep puttin’ him on the Sunday shows, though! It’s workin’ out great!

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March 24, 2012 · 12:05 AM

Newt Gingrich: Obama’s Trayvon Martin Statement ‘Disgraceful’

I really don’t like Newt Gingrich…in my mind, he personifies EVIL…

The Huffington Post

Republican hopeful Newt Gingrich slammed Barack Obama on Friday, saying the president’s remarks about the fatal February shooting of Trayvon Martin were“disgraceful.”

President Barack Obama addressed Martin’s death during a Rose Garden appearance earlier Friday, framing the tragedy in personal terms by saying, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”Gingrich responded to Obama’s remarksduring a “Hannity Radio” interview:

What the president said, in a sense, is disgraceful. It’s not a question of who that young man looked like. Any young American of any ethnic background should be safe, period. We should all be horrified no matter what the ethnic background.Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot, that would be OK because it didn’t look like him. That’s just nonsense dividing this country up. It is a tragedy this young man was shot. It would have been a tragedy if he had been Puerto Rican or Cuban or if he had been white or if he had been Asian American of if he’d been a Native American. At some point, we ought to talk about being Americans. When things go wrong to an American, it is sad for all Americans. Trying to turn it into a racial issue is fundamentally wrong. I really find it appalling.

Gingrich’s comments came amid boiling public outrage over the death of Martin — an unarmed, 17-year-old African American shot by a volunteer neighborhood watchman. The former House speaker commented on the shooting Thursday duringan interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan, calling it a “tragedy.”

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February 15, 2012 · 8:49 AM

Newt Gingrich Dismisses Birther Question From Orly Taitz

It’s my firm believe that the cockroach will not be the only survivor of a nuclear holocaust. It’s possible that  Orly Taitz will be among the surviving species as well.

No matter how many times the Court has knocked her down by dismissing her cases before them, she gets back up and continues her frenetic attempts for someone in a judicial capacity to not only hear what she has to say, but to adjudicate her findings.

She came close, here in the state of Georgia, but ultimately ended up with egg on her face for the umpteenth time…

The Huffington Post

Orly Taitz took her anti-Obama birther crusade to GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich on Monday, only to come up empty-handed. Again.

At a campaign event in Pasadena, Calif., Gingrich took questions after delivering a stump speech blasting , among other things, “President Obama’s war on the Catholic Church” and the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which recently overturned California’s same-sex marriage ban.

After answering concerns about the state of his campaign following a slide in recent polls and primary contests, Taitz came forward, suggesting that the birther issue could provide a “boost ” to his candidacy if he made it a hallmark issue.

“Somebody who wouldn’t be good enough, who wouldn’t be certified to pick tomatoes or clean bathrooms is sitting in the White House,” Taitz told Gingrich, reportedly to a mixed reception  from the largely Tea Party audience.

“That’s a project you should pursue,” Gingrich responded. He went on to say that with ongoing economic issues and other mismanagement he saw in the president’s agenda, he had “enough issues to debate Obama about.”

Taitz, a California attorney and dentist, is one of the most outspoken members of the birther movement, whose adherents claim that Obama is ineligible to serve as president because he isn’t actually a U.S. citizen. (In fact, the White House has released  the president’s long-form birth certificate, in hopes of quelling the conspiracy theories.) Taitz, who specifically believes that the president has forged his official documents, made something of a stir in Georgia last month when a judge subpoenaed Obama in a case her clients had filed attempting to bar Obama from the state’s primary ballot. Obama’s legal team ignored the judge’s order, however, and the case proceeded without him. It was eventually dismissed  by the judge, who determined that Obama was eligible to be on Georgia’s primary ballot in March.

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February 10, 2012 · 8:17 AM

Food Stamp President(s) – Oh SNAP!

February 8, 2012 – Congressman Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) came to the House Floor to respond to Newt Gingrich, who has begun calling President Obama the “Food Stamp President.” Armed with facts, the Congressman has a little fun setting the record straight and despite the name calling, he concludes that “hunger knows no race or religion or age or political party. Hunger is colorblind.”

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· 7:42 AM

Virginia State Officials Confirm: Gingrich Campaign Being Investigated for ‘Illegal Acts’

Everything old is new again…

Addicting Info

Have you ever known Newt Gingrich to identify a flaw or fault with a politician, the President, the Democratic Party (etc), that he didn’t turn into the gravest, most evil transgression that humanity have ever been subjected too? When it comes to making proverbial mountains at of molehill, employing hyperbolic rhetoric to embarrass and humiliate his enemies, the-Newt, is king of the demagogues.

So if this story happened to Mitt Romney, Barack Obama or any other political enemy of the former House Speaker, how do you think he might handle it?

The BRAD BLOG  is reporting that Virginia State officials have confirmed that a criminal investigation of the Gingrich for President Campaign is now underway in what investigators are describing as, massive “voter fraud.”

You may recall, that the Gingrich campaign failed to turn in enough signatures  on petitions this past December, to qualify the candidate to appear on that state’s upcoming Republican primary ballot. In fact, by Gingrich’s own admission, his campaign turned in 11,100 signatures when only 10,000 were needed. The problem? 1500 of those signatures were quickly identified as fraudulent.

Of course Newt wants us to believe that this was “just a mistake” made by person his campaign had hired to collect signatures. Who was this one person who made the mistake? The campaign won’t say. Why not? Wouldn’t it be easier to scape-goat a lazy, minimum wage signature collector that let the entire campaign get black eye?

The Virginia State Attorney General’s  office doesn’t view voter fraud on this scale as being “just a mistake.” In fact, an official in the Virginia State Board of Elections (SBE) described it as, “definitely an illegal act.”

Brian J. Gottestein, Director of Communication for the Office of the Attorney General confirmed to The BRAD BLOG that there is “an investigation underway.” Other than stating that fact, Gottestein refused to comment further and declined to indicate how much cooperation the AG’s office is getting from Gingrich’s Virginia campaign organization.

Only Mitt Romney and Ron Paul campaigns turned in enough signatures to be on the ballot. Surprisingly, Rick Santorum’s  campaign also failed to collect enough signatures to insure that his name would be on the ballot in the southern, socially conservative state.

In the last presidential election, the grass-roots progressive organization ACORN , was put out of business when it was determined that some of the people they had hired to do voter registration, had turned in fraudulent forms.

At the time, The BRAD BLOG points out, Newt Gingrich wrote in an op-ed column that “ACORN has a long history of engaging in voter fraud.”

Really? Based on that logic, can we assume from the Virginia incident that this was not the first time the Gingrich campaign has engaged in illegal acts and voter fraud?

It will be interesting to see how the conservative media handles this scandal in light of the incessant coverage given to the “mistake” ACORN made.

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February 7, 2012 · 7:06 AM

Bill Moyers Essay: Newt’s Obesession with Saul Alinsky

Bill Moyers explains what we need to know about community activist Saul Alinsky, and why New Gingrich might be so afraid of him.

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February 2, 2012 · 5:58 AM

Mitt Romney: Newt Gingrich never calls to congratulate

It appears that Newt Gingrich is just as petty as many of us thought…

Politico

The morning after his win in the Florida primary, Mitt Romney suggested on the morning TV shows that Newt Gingrich may have missed the memo on one important campaign etiquette: extending the winner a congratulatory phone call.

“Newt didn’t call after Iowa or New Hampshire. I called him after South Carolina, his win there, but he didn’t call again last night. The other candidates all called. But I don’t know, I guess [former] Speaker Gingrich doesn’t have our phone number,” Romney said Wednesday, laughing, on NBC’s “Today” show.

Asked again about whether Gingrich had called to congratulate him on Fox News, Romney repeated that Gingrich had failed to do so on multiple occasions.

“By the way, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul and I talk after each campaign, congratulate one another on the campaigns the others have run, but Speaker Gingrich I guess doesn’t participate in that tradition,” Romney said.

When “Fox & Friends” host Steve Doocy joked that the candidate should give Gingrich his phone number on the air, Romney laughed and said, “Sure, give me yours first.”

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February 1, 2012 · 2:22 AM

Gingrich to Obama: ‘Respect our religion,’ not ‘every other religion’

So, Newt Gingrich has joined the chorus of other anti-Obama zealots with this latest statement and pushing everyone else out of the way so he can be the chorus leader.  Poor Newt, someone forgot to tell him that his “fifteen minutes” have lapsed…

The Raw Story

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich says he’s had it with President Barack Obama “respecting every other religion on the planet,” and thinks it’s time for him to “respect our religion” instead.

At a campaign event in Florida on Monday, Gingrich seized on letters read at Catholic Churches across the U.S. that condemned the Obama administration for making birth control more available to women.

“Callista and I were at mass last night, and I believe at every Catholic Church, they are reading a letter about the Obama administration’s attack on Christianity,” Gingrich explained. “This is a fundamental assault on the freedom of religion. … If you help me win the nomination and then you help me win the election, on the very first day I’m inaugurated, I will sign an executive order repealing every Obama attack on religion across the entire government.”

“I think we need to have a government that respects our religions,” he added. “I’m a little bit tired of being lectured about respecting every other religion on the planet. I’d like him to respect our religion.”

While he was at it, Gingrich also charged that the current Republican frontrunner, Mitt Romney, had waged his own war on religion.

“Gov. Romney imposed on the Catholic hospitals in Massachusetts, a position against their conscious,” he said, possibly referring to the misleading claim that Romney supported government-subsidized abortions. He could have also been referencing a decision the former Massachusetts governor made to provide the Plan B birth control pill under Medicaid.

“Gov. Romney cut off Kosher meals for Jewish senior citizens who were on Medicaid to save $5 a day,” Gingrich continued.

The New York Post reported last week that that Romney had used his veto in 2003 to reject $600,000 in funds that would have allowed poor Jewish nursing homes to get Kosher meals.

Watch this video from CNN, broadcast Jan. 30, 2012.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/01/31/gingrich-to-obama-respect-our-religion-not-every-other-religion/

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