All posts in Newt Gingrich

Gingrich in 2009: We need a must-carry law on health insurance

by Admin on January 30, 2012 in Marxism, Newt Gingrich, Obamacare, RINO's, Romneycare, Socialism with No comments

Via: Hot Air

Morgen and John at Verum Serum dug up this nugget, and not from 15 years ago when the Heritage Foundation had its brief and ill-advised fling with individual health-insurance mandates at the federal level. This comes from a May 2009 conference call hosted by Newt Gingrich on the subject of health-care reform as ObamaCare had just begun its tortured path through Congress. In this clip, Gingrich specifically calls for individual “must carry” mandates, and even notes that the insurance companies agreed that such a law would make “must issue” a better deal for them:

The most relevant part comes at the 28-second mark in this clip:

The real foundation, the most important part of this, is individual rights, responsibilities, and expectations of behavior. … We believe that there should be must-carry, that everybody should have health insurance, or if you’re an absolute libertarian, we would allow you to post a bond, but we would not allow people to be “free riders” failing to insure themselves and then showing up in the emergency room with no means of payment.  If you have must carry, then the insurance companies have told us that we can have must-issue, and you will therefore have a system in which you don’t have to worry about cherry-picking and maneuvering. … This is the kind of general model we will be advocating.

Frankly, that sounds like what Mitt Romney argued in Massachusetts, and it’s almost exactly what Barack Obama argued when pushing ObamaCare.  The only exception would have come for “absolute libertarians,” and in 2008, put the price of that bond at $100,000 – $150,000 — far out of the reach of most Americans.   This makes sense, of course, because the wealthy are quite unlikely to be “free riders” anyway, but the mechanism that Gingrich backed even as ObamaCare was rolling out is essentially the same as Congress passed less than a year later, and it would have trapped the entire middle and working classes.

Gingrich has since said he was wrong about the individual mandate, and challenges Romney to do the same on the campaign trail — even though he told NBC in May of last year that he wouldn’t use the mandate against Romney because of his previous support.  But his admissions of error tend to leave people with the impression that he repented of this a few years earlier, when Gingrich had backed forms of a mandate up until getting into the race (see above link).  Morgen sums up:

Not only did Gingrich make the “conservative” argument for the mandate in dealing with the free rider problem, he also advanced a favorite argument of the left. Which is that the only way insurers could be required to offer coverage to everyone regardless of their health status (“must issue”), was to require everyone to carry insurance. This was ultimately the argument which convinced none other than Barack Obama, who remember, opposed an individual mandate during the Democrat primary campaign in 2008.

Romney is arguably even more compromised on ObamaCare than Gingrich, but it’s a much closer call in my opinion than some seem to believe.

I think either man would act to rescind ObamaCare if elected; the pressure from Republicans would be too much to bear, and in any case, the past two election cycles have proven the mandates to be politically toxic.  But if one is looking for daylight between the two on this topic, they’d be hard pressed to find it.

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FREEDOMWORKS PRESIDENT WANTS NEW GOP CANDIDATE: TEA PARTY HASN‘T ’COALESCED’ AROUND GINGRICH

by Admin on January 30, 2012 in Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, RINO's, Tea Party with 1 Comment

Via: The Blaze

On Tuesday’s episode of “Real News From The Blaze,” special guest Matt Kibbe, president of the conservative organization FreedomWorks, along with the panel, discussed why Newt Gingrich is not the Tea Party candidate for 2012.

Blaze host S.E. Cupp shared her observation that the Tea Party wants a small government outsider and thus could never be satisfied with Gingrich, a “big government Republican.”

“But where are they going to go?” asks Kibbe, suggesting that panel members are holding the Tea Party and its ideal candidate “to standard no one can be held to.”

“I don’t think the Tea Party has coalesced around Newt Gingrich,” Kibbe said, speculating that there could even be a brokered convention with an outside candidate being chosen to run.

“I would love to find someone outside of the current field,” he added.

When asked who might shine as an ideal presidential candidate with core Tea Party values, Kibbe offered Bobby Jindal, Marco Rubio and Tim Scott but ceded that they’re all “too green” to run for president. Kibbe did agree that Jeb Bush could also be a good choice, underscoring a National Review post out Tuesday suggesting that the “charismatic governor” could “save the Republican party.”

Watch Kibbe and the panel discuss a Tea Party candidate below:

From Artur Davis at NRO who posits that there is a “feasibility around the idea” of a Jeb Bush run that before “seemed unthinkable.” He writes:

To be sure, the Jeb scenario will need more instability in order to flourish. The likeliest path involves Gingrich’s momentum carrying him through Florida; the February races in Arizona and Michigan dividing between Romney and Gingrich; Romney rebounding in March in moderate-leaning midwestern states such as Illinois and Wisconsin; Gingrich winning easily in the Deep South on Super Tuesday and Texas in early April, with Romney proving equally strong in New York and the rest of the Atlantic coastline, while states like Ohio and Indiana fail to resolve the split.

Imagine that California’s ultimate showdown leaves Gingrich with the slightest of edges, but with Romney remaining viable and in possession of a broader geographic base, far more internal support from GOP leadership, and a substantial chunk of delegates. To stop Gingrich, Romney might have no practical choice but to offer to throw his support to Bush, whose popularity would also implode Gingrich’s slim plurality.

Not one bit of it is implausible.

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Best Article On Newt – By “Morning Joe”

by Tom Tancredo on January 29, 2012 in Newt Gingrich, RINO's, Tom Tancredo with 2 Comments

By Tom Tancredo

English: Al Gore and Newt Gingrich applaud to ...

Speaker, Newt Gingrich

I was elected to Congress in 1998 and within a few days thereafter received the perfunctory call from the Speaker to congratulate me.  The Speaker was Newt Gingrich. I thanked him for the call and praised him for his role in the “revolution.” He then said another purpose of the call was to make sure I could count on his vote for Speaker when the House convened in January. I swallowed hard and said I would not be able commit to him.  He angrily asked,”Why not?” I said it was because we had lost seats in the elections following his taking the reins while growing government at the same rate as the Dems.  I told him I felt he had let the revolution fizzle out. He said that I really didn’t have the perspective needed to legitimately criticize him.  I agreed that I was observing from afar but that he asked me a simple question as to whether or not he could count on my vote and the honest answer to that was no.

As it turned out, I didn’t have to face that dilemma because when he finished counting his votes for reelection he was far short of a majority. He announced therefore, that he would drop out of the race and resign from Congress. I am not sure, but I think that is the first time a Speaker has been ousted from that position by his own caucus.

I found the following account by Joe Scarborough of the events leading up to Newt’s demise as Speaker to be compelling reading.

Newt and his supporters are spinning all criticism of him as driven by party moderates and the Republican establishment.  Perhaps Scarborough can be tagged with that.  I cannot!

The Newt I know

By: Joe Scarborough
January 27, 2012 01:05 PM EST
Yeah, yeah. I know. Newt Gingrich had a lousy week and will probably lose the Florida primary on Tuesday. But for those tempted to once again predict the speedy collapse of his campaign, consider yourselves forewarned. I’ve known this guy long enough to realize that the only three species destined to survive a nuclear holocaust will be cockroaches, Cher and Newton Leroy Gingrich. I first met Gingrich 17 years ago at a Destin, Fla., fundraiser held in my honor a few weeks after Newt declared that I was too conservative to win the general election. But after I won the primary against the moderate woman he anointed, there he was in Florida looking supremely bored and a little put out that he was having to sit through another politician’s speech.
In the ensuing years, I found the mercurial maverick to be inspiring and maddening, disciplined and self-indulgent, forward thinking and short-sighted, gifted and dumb — sometimes all within the same hour. If, as Shakespeare wrote, what’s past is prologue — and it often is — then Gingrich’s political history is particularly relevant now. It’s a history I know well because I was there. And what I saw at the revolution has concerned me since I left Washington.

Many who have heard my harsh assessments of Gingrich over the past year have assumed that I feel a personal animus toward my former colleague. That’s just not true. That fact is that I remain awestruck that Newt envisioned a Republican majority when his closest allies thought he was crazy. Even an eternal optimist like me laughed at the “Think Majority” sign hanging over the NRCC reception area in early 1994.

But Newt was right and we were wrong. The Gingrich Revolution overtook Washington (with a huge assist from Bill Clinton’s overreaching agenda) and good things followed. Within a few years, Congress passed the first balanced budget in a generation, welfare reform, tax cuts and meaningful congressional changes.

If Newt’s story ended there, I might have a Gingrich 2012 sign in my front yard. But unfortunately, it does not.

Three years into his speakership, the man who helped draft the Contract With America began trying to undo some of that document’s key provisions. The government shutdown had badly damaged the speaker’s brand and he went to work trying to raise his 27 percent approval rating.

In April 1997, Gingrich told The New York Times he was ready to be a kinder and gentler Republican by negotiating away the very tax cuts that he had once called “the crown jewels of the contract.” Soon, conservatives were being pressured to vote for big spending appropriations bills. In his final speech from the floor of Congress, Newt Gingrich lashed out wildly at the same freshmen who had made him speaker — mocking us as cannibals who made up “the perfectionist caucus.”

It was the last time Newt would attack the most conservative members of his caucus from the lofty perch as speaker. In 1997, ten of my fellow classmates had led a coup attempt against Gingrich, shutting down the House over the speaker’s efforts to violate the Contract with America by swelling the number of committee staff members.

Conservative stalwarts like Steve Largent, Tom Coburn and Matt Salmon joined me and seven others to demand a cut in spending and a promise to hold firm on tax cuts.

Newt did not take the rebellion lying down. He immediately summoned the sergeant of arms to drag the 11 rebels down to a Republican caucus meeting in the bowels of the Capitol basement, where Newt lined us up in front of a packed room of seething House members who were now missing the first day of their Easter recess because of our insurgency. Gingrich then began screaming and demanded that the 11 of us account for our behavior.

He then taught me a political lesson I will always remember: Never willingly hand the microphone over to your enemies. Especially when the first rebel to speak was elected to the NFL Hall of Fame and one of People Magazine’s Most Beautiful Men Alive.

As Steve Largent grabbed the microphone, the crowd of GOP members was still shouting insults. But by the time he stood behind the podium, even our most hostile opponents grew quiet.

Steve spoke softly about how he signed a contract with the Seattle Seahawks and remembered shaking the hand of the team’s owner after the deal was done. A few years later, the NFL Players Association went on strike. But Largent told the mob, who were now transfixed, that he crossed those picket lines because he signed a contract and gave his word. Largent told the group that a few years later, the NFL players went on strike a second time and he was once again one of the few NFL players to keep reporting for work. For Steve, it was a matter of principle.

The beautiful NFL Hall of Famer then quietly moved in for the kill.

Turning to the Speaker, who a year earlier had been named Time Magazine’s person of the year, Largent said, “Newt, you were the one who drafted the contract and then told us to sign it. Now, you’re the one pressuring us to break it. But Newt, if I wasn’t intimidated by the thought of 250 pound linebackers who wanted to kill me every time I crossed the field, why would I be intimidated by you?”

And with that, the speakership of Newt Gingrich was over. A year later, he would be driven from power and sent into a political wilderness from which he emerged 14 years later on a Saturday night in South Carolina.

Gingrich’s precipitous fall from power was the result of arrogance, self-satisfaction and a fatal tendency to flit from issue to issue — and even from core conviction to core conviction — in the seeming belief that if he spoke well enough (and used as many adverbs as possible), no one would notice that he was doing something he had equally eloquently (and equally adverbially) opposed before.

Let’s be clear: Gingrich is an important figure. Regardless of what happens in Florida and beyond, he will be remembered as the man who brought the Reagan Revolution to Congress. Yet it will also be recorded that Newt compared the Great Reagan with Neville Chamberlain, dismissed Reaganomics as flawed and called Reagan’s approach to the Soviet Union an utter failure a few years before the U.S.S.R. was relegated to the dustbin of history.

These unpleasant facts do not stop Newt from trying to embrace the same policies he once denounced (one wonders if he even remembers the contradictions at this point), but that’s what makes my former colleague so fascinating. And so troubling.

A Gingrich campaign is always a high wire act without the net and sometimes, the main actor in this manic routine actually makes it to the other side. But after his listless march through the Sunshine State, even I wonder how many more performances remain.

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Definitive Proof: Santorum did NOT support the individual mandate

by Admin on January 27, 2012 in Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Obamacare, Rick Santorum, Romneycare with No comments

Via: Right Scoop

This video back from 1994 should clear up any confusion (or smear campaign) that Santorum supported forcing Americans to buy health insurance. It is simply not true.

Watch below:

 “I think what the role of the federal government is to provide opportunity for everyone to get what they want, to live their dreams and not to dictate what everybody should have,” he said.

And he explained why, which is even when certain things are mandated by the federal government, they often don’t work and added it simply is “not the American way of doing things.”

“You can’t force every American to do something they don’t want to do,” Santorum explained. “You can force people to be in Social Security, yet I think it’s only about 96 percent of Americans that are in Social Security. There are lots of mandates we put on people and they don’t obey. That’s wrong. That’s not the American way of doing things. The American way of doing things is getting people to live their dreams to make their choices.”

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Gingrich mocks Romney’s wealth; self-deportation

by Admin on January 27, 2012 in Amnesty, Hypocracy, Newt Gingrich, Tom Tancredo with No comments

“How close were to breaking out and laughing out loud about this fantasy?” Newt said mockingly while discussing Mitt Romney’s idea of “self deportation” during his interview with Univision this morning.

“I think that you have to live in a world of Swiss bank accounts and Cayman Island accounts and automatic $20 million a year income with no work to have fantasy this far from reality.” he continued.

Gingrich added that Romney showed “no humanity” towards elderly illegal immigrants and suggested that the United States work for “legality for the entire country.”

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Gingrich opens door for illegal immigrants

by Admin on January 26, 2012 in Illegal Immigration, Newt Gingrich with No comments
English: Newt Gingrich

Newt Gingrich

Fighting to curry favor with Florida’s large pool of Hispanic voters, Newt Gingrich on Wednesday called for a guest-worker program for most illegal immigrants, but his campaign could not say whether those people would be on a path to citizenship — the key question in the immigration debate.

Under close questioning by Univision’s political host, Jorge Ramos, Mr. Gingrich said he would grant quick citizenship rights to illegal immigrants who join the military or to those who have been in the U.S. between 20 and 25 years. He said the rest of the estimated 11 million should be given access to a guest-worker program.

“With most of them? I would urge them to get a guest-worker permit,” he said, calling for a substantial rewrite of immigration laws that would cancel existing penalties and instead let illegal immigrants stay.

But his campaign said it was unclear whether at the end of that guest-worker period the immigrants would be allowed to stay and gain citizenship, essentially jumping the legal immigration line, or whether they would be required to return home.

“Undetermined,” Gingrich spokesman R.C. Hammond told The Washington Times.

The question is at the crux of the immigration debate.

Keep reading

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Newt who? Democrats attack Romney harder than they hit his rivals

by Admin on January 25, 2012 in ACORN, AFL/CIO, AFSCME, Newt Gingrich, SEIU with No comments
By Scott Powers, Orlando Sentinel

Debbie Wasserman-Schultz

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has an unlikely ally this week in his Florida primary battle against Mitt Romney: the Democratic National Committee.

The Democrats are targeting Mitt Romney as if he were already the Republican nominee running against President Barack Obama, with campaign ads, Internet videos, daily news conferences and dozens of news releases attacking the former Massachusetts governor.Traditional Democratic partners are jumping in, too. Both theAmerican Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees’ and Service Employees International Union’s political-action committees are running their own TV commercials in Florida this week — attacking Romney.

Gingrich and the other two Republican candidates, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and Texas U.S.Rep.Ron Paul, are being all but ignored by the DNC and its allies. Instead, they’re hammering Romney harder even than his rivals are, paying for TV and radio ads saying that Romney changes his positions on issues such as abortion; that his hard-line positions on immigration would be “devastating” to Hispanics in a state full of them; that his business record was characterized by “greed.”

Gingrich, a former U.S. House speaker, is the latest Republican candidate to ride a “not-Mitt Romney” surge, winning South Carolina last week. The latest polls show him and Romney neck-and-neck in Florida as the Jan. 31 primary nears. But Romney has more national organization and money and remains the more-probable nominee.”Barack Obama and his liberal allies are terrified of Mitt Romney because they know if he is the Republican nominee, he will win in November,” Romney spokesman Ryan Williams said. “They have stepped up their false and dishonest attacks to distract from Obama’s failed jobs record, and they hope to prop up Speaker Gingrich. … They realize he would be an incredibly weak nominee and would get trounced by President Obama.”

Gingrich’s campaign did not respond Tuesday to inquiries regarding the DNC tactics.

The Democrats say they are merely responding to Romney, who until recently ignored his rivals to attack Obama for everything from his “Obamacare” health plan to his “European” and “failed” economic policies that undermine American individualism.

And they say they are working from the perspective that Romney is the national front-runner and the presumptive eventual nominee, notwithstanding Gingrich’s rapid rise in the polls.

“Mitt Romney has earned the distinction,” DNC press secretary Melanie Rousell said. “He attacks the president every opportunity he has. We are only trying to set the record straight, both on the president and on Mitt Romney’s record, which he doesn’t want to talk about.”

Rousell said the DNC has no interest in influencing the outcome of the Republican race, only to define the Republican candidates.

“We generally see the field as all the same: They’re all fighting to be the most extreme,” she said.

The DNC strategy is not new: Romney’s camp has noted increased Democratic attention since Iowa. But the stakes are getting higher with every primary.

In the three days since the South Carolina primary was decided Saturday night, the DNC has organized four news conferences for Florida media, released a video and issued at least 25 news releases attacking Romney’s record and background, with only rare mentions of Gingrich.

At a Sunday news conference, DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Weston welcomed Romney to Florida, where, she said, voters will learn “he will say anything to get elected.” On Monday, Florida Democratic Party Chairman Rod Smith told reporters that Romney likes to play by different rules. Tuesday, DNC Executive Director Patrick Gaspard picked apart Romney’s newly released tax returns. And Smith critiqued Romney’s performance in Monday night’s Republican debate.

“I don’t think he connects well with people,” Smith said. “In North Florida, I don’t think he’ll connect. I think in South Florida he has a problem with the immigration issue.”

Rollins College political scientist Donald L. Davison said the Democrats could have a variety of reasons for their attacks, including a decision that “they would rather face Gingrich,” whose multiple marriages and $1.6 million in “consultant” earnings from Freddie Mac in Washington could make him a weaker nominee.

He noted that the most extreme historical precedent for such a strategy was when President Richard Nixon‘s Committee to Re-Elect the President worked hard in 1972 to get Democrats to pick Sen. George McGovern, an outspoken liberal whom Nixon beat easily.

“Ultimately, it is in their [Democrats] interest to see the Republican Party tied up in knots — which the party seems to be doing a pretty good job of all on its own,” Davison said.

The Romney campaign is annoyed by the two-front attack — Gingrich on one side, the DNC on the other — but ultimately thinks the Democrats’ attacks will have little effect on the state’s Republican voters.

“Fortunately, Floridians are smart enough to see through it,” Williams said.

smpowers@tribune.com or 407-420-5441


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British Baffoons attack Andrew Breitbart

by Admin on January 23, 2012 in Andrew Breitbart, Crony Capitalism, GOP Primary Election, Media Bias, Media Corruption, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich with 1 Comment

George Soros funded and NBC operatives MSNBC and CNN import British buffoons who “have no skin in the game, of American Politics” to wage war against conservatives and the American democratic Republic.

CNN PRIME TIME ANCHOR TO BREITBART: ‘YOU ARE NOTORIOUSLY EVIL’

In the midst of an otherwise straight-forward appearance on CNN, Andrew Breitbart was bizarrely addressed by host Piers Morgan as being “notoriously evil about almost everybody.” After Breitbart responded that Morgan didn’t really know him and that they had spent “maybe eight seconds together” in the past, Morgan responded “it was a long eight seconds.”

Breitbart Responds To Piers Morgan Incident

BREITBART LOOKS ‘LESS EVIL’ ON PIERS MORGAN

Andrew Breitbart appeared on the CNN show to talk about the conservative reaction to Newt’s victory in South Carolina.

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Tancredo: Newt Was ‘Tossed Out’ Of Speaker Because ‘He Was Not A Good Leader’

by Admin on January 19, 2012 in Newt Gingrich, Tom Tancredo with 4 Comments

Jimmy Carter to Piers Morgan, ‘Newt using subtlety of racism’

by Admin on January 18, 2012 in Hypocracy, Newt Gingrich, Progressivism with 1 Comment

From the Washington Examiner from 09/16/09, By: David Freddoso

Jimmy Carter also bantered racist attacks on anyone opposing President’s Obama’s health care bill. Proving the point that the left uses race at every turn as a propaganda tool against any and all on the right.

Jimmy Carter’s racist campaign of 1970

Former President Jimmy Carter has created a stir today by alleging that those protesting and opposing President Obama’s health care bill — by some measures, up to 55 percent of the country – are doing so because they cannot accept the idea of a black man in the White House. As The New York Times put it:

He lamented the tone of disrespect toward the current president, adding: “Those kind of things are not just casual outcomes of a sincere debate on whether we should have a national program on health care. It’s deeper than that.”

Setting aside the much greater disrespect shown by the Left at nearly every moment of former President George W. Bush’s presidency, it is not unfair to suggest that Carter is attributing the same racial cynicism to others that he himself employed during his 1970 campaign for governor of Georgia.

Readers should refer to Stephen Hayward’s The Real Jimmy Carter if they want a taste of the out-and-out racism that Carter employed in order to defeat moderate former Gov. Carl Sanders for the Democratic nomination that year. As Hayward’s book points out:

  • Carter’s top campaign staffers were spotted distributing grainy photographs of Sanders arm-in-arm celebrating with two black men. Sanders was a part-owner of the Atlanta Hawks, and in the photograph he was celebrating a victory with two players who were pouring champagne over his head. Carter’s leaflet was intended to depress Sanders’s white vote.
  • “The Carter campaign also produced a leaflet noting that Sanders had paid tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr.”
  • Carter criticized Sanders, a former governor, for preventing Alabama Gov. and notorious segregationist George Wallace from speaking on Georgia state property. “I don’t think it was right for Governor Sanders to try to please a group of ultra-liberals, particularly those in Washington, when it means stifling communication with another state,” said Carter.
  • “‘I have no trouble pitching for Wallace votes and black votes at the same time,’ Carter told a reporter. Carter also said to another reporter, ‘I can win this election without a single black vote.’”
  • Upon receiving the endorsement of former Democratic Gov. Lester Maddox, Carter responded by praising the life-long segregationist: “He has brought a standard of forthright expression and personal honesty to the governor’s office, and I hope to live up to his standard.” Maddox had not only refused to serve blacks in the restaurant he once owned, but he had also greeted civil rights protestors with a gun, and made sticks available to his white customers with which to intimidate them.
  • “The campaign paid for radio ads for a fringe black candidate, C.B. King, in an effort to siphon black votes away from Sanders.”
  • “Then there was the radio commercial in which Carter said he would never be the tool of any ‘block’ vote, slurring over the word ‘block’ so that it could be mistaken for ‘black.’

Carter won the Democratic nomination and the governorship — unsurprisingly, with almost no black support. He famously did not carry the racism of his 1970 campaign into his governorship. That is laudable, but his campaign was not. Nor is it laudable for him today to attribute his own racial cynicism to others who have ample reasons for legitimate political disagreement with this president.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/jimmy-carter039s-racist-campaign-1970#ixzz1jrAtheLN

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