WHAT ABOUT OLD NEWT ?
let's see how his republican moral values are, shall we...
Tuesday, Mar 8, 2011 9:01 AM 12:00:48 CST The truth about Newt and his cancer-stricken wife
How Newt Gingrich's bedside visit with his hospitalized first wife has haunted him for three decades
By Justin Elliott
.
Topics:Newt Gingrich, War Room
For almost three decades, Newt Gingrich has been dogged by a single devastating anecdote from his past, one that has been repeated in the national press hundreds of times and that has arguably come to define his political persona. After being elected to Congress in 1978 on a family values platform, the story goes, he visited his wife Jackie, who was in the hospital recovering from an operation for uterine cancer, and demanded that she discuss terms of their divorce.
It's a story that, remarkably, Gingrich disputes to this day. Testament to how deeply it has reverberated, some version of the story — often rendered as Gingrich "serving divorce papers" to his wife in the hospital — has been cited in the last month alone by Slate, MSNBC, Politico, Commentary and the New York Times, among other outlets.
The pattern of attention on the episode when Gingrich is in the news — this time for exploring a presidential bid — has been repeated ever since the anecdote originally appeared in the first big national profile of the then-Georgia congressman. That was a 1984 piece in Mother Jones written by David Osborne and headlined "Newt Gingrich: Shining Knight of the Post-Reagan Right."
"We thought it was going to be a piece about an intellectually interesting Republican," Osborne, who later worked for Vice President Al Gore and is now a consultant, told me. But when Osborne started talking to former Gingrich staffers and his ex-wife Jackie, he got some explosive material on Gingrich's alleged hypocrisy and moral failings, and the magazine rushed the story to publication before the 1984 election.
Here's how Mother Jones recounted Newt's hospital visit with Jackie, who was her husband's former high school math teacher:
Jackie had undergone surgery for cancer of the uterus during the 1978 campaign, a fact Gingrich was not loath to use in conversations or speeches that year. After the separation in 1980, she had to be operated on again, to remove another tumor While she was still in the hospital, according to Howell, "Newt came up there with his yellow legal pad, and he had a list of things on how the divorce was going to be handled. He wanted her to sign it. She was still recovering from surgery, still sort of out of it, and he comes in with a yellow sheet of paper, handwritten, and wants her to sign it.
The source was Lee Howell, a former Gingrich campaign press secretary who had been the editor of the student newspaper at West Georgia College, where Gingrich was a history professor. As Osborne told me this week: "Most Gingrich staff people felt burned by the time they left. Howell was one of those people. But I also got [the story] from Jackie."
Interestingly, the hospital bed visit was hardly the most salacious detail in the piece — though some of the other material was based on anonymous sources:
One former aide describes approaching a car with Gingrich's daughters in hand, only to find the candidate with a woman, her head buried in his lap. The aide quickly turned and led the girls away. Another former friend maintains that Gingrich repeatedly made sexual advances to her when her husband was out of town. On one occasion, he visited under the guise of comforting her after the death of a relative, and instead tried to seduce her. In certain circles in the mid-1970s, Gingrich was developing a reputation as a ladies' man.
A few months later, after the Mother Jones piece had been sent around en masse by Gingrich's political enemies — and placed in the Congressional Record by giddy Democrats — he told the Washington Post: "I am not going to argue every point of that story, but I will say that it painted a picture of me that is essentially untrue."
That same Post profile quoted Jackie herself giving a slightly different version of the story (one that doesn't mention any legal pad):
"He can say that we had been talking about [a divorce] for 10 years, but the truth is that it came as a complete surprise," says Jackie Gingrich, in a telephone interview from Carrollton. "He's a great wordsmith … He walked out in the spring of 1980 and I returned to Georgia. By September, I went into the hospital for my third surgery. The two girls came to see me, and said Daddy is downstairs and could he come up? When he got there, he wanted to discuss the terms of the divorce while I was recovering from the surgery … To say I gave up a lot for the marriage is the understatement of the year."
Asked if, in fact, he handled the divorce as insensitively as portrayed, Gingrich responded: "All I can say is when you've been talking about divorce for 11 years and you've gone to a marriage counselor, and the other person doesn't want the divorce, I'm not sure there is any sensitive way to handle it."
Asked about the hospital story, Gingrich spokesman Rick Tyler told me: "He was taking his two daughters to see their mother in the hospital. When they were at the hospital they got in an argument. That is the extent of what happened." Asked about any yellow legal pad or discussion of divorce terms, Tyler said: "That didn't happen. It was unfortunate and regrettable that he got in an argument."
After the Mother Jones piece, every big Gingrich profile touched on the hospital encounter with Jackie.
In 1992, Gingrich, then House minority whip, faced a challenge from Tony Center, a Democratic attorney. Center ran a brutal ad against Gingrich saying that the congressman "delivered divorce papers to his wife the day after her cancer operation." It went on: "the same Newt Gingrich who used taxpayer money for his limo had to be ordered by the court to pay for kids' heat and electricity. No more perks. No more lies. No more Newt."
Gingrich went on to win that election handily, but not before claiming he was so disgusted by the level of "filth" and "degradation" in politics that he had considered dropping out of the race.
When Gingrich won reelection in 1994, just before he ascended to the speakership, the cartoonist Mike Luckovich drew an item that showed the congressman "flanked by two brazen-looking beauties labeled 'D.C. highrollers,' with the three of them hovering over the hospital bed of a sickly looking woman labeled 'Georgia constituents,'" the AP reported. The top of the comic read, "I want a divorce." In retaliation, a furious Gingrich barred reporters from Luckovich's paper, the Atlanta Constitution, from his victory night party.
The anecdote was repeated ad nauseam when Gingrich became House speaker in 1995. Then it was repeated ad nauseam when he filed for divorce with his second wife, Marianne, in 1999. The story came up again in the mid-2000s when Gingrich was openly mulling a 2008 presidential bid. In 2007, when Gingrich told James Dobson in a radio interview that he had in the 1990s cheated on his second wife (with his current wife, Callista), several stories about the admission also noted the 1980 hospital encounter.
If Gingrich is really serious about a 2012 candidacy, expect the hospital story to stay with him throughout the campaign. Close. Justin Elliott is a Salon reporter. Reach him by email at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @ElliottJustin More Justin Elliott
http://www.salon.com/2011/03/08/gingrich_divorce_hospital_cancer/
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich Acknowledges Having Affair During Clinton Impeachment
Published March 08, 2007
Associated Press
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was having an extramarital affair even as he led the charge against President Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair, he acknowledged in an interview with a conservative Christian group.
"The honest answer is yes," Gingrich, a potential 2008 Republican presidential candidate, said in an interview with Focus on the Family founder James Dobson to be aired Friday, according to a transcript provided to The Associated Press. "There are times that I have fallen short of my own standards. There's certainly times when I've fallen short of God's standards."
Gingrich argued in the interview, however, that he should not be viewed as a hypocrite for pursuing Clinton's infidelity.
"The president of the United States got in trouble for committing a felony in front of a sitting federal judge," the former Georgia congressman said of Clinton's 1998 House impeachment on perjury and obstruction of justice charges. "I drew a line in my mind that said, 'Even though I run the risk of being deeply embarrassed, and even though at a purely personal level I am not rendering judgment on another human being, as a leader of the government trying to uphold the rule of law, I have no choice except to move forward and say that you cannot accept ... perjury in your highest officials."
Widely considered a mastermind of the Republican revolution that swept Congress in the 1994 elections, Gingrich remains wildly popular among many conservatives. He has repeatedly placed near the top of Republican presidential polls recently, even though he has not formed a campaign.
Gingrich has said he is waiting to see how the Republican field shapes up before deciding in the fall whether to run.
Reports of extramarital affairs have dogged him for years as a result of two messy divorces, but he has refused to discuss them publicly.
Gingrich, who frequently campaigned on family values issues, divorced his second wife, Marianne, in 2000 after his attorneys acknowledged Gingrich's relationship with his current wife, Callista Bisek, a former congressional aide more than 20 years younger than he is.
His first marriage, to his former high school geometry teacher, Jackie Battley, ended in divorce in 1981. Although Gingrich has said he doesn't remember it, Battley has said Gingrich discussed divorce terms with her while she was recuperating in the hospital from cancer surgery.
Gingrich married Marianne months after the divorce.
"There were times when I was praying and when I felt I was doing things that were wrong. But I was still doing them," he said in the interview. "I look back on those as periods of weakness and periods that I'm ... not proud of."
Gingrich's congressional career ended in 1998 when he abruptly resigned from Congress after poor showings from Republicans in elections and after being reprimanded by the House ethics panel over charges that he used tax-exempt funding to advance his political goals.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,258001,00.html
Bachmann blasts Gingrich over Freddie Mac ties
By Geneva Sands-Sadowitz - 11/17/11 12:35 PM ET
Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann criticized rival contender and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich over his involvement with the mortgage firm Freddie Mac.
"Fannie [Mae] and Freddie, as you know, have been the epicenter of the financial meltdown in this country, and whether former Speaker Gingrich made $300,000 or whether he made $2 million, the point is he took money to also influence senior Republicans to be favorable toward Fannie and Freddie," Bachmann said Wednesday after a campaign event in Webster City, Iowa, according to published reports.
Gingrich has strongly denied lobbying on behalf of Freddie Mac, despite reports that his consulting firm earned between $1.6 million and $1.8 million in consulting fees from the mortgage giant. Gingrich says he merely offered "strategic advice" to the public corporation which he has strongly criticized and which many conservatives blame for fueling the 2007 mortgage crisis.
The reported amount is significantly higher than the payment of $300,000 that Gingrich has acknowledged in the past.
Bachmann said she wants to place Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into receivership and move to shut them down.
— Justin Sink contributed to this story.
http://thehill.com/video/campaign/194285-bachmann-blasts-gingrich-over-freddie-mac-ties
Newt Gingrich enjoys his 15 minutes at the top Comments 0Share0 Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
12:27 p.m. EST, November 17, 2011 Oh, see them climb. Oh, watch them fall.
Ironically, there is something inherently democratic about this season's Republican primary: each candidate, in turn, gets his or her turn at the top of the pile as the "anybody-but-Mitt" flavor of the week. Donald Trump, remember, enjoyed his brief moment in the sun, followed by the even briefer dominance of Michele Bachmann. Rick Perry flared and flamed, allowing Herman Cain suddenly to cruise and crash. And now Newt Gingrich is enjoying his 15 minutes at the top.
The fact that Gingrich is temporarily on top of the pile -- does anyone seriously expect him to be the party's nominee? -- is less surprising than the fact that he's still in the race at all.
After all, Gingrich started his campaign with the ultimate conservative no-no: dumping on Paul Ryan's draconian budget-cutting plan, which every House Republican voted for and which the tea party adopted as its new Bible. Calling it "too big a jump," Gingrich denounced the Ryan proposal on "Meet the Press." "I don't think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering," he scoffed.
Gingrich's recent history, in fact, is replete with instances of unorthodoxy. As an upstart member of Congress, he appeared on "Meet the Press" in October 1993 and advocated requiring every American to buy health insurance, just like the individual mandate contained in President Obama's Affordable Care Act. "I am for people, individuals -- exactly like automobile insurance -- individuals having health insurance and being required to have health insurance," he said back then -- a policy position he repeated as recently as May 2011. Today, as candidate, he's flip-flopped on the issue, saying his first act as president would be to repeal "Obamacare" because its individual mandate is unconstitutional.
On Libya, also, Gingrich has been on both sides of the issue. When opposition forces made their first moves against Gadhafi, Gingrich told Fox News the United States should take unilateral action to bomb the country, without involving either NATO or the United Nations. Two weeks later, after President Obama actually ordered American war planes to start bombing Libya, the former speaker condemned him for doing so. Then, after Gadhafi was killed, Gingrich expressed his doubts about the ability of Libya's transitional leaders to build a new country. Flip-flop-flip?
More embarrassingly, perhaps, Gingrich today says he's not sure there's any such thing as global warming, even though he appeared in a 2008 national TV ad urging congressional action on climate change -- with Nancy Pelosi! He also must now explain how he could make getting rid of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the centerpiece of his campaign, after having pocketed $1.6 million in consulting fees from Freddie. Of course, thanks to Mrs. Gingrich, Freddie's loss was Tiffany's gain.
There's one other factor in the equation. As the National Journal's Major Garrett told my radio audience this week, Gingrich is "the worst retail politician" in America today. He doesn't like to campaign, therefore he doesn't campaign, which is why his entire campaign staff walked out on him. Most politicians at least pretend to be glad to see you when they shake your hand. Not Newt. He looks down at people, as if to say, "Do you realize how smart I am?"
For the last few months, in fact, Gingrich's only "campaign" activity has been to show up for every debate and scold the media for daring to ask tough questions. That's enough to win him the love and temporary loyalty of tea partiers, but not enough to qualify him as commander-in-chief.
And then, poor Newt, just as he soars to the top, comes the lowest blow of all. Disgraced former Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who served three and a half years in prison for bribing members of Congress, called Gingrich corrupt. By representing Freddie Mac, Abramoff told NBC's David Gregory, Gingrich is "engaging in the exact kind of corruption that America disdains. The very things that anger the tea party movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement and everybody who is not in a movement and watches Washington and says why are these guys getting all this money, why do they all become so rich, why do they have these advantages?" When Abramoff says you're corrupt, you know you're in trouble.
So Newt Gingrich is now leading the national polls? Fuggedaboutit! Ain't gonna happen. Not even Republicans are dumb enough to nominate him.
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/opinion/views/os-ed-bill-press-111711-20111117,0,587362.column
U.S. News Gingrich writings, speeches scrutinized
Published: Nov. 17, 2011 at 12:41 PM
WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 (UPI) -- The writings and speeches given by Republican U.S. presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich since he left the U.S. House are coming under scrutiny, observers said.
Gingrich has written dozens of columns and given speeches promoting various companies while failing to disclose that the companies were paying members of a think tank Gingrich founded and ran, USA Today reported Thursday.
In a series of commentaries written in the dozen years since he resigned as speaker, Gingrich has advocated for various healthcare related issues, including electronic healthcare records and medical malpractice reform without revealing the issues were tied to members of the Center for Health Transformation, a for-profit think tank he founded in 2003.
Group members pay between $5,000 and $200,000, depending on how many employees attend the center's meetings and use other services, Center for Health Transformation spokeswoman Susan Meyers said. She said Meyers said the center should have done a better job putting the member affiliation in the underline of his commentaries.
But Meyers and Gingrich campaign spokesman R.C. Hammond say the Georgia Republican had ideas about healthcare long before health industry-related clients joined his organization.
Gingrich is under fire for failing to fully disclose receiving at least $1.6 million in consulting fees from mortgage giant Freddie Mac after he left Congress in 1999. On the stump, Gingrich has been critical of the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp.
Gingrich and his campaign said in a statement Wednesday he worked for Freddie Mac, but that it was one of the many entities that hired his consulting firm, The Gingrich Group. Gingrich, the campaign said, did not lobby for his clients.
© 2011 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Any reproduction, republication, redistribution and/or modification of any UPI content is expressly prohibited without UPI's prior written consent.
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2011/11/17/Gingrich-writings-speeches-scrutinized/UPI-91021321551668/
let's see how his republican moral values are, shall we...
Tuesday, Mar 8, 2011 9:01 AM 12:00:48 CST The truth about Newt and his cancer-stricken wife
How Newt Gingrich's bedside visit with his hospitalized first wife has haunted him for three decades
By Justin Elliott
.
Topics:Newt Gingrich, War Room
For almost three decades, Newt Gingrich has been dogged by a single devastating anecdote from his past, one that has been repeated in the national press hundreds of times and that has arguably come to define his political persona. After being elected to Congress in 1978 on a family values platform, the story goes, he visited his wife Jackie, who was in the hospital recovering from an operation for uterine cancer, and demanded that she discuss terms of their divorce.
It's a story that, remarkably, Gingrich disputes to this day. Testament to how deeply it has reverberated, some version of the story — often rendered as Gingrich "serving divorce papers" to his wife in the hospital — has been cited in the last month alone by Slate, MSNBC, Politico, Commentary and the New York Times, among other outlets.
The pattern of attention on the episode when Gingrich is in the news — this time for exploring a presidential bid — has been repeated ever since the anecdote originally appeared in the first big national profile of the then-Georgia congressman. That was a 1984 piece in Mother Jones written by David Osborne and headlined "Newt Gingrich: Shining Knight of the Post-Reagan Right."
"We thought it was going to be a piece about an intellectually interesting Republican," Osborne, who later worked for Vice President Al Gore and is now a consultant, told me. But when Osborne started talking to former Gingrich staffers and his ex-wife Jackie, he got some explosive material on Gingrich's alleged hypocrisy and moral failings, and the magazine rushed the story to publication before the 1984 election.
Here's how Mother Jones recounted Newt's hospital visit with Jackie, who was her husband's former high school math teacher:
Jackie had undergone surgery for cancer of the uterus during the 1978 campaign, a fact Gingrich was not loath to use in conversations or speeches that year. After the separation in 1980, she had to be operated on again, to remove another tumor While she was still in the hospital, according to Howell, "Newt came up there with his yellow legal pad, and he had a list of things on how the divorce was going to be handled. He wanted her to sign it. She was still recovering from surgery, still sort of out of it, and he comes in with a yellow sheet of paper, handwritten, and wants her to sign it.
The source was Lee Howell, a former Gingrich campaign press secretary who had been the editor of the student newspaper at West Georgia College, where Gingrich was a history professor. As Osborne told me this week: "Most Gingrich staff people felt burned by the time they left. Howell was one of those people. But I also got [the story] from Jackie."
Interestingly, the hospital bed visit was hardly the most salacious detail in the piece — though some of the other material was based on anonymous sources:
One former aide describes approaching a car with Gingrich's daughters in hand, only to find the candidate with a woman, her head buried in his lap. The aide quickly turned and led the girls away. Another former friend maintains that Gingrich repeatedly made sexual advances to her when her husband was out of town. On one occasion, he visited under the guise of comforting her after the death of a relative, and instead tried to seduce her. In certain circles in the mid-1970s, Gingrich was developing a reputation as a ladies' man.
A few months later, after the Mother Jones piece had been sent around en masse by Gingrich's political enemies — and placed in the Congressional Record by giddy Democrats — he told the Washington Post: "I am not going to argue every point of that story, but I will say that it painted a picture of me that is essentially untrue."
That same Post profile quoted Jackie herself giving a slightly different version of the story (one that doesn't mention any legal pad):
"He can say that we had been talking about [a divorce] for 10 years, but the truth is that it came as a complete surprise," says Jackie Gingrich, in a telephone interview from Carrollton. "He's a great wordsmith … He walked out in the spring of 1980 and I returned to Georgia. By September, I went into the hospital for my third surgery. The two girls came to see me, and said Daddy is downstairs and could he come up? When he got there, he wanted to discuss the terms of the divorce while I was recovering from the surgery … To say I gave up a lot for the marriage is the understatement of the year."
Asked if, in fact, he handled the divorce as insensitively as portrayed, Gingrich responded: "All I can say is when you've been talking about divorce for 11 years and you've gone to a marriage counselor, and the other person doesn't want the divorce, I'm not sure there is any sensitive way to handle it."
Asked about the hospital story, Gingrich spokesman Rick Tyler told me: "He was taking his two daughters to see their mother in the hospital. When they were at the hospital they got in an argument. That is the extent of what happened." Asked about any yellow legal pad or discussion of divorce terms, Tyler said: "That didn't happen. It was unfortunate and regrettable that he got in an argument."
After the Mother Jones piece, every big Gingrich profile touched on the hospital encounter with Jackie.
In 1992, Gingrich, then House minority whip, faced a challenge from Tony Center, a Democratic attorney. Center ran a brutal ad against Gingrich saying that the congressman "delivered divorce papers to his wife the day after her cancer operation." It went on: "the same Newt Gingrich who used taxpayer money for his limo had to be ordered by the court to pay for kids' heat and electricity. No more perks. No more lies. No more Newt."
Gingrich went on to win that election handily, but not before claiming he was so disgusted by the level of "filth" and "degradation" in politics that he had considered dropping out of the race.
When Gingrich won reelection in 1994, just before he ascended to the speakership, the cartoonist Mike Luckovich drew an item that showed the congressman "flanked by two brazen-looking beauties labeled 'D.C. highrollers,' with the three of them hovering over the hospital bed of a sickly looking woman labeled 'Georgia constituents,'" the AP reported. The top of the comic read, "I want a divorce." In retaliation, a furious Gingrich barred reporters from Luckovich's paper, the Atlanta Constitution, from his victory night party.
The anecdote was repeated ad nauseam when Gingrich became House speaker in 1995. Then it was repeated ad nauseam when he filed for divorce with his second wife, Marianne, in 1999. The story came up again in the mid-2000s when Gingrich was openly mulling a 2008 presidential bid. In 2007, when Gingrich told James Dobson in a radio interview that he had in the 1990s cheated on his second wife (with his current wife, Callista), several stories about the admission also noted the 1980 hospital encounter.
If Gingrich is really serious about a 2012 candidacy, expect the hospital story to stay with him throughout the campaign. Close. Justin Elliott is a Salon reporter. Reach him by email at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @ElliottJustin More Justin Elliott
http://www.salon.com/2011/03/08/gingrich_divorce_hospital_cancer/
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich Acknowledges Having Affair During Clinton Impeachment
Published March 08, 2007
Associated Press
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was having an extramarital affair even as he led the charge against President Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair, he acknowledged in an interview with a conservative Christian group.
"The honest answer is yes," Gingrich, a potential 2008 Republican presidential candidate, said in an interview with Focus on the Family founder James Dobson to be aired Friday, according to a transcript provided to The Associated Press. "There are times that I have fallen short of my own standards. There's certainly times when I've fallen short of God's standards."
Gingrich argued in the interview, however, that he should not be viewed as a hypocrite for pursuing Clinton's infidelity.
"The president of the United States got in trouble for committing a felony in front of a sitting federal judge," the former Georgia congressman said of Clinton's 1998 House impeachment on perjury and obstruction of justice charges. "I drew a line in my mind that said, 'Even though I run the risk of being deeply embarrassed, and even though at a purely personal level I am not rendering judgment on another human being, as a leader of the government trying to uphold the rule of law, I have no choice except to move forward and say that you cannot accept ... perjury in your highest officials."
Widely considered a mastermind of the Republican revolution that swept Congress in the 1994 elections, Gingrich remains wildly popular among many conservatives. He has repeatedly placed near the top of Republican presidential polls recently, even though he has not formed a campaign.
Gingrich has said he is waiting to see how the Republican field shapes up before deciding in the fall whether to run.
Reports of extramarital affairs have dogged him for years as a result of two messy divorces, but he has refused to discuss them publicly.
Gingrich, who frequently campaigned on family values issues, divorced his second wife, Marianne, in 2000 after his attorneys acknowledged Gingrich's relationship with his current wife, Callista Bisek, a former congressional aide more than 20 years younger than he is.
His first marriage, to his former high school geometry teacher, Jackie Battley, ended in divorce in 1981. Although Gingrich has said he doesn't remember it, Battley has said Gingrich discussed divorce terms with her while she was recuperating in the hospital from cancer surgery.
Gingrich married Marianne months after the divorce.
"There were times when I was praying and when I felt I was doing things that were wrong. But I was still doing them," he said in the interview. "I look back on those as periods of weakness and periods that I'm ... not proud of."
Gingrich's congressional career ended in 1998 when he abruptly resigned from Congress after poor showings from Republicans in elections and after being reprimanded by the House ethics panel over charges that he used tax-exempt funding to advance his political goals.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,258001,00.html
Bachmann blasts Gingrich over Freddie Mac ties
By Geneva Sands-Sadowitz - 11/17/11 12:35 PM ET
Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann criticized rival contender and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich over his involvement with the mortgage firm Freddie Mac.
"Fannie [Mae] and Freddie, as you know, have been the epicenter of the financial meltdown in this country, and whether former Speaker Gingrich made $300,000 or whether he made $2 million, the point is he took money to also influence senior Republicans to be favorable toward Fannie and Freddie," Bachmann said Wednesday after a campaign event in Webster City, Iowa, according to published reports.
Gingrich has strongly denied lobbying on behalf of Freddie Mac, despite reports that his consulting firm earned between $1.6 million and $1.8 million in consulting fees from the mortgage giant. Gingrich says he merely offered "strategic advice" to the public corporation which he has strongly criticized and which many conservatives blame for fueling the 2007 mortgage crisis.
The reported amount is significantly higher than the payment of $300,000 that Gingrich has acknowledged in the past.
Bachmann said she wants to place Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into receivership and move to shut them down.
— Justin Sink contributed to this story.
http://thehill.com/video/campaign/194285-bachmann-blasts-gingrich-over-freddie-mac-ties
Newt Gingrich enjoys his 15 minutes at the top Comments 0Share0 Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
12:27 p.m. EST, November 17, 2011 Oh, see them climb. Oh, watch them fall.
Ironically, there is something inherently democratic about this season's Republican primary: each candidate, in turn, gets his or her turn at the top of the pile as the "anybody-but-Mitt" flavor of the week. Donald Trump, remember, enjoyed his brief moment in the sun, followed by the even briefer dominance of Michele Bachmann. Rick Perry flared and flamed, allowing Herman Cain suddenly to cruise and crash. And now Newt Gingrich is enjoying his 15 minutes at the top.
The fact that Gingrich is temporarily on top of the pile -- does anyone seriously expect him to be the party's nominee? -- is less surprising than the fact that he's still in the race at all.
After all, Gingrich started his campaign with the ultimate conservative no-no: dumping on Paul Ryan's draconian budget-cutting plan, which every House Republican voted for and which the tea party adopted as its new Bible. Calling it "too big a jump," Gingrich denounced the Ryan proposal on "Meet the Press." "I don't think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering," he scoffed.
Gingrich's recent history, in fact, is replete with instances of unorthodoxy. As an upstart member of Congress, he appeared on "Meet the Press" in October 1993 and advocated requiring every American to buy health insurance, just like the individual mandate contained in President Obama's Affordable Care Act. "I am for people, individuals -- exactly like automobile insurance -- individuals having health insurance and being required to have health insurance," he said back then -- a policy position he repeated as recently as May 2011. Today, as candidate, he's flip-flopped on the issue, saying his first act as president would be to repeal "Obamacare" because its individual mandate is unconstitutional.
On Libya, also, Gingrich has been on both sides of the issue. When opposition forces made their first moves against Gadhafi, Gingrich told Fox News the United States should take unilateral action to bomb the country, without involving either NATO or the United Nations. Two weeks later, after President Obama actually ordered American war planes to start bombing Libya, the former speaker condemned him for doing so. Then, after Gadhafi was killed, Gingrich expressed his doubts about the ability of Libya's transitional leaders to build a new country. Flip-flop-flip?
More embarrassingly, perhaps, Gingrich today says he's not sure there's any such thing as global warming, even though he appeared in a 2008 national TV ad urging congressional action on climate change -- with Nancy Pelosi! He also must now explain how he could make getting rid of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the centerpiece of his campaign, after having pocketed $1.6 million in consulting fees from Freddie. Of course, thanks to Mrs. Gingrich, Freddie's loss was Tiffany's gain.
There's one other factor in the equation. As the National Journal's Major Garrett told my radio audience this week, Gingrich is "the worst retail politician" in America today. He doesn't like to campaign, therefore he doesn't campaign, which is why his entire campaign staff walked out on him. Most politicians at least pretend to be glad to see you when they shake your hand. Not Newt. He looks down at people, as if to say, "Do you realize how smart I am?"
For the last few months, in fact, Gingrich's only "campaign" activity has been to show up for every debate and scold the media for daring to ask tough questions. That's enough to win him the love and temporary loyalty of tea partiers, but not enough to qualify him as commander-in-chief.
And then, poor Newt, just as he soars to the top, comes the lowest blow of all. Disgraced former Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who served three and a half years in prison for bribing members of Congress, called Gingrich corrupt. By representing Freddie Mac, Abramoff told NBC's David Gregory, Gingrich is "engaging in the exact kind of corruption that America disdains. The very things that anger the tea party movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement and everybody who is not in a movement and watches Washington and says why are these guys getting all this money, why do they all become so rich, why do they have these advantages?" When Abramoff says you're corrupt, you know you're in trouble.
So Newt Gingrich is now leading the national polls? Fuggedaboutit! Ain't gonna happen. Not even Republicans are dumb enough to nominate him.
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/opinion/views/os-ed-bill-press-111711-20111117,0,587362.column
U.S. News Gingrich writings, speeches scrutinized
Published: Nov. 17, 2011 at 12:41 PM
WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 (UPI) -- The writings and speeches given by Republican U.S. presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich since he left the U.S. House are coming under scrutiny, observers said.
Gingrich has written dozens of columns and given speeches promoting various companies while failing to disclose that the companies were paying members of a think tank Gingrich founded and ran, USA Today reported Thursday.
In a series of commentaries written in the dozen years since he resigned as speaker, Gingrich has advocated for various healthcare related issues, including electronic healthcare records and medical malpractice reform without revealing the issues were tied to members of the Center for Health Transformation, a for-profit think tank he founded in 2003.
Group members pay between $5,000 and $200,000, depending on how many employees attend the center's meetings and use other services, Center for Health Transformation spokeswoman Susan Meyers said. She said Meyers said the center should have done a better job putting the member affiliation in the underline of his commentaries.
But Meyers and Gingrich campaign spokesman R.C. Hammond say the Georgia Republican had ideas about healthcare long before health industry-related clients joined his organization.
Gingrich is under fire for failing to fully disclose receiving at least $1.6 million in consulting fees from mortgage giant Freddie Mac after he left Congress in 1999. On the stump, Gingrich has been critical of the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp.
Gingrich and his campaign said in a statement Wednesday he worked for Freddie Mac, but that it was one of the many entities that hired his consulting firm, The Gingrich Group. Gingrich, the campaign said, did not lobby for his clients.
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http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2011/11/17/Gingrich-writings-speeches-scrutinized/UPI-91021321551668/
