New Developments III

[criddic3]

I detect a note of sarcasm in some of these posts. Honestly, though, it is amazing how far Mr. Cain managed to go in his nomination bid. He was virtually unknown before this race. His approach to speeches and his enthusiasm for his 999 plan will be remembered. Also of note is the fact that an African-American conservative became so popular that at one point he was a front-runner for the GOP Presidential nomination.

Unfortunately, he never overcame his lack of foreign policy knowledge, and the (so far not backed-up) allegations of sexual harrassment brought him down. But he was a positive voice in the nominating process, and it's healthy to have a variety of candidates to choose from. Frankly, it's about time someone dropped out anyway. How long can there be 8 candidates?

[Greg]

I'm happy for him. Ending his campaign will free up a lot of time for him to start dating again.

How do you know he stopped? It appears he saved himself a lot of time by never bothering with minor compaign issues like formulating policy.

[Dien]

It's a sad day for pizza.

[Damien]

I hope all those whores are happy now. They brought a good man down.

[Sonic Youth]

I'm happy for him. Ending his campaign will free up a lot of time for him to start dating again.

[OscarGuy]

Herman Cain is announcing Saturday what his plans are for the future of his presidential campaign. That means he's dropping out of the race. Bad news is always announced on Friday or over the weekend to try and mute its impact while no one is supposedly paying attention.

[criddic3]

That's good news for Mr. Gingrich, who needs all the help he can get in New Hampshire.

[taki15]

Uh, oh! That's like deja vu all over again for Mitt.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/2 ... 14869.html

WASHINGTON — New Hampshire's largest newspaper on Sunday endorsed former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in the 2012 GOP presidential race, signaling that rival Mitt Romney isn't the universal favorite and potentially resetting the contest before the state's lead-off primary Jan. 10.

"We are in critical need of the innovative, forward-looking strategy and positive leadership that Gingrich has shown he is capable of providing," The New Hampshire Union Leader said in its front-page editorial, which was as much a promotion of Gingrich as a discreet rebuke of Romney.

"We don't back candidates based on popularity polls or big-shot backers. We look for conservatives of courage and conviction who are independent-minded, grounded in their core beliefs about this nation and its people, and best equipped for the job," the editorial said.

...

Gingrich hasn't begun television advertising and has refused to go negative on his opponents.

Yet The Union Leader's backing could give him a nudge in New Hampshire and provide a steady stream of criticism.

Four years earlier, the newspaper threw its support to Arizona Sen. John McCain's bid and used front page opinion columns and editorials to boost him and criticize chief rival Romney. In the time since, Romney has worked to court Union Leader publisher Joe McQuaid, who often runs columns on the newspaper's front page under his signature.

"The Union Leader's style is we don't just endorse once," McQuaid told The Washington Post in 1999. "We endorse every damn day. We started endorsing Reagan in 1975 and never stopped."

[Dien]

Is it just me or does his name sound like it came out of a Dr. Suess book?

[Sonic Youth]

Why The New 'Mature' Newt Is Just The Same Old Gingrich
Wed, 11/16/2011 - 1:00am — Joe Conason


Very few politicians have provided as much villainous entertainment over the years as Newt Gingrich, who now assures everyone that he has "matured" since his brief and tumultuous reign on Capitol Hill. While the former speaker may at last have settled into a third marriage, there is no sign of improvement in his character. He is rising in current polls because Mitt Romney repels many Republicans and he is the last alternative. But Gingrich's most recent debate performance revealed the same brazen dissembler whose flaws proved ruinous to him and -- were he to win the nomination -- would be disastrous for his party. On Nov. 9, with millions watching, he uttered a bald lie that revived memories of his most embarrassing moments in Washington.

The moment of truth -- or more accurately, falsehood -- came when CNBC's John Harwood noted that back in 2006, Gingrich was paid $300,000 by Freddie Mac, the gigantic federally backed housing financier. "What did you do for that money?" asked Harwood, while attempting to suggest that Gingrich sought to "fend off" stricter regulation of Freddie Mac and its sister company, Fannie Mae, by officials in the Bush administration and the Federal Reserve worried about the firms' inflated $5 trillion in mortgage securities.

"I offered them advice on precisely what they didn't do," replied Gingrich, who went on to claim that "as a historian," he had warned the Freddie Mac officials who hired him that their lending practices were causing "a bubble" which was "insane" and "impossible." He was not a lobbyist, he proclaimed, but a prophet: "It turned out, unfortunately, that I was right. ... And I think it's a good case for breaking up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and getting much smaller institutions back into the private sector to be competitive and to be responsible for their behavior."

The transcript shows that after Gingrich pronounced those closing conservative buzzwords -- "private sector," "competitive," "responsible" -- the audience applauded.

All politicians lie, but Gingrich specializes in this brand of self-puffing fantasy. The actual history of his employment by Freddie Mac, as excavated first by reporters at the Associated Press and more recently at Bloomberg News, is far less flattering to the former speaker than his own dramatic account. According to stories published by both news services since the debate, Freddie Mac hired Gingrich precisely to head off stronger regulation by arguing to Republicans that the mortgage firm had demonstrated the benefits of private-public partnerships.

The executives who dealt with Gingrich remember no brisk lectures from the former history professor about their risky "bubble." Instead, he attended strategy sessions at Freddie Mac's Washington offices -- and failed to live up to their hope that he would provide useful advice or written materials defending their business. As a congressman from Georgia, he promoted the same lending to low- and moderate-income homeowners that he now denounces so bitterly, and got on the Freddie Mac sugar teat in 1999, within a year after resigning his congressional seat in disgrace. Indeed, today Bloomberg reports that Gingrich stuffed his bulging pockets with as much as $1.8 million in Freddie Mac consulting fees between 1999 and 2007.

Confronted with the Freddie Mac denials this week, a Gingrich spokesman had the gall to cite a "confidentiality clause" in his 2006 contract that prohibits him from discussing his work for them. Evidently that clause only forbids him from telling the truth about the consulting deal, while leaving him free to invent a version that portrays him as prescient and honest.

Gingrich's conduct may not trouble the pork-choppers in the Republican hierarchy, who punted him as speaker only when he became a political liability after the Clinton impeachment fiasco. But it ought to infuriate the Tea Party faction, which supposedly despises Washington insiders feeding off the public-private teat, as Gingrich obviously did. He says that every contract he has signed since leaving Congress stipulates that he isn't a lobbyist -- but many more questions might now be asked about the specifics of his "non-lobbying" business as an agent of influence for those who could pay his exorbitant fee.

As Joan Walsh so wittily put it, even Newt's baggage has baggage. His crude mistreatment of his first two wives makes Herman Cain look chivalrous; his flip-flopping on climate change and health care makes Mitt Romney look consistent; his anti-Muslim extremism (almost) makes Michele Bachmann sound tolerant; and his record as the first and only speaker ever to be punished by the House Ethics Committee makes Rick Perry appear virtuous. That momentary lead in primary polls may make Democrats wishful and hopeful, but this sequel to his failed career is more likely to end in farce -- just like the original.

[Sonic Youth]

Gingrich: Child labor laws are absurd; allow kids to clean their own schools.

How Dickensian of him!

[Sonic Youth]

Newt Gingrich's (First) Divorce: The Revisionist History
By Kathy Kiely
November 19, 2011 | 7:41 PM |
National Journal

One-time history professor Newt Gingrich is ramping up a belated effort to revise some unpleasant history that's been written about him.

More than a quarter century after leftie magazine Mother Jones first published a devastating profile that, among other things, described the then-up-and-coming congressman discussing divorce with his first wife while she was in the hospital, the former Georgia congressman's suddenly surging campaign is pulling out all the stops to label the oft-repeated story "a vicious lie." Those are the words used on a new website the Gingrich campaign has launched to rebut attacks on him.

Journalists who mention the episode in stories about Gingrich get emails from the campaign demanding corrections. National Journal has been on the receiving end of a couple of those.

And now, the former House speaker and one of his daughters from his first (of three) marriages are personally rebutting the allegations in an interview with John DiStaso, the influential New Hampshire political writer. The story will be published in Sunday's New Hampshire Union-Leader, an important publication in a state where Gingrich would like to score a big upset in its first in the nation presidential primary on Jan. 10.

The Washington Post also published a story about the Gingrich divorce contretemps. In it, the the writer of the original Mother Jones does not back down from his story. Nor does the Post retract its own 1985 story in which Gingrich's first wife, Jackie Battley, is quoted as describing the hospital visit in which her then-husband "wanted to discuss the terms of the divorce while I was recovering from surgery."

Jackie Gingrich Cushman, who earlier this year penned a column in defense of her dad, told the Union-Leader that she was in the hospital room with her parents and that the conversation didn't go down at all the way Mother Jones or the Post described it. However, Cushman acknowledged she couldn't remember exactly what was said. According to DiStaso's story, she was 13 at the time.

Unheard from in all of this is the first Mrs. Gingrich, who happily survived her battle with uterine cancer. Gingrich spokesman R.C. Hammond says Battley won't talk to reporters because she's harboring a 26-year-old grudge against journalists. "She told her daughters what is in that Post story is inaccurate," he said.

When I talked to Hammond about the campaign's effort to correct a nearly three-decade-old record, he said he detected a certain skepticism in my questions. That's putting it mildly. Let me count the whys:

•Why did Gingrich wait so long to make a full-bore effort to deny a story that most people would want to have refuted immediately or sooner if it weren't true?
•Why are we being asked to accept the account of a young woman who is working for her dad's presidential election and who was a teenager at the time she witnessed the disputed events rather than hearing from the woman who -- if the original stories are to be believed -- leveled the allegations about Gingrich's ungallant behavior? If Battley wants to recant or dispute what the Post and Mother Jones printed, she doesn't have to talk to reporters. She can issue a statement.
•Why is the campaign so focused on technicalities? Hammond says reporters are wrong to report that Gingrich asked his wife for a divorce when she had cancer because a) divorce proceedings already were underway at the time of Battley's surgery; b) she initiated the proceedings, c) she wasn't dying and d) she didn't have cancer. The Gingrich campaign reaches that last conclusion because, although Battley had had a cancerous growth removed two years earlier, the particular tumor excised in the 1980 surgery she had just before her then-husband's now-infamous hospital visit turned out not to be malignant.

None of this erases the fact that Gingrich divorced an ailing wife and discussed -- in the Union-Leader interview, he acknowledges they argued over -- the impending end of their marriage while she was in her sickbed.

The whole awkward episode smacks of exactly the sort of undisciplined campaign that Gingrich vowed at the beginning of the year he'd avoid. It reminds people, rather than reassures them, about Gingrich's messy personal life. At this point, there's only one clear beneficiary of Gingrich's effort to rewrite history: Mother Jones, which is getting a whole new generation of readers for a 27-year-old magazine profile.

[Dien]

Alright, now let's tie New Developments with Oscar candidates through song!

These pig songs are relative to our dismay with the government and society
The second pig in Pink Floyd's "Pigs (Three Different Ones)" is related to Margaret Thatcher
The song references that she likes the feel of steel
Steel is an alloy consisting mostly of iron
Margaret Thatcher's nickname is The Iron Lady
Meryl Streep stars as Margaret Thatcher in the film The Iron Lady

Six Degrees!

[kaytodd]

kaytodd, I have to say I've never heard the verses you included about piggy pranks and banks. Where'd you come up with them?

Those are lyrics cut from the album version, I believe. He used them in his solo live performances though.

I always thought those lyrics were straight from the White Album. Dien, you reminded me of Pink Floyd's Pigs (Three Different Ones). Heavy handed, unsubtle, but that also describes the GOP, especially the Tea Partiers. Here are the lyrics, with a slight change:

Big man, pig man, ha ha charade you are.
You well heeled big wheel, ha ha charade you are.
And when your hand is on your heart,
You're nearly a good laugh,
Almost a joker,
With your head down in the pig bin,
Saying "Keep on digging."
Pig stain on your fat chin.
What do you hope to find.
When you're down in the pig mine.
You're nearly a laugh,
You're nearly a laugh
But you're really a cry.
Bus stop rat bag, ha ha charade you are.
You fucked up old hag, ha ha charade you are.
You radiate cold shafts of broken glass.
You're nearly a good laugh,
Almost worth a quick grin.
You like the feel of steel,
You're hot stuff with a hatpin,
And good fun with a hand gun.
You're nearly a laugh,
You're nearly a laugh
But you're really a cry.
Hey you, GOP,
Ha ha charade you are.
You house proud town mouse,
Ha ha charade you are
You're trying to keep our feelings off the street.
You're nearly a real treat,
All tight lips and cold feet
And do you feel abused?
You gotta stem the evil tide,
And keep it all on the inside.
Mary you're nearly a treat,
Mary you're nearly a treat
But you're really a cry.

[Dien]

kaytodd, I have to say I've never heard the verses you included about piggy pranks and banks. Where'd you come up with them?

Those are lyrics cut from the album version, I believe. He used them in his solo live performances though.