Tag: Newt_Gingrich

Sanctified Mind

As we noted, Newt Gingrich isn’t a serious candidate for the GOP nomination: he didn’t bother to follow the rules in Virginia regarding collecting signatures. For a grifter like Newt, with years and years of ethical lapses associated with his name, you’d think he’d go to the effort of following the actual law instead of relying on the wink-and-nod of the old system.

In order to understand it, you need to understand how candidates are chosen for the ballot in Virginia — namely, by collecting thousands of signatures. If a candidate runs for a slot on a party ballot (e.g. as a Republican or a Democrat), party officials are responsible for verifying the validity of the signatures, which have to meet a number of criteria. If a candidate runs as an independent, the State Board of Elections verifies the signatures.

As Winger reports, up until this year the state GOP did not verify the signatures with the diligence that you might expect. “[I]n the only other presidential primaries in which Virginia required 10,000 signatures (2000, 2004, and 2008) the signatures were not checked,” Winger writes. “Any candidate who submitted at least 10,000 raw signatures was put on the ballot.”

Put another way, Winger says Republican officials used to essentially ignore the legal requirement that signatures be verified, accepting raw signatures instead. But this year, things were different. The state GOP gave the list of signatures a close look, Winger says, which is why Gingrich and Perry (who both professed to turn in more than 10,000 signatures) didn’t make it.

(Michael) Osborne ran as an independent after he says the Republicans denied him a shot at the GOP ballot line. Then he filed a lawsuit against his local GOP in October, claiming it was unfair that he had to have his signatures verified by the state while his GOP opponent only had to get the sign off from the Republican Party. The legal action is still underway, but Winger wrote the suit led the state GOP to switch up its verification procedures (or, put a different way, start having some.)

…

“I blame Gingrich,” he said. “The law’s very clear. If he didn’t get the signatures and other people did…the law’s the law and it should be fairly applied to everybody.”

(click here to continue reading Is This Man The Reason Newt Gingrich Isn’t On The VA Ballot? | TPM2012.)

Talk about voter fraud…

Quietly Laughing

Amusingly, even a large percentage of Republicans don’t want Newt Gingrich to win the GOP nomination, fearing Gingrich will be a drag on down-ticket races.

From the House that Newt Gingrich once ran through the Washington establishment to state capitals across the nation, some Republicans are going public with their concerns that Mr. Gingrich would be a weak general election candidate and a drag on the party’s fortunes if he won the presidential nomination.

“Since we don’t know how he got here, I don’t know how he can be stopped,” said Ed Rogers, a longtime Washington lobbyist and party strategist who worked for the first President George Bush.

Mr. Rogers, who has not endorsed anyone, is like many in the party who esteem Mr. Gingrich for his achievement in leading Republicans to the control of Congress in 1994, after 40 years in the House minority, but who recoil from the prospect of him at the top of the ticket given the controversy, scandal and electoral defeats that defined his four years as speaker.

…

Some Republicans on Capitol Hill say that Mr. Gingrich would not only lose to Mr. Obama, but that he could take other Republican candidates down, too, in a year when high unemployment has driven hopes within the party of capturing the White House and the Senate while holding control of the House.

Representative Peter T. King, a New York Republican who served in the House when Mr. Gingrich was speaker, has been an outspoken critic. “I’ve had any number of members of Congress come over to me and thank me for what I’m saying,” he said. “They say, ‘This guy is going to kill us if he gets the nomination.’ ”

Mr. Gingrich was “a disaster” as speaker and most likely would be as a nominee, Mr. King said, given his “compulsion to exaggerate,” erratically changing ideas, intellectual arrogance and the grandiosity of his self-comparisons to the likes of Winston Churchill and others.

(click here to continue reading As Newt Gingrich’s Star Rises, So Do G.O.P. Concerns – NYTimes.com.)

Decline and Fall of Empire

Nancy Pelosi doesn’t seem gleeful so much as not fearful of the Newt Gingrich train steamrolling Obama in 2012.

“I like Barney Frank’s quote the best, where he said ‘I never thought I’d live such a good life that I would see Newt Gingrich be the nominee of the Republican party,’” Pelosi said in an exclusive interview Friday. “That quote I think spoke for a lot of us.”

Pelosi didn’t go into detail about Gingrich’s past transgressions, but she tipped her hand. “One of these days we’ll have a conversation about Newt Gingrich,” Pelosi said. “I know a lot about him. I served on the investigative committee that investigated him, four of us locked in a room in an undisclosed location for a year. A thousand pages of his stuff.”

Pressed for more detail she wouldn’t go further.

“Not right here,” Pelosi joked. “When the time’s right.”

Which is to say that if Gingrich somehow clinches the nomination, there’s one hell of an oppo dump coming.

(click here to continue reading Democrats Gleeful At Prospect Of Running Against Gingrich | TPMDC.)

You’d think GOP leaders would be a little nervous themselves: they know of Newt’s ethical lapses as well as anyone, having responded to them for so many years. If the GOP wasn’t in disarray, I’d doubt Romney or Gingrich would have gotten this far.

Honey Bucket

If Newt Gingrich becomes president, I have to flee this country. I couldn’t take it.

Republicans have a far greater talent for hypocrisy than easily cowed Democrats do — and no doubt appreciate that in a leader.

Gingrich led the putsch against Democratic Speaker Jim Wright in 1988, bludgeoning him for an ethically sketchy book deal. The following year, as he moved into the House Republican leadership, he himself got in trouble for an ethically sketchy book deal.

Gingrich was part of the House Republican mob trying to impeach Bill Clinton for hiding his affair with a young government staffer, even as Newt himself was hiding his affair with a young government staffer.

Gingrich has excoriated Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae for dragging the country into a financial spiral and now demands that Freddie Mac be broken up. But it turns out that he was on contract with Freddie for six years and paid $1.6 million to $1.8 million (yacht trips and Tiffany’s bling for everyone!) to help the company strategize about how to soften up critical conservatives and stay alive.

At a Republican debate in New Hampshire last month before this lucrative deal became public, Gingrich suggested that Barney Frank and Chris Dodd should be put in jail. “All I’m saying is, everybody in the media who wants to go after the business community ought to start by going after the politicians who were at the heart of the sickness that is weakening this country,” he said.

(click here to continue reading My Man Newt – NYTimes.com.)

MoDo – Get a Clue

-parenthetical note, what does Dowd mean by “easily cowed Democrats?”

-second parenthetical note: Dowd writes,

Mitt Romney is a phony with gobs of hair gel.

But a couple days ago, the New York Times reported otherwise:

Mr. Romney’s is a restrained, classic look: short at the neck, neat on the sides and swept back off the forehead. “It is not something stylish,” Mr. de Magistris noted. “It is clean and conservative.”

The cut is so recognizable that men in this well-heeled suburb of Boston ask for it by name. “The Mitt,” they whisper to Mr. de Magistris from the red vinyl chairs in his upscale salon, Leon & Co., a few blocks from the sprawling home where Mr. Romney raised his family.

Mr. de Magistris, who gave Mr. Romney a $70 trim three weeks ago, agreed to share some of the secrets behind his most famous client’s coiffure in between haircuts the other day.

No, he said, Mr. Romney does not color his hair. Any such artificial enhancement, Mr. de Magistris said, “is not — what do you call it? — in his DNA.”

Despite holding its shape under all but the most extreme conditions, it is gel and mousse-free. “I don’t put any product in there,” he avowed.

(click here to continue reading Romney’s Image Expert, the One for His Hair, Anyway – NYTimes.com.)