4um: VOTER'S ELATED - Newt Gingrich tells Georgia Republicans he’ll be a candidate in ‘12

Title: VOTER'S ELATED - Newt Gingrich tells Georgia Republicans he’ll be a candidate in ‘12
Source: AJC
URL Source: http://blogs.ajc.com/political-insi ... tial-campaign-out-of-buckhead/
Published: Jan 22, 2011
Author: jgalloway
Post Date: 2011-01-22 07:57:19 by noone222
Keywords: None
Views: 524
Comments: 25

In the last 24 hours, former U.S. House speaker Newt Gingrich has touched base with several prominent Republicans in his former home state, telling them that he intends to make a run for president in 2012 using Georgia as his base – and that he already has his eye on office space in Buckhead for a campaign headquarters.

Former U.S. House speaker Newt Gingrich Gingrich met on Thursday with Nathan Deal, whom Gingrich endorsed during a critical phase of last year’s Republican primary for governor.

House Speaker David Ralston introduced Gingrich Thursday night at a downtown Atlanta affair hosted by the Paulding County Chamber of Commerce.

The visits and conversations – some face-to-face, others on the phone — appear to be an attempt by Gingrich to revive his old campaign network and lock down as much support as possible in a state won by Republican Mike Huckabee in the 2008 presidential primary.

A spokeswoman for Johnny Isakson said Gingrich called the U.S. senator earlier this month – adding that Gingrich was not definite about his plans in that conversation. In an interview on Friday, U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss said he had not talked to Gingrich yet, but that the former U.S. House speaker had asked for an appointment in the near future. “He said, ‘I need a significant amount of your time,’” Chambliss said.

Gingrich, 67, is registered to vote in Virginia, and has a Virginia driver’s license. But he spent most of his adult life in Georgia, and from 1979 until 1999 — the last three years as speaker — Gingrich was a congressman from metro Atlanta.

Gingrich most recent visit here was clearly an attempt to lock down as much support as possible in a state won by Republican Mike Huckabee in the 2008 presidential primary. In a meeting with reporters, Gingrich emphasized his Georgia roots.

“My offices are here. My grandchildren are here. I’m here regularly,” Gingrich said at a Thursday news conference at his Center for Health Transformation in suburban Atlanta. “I helped create the modern Republican Party in Georgia starting in 1960. I have a certain fondness for being back in Atlanta.”

Perhaps more important, fundraising for Gingrich’s American Solutions organization is conducted out of Atlanta.

However, Rick Tyler, a spokesman for Gingrich, contacted Friday, said the former House speaker’s schedule for deciding on a 2012 presidential run had not changed. “His plans are to decide on whether to create an exploratory committee in late February, and make a decision about his candidacy in March,” Tyler said.

But Tyler said that Atlanta shouldn’t be ruled out as a headquarters – should Gingrich join the presidential contest.

For Gingrich, the key question is whether or not he can recreate an enthusiastic political base in Georgia more than a decade after he left it. There is no guarantee. Take, for instance, Saxby Chambliss. In a session with reporters, the U.S. senator said:

“Newt is my friend. He’s been a mentor, in some respects, since he was speaker when I got elected [to Congress].”

“But it’s a different world right now, and we’ve got to make sure that whoever the nominee is , that he can win in November. That’s the goal of every Republican right now. John Thune[, the U.S. senator from South Dakota,] is a very close friend. He’s talked to me about his potential campaign.

While Chambliss said he would pay good money to watch a debate between Gingrich and President Barack Obama, and has several strong points — his communication skills, and his familiarity with both fiscal issues and health care. But Chambliss has questions about Gingrich’s viability:

“Newt hasn’t said this to me, but he’s obviously aware of all the negative aspects of the campaign. And I’d be curious to hear from him why he thinks he can win in spite of that.

“In presidential campaigns now, you have to do something in Iowa. You may not have to win Iowa, but you’ve got to make a good showing in Iowa. Then you’ve either got to win or make a good showing in New Hampshire – if you don’t win Iowa.

Then if you don’t win New Hampshire or Iowa, you’ve got to win South Carolina. Can Newt do that?”

Articles such as this remind me that 4UM needs a Ya GOTTA BE SHITTIN ME category.

"Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters." - Ben Franklin

Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces. Etienne de la Boetie

Title: The Three Major National Issues Completely Ignored During Palin/Biden Debate
Source: CNN Transcript
URL Source: http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/02/debate.transcript/
Published: Oct 2, 2008
Author: Gwen Ifill
Post Date: 2008-10-02 23:29:21 by Happy2BMe-OnLP
Views: 6
Comments: 42

Moderator Gwen Ifill created each question for the Vice Presidential national debate and did not disclose them to anyone prior to the actual debate when they were first heard by the two candidates.

Gwen Ifill deliberately steered away from asking what positions the two Vice Presidential candidates Sarah Palin and Joseph Biden held on these three important national issues:

U.S. Constitution - Article IV, Section 4: NO BORDERS + NO LAWS = NO COUNTRY

...and another category called reincarnation. This idiot is Teddy Kennedy reincarnated. He's a womanizer big time, even told his dying wife, on her death bed, he was divorcing her so he could be with one of his floozies he was shacking up with.

Does "contract~~with~~ on America ring a bell? He led the 104th congress when they saddled us with that bullshit. If the voters want this scum in the whitehouse, they deserve him.

They are running out of ideas for good entertaining tv shows and are making some sequels and showing many reruns while scratching their heads trying to come up with new shows. Many of the new shows are purely garbage. Sequels are down right garbage reruns; " you gotta be shitting me shows". The Grim Reaper could do us all a favor here!

What is it exactly that good people find so attractive about these shit eaters that they continue to "VOTE" for them and pay tribute to their elitist cause ?

The only answer I can come up with is they are extremely retarded or are masochistic and love being beaten again and again. They love their masters. Birds of a feather stick together.

The odd trio The Tofflers, Gingrich look to crest on the Third Wave

WASHINGTON -- Frederick the Great had Voltaire, Franklin Roosevelt had Felix Frankfurter, and John Kennedy had Arthur Schlesinger Jr., but never in the history of political mentors has there been a relationship quite like that of House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Alvin and Heidi Toffler.

For decades the Tofflers have been heroes to a cult of futurists, many of them on the left. But in the past several months they have emerged as perhaps the leading theorists to Gingrich and the revolutionaries on the right who just took over the House.

The Tofflers speak of "the demassification of mass-production," of the "growing noninterchangeability of labor" and of "the precybernetic machine." They assert that "as the super-symbolic economy unfolds, the proletariat becomes a cognitariat."

But as inscrutable as some of their rhetoric may seem, the Tofflers, who began conducting a dialogue with Gingrich long before he entered the House, are speaking the language of the new Republican Party and the future its insurgents hope to make for themselves.

At the heart of the Toffler ethos is the notion that the world is in the throes of a transition to civilization's "third wave," a revolution of information technology and rapid change that follows the first two waves, the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution. "The third wave," the Tofflers write, "will sweep across history and complete itself in a few decades."

The Tofflers have promoted the "third wave" theory since his book by the same name appeared in 1980. The volume has been translated into nearly two dozen languages and attracted enthusiastic attention among futurists, but the Tofflers' theory didn't cause waves in mainstream political circles until Gingrich became speaker and until the Progress & Freedom Foundation, a group that sponsors Gingrich's college course, promoted their views.

Like much of their thinking, the Tofflers' association with Gingrich shatters conventional assumptions. American conservatives traditionally have talked of a bright future but have found comfort in the past, its simple verities, its alluring folklore. Gingrich, by contrast, is a conservative whose obsession with the future has made him almost a caricature.

Despite their differences, the Tofflers, who traffic in high-toned rhetoric, and Gingrich, whose language has mobilized a suburban, middle-class constituency, have much in common. They are future-oriented, but also iconoclastic, rebels by temperament and choice. They share a strategy: Seize the future by identifying what it will be.

"The Third Wave forces in America have yet to find their voice," the Tofflers wrote last year. "The political party that gives it to them will dominate the American future. And when that happens a new, dramatically different America will rise from the ruins of the late 20th century."

Many critics, particularly in Washington, dismiss the Tofflers variously as vague, as masters of the obvious or even as cranks.

"Most of this is an excuse for very sloppy thinking," says Bruce Freed, a Washington consultant and former Democratic leadership aide. "When you're talking about blue skies, you don't have to be very specific."

Robert L. Borosage, a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal Washington think tank, adds: "The Tofflers' ideas can be goofy and fun, but you wouldn't want to base your country's policy on it."

Even some Republicans are uncomfortable with the Tofflers and are troubled about their relationship with Gingrich, particularly after Heidi Toffler and Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, the new-age wife of former Rep. Michael Huffington, engaged in a colloquy at a Washington conference this month about the role of women in politics. "It drives some people nuts that Newt's so close to them," says Frank Luntz, the GOP pollster.

But Gingrich's intellectual life is like a salad bar: He samples from a variety of bowls and bins. He has seized upon the thinking of the Tofflers both for the substance of their views and for the value of their thinking as a metaphor, permitting those in his circle to dismiss opponents by saying, disparagingly, that they are "second wave" -- the put-down of choice on the new Capitol Hill.

"The Tofflers give Newt a paradigm for thinking about what he'd like the country to look like," says David Rehr, who is close to Gingrich and who serves as vice president of government relations for the National Association of Beer Wholesalers.

But Gingrich is also attracted to the Tofflers because of the way they think, attacking a problem with unusual methods of analysis. They first burst on the scene with "Future Shock," a 1970 book about the increasingly rapid pace of change that gave voice to the difficulties of life in the modern age and made such an impression on contemporary culture that the title phrase is listed in Webster's New World Dictionary.

"It's less the specifics than the way of thinking that attracts Newt," Luntz says. "It's not to allow yourself to think that just because things have been done one way they always have to be done that way."

The Tofflers have in mind an America whose differences from the present are more dramatic than simply the fact that one 140-year-old political party, the Republican Party, has replaced another ancient political party, the Democrat Party, at the top of the legislative branch of the world's longest-running democracy. They envision fundamental change, not only in the content of our politics but in the nature of our politics.

They believe, for example, that contemporary American political institutions are unsuited for a plugged-in, wired-up world. "The fact is," they write, "that building a Third Wave civilization on the wreckage of Second Wave institutions involves the design of new, more appropriate political structures." They envision "a protracted battle to radically overhaul" not only the Congress but the British House of Commons, the French Chamber of Deputies, the German Bundestag, Japan's Diet and other institutions.

The Gingrich "reforms" of the House -- changing the names and structures of committees, altering the way the body works -- thus are consistent with the Toffler vision. But that vision also includes new ways of governing because, as they put it, "majority rule, the key legitimating principle of the Second Wave era, is increasingly obsolete."

It is minorities, not majorities, that count, and the Tofflers call for a democracy of minorities: ways to let small, often self-identifying, groups assert their principles and prerogatives.

"We need new approaches designed for a democracy of minorities -- methods whose purpose is to reveal differences rather than to paper them over with forced or fake majorities based on exclusionary voting, sophistic framing of the issues or rigged electoral procedures," they write. "We need, in short, to modernize the entire system so as to strengthen the role of diverse minorities, yet permit them to form majorities."

The Tofflers call for "imaginative new arrangements for accommodating and legitimating diversity."

The Founding Fathers came up with imaginative new arrangements for governing more than two centuries ago. Since then, their notions have been celebrated in this country and copied abroad, and though thinkers like the Tofflers may disparage the American system as "Second Wave," many contemporary Americans are loath to tinker with it. That impulse is so strong that President Clinton was forced in June 1993 to abandon his selection of Lani Guinier to head the Justice Department's civil rights division, because the University of Pennsylvania law professor had toyed with alternative voting schemes to assure minority representation,

"If Toffler is {Gingrich's} guru, I wonder why he discards some essential principles," Borosage says. "The essence of the Third Wave is the emergence of minorities and finding ways of empowering them, but the essence of Gingrich conservatism is to represent a white majority being infringed upon by pushy minorities."

Whatever the limits of the contemporary political system, according to the view of both the Tofflers and the speaker, the Democrats, with their ties to organized labor and the established ways of the old Congress, are "Second Wave," caught in the web of an industrial-based world that is fast-disappearing and accomplished in the art of winning roads and public-works projects that form the infrastructure of a way of life that is quickly being overtaken.

But the Tofflers make an important distinction among Republicans, dividing them among the traditional Republicans who "are still beholden to some of the Second Wave past, and to their trade associations, lobbies, and policy-formulating round tables," and the new, high-tech Republicans who are attuned to the changes in the workplace and in the economy.

For that reason the Tofflers, who nonetheless have kind words for Democrats such as Vice President Al Gore, worked assiduously to cement their relationship with Gingrich.

"The failure of the Democrats to make themselves the party of the future (as, indeed, they once were) throws the door wide open for their adversaries," the Tofflers write. "The Republicans, less rooted in the old industrial Northeast, thus have an opportunity to position themselves as the party of the Third Wave."

Asshats like Gingrich are so compromised and owned by the communists like the Tofflers that they play the monkey while the Tofflers grind out the tune.

Great pic there. I'm not at all surprised Gingrich would reappear on the public stage. I am surprised he isn't greeted with a shower of over ripe fruit.

Newt can run as much as he wants, I wouldn't be surprised if the Obama campaign sent him some money. A Newt-Palin ticket for the Republicans would probably make Barack Obama President For Life.

Israel just gave Gingrich a gold star to put in his little neocon diary beside the date of Thursday, January 20, 2011.....

__________________________________________________________
"This man is Jesus,” shouted one man, spilling his Guinness as Barack Obama began his inaugural address. “When will he come to Kenya to save us?"

Newt shall be the first in the steaming pile of turds running on neocon nuttery and false promises. He just had to step in to lower the bar so Guilliani could try again. Just when you think the last steaming pile was the worst pile of crap choices......2012 election cycle rolls in to prove that not only can it be crappier, but it will be crappier. Hip-Hip Hooray!!

" If you cannot govern yourself, you will be governed by assholes. " Randge, Poet de Forum, 1/11/11

"If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.”—Samuel Adams

When ever I see the term "futurist" I always think of Robert Heinlein's definition of a futurist: "A writer of bad Science Fiction."

"“Believe nothing merely because you have been told it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be kind, conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings - that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide.” ~ Gautama Siddhartha — The Buddha

Assuming of course that they can manufacture a valid looking Birth Certificate for him.

Thank you for posting this. Most people have no idea of the connection between Newt and the Third Way.

I used to be a big Newt fan. Then one day C-Span showed him speaking live to the National Press Club. Almost the whole speech was about the Third Way. He made it sound so great that I ran out and purchased the book, only to find that it was nothing more than the same old central planning bullshit.

I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. - Benjamin Franklin

Fat. Glib. Without a personal ethic that I can see. A man who apes a public show of belief in our First Principles which is tissue thin & with just enough starch in it to fool the rubes.

I would say he's past it, but I think the 'pubs have just about run out of bullets.