After the NBC debate Newt Gingrich blamed the media for not allowing the audience to cheer and even threatened to pull out of future debates that do the same. Now he's claiming that the cheering audience last night was stacked against him:

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich rode a strong performance and crowd enthusiasm at a debate in South Carolina to victory in that state’s primary, but the crowds at two debates in Florida this week haven’t been as wild for Gingrich. Now his campaign is claiming that rival Mitt Romney’s campaign stacked the audience at Thursday’s debate with its supporters to shift the energy toward Romney, the Huffington Post reported.

“They definitely packed the room," Kevin Kellems, a Gingrich adviser, told the Post.
But that’s not the case, according to both the Florida Republican Party and the Romney campaign. The party, which doled out 900 of the 1,200 tickets, says most of them went to “rank and file” Republicans.

“We did a very thorough job of getting them to the rank and file, vetting them to make sure they went to registered Republicans and then making sure they went out to people that were not knowingly affiliated” with the campaigns, Party spokesman Brian Hughes told the website.

But I guess in this case there could be some truth. The "rank and file" Republicans are the ones who are opposed to Newt winning the nomination. They are the ones currently out there blasting him in the news cycle 24/7. It's not the Democrats or the "liberal media", but Newt's own party that is against him. Newt has a serious problem and can't even logically blame his usual nemesis' for it.

PolitiFact is back at it again, showing that they don't even know the meaning of fact. Tuesday night they gave President Obama a half true for this statement in the SOTU:

in the last 22 months, businesses have created more than three million jobs. Last year, they created the most jobs since 2005

PolitiFact originally called that only half true but now have changed it to mostly true, with this editor's note:

EDITOR’S NOTE: Our original Half True rating was based on an interpretation that Obama was crediting his policies for the jobs increase. But we've concluded that he was not making that linkage as strongly as we initially believed and have decided to change the ruling to Mostly True. The original article is archived here.

Here's what they originally nailed Obama on:

As for whether 2011 was the best job-producing year since 2005, he’s right if you’re counting private-sector jobs, and slightly off if you’re counting all jobs.

But the President specifically said business, meaning private sector. He didn't at all mention government jobs. This is back to the definition of what "is" is.

So what is PolitiFact dinging him on now? Here we go back to the updated article:

Finally, there's another dimension. In his remarks, Obama described the damage to the economy, including losing millions of jobs "before our policies were in full effect." Then he describe the subsequent job increases. This suggests that he’s taking a degree of credit for the job growth, which runs counter to the reality that no mayor or governor or president deserves all the blame or all the credit for changes in employment.

This exchange happened in an interview on CNN with Nancy Pelosi:

John King, CNN: "You make your case there passionately for President Obama. But also understand that this is a tough reelection climate for any president, Democrat or Republican in this economy. Because of your history with Speaker Gingrich, what goes through your mind when you think of the possibility, which is more real today than it was a week or a month ago, that he would be the Republican nominee and that you could come back here next January or next February with a President Gingrich?"

Rep. Nancy Pelosi: "Let me just say this. That will never happen."

King: "Why?"

Pelosi: "He's not going to be President of the United States. That's not going to happen. Let me just make my prediction and stand by it, it isn't going to happen."

King: "Why are you so sure?"

Pelosi: "There is something I know. The Republicans, if they choose to nominate him that's their prerogative. I don't even think that's going to happen."

You can watch the video here.

What is it that Nancy is saying she "knows" that would cause someone to not be elected President or even nominated for their party? It must be pretty damn serious for this to happen.

The real troubling part is the secrecy involved. Given the number of Gingrich era Republicans out there blasting him, I can't believe that someone else wouldn't know this big "heads in the duffle bag" secret. It's also meant to lead to a lot of speculation of what it could be, if anything.

God knows I can't stand Newt Gingrich, but Pelosi is engaging in very dirty politics here. As Jonathan Turley puts it:

Since Newt's win in South Carolina this weekend and Florida only a week away the civil war in the GOP is really heating up. The battle is establishment verses base and it's really becoming fun to watch.

First off we have this from CNN:

Veteran Republican leadership aide Ron Bonjean said on the record what most of his colleagues would only tell CNN privately.

"Most people on Capitol Hill and in Washington are very nervous about a Gingrich candidacy," he said. "It sends a shiver down a lot of Republican spines."

"You can actually feel the nervousness from Republicans around town that Gingrich could actually bring the craziness back of his speakership from the 1990s. It's everywhere."

The establishment remembers what it was actually like having Newt Gingrich in charge. They hated it and don't want to see it return. That explains this from another establishment person, Bill Kristol:

I’ve got to think Monday night’s debate further swelled the groundswell of support for Mitch Daniels. The liveliest part of the debate was at the beginning, when Mitt went after Newt—and Republicans all over America watched with fascinated horror at the thought that these are the two GOP frontrunners. The only spectacle in American politics more off-putting than Newt Gingrich in self-righteous defense mode is Mitt Romney in self-righteous attack mode. I thought Mitt’s attacks were somewhat more dishonest than Newt’s defenses were disingenuous, but it was good to move on to the rest of the debate, where little further damage was done.

Bob Cesca points to this line from Newt Gingrich:

GINGRICH: “When I was speaker, we had four consecutive balanced budgets.”

As Bob points out, we only had two, not four balanced budgets.

But there is something else here that has been eating away at me. More and more the right is trying to make it out that Newt was the sole man responsible for the balanced budget. They won't mention President Clinton and that it involved negotiations. Somehow the Speaker of the House has become the budget writer for the United States under these people.

So why haven't we had one since? In the 14 years since the time Newt refers to ten of those years we had a Republican Speaker. Neither Dennis Hastert nor John Boehner have produced a balanced budget. During most of Hastert's term we also had a Republican controlled Senate and White House. Why no balanced budget?

I'm not going to get on Newt for lying. We know this is a man that has a hard time ever telling the truth. What does get me is how many people on the right buy into this line of bullshit. To those people they need to ask themselves this; if the Speaker is the man who balances the budget and that is what we need right now, then why isn't Newt running for Congress? I think we all know the answer to that....

The 4th Amendment gets a win:

The Supreme Court says police must get a search warrant before using GPS technology to track criminal suspects.

The court ruled in the case of Washington, D.C., nightclub owner Antoine Jones. A federal appeals court in Washington overturned his drug conspiracy conviction because police did not have a warrant when they installed a GPS device on his vehicle and then tracked his movements for a month.

This man needs to go away for good:

Dodd mentioned rethinking the film industry's distant relationship with Silicon Valley, and said he would welcome a meeting between Internet companies and content providers in order to rework the bills. Unfortunately, there was no mention of his inflammatory comments before the blackout, including calling the Internet protests an "abuse of power" and accusing critics of punishing officials trying to fight "foreign criminals." Dodd may take a different tack in his next round of lobbying, but cutting out the alarmist rhetoric probably won't be part of it.

Calling the exercising of our Constitutional right to freedom of speech an "abuse of power"? An "abuse of power" is using your time in office to fatten your wallet. You should know something about this.

Now go away once and for all. America is much better off without assholes like you around.

With the DOJ taking down the file sharing site megaupload yesterday, we are now exposed to another problem of such actions. This involves the law abiding citizens that use that service.For example, here's a video from a bunch of big name artists that explained what Megaupload was and why they used it:

Not only that, but Megaupload also was used by a lot of Fortune 500 companies. This from Megaupload's assertion:

Mega has over 150 million registered users and over 50 million daily unique visitors. Employees of over 70% of the world’s Fortune 500 companies have accounts with us. We have become the de-facto standard for sending files that are too big to email. We are the most popular hard disk in the cloud. We host more backups than any other company. If Mega is a rogue operator as we have been unfairly labelled by the MPAA and RIAA, then what about Google? What about Yahoo? And every single ISP? At any given time, they all host pirated, illegal or even criminal content for which they are not liable nor legally obliged to prevent their users from posting. They are, like Megaupload, online service providers who are in no position to monitor or restrict their users’ activities. There are technical, practical and legal reasons why these entities as a whole enjoy safe harbor protection all over the world. Service providers like Megaupload are simply better off focusing on providing a better service to their customers than fending off lawsuits from third parties unhappy about content.