January 2012

New audio has surfaced from 2009 of Newt Gingrich embracing health insurance mandates. The key takeaway:

The real foundation, the most important, uh, part of this is individual rights, responsibilities, and expectation of behavior.

Uh, we believe that there should be must-carry, that everyone should have health insurance, or if you’re absolute, uh, libertarian we would allow you to post a bond. But we would not allow people to, uh, be free riders failing to ensure themselves and then showing up in the emergency room, uh, with no means of payment. Uh, if you have, uh, must carry, then the insurance companies have told us that we can have must-issue and you will therefore have a system in which you don’t have to worry about cherry picking and maneuvering. As we move beyond today’s press conference, this is kind of general model we’re going to be advocating…

And you can even hear it for yourself:

As the blog Verum Serum points out:

But the real news here I think is that this clip really should dispel once and for all any questions over Gingrich’s support for a national health insurance mandate. Somewhat strangely he’s never really denied supporting the mandate, and in fact as late as May of last year reiterated essentially the same position on Meet the Press. Yet throughout the campaign he has said repeatedly that it is “clearly unconstitutional”, and more recently claimed absurdly that he has only ever supported state level mandates.

Well, here you have it: not only has Gingrich been a long-standing proponent of a federal health insurance mandate, he clearly and unequivocally called for it as part of the White House health reform initiative in May 2009. Mission accomplished then.

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: