Free Republic

Newt Gingrich, plunging in the polls, dropped this bomb Wednesday: he would consider asking Sarah Palin to serve as his number two or in his Cabinet if he became president. "She is certainly one of the people you would look at," Gingrich said Wednesday, according to Right Wing Watch, when asked if he would consider tapping the 2008 vice presidential nominee for a second try. "I am a great admirer of hers and she was a remarkable reform governor of Alaska, she's somebody who I think brings a great deal to the possibility of helping in government and that would...

Newt Gingrich isn't exactly chasing the gay vote. The Republican presidential candidate told a homosexual Iowa man at a campaign event on Tuesday to vote for President Obama. Scott Arnold, a Democrat and associate professor of writing at William Penn University, approached the ex-House speaker in Oskaloosa wanting to know how Gingrich would represent him as President, according to the Des Moines Register. "I asked him if he’s elected, how does he plan to engage gay Americans. How are we to support him? And he told me to support Obama," Arnold told the newspaper. The Gingrich campaign did not immediately...

Slipping in polls under an onslaught of attacks, Republican presidential contender Newt Gingrich promises to wage a sharper and more aggressive campaign in the final two weeks before Iowa kicks off the party's nominating race. Gingrich says he will be quicker to respond to attacks and more agile in getting his message across to voters who may have lost faith in him after rivals launched a withering barrage of criticism of his past as a Washington insider. A 44-stop bus tour in the run-up to the January 3 Iowa caucus, daily calls with supporters to respond to new criticisms and...

If Newt Gingrich were being nominated for sainthood, many of us would vote very differently from the way we would vote if he were being nominated for a political office. What the media call Gingrich's "baggage" concerns largely his personal life and the fact that he made a lot of money running a consulting firm after he left Congress. This kind of stuff makes lots of talking points that we will no doubt hear, again and again, over the next weeks and months. But how much weight should we give to this stuff when we are talking about the...

Republican elder statesman and former Senate leader Bob Dole on Sunday endorsed Mitt Romney to be the Republican presidential nominee, a day after the former Massachusetts governor received the backing of Iowa's main newspaper. In an open letter to Iowa voters, Dole - himself a former presidential candidate - said a great deal was at stake on January 3, when Iowa votes in the first nominating contest for the 2012 presidential election. "A number of my friends are currently candidates seeking the GOP nomination. But the time has now come for us to decide who among them can defeat Barack...

Newt Gingrich on Sunday reiterated his argument that there is something "profoundly wrong" with the United States' judicial system, and argued that the balance of power in American government should come down to "two out of three" branches of the government. In an appearance on CBS' "Face the Nation," Gingrich continued to defend his controversial position that Congress and the president should have the authority to ignore the rulings of federal judges when they disagree with them. Citing what he describes as "extreme behavior" on the party of the judicial system, Gingrich proposes a system wherein "it's always two out...

...Mr. Gingrich represents a new kind of Catholic, one very different from the Kennedys, who were Democrats, political liberals and cradle Catholics shaped by the Irish immigrant church...Mr. Gingrich is a culture wars Catholic for whom the church seems a logical home for conservative Republicans Generations removed from the Kennedy years when Catholics predictably voted Democratic, this is a new era in which conservative Catholics and evangelical Protestants have joined forces in what they see as a defining struggle against abortion, same-sex marriage and secularism. Like many recent converts to the church, Mr. Gingrich is what Catholics call a “John...

As Newt Gingrich has risen in the presidential polls, the campaign of former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has flushed a bevy of Republican establishment figures to criticize the former House Speaker. And they have plenty to work with. In a forty-year career in politics, Gingrich has stepped on a lot of toes and made plenty of enemies who are only too happy to come forward to say that he is temperamentally unfit to be president, would waste money on faddish intellectual exercises, has too much personal baggage, etc. As Gingrich himself acknowledges, some of these concerns are legitimate issues to...

One of the pithiest quotes in American history may also be the dumbest: “There are no second acts in American lives.” F. Scott Fitzgerald said it and promptly died before he could have a second act — but he would have had one, because that’s what tends to happen to famous and accomplished people in the United States. It’s happening to Newt Gingrich right now. For those of us who live and breathe politics and make our livings in and around it, the words “Newt Gingrich” mean something entirely different than they do to the Republican primary voters who are...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: It's like clockwork. It's becoming predictable. I don't care who it is, a Republican presidential candidate breaks out of the pack, gets close to Romney -- or even surpasses Romney in polling data in certain states -- and the Republican establishment goes after him. Today there is a coordinated -- well, I don't know that it's coordinated, but it sure appears to be. Regardless, no matter where you look in the Republican establishment media today, there looks to be a coordinated attack on Mr. Newt. I'm not gonna mention any names because you know when I do,...

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi now says she is not sitting on a trove of opposition research on former House Speaker-turned-GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich. In an interview conducted Friday and published Monday, Pelosi hinted that once the time is right she has some juicy stories to tell about her former colleague. “One of these days we’ll have a conversation about Newt Gingrich,” Pelosi, D-Calif., told Talking Points Memo. “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...

Pelosi plans to reveal information about Gingrich 'when the time is right' By Alicia M. Cohn - 12/05/11 11:44 AM ET House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is holding back some information on Republican Newt Gingrich that could detract from his presidential campaign, according to a report published Monday. “One of these days we’ll have a conversation about Newt Gingrich,” Pelosi told Talking Points Memo. “When the time is right. … 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....

This is the week it became clear that nobody knows anything. Pretty much all the conventional wisdom about the 2012 presidential race has turned out to be wrong. Newt rules, Cain’s over, Romney’s rocked. Nobody knows what’s going to happen. We’ll start with the president: Gallup. Obama down. Forty-three percent approval. Lower than Jimmy Carter at this point. The Democratic spin: This is good, with the economy so bad, you’d think his numbers would be lower! Actually you’d think an incumbent nobody likes would be exactly where Jimmy Carter was before he lost in a landslide. More to the point,...

Guy Molinari, the Republican power broker and former Staten Island Beep, ripped Newt Gingrich as unfit to be president yesterday — a day before the front-running GOP candidate was set to attend a Tea Party rally in the borough. At least 600 people are expected to pack the Staten Island Hilton Garden Inn today to hear Gingrich speak at a 2 p.m. town-hall meeting. But Molinari, who served with Gingrich in Congress and supports Mitt Romney, rained on the former House speaker’s parade. “God help us if Newt Gingrich is elected president. I won’t vote for him. I love my...

...The trouble for Gingrich is that Cain isn’t doing what Perry is and hanging on. Cain maintained his Real Clear Politics Average high-point of 26 percent, essentially tied with Mitt Romney, for only two weeks. And he may go front frontrunner to hash mark in less than a month. Gingrich would have been better off if Cain’s candidacy would have slowly withered. Gingrich wants to be in a two-way race with Romney and to have only to appear more conservative and more consistent than Romney. Gingrich might survive daily releases of new skeletons from his past...[snip]....But only if juxtaposed as...

...Since Gingrich had taken control in January 1995, Republicans in the House had held together. Focused on fulfilling the Contract with America, they passed a flurry of legislation, which kept them occupied — and their divisions concealed — for the first two years. By July 1997, however, the contract was finished, and conservatives, particularly those elected in the Revolution of ’94, were growing frustrated with Gingrich’s leadership. The speaker was disorganized. “He knew nothing about running meetings and nothing about driving an agenda,” DeLay writes in his memoir, No Retreat, No Surrender. He was erratic. “On Monday, we would say...

Immigration has always been a hot-button issue for both sides of the aisle, and in the 2012 presidential election, things are not going to be different. That's why former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is making headlines for advocating for a more "humane" approach for dealing with the roughly 11 million illegal aliens in this country. Gingrich, who is rising in most polls, endorsed a version of amnesty that would grant long-term undocumented aliens a "red card" visa, allowing them to gain legal status without earning U.S. citizenship. "If you've been here 25 years and you got three kids...

Newt Gingrich, whose GOP competitors accuse him of being soft on illegal immigration, pledged Thursday, if elected president, to build a double fence along the Mexican border during his first days in the White House. “We haven’t been able to build a fence on the border because we have not been a serious country,” the former House speaker said at an event in Iowa, before he signed his name to the pledge sponsored by the activist group Americans for Securing the Border. Gingrich has maintained that the border needs securing but has also suggested that some of the 11 million...

Newt Gingrich says “it’s clear the country is talking to itself” and what they’re saying is: “We need Newt Gingrich.” In an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity that will be broadcast Wednesday night, Gingrich acknowledges that even he’s been surprised by his rapid rise in the GOP primary field. “Whereas I would have thought originally it was going to be Mitt and not-Mitt, I think it’s going to — it may turn out to be Newt and not-Newt,” Gingrich tells Hannity, according to excerpts of the interview . “And that’s a very different formula than, frankly — I mean...

OK, Republicans. Since you’re so religious and all – it’s time for a little “come to Jesus meetin’”. If you’re not familiar with the term, click on the link. It’s time for a little harsh dressing down. Do you realize what we have at stake in this election next year? This isn’t just about taxes, pork spending, social security benefits and repairing bridges. This is about saving our Republic. Do you know we’re already past our life expectancy? Economies and societies built on the rule of law, liberty and economic freedom have this troubling tendency to destroy themselves at around...