[The_Reader_David]

Newt doesn’t speak of things like ARPA-net. Newt speaks of things like Solyndra.

Can you back that up with quotes? I'd note that until the 'Rats decided to turn them into social service programs with the Clinton-era expansion of the CRA, even Fannie, Freddie, and the FHA home loan program were all successful in their stated goals and did encourage economic activity.

[MontaniSemperLiberi]

Here we go,

Newt Gingrich earned some $600,000 as a consultant to a major ethanol lobbying group, not the $312,500 that the organization, called Growth Energy, disclosed last spring.

“I am not a lobbyist for ethanol,” Newt Gingrich declared in a mid-winter spat with the editors of The Wall Street Journal over his support for government subsidies for alternative fuel.

But Gingrich was a hired consultant to a major ethanol lobbying group—at more than $300,000 a year.

According to IRS records, the ethanol group Growth Energy paid Gingrich’s consulting firm $312,500 in 2009.The former House Speaker was the organization’s top-paid consultant, according to the records. His pay was one of the group’s largest single expenditures, as it took in and spent about $11 million to promote ethanol and to lobby for federal incentives for its use.

In a Growth Energy publication, Gingrich was listed as a consultant who offered advice on “strategy and communication issues” and who “will speak positively on ethanol related topics to media.”

Newt approves of the government picking technology winners. He has said so dozens of times.