http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnOMFL1ZfDg
Levin’s judgement trumps all those you just listed. Limbaugh must have had a lapse in judgement too.
Levin worked in the Reagan administration as Assistant Attorney General. If anyone knows Newt, Levin would, and yet Levin still made a conscious decision to support Santorum and Bachmann over the others.
Also, can you tell me something conservative Newt has done in the last 5 years? Going back to the 80’s and 90’s is like going back to Barry Goldwater’s record in the 60’s and 70’s. By the 80’s, Goldwater was much different from the conservative he was in the 60’s. He still considered himself a conservative, but most would call him a libertarian who soured on Reagan and started going after the Christian right. If Ronald Reagan had never been born and Barry Goldwater had ran for President in 1980 or 1984, what do you think his prospects would have been given his conservative record from the 60’s but his evolution into libertarianism in the late 70’s early 80’s. Do you think Goldwater could have still gotten away with running as a true conservative?
I know in the last 5 years, Newt has written a book on the environment with a chapter devoted to climate change, endorsed a liberal Republican in line with his “big tent Republican” concept, referred to Paul Ryan’s plan as “right wing social engineering”, sat with Pelosi on the infamous couch, and criticized the TARP on TV as an analyst, but admitted he would have voted for it as a member of Congress.
Now he wants us all to forget that and go back to his record of the 80’s and 90’s.
Newt trying to run as a conservative in 2012 is like Goldwater trying to run as a conservative in 1984. It only works if you ignore recent history and go back to the past.
The extent of your research into Newt’s recent activities clearly hasn’t gone any deeper than the Mitt Romney spin room. In addition to being a CONSERVATIVE commentator on FOX News since the mid-2000s (i.e. not someone who was brought on to agree with Alan Colmes), here are some of his activities, which go far beyond your nitpicky spin over a handful of incidents you think imply something that isn’t there.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703916004576271263380723514.html
On any given day, the former Speaker of the House can be found on a chartered jet headed to Iowa to train future GOP candidates through his American Solutions group, or in Phoenix discussing ways to lower health-care costs with drug makers through his for-profit Center for Health Transformation. He might also be in Philadelphia, narrating a film produced by Gingrich Productions, or in Texas, reaching out to conservative Latino leaders through his bilingual news and commentary website, the Americano.
After raising money through one of his groups, Mr. Gingrich funneled $150,000 in seed money to a successful campaign last fall to oust three Iowa Supreme Court judges who supported gay marriage.
“Newt’s role was quiet and very low key, but it was pivotal,” said Bob Vander Plaats, a well-known Iowa conservative who led the anti-judges campaign.
In 2006, Mr. Gingrich started the group American Solutions for Winning the Future, with a $1 million donation from Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. The group allowed Mr. Gingrich to broaden his ambitions. It was billed as a centrist policy shop that would train local candidates and promote an array of pet causes, among them Social Security privatization and what Mr. Gingrich called “patriotic education,” including mandatory annual public-school instruction on the Declaration of Independence.
In March 2009, just weeks before converting to Catholicism, he formed Renewing American Leadership, a nonprofit group designed “to bring moral leadership back to our nation.” Six months later he created the Americano to target conservative Hispanics.
Mr. Gingrich tossed off a line in a paid speech that May in Las Vegas. “Someone in this room ought to simply have a bumper sticker that says, ‘Drill more, pay less,’” he told the Money Show conference, to a smattering of applause.
American Solutions launched an online petition campaign under the title, “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less.” It got 100,000 signatures in a week, and more than a million in a month. Sen. John McCain made the slogan a core plank of his presidential campaign, and at the Republican nominating convention that September, it morphed into “Drill, Baby, Drill.”
Mr. Gingrich sees nothing unusual in the sweep of his many endeavors over the past several years. “This is just an institutional variation on what I have been doing since 1978, which is trying to build a permanent Republican majority,” he said in an interview. “Except now, I am reaching out to people on a huge scale.”
In the past four years, Gingrich Productions has produced three films on religion and one each on energy, Ronald Reagan and the threat of radical Islam—all done as joint projects with the conservative activist group, Citizens United. The latest project: A film on American exceptionalism, another likely campaign theme.
...the former speaker talks constantly of the need to reclaim the country’s Judeo-Christian heritage, expand oil drilling, rebuff secularism and protect against Islamic extremism.
Mr. Gingrich tossed out ideas for revamping the Environmental Protection Agency, replacing it with a joint venture between business and government that would make sure environmental regulations don’t stifle job creation. He also proposed getting the private sector to help slash regulations across other federal departments.
http://www.sunshinestatenews.com/print/4463516
Gingrich’s ties to the tea party movement are deep and long-lasting.
In March 2009, when tea parties were just beginning to be organized, the Georgian pledged to use his prodigious mailing list at American Solutions to publicize the inaugural Tax Day event.
He posted a link on every website he owned, sent emails to everyone in his database and produced a video while publicly announcing his support of the tea party movement — long before radio talkers like Glenn Beck jumped on the bandwagon.
Please go to Newt’s site to see the de-spinning of the Romney-ite political spin you’re referencing, and don’t bring it up anymore unless you include quote’s to Newt’s responses about those topics. We’re not here to spread rumors, we’re here to be fair, balanced and accurate about which candidates are conservative and which are not.
Paul Ryan (and the House GOP’s) Medicare Plan
Like Ryan and the House GOP, Newt supports a premium support model for Medicare. However, he wants seniors to have the choice to opt into the new system or to stay in traditional Medicare.
Newt agrees wholeheartedly with Rep. Ryan that we must give our seniors more choices than the current one-size-fits-all Medicare model. Both concur that creating the opportunity for seniors to buy private insurance is the key to both improving care and lowering costs.
The one key difference is that under Newt’s plan, as outlined in his 21st Century Contract with America, seniors will also have the choice to stay in the current Medicare system or choose a private insurance plan with support from the government to pay the premiums. The other difference is that Newt believes that seniors should have this option starting next year, not in ten years.
Global Warming/Cap and Trade
Newt does not believe there is a settled scientific conclusion about whether industrial development has dramatically contributed to a warming of the atmosphere.
Newt absolutely opposes “cap and trade” as well as any system of taxing carbon emissions. He testified before Congress against it in 2009 and led a grassroots effort while the Chairman of American Solutions to block its passage in the House and Senate.
Newt believes that cap and trade would kill hundreds of thousands of American jobs, cause electricity and fuel prices to skyrocket, and make America poorer. In contrast, Gingrich believes the best way to protect the environment is through markets, incentives, and entrepreneurs, who quite often are deploying innovative new technologies.
As for the question of whether industrial development has dramatically contributed to a warming of the atmosphere, Newt has noted there is no settled scientific conclusion. Many scientists believe it is the case. Others do not. But this unsettled scientific question has nothing to do with the best approach to protecting our environment, which is always markets, incentives, and entrepreneurs creating better and more efficient products and services.
Q: So why did Newt do the ad with Nancy Pelosi in 2007 calling for action to address climate change?
Newt does not believe there is a settled scientific conclusion about whether industrial development has dramatically contributed to a warming of the atmosphere.
Through his entire career, Newt has supported pro-market, pro-entrepreneur, innovative solutions to our environmental challenges, which he believes are superior to the liberal pro-bureaucracy, pro-tax, pro-regulation approach to the environment.
Newt believes that conservatives cannot be absent from the conversation about the environment and instead that conservatives must offer and explain why conservative solutions are better. Unfortunately, the attempt to get that message out through the ad with Nancy Pelosi failed. On November 8, 2011, Newt told FOX News’ Bret Baier that doing that commercial with Pelosi was “probably the dumbest single thing I’ve ever done”.
Newt will continue to oppose the Democrats’ destructive cap-and-trade and carbon tax proposals, continue to support expanded domestic oil and gas drilling, and continue to fight for a fundamental replacement of the job-killing Environmental Protection Agency with an Environmental Solutions Agency.
TARP
Newt believes that the reckless, secretive and opaque way in which the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department administered the bailouts has been an affront to democracy.
Newt was appalled and disgusted at the amount of dictatorial power that Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson tried to grab for himself at the outset of the financial crisis. However, he reluctantly supported a scaled-down plan after Paulson told the country that the world financial system was going to collapse without this emergency support.
Newt believes that the reckless, secretive and opaque way in which the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department administered the bailouts has been an affront to democracy. The Fed was picking winners and losers, using several emergency lending facilities to make all types of loans to connected parties, including to a bank owned by the Libyan government.
This is why broadly scaling back the role of the Federal Reserve and repealing the Dodd-Frank bill are two of the central pillars of Newt’s 21st Century Contract with America. The Fed will be fully audited and made more transparent to ensure the events of 2008 are never repeated, and getting rid of Dodd-Frank will once and for all end the destructive policy of “too big to fail.”