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The basics of this were covered by Drew, below, but this is Newt Gingrich himself saying it, from his own Twitter account. Romney is pretty brazen about forgetting his myriad past positions. It's just odd to me that he attacks aggressively on an issue like this, when he himself has pro-amnesty statements in his very recent past. (So recent they are pop culturally relevant.) It might be some kind of strategic decision that the best defense is a shameless offense, or a calculation that people can only remember the attack and not the counter-attack. Or it could be that he...

There are lots of reasons. But here’s one. Ron Paul isn’t serious about the most basic requisite of a national government, which is defense. Paul’s position just isn’t one reflective of serious leadership. The idea that the federal government doesn’t have an obligation to PREVENT a Timothy McVeigh or a Mohammed Atta or a Major Hasan from doing evil to innocent Americans is one which can’t be found in the head of anybody who understands what it means to be president.

I'll take the heat; I can handle it. I'm not voting 3rd party, nor am I abstaining like a fool (self-centered fool at that). If Romney wins/steals/usurps/fools us to winning the nomination, I will vote for him. There is no argument that can be made outside of pure "pride of wanting to prove we're right" that allowing Obama to win and hence destroy the country instead of voting for Romney. I DO NOT WANT ROMNEY TO WIN. I hope I'm clear on that. I'd like to see Cain/Palin or Cain/Rubio or Cain/Ginrich or any combination of these, Bachman and Rubio...heck,...

Missed the debate because of wrestling practice, but it’s hardly surprising that Newt would support amnesty for illegal aliens. After the Pelosi global-warming ad and Dede Scozzafava and “right-wing social engineering,” is it any surprise he’d adopt the left’s line on immigration too? He earned a career grade of D from Numbers USA (they calculate back to 1989). Heck, even Barbara Boxer has a career grade of D+. .. So the Gingrich Amnesty would cover illegal immigrants here when Congress passed IRCA. That is to say, it would pick up where the previous amnesty left off, legalizing precisely those people...

At press time, the leading non-Romney in the Republican presidential race was Newt Gingrich. It's not easy keeping up with who holds that distinction, it changes so rapidly. Is it Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry or Herman Cain today? Ring around the rosie, they all tend to fall down once they're closely examined. For the moment it's Newt. (It's hard to resist calling so familiar a figure on the American celebrity/scandal scene by his first name.) The former speaker and just about everything else is a master of the snappy comeback. Also the political kind. Call him this year's Comeback Kid....

Think carefully about what Newt said. He said, "Is it inhumane to deport an illegal immigrant who came to the United States 25 years ago," Why did he choose 25 years ago and not 20 or 30. People assume that 25 years was just a number that Newt pulled out of his ass. It is not. Think back about about what happened 25 years ago. That would be 1986. That was the year Ronald Reagan's bill gave amnesty to the then current residents in exchange for sealing the border. The border wasn't sealed and millions more Mexicans and other poured...

Were Gingrich strategically focused on scooping up primary voters discontented with Romney, surely he would have said something about Romney's past and present liberalism. He didn't say a word. Romney had a so-so debate performance, but it probably doesn't matter, since Gingrich didn't bother to engage him. Helping Romney even more was that Gingrich decided to use a national security debate to remind conservatives of the nuances of his "humane" approach to illegal immigration -- a lecture, for whatever its merits, conservative primary voters probably don't want to hear and particularly not in the scolding tone in which Newt delivered...

I was only 15 in 1994, when Newt Gingrich experienced his last great moment. (Well, before this one, where he’s surging in the polls, with his campaign having figured out how to run for President.) So I don’t really remember Newt’s glory days. I have interviewed him on many occasions, however, as far back as 2006 and as recently as last month, and every time we talk, I’m struck by how smart he is. Despite that, I can’t get past the nagging voice in my head telling me that no matter how good he would be at running the country,...

...The Immigration Bill could have succeeded if the political class in Congress and the president had listened to the public and addressed the four distinct problems. Namely, secure the borders convincingly, expand the temporary worker program for skilled legal immigrants, establish a reliable legal immigrant identification program and then propose a reasonable program for the 12 million (and counting) illegal persons who broke our laws to get here, but not amnesty...

November 22, 2011 - Gingrich On Top Of GOP Pack As Cain Fades, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds; Romney Ties Obama In One-On-One Matchup Word format Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich more than doubles his share of the Republican presidential vote to lead the presidential pack with 26 percent and in a head-to-head matchup tops former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney 49 - 39 percent, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released today. But Romney is tied with President Barack Obama. Former pizza magnate Herman Cain drops from the top spot with 30 percent in a November 2 national survey...

Voters Trust Newt To Handle 3am Phone Call On the day of the CNN/AEI/Heritage foreign policy debate, new polling from Quinnipiac and CNN make it clear who Republicans trust the most to handle the "3am phone call" as president if there is a national emergency: Newt Gingrich. The poll Quinnipiac's poll, which also shows Newt leading the field for the first time in one of their polls (Gingrich 26, Romney 22), asked the following questions in which respondents made clear they most trust Newt as Commander-in-Chief. Which Republican candidate do you think would do the best job handling foreign policy?...

Almost immediately upon Sarah Palin's announcement that she would not seek the Republican nomination for president, the phone calls from almost all of the GOP candidates began pouring in. They wanted her endorsement. While Palin has characteristically kept her cards close to her chest, advisers suggest that the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee is likely to endorse before someone emerges as the inevitable nominee -- and that Newt Gingrich appears to be best-positioned to secure her support. "They speak very favorably of Newt and what they see as his credentials as compared to Perry and Romney," one member of Palin's...

<p>“I do not believe that the people of the United States are going to take people who’ve been here for a quarter of a century … [and] separate them from their families and expel them,” Gingrich said during a discussion about illegal immigration and border security. “I do believe we should control the border. I do believe we should have very severe penalties.”</p>

Oil majors Royal Dutch Shell and Total have slashed Syrian oil production as international sanctions make exports impossible, industry sources told Reuters. The development is a further sign that sanctions begin to bite the regime of President Bashar al-Assad at a time when the international community is considering widening the sanctions against Iran, a much bigger oil producer. Syrian oil represents less than 1 percent of daily global production but accounts for a vital portion of Syrian government earnings, which Western powers say could be used by Assad for a bloody military crackdown on the opposition.

*snip* The former House speaker, who is putting a campaign organization together on the fly, failed to qualify for the contest in the Show Me State. According to the Missouri Secretary of State's office, Gingrich did not file the necessary papers as of Tuesday's 5 p.m. deadline. That means his name will not be on the Feb. 7 ballot. The filing requirements are not particularly onerous. A $1,000 check and some paperwork are all that's needed.

Q. "You were asked about world government and you said 'there is no world government'. What is your role in groups like the bohemian club, freemasonry, and that sort of thing, Council on Foreign Relations? Gingrich: "I don't belong to the Bohemian Club, I have no role in freemasonry. And my primary activity in Council on Foreign Relations was on figuring out how to fight terrorism"

In his Nov. 17 Op-Ed column, Doyle McManus draws attention to Newt Gingrich's comeback and compares it with Richard Nixon's makeover in 1968. To that end, McManus offers a side-by-side comparison of the two Newts: Old Newt -- Angry Newt, the one who entered the presidential campaign last spring -- talked in apocalyptic terms about threats to American culture. Old Newt wrote about "a secular-socialist machine" led by the Democratic Party that "represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did." "If we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of...

Whether the matchup between Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney is the final bout on the GOP primary card is impossible to know. The whole season has been more like professional wrestling than boxing, with weird characters sporting implausible hair appearing out of nowhere to talk smack and explain why they are the greatest in the world (I'm looking at you in particular, Mr. Trump). Still, let's assume for the moment that it's a Gingrich-Romney contest. It's quite a matchup. Romney has been brutalized for having too little personality, Gingrich for having way, way too much. Romney looks like the picture...

Poll, lower left side of page - Given a choice between Barack Obama and Newt Gingrich for President of the United States, how would you vote? Barack Obama Newt Gingrich Stay Home / No Vote

As we sort through our reasons for gratitude this Thanksgiving, we can thank our lucky stars that Newt Gingrich will never be president of the United States. Gingrich, currently the flavor of the GOP minute, is an interesting man with larger-than-life strengths in that he is a shrewd, bombastic collector of opinions. He also has some staggering weaknesses, such as arrogance, lack of discipline and hypocrisy. But let us not savage the man; he’s already self-destructed more times than seems humanly possible. Where to start? He was ejected from his post as speaker of the House for ethics violations. Since...