2012 republican presidential nominee III: can romney get santorum out of his hair?

newtpowerrangers.jpg

just to derail for a sec, red meat for Florida

"You always have to wonder when Obama speaks, which country he thinks he's talking about," said Gingrich, to shrieks of delight from the audience.

Newt Gingrich in Sarasota. Photograph: TJ Kirkpatrick/Corbis
With Obama, though, it is different to any other president. The undercurrent is not only that Obama does not know his own country but that he is not a real American.

The attempts to claim that the president was not born in the US - led by bits of Fox News, right wing radio talk show hosts and an East European immigrant dentist in California - have largely been put to rest.

But the implication of otherness – that Obama is African American, and is also not really of America – is ever present at Gingrich rallies.

"By the time ex-president Obama lands in Chicago," he said, imagining the first day of a Gingrich presidency, "we will have dismantled about 40% of his administration".

In response, some in the crowd started chanting "Kenya, Kenya" - saying that Obama should go back to where his father, and some say he, was born.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/25/newt-gingrich-conservative-revolution

you always have to wonder when newt speaks, which PLANET he thinks he's talking about

http://biscuette.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Newt-on-the-Moon.png

uh

Not everyone is so enthralled. Julie London has a stall at the back end of the hangar selling paintings and portraits. A painting imagining all the Republican presidents in history playing poker goes for $250.

London says she is a registered Democrat. She has a "Newt 2012" badge clipped to her waist but says she voted for Obama four years ago. She's not sure how she'll vote in November, but it won't be for Gingrich. She smiles rather than explain why.

Business is not so good, she says. No one has snapped up the pictures of the elder President Bush or President Franklin D Roosevelt.

But FDR was a Democrat, and a liberal, big-spending one at that.
London looks alarmed at the news.

"Really? My husband said he was a Republican," she said. "No wonder they haven't been buying."

At which point she snatched the picture and stuck it under the stall.

Hahah.

Haha waht

I know The Guardian had "lol stupid yank" in mind but, well, I'm embarrassed as a citizen.

i want just one, in primetime, no shirts

Two 90 minute debates, one vice-presidential candidate debate

xpost -- Frankly both her and her husband deserve the contempt they get.

omg this gingrich nasa speech

"In summary Newt Gingrich called for setting aside 10% of the NASA budget for prizes (which would be awarded tax free), that there'd be a human base on the Moon by the end of his Administration flying an American flag, that progress on a trip to Mars would be made using propulsion that would dramatically reduce travel time, that there should be 5 launches a day - not just 1, and that the current NASA civil service system should be replaced with something more akin to what is used in the aerospace industry."

"that there'd be a human base on the Moon by the end of his Administration..."

hmm i dunno about

"...flying an American flag"

FUCK YEAH

After losing big in South Carolina, Romney and his surrogates started "going far more negative on Newt Gingrich," calling him a "disgrace" who "embarrassed his party," says Doug Mataconis at Outside the Beltway. The problem is, "Romney isn't necessarily very good when he goes on the attack." Worse, this "Mad Mitt Beyond BlunderDome" routine is "most un-presidential and runs contrary to the finely crafted image his army of consultants have crafted for him," says Dan Riehl. When people ask for him to show more passion, they don't mean "angrily spewing slander."

when his proposed permanent lunar base reaches a population of 13,000 it can apply for statehood

Is there no treaty regarding the moon's neutrality, as there is for antarctica? I had thought there was one by now.

actually dan i probably agree with you more than most here, and i also agree that you could vote for obama and vote your conscience at the same time. i was just pitching my argument a little bit to the left -- adopting to my audience you could say. i still like obama, i think a lot of what he gets castigated for is unfair. i think he miscalculated on the health care stuff and on some other things. i also think it's important not to let up on him in terms of pushing a progressive agenda.

but what i certainly disagree with is the hands-thrown-up posture that the whole tweedledee/tweedledum argument presupposes.

i do think a lot of the decisions his administration has made with regard to drones, extrajudicial assassinations, etc. are very unfortunate in ways that will probably play out after he's out of office... but it's also true that nearly every president of the last 70 years has helped to consolidate power in the executive office by making foreign policy by fiat. that doesn't make it excusable. and i think that a romney presidency would probably either continue these policies or intensify them. and it certainly wouldn't do the disadvantaged members of our society, or anyone in public schools, or anyone concerned about the fate of our environment, etc. any good.

XPOST

WE NEED TO CLAIM THE MOON BEFORE IRAN GETS THERE AND PLANTS THE FLAG OF ISLAM IN THE AITKEN BASIN.

We can get to Mars now, but we'd go mad getting there, much less getting back. As others have pointed out, we coukd have used the four we blew on Iraq and had a sizable Lunar colony by now.

I grew up obsessed with space(got an aero engin degree in it), reading a shitloada sci-fi and 80s Clancy, and it's screechingly clear to me that technothriller wank informs Newt down to his core. All the kinda potboilery plot points which make such books catnip to conservative suburbanite middle-class white male boomers like my dad(who gave me the Clancy and Crichton books) constantly show up in Newt's harangues, like whenever he goes on about apocalypses brought on by Iranian(or fill in the blank) EMP blasts or some shit.

Let's just say that the resemblence to Dwight Schrute ain't just in his old photos. If Tombot were still around, I'm willing to bet he'd have a good deal to say on this, too.

Well, do you mean Obama "miscalculated" on tactics or vision? As reporting has shown, Obama didn't miscalculate about what he wanted from Congress: the White House made it clear that it never wanted a public option. The question was how many congressman it had to bribe into accepting its health care professional-anchored system (i.e. Ben Nelson).

while i agree that allowing newt to come any closer to power is a bad thing, i'm kinda curious how he would actually *be* as president. a spectacle, for sure.

he doesn't seem to have much talent for organization, he's undisciplined, etc. plus it is of course much easier to be the wrathful voice in the wilderness than to actually govern.

it would be a zoo!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/gingrich-wild-about-zoos/2011/12/08/gIQAVb1yiO_print.html

screechingly clear to me that technothriller wank informs Newt down to his core.

i presume you read that hilarious joan didion takedown somebody posted upthread...

Just to clarify: that post I quoted earlier about an Obama/Gingrich match-up a) takes it for granted that Obama would win handily, therefore there'd be no real danger of a Gingrich presidency (even though I really think nothing's impossible in today's climate), and b) is a simple acknowledgement of how numbing an Obama/Romney match-up will be by contrast. I wasn't agreeing with the guy's assessment of Gingrich.

Asteroid Mining might be necessary 50-100 years from now

newt's love of space, space travel, space colonization, etc is the only thing i find endearing in him

He's got a great first name--it makes me think of Michael Hurley--and he has an excellent command of adverbs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhYavH5pQRA

:-)

newt's love of space, space travel, space colonization, etc is the only thing i find endearing in him

ditto. but like emph on "only"

i presume you read that hilarious joan didion takedown somebody posted upthread...

Nope, I haven't yet, I just know about his fearmongering from the 80s onward, and weird cowriting on sci-fi & alt-history stuff.

worth reading: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1995/aug/10/the-teachings-of-speaker-gingrich/

What if the Nazis had landed on the moon.

They did have a rocket program, and we would never have gotten there were it not for Operation Paperclip

lunarwaffe

http://www.bookfever.com/book_photos/49195.jpg

how I was first introduced to the multiverse theory in quantum mechanics when I was like 13

L to R: tom selleck, liam neeson, hal holbrook.

http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/6379590-L.jpg

how i was first introduced to quantum mechanics period

its treatment of the subject was shallow at best

newt's love of space, space travel, space colonization, etc is the only thing i find endearing in him

well, Ming the Merciless loved that shit too ...

today newt informed a florida crowd that when his proposed permanent lunar base reaches a population of 13,000 it can apply for statehood

as a dc resident, even i kinda have to give credit where credit's due re trolling at this level

god the primary season would be so complicated

Or booking a short tour, even

Would they get an NBA franchise?

Sheldon Adelson backing Newt has started making me rethink Citizens United. Before, candidates were being bought by wealthy people and industries, but the network of donations and money funneling was so complex as to make it incomprehensible to average voters. Also, from Chait:

Money is the primary mechanism that parties use to herd voters toward the choices the elites would prefer them to make. The nomination of George W. Bush offers a classic example. Bush and his network had organized so many Republicans to donate so much money that the contest was essentially over well before a vote had been cast. The Bush fund-raising network didn’t involve a handful of billionaires in a room. It required thousands of fairly affluent people working together.

..But under the present system, Gingrich can simply have a single extremely wealthy supporter, Sheldon Adelson, write a series of $5 million checks. “Winning Our Future” is Gingrich’s “independent” PAC, and it’s an entire shadow campaign, complete with a ground operation in addition to advertising. Adelson’s money isn’t enough for Gingrich to attain parity with Romney – he’s probably being outspent at least two to one – but it is keeping him alive.

If true, CU is subverting the normal ways of doing business in politics. Obviously there are issues in having a candidate so obviously beholden to one particular billionaire, but does that substantively differ from that candidate being beholden to a particular industry, or a group of billionaires/millionaires with aligned interests? Maybe this will force the reigns of power to become more public and overt - which will open them up to criticism and dissent in a way that's impossible to do when the contributors are nameless.

Just a thought...

That is the only good part of the CU decision IMO

nate silver thinks romney has a slight edge in florida atm

in any case it should be close enough for gingrich to be sticking around

Reality's setting in. I'm sad.

newt's love of space, space travel, space colonization, etc is the only thing i find endearing in him

well, Ming the Merciless loved that shit too ...

iirc Ming's platform was more about cannabis legalisation and latterly turf-cutting.

What's w/ Pelosi's cryptic "[pause, grin]...There's something I know" response to the reporter asking her how she is sure Gingrich won't be president? (video 1:50)

maybe he's been cheating on callista w/ pelosi

ha funny enough i just read a little bit on that

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/01/nancy-pelosi-doesnt-have-a-gingrich-secret.html

After telling CNN yesterday that she was certain Newt Gingrich would never become president because "there is something I know," Nancy Pelosi is now clarifying that she doesn't actually have any deep, dark Gingrich secrets. "The 'something' Leader Pelosi knows is that Newt Gingrich will not be President of the United States," a spokesperson claims. So how does she know? Because she knows. Fascinating.