IS NEWT GINGRICH GUILTY OF MAJOR PERSONAL BRIBERY DEAL WITH IRAQ?

Randy Rhodes had a lot of constructive, positive remarks to share today at noon.  But the larger question is why liberals don’t get traction.  Why did the Presidential speech have such low viewership?  This is not good.  I downloaded the text and it’s a long text and ran an hour and five minutes or so.  But there were far fewer applause.  There were some obvious applause lines met with dead silence.  Rush Limbaugh referred to the speech as an “occupy Wall Street rally”.  You would have thought since back in January of 2006 when I began listening to progressive radio that the left would be quite organized and effective by now.  But they aren’t.  I would have never believed you if you told me none of those issues would ever gain general “traction”.   How can a candidate “crash and burn” in Iowa and now be leading in the polls in Florida, and believe me- this one counts.  Not only is it by far the biggest state and also much more of a cross section urban state than any previous state, but they say Florida is a winner take all primary, so that the winner gets all the gold, and nobody else gets squat.  In some ways this is a dream scenario for democrats.  You have the top two Republicans tearing at each other’s throat, and basically seem to despize one another.  These economic issues are petty beyond belief and would scarcely be a blip on the radar screen any other year prior to 2008.  And you have an impressive list of Presidential accomplishment both at home and abroad.  You have some of the most marked consumer reform in years.  You have a President who is willing to get quite specific as to his plans.  You have an even tempered President who is not swayed in the least by the most vicious criticism and even overt threats.  You have the meer passage of time where yesterday “young voters” are in positions of influence now.  Assuming younger voters to be the more liberal, this should be positive.  At the same time memories of that great Icon- - - - president Reagan - -  would have to be fading since if your were forty-one now you would have been just ten years old when Reagan was elected.   Vast segments of the population would have no memory of President Carter at all.  In fact the strongest memories of vast segments of the electorate would be of a good US economy under a Democrat and a poor economy under a Republican.  You have minories and gay advocacy groups becoming more active.  But all of this is canceled out due to the Koch Brothers and tea party well funded hate machine.  Now Nancy Palosi says that Newt Gingrich will never be elected President.  Nancy is virtually certain of that because she knows something about Newt that when made public will finish him as a politician.  It’s been speculated that Newt in 1998 was in the process of bribing the Iraqi government to do one thing or another and Gingrich was personally guaranteed to be paid ten million dollars.  Admittedly in this day and age that’s pocket change, but remember that Newt resigned as House Speaker - - and investigations of him were dropped.  We don’t know what those investigations entailed.  They could well have entailed big stuff that Gingrich didn’t want to come to light.

Hammill's statement, however, acknowledged that this wasn't the first time that Pelosi hinted that she knows something about Gingrich that she hasn't revealed.  In December, Pelosi reminded an interviewer that she served on the ethics panel that investigated Gingrich's use of tax-exempt organizations. That case ended with a reprimand by the House and a $300,000 penalty against the then-speaker for misleading the committee and prolonging its investigation.  Pelosi said at the time, "One of these days we'll have a conversation about Newt Gingrich. 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 pages of his stuff."

There are things which we should no longer necessarily assume.  You know I am arguably a quintessential conservative, because I believe there are certain unchanging principles and assumptions you can base your life and conduct on.  But these assumptions and principles are not necessarily shared by the other side.  According to Jeopardy – the state of Mississippi went 87% for Goldwater in 1964.  He had the bigotry anti civil rights vote down solid.  So one should not necessarily assume that those who voted for Goldwater shared his views on race where he said he personally was not a racist.  The problem is the public accomidations section.  We assume business have some obligation to serve anybody who walks into their venue, when they don’t.  A gambling casino for example can refuse to take a bet by virtue of the contestant being a card counter in blackjack, just having an advantage in the bet.  Gambling casinos and insurance companies are in the sole business of conning you out of your money.  If nobody got medical insurance, in the agragate, the individual would be better served and the odds are that at the end of his life he’d have more money if he did not regularly “place bets on his death” hoping perversely to cash in on the insurance lottery.  Of course Neil Savedra reminds us that churches need not necessarily invite anyone in to worship because if you don’t put money in the kitty you are “stealing their light and power to heat the building” etcetra.  In the same vein, we don’t necessarily assume that the internet will be free as it is today.  But certain carriers may decide to “segregate” their download speeds into paying and non paying customers and do other guimics to reduce public accesss.  We used to assume college bowl games would always be broadcast on free over the air television.  Now we know better.  In California the people voted down a pay TV bill because they feared loss of free sports coverage, such as the Olympics.  I highly doubt if we held a vote today we would get the same results.  People used to regard state lotteries to raise money for anything- - as immoral and a violation of Biblical principles about stewardship of the Lord’s money.  But no more.  Obama reminds us that banks used to be barred from gambling with our savings.  Now they want to turn Social Security funding into a giant gambling casino.  The time may come when atheists may be barred from attending church sermons “because they are only there to gather evidence against Christianity.  We never thought that someone of Newt Gingrich’s sexual morality would ever run as a serious candidate for President.  If Mitt Romney were to become President we have absolutely no assurance that he would not crash the economy and somehow some way find a way to personally profit by it.  We used to assume that Congressmen and women were barred from insider stock trading.  Now we know better.  How many applause did that line from the President’s speech?  (Honestly, I don’t remember)  The time may come with all this flip flopping by the right that it may soon be a called a hericy to believe that God either won’t lie to us, or that God will “change his mind on an issue” even though Scripture expressly says otherwise.  I cannot think of one Old or New Testament story that extolled the virtues of greed and selfishness with one’s possessions.  But this does not stop the tea party from extolling these virtues.  And just remember that Jesus said every citizen should pay his taxes.  We used to assume that Presidents cared about the poor.  Even Ronald Reagan in a 1984 speech talked about programs to alleviate unemployment in poor ghetto areas.  You’d never hear a tea party say “government jobs programs” were EVER good.  Reagan spoke of the basic fairness of closing loopholes for the rich.  Yet when President Obama says this he gets attacked.  Rush Limbaugh reffered to last night as “The occupy Wall Street rally”.  All through the Bible you find instances where optimism is praised over pessimism.  Jesus criticized the guy with but one talent for not having the faith to invest it and grow it.  But today people stuff money in a mattress or a Swiss account and have their underground food shelters.  They refuse to put money in circulation.  And why should they?  They pay so little in taxes.  Although to be fair to Romney, if you don’t count the income he gave to the Mormon Church, he really gave MORE than fifteen percent if you base his income figure only on the money you’re allowed to count, which is three million less.  The idea that Newt may still be hiding secrets is hardly an improbable one.  One could almost generalize that ‘If you can conceive of a sin, Newt Gingrich is guilty of it”.  In previous times we believed it was “bad tastes” to advertise legal or medical services on TV.  Who would guess that today corporations routinely spend more on lobbying than they do on taxes.  So when you come right down to it, my 59 points, far from being radical- is really a monument to political conservatism, in that I wand to ‘conserve” some traditions of the immediate past.  We used to assume you could not be held indefinitely without charges if you were a United States citizen.  We used to assume it was immoral for corporations to give to political campaigns.  Who would have guessed five years ago that an indignent woman would stand up and tout sexual morality with her out of wedlock pregnant daughter standing right next to her?  Who would have guessed talk radio would turn into a cesspool of such vile hatred and ignorance and incivility?  This did not exist 25 years ago.  We used to assume it was bad taste and in insult to the intellectual climate to show emotion during a debate.  Now suddenly debates are turned as poisoned in atmosphere as the court of some English King of the past like King Henry VIII.  We used to hear from the right that “free speech does not extend to the right to intimidate others from speaking”.    We used to believe that if you tuned in “the news” you were actually getting reports from real journalists.  We used to assume that racial epithets would not be hurled at a President of the United States.  We have Newt Gingrich saying that unless you have education in the context of some State Religion, that “knowledge is dangerous”.  You know- - the President bombarded the Republicans with cold, hard facts last night.  And not even Rush Limbaugh or FOX news are able to deny them.  So at this point you have to unhinge yourself from reality in order to live with yourself.  I don’t know what a psychologist would make of the thought process of these tea party people.  People speak of the evils of the 99%.  But if the 99% would just stick together, the one percent would have no power.  If women stuck together there are more of then than there are of men.  But the only people who stick together are rural right wing senators in the first Obama congress which single handedly blocked countless legislative bills passed by the House of Representatives.  Even though those who elected these rural senators amount to a sliver of the whole, their power is all out of perportion to their representation.  Yet these rich people continue to refer to themselves as “victims” of the progressives, and claim that there not Enough measures to insure their dominance but want to enact more measures.  They say “We have not been strident enough in pressing our beliefs”.   To say that Newt Gingrich would be an easily defeatable and amusing candidate- - is folly.  I’m sure the Germans said the same thing about Adolph Hitler.  Germans then made certain “assumptions” that turned out not to be so.  We know what happened.

Let’s remember how we got here.
 Long before the recession, jobs and manufacturing began leaving our shores.


 Technology made businesses more efficient, but also made some jobs obsolete.


 Folks at the top saw their incomes rise like never before, but most hardworking Americans struggled with costs that were growing, paychecks that weren’t, and personal debt that kept piling up.


In 2008, the house of cards collapsed.

 We learned that mortgages had been sold to people who couldn’t afford or understand them.
 Banks had made huge bets and bonuses with other people’s money.

 Regulators had looked the other way, or didn’t have the authority to stop the bad behavior.
It was wrong. It was irresponsible.

 And it plunged our economy into a crisis that put millions out of work, saddled us with more debt, and left innocent, hard-working Americans holding the bag

 In the six months before I took office, we lost nearly four million jobs. And we lost another four million before our policies were in full effect.
Those are the facts