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Mitt Romney Newt Gingrich Politics presidential Republican

Pot and Kettle – Mitt Romney Calls Newt Gingrich “Unreliable”

When an inconsistent flip-flopper calls you an inconsistent flip-flopper, you know you’ve got problems. This is Mitt Romney’s next message for the Republican voters, that Newt is like a chameleon experienced in changing his colors to match his surroundings.

Defending himself against charges that his own conservative credentials are suspect, the former Massachusetts governor turned the question in Gingrich’s direction and said that it is the former speaker who has strayed repeatedly from embracing conservative doctrine in recent years.

“He has been an extraordinarily unreliable leader in the conservative world—not 16 or 17 years ago but in the last two to three years,” Romney said. “And even during the campaign, the number of times he has moved from one spot to another has been remarkable. I think he’s shown a level of unreliability as a conservative leader today.”

And who’s better equipped to talk about being a switch hitter than Ol’ Mitt Romney. His flip-flops are well documented here here, here here… and we could keep going, but you get the point. So, Mitt calling Newt “extraordinarily unreliable” and moving “from one spot to another” is – to borrow a phrase from Ed Shultz – Psycho Talk!

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Newt Gingrich Politics

Obama’s Team On Gingrich – “The Higher A Monkey Climbs… The More You See His Butt!”

Words of wisdom coming from David Axelrod, the top strategist and adviser to President Obama, suggesting that the more Newt Gingrich leads in the polls, the more scrutiny he’ll get. And with scrutiny, the skeletons come falling out!

Discussing the GOP primary electorate, Axelrod said, “All the energy is on the side of the Tea Party folks. And Gov. Romney comes from that other tradition of the Republican Party. And ya got to give him credit for trying. He’s done everything but light himself on fire for the last eight weeks trying to win.”

Then Axelrod turned to Gingrich–who has resurrected his candidacy after nearly tanking earlier in the year.

“Now Newt is back. Last week you all left him for dead at the checkout counter at Tiffany’s and now he’s back, a lion in winter,” Axelrod quipped. “That’s L-I-O-N by the way, I don’t want to stir up any trouble here.”

The Obama team has been tying Gingrich to the Tea Party movement, and Axelrod reinforced this messaging at the briefing.

“In certain ways [Gingrich] fits the role for this, because as we pointed out earlier in the week he is the original tea partier. You know, he brought that kind of politics to Congress in the early 90s, he led three government shut downs in order to try and roll back environmental protection…roll back the Department of Education and education programs, he wanted to cut Medicare, he wanted to give more tax cuts to the wealthy. He was really a forerunner of what we see today.”

Axelrod also noted that Gingrich has a long record that will be scrubbed and scrutinized.

“So the question is, can he sustain this over time?,” Axelrod said.

“I told my colleagues yesterday a bit of homespun wisdom that I got from an alderman in Chicago some years ago when one of his …colleagues wanted to run for higher office and he was really dubious. He said, ‘just remember the higher a monkey climbs on a pole, the more you can see his butt.’ So, you know, the Speaker is very high on the pole right now and we’ll see how people like the view.”

Just what you need – a vision of Newt’s monkey butt. Hope you’re not having dinner. 🙂

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marriage Newt Gingrich Politics

Oh, Now Newt Gingrich Pledges To Be Faithful To His Third Wife

This could be for a number of reasons. Maybe Newt is really sincere about being faithful to his third wife after cheating on the first two, or maybe Newt’s just being Newt – pandering to the masses, telling a specific group exactly what they want to hear at that specific moment.

With the Republican nomination elections set to begin in just a few weeks in Iowa, Newt Gingrich signed his version of a pledge to the Christian Conservative Evangelists of that state, promising to “uphold the institution of marriage through personal fidelity to my spouse and respect for the marital bonds of others.”

Gingrich made the pledge to The Family Leader, a socially conservative group based in Iowa. The organization has its own Marriage Pledge that other 2012 White House hopefuls have signed, including Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum.

Gingrich did not sign The Family Leader’s pledge himself, but did provide a lengthy written response to the organization. The former House speaker said he was fully committed to defending traditional marriage, including enforcing the Defense of Marriage Act and supporting a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and woman.

And apparently, the Conservative group bought it. The issued this statement;

“We are pleased that Speaker Gingrich has affirmed our pledge and are thankful we have on record his statements regarding DOMA, support of a federal marriage amendment, defending the unborn, pledging fidelity to his spouse, defending religious liberty and freedom, supporting sound pro-family economic issues, and defending the right of the people to rule themselves.”

Maybe this group is just a glutton for punishment, or maybe they’re just willing to believe anything Gingrich says because they just cannot support Romney, or maybe Gingrich really has changed and is willing to do the right thing. Who knows, only time will tell if Newt can really uphold his pledge.

But this we do know. Using ‘Gingrich’ and ‘do the right thing’ in the same sentence should never be done. EVER!

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BLM Politics teachers

Class And The Classroom

Why does it seem that money matters everywhere but in public education? Corporations spend lavishly to recruit the best workers and provide the most luxurious perks. The best places to live are in the wealthier suburbs that can pay for clean, safe streets. High end cars have the latest gadgetry and safety features.

But public education? In the most important industry we have to promote learning, culture, and democracy we race to the bottom to find out who can spend the least and cut the most, then lament that we don’t get the best people to teach or the highest test scores in the world. Politicians want to break teacher’s unions under the pretense of saving money and are working to create evaluation systems that will use bad data to punish educators and pay them less. And the biggest fraud is the old saw that schools can ameliorate the effects of poverty and raise all students to above average academic levels, a claim that any mathematics teacher will tell you defies the bell curve.

This particular lie is uncovered in the opinion piece, Class Matters. Why Won’t We Admit It? by Helen F. Ladd and Edward B. Fiske in Monday’s New York Times.  The findings should not surprise anyone: 

The correlation has been abundantly documented, notably by the famous Coleman Report in 1966. New research by Sean F. Reardon of Stanford University traces the achievement gap between children from high and low-income families over the last 50 years and finds that it now far exceeds the gap between white and black students. 

Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that more than 40 percent of the variation in average reading scores and 46 percent of the variation in average math scores across states is associated with variation in child poverty rates. 

International research tells the same story. Results of the 2009 reading tests conducted by the Program for International Student Assessment show that, among 15-year-olds in the United States and the 13 countries whose students outperformed ours, students with lower economic and social status had far lower test scores than their more advantaged counterparts within every country. Can anyone credibly believe that the mediocre overall performance of American students on international tests is unrelated to the fact that one-fifth of American children live in poverty? 

George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act was meant to address this correlation, but it only showed how faulty the logic was behind the law. 

As we are now seeing, requiring all schools to meet the same high standards for all students, regardless of family background, will inevitably lead either to large numbers of failing schools or to a dramatic lowering of state standards. Both serve to discredit the public education system and lend support to arguments that the system is failing and needs fundamental change, like privatization.

We’ve wasted billions of dollars trying to achieve results using the wrong measurements and the wrong strategies, from relying on standardized tests to using scripted curricula to cutting money for vocational and technical training for students who do not excel at academic subjects. Then came the devastating budget cuts precipitated by the recession and the rise of Republican governors who don’t understand that competition within schools does little other than to destroy the collaborative atmosphere that enables successful schools to thrive.

What works?   

Large bodies of research have shown how poor health and nutrition inhibit child development and learning and, conversely, how high-quality early childhood and preschool education programs can enhance them. We understand the importance of early exposure to rich language on future cognitive development. We know that low-income students experience greater learning loss during the summer when their more privileged peers are enjoying travel and other enriching activities. 

Since they can’t take on poverty itself, education policy makers should try to provide poor students with the social support and experiences that middle-class students enjoy as a matter of course.  

Of course, you can’t replicate the middle class experiences by implementing policies that hurt the existing middle class while protecting the wealthy, but that’s a minor detail.

As always, though, there’s more.

Another article sheds more light on the relationship between quality education and money in a less obvious realm; the military. That’s right. According to Military Children Stay a Step Ahead of Public School Students by Michael Winerip, children in public schools on military bases are performing better than the general public school population on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and are narrowing the income gap at the same time. 

At the military base schools, 39 percent of fourth graders were scored as proficient in reading, compared with 32 percent of all public school students. 

Even more impressive, the achievement gap between black and white students continues to be much smaller at military base schools and is shrinking faster than at public schools. 

On the NAEP reading test, black fourth graders in public schools scored an average of 205 out of 500, compared with a 231 score for white public school students, a 26-point gap. Black fourth graders at the military base schools averaged 222 in reading, compared with 233 for whites, an 11-point gap.

In fact, the black fourth graders at the military base schools scored better in reading than public school students as a whole, whose average score was 221. 

Now, I’m not saying that a 39% reading proficiency rate is something to crow about, and there is the matter that military people must be high school graduates and pass an entrance exam to get into the service, but the results do show an improvement over other public school children. And they succeed without doing most of the things that busybody state governments want their schools to accomplish. Military base schools do not use standardized tests to evaluate teachers, but only to identify students’ strengths and weaknesses, and the principal can decide how many times to observe their teachers. Average class size is lower than regular public schools and there seems to be a positive relationship between the teacher’s union and the administration.

But the real lesson is that economically and academically, the students get the support from home that they need in order to succeed. All of the families have health care, housing and necessities because they serve in the military, and at least one parent in the household has a job. These are the basic middle class advantages that are missing from many communities across the country, but ones that politicians are ignoring in their race to blame teachers and demonize their negotiated benefits. They are also what Ladd and Fiske refer to as the absolute minimum that less fortunate students need to compete with upper middle class schools.

Excellent public schools must be available to all students, but they won’t be as long as know-nothing politicians and would-be reformers concentrate on the wrong remedies and research that advocates privatization and cuts to social programs. We need to replicate what actually works for children, families and communities.

Find out what else works at www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives

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Iowa Mitt Romney Politics

Rick Perry Calls Mitt Romney’s $10,000.00 Bet “Pocket Change”

Tasting blood in the water, Rick Perry went in for what he hopes is the kill. On Sunday, Perry went into attack mode, suggesting that Rick Perry’s $10,000.00 bet is “pocket change” for Romney, and suggests that Romney is out of touch with middle class Americans.

The morning after Mitt Romney challenged Rick Perry to a $10,000 bet, the Texas governor slammed Romney’s casual but pricey wager and suggested the sum is merely “pocket change” for his wealthy rival.

“Having an extra ten thousand that you would throw down on a bet just seems very out of the ordinary,” Perry told a New York Times reporter after a crowded event in an Ames diner.

“I would suggest to you that ten thousand dollars is pocket change for Mitt,” he added

The “pocket change” remark offered a sharp new nettle on Perry’s earlier criticism of Romney in an interview with Fox News Sunday, in which he dubbed the former Massachusetts governor “a little out of touch with the normal Iowa citizen.”

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Fox News Stupid

Math And Fox News Are Not Friends

From Gawker – This is too good not to repost.

The junior high school students who run the Fox News Charts Shop during detention have produced this latest visual explosion showcasing the unemployment rate’s fluctuations under our current president, Obama. Some interesting findings here, specifically that the number 8.6 is the same thing as the number 9.0. If Obama can just get the unemployment rate down from 8.6% to 8.8% or 8.9%, then he’ll be in the clear.

I bet their viewers still can’t see what’s wrong here.

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Newt Gingrich Politics republican candidates

Ron Paul Attacks Newt Gingrich – “It’s About Serial Hypocrisy” – Ad

Out of all the candidates running for the Republican nomination, Ron Paul is the only one going all out. His campaign is bringing out these ads faster than Newt Gingrich can tell you the name of his present wife.

The new ad is called “Serial Hypocrisy,” and in it, Gingrich, the present leader in the Republican race who is now trying to sell himself as a Washington outsider  tagged to clean up the Washington game, is heard saying, “if you’ve been Speaker of the House, you’re always an insider.”

But pay no mind to the 84 ethics violations brought against Newt Gingrich when he was Speaker of the House. Christian Conservatives – Newt’s your man!

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Racism Teaparty

Teaparty Racism – Depicting President Obama As A Skunk

We’ve shown you previous examples where the Teaparty and some Republicans have stepped out of their secretive shell and have decided that bringing their racism out into the spotlight, will rally others to their call.

Today’s example? A Teaparty organization in Hutchinson Kansas called Patriot Freedom Alliance. This group of “patriots” decided that comparing the President of the United States to a skunk is the patriotic thing to do. They posted the comparison on their website, then after the expected backlash that apparently surprised the group, the depiction was removed from their website.

Here is the wisdom of these “Patriots” –

“The skunk has replaced the eagle as the new symbol for the President. It is half black, half white and everything it does, stinks.”

But the group is still defending the skunk anology. One Teaparty member,  Chuck Sankey,  said that Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate, had been the target of worse insults than what’s on their website.

Well – thanks for your contribution “Patriots,” we are now a better nation because of your uplifting message.

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Politics Sonia Sotomayor

Perry Defends His Lack Of Basic Political Knowledge

In an attempt at a smackdown aimed at Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich – the two leaders in the Republican nomination race – Rick Perry tried defending his limited knowledge of basic political science when he said that Americans don’t want a robot for President.

Perry went on Fox News to try and explain why he couldn’t remember Sonia Sotomayor‘s name, and why he thought there were eight Supreme Court Judges on the bench.

“I don’t have[sic] memorized all of the Supreme Court Judges,” Perry said. He continue, saying “Americans are not looking for a robot that can spit out the name of every Supreme Court justice, or someone that’s gonna be perfect in every way.”

True. Americans aren’t looking for a robot, but we do want a president…with a brain.

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Iowa Mitt Romney Newt Gingrich Politics presidential

My Kingdom For $10,000: Mitt Goes Gilded Age

So, how much damage did Mitt Romney do to his presidential campaign after offering Rick Perry a $10,000 wager on his health care position?  We’ll find out in the next few days after the pollsters have had a chance to wade through their data, but my sense is that it will do damage to what’s left of Romney’s standing as a regular guy who happens to be rich.

The damage control has already begun.

Political campaigns have turned on worse gaffes, as Perry, Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain can tell you, but this one will stand out as Romney’s low point. It also comes at a bad time, with voting set to begin in Iowa a day after you’ve returned that last questionable holiday gift.

Of course, Newt Gingrich has harvested the most media attention over the past few weeks, and this trend continued last night. This AP article described Newt as having a “steely calm” and as:

defending his most controversial stands without appearing to be the thin-skinned hothead his critics often describe.

The former House speaker seemed to accomplish that goal in Saturday’s debate in Iowa. His challenge will be to sustain the strategy while rivals attack him on the airwaves and the ground, and to convince conservative voters that he’s their champion despite his occasional departures from orthodoxy.

But Newt’s already had to backtrack on his comment describing the Palestinians as an invented people, which will do nothing to help his foreign policy credentials. And he did a bit of constitutional reinvention when discussing his views of the mandate that would require everyone to buy health insurance. It seems that he supported it in 1993 when he was fighting Bill and Hillary’s program, but explained it this way on Saturday:

“I frankly was floundering, trying to find a way to make sure that people who could afford it were paying their hospital bills, while still leaving an out so libertarians could not buy insurance,” Gingrich said. “It’s now clear that the mandate, I think, is clearly unconstitutional. “

So I guess the Gingrich constitutional test has an 18 year time limit. He’ll need to work on that one.

Overall, Mitt did not do poorly aside from the bet, Bachmann’s reference to Newt Romney was amusing, and Ron Paul’s message continues to be the most consistent of all the candidates. It won’t get him the nomination, but you can’t accuse him of flip-flopping. He’s my pick for second place in Iowa.

What now then? Thankfully, Donald Trump’s mega-disaster debate has been exposed for what it truly is: an opportunity for him to be the star in a political game that only he can win. The GOP field will continue to try and get their messages out while the rest of America goes shopping, and President Obama will try to paint each and every one of them as against the middle class. The latest polls show Obama ahead both nationally and ahead of Gingrich specifically in the key swing states of Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

Six months ago, it would have been madness to predict the Republican state of affairs as it exists today. Six months from now, I think that Mitt Romney will stand as the eventual nominee. I don’t have $10,000 to back it up, though.

For more prescient predictions, visit facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives

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Mitt Romney Politics republican candidate

Romney Went From “Growing Up Rich” To “Having No Toilets” In 24 Hours.

Mitt Romney wants you to see him as an average man. After tarnishing that ‘average man’ image in the debate on Saturday, where he offered Rick Perry $10,000.00 on a bet, Romney is now trying to revise the public’s view of him. But is it too late? Can Romney flip-flop one more time to save his campaign?

In the last debate, a viewer asked the candidates if they ever had to give up any of  life’s  necessities to make ends meet. In today’s tough economic times, the question was and is very valid. The average voter wants a president who they can identify with, someone who can relate to their daily struggles. All the other Republican contenders in Saturday’s debate had a story to tell where they “struggled”, but when it became Mitt Romney’s turn to relate, the multi-millionaire couldn’t come up with any such experience.

“I didn’t grow up poor,” Romney answered. “If somebody is looking for somebody who has that background, I am not that person.” This admission by Romney came on the same night he offered Rick Perry the $10,000.00 bet… like it was nothing… pocket change!

After the debate, Romney saw how inappropriate his responses were. He told reporters that his wife came to him and said she enjoyed the debate, but his bet offer was not his strong point.

And sure enough, that Sunday Mitt Romney had to do what Mitt Romney does best – the flip-flop.

Asked by another voter in Iowa the very same question he previously answered, “I didn’t grow up poor,” to, Romney magically did  remembered a poor moment in his life when he was 19 years old and went to France to do missionary work.

Living on no more than $110 a month in France – which Romney said was the equivalent of $500 or $600 in today’s dollars – the former Massachusetts governor said he learned to live simply when he left for France in 1966 at the age of 19, stretching those dollars to cover food, clothing and rent over two and a half years in France. He lived in a series of apartments with little or no plumbing or amenities like refrigeration.

“You’re not living high on the hog at that level,” he said. “A number of the apartments that I lived in when I was there didn’t have toilets – we had instead the little pads on the ground – OK, you know how that works, pull – there was a chain behind you with kind of a bucket, bucket affair. I had not experienced one of those in the United States.”

Romney said he and his fellow missionaries showered once a week at a facility where you could pay a few francs to bathe – “Or if we were got lucky, we actually bought a hose and would hold it there on the sink … and wash ourselves that way.”

Let’s see… a debate on Saturday, where he answered he didn’t grow up poor, so couldn’t share any moments of hardship, then less than 24 hrs later, he was so poor, he was only able to shower once a week and had no toilets. From one extreme to anther in the span of 24 hours?

This has to be a record flip-flop… even for Mitt Romney.

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Iowa Mitt Romney Newt Gingrich Politics republican debate

A Breakdown Of The Republican Debate – Video

So you missed the Republican Debate last night? Have no fear. This video gives you a full rundown of all the highlights and low points of the debate. And for sections of the debates not shown in the video, well, just fill those parts in with the usual  “repeal obamacare,” “this president can’t lead,” and “I understand how to create jobs, Obama does not.”

That’s it, the entire debate. You didn’t miss much.

But do pay close attention to the $10,000 bet Mitt Romney tried to get Rick Perry to agree to. That bet is bound to come back to bite Romney in the future. Just for perspective, most middle class families have to work for months to see $10,000. Yep, that bet was not a good look for Romney… pure insensitivity on his part.

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