Adele Stan - How Ron Paul Could Win Iowa Caucuses -- and Screw Up Everything

By Adele M. Stan, AlterNet

Posted on December 19, 2011, Printed on December 20, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153511/how_ron_paul_could_win_iowa_caucuses_--_and_screw_up_everything

In the week before Christmas, the elfin creatures of the world are said to be very, very busy, hammering out toys for all the good girls and boys. At least one, however, is busy plotting his revenge -- revenge on the media, whose smarty-pants talkers regard him as a curiosity; on the Republican Party, whose establishment has long dismissed him as a crank; on the president of the United States, who, as an African American, has the audacity to lead a nation in which he shouldn't even have the right to sit at a lunch counter.

This industrious fellow, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, is planning to win the Iowa caucuses, the January 3 opening round of the GOP presidential primary season, just as the nation settles into its post-holiday doldrums. And from the way it looks now, he'll probably do just that.

Follow the Bursting Bubble

Barely over a week ago, conventional wisdom-peddlers were shifting their bets from former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Ga., as polls showed the bombastic bomb-thrower surging. But bubbles have a tendency to burst, as Gingrich himself surely knows, having collected $1.6 million for his historical advice to bubble king Freddie Mac, the federally sponsored mortgage giant whose executives were charged with fraud last week by the Securities and Exchange Commission for their role in creating the spectacular bursting orb that brought down the global economy. Since his peak polling in Iowa last week at 27 percent, according to Public Policy Polling (some polls had him as high as 33 percent), Gingrich lost 13 points, leading PPP analysts to describe his campaign, with its current 14 percent share and high unfavorability ratings, as “imploding.” (Just as we predictedduring the Newt bubble's peak.)

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Uri Avnery - Gingrich, Israel and the Palestinians

WEEKEND EDITION DECEMBER 16-18, 2011

HTTP://WWW.COUNTERPUNCH.ORG/

by URI AVNERY

What a bizarre lot these Republican aspirants for the US presidency are!

What a sorry bunch of ignoramuses and downright crazies. Or, at best, what a bunch of cheats and cynics! (With the possible exception of the good doctor Ron Paul)”.

Is this the best a great and proud nation can produce? How frightening the thought that one of them may actually become the most powerful person in the world, with a finger on the biggest nuclear button!

BUT LET’S concentrate on the present front-runner. (Republicans seem to change front-runners like a fastidious beau changes socks.)

It’s Newt Gingrich. Remember him? The Speaker of the House who had an extra-marital affair with an intern while at the same time leading the campaign to impeach President Bill Clinton for having an affair with an intern.

But that’s not the point. The point is that this intellectual giant – named after Isaac Newton, perhaps the greatest scientist ever – has discovered a great historical truth.

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Ben Adler - Why Newt Gingrich Hates the State Department

Ben Adler on December 12, 2011 - 8:35pm ET

http://www.thenation.com/blog/165114/why-newt-gingrich-hates-state-department

One of Newt Gingrich’s many peculiar fixations stands out as especially troublesome: his hatred of the State Department. Gingrich has recently been attacking career civil servants there in hostile terms, complaining that they are “Arabists” who advocate “appeasement” of America’s enemies. At the Republican Jewish Coalition candidate forum on Wednesday in Washington, Gingrich got more specific. He pledged to nominate the famously nationalist, hawkish former UN Ambassador John Bolton to be his Secretary of State, but only if Bolton pledges to radically overhaul the department. Here’s what Gingrich said:

If he will accept it, I will ask John Bolton to be Secretary of State. But I will only appoint him if he will agree that his first job is the complete and thorough transformation of the State Department and the replacement of the current Foreign Service culture with a new entrepreneurial and aggressive culture dedicated to the proposition that defending freedom and defending America is the first business of the State Department, not appeasing opponents.

Why does Gingrich harbor such strange antipathy for the nonpartisan, apolitical analysts in Foggy Bottom?

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Robert Reich - Newt's Tax Plan, and Why His Polls Rise the More Outrageous He Becomes

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Newt-s-Tax-Plan-and-Why-H-by-Robert-Reich-111213-493.html

December 13, 2011 By Robert Reich Most forecasts of the budget deficit cover 10 years. The elusive goal of the White House and many on both sides of the aisle in Congress is to reduce that 10-year deficit by 3 to 4 trillion dollars. Newt goes in the other direction, with gusto. Increasing the deficit by $850 billion in a single year is beyond the wildest imaginings of the least responsible budget mavens within a radius of three thousand miles from Washington. Newt Gingrich has done it again. With his new tax plan he has raised the bar from simply irresponsible to wildly reckless. Every dollar estimate I'm about to share with you comes from the independent, non-partisan Tax Policy Center -- a group whose estimates are used by almost everyone on Washington regardless of political persuasion. First off, Newt's plan increases the federal budget deficit by about $850 billion -- in a single year! To put this in perspective, most forecasts of the budget deficit cover 10 years. The elusive goal of the White House and many on both sides of the aisle in Congress is to reduce that 10-year deficit by 3 to 4 trillion dollars. Newt goes in the other direction, with gusto. Increasing the deficit by $850 billion in a single year is beyond the wildest imaginings of the least responsible budget mavens within a radius of 3,000 miles from Washington.

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Danny Schechter - Bull Moose or Bull Shoot: Is Obama Changing His Stance Towards Wall Street?

By Danny Schechter

Author of The Crime of Our Time

Is Obama changing?

Many in the Occupy Wall Street Movement are patting their efforts on the back, and even claiming credit for what looks like a shift by President Obama towards a more engaged campaign discussing economic fairness.

The President’s speech in Kansas was modeled on remarks made by the Republican Bull Moose Teddy Roosevelt in 1910. There’s nothing like quoting a Republican for credible centrist positioning. (Note: he quotes TR, not FDR.)

Will he embrace GOP Pres Eisenhower’s warning about the Military Industrial Complex next? Unlikely.

Richard Eskow was quick to salute the new Obama:

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Stephen Lendman - Fascism in America

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Fascism-in-America-by-Stephen-Lendman-111205-132.html

December 5, 2011 By Stephen Lendman Post-WW I, Fascim's roots emerged. At the time, Western civilization was thought to be decadent, destructive, and in decline. Fascism in America - by Stephen Lendman America's lurching fast toward full-blown tyranny. In 1932, Mussolini declared the 20th century a "Fascist century," saying: "It is to be expected that this century may be that of authority, a century of the "Right," a Fascist century." He claimed it would "sav(e) Western civilization." For what he didn't explain. Post-WW I, Fascim's roots emerged. At the time, Western civilization was thought to be decadent, destructive, and in decline. In his book titled, "The Decline of the West," Oswald Spengler said "liberalism, democracy, socialism (and) free-masosnry" weakened it. Only fascism could save it.

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Jeremy R. Hammond - Newt Gingrich's Invented History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Gingrich’s Serial Hypocrisy Knows No Bounds

By Jeremy R. Hammond

Global Research, December 12, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28180

The Republican presidential candidates are falling all over themselves competing for who can be the most “pro-Israel”, with Newt Gingrich taking the game to a whole new level  last week when he said in an interview with The Jewish Channel that Palestinians were an “invented” people. When asked whether he considered himself a Zionist, Gingrich responded (his emphasis):

Well, I believe that the Jewish people have the right to have a state, and I believe that the commitments that were made at the time—remember, there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs and who were historically part of the Arab community. And they had a chance to go many places, and for a variety of political reasons, we have sustained this war against Israel now, since the 1940s, and it’s tragic.

Shall we take that as a “Yes”? During the ABC News Republican debate in Iowa on December 10, Gingrich defended his comments by saying:

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Justin Elliott - Apocalypse Newt

SALON.COM   Tuesday, Dec 13, 2011

Gingrich's bizarre obsession with civilization-ending threats

By Justin Elliott

http://www.salon.com/2011/12/13/apocalypse_newt/

Newt Gingrich has changed a lot of positions over his many years in public life, but there are a few things about his worldview that are consistent. One is an obsession with apocalyptic or civilization-ending threats, often paired with the idea that Gingrich himself is alone (or nearly so) in recognizing the scale of the danger and in being equipped to deal with it.

My favorite example of this genre of Gingrich studies is a 1994 interview in which he declared “People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz.”

That line became an instant classic for Newt aficionados; less well-known is that Gingrich elaborated on the theme — at length — in the same interview, conducted by the Atlanta Journal Constitution:

“I see evil around me every day,” he says. He cites the widespread slaughter from Bosnia to Washington D.C. The German tourist killed by what Gingrich calls “a savage” from the urban jungle of Miami.

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Ira Chernus - Gingrich on Palestine: Small Truths In A Big Lie

Published on Monday, December 12, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/12/12-1

by Ira Chernus

If Newt had really said what the headlines claimed:  “Gingrich Calls Palestinians an ‘Invented’ People,” I would have shrugged and said, So what? Americans are an invented people too. So are British, Chinese, and every other national group. We’ve been teaching that in our college classrooms for twenty years or more as an obvious no-brainer.

But that’s not what Gingrich said.  He said “We,” apparently meaning the United States, “have invented the Palestinian people.” Wrong! The Palestinians invented themselves, at least as early as the first Palestinian National Congress in 1919. So it’s the “we,” not the “invented,” that should get headlines and stir angry reactions.

Gingrich got another small piece of the truth right when he said that the Palestinians “are in fact Arabs and are historically part of the Arab people.” the dream of one big pan-Arab nation was a powerful idea before World War I. But it died for all practical purposes after that war when Britain and France divvied up the Middle East between them and started creating new nations.

Those smaller mistakes by Newt and the mass media pale, though, before their big ones. Read the whole transcript.

Newt blandly asserted that the Palestinians -- both the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority and Hamas -- are “a group of terrorists who are firing missiles everyday” because of their “enormous desire to destroy Israel.” In fact, missiles aren’t often fired at Israel any more. And when they are, it’s in response to Israeli provocation.

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David Rosen - Austerity and Social Unrest

WEEKEND EDITION DECEMBER 9-11, 2011

HTTP://WWW.COUNTERPUNCH.ORG/2011/12/09/AUSTERITY-AND-SOCIAL-UNREST/

by DAVID ROSEN

Whatever the long-term fate of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, it has made two major contributions to the warming 2012 political climate.

First, OWS put the concept of economic and social (in)equity, of the haves and have-nots, the 99%-ers, of class, center stage in national political discourse.  This is no insignificant accomplishment.  For the last half-century, there has been an unstated ban on acknowledging the concept of class in political discourse.  It was an agreement shared in politics, education/academia, the media and the labor movement.  “Workers” became the “middle class” and the sins of capitalism forgiven.

OWS’s second contribution has been to recover direct action, particularly mass social mobilization, as a valid form of political engagement.  There is a growing perception that petition signing, marches and voting mean little, rituals confirming predetermined outcomes.  People on all sides of the growing number of political and social issues (including grassroots Tea Partyers) are discovering their voices, mobilizing and getting busted.  Not surprising, activists often use high-tech communications media to accomplish miracles.  Direct action is likely to take still new and unexpected forms as the economic crisis deepens, drags on and social unrest mounts.

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Robert Scheer - Government-Sponsored Sinner

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/government-sponsored_sinner_20111208/

Posted on Dec 8, 2011

By Robert Scheer

Who would have thought that Republican voters would prove so accepting of sin? At least when its committed by a white guy, like the serial philanderer Newt Gingrich, who betrayed not one but two wives while they were enduring serious medical difficulties.

In the latest New York Times/CBS poll of Iowa Republicans, alleged philanderer Herman Cain’s once impressive support shifts to the new front-runner, Gingrich, whose richer history of marital deceit is not a problem even for the self-described evangelical Christian voters who favor him over Mitt Romney by a ratio of 3-1.

It is the first time that I have felt sympathy for a candidate experiencing the prejudice directed at a practicing Mormon. Clearly the ultimate of “squeaky clean” doesn’t cut it for a presidential contender of that faith among Republican Christian “values voters,” even when he is compared with a sexual roué of Gingrich’s considerable magnitude.

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Greg Palast - Romney's Billionaire Threatens BBC Investigative Reporter

Friday 2 December 2011

by: Greg Palast, Truthout | Author Commentary

http://www.truth-out.org/romneys-billionaire-threatens-bbc-investigative-reporter/1322851521

Palast is the author of  " [4]Vultures Picnic: in Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores." [5] [6]It is directly available from Truthout [7]. This column is Palast's commentary based on material in his book.

Last Monday, a call came in to BBC Television Centre, London, from the office of Mitt Romney's billionaire backer and "advisor" Paul Singer.

Singer, top donor to the Republican Senate Campaign Committee had a message for the news chiefs at the prestigious broadcaster:

"We have a file on Greg Palast."

I bet they do.

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Obama Is Watering Down Regulations More Than Bush, Study Shows

Nov. 30 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama, criticized by Republicans for slowing job growth by over regulating, has weakened proposed rules at a greater rate than President George W. Bush, according to a new study.

The White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs changed 76 percent of agency rules submitted for review under Obama, compared with 64 percent under his Republican predecessor, according to the study from the Center for Progressive Reform. Obama also has ignored requirements that he disclose documents exchanged between OIRA and federal agencies, the report said.

“We are disappointed because we thought President Obama had great potential,” Rena Steinzor, president of the center, a Washington-based research group that supports health and environmental rules, said in an interview. “He promised us he would be transparent, but he is just as bad as Bush.”

The scope of government regulation has emerged as a major issue in the 2012 presidential race and on Capitol Hill. Republican presidential candidates have accused Obama of stifling job creation by imposing rules on business, and House Republicans have vowed to rein in proposed regulations on everything from the environment to health care to banking.

Industry Dominates Meetings

In a Nov. 9 presidential debate focused on the economy, Texas Governor Rick Perry said “it’s the regulatory world that is killing America.” Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota said, “Our biggest problem right now is our regulatory burden.”

The regulatory affairs office’s 1,080 meetings over the past decade have been heavily dominated by business interests, according to the study. Industry representatives made up 65 percent of meeting participants, compared with 12 percent representing public interest groups.

Of the top 30 groups that met with OIRA over the decade, 17 were from industry, including the American Chemistry Council, Exxon Mobil Corp. and the American Forest and Paper Association. Only five were environmental groups, including the National Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club.

Groups that met with OIRA were 29 percent more likely to get a rule changed than those who were not, according to the study released yesterday.

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Ray McGovern - Ask the Candidates Real Questions -- Like These

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Ask-the-Candidates-Real-Qu-by-Ray-McGovern-111125-819.html

November 25, 2011 By Ray McGovern During recent presidential debates, moderators have asked mostly predictable questions and--except for some notable gaffes---have elicited mostly talking-point answers. It's time for citizens to put politicians on the spot with some more pointed questions. Pity the pundits. It must be hard to pretend to be a journalist and live in constant fear of being one question or comment away from joining the jobless. This Thanksgiving holiday weekend we can be thankful for the obscene transparency of the "mainstream" pundits' efforts to avoid at all cost offending the corporations that own and use them.

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Firmin DeBrabander - The Wrath of Rand -- The Boundaries of Individualism

WEEKEND EDITION NOVEMBER 11-13, 2011

The Boundaries of Individualism

by FIRMIN DeBRABANDER

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/11/the-wrath-of-rand/

Many have commented on the remarkable callousness fashioned by this Republican presidential field. Most prominently, Herman Cain maintained that the poor and unemployed are responsible for their own plight; Ron Paul claimed that people who refrain from buying health insurance but become debilitated should not be bailed out by government healthcare—they should just die instead, his audience helpfully suggested (or hollered, rather); and just about all the candidates have recommended ever harsher, ever more absurd measures to keep out poor immigrants on our border with Mexico: double fences, electric fences, even soldiers with ‘real guns and real bullets,’ as Herman Cain put it.

What’s driving this show of meanness? You might say it’s just what the electorate—or some loud part thereof—wants. It seems like there are some seriously angry voters out there these days, and I’m sure the recession is taking a toll on people’s patience and generosity. And yet, I suspect this is no fleeting trend, but something with deeper ideological roots. In short, I sense Ayn Rand.

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