On Debate Day, Newt Lands $20 Million from Vegas
Mogul

Republican nomination for $20 million, please. Who’s getting creamed in the ad wars in Iowa and seeing his polls numbers slide? Answer, of course is Newt Gingrich, who is about to get some much needed financial assistance. Casino magnate Sheldon[...]

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By: strangely enough

With the requisite number of Dem protest votes. There's an election coming up, ya know?

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tee/#comment-2464684

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By: wirerat1

When can we start emigrating? This country is shit and its not going to get better. Leave now before they start stopping us from doing so.

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tee/#comment-2464683

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Joe Arpaio: This Is A 'Sad Day For America'

Sheriff Joe Arpaio says that it's a "sad day for America" when he's accused of discrimination.

Arpaio held a press conference Thursday to address a Justice Department report that accuses him and the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office of discriminatory policies. He called the report a "witch hunt" and said that it was an effort by the government to put the department out of the illegal immigration enforcement business. It's a "sad day for America," Arpaio said.

JJ Hensley of the Arizona Republic reported via Twitter that Arpaio said: "President Obama and a band off [sic] his merry men, might as well erect their own pink neon sign at border saying welcome all illegals."

Arpaio and his attorney also denied the DOJ's claim that the MCSO impeded the investigation or did not respond to the allegations, arguing that they had just received the report Thursday.

Deputy Chief Jack MacIntyre of the MCSO said that "this is targeted strictly by the Obama administration for votes in 2010, that's the only purpose for it," according to Hensley.

William Pitts of 12 News in Phoenix, who was also tweeting from the press conference, reported that Arpaio also compared the situation to Pearl Harbor.

Arpaio said that the MCSO plans to cooperate, and if the DOJ isn't happy he'll be happy to meet them in court.

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GOP: Walker Recall Violates Constitution

Wisconsin GOP files suit claiming that Walker recall process violates Governor Walker's 14th Amendment rights. [...]

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What's the Difference Between Newt Gingrich and
God

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What's the difference between Newt Gingrich and God? God doesn't think he's Newt Gingrich.

In a Republican presidential contest in which most of the major contenders, including Gingrich, claimed God "called" them to run, Newt alone worships at his own altar. Even after burning through three religions and three wives, Gingrich's self-proclaimed mission on earth remains to be "definer of civilization" and "leader of the civilizing forces."

Newt's belief in his destiny as a "world historical figure" dates well before he assumed the mantle of GOP frontrunner, became Speaker of the House or even led the 1994 Republican revolution. As he explained to the Washington Post in 1985:

"I have an enormous personal ambition. I want to shift the entire planet. And I'm doing it...Oh, this is just the beginning of a 20-or-30-year movement. I'll get credit for it."

As it turns out, the Newt the historian's grandiose self-vision was strongly influenced by science fiction. Gingrich's personal mission statement, uncovered in 1997 during the House investigation into his ethical woes, reads like the cover of Isaac Asimov's The Foundation about "a future century the Galactic Empire dies and one man creates a new force for civilized life":

"Gingrich--primary mission: advocate of civilization, definer of civilization, teacher of the rules of civilization, arouser of those who fan civilization, organizer of the pro-civilization activists, leader (possibly) of the civilizing forces."

And the Great Civilizer doesn't merely believe that "I am much like [Ronald] Reagan and Margaret Thatcher." As Gingrich explained in 1994, "People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz."

As Gail Sheehy revealed in her jaw-dropping 1995 Vanity Fair profile of then-Speaker Gingrich, Newt's belief in his epic role has deep roots:

"I'm a mythical person," says Newt, no stranger to revolutions. "I had a period of thinking that I would have been called 'Newt the McPherson,' as in Robert the Bruce." He is referring to his childhood, when he strongly identified with his biological father, Newton McPherson.

"Robert the Bruce," Newt continues, "is the guy who would not, could not, avoid fighting...He carried the burden of being Scotland." Like the Bruce, Newt feels he must carry the burden of being his nation.

"What makes me unusually intense is that I personalize the pain of war, the pain of children being killed, the pain of a 16-year-old who has been permanently cheated by his school and cannot read."

If Gingrich's self-description as a fighter who personalizes the pain of war seems odd, it should. After all, Newt never served in the military, getting deferments while his first wife funded his education. "Without corrective lenses, he couldn't see across the room," Colonel Bob Gingrich sneered about his stepson Newt, "Flattest feet I've ever seen. He's physically incapable of doing military service."

Newt Gingrich may not actually be a fighter, but he apparently fancies himself a lover. As Sheehy made clear, Gingrich's endless appetite for women other than his wives goes back to his earlier runs for office:

Along with his amorphous political persona, Newt showed a propensity for the kind of behavior boys boast about in the locker room. Throughout his first campaign he was having an affair with a young volunteer. Dot Crews, who occasionally drove the candidate, says that almost everybody involved in the campaign knew. Kip Carter claims, "We'd have won in 1974 if we could have kept him out of the office, screwing her on the desk."

As Anne Manning, with whom Gingrich had a dalliance in the 1970's explained, Newt the "definer of civilization" put plausible deniability at the top of his civilizational values:

In the spring of 1977, she was in Washington to attend a census-bureaus workshop when Gingrich took her to dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant. He met her back at her modest hotel room. "We had oral sex," she says. "He prefers that modus operandi because then he can say, "I never slept with her." Indeed, before Gingrich left that evening, she says, he threatened her: "If you ever tell anybody about this, I'll say you're lying."

After dispensing with wife number one in 1980, Newt the world historical figure explained to wife number two why he had to leave her. As Marianne Gingrich (nee Ginther) told Esquire:

He'd just returned from Erie, Pennsylvania, where he'd given a speech full of high sentiments about compassion and family values.

The next night, they sat talking out on their back patio in Georgia. She said, "How do you give that speech and do what you're doing?"

"It doesn't matter what I do," he answered. "People need to hear what I have to say. There's no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn't matter what I live."

Gingrich, of course, had been involved with Callista Bisek, a Congressional staffer and the future Mrs. Gingrich #3, for years. Even during his role as Clinton impeachment inquisitor, Bisek was, as Vanity Fair described her, his "frequent breakfast companion."

But in God Gingrich's moral universe, it's all good. As he put it in 1994:

"I think I am a transformational figure. I think I am trying to effect a change so large that the people who would be hurt by the change, the liberal machine, have a natural reaction."

Gingrich, who swapped his Baptist faith for Catholicism just in time to attack President Obama's 2009 address at Notre Dame University, later explained that his rapid fire infidelities were the actually product of his own patriotism:

"There's no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate. And what I can tell you is that when I did things that were wrong, I wasn't trapped in situation ethics, I was doing things that were wrong, and yet, I was doing them."

"I found," Gingrich told CBN in March, "that I felt compelled to seek God's forgiveness."

And then got it, from himself.

(An earlier version of this piece appeared at Perrspectives.)

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http://crooksandliars.com/jon-perr/whats-difference-between-newt-gingrich-and-god

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Romney claimed he lived impoverished existence in
France, in fact he lived in a "palace" in Paris

Romney's impoverished home
while living in Paris was until recently
the embassy of the UAE.To hear Mitt Romney tell it, his two and a half years as a Mormon missionary in France in the late 1960s were tough times.  The places he was staying often had no working toilet, and certainly no baths or showers, he said just this past Sunday (in an effort to divert attention from the $10,000 bet he made Rick Perry).  He lived, he said, just like lower-middle income Frenchmen lived.

The truth is slightly different.  According to the Telegraph, for nearly a year during his time in France, Romney lived in a "palace" in Paris' richest neighborhood, known as "the 16th."

Although he spent time in other French cities, for most of 1968, Mr Romney lived in the Mission Home, a 19th century neoclassical building in the French capital?s chic 16th arrondissement. ?It was a house built by and for rich people,? said Richard Anderson, the son of the mission president at the time of Mr Romney?s stay. ?I would describe it as a palace?.

It had chandeliers, stained glass windows, its own art collection and servants.  I found a photo of one of the windows, via the Mormon Paris mission's Web site:

The stained glass stairway at Mitt Romney's
"lower-middle class" Paris group home.Until just recently the building housed the embassy of the United Arab Emirates, a government known for its impoverished lower-middle class lifestyle.  Using that info, I was able to track down the address to 3, rue de Lota, Paris 75016.  And using Google maps, I was able to locate the building (above) and recreate the entire facade using some panoramic software, below (that entire photo, left to right, is the house):

Click photo to see a much larger version.I lived in Paris twice, and have visited a lot. That is one heck of a house.  Mind you, these places were probably built over a hundred years ago, possibly more.  It's a fair bet that it looked just like this when Romney lived there four decades ago.

Oh, but the Telegraph has more:

In his remarks this week, Mr Romney said of his French lodgings: ?I don?t recall any of them having a refrigerator. We shopped before every meal?. Mr Anderson said that as well as a refrigerator, the mansion had ?a Spanish chef called Pardo and a house boy, who prepared lunch and supper five days a week?.

The home in fact had several baths and showers.

You get the picture.

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-impoverished.html

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If Workers’ Share Of National Income Were
At The Post-War Average, They Would Earn An Extra $740 Billion This Year

Photo by Flickr use Kyle Ford.

Since 2009, 88 percent of national income growth has gone to corporate profits, while just one percent has gone to wages, adding another chapter to the decline of the middle class, whose incomes have been shrinking and wages stagnating for decades. In fact, according to data analyzed by the Financial Times, workers’ share of national income has fallen to its lowest level on record, and if it were back at the post-war average, workers would earn an additional $740 billion this year:

?We are the 99%?, the slogan of Occupy Wall Street, is a reference to the rising wealth of the top 1 per cent of US income distribution. But an equally valid slogan might be: ?We get 58%?.

That figure is the share of US national income that goes to workers as wages rather than to investors as profits and interest. It has fallen to its lowest level since records began after the second world war and is part of the reason why incomes at the top ? which tend to be earned from capital ? have risen so much. If wages were at their postwar average share of 63 per cent, workers would earn an extra $740bn this year, about $5,000 per worker, according to FT calculations.

This decline in workers’ share of income is actually holding back the national recovery, as “workers on lower wages consume much of their income, while higher wage earners and those with capital income are more likely to save.” Instead of going to the people who are likeliest to spend it, and thus boost the economy, more income is going to corporations and rich people who are just sitting on it. Corporations are actually holding trillions of dollars in cash reserves (and clamoring for more tax breaks), money that could create millions of jobs if it were deployed in a different fashion.

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http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/12/15/390434/workers-national-income/

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Bachmann: ‘The Number One Way We’ll
Advance The Cause Of Life’ Is By Repealing Health Reform

Like Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann found no irony in calling for the repeal legislation that would extend health insurance coverage to 32 million Americans (and already insured 2.5 million young adults) at a “pro-life” event last night, saying, “the number one way we’ll advance the cause of life is through the 100 percent repeal of Obamacare.” Speaking at the premiere of The Gift of Life, an anti-abortion movie, Bachmann also criticized the administration for denying greater access to the morning after pill, despite agreeing with the decision. She warned that if re-elected, the administration would surely make Plan B available “on the grocery store aisles next to bubble gums and next to M&Ms.” Watch it:

Of course the morning after pill will never be available in candy aisles. Currently, the medication can only be purchased behind the counter by women 17 and older ? meaning that they do not need a prescription but they have to ask a pharmacist for the drug. Those 16 and younger need a prescription in order to obtain it.

Meanwhile, all available data — both in Massachusetts and around the world — shows that women contemplating an abortion are far less likely to seek one if they can afford health insurance for themselves, and feel confident they can provide quality medical care to their newborn children. Therefore, repealing health reform would not only violate the general concept of supporting human life, it would also destroy the “life” of the fetuses that conservatives talk so much about protecting.

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http://thinkprogress.org/health/2011/12/15/390589/bachmann-the-number-one-way-wel
l-advance-the-cause-of-life-is-by-repealing-health-reform/

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SOPA Getting a Markup in House Judiciary
Committee

The markup in the House Judiciary Committee of the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, has begun. Observers expect at least two days of markups, and the bill wouldn't see the House floor until sometime thereafter, probably next year. There are over 60[...]

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