Thursday, November 17, 2011 8:48:56 PM
Newt: Jail Chris Dodd And Barney Frank
Oct 11, 2011
===
Gingrich on Defensive Over Freddie Mac Fees
By JIM RUTENBERG and JEFF ZELENY
Published: November 17, 2011
For roughly six years, Newt Gingrich [ http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/primaries/candidates/newt-gingrich ] worked closely with high-level officials at the government-sponsored mortgage company Freddie Mac. As a highly paid consultant, he coached them on how to win over the conservatives who consider their company an anathema, spoke to their political action committee and offered general advice as they worked to stave off various threats to Freddie Mac’s survival, several people familiar with his role there said on Wednesday.
The full extent of Mr. Gingrich’s involvement with Freddie Mac burst into the open after Bloomberg News reported Tuesday that he earned $1.6 million to $1.8 million, in an on-and-off relationship from 1999 to 2008, with the mortgage company that has since been taken over by the federal government. The payments were far more than had previously been known, or than Mr. Gingrich, the former House speaker, had acknowledged.
His compensation, which several former Freddie Mac officials confirmed in interviews on Wednesday, and the extent of his work with the mortgage company, presented Mr. Gingrich with a fresh challenge to his Republican bid for the presidency just as he was climbing in polls.
Not only is Freddie Mac a longtime conservative whipping post, but the extent of his consultancy for the mortgage giant seemed to be at odds with his own statements about his work there. He has also blamed it for the collapse of the housing market, saying that at least one Democratic supporter should be jailed, and, in 2008, that President Obama should give back any money his campaign received from its executives.
The news of the full extent of his Freddie Mac contract put him on the defensive all day. And all of his corporate work, in energy, health care and other industries, is now sure to be scrutinized by the news media and his opponents.
“Fannie and Freddie, as you know, have been the epicenter of the financial meltdown in this country,” Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota said while campaigning in Iowa. “While he was taking that money, I was fighting against Fannie and Freddie.”
Speaking with reporters in Iowa on Wednesday, Mr. Gingrich played down the report, saying that he did not know exactly how much he was paid, and that Freddie Mac was but one company that enlisted his firm, the Gingrich Group.
“It’s a multiyear project. It was paid to Gingrich Group. Gingrich Group has many clients,” he told reporters. “I offer strategic advice for a lot of different companies.” (His campaign followed up by listing some of them, including I.B.M., Microsoft and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.)
And, he said, “I did no lobbying of any kind.”
In interviews on Wednesday, several former Freddie Mac officials, and others with direct knowledge about his work there did not dispute that. But at least four of them did dispute Mr. Gingrich’s own description of his work for Freddie Mac during the CNBC debate last week. When asked about a $300,000-per-year, two-year contract in 2006 and 2007, Mr. Gingrich said he had acted as a “historian.”
He said Freddie officials had asked his advice, telling him, “We are now making loans to people who have no credit history and have no record of paying back anything, but that’s what the government wants us to do.”
And, he explained: “As I said to them at the time, this is a bubble. This is insane. This is impossible.”
Five officials with knowledge of the interactions, and speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid getting drawn into a public fight with Mr. Gingrich, said they had never heard of him saying any such thing.
“Freddie wasn’t spending $25,000 to $35,000 a month for years to have somebody give them history lessons on what would have happened in 1945 if Japan had won,” one former official said.
Another said Mr. Gingrich was enlisted at a time when conservatives were moving aggressively to dismantle Freddie and its counterpart, Fannie Mae, and the organizations were trying to fight back by presenting themselves “as American as apple pie.”
Officials said Mr. Gingrich was brought in to help Freddie Mac hone its message to conservative audiences. One person recalled that Mr. Gingrich advised them, for instance, to tell Republicans that the organization was not explicitly government-backed — and, at the time, it was not — but also not as freewheeling as Wall Street banks, occupying a responsible middle ground.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were commonly referred to as government-sponsored entities. They were established by Congress, and their debt and other obligations have always carried an implicit guarantee that the federal government would step in to save them if they were ever in danger of collapse. Republicans said that the companies — and by implication their Democratic supporters — fueled the crisis by financing vast numbers of unaffordable loans.
In all, Mr. Gingrich served two terms as a consultant to Freddie Mac, the first starting shortly after he left the House in 1999. Hired by the head of the mortgage company’s government affairs shop, Robert Mitchell Delk, he stayed on through 2002. In an interview with Bloomberg, Mr. Delk said Mr. Gingrich helped him devise a program on expanding home ownership that Mr. Delk then shared with White House officials under President George W. Bush.
Two other officials said that during Mr. Gingrich’s second run with the group, when he took a two-year contract starting in 2006, he addressed donors to the Fannie Mac political action committee and discussed writing an op-ed article or academic “white paper,” but never put his name on anything on Freddie’s behalf.
Mr. Gingrich has in recent months been harshly critical of those who have worked with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. For instance, he said, Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, should be jailed for his association with “a lobbyist who was close to Freddie Mac.”
On Wednesday, his campaign said that Mr. Gingrich believes Freddie Mac should be “broken up.” Asked whether Mr. Gingrich regrets helping the company, his spokesman, R. C. Hammond, said that he did not and that his views had changed after the housing meltdown.
For his part, Mr. Gingrich said he welcomed the scrutiny. “Everybody will dig up everything they can dig up,” Mr. Gingrich said. “That’s fine; they should.”
Trip Gabriel, Charles Duhigg and Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.
© 2011 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/us/politics/newt-gingrich-on-defensive-over-freddie-mac-fees.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/us/politics/newt-gingrich-on-defensive-over-freddie-mac-fees.html?pagewanted=all ]
===
Dodd, Frank Belong In Jail - Gingrich
Oct 12, 2011
===
Newt's Freddie Mac Lobbying Whopper
Former Speaker Newt Gingrich (bottom right) and the elephant in the room.
Courtesy of Gingrich Productions
By Tim Murphy
Wed Nov. 9, 2011 6:03 PM PST
At Wednesday night's GOP presidential debate in Michigan, Newt Gingrich was asked by the mostly on-the-ball CNBC panel about his work on behalf of housing giant Freddie Mac. For the former Speaker of the House, it was a bit of a welcome-back moment; for the last few months, he's been so much of an afterthought that moderators haven't even bothered with his own personal history and resume.
But Gingrich had an answer ready. He denied the lobbying charge, and then, via Benjy Sarlin [ http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/11/newt-i-wasnt-a-housing-lobbyist-just-a-housing-historian.php ], offered this spirited defense:
I offered advice. My advice as an historian when they walked in and said we are now making loans to people that have no credit history and have no record of paying back anything but that’s what the government wants us to do. I said at the time, this is a bubble. This is insane. This is impossible. It turned out unfortunately I was right and the people who were doing exactly what Congresswoman Bachmann talked about were wrong.
It's pretty self-evident, though, that Gingrich wasn't hired as a consultant because he was an untenured history professor at North Georgia College in the late 1970s. He was hired because, as a former Speaker of the House, he had a lot of influence with a lot of imporant people. An AP investigative report from 2008 framed Gingrich's role as that of a political operator, greasing the wheels on Capitol Hill. Key section [ http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/mortgage-meltdown-freddie-mac-lobbying-held-federal-regulators-bay ]:
Efforts to tighten government regulation were gaining support on Capitol Hill, and Freddie Mac was fighting back.
According to internal Freddie Mac documents obtained by the AP, Reps. Bob Ney (R-Ohio), and Paul Kanjorski (D-Pa.) spent the evening in hard-to-obtain seats near the Nationals dugout with Freddie Mac executive Hollis McLoughlin and four of Freddie Mac's in-house lobbyists. Both were members of the House Financial Services Committee. The Nationals tickets were bargains for Freddie Mac, part of a well-orchestrated, multimillion-dollar campaign to preserve its largely regulatory-free environment, with particular pressure exerted on Republicans who controlled Congress at the time.
Internal Freddie Mac budget records show $11.7 million was paid to 52 outside lobbyists and consultants in 2006. Power brokers such as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich were recruited with six-figure contracts. Freddie Mac paid the following amounts to the firms of former Republican lawmakers or ex-GOP staffers in 2006...
Pushing back, Freddie Mac enlisted prominent conservatives, including Gingrich and former Justice Department official Viet Dinh, paying each $300,000 in 2006, according to internal records.
Gingrich talked and wrote about what he saw as the benefits of the Freddie Mac business model.
Gingrich made a pretty penny as a consultant in the 2000s. As CPI reported, the former Speaker's consulting firm took in $312,000 from the ethanol lobby in 2009. Presumably, they weren't paying him for his historical insights.
Copyright ©2011 Mother Jones and the Foundation for National Progress
http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/11/newts-fannie-mae-lobbying-whopper [with comments]
*
(linked in):
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=69120717 and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=69125454 (and any future following)
===
Barney Frank Blasts Newt Gingrich For Saying He Should Be In Jail
Oct 13, 2011
more at msnbc.com
*
Barney Frank responds to Gingrich's debate comments on Hardball - 10/12/11
Oct 13, 2011
Not shown in this video, but at the end of interview Chris Mathews says, "Thank you very much ... Barney Frank, who I do believe has the IQ that Newt, in his delusion, thinks he might have had at one point in his earlier life." Way to go Matthews! Love that.
*
Barney Frank RespondsTo Newt Gingrich's 'Jail Frank & Dodd' Stink Bomb at Dartmouth Debate [full segment]
Oct 13, 2011
===
Gingrich’s Big Flabby Hand Caught in the Freddie / Fannie Cookie Jar!
November 17, 2011
http://deadlinelive.info/2011/11/17/gingrichs-big-flabby-hand-caught-in-the-freddie-fannie-cookie-jar/ [no comments yet]
===
Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) Sets The Record Straight On Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac and Subprime Mortgages
Jul 1, 2010
June 30, 2010 debate Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act -- HR 4173. Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) sets the records straight on Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac and subprime mortgages. Frank calls out opponents for rewriting the history of reform efforts and gets in a couple of comedic jabs at Tom Delay.
*
Taking On The Banks, with John Avalos - Countdown with Keith Olbermann
Oct 12, 2011
===
A Gingrich-Obama debate? Newt would be toast
Jay Bookman
7:40 am November 17, 2011, by Jay
Jonah Goldberg, writing in National Review [ http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/283245/debates-newt-gingrich-s-real-target-obama-jonah-goldberg ], acknowledges that Newt Gingrich’s rise in Republican polls can be explained in part by the belief that the former speaker would dismantle the hated Barack Obama in a debate.
And since Gingrich’s moment in the sun may be brief, let’s indulge that fantasy while we can, shall we?
Goldberg writes:
Watching Gingrich walk onto the debate stage, it’s like seeing a great beast returned to its natural habitat. They should play “Born Free” whenever he comes out from behind the curtain.
…. the unifying conviction among hard-core Republican voters is that Obama is both overrated and full of it, a man pretending to be presidential and intellectual rather than the real thing. (Ironically, Gingrich has long been the subject of similar criticisms, mostly from the left.) Gingrich’s promise to goad Obama into a fair fight is beyond tantalizing.
Talk to rank-and-file conservatives about such a matchup and they grow giddy, like nerds asked if they’d like to see a battle between Darth Vader and Gandalf the wizard. Ask them if they’d like to see an Obama versus Romney debate (the thrilla with vanilla!) and they shrug. Meanwhile, if you nominate Gingrich, you’ll get a ticket to the fight of the century.
You know what I say? Bring it on. I’d not only buy myself a ticket, I’d wager a good sum on the outcome. Obama would clean the Newtster’s clock, for reasons both of style and substance.
Let’s begin by admitting that Gingrich has done pretty well in the GOP debates, and that his current standing in the polls reflects that performance. However, there are two ways to account for that success:
1.) Gingrich has repressed his instinct to belittle his opponents, focusing his scorn instead on the media and allowing him to come across as statesmanlike and diplomatic. As we all know, he is neither, and in a one-on-one debate against Obama his inner jerk would surely come to the surface. Conservative die-hards might love that kind of performance, but independent voters would be turned off by a surly Gingrich pitted against a calm Obama.
2.) In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. In other words, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry haven’t exactly been setting a tough standard for Gingrich in the debates. On the one occasion in which I can remember Gingrich daring to take on Mitt Romney, attacking him for implementing a big-government solution to health care in Massachusetts, Romney calmly slapped him right back into place:
“Actually, Newt, we got the idea of an individual mandate from you.” And that was pretty much that.
You see, Gingrich is a bully at heart, someone who enjoys picking on people who are unable to defend themselves. He first made his mark in the early ’80s attacking the patriotism of Democratic colleagues in speeches televised from the floor of the U.S. House by C-Span. To the uninitiated viewer, it looked as though the animated Gingrich was taking on his opponents in person. The sight was so misleading that House Speaker Tip O’Neill got on the phone and ordered the cameras to pan the House floor, revealing that Gingrich was bravely ranting to an empty chamber.
However, when confronted with someone who might be his rhetorical equal or better, Gingrich tends to shrink. That was certainly how he responded to President Bill Clinton, for whom he developed an unrequited man-crush that drove his fellow Republicans crazy.
“I melt when I’m around him,” Gingrich admitted in a rare candid moment back when he was speaker. “After I get out, I need two hours to detoxify. My people are nervous about me going in there because of the way I deal with this.” It got so bad that Gingrich’s top aides refused to let him meet one on one with Clinton, out of fear that Clinton would dominate him.
It’s also telling to recall how Gingrich ended up losing his showdown with Clinton over the governmental shutdown. His insecurity got the best of him. The then-speaker threw a childish, public fit of pique because he felt disrespected by Clinton. Gingrich now claims to be much more mature than he was back then, and not so easily provoked, but I have my doubts. He was 53, not 13 or 23, at the time, and your basic nature doesn’t change.
And then there’s the matter of actual content.
Want to debate health care? See Romney above. Foreign policy? Tell us why you began advocating the invasion of Iraq within days of Sept. 11, Mr. Speaker, leading us into a trillion-dollar mistake. Explain why you advocated military action against Moammar Gadhafi right up to moment that such action began, at which point you turned against it, predicting it would be a disaster.
Global warming? Please explain the mental gymnastics needed to transition from a strong advocate of a cap-and-trade approach, even appearing in a commercial with Nancy Pelosi, to your current position of denying the problem even exists. The economy? Explain how you took some $1.6 million from Freddie Mac “as a historian,” never uttering a word in public or apparently in private about the problems that you now claim to have foreseen. Explain how you predicted that Clinton’s 1993 tax hikes would lead to economic disaster, but instead were followed by the longest expansion in post-war history.
Whatever the topic, Obama would have an easy rebuttal, and in many cases the rebuttal could be supplied by Newt himself.
The truth is, Gingrich likes to talk in sweeping generalizations and stirring absolutes, which helps him come across like the big lofty thinker he claims to be. Everything is “fundamentally” this or “profoundly” that, not to mention “dramatic” and “transformative.” It’s an effective style in speeches and public appearances, because bombastic claims, assumptions and leaps of logic can’t be challenged.
But in a debate format against a worthy opponent, unable to hide in the clouds and forced to deal with specifics and his own record, Gingrich would fold.
© 2011 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
http://blogs.ajc.com/jay-bookman-blog/2011/11/17/a-gingrich-obama-debate-newt-would-be-toast/ [with comments]
===
(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=53088601 and preceding and following (and [in] http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=68201319 , and http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=68360657 and preceding and following)
Oct 11, 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQ5xa7AjPXM
===
Gingrich on Defensive Over Freddie Mac Fees
By JIM RUTENBERG and JEFF ZELENY
Published: November 17, 2011
For roughly six years, Newt Gingrich [ http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/primaries/candidates/newt-gingrich ] worked closely with high-level officials at the government-sponsored mortgage company Freddie Mac. As a highly paid consultant, he coached them on how to win over the conservatives who consider their company an anathema, spoke to their political action committee and offered general advice as they worked to stave off various threats to Freddie Mac’s survival, several people familiar with his role there said on Wednesday.
The full extent of Mr. Gingrich’s involvement with Freddie Mac burst into the open after Bloomberg News reported Tuesday that he earned $1.6 million to $1.8 million, in an on-and-off relationship from 1999 to 2008, with the mortgage company that has since been taken over by the federal government. The payments were far more than had previously been known, or than Mr. Gingrich, the former House speaker, had acknowledged.
His compensation, which several former Freddie Mac officials confirmed in interviews on Wednesday, and the extent of his work with the mortgage company, presented Mr. Gingrich with a fresh challenge to his Republican bid for the presidency just as he was climbing in polls.
Not only is Freddie Mac a longtime conservative whipping post, but the extent of his consultancy for the mortgage giant seemed to be at odds with his own statements about his work there. He has also blamed it for the collapse of the housing market, saying that at least one Democratic supporter should be jailed, and, in 2008, that President Obama should give back any money his campaign received from its executives.
The news of the full extent of his Freddie Mac contract put him on the defensive all day. And all of his corporate work, in energy, health care and other industries, is now sure to be scrutinized by the news media and his opponents.
“Fannie and Freddie, as you know, have been the epicenter of the financial meltdown in this country,” Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota said while campaigning in Iowa. “While he was taking that money, I was fighting against Fannie and Freddie.”
Speaking with reporters in Iowa on Wednesday, Mr. Gingrich played down the report, saying that he did not know exactly how much he was paid, and that Freddie Mac was but one company that enlisted his firm, the Gingrich Group.
“It’s a multiyear project. It was paid to Gingrich Group. Gingrich Group has many clients,” he told reporters. “I offer strategic advice for a lot of different companies.” (His campaign followed up by listing some of them, including I.B.M., Microsoft and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.)
And, he said, “I did no lobbying of any kind.”
In interviews on Wednesday, several former Freddie Mac officials, and others with direct knowledge about his work there did not dispute that. But at least four of them did dispute Mr. Gingrich’s own description of his work for Freddie Mac during the CNBC debate last week. When asked about a $300,000-per-year, two-year contract in 2006 and 2007, Mr. Gingrich said he had acted as a “historian.”
He said Freddie officials had asked his advice, telling him, “We are now making loans to people who have no credit history and have no record of paying back anything, but that’s what the government wants us to do.”
And, he explained: “As I said to them at the time, this is a bubble. This is insane. This is impossible.”
Five officials with knowledge of the interactions, and speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid getting drawn into a public fight with Mr. Gingrich, said they had never heard of him saying any such thing.
“Freddie wasn’t spending $25,000 to $35,000 a month for years to have somebody give them history lessons on what would have happened in 1945 if Japan had won,” one former official said.
Another said Mr. Gingrich was enlisted at a time when conservatives were moving aggressively to dismantle Freddie and its counterpart, Fannie Mae, and the organizations were trying to fight back by presenting themselves “as American as apple pie.”
Officials said Mr. Gingrich was brought in to help Freddie Mac hone its message to conservative audiences. One person recalled that Mr. Gingrich advised them, for instance, to tell Republicans that the organization was not explicitly government-backed — and, at the time, it was not — but also not as freewheeling as Wall Street banks, occupying a responsible middle ground.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were commonly referred to as government-sponsored entities. They were established by Congress, and their debt and other obligations have always carried an implicit guarantee that the federal government would step in to save them if they were ever in danger of collapse. Republicans said that the companies — and by implication their Democratic supporters — fueled the crisis by financing vast numbers of unaffordable loans.
In all, Mr. Gingrich served two terms as a consultant to Freddie Mac, the first starting shortly after he left the House in 1999. Hired by the head of the mortgage company’s government affairs shop, Robert Mitchell Delk, he stayed on through 2002. In an interview with Bloomberg, Mr. Delk said Mr. Gingrich helped him devise a program on expanding home ownership that Mr. Delk then shared with White House officials under President George W. Bush.
Two other officials said that during Mr. Gingrich’s second run with the group, when he took a two-year contract starting in 2006, he addressed donors to the Fannie Mac political action committee and discussed writing an op-ed article or academic “white paper,” but never put his name on anything on Freddie’s behalf.
Mr. Gingrich has in recent months been harshly critical of those who have worked with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. For instance, he said, Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, should be jailed for his association with “a lobbyist who was close to Freddie Mac.”
On Wednesday, his campaign said that Mr. Gingrich believes Freddie Mac should be “broken up.” Asked whether Mr. Gingrich regrets helping the company, his spokesman, R. C. Hammond, said that he did not and that his views had changed after the housing meltdown.
For his part, Mr. Gingrich said he welcomed the scrutiny. “Everybody will dig up everything they can dig up,” Mr. Gingrich said. “That’s fine; they should.”
Trip Gabriel, Charles Duhigg and Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.
© 2011 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/us/politics/newt-gingrich-on-defensive-over-freddie-mac-fees.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/us/politics/newt-gingrich-on-defensive-over-freddie-mac-fees.html?pagewanted=all ]
===
Dodd, Frank Belong In Jail - Gingrich
Oct 12, 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1iE2ZVk3mw
===
Newt's Freddie Mac Lobbying Whopper
Former Speaker Newt Gingrich (bottom right) and the elephant in the room.
Courtesy of Gingrich Productions
By Tim Murphy
Wed Nov. 9, 2011 6:03 PM PST
At Wednesday night's GOP presidential debate in Michigan, Newt Gingrich was asked by the mostly on-the-ball CNBC panel about his work on behalf of housing giant Freddie Mac. For the former Speaker of the House, it was a bit of a welcome-back moment; for the last few months, he's been so much of an afterthought that moderators haven't even bothered with his own personal history and resume.
But Gingrich had an answer ready. He denied the lobbying charge, and then, via Benjy Sarlin [ http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/11/newt-i-wasnt-a-housing-lobbyist-just-a-housing-historian.php ], offered this spirited defense:
I offered advice. My advice as an historian when they walked in and said we are now making loans to people that have no credit history and have no record of paying back anything but that’s what the government wants us to do. I said at the time, this is a bubble. This is insane. This is impossible. It turned out unfortunately I was right and the people who were doing exactly what Congresswoman Bachmann talked about were wrong.
It's pretty self-evident, though, that Gingrich wasn't hired as a consultant because he was an untenured history professor at North Georgia College in the late 1970s. He was hired because, as a former Speaker of the House, he had a lot of influence with a lot of imporant people. An AP investigative report from 2008 framed Gingrich's role as that of a political operator, greasing the wheels on Capitol Hill. Key section [ http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/mortgage-meltdown-freddie-mac-lobbying-held-federal-regulators-bay ]:
Efforts to tighten government regulation were gaining support on Capitol Hill, and Freddie Mac was fighting back.
According to internal Freddie Mac documents obtained by the AP, Reps. Bob Ney (R-Ohio), and Paul Kanjorski (D-Pa.) spent the evening in hard-to-obtain seats near the Nationals dugout with Freddie Mac executive Hollis McLoughlin and four of Freddie Mac's in-house lobbyists. Both were members of the House Financial Services Committee. The Nationals tickets were bargains for Freddie Mac, part of a well-orchestrated, multimillion-dollar campaign to preserve its largely regulatory-free environment, with particular pressure exerted on Republicans who controlled Congress at the time.
Internal Freddie Mac budget records show $11.7 million was paid to 52 outside lobbyists and consultants in 2006. Power brokers such as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich were recruited with six-figure contracts. Freddie Mac paid the following amounts to the firms of former Republican lawmakers or ex-GOP staffers in 2006...
Pushing back, Freddie Mac enlisted prominent conservatives, including Gingrich and former Justice Department official Viet Dinh, paying each $300,000 in 2006, according to internal records.
Gingrich talked and wrote about what he saw as the benefits of the Freddie Mac business model.
Gingrich made a pretty penny as a consultant in the 2000s. As CPI reported, the former Speaker's consulting firm took in $312,000 from the ethanol lobby in 2009. Presumably, they weren't paying him for his historical insights.
Copyright ©2011 Mother Jones and the Foundation for National Progress
http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/11/newts-fannie-mae-lobbying-whopper [with comments]
*
(linked in):
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=69120717 and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=69125454 (and any future following)
===
Barney Frank Blasts Newt Gingrich For Saying He Should Be In Jail
Oct 13, 2011
more at msnbc.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETq7OFtSJ8U
*
Barney Frank responds to Gingrich's debate comments on Hardball - 10/12/11
Oct 13, 2011
Not shown in this video, but at the end of interview Chris Mathews says, "Thank you very much ... Barney Frank, who I do believe has the IQ that Newt, in his delusion, thinks he might have had at one point in his earlier life." Way to go Matthews! Love that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4m1RRlxYoI
*
Barney Frank RespondsTo Newt Gingrich's 'Jail Frank & Dodd' Stink Bomb at Dartmouth Debate [full segment]
Oct 13, 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kR3eSx2zF8Y
===
Gingrich’s Big Flabby Hand Caught in the Freddie / Fannie Cookie Jar!
November 17, 2011
http://deadlinelive.info/2011/11/17/gingrichs-big-flabby-hand-caught-in-the-freddie-fannie-cookie-jar/ [no comments yet]
===
Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) Sets The Record Straight On Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac and Subprime Mortgages
Jul 1, 2010
June 30, 2010 debate Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act -- HR 4173. Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) sets the records straight on Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac and subprime mortgages. Frank calls out opponents for rewriting the history of reform efforts and gets in a couple of comedic jabs at Tom Delay.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bijtBkKQwY8
*
Taking On The Banks, with John Avalos - Countdown with Keith Olbermann
Oct 12, 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh7rINV6Lo8
===
A Gingrich-Obama debate? Newt would be toast
Jay Bookman
7:40 am November 17, 2011, by Jay
Jonah Goldberg, writing in National Review [ http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/283245/debates-newt-gingrich-s-real-target-obama-jonah-goldberg ], acknowledges that Newt Gingrich’s rise in Republican polls can be explained in part by the belief that the former speaker would dismantle the hated Barack Obama in a debate.
And since Gingrich’s moment in the sun may be brief, let’s indulge that fantasy while we can, shall we?
Goldberg writes:
Watching Gingrich walk onto the debate stage, it’s like seeing a great beast returned to its natural habitat. They should play “Born Free” whenever he comes out from behind the curtain.
…. the unifying conviction among hard-core Republican voters is that Obama is both overrated and full of it, a man pretending to be presidential and intellectual rather than the real thing. (Ironically, Gingrich has long been the subject of similar criticisms, mostly from the left.) Gingrich’s promise to goad Obama into a fair fight is beyond tantalizing.
Talk to rank-and-file conservatives about such a matchup and they grow giddy, like nerds asked if they’d like to see a battle between Darth Vader and Gandalf the wizard. Ask them if they’d like to see an Obama versus Romney debate (the thrilla with vanilla!) and they shrug. Meanwhile, if you nominate Gingrich, you’ll get a ticket to the fight of the century.
You know what I say? Bring it on. I’d not only buy myself a ticket, I’d wager a good sum on the outcome. Obama would clean the Newtster’s clock, for reasons both of style and substance.
Let’s begin by admitting that Gingrich has done pretty well in the GOP debates, and that his current standing in the polls reflects that performance. However, there are two ways to account for that success:
1.) Gingrich has repressed his instinct to belittle his opponents, focusing his scorn instead on the media and allowing him to come across as statesmanlike and diplomatic. As we all know, he is neither, and in a one-on-one debate against Obama his inner jerk would surely come to the surface. Conservative die-hards might love that kind of performance, but independent voters would be turned off by a surly Gingrich pitted against a calm Obama.
2.) In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. In other words, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry haven’t exactly been setting a tough standard for Gingrich in the debates. On the one occasion in which I can remember Gingrich daring to take on Mitt Romney, attacking him for implementing a big-government solution to health care in Massachusetts, Romney calmly slapped him right back into place:
“Actually, Newt, we got the idea of an individual mandate from you.” And that was pretty much that.
You see, Gingrich is a bully at heart, someone who enjoys picking on people who are unable to defend themselves. He first made his mark in the early ’80s attacking the patriotism of Democratic colleagues in speeches televised from the floor of the U.S. House by C-Span. To the uninitiated viewer, it looked as though the animated Gingrich was taking on his opponents in person. The sight was so misleading that House Speaker Tip O’Neill got on the phone and ordered the cameras to pan the House floor, revealing that Gingrich was bravely ranting to an empty chamber.
However, when confronted with someone who might be his rhetorical equal or better, Gingrich tends to shrink. That was certainly how he responded to President Bill Clinton, for whom he developed an unrequited man-crush that drove his fellow Republicans crazy.
“I melt when I’m around him,” Gingrich admitted in a rare candid moment back when he was speaker. “After I get out, I need two hours to detoxify. My people are nervous about me going in there because of the way I deal with this.” It got so bad that Gingrich’s top aides refused to let him meet one on one with Clinton, out of fear that Clinton would dominate him.
It’s also telling to recall how Gingrich ended up losing his showdown with Clinton over the governmental shutdown. His insecurity got the best of him. The then-speaker threw a childish, public fit of pique because he felt disrespected by Clinton. Gingrich now claims to be much more mature than he was back then, and not so easily provoked, but I have my doubts. He was 53, not 13 or 23, at the time, and your basic nature doesn’t change.
And then there’s the matter of actual content.
Want to debate health care? See Romney above. Foreign policy? Tell us why you began advocating the invasion of Iraq within days of Sept. 11, Mr. Speaker, leading us into a trillion-dollar mistake. Explain why you advocated military action against Moammar Gadhafi right up to moment that such action began, at which point you turned against it, predicting it would be a disaster.
Global warming? Please explain the mental gymnastics needed to transition from a strong advocate of a cap-and-trade approach, even appearing in a commercial with Nancy Pelosi, to your current position of denying the problem even exists. The economy? Explain how you took some $1.6 million from Freddie Mac “as a historian,” never uttering a word in public or apparently in private about the problems that you now claim to have foreseen. Explain how you predicted that Clinton’s 1993 tax hikes would lead to economic disaster, but instead were followed by the longest expansion in post-war history.
Whatever the topic, Obama would have an easy rebuttal, and in many cases the rebuttal could be supplied by Newt himself.
The truth is, Gingrich likes to talk in sweeping generalizations and stirring absolutes, which helps him come across like the big lofty thinker he claims to be. Everything is “fundamentally” this or “profoundly” that, not to mention “dramatic” and “transformative.” It’s an effective style in speeches and public appearances, because bombastic claims, assumptions and leaps of logic can’t be challenged.
But in a debate format against a worthy opponent, unable to hide in the clouds and forced to deal with specifics and his own record, Gingrich would fold.
© 2011 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
http://blogs.ajc.com/jay-bookman-blog/2011/11/17/a-gingrich-obama-debate-newt-would-be-toast/ [with comments]
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Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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