Tag: newt gingrich

Obama Channels Presidents Romney and Gingrich

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In 2012, Mitt Romney told Time Magazine’s Mark Halperin that by the end of his first Presidential term (i.e., 2016), he would get the unemployment rate “down to 6 percent, perhaps a little lower”:

HALPERIN: Would you like to be more specific about what the unemployment rate would be like at the end of your first year?
ROMNEY: I cannot predict precisely what the rate would be at the end of one year. I can tell you that over a period of four years, by a virtue of the polices that we put in place, we get the unemployment rate down to 6 percent, perhaps a little lower.

He later went on Fox News to repeat his promise, and added,

“People all across the country are saying, ‘Wow, 6 percent sounds pretty good,’”

Mitt Romney lost. So, how did the unemployment rate do under Marxist Fascist n0bummer?

Well, consider this:

1. During George W. Bush’s second term, the US saw a net loss of 671,000 jobs. So far, in President Obama’s second term, the U.S. has a net gain of 4,784,000 jobs.

2. Friday’s jobs report showed 321,000 new jobs, and 91% of them were not in health care, showing that other sectors are showing signs of growth, confidence, and improvement.

3. Here’s how employment has gone, starting with the 2008 Bush economic collapse:

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Courtesy @ddiamond

In 2012, President Newt Gingrich blamed President Obama for high gas prices, claiming that he had a plan to bring prices at the pump at or below $2.50/gallon. Just about anyone with a brain dismissed Gingrich’s promise as utter nonsense. The President has no power over global oil prices, much less the cartel of oil producing nations. The price of gasoline had climbed during the last decade with turmoil and supply disruptions arising out of the Iraq war, and was exacerbated by Hurricane Katrina, which took a huge chunk of America’s refining capacity offline. Gas prices plummeted in late 2008 / early 2009 thanks to the global economic downturn, but oil prices soon rebounded and until recently had been north of $100/bbl.

But OPEC leaders recently were unable to agree on production cuts to prop up the price of oil, and prices have plummeted – both crude and at the pump. The average price for a gallon of gas right now is reaching $2.50 nationally.

 

Of course, when you compare the national average to Buffalo, you get higher spikes locally, and much slower responses to drops in prices.

Even if you compare us to Rochester, it’s evident that Buffalo seems to be taken advantage of.

I don’t think it’s because we’re at the end of some pipeline, and it can’t be taxes. It’s something else, and it’d be nice if someone figured out what.

But if you look at the national average, Gingrich’s dopey promise is coming true. The national average for a price of a gallon of gas is close to $2.50, and that’s under President n0bama.

So, thankfully we didn’t have to do a thing – the economy has been making improvements in spite of Congressional gridlock and malfeasance, such as the 2013 shutdown. The price of gas has fallen in recent months because of things that have happened in the global marketplace, rather than by Presidential fiat.

As consumers find they pay less to fill up cars that are now significantly more fuel efficient than 20 years ago – the average MPG has jumped from 20 to 25 just since 2007 – that’s money back in their pockets and helps to stimulate other spending. American crude oil production has skyrocketed since Obama took office, thanks in large part to shale oil (not to be confused with hydrofracking, which produces natural gas).

So, more efficient cars help to lower demand, and a combination of increased domestic production, and OPEC stalemate help to keep supplies high, and even with a rebounding domestic economy, we’re seeing gas prices come down to Gingrichian levels.

The current unemployment rate is 5.8%, which outperforms what Mr. Romney promised might happen under him by 2016. December’s jobs report represented the 10th straight month of job gains surpassing 200,000.

Thanks, President Obama!

Newt Gingrich: Incredibly Disliked

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Today, Carl Paladino will host a campaign rally for all-but-dropped-out Newt Gingrich. Gingrich is the preferred choice of the right wing of the Republican Party who can no longer vote for theocratic lunatic Rick Santorum. 

A recent poll shows this about Gingrich: 

That’s a close match with George W. Bush’s final favorability rating of 25%. In other words, about the same number of people who like Gingrich still liked Bush as the world financial meltdown of 2008 was underway. True believer right-wing Obama-hating people who probably forward loads of false “N0bama” chain emails that they didn’t first run through Snopes. 

This sounds less like a campaign stop – because really, there’s no campaign left – and much more like a paid personal appearance. And no one ever voted for Newt Gingrich ever again. The end. 

On to Florida

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Newt Gingrich is the anti-establishment candidate; the outsider. It doesn’t get more surreal than that.

Mitt Romney will deign – at long last – to release his tax returns, but only for 2010 and 2011. The LGBT community is fascinated to see whether he helped the effort to abolish same sex marriage in California. The rest of us are curious whether he pays something remotely considered “fair” in federal income taxes.

Barack Obama must be tickled over the Republicans’ infighting and the Gingrich surge.

But after Saturday’s South Carolina primary – the place that helped clinch the nomination for George W. Bush in 2000 over a still-moderate, sane John McCain – it’s become quite an interesting primary race.

And one thing is for sure – no one would be paying this much attention to Mitt Romney’s income and his tax bracket were it not for the Occupy movement that has highlighted just how rigged our entire economic and political system has become in favor of the very wealthiest Americans, and how the middle class has been left behind since Reaganomics became our version of a national religion.

Gingrich Family Values

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Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory. – John Kenneth Galbraith

As Newt Gingrich rises in the polls, becomes the darling of the less pragmatic, ideological right, it’s easy to forget just what a detestable person he is. There’s his inner hypocrisy and his inflated sense of self-worth and importance, there’s his casual demagoguery and epic fits of pique, but there’s also Newton Gingrich the person. We know that he left his first wife as she was recuperating in the hospital after uterine cancer surgery, and we know that he fought her so hard on a financial settlement that she was left almost destitute for a time. We also know that he left his second wife shortly after she was diagnosed with MS, at which time he told her about his 6 year-long affair with a much younger staffer, Callista, is future ex-third-wife. 

Newt’s second wife, Marianne, has claimed that she could end Newt’s political career with one interview. 

Marianne just gave ABC a two-hour long interview, set to air as soon as practicable.

And that’s the sticking point. Newt is doing reasonably well in South Carolina, and the primary there is scheduled for  Drudge says that ABC was agonizing over whether to air the interview before or after the primary – after all, a televised interview has a different effect than one from a magazine.

So, is ABC right to air an interview about a Presidential candidate on the Thursday night before a primary being held on Saturday? Of course they are. It’s news that’s relevant to the election, to the primary, to one of the candidates. What difference does it make if they air something that affects the South Carolina primary as opposed to Florida, which comes next?

What it all means for me, however, is that Newt Gingrich is the living, breathing proof that family values are of no importance whatsoever to contemporary Republicans or conservatives. “Family values” is something to be used as a sword against Democrats and homosexuals. It’s ok if you’re Republican.

Gingrich: Give Millionaires a Leg Up!

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The Palinist wing of the so-called “tea party” is just a front group for superwealthy conservatives. As further proof of that, their favored Presidential-candidate-of-the-month, Newt Gingrich, is proposing a reformation of the tax code to codify a lower marginal income tax rate on millionaires than on middle-class families earning $40 – 50,000.

It’s all part of the Republican Party’s war on the middle class, and the social safety net that Americans fought for throughout the course of the last century. A tax cut of this magnitude on the superwealthy would starve the federal government of revenue, resulting either in a fiscal crisis or massive cuts to programs like Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, and other things on which people depend when they are elderly or in the midst of a personal financial crisis.

It’s part of an ideology that treats any public expenditure as redistributionary socialism and represents a real danger that the country slips back to conditions extant during the times of the robber barons.

Right down to Gingrich blaming America’s underclass for being poor.

Right down to Gingrich’s support for an abolition of child labor laws.