Gingrich offers “dream team” to supporters
For a $100 donation, this free poster of Newt Gingrich and his conservative “Dream Team” can be yours.
The poster — featuring the Republican presidential candidate flanked by endorsers of his White House bid — was offered to supporters Tuesday in a new fundraising appeal.
The Dream Team photo was unveiled at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington last week. The Gingrich campaign said it was hit, and now conservatives across the country are clamoring for a copy of their own.
We wondered whether the Gingrich folks were inspired by the reported success of rival Rick Santorum’s sweater vest campaign. But there was no immediate response to an email inquiry about the initial poster offering.
By its own account, the Santorum campaign’s “thank you” gift to small donors — supporters without SuperPAC money — has been a hit too.
The Santorum camp has “extended by popular demand” — for a limited time — its offer of the official Rick Santorum For President sweater vest, which can be had for a minimum contribution of $100. “It’s a great way to show your support for Rick,” the campaign says, describing the vest as 100 percent cotton, made in the USA, and grey (shouldn’t that be g-r-a-y?).
And that’s not even the biggest acknowledgement being offered to people willing to make small contributions to their favorite candidate.
Tending to China-US relations
Valentine’s Day is as good a day as any for China and the United States to work on the kinks in their relationship.
Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping signaled beforehand that tending to the state of the “dynamic and promising” U.S.-China connection would be the at the heart of his White House visit on Tuesday.
The economic and trade relationship between the two countries is far too important to be frayed by “frictions and differences,” Xi wrote in a Q&A submitted to the Washington Post and published on the eve of his White House meeting with President Barack Obama.
“What is important is that we properly handle these differences through coordination based on equality, mutual benefit, mutual understanding and mutual accommodation. We must not allow frictions and differences to undermine the larger interests of our business cooperation,” Xi wrote.
The man many see as China’s leader-in-waiting promised to do better and called on the United States to make an effort too — but he might not be feeling any love from the Republicans seeking to upset Obama in the Nov. 6 election.
Tough talk on China has been a recurring theme on the campaign trail — especially for former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. He calls China a cheater and says, if elected, he’d work to get Bejing labeled a currency manipulator, something the U.S. Treasury has so far refrained from doing.
In a speech last week, the Republican lumped China with Russia and jihadism. (It didn’t have the same ring of George W. Bush’s axis of evil, but the point was made.) Romney, a leading candidate now tied in recent polls, said that trio threatened to compete with the United States and the West for world leadership.
Washington Extra – A Deng Xiaoping Moment?
Maybe it’s the careful, consensus-oriented system that produces them, but China’s leaders in recent years have not exactly exuded personality. President Hu Jintao is famous for his stiff manner and scripted speaking style. Jiang Zemin was slightly more relaxed, and enjoyed showing off his English language skills and knowledge of U.S. history.
Washington on Tuesday will get its first close look at China’s next president, current Vice President Xi Jinping, who has a reputation for being more open and refreshingly direct than some of his predecessors. It may be too much to hope for a “Deng Xiaoping moment,” a 1979 turning point in Sino-American cultural relations when the diminutive Deng, China’s great modernizer, attended a rodeo in Simonton, Texas, donned a giant cowboy hat and wowed the crowd. Deng was then China’s vice premier.
Xi has conflicting needs on this visit. He wants to show peers and the public back home that he can handle the American account, China’s most important relationship. He visited Iowa in 1985 and, by all accounts, the experience affected him. He also wants to strike a good working relationship with the White House and Capitol Hill, which could help both sides handle a daunting array of disagreements: human rights, the South China Sea, China’s currency, and Obama’s more aggressive posture in Asia, to name a few.
But Xi also won’t want to make any waves that could complicate his ascendance to the top of China’s pyramid, still 13 months away. So a jaunty tractor ride when he returns to Iowa later this week may not be in the cards.
Here are our top stories from Washington…
Obama election-year budget aims to spur hiring President Barack Obama called for new spending to boost growth and higher taxes on the rich, laying out an election-year vision for America in a budget that drew heavy fire from Republicans for failing to curb huge deficits. Obama’s 2013 spending proposal is expected to go nowhere in a divided Congress and is widely seen as more of a campaign document that frames his economic pitch to voters and seeks to shift the focus from deficits to economic growth. For more of this story by Alister Bull and Laura MacInnis, read here. For a story on the Arab Spring and the budget by Susan Cornwell, read here. For a story on proposed dividend tax hike by Kim Dixon and Patrick Temple-West, read here.
Watch live: Newt Gingrich speaks at CPAC
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich speaks at CPAC at 4:10pm ET.
Watch live:
Maybe it’s better not to get that big endorsement
One staple of the U.S. political scene is the quest for endorsements, and Republican front-runner Mitt Romney seems to be leading in the race for support from the GOP establishment.
He picked up the support of Arizona Senator John McCain, who was the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota, who also was a member of the U.S. presidential field until August.
He may not be part of the party “establishment,” but Romney even got the backing of a high-profile party figure — albeit one who declared himself an independent in December — reality television star and real estate mogul Donald Trump, who called the former Massachusetts governor “tough, sharp and smart.”
But does such support really help?
“At best, so far that’s gotten him mixed results,” Republican strategist Keith Appell said, when asked about Romney’s support by party leaders. “Nikki Haley didn’t help in South Carolina. Tim Pawlenty did not help him in Minnesota.”
Prominent supporters can act as useful surrogates. Backers might pay to attend a fundraiser headlined by a well-known supporter, and voters might turn out to hear one speak.
How could a smart guy like Mitt Romney think that the endorsement of a scam artist like Trump could bolster his credibility with anybody. Romney’s ONLY asset is his business acumen, touching Trump is a “tar-baby: that tarnishes that asset.
PS. If phrase “tar-baby” could not conceivably be considered racist, when applied to anyone as “White” as Trump, pc has truly gone too far.
Newt’s moon colony — the gift that keeps on giving
Comedians everywhere surely could not have been more thrilled last week when Republican White House hopeful Newt Gingrich laid out his plans for a permanent colony on the moon, with the long-term goal of making it the 51st U.S. state. “By the end of my second term we will have the first permanent base on the moon,” Gingrich said to thundering applause at the NASA stronghold of Cocoa, Florida.
That includes the copywriters at Team Mitt Romney, for whom Gingrich’s proposed moon program is the gift that keeps on giving. Following up on an email over the weekend entitled “Earth to Newt: Tell the Truth,” the Romney Press Shop sent out the following missive on Thursday: “Ground Control to Major Newt: Nevada needs jobs, not a moon colony,” which reminded the former U.S. House speaker that unemployment in the Silver State is still running at 12.6 percent and nearly six in ten mortgaged homes in the state are under water.
Predictably, Comedy Central political satirists Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were quick to ridicule the moon colony. Stewart accused Gingrich of wanting to be “Lunar Trump” by starting a colony the size of a condo development. “And like Earth Trump, you will not be President,” he said. Colbert mocked Gingrich’s idea that the moon could become a manufacturing hub. “America will bring manufacturing to the moon. Ohio? Out of luck.”
Late night comedian David Letterman made hay with Gingrich’s moon plans on Monday night — perhaps the last thing that some Florida voters heard on the night before the state’s primary election. “Newt Gingrich wants to build a colony on the moon. If Newt Gingrich is president I’m going to the colony on the moon,” Letterman quipped, adding that Gingrich proposes to “spend $20 billion to study the effect of gravity on double chins. “
Gingrich has written in the past of his admiration for Hari Seldon, the fictional hero of author Issac Asimov’s “Foundation Series” of science fiction novels. Seldon, a mathematics professor on the far-off planet Trantor, uses “psychohistory” to predict the future in probabilistic terms, including the eventual fall of the Galactic Empire.
As a Seldon devotee, when he promised the moon a week ago, perhaps Gingrich should have seen this coming.
I had a pretty good laugh when I first heard the news, but it made me wonder what it would mean to try to set this up by 2020. I’m not sure it makes much sense to undertake something like this right now, but it’s part of our future, and good to know what would be involved. Here’s a pretty good synopsis of what it would take to have a moon colony:
http://wp.me/p1SONx-5S
More grief for “The Mitt” with backing from The Donald?
Mitt Romney, Donald Trump said in a surprise endorsement from Las Vegas this afternoon, would make a “tough” and “smart” president who wouldn’t “allow bad things to continue to happen to this country we all love.”
But it wasn’t clear that backing from Trump, a real estate mogul who cultivates an aura of glitz and glamour, would help Romney, the former private equity executive who has a net worth estimated at some $270 million and fights charges by critics that he is out of touch with the concerns of average Americans.
Democrats pounced on the opportunity to draw parallels between Romney and the television personality, claiming in a video that alluded to Trump’s starring role on the reality television program, “The Apprentice,” that Romney nabbed Trump’s endorsement because “they both like firing people.”
Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz echoed the theme, telling MSNBC that the endorsement wasn’t surprising because “they both like firing people and they both made millions doing it.” Likening Trump to a “cartoon character,” the DNC head said his endorsement is “like Bugs Bunny saying which candidate for president he supports. So it’s really kind of a non-news event.”
Newt Gingrich, Romney’s chief Republican rival who had reportedly expected to receive Trump’s backing, issued through his spokesperson a long list of public criticisms Trump had previously leveled at the former Massachusetts governor. Among them was a comment Trump made on CNN in April of last year:
“Mitt Romney is a basically small business guy,” Trump said. “He was a hedge fund guy, a fund guy, he walked away with some money from a very good company that he didn’t create; he worked there. He would buy companies; he’d close companies; he’d get rid of jobs.”
Romney was upset in the South Carolina primary on Jan. 21 after a series of ads portraying him as a heartless corporate raider. He once said – in a remark taken out of contest – that he enjoyed firing people. But he also told a questioner last summer that “corporations are people,” and yesterday took heat for saying he did not care about the very poor.
Why is Trump backing Romney if Mitt still hasn’t shown us his Birth Certificate? http://www.senorromney.com
Washington Extra – Combat ready?
The Obama administration is known to be methodical when it comes to its messaging. But Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s declaration that the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan might end next year seems to have caught people here and overseas by surprise.
Today, everyone from Panetta to White House spokesman Jay Carney to NATO allies tried to tamp down notions that a major policy shift was underway. But many were still scratching their head about whether there is now a new U.S. timetable for winding down a war that is over a decade old.
One senior NATO official summed up the potential for confusion with a mind-bending quote: “He (Panetta) said the combat role will come to an end but he also said combat will continue. And that’s exactly what I’m saying.”
So the question is: Did Panetta jump the gun or is this part of a carefully crafted messaging plan, right out of the Obama administration’s playbook?
Here are our top stories from Washington…
Gingrich to get Trump recommendation – media reports
The “major announcement” Donald Trump will make Thursday afternoon in Las Vegas is that he is endorsing the presidential bid of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, according to media reports.
The CBS affiliate in Las Vegas, KLAS TV reports sources confirmed what Trump would say. Earlier a Trump spokesman said only that the impending announcement would pertain to the campaign.
Trump’s announcement will come two days before the Republican caucuses in Nevada, the next state in the party’s presidential nominating contest.
The host of the TV show “The Apprentice” and the former Speaker of the House of Representatives met in Manhattan early in December. “I want his endorsement,” Gingrich told a news conference after their hour-long meeting at Trump’s Fifth Avenue office.
Trump flirted with a presidential run as a Republican and was derided for pushing a discredited charge that President Barack Obama, a Democrat seeking re-election, might not have been born in the United States.
He left the Republican party in December, raising the prospect of a potential third-party run for president.
UPDATED
Is Romney too rich and out of touch?
Mitt Romney ran into a wall of criticism during what should have been his Florida victory lap when he said live on CNN this morning that he is “not concerned about the very poor” and the country has a safety net to protect them.
Democrats leaped onto the remark as yet another sign that the wealthy Republican frontrunner is out of touch with average Americans. Whether or not that is true, it was another gaffe by a candidate who is becoming increasingly known for misspeaking on the campaign trail, especially on issues related to wealth and poverty, even as he blasts Democratic President Barack Obama for waging “class warfare.”
Last month, Romney said he had made “not very much” in speaking fees — and the total turned out to be $375,000. In December, he blundered in a debate by offering Texas Governor Rick Perry a $10,000 bet on healthcare policy. Earlier in the campaign, Romney came under fire for saying he liked to fire people, telling jobless workers in Florida that he, too, was unemployed. And he famously told a questioner at the Iowa State Fair that “corporations are people.”
Romney’s personal fortune has been estimated at $270 million, and his initial refusal to release his tax returns was harshly criticized in the campaigning for South Carolina’s Jan. 21 primary. That line of attack, and ads painting Romney as a heartless corporate raider, helped deliver the contest to Romney’s rival, Newt Gingrich, in a surprise upset. But Romney released the returns and cruised to a 14-point victory in Florida 10 days later after two strong debate performances and a blizzard of anti-Gingrich attack ads.
It remains to be seen how Romney’s wealth plays with Democrats and Independents if he ends up winning the nomination to oppose Obama in the general election on Nov. 6. But Republican strategists said they did not expect it to be an issue for the party’s base as he fights for the nomination.
“Republicans are aspirational people,” said Carlos Curbelo, a Republican strategist based in Miami. “I don’t anticipate any sort of resentment towards Romney because of his ‘healthy’ tax return.”
oh man, part of that $100 goes to the guy that photoshopped 20 lbs of bacon fat off Newt’s neck. That’s great. It looks like some kind of poster for CSI: Ignorantville.