A Question for Newt Gingrich. Newt Gingrich: The invented political gnome. New York, NY - From Paracelsus (1493-1541) to CS Lewis (1898-1963), JRR Tolkien (1892-1973) and all the way to JK Rowling, the creative crafts of alchemists, philologists, novelists and high fantasy legendarium visionaries have seen fit to give humanity the dubious gift of the small humanoid creature that lives underground, minding his and our business - and we call the thing a gnome. As a figurine, a spectre and a creature, the invention of the gnome was an act of supplementarity, an afterthought to our humanity, something that was supposed to be a supplement, but that has ended up supplanting.
The gnome to man is like writing is to speech - if Derrida were to write on gnomes. As all other cases of supplementarity, the humanoid gnome did not compromise humanity - it made the familiarity of the human foreign. Be that as it may, a gnome is a humanoid invention belying the insufficiency of humans in minding their own business. HAL has taken over Tyranny in democracy. Gingrich's Big, Really, Really Big Ideas. 'Invented' Palestinian confronts Gingrich at GOP debates.
Finally, weeks after Newt Gingrich’s remarks citing Palestinians as an “invented people,” in last night’s Florida presidential debate, the GOP candidates were confronted by a Palestinian—and a Republican Palestinian too! The man, Abraham Hassan respectfully affirmed that he does exists and asked Republican candidates to explain how they will bring peace to the Middle East. Hassan’s question: Abraham Hassan from Jacksonville, Florida. How would a Republican administration help bring peace to Palestine and Israel when most candidates barely recognize the existence of Palestine or its people?
As a Palestinian American Republican I’m here to tell you we do exist. Before Romney spoke, the first of the presidential hopefuls to respond, the crowd applauded Hassan’s question. Romney evaded the “invented” comment, and suggested Palestinian “aggression” was caused by Obama: Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) fact-checked Romeny’s comments, catching him in a lie regarding Obama. Gingrich continues: America At Risk: The War With No Name - Official Trailer. Newt Gingrich and his sleazy ways: A history lesson.
By Roger Parloff, senior editor The views expressed here are his own. FORTUNE -- Young conservatives were apparently taken aback by recent revelations that late-surging GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich had, between 1999 and 2008, received at least $1.6 million in payments from the now-seized mortgage giant Freddie Mac. While Freddie was, in anyone's book, a contributor to the great financial crisis that still afflicts us, it was, in the view of most Republicans, an archfiend on the level of Lex Luthor. But aside from the substantive questions Gingrich's lucrative assignment raised—exactly what services had he performed for Freddie? —it was also an embarrassment at a more elementary, glass-house-stone-throwing level, since Gingrich had so recently and contemptuously denounced Rep.
Then, as Gingrich bullied his way past questions about his Freddie assignment, his hypocrisy was soon eclipsed by his breathtaking lack of candor. "Aggressive" interpretation of the law 1. Gingrich Tax Plan Would Codify Lower Taxes On Rich Than On Middle Class. On Monday, the Tax Policy Center published an analysis of Newt Gingrich's plan to overhaul the tax code -- the latest in a series of of analyses of GOP presidential candidate tax proposals. And like all the plans that came before it, Gingrich's constitutes a massive tax cut for the rich. Indeed, no matter how you stack the numbers, Gingrich wants a tax system that permanently holds tax rates on the highest earners lower than tax rates on the middle class. There are a lot of ways to parse the data.
Gingrich proposes creating an alternative tax system that would significantly flatten the code, while keeping the current one in place as an option. So you can run the numbers assuming everybody jumps into the new system, or you can run them assuming that the only people who hop into the new system are people who would benefit financially as a result. Here's what happens to people's average federal tax burden as a result. Palestinians are an invented people, says Newt Gingrich | World news. The US Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has declared that the Palestinians are an "invented" people who want to destroy Israel. The Jewish Channel, a cable TV station, posted online its interview with the former US House speaker, who has risen to the top of Republican nomination candidates to challenge Democratic President Barack Obama in the November 2012 election.
Gingrich differed from official US policy that respects the Palestinians as a people deserving of their own state based on negotiations with Israel. "Remember, there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire" until the early 20th century, Gingrich said. "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," he said. No, Newt and JPost, there is no Santa Claus: how national identities are really formed | Ibishblog. What's most interesting about the brouhaha regarding Newt Gingrich's outrageous comments about Palestinians being “an invented people” — which he then augmented by describing them in general as “terrorists" — isn't the rebuttals or defenses of these comments.
Almost every responsible, sane and rational actor has dismissed Gingrich's remarks as preposterous, not because the Palestinians are not in some sense “invented” but because all modern national identities plainly are, in the same ways. This is not only obvious at first glance, it's also been thoroughly dissected and documented by a host of academics in multiple disciplines over the past 30 years. Over the summer, I wrote two lengthy essays (read them here and here) about how this process works in both Israeli and Palestinian nationalisms, both of which can draw in ancient sources, but both of which are of course entirely modern and essentially 20th-century phenomena.
So far, so good, one would think. The real 'invented' people. It is hard to believe that anyone who defends Israel's legitimacy as a state would buy into former Speaker Newt Gingrich's argument that Palestine is an "invented nation". The singular triumph of the Zionist movement is that it invented a state and a people - Israel and the Israelis - from scratch. The first Hebrew-speaking child in 1900 years, Ittamar Ben-Avi, was not born until 1882. His father, the brilliant linguist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, created a modern language for him to speak by improvising from the language of the Bible. The founder of the Israeli state was Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), an assimilated Viennese writer who was convinced by the Dreyfus trial in France - and the horrendous right-wing anti-Semitism that resulted from it - that Jews had to get out of Europe.
In 1897, he wrote the book that would essentially inaugurate the Zionist movement. He didn't specify where the Jewish homeland should be. The reaction to Herzl's idea was primarily that he was a bit crazy. Newt Gingrich: Uninsured Should Receive Health Care Through Charity, Not Government. IT'S ON! Nancy Pelosi Launches War Against Newt Gingrich. Newt Gingrich has skyrocketed to the top of the Republican presidential field — and Democrats couldn't be more thrilled with their new target.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi fired the first shot this week, needling her former House colleague about the ethics investigation Gingrich faced while he was House Speaker. In an interview with Talking Points Memo yesterday, Pelosi teased that she knows "a lot" from her days as senior Democrat on the House Ethics Committee, which investigated Gingrich for tax cheating and campaign finance violations. “One of these days we’ll have a conversation about Newt Gingrich,” Pelosi said. “I know a lot about him. I served on the investigative committee that investigated him, four of us locked in a room in an undisclosed location for a year.
"It tells you how capriciously political that committee was that she was on it. It's a far cry from this buddy-buddy 2008 ad featuring Gingrich and Pelosi cozying up on a loveseat talking about global warming. Newt Is Dumb. Gingrich slots MEK terrorists' supporter John Bolton for State. Newt Gingrich says he would appoint John Bolton as Secretary of State in order to “reform” the State Department.
John Bolton Bolton is an irascible attorney who is horrible to his subordinates, makes Rod Blagojevich look like a paragon of truthfulness, played a role in inserting the notorious, forged “yellowcake uranium from Niger” assertion in George W. Bush’s pre-Iraq War State of the Union address, wants to bomb Iran so badly he sometimes just sits in an F-18 and imagines himself over Isfahan; and, worst of all, he has offered moral support to a terrorist organization, which the Supreme Court rather frowns on.
Bolton spoke at an event in honor of the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), an Iranian terrorist organization that mixes Marxism and Islam (its logo has a hammer and sickle) and has killed many civilians in Iran as well as having at one time targeted Americans. The MEK is on the State Department terrorism list. MEK Logo with Hammer and Sickle. Bruce Bartlett: Gingrich and the Destruction of Congressional Expertise.