Posted on 05/31/2009 3:03:20 PM PDT by lewisglad
Newt Gingrich grabbed cable news chatter all week after Twittering that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor was a "Latina woman racist." The ensuing controversy has not moderated his opposition.
Today, Renewing American Leadership, a 501(c)3 nonprofit that he heads, sent out an email to supporters calling on them to both "send blast faxes" to U.S. Senators demanding opposition to Sotomayor and contribute money to help the fight. The email opens with this quote, from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: "I have a dream: that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
It continues:
Can you imagine if the President of the United States nominated a judge to the U.S. Supreme Court who said this:
"My experience as a white man will make me a better judge than a Latina woman would be."
Or could you imagine if that same judge ruled from the bench to deny 18 African-American firefighters a promotion just because of their skin color?
That judge would be called a bigot -- and in my judgment, rightly so! Would there be any doubt that he would be FORCED to WITHDRAW his nomination for the Supreme Court?
(Excerpt) Read more at swampland.blogs.time.com ...
When it comes to politicians the first thing I think about (because that’s the first thing they think about) is how will this benefit them politically. If you think in those terms instead of whether or not they are acting based on a set of beliefs you will be far less disappointed when you discover they were acting out of political self interest.
While I am 100 % behind Newt on everything, I give him full marks for standing up the RINO ba*****s that are trying to soft pedal her racist remarks and the other obvious flaws that she has. Her nomination should be withdrawn and every Republican politician should be calling for her to resign NOW. Instead we have dumbos like Sessions(what a disappointment)praising her and letting the WH get away with the BS statement that she “misspoke”, what a crock that is!
The cabal will release power from their cold dead hands only when that happens..
Until it does... calls/emails are just a distraction..
The GOP does have enough votes to stop the nomination. Remember, she needs one REPUBLICAN vote in committee to go to the floor. If Sessions wanted to, he could stop it.
I hope I’m wrong but me thinks this is a political trap. This woman will become a Justice on the Court if the Republicans stick to this race thing, and everything that is said about her that is negative will be used as propaganda by the media to prove that all Republicans are racist.
And while the Republicans get bogged down in defending themselves, the Dems will be passing universal health care and cap and tax. On top of that, the economy will be melting down while we print ourselves into hyperinflation.
After all of this happens, she’ll be sitting on the bench supporting the confiscation of our liberty. Lose, lose, lose... all the way around.
But, like I said, I hope I’m wrong.
Republicans and other persons of conscience need to shut up and simply vote no. No filibuster, just a no vote.
Let the dems defend the indefensible and the republicans keep their rhetorical powder dry.
If the GOP doesn’t question her racism where will the charge come from for the Dems to defend? She would simply be confirmed without anyone questioning it and nothing there for the Dems to defend.
Political traps are just a trait of the Newspapers - all left wing... So to say that someone who disagrees with the Democrats is right wing is a common tactic. With today’s left wing media, it has very little meaning...
So, He is right... She is not only left wing but racist if you actually take her comments in context. Unfortunately, that never stopped the left from pursuing their goals...
“...exposing her will help the GOP.”
It may in the long term, but only after the GOP overcomes the substantial negative blowback if they vote her out of committee.
As IsabelC proposed in another post, in addition to not voting for Sotomayor, the Republicans ought to offer up a list of more qualified Hispanic candidates.
To do so would dramatically change the game and put a brighter light on the Dem’s agenda.
"The standing-room-only debate, staged yesterday in an ornate Senate hearing room, offered an indication that even diehard conservatives like Gingrich, who stepped down as speaker in 1998, are abandoning their skepticism on global warming. ,As recently as two years ago Gingrich ridiculed the notion that humans are causing the earth to warm, but yesterday he said the evidence was "sufficient."
That's a good, fair question.
Each republican needs to say "I cannot, in good conscience, vote to put a person with racist and provably unconstitutional view on the Supreme Court of the United States." Then shut up.
Let the libs prove the negative in the face of the evidence. Take this "racism" charge to them and right into their face by being silent in the face of incontrovertible evidence.
Simply put, take a self-confident, moral stand and vote no - without filibustering - whether we have the votes to kill the nomination or not. That, in my book, is called taking the high road.
Newt RINO? Global warming moron.
Political trap? The Dems have already successfully branded Reps as racists. Even Lindsey Graham and Karl Rove called those who opposed amnesty as racists, bigots, and xenophobes.
The Democrats created the artificial category of “Hispanics” in the 1970s as a way to create another class of victims, which they could imbue with special rights and privileges, including affirmative action and minority business set asides. The result is another minority group that votes Democrat. It doesn’t matter that, according to the Census Bureau, 51 percent of Hispanics self-identify themselves as white.
There is no such thing as an Hispanic race. And Hispanics are not a monolith. The Democrats, under the banner of multiculturalism and diversity, have forged a political coalition that depends on individuals coalescing around racial and ethnic identities rather than the issues.
The Republicans need to expose the Democrats as the real racists and bigots who provide people, including newly arrived immigrants, with special rights and privileges based on race, ethnicity, and gender.
Newt hit this one out of the ball park. Keep saying the things that need to be said. We need to, like Gen. Washington in the Revolution, keep fighting the delaying action and not give up. We may well be in Valley Forge but from this time will come a glorious victory and a new nation.
America will be stronger if it develops coherent technology and market-oriented solutions to environmental conservation and energy consumption. Consider how much better we can do in each field.
It is possible to have a healthy environment and a healthy economy. It is possible to build incentives for a cleaner future. It is possible to have biodiversity and wealthy human beings on the same planet. And it is possible to have free markets, scientific and technological advances, and an even more positive environmental outcome. There is every reason to be optimistic that if we develop smart environmental and biodiversity policies our children and grandchildren will experience an even more pleasant world.
It is clearly possible to combine human progress with biodiversity. There are more trees in Georgia today than there were in 1900 or 1940. The very increase in wealth in America made it possible in 1895 to found the New York Zoological Society (now the Wildlife Conservation Society) and save the American bison from extinction. The application of new technology and new science has cleaned up the air of most American cities (it is far cleaner now than it was twenty years ago even though people are driving more cars more miles).
The greatest dangers to biodiversity on the planet today are poor people cutting down tropical forests for money and killing endangered species for meat. Wealthy people can afford to protect the forests and protect endangered species.
The greatest areas of pollution and toxic wastes on the planet today are the byproducts of the Soviet Empire and a centralized command bureaucracy that was willing to kill the environment to reach production quotas.
Here are a few examples of the kind of science-based, technologically-oriented environmentalism that could improve our quality of life, increase our options, and enhance the natural world.
We have made significant progress in cleaning up places like San Francisco Bay and the Chesapeake but there is much more to be done. Some of it can be accomplished by government’s tapping innovative private clean-up companies.
We must insist that cities meet their obligations in waste cleanup. Atlanta has been a far larger polluter of the Chattahoochee than any private business, yet the federal government has maintained a double standard between what cities and industries are allowed or required to do. Government should be as responsible for running its waste treatment centers professionally and competently as the private sector. The rivers will be cleaner as a result.
We should encourage the kind of public-private partnerships that have enabled the Trust for Public Land, the state of Georgia, the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation, and the federal government to create environmentally sound land use along the Chattahoochee. It is important for cities, counties, and states to buy parkland when it is cheap and easily available and before population growth overwhelms open space.
The world biodiversity hot spots have been identified. These are places where biologists and botanists have discovered unusually rich concentrations of animals and plants. If the United States challenged Europe and Japan to join it in financing a world biodiversity refuge system and tied foreign aid into the process of maintaining biodiversity, we could probably save a very high percentage of the earth’s biological richness for our children and grandchildren to enjoy, study, and learn from at a surprisingly small cost (trivial compared to what the Left would spend through the Kyoto Treaty).
Kyoto is a bad treaty. It is bad for the environment and it is bad for America. It sets standards that will require massive investments by the United States but virtually no investments by other countries. The Senate was right when it voted unanimously against the treaty. We should insist on revisiting the entire Kyoto process and resolutely reject efforts to force us into an anti-American, environmentally failed treaty.
The United States should support substantial research into climate science, managing the response to climate change, and in developing new non-carbon energy systems. It is astounding to watch people blithely propose trillions of dollars in spending on a topic on which we have failed to spend modest amounts to better understand. To its credit the Bush administration has begun to increase funding on climate research but much more needs to be done. Furthermore, it is astounding to have people focus myopically on carbon as the sole source of climate change. The world’s climate has changed in the past with sudden speed and dramatic impact. Global warming may happen. On the other hand it is possible Europe will experience another ice age. The Norwegian politicians who worry much about global warming (the politically correct thing to do even in a cold country that would demonstrably benefit from a warmer climate) may suddenly find themselves migrating south if a new interim ice age were to happen. This point is politically incorrect but the history and science of climate change is far more complex and uncertain than the politically driven mass hysteria of scientists who sign on to ads about a topic for which they have no scientific proof.
The federal government should establish measurable standards for a healthy environment but allow widespread experimentation in achieving those goals. Too much of the conflict between landowners and federal employees and between cities and states and the federal government are a function of a heavy handed bureaucracy. The lengthy process of environmental planning is made adversarial and expensive beyond reason and should be redesigned to have a collaborative style with the goal of having both development and a healthy environment.
Brownfields (abandoned former industrial sites often with toxic and other wastes that need to be cleaned up) need a new federal law to encourage cities to get them cleaned up. The current system favors litigation over cleanup and has kept thousands of sites in our cities from being cleaned up. The trial lawyers have been winning but the people of the cities have been losing. We need litigation reform and financial encouragement for citizens to clean up the sites. This will help create economic opportunity in our cities, and replace blighted, abandoned areas with new development opportunities.
The Bush initiative on healthy forest management is an important step in the right direction. Forests in particular and national lands in general should be run on sound science and conservation principles rather than on emotional rhetoric designed for political effect. The refusal to manage the forests intelligently led to huge beetle infestations in the southwest that produced sicker and poorer forests. The refusal to clear out dead timber across the west led to fires that were hotter, more intense, and therefore more destructive. The left wing of the environmental movement represents a repudiation of eighty years of sound conservation practice that stemmed from the principles laid down by Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot. The new healthy forest policies are sound steps in the right direction and should be expanded.
These are just a few examples of how a positive, activist, problem-solving environmentalism could give our children and grandchildren a better world. That goal will be even more rapidly achieved if we make dramatic progress on the energy front.
Energy
A sound American energy policy would focus on four areas: basic research to create a new energy system that has few environmental side effects, incentives for conservation, more renewable resources, and environmentally sound development of fossil fuels. To its credit, the Bush administration has approached energy environmentalism the right way, including using public-private partnerships that balance economic costs and environmental gain.
The Bush administration’s investment in developing hydrogen energy resources may be the biggest breakthrough of the next half-century. Hydrogen has the potential to provide energy that has no environmental downside. In one stroke a hydrogen economy would eliminate both air pollution and global warming concerns. Since hydrogen is abundant in the air and water around us, it eliminates both the national security and foreign exchange problems associated with petroleum. Suddenly oil would become a source of petrochemicals and cease to be a source of energy. The relative requirements for oil would shift to making plastics and away from providing fuel. The result would be a lot less reliance on the Middle East and a lot less concern over balance of payments.
A hydrogen economy is probably twenty years away but there seems to be no scientific reason the hydrogen engine cannot be mass-¬produced. General Motors and virtually every other major automobile manufacturer have major programs underway to develop hydrogen energy designs and production. The potential is real that many of the pollution problems of our lifetime will begin to disappear after 2020 or 2025.
Conservation is the second great opportunity in energy. Already the United States has adjusted to earlier oil price increases by becoming a dramatically more efficient user of energy. But companies like Honeywell and Johnson Controls believe we could achieve 30 to 60 percent improvements in energy conservation if our tax policy better encouraged it and if we set the standard by optimizing energy use in government buildings. A tax credit to subsidize energy efficient cars (including a tax credit for turning in old and heavily polluting cars) is another idea we should support.
Renewable resources are gradually evolving to meet their potential: from wind generator farms to solar power to biomass conversion. Continued tax credits and other advantages for renewable resources are a must.
Finally, it is time for an honest debate about drilling and producing in places like Alaska, our national forests, and off the coast of scenic areas. The Left uses scare tactics from a different era to block environmentally sound production of raw materials. Three standards should break through this deadlock. First, scientists of impeccable background should help set the standards for sustaining the environment in sensitive areas, and any company entering the areas should be bonded to meet those standards. Second, the public should be informed about new methods of production that can meet the environmental standards, and any development should be only with those new methods. Third, a percentage of the revenues from resources generated in environmentally sensitive areas should be dedicated to environmental activities including biodiversity sustainment, land acquisition, and environmental cleanups in places where there are no private resources that can be used to clean up past problems.
With these kinds of investments we can have an energy strategy that meets our economic and environmental needs, and a generation from now we can be a healthier and wealthier country that is less reliant on foreign sources of energy.
Source: Newt.org
Agreed...aren’t there any real men left in the party? Only Palin appears to be such.
Rush doesn’t want to be president, but he may end up having to run due to nothing but panywaists in the party.
Our side are such dorks that they still think they have to make the media like them.
So you care about what the left thinks? And they will hug us and love us if we don't attack?
You are correct that it is a trap for any conservative that pretends to give a rat's pointy tail about what leftists think.
/johnny
Transcript:
KERRY: I’m excited to hear you talk about the urgency — I really am. And given that — albeit you still sort of have a different approach — what would you say to Sen. Inhofe and to others in the Senate who are resisting even the science? What’s your message to them here today?
GINGRICH: My message I think is that the evidence is sufficient that we should move towards the most effective possible steps to reduce carbon-loading of the atmosphere.
KERRY: And to it urgently — and now…
GINGRICH: And do it urgently. Yes.
If I can, let me explain partly why this is a very challenging thing to do if you’re a conservative. For most of the last 30 years, the environment has been a powerful emotional tool for bigger government and higher taxes. And therefore, if you’re a conservative, the minute you start hearing these arguments, you know what’s coming next: which is bigger government and higher taxes.
So even though it may be the right thing to do, you end up fighting it because you don’t want big government and higher taxes. And so you end up in these kinds of cycles. And part of the reason I was delighted to accept this invitation and I’m delighted to be here with Sen. Kerry is I think there has to be a if you will a “green conservatism” — there has to be a willingness to stand up and say alright here’s the right way to solve these as seen by our value system.
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