Gingrich's 12 steps to replace the Left.

On National Review Online, Robert Costa lists the 12 steps ("at least 12") that Newt has laid out in his goal of replacing the Left (above is the entire speech):

1. Turn the $132 billion spent on unemployment compensation last year into a human capital development fund by requiring every person who can’t find a job to take a training program in return for their compensation. Paying people to do nothing for 99 weeks is as wrong in unemployment compensation as it was in welfare. This is an opportunity to dramatically enhance the working skills of the American people at no new cost.

2. Replace litigation-focused workers compensation with a rehabilitation and capabilities focused program that maximizes the speed of helping people medically, and focuses on retraining and focusing on what they can do rather than on what they can’t do.

3. Review the IBM proposal to take $1 trillion out of the cost of running the federal government over the next decade, and ask IBM and other technology companies to make a similar proposal for state and local government.

4. As a first step toward a tenth amendment project, identify every federal regulation which costs money and minimizes state creativity. Work through the ALEC collectively to have Congress repeal the regulation, abolish the office or agency or defund the activity.

5. As a step toward replacing Obamacare, block grant Medicaid by number of people in poverty per state, and give the states freedom to invent a more effective system of prevention, wellness, and chronic disease management without Washington red tape and bureaucratic dictation.

6. As a step toward more affordable care, eliminate the $70 billion to $120 billion in theft in Medicare and Medicaid created by the administrative incompetence of the federal bureaucracy and the innovative determination of modern criminals.

7. Propose a fifty-state competition to block grant all federal Health Information Technology money and see which state can complete the first paperless health system.

8. As a leader in your state, bring together every innovative entrepreneur and CEO in the state to develop a benchmark for helping businesses and entrepreneurs create high paying jobs in competition with China, India, and Germany and to focus on growing your state’s export success to create local jobs through worldwide sales.

9. Emphasize the right of parents to know how their children are doing, know how their school is doing, and have the right to choose a better school if they believe their child is being inadequately prepared for success.

10. Insist on paying great teachers a lot more and releasing bad teachers before they can cripple the future of the children they serve.

11. Benchmark salaries and benefits in your state and insist that government employees be compensated fairly within the framework of the taxpayers’ capabilities. As Governor-elect Scott Walker has said, we are not going to have bureaucratic have’s and taxpayer have-not’s in America.

12. Insist on reasserting American Exceptionalism by having every student in taxpayer-financed schools, whether K through 12 or in the state college and university systems, have a brief course annually on the Declaration of Independence, its assertion of self-evident truths, and its declaration that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The time has come to reassert that we are Americans, and America is a learned civilization.

Newt's PAC raises second most among GOP, spends more in Iowa than anyone else.

According to FEC reports, American Solutions PAC raised $314,000 in the last quarter. Among Republicans, only Sarah Palin had more, with $469,000. Both her and Gingrich outpaced, as the Washington Post put it, "longtime fundraising leader" Mitt Romney. Of all the prospective Presidential candidates -- Palin, Romney, Mike Huckabee, Haley Barbour, Tim Pawlenty, etc. -- Newt was the last to start a PAC. Yet in less than a year, he is competitive with the two top fundraisers: Palin, whose committee has been up for a couple of years, and Romney, whose PAC is nearly three years old.

So where was Gingrich spending this money? He spent the third most -- behind Romney and Palin -- on contributions "to other candidates and state parties."

And interestingly, much of Gingrich's money went to the state that has held the nation's first Presidential contest since 1972: Iowa.

Danielle Kurtzleben writes:

American Solutions, a political action committee founded and chaired by Gingrich, contributed $107,500 to Iowa politicians and the state party. Pawlenty's Freedom First PAC donated $82,000 in the state, and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney gave $50,100. Other possible presidential hopefuls spending on 2010 Iowa elections included Huckabee, who dropped $15,500; Palin, with $15,000....

Cary Covington, professor of political science at the University of Iowa, says that contributing to state officials' campaigns can go a long way toward mobilizing Republican voters. 'You need the support of the party at the local level,' says Covington. 'Getting people to come out on a cold winter night isn't easy, and (state-level politicians) are the people who have the connections and the organization to do that.'

On top of that, Newt's 527, American Solutions for Winning the Future, raised over 9.9 million dollars the first nine months of 2010. (527s can raise money in unlimited amounts, unlike PACs.)

Alexander Burns of Politico:

And even those figures won’t provide a full reckoning of Gingrich’s fundraising activities this cycle. According to data shared with Morning Score, Gingrich helped Republicans raise more than $7 million over the 2009-2010 cycle, through dozens of speeches and nearly $1.9 million raised for GOP campaign committees through direct mail. He also participated -- along with many others -- in a joint NRSC/NRCC fundraising dinner that brought in over $14 million for the two committees.

Gingrich spread his attention widely, but also put down deep financial markers in early primary states: In Iowa, Gingrich’s donations, speeches and other appeals guided some $256,000 to Republican candidates. In South Carolina, he generated $68,000 for the GOP. His New Hampshire presence was more limited, but he still brought in $5,000 at a speech to a state GOP breakfast and raised $18,000 for Sen.-elect Kelly Ayotte in combined small-dollar donations.

Given the earlier numbers, that means that through his "speeches and other appeals" in Iowa that Newt raised nearly $150,000.

Though it is not clear, it would appear that Newt's role in the larger campaign to remove three Iowa judges who called gay marriage a "constitutional right" does not count toward that above total as it was not a Republican Party effort.

The Americano

Last year, Newt Gingrich launched The Americano, a news site for Hispanic Americans. "[I]t is the bilingual brainchild of Sylvia Garcia, a longtime employee of Gingrich Communications, the former speaker's consulting business," wrote Michael Scherer on Time.com. "The idea came during the election," Garcia says. "There really isn't any media that is covering conservative values for Hispanics. Everything you see is very one-sided."

Today, the first annual Americano Forum will kick off in Washington, D.C. Three of the presentations:

• Why Hispanics are Natural Conservatives.
• Melting Pot or Salad Bowl?
• Hispanics and the American Experiment: The Greatness of Conservatism.

Some of the guests include Jeb Bush, Jr., former Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez, former Prime Minister of Spain José María Aznar, and Mexican Ambassador Arturo Sarukhan.

The Washington Post notes that Fox News launched a Latino website, latino.foxnews.com, in October and that the Heritage Foundation will soon have Libertad.org. But "Gingrich's efforts are drawing the most attention," writes David Montgomery.

Montgomery quotes Lionel Sosa, "who pioneered GOP outreach to Lationos on behalf of Ronald Reagan and both George Bushes": "This is the first time that planning for the Latino vote and getting together all the conservative Latinos in a major effort has been done outside of a campaign.

Juan Hernandez told Montgomery, "Newt is setting a table that had not been set before."

Univision anchor Jorge Ramos: "It's a matter of respect. Newt Gingrich understands that." Part of that respect is that Gingrich has been studying Spanish an hour a week lately.

Gingrich told the Post:

My firm defense of American exceptionalism gets its strongest endorsement from first-generation immigrants, who walk up with tears in their eyes and say, 'This is why we came to America.' On one hand, they want to know that I'm sensitive to, and care about, their historical background; on the other hand, they really want me to be aggressively for America. It's the integrating of that balance that's so important.

Newt's interview with Hannity

The first segment.

If the second becomes available online, I will post it.

The Essential (and Exceptional) American

In his weekly e-mail newsletter, this one entitled "The Essential (and Exceptional) American," Newt lays out why the concept of American Exceptionalism is so important and why the left gets it wrong.

Asserting American Exceptionalism is not a vain exercise in building our national self-esteem by boasting about our country's great wealth and military capability.

It is also not an argument that says America can 'go it alone' on the world stage.

Nor is it a belief that America's success is pre-ordained by the Almighty, no matter what we do (which is not to say that the hand of Providence cannot be seen during key points in American history.)

Instead, American Exceptional ism is an idea as old as our country itself. The Founding Fathers understood that the vast resources at our fledgling country's disposal coupled with our puritan roots and lack of a feudal past meant that the United States was uniquely positioned to thrive as an exception to the corruption and poverty of other countries.

More importantly, they understood that the new nation was the first to be founded on the self-evident truth that individual rights come directly from God, not the church or a King, and that citizens loan that power to the state. In America, the individual is sovereign, not the government, which was a revolutionary break with previous forms of government in the world.

This relationship was expressed in our founding political document, the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Having defined it, Newt goes after liberal critics of it:

The Left routinely mocks the idea of American Exceptionalism, with one liberal writer recently dismissing it as an exercise in 'toasting our fabulousness.'...But what the Left fails to understand is that the relationship between God, the citizen, and the state, understood by our founding fathers and expressed in the Declaration, shaped the Constitution (which identifies the source of the new government's power as "We the people..."), our subsequent national policies, and our enduring understanding of American Exceptionalism.
America developed a free market economic system not based on some academic analysis that it is more efficient at creating wealth, but because if the individual is sovereign, the idea of the state trying to organize human activity is abhorrent, a violation of the individual's right to pursue happiness.

Instead, our country believes the proper role of government in the economic sphere is to create a framework that maximizes the ability of citizens to engage in free exchange, such as putting the weight of law behind the enforcement of contracts and by prosecuting fraud. It is not the role of government to try and redistribute wealth, create new entitlements or bail out politically connected special interests.

Similarly, America's great freedom of religious practice did not evolve based on a simple desire to create social harmony. It is a direct consequence of this historic understanding of the relationship between God, the citizen and the state. If "our Creator" is the source of our unalienable rights – including the right to know and worship God – then it is illicit for government to get between the citizen and the worship of God.

The modern distortion of the establishment clause of the First Amendment, which has been used to justify the tearing down of crosses on public land and the harassment of civic organizations like the Boy Scouts of America, is an explicit violation of this natural order.

The Left hates the idea of American Exceptionalism because it sets boundaries on the power of the state. The Left's desire for ever bigger government clashes with the core principles of America's exceptional founding.

That's why the Left is engaged in an unending war in academia and Hollywood to reduce the exceptional nature of America's founding by trashing the integrity of our founding fathers and trying to paint our country's enormous and rapid rise in wealth and power as due to almost anything other than the freedoms we enjoy.

Newt's daughter, Jackie, has a book out, titled The Essential American: 25 Documents and Speeches Every American Should Own.

You can sign up for Newt's weekly newsletter here.

Gingrich interviewed by Greta Van Susteren

First segment. Second segment.

Gingrich in 2nd place, says PPP.

Public Policy Polling (PPP) releasaed a poll Tuesday showing that Sarah Palin, at 21%, is first among Republicans, with Newt Gingrich's 19% support in second. Mitt Romney is narrowly behind at 18 and Mike Huckabee gets 16% of likely primary voter support.

The last such poll done by PPP had Romney at 22%, Huckabee at 21%, Gingrich at 18%, and Palin at 17%.

Newt up 43-39 against Obama, says Zogby.

In their most recent poll, Zogby International reports that Newt Gingrich is leading President Obama by four points, 43-39. Mitt Romney is up 44-38, while Sarah Palin is down 41-40.

If one of Romney's main selling points is electability, this poll would seem to do some damage to that as he barely outdoes Gingrich. This after Romney already ran for President.