Can you guess which word Newt most often uses on Twitter?

Human Events had an interesting article today about how the 2012 Republican Presidential candidates are using Twitter. They linked to a sort of word cloud using what each person tweets.

Here is Newt's.

Surprised what the most commonly used word is? Me either.

Video of Newt on the O'Reilly Factor

Link.

The Gawker Story (Update: NBC's Social Media Director tried to correct Gawker shortly after story's release.)

This afternoon, Gawker, a self-described gossip site, published a story alleging that many of Newt's Twitter followers were fake. Their "source" was allegedly a former Gingrich staffer who, of course, would not go on the record.

Newt's spokesman, R.C. Hammond, tweeted tonight: "@Newtgingrich's 1.3 million followers are legitimate. @Gawker 's "source" is not. Story untrue."

Then some other staffers -- and a former one -- had some fun with the story:

Steve Everley, who used to work at American Solutions but is now not in politics (just energy policy issues), tweeted: "The question isn't "are Newt's followers legitimate?" but rather "who still reads Gawker?"

Tim Cameron tweeted at the author of the story: ".@johnjcook when u were writing that story on Newt didn't it seem a little off to u? Like wouldn't these 'companies' be on FEC disclosures?"

Adam Waldeck: "curious if this was the "former gingrich staffer" gawker talked to on their twitter story." He then posted this picture:

Link.



Newt 2012 Intern Adam Savader: "I can't stand listening to people refer to Gawker's @johnjcook as a reporter, journalist, columnist, or writer. The man is a hack!"

(If you are not already following them on Twitter, please do so.)

(Update: The aforementioned Cameron found out that Ryan Osborn, the social media director at NBC News, tweeted to the author of the Gawker story: "Newt was on Twitter's Suggested List which is how his account gained most of its followers." Undeterred by facts, the author does not retract any of the story.)

(Another update: Jacob Hawkins of Newt's campaign brought attention to a story that Osborn linked to in which the "Suggested Users" feature is described.)

Amity Shlaes: GOP should "Pull a Newt" on deficit talks

Shlaes, who wrote the terrific book The Forgotten Man, which corrected many of the falsehoods of the economic history of the Great Depression, writes:

Thank goodness for Mitch McConnell. Thank goodness Republicans in Congress didn’t “pull a Newt.” Welcome, Clinton Era II.

That’s the conventional wisdom about the budget deal reached July 31. Commentators are emphasizing the statesmanship of the Senate minority leader. Without the Kentucky senator’s diplomacy, the radicals in the Grand Old Party might have played too rough and shut down the government, as House Speaker Newt Gingrich did in the 1990s, rather than giving in to President Bill Clinton on the budget.

Therefore, we have avoided calamity. If the Tea Party leaders, sons of Newt, keep quiet, we may even move into a balmy period of growth and narrowing deficits, just like during the late 1990s, the thinking goes. This attitude is reinforced by McConnell’s loud suggestion that Gingrich’s intransigence damaged the Republican “brand.”

Gingrich recently said that McConnell represented a “Washington version of reality that’s just not true.” And he’s right. The conventional wisdom is contrived. The debt-limit deal, which will cut more than $2 trillion in spending over the next decade, is impressive. However, a little more Newt would have got the bond market something it would like even better: a tougher and more enduring commitment from U.S. leaders to reduce our debt and deficits.

Consider what actually happened in the 1990s to Gingrich, the Republican Party and the budget deficit. He became speaker in 1995 brandishing the “Contract with America,” which promised to amend the Constitution to require a balanced budget. Rather than give in to a weak budget proposal, Gingrich forced a government shutdown not once, but two years in a row.

In the short term, Americans didn’t approve. CNN polls in July 1995 showed that 44 percent of Americans said Republicans were doing a better job of handling the budget than Democrats were. By Nov. 15 of that year, with the first shutdown underway, respondents had flipped, with 49 percent of Americans approving more of the Democrats’ approach and 33 percent preferring the Republican way.

But evidence that the shutdowns did longer-term damage to Gingrich, the party or the country is scant. Gingrich achieved much after the shutdowns, including negotiating welfare reform and some of the budget deals that led to the federal surplus a few years later.

Those who criticize Gingrich’s tactics in budget negotiations are forgetting the big story. President Clinton didn’t come into office as an austerity champion. He came to Washington to rearrange health care and promulgate Labor Party-style workplace reforms. Had Gingrich and the Republicans not been there, and had Democrats ruled both Houses, Clinton would have heeded deficit doves such as Labor Secretary Robert Reich and adopted a gentler plan for balancing the budget. Reich repeatedly criticized Clinton for “caving” on the deficit.

But thanks to Gingrich and others — especially the House Ways and Means Committee chairman, Bill Archer — Republicans were able to win an agreement from the White House and Democratic legislators to overhaul welfare. The budget-reducing regime that Clinton and Gingrich had agreed to narrowed the deficit each year. Eventually, Archer even got Clinton to cut the capital-gains tax. Government analysts expected the deficit to shrink, but not as much or as steadily as it did.

...

A plan to do so might include a balanced-budget amendment of the sort written into the Contract with America. It may involve a new monetary law that gives the Federal Reserve less discretion in setting interest rates. It certainly should begin with a reform of Social Security. President Barack Obama’s own record, whether campaigning or promulgating his health-care policy, suggests that he, like Clinton, isn’t temperamentally inclined to go along with such ideas without mega-pressure from the opposing party.

Senator McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner won’t be able to apply that pressure without the help of that rash group, so capable of “pulling a Newt,” called the Tea Party.

The full article can be read here.

More from Newt's weekend in Iowa

From NBC's Alex Moe:

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich made three appearances in Northeast Iowa on Saturday — a pancake breakfast, a parade, and a county fair — two of them tied to this town’s 45th Nordic Fest.

The festival celebrates the area’s Norwegian heritage, and it has been taking place there since 1967. Gingrich began his day eating pancakes and sausage at the Decorah Fire Department. He made his way around to every table in the two-room truck hall, shaking hands and asking for support in next year’s caucuses.

The former House speaker then made his way to the Annual Nordic Fest Grand Parade a couple blocks from the local fire station. Gingrich and his wife Callista (who is in town to play the French horn in her Luther College band reunion Sunday) rode on a float with hay pulled by a big red tractor. The banners on the sides read, “The Winneshiek Country GOP welcomes Newt Gingrich.” Amid other floats with Vikings, Wizard of Oz dancers, and clowns, the Gingriches threw candy and waved along the parade route.

After the parade ended, Gingrich commented on the ongoing debt crisis. He called President Obama “really irresponsible” and said he felt House Speaker Boehner’s efforts are “steps in the right direction.”

The last event on Gingrich’s public schedule yesterday included a stop at the Mitchell County Fair in Osage, IA where he again greeted Iowans asking for their support in the caucuses. “I will be the only Newt Gingrich on the ballot,” he said. Gingrich was escorted around the fair by State Rep. Josh Byrnes, who introduced the presidential hopeful to many locals, including small business owner Wally Rowcliffe.

Rowcliffe is undecided whom to support in the upcoming caucuses, but he noted, “Today would make a big difference, that he [Gingrich] had enough time to come and talk to us here in small town USA.”

The Gingrich campaign said the candidate will be back in the Hawkeye State later this week.

Newt on debt deal: "not a solution" to our "jobs and debt crisis"

From The Daily Caller:

“This agreement only sets the stage for an enormous amount of work going forward -- well beyond the next two years -- on how to create jobs, reduce government spending, return to balanced budgets and pay off our debt,” Gingrich said in a statement.

“If the ultimate result of this deal is a tax increase and/or debilitative cuts in our investment in national security, it will be a destructive failure,” he continued. “With so much work remaining to be done, this deal is yet another reminder of the urgent need to replace President Obama and his radical commitment to big government and higher taxes.”

Gingrich said that, if elected president, he would solve America’s debt crisis by focusing on job creation, keeping politics out of national security spending and reducing federal spending by restructuring government.

Newt: "I actually think ideas matter."

Newt sat down with the editorial board of the Marietta Daily-Journal last Thursday. It is too long to post even a majority of the interview, I will post quite a bit. Here is the full article.

On false, ugly rumors about him:

"I think you tell them the truth," Gingrich said. "And you say, 'I've done things in my life that I've had to reconcile with God and seek forgiveness for, and that's a fact. And I have a very strong marriage. I'm very close to both my daughters. I'm very close to both my grandchildren, close to my two son-in-laws.'"

Gingrich, who represented Georgia's Sixth District from 1979 to 1999 as a Republican U.S. congressman and served as House Speaker from 1995 to 1999, recalled a campaign he went through in Georgia.

"We had a candidate who was attacking me about family and my younger daughter did a commercial and just said, 'it's not true and it's not accurate.' I mean, the worst things said about me are simply not true, and I think both of my daughters are quite prepared to say those things are not true. Now, that means people attacking me aren't going to have a fight with me, they're now going to have to have a fight with Jackie and Kathy, and I think that becomes pretty convincing for people."

On his campaign:

Gingrich blamed the "elite media" for why his campaign had trouble getting traction.

"If you look at the news media coverage, the elite media went out of their way for seven or eight weeks to attack me," Gingrich said. "You had day after day people saying, 'well, his campaign's dead. He's gone. It's over.'"

He recalled a week where he campaigned at various town hall meetings in Iowa, each with a bigger crowd than expected.

"So I'm having a great time," Gingrich said. "Meanwhile, every night on every talk show various analysts, none of whom have been in Iowa, are all going, 'well, Gingrich is gone.' What that really did was is it affected our fundraising very dramatically, didn't affect voters, but it affected our fundraising very dramatically."

Gingrich referred to a news article that did an analysis of Twitter followers.

"And it says, 'now it's true that Gingrich has 1.3 million followers and (Michele) Bachmann only has 59,000, but she's getting more new people every week.' It turned out I have six times as many Twitter followers as all the other candidates combined, but it didn't count because if it counted I'd still be a candidate; since I can't be a candidate that can't count. So we've been a little bit like a sailing ship in the middle of a hurricane in which we are sailing straight into the teeth of the media, and that slowed us down."

Using political consultants, he said, was a mistake.

"And it was a serious mistake. Reagan did the same thing, and in 1980 in New Hampshire 13 senior staff resigned on the morning of the New Hampshire primary, including the manager and the top people. He brought in Bill Casey who was not a consultant; he was a top lawyer. Two weeks later Casey laid off 100 people. And I look back and in retrospect this was just a mistake on my part," he said.

In both the Reagan campaign and Gingrich's Contract with America, ideas were central but slow to mature. Reagan, for instance, didn't dramatically pull away from Jimmy Carter until the October debate, he said.

"What I say to conservatives is very simple. The first is it's October of 2012. Obama has a billion dollars to spend on lies designed to destroy the Republican candidate. The key is going to be the debates. Because the whole country will watch. And they'll either conclude as they did in 1980, remember, 'there you go again,' and they said, 'yep, got it,' and Ronald Reagan carried more states than FDR did in 1932. So who do you want to have on the platform with Obama? Who do you think can look him in the eye and have both the skill and the nerve for example to say, 'Mr. Obama, you have been terrific with food stamps, but that's not good enough for America.' Because if you don't have the nerve to say that you're not going to cut through the billion dollars of advertising."

On polling and the ability of the Internet:

Gingrich cited a Gallup poll that placed him fourth.

"And nobody is first by any big margin," he said. "The front runner who has the most money after five years of campaigning is at I think 19 percent and the 19 percent's not hard. When they did a poll recently in New Hampshire, and they said, 'Are you certain who you're going to vote for?' ten percent of the people said 'yes.' I mean, 90 percent of the people said, 'well, I'm not really sure,' so I start with the idea that this is a much more open race than people think it is, and it's a long way until the first delegates are picked in January. ... I believe if this was not a serious time I would have no hope. I believe this is such a serious time and Americans know it's such a serious time that they're going to look for a serious leader, so I think the talking points and the clever ads and the gimmicks are all going to disappear in the next five months."

The former speaker predicted he could win the nomination for under $20 million. The other day someone reminded him that former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue won the primary for under $250,000.

"People overvalue money and undervalue ideas. That's part of the core gamble of this campaign. I actually think ideas matter. I also think the Internet is such a collapser of cost. I mean, it's actually pretty ironic; one of the complaints the consultant said was that we were spending too much money. The day they left our budget collapsed dramatically, and we've actually raised more than we've spent every single week since they left ..."

Gingrich said he's running for president because the country is faced with three catastrophes coming down the road, one involving China, one involving the loss of American identity and one involving the Middle East.

If the U.S. doesn't fix its manufacturing, science and technological pattern the Chinese will be the leading country in the world, he said.

"And if they both own trillions of dollars of our debt, and they have a superior manufacturing system and a superior military, then our range of independence will be within the framework the Chinese tolerate," Gingrich said. "Now, I don't find that to be a very acceptable future. So I think you've got to rebuild our science, technology and manufacturing base in order to be able to rebuild our military with the recapitalization, and I think if you don't do that we will cease to be the most significant country on the planet, and it will literally dramatically limit our freedom."

Regarding the Middle East, Gingrich referenced a conference Iran held on terrorism.

"Now this is the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world holding a conference on terrorism," Gingrich said. "Sixty countries went to the conference. The Secretary General sent a special envoy. Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan were at the conference. Now this means that after thousands of dead Americans, billions of American dollars, the two countries we've tried to help both thought it was better to irritate us than to irritate the Iranians. Now I don't think anybody in the Obama White House has a clue what that meant or how dangerous that is."

The first step is to recognize that radical Islam is real, large and sincere, he said. Moreover, a large part of the Pakistani government was protecting Osama bin Laden.

"If you had asked me - and I have a fair amount of knowledge about intelligence. I have fairly good ties to the Agency and the NSA - if you had asked me up until the week before we went in, I would have said to you, 'he's in a cave in Waziristan.' And if you had said to me, 'oh no, he is in a military city one mile from the national defense university, I would have said to you, 'that means a big chunk of the Pakistani government is protecting him. And that's a problem on a grand scale."

The problem is made all the more complicated with Pakistan harboring perhaps a hundred nuclear weapons, a few of which could be leaked to terrorists, he said.

What is needed is a fundamental overhaul of the U.S. intelligence laws to allow U.S. intelligence agencies to go back to spy work, he said.

"Because we today are so crippled by these various so-called reforms that we don't do spying. We rely on the Pakistanis to give us intelligence. Well, you just learned that the Pakistani intelligence system is on the other team."

On the home front, Gingrich called on the repeal of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which "is to financial services what Obamacare is to health."

He called on reforming the Food and Drug Administration to move new knowledge from the laboratory to the patient as rapidly as possible.

"Today you have an adversarial FDA which is killing the American health industry and driving jobs offshore, while killing patients by slowing down moving new things," he said.

He wants to replace the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency with an agency that values economics and cooperates with rather than dictates to local communities.

"You got to replace it because the current bureaucrats at EPA hate business, hate local communities and are destructive of the American future," he said.

Gingrich ripped Obama's energy policy.

"We're the third largest oil producing country in the world," he said. "We have more hydro-carbon than any country in the world. Do you know how bad your government has to be to artificially create these shortages? It's maniacal. So one of the ads we're going to use next year is Obama in Brazil saying, 'I'm glad you're drilling offshore. We'd like to be your best customer.' And I'm going to say, 'there's a simple choice: everybody who thinks the American president should be a purchasing agent for foreigners, you want Obama. Everybody who thinks we ought to be salesmen for Americans, you're for me.'"

Video of one of the opening speeches at Newt's anti-tax rally

Link.



An impressive speech before last week's speech in Marietta, Georgia.

Video of Newt's Second Google+ Hangout

Link.



Newt touches on a number of topics -- the debt ceiling, education (with praise for homeschoolers), and how to help small businesses.

Here is the link to Newt's YouTube Channel.

Here is his Google+ profile.

A Newt supporter tells his story of being in Marietta this past week

Bryan Jacoutot -- BJacoutot on Twitter -- wrote about his experience seeing Newt 2012 up close this last week. I will quote a few parts from his article, which can be found here. (The whole thing is worth reading.)

Gingrich and I agree almost exactly on how to address the issue of immigration reform in this country. I think that at this point, it should be abundantly clear that neither a policy of mass deportation, nor mass amnesty is any sort of real fix to the problem.

...

“I think it has to be taken one step at a time,” Gingrich said. “Today if you’re trying to be here legally and some of you have friends who have been through this, it takes longer and is more expensive and you have to have a lawyer to deal with the state department, so it’s actually cheaper to hire a coyote to sneak into the country than it is to pay your legal fees to get into the country legally. That’s really dumb.” He also advocated for an intermediate step to legality without citizenship for illegal residents who have been here for a number of years. He argued that this “legal status” would get them out of “the grey zone” but not allow them easier access to citizenship than someone who has been waiting patiently across the border to come here legally.

What went largely unnoticed by the onlookers in Marietta this past Thursday was Gingrich’s reference to the highly touted business technique known as Lean Sigma. Gingrich himself only briefly mentioned it as part of his plan to help reduce government waste but the term stuck out to me as a person who has heard his father mention it on a number of occasions at the dinner table in dealing with his business. In a White Paper released by the University at Buffalo Center for Industrial Effectiveness, Lean Sigma is outlined and its successful implementation by the government of Eerie County, New York is highlighted. In a nutshell, Lean Sigma focuses on using facts, data, and statistical analysis to observe trends in all sorts of aspects of our day to day life, aspects that can include the execution of government. With the implementation of a “Lean Sigma based mentality” to how we operate our federal government, the amount of taxpayer dollars that can be saved by preventing governmental waste would be astronomical. This, however, requires taking a business minded approach when dealing with the government, a blend that Gingirch is well suited for following his many successful business ventures since his time as Speaker of the House. A successful application of Lean Sigma to the federal government could earn savings that would considerably dwarf any of the potential plans that our law makers attempting to balance the budget currently have out.

Ultimately, this is where Newt Gingrich separates himself from every other candidate in the running for the office of the President. I’ve mentioned this in earlier posts but it continues to hold true. His speeches aren’t wasted on rhetoric or conjecture. Rather, in a short time, he communicates brilliant ideas, and more importantly, workable plans for those ideas that are backed up both by experiential and learned knowledge. In electing any other candidate, we take a chance because we have no way of knowing if their ideas and rhetoric are backed up by substantive plans for execution. If you ask Gingrich about a campaign issue, he doesn’t stop at telling you what the problem is, he follows up with six ways on how to go about fixing it.

Well, I tried to only quote some of it -- ended up quoting a lot because it really gets the point across. Here is the link for the full article again. And here his Twitter account once again.