Public Policy Polling will release a national poll Wednesday showing Newt above Perry

Big news today on Twitter. I'll have more about the poll when PPP releases the poll in full tomorrow.

Audio of Newt on the Jeff Katz Show this morning

Link.

They discuss the economy, tonight's debate, and the Occupy Wall Street...folks.

Take a look at these pictures taken by a Newt 2012 volunteer, Jim Shinn

I am slowing in posting this, but Jim Shinn, who volunteers at the Newt 2012 Atlanta office, went to Dawsonville, Georgia, last week to help out on a 21st Century Contract with America event there.

He took some great pictures. Here is the link to his blog, where he collected them all. He also took a few before Newt appeared on Sean Hannity's TV show last Thursday.

(Video) Newt on Face the Nation Sunday

Link.

Following up on his speech at the Values Voter Summit Friday, Newt went on Face the Nation and discussed his proposal to rein in judges, getting them back under the Constitution.

Here is the link to that speech at the Values Voter Summit.

And here is the position paper Newt 2012 released on the topic.

Peter Ferrara on 21st Century Contract with America

Peter Ferrara, who was in the Reagan White House, wrote a terrific article about Newt's 21st Century Contract with America. Some excerpts:

In the 1994 Congressional campaigns, Republicans not only rode Newt's Contract with America proposals to Republican majorities in Congress. They maintained their House majority for 12 years, after Republicans had only held a House majority for 2 of the previous 74 years.

Newt's 21st century contract is similarly a document on which the entire Republican Party can campaign next year, and win a generation of governing majorities.

Gingrich's economic recovery plan would also abolish the capital gains tax, because "At a zero percent rate, hundreds of billions of dollars in new investments would pour into the United States to create new firms and build new factories." By effectively double-taxing capital income, the capital gains levy discourages the venture capital that feeds start-ups and creates jobs. That is why 14 out of 30 OECD countries, plus China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and others, already enjoy zero capital gains taxes. Gingrich's Contract would further eliminate double taxation by abolishing the death tax and the Alternative Minimum Tax.

Art Laffer, a central architect of Reaganomics, says regarding Gingrich's economic recovery plan, "The combination of pro-growth tax reform, spending restraint, and sound money will restore robust economic growth with low unemployment and low inflation," and praises "the powerful effect it will have on the future growth path of the United States economy." Indeed, Gingrich has the formula for another generation long economic boom achieved by freeing a dynamic economy that is straining to break out of the bonds of Obamanomics.

Ferrara quotes from Newt what the former will push for after repealing Obamacare:

I will advocate for specific replacement health policies that will create a free market framework for health care, provide affordable, portable, and reliable healthcare coverage, and establish a health care safety net focused on those in need. This system will assure health care for all with no individual mandate or employer mandate of any kind. This alternative to Obamacare begins with patient power and localism and the many common sense ideas developed over the past eight years at the Center for Health Transformation.

Back to Ferrara:

The specific Contract proposals implementing this vision include "a voluntary option for younger Americans to put a portion of their Social Security contribution into personal Social Security savings accounts.

On Medicare, Ferrara again quotes from Newt:

My proposed legislation will offer seniors new choices in Medicare, as well. It will give them the option to choose, on a voluntary basis, either to remain in the existing program, or to transition to a more personalized system in the private sector with greater options for better care. If they select the personalized system, beneficiaries would receive support to cover their private sector premiums. Giving all seniors the option to choose their insurance provider will improve price competition and help lower costs for the program.

More Newt:

There are 184 other means-tested entitlement programs that can be block granted in a similar manner to our reform in 1996. One program alone -- Medicaid -- could save the federal government over $700 billion in the next decade, according to Congressman Paul Ryan's 2012 Republican Budget. Not only would these programs be more responsive and dynamic on a state level, but Americans would save hundreds of billions of federal tax dollars every year.

Ferrara concludes the piece:

Gingrich's Contract advances other path-breaking ideas, such as using Congress's powers to reorganize the federal judiciary and regulate the jurisdiction of the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, to rein in judicial activism, enforcing the Tenth Amendment, and unleashing the private sector to produce the maximum in American energy. Most exciting, Newt's Contract launches all of these ideas into the mainstream of the Republican Party.

While it probably seems like I quoted the whole article, there is a ton I didn't. I encourage you to read the entire article here.

Ferrara has wrote other pieces praising Newt's ideas -- here, here, and here.

(Video) Newt at Versailles Restaurant in Miami

(This is older, almost a month old, but there really hasn't been a time to post it before now.)

Link.

(Video) Newt discussing Strong America Now in Ames

(Just as a note on Tuesday night's debate: It's on Bloomberg TV, so if you are like most (including me) who do not get that channel, you can stream it live on bloomberg.com at 8 PM ET.)

Link. (It runs 2 minutes, 58 seconds, so take a quick look please.)

Watch this video by a Newt supporter. It's...superb.

Link.

Newt: "The Root-and-Branch Candidate"

(Thank you to Gary Moss for passing along this article.)

Below the title of the article is the line: "Gingrich doesn’t want to beat just Obama, but statism, too." (An interesting side note is that Sarah Palin likes to use root-and-branch imagery a lot.)

Some excerpts:

[Gingrich] knows how to play the game, but he has always had his own very strong ideas about how it ought to be played — and he has been the smartest guy in the room enough times to realize counterrevolutions are not impossible, even if the conventional wisdom says so.

Newt will never be the safe candidate. But he could be the root-and-branch candidate. And the branch he is currently targeting for deracination is the federal judiciary. In his “21st Century Contract with America,” a bold action item is: “Bringing the courts back under the Constitution and the rule of law.”

And bold it is. For more than a half-century, it has been monotonously proclaimed that the judges are the last word on what the law is, and, therefore, that not only the litigants in the case but the whole of society must yield to their decisions. It has become easy to forget — or to have never known — that it was not always this way. As Gingrich argues in a position paper he rolled out with a speech on Friday, there is nothing in the Constitution that stands for this proposition. It is a promotion the Warren court gave itself in 1958, in a gambit Stanford Law School dean Larry Kramer aptly described as “not reporting a fact so much as trying to manufacture one.”

If he were elected president, Gingrich promises, he would pursue a series of concrete steps to reestablish the original balance of constitutional power — the balance designed to ensure that Americans decided important affairs of state democratically rather than having decisions imposed on them by unelected lawyers. In passing laws, the political branches would make use of Congress’s constitutional authority to deny courts jurisdiction to hear categories of cases, something about which progressives will no doubt shriek...at least until someone catalogues the provisions to avoid judicial review that are written into the Obamacare statute.

Following the example of President Jefferson and the early 19th century Congress, Gingrich foresees the political branches’ eliminating courts that consistently attempt to rewrite the laws and impose their personal predilections. In particularly egregious cases, judges could be impeached for ignoring the Constitution and failing to heed the legitimate prerogatives of the political branches. Congress could use its power of the purse to defund enforcement of lawless rulings, and the political branches could ignore them -- as they did in the Civil War era with respect to aspects of the notorious Dred Scott decision. We could go back to the Lincoln formulation, which conceded the binding nature of judicial rulings on private litigants in a particular case but denied that these rulings operated as precedents binding on the American people and their elected representatives.

Here is the link to the full article again.

(Video) Newt's interview on Huckabee from Saturday

Link.