Three ways to lower gas prices

Here in Wisconsin, there's a grass roots effort, a petition drive being led by an ordinary citizen with help from Americans for Prosperity.


And just recently Congressman Steve Kagen (D) had a campaign event with his fellow Democratic Congressman Collin Peterson, the head of the House Agriculture Committee. During a speech endorsing Kagen, Peterson called for more drilling (something the Gard campaign completely missed the boat on). The Appleton Post Crescent* quotes Peterson,

"I'm for drilling, I'm for nuclear, I'm for coal, whatever it takes to get us out of the Middle East," he said at the Wiese Brothers' Greenleaf farm where liquid manure is dried into a fuel used to generate electricity.

"We need more (energy production) … and we need to conserve," he said.

That's a very different position than the position of the Democratic leadership, including the party's nominee for president Barack Obama, and certainly a different position than the one adopted by Steve Kagen.

Senator John McCain has finally seen the light. The head of the House AG committee has seen the light. How soon before we drill for our own oil, before we add more nuclear power, lest everyone seeing the light watches the lights go out?

* aka The Appleton Half-Moon

Happy Birthday Newt Gingrich

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is 65 today. Of course, you can't miss the irony that he is now eligible for Medicare.

The big Spitzer picture

As we consume every salacious detail of the Spitzer story, there is a larger point to all of this.

But as much as we would wallow in the details, can we ask ourselves if there still is a line between the private lives of politicians and their public lives?

As much as that line ever existed, it was a 20th century invention.

Thomas Jefferson’s affair with Sally Hemings was frontpage material in the opposition newspapers. Andrew Jackson was accused of bigamy. When Grover Cleveland ran for president in 1884, his opponents chanted “Ma, ma, where’s my pa?” referring to Cleveland’s possible illegitimate child. Cleveland’s supporters had the last laugh when Cleveland won, “He’s gone all the way to Washington.”

Less than 30 years later Woodrow Wilson’s personal life was mostly off limits.

So it was until the Miami Herald photographed Sen. Gary Hart onboard a yacht conveniently named the “Monkey Business” in midpresidential campaign, um, relaxing.

Of course, we had the momentary backlash during the Clinton era, with Hillary Clinton standing by her man even as he committed perjury. But we forget that at the height of the scandal, Congressman Bob Livingston was forced to resign due to his extramarital affair rather than succeed Newt Gingrich as speaker of the House.

So what’s our standard for interest in politicians’ lives? Does it matter how many divorces Sen. Russ Feingold, former Sen. Fred Thompson, former Speaker Gingrich, Sen. John McCain and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani had collectively? Probably not, any more than it mattered President Ronald Reagan was once divorced and had strained relations with his children.

As long as we’re limited to mere mortals for candidates, we know that all will carry some flaw. Perhaps a reasonable standard should be if they yield to temptation we should let it remain a private matter unless it involves breaking the law, abusing the trust of their office or somehow impedes their job performance.

But we’re in a celebrity age, and insisting on a reasonable privacy standard is like the Dutch Boy with a finger in the dike. So long as politicians use their families as props and fodder for stock campaign photos, the temptation will be to probe for hypocrisy, or at least entertainment value. Politicians should be warned if they don’t want a Jerry Springer reputation, they should avoid a Jerry Springer lifestyle.

When bad news comes to town

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is warning Republicans of more congressional losses in 2008, according to the Associated Press.

"If the Republicans run a stand-pat presidential candidate who ends up being on defense for all of September and October and who is seen by the country as representing four more years, the fact is that Republicans are not going to" win, Gingrich told the American Enterprise Institute.

Gingrich was the architect of the Contract with America and the victory of House republicans in 1994. Thirteen years later Gingrich is a possible presidential candidate that would have an immediate following if he entered the race.

Gingrich brings the road show here the end of next week to the (where else?) Country Springs Hotel:

Friday June 15, 2007 1-3 p.m.
Grand Ballroom
Country Springs Hotel
2810 Golf Road, Pewaukee

Admission is Free!

The event is co-sponsored by Americans for Prosperity and the Wisconsin Club for Growth. Pre-registration is required. There's an event also at the University Club in downtown Milwaukee.

The University Club,
924 East Wells St.,
Milwaukee.
6/15/2007 5:30 p.m.

$250.00 per couple,Tables of 10 are available
Contact Mary Stitt @ 262.268.6859 Or marystitt@wi.rr.com

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Oh yeah, we need one of them editor thingies

Gretchen Schuldt stumbled across a review of the latest book by Newt Gingrich in the New York Times. The book has a few flaws.

Because you would find phrases like “to withdraw backward was impossible,” sounds like “wretching noises” to accompany vomiting, or constructions like “incredulous as it seemed, America had not reacted.” Although the book has two authors, it could have used a third assigned to cleanup patrol.

This is not a matter of isolated typographical errors. It is a serious case for the comma police, since the book’s war on punctuation is almost as heated as the air assaults it describes. “One would have to be dead, very stupid Fuchida thought,” the book says about the fighter pilot Mitsuo Fuchida, “not to realize they were sallying forth to war.” Evidence notwithstanding, the authors do not mean to insult the fighter pilot’s intelligence — or, presumably, the reader’s.

Some of these glitches are brief, while some are windier. The long ones are particularly dangerous. Here is what happens when James Watson, an academic and a decoding expert who is one of the book’s cardboard Americans (as opposed to its cardboard British and Japanese figures), has lunch:

“James nodded his thanks, opened the wax paper and looked a bit suspiciously at the offering, it looked to be a day or two old and suddenly he had a real longing for the faculty dining room on campus, always a good selection of Western and Asian food to choose from, darn good conversations to be found, and here he now sat with a disheveled captain who, with the added realization, due to the direction of the wind, was in serious need of a good shower.”

Of course, the New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin could have used an editor, too.

Correction: May 26, 2007

The Books of The Times review on Thursday, about “Pearl Harbor,” by Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen, misstated the phrase that President Franklin D. Roosevelt used in referring to Dec. 7, 1941, the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He called it “a date which will live in infamy,” not a “day” that will live in infamy.

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Attention Gingrich groupies

Here's an event I'm looking forward to. The Wisconsin Club for Growth is announcing former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is coming to town June 15th.

The Wisconsin Club for Growth announced Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich will headline several Club events on June 15, 2007 including a lunch at the University Club in Milwaukee and a grassroots rally at the Country Springs Hotel in Pewaukee {Why go anywhere else? - JW}.

“We are honored to welcome one of the brightest minds in American politics back to
Wisconsin,” said Club President Butch Johnson. “Newt Gingrich is undeniably one of the greatest conservative thinkers of our time.”

Gingrich is well-known as the architect of the “Contract with America”, which led the
Republican Party to victory in 1994, capturing the majority in the U.S. House for the first time in forty years. Under his leadership, Congress passed welfare reform, the first balanced budget in a generation, and the first series of tax cuts in sixteen years. He is the founder of the Center for Health Transformation and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Gingrich has a Ph.D. in history. He is a best-selling author and a contributor for the Fox News Channel.

As more details (prices, event times) come along I'll be happy to pass them along. In the meantime, dust off that Newt memorabilia and get it ready to be autographed. And yes, I'll be the first in line.

They still don't get it

As this Associated Press story shows, the media still does not "get" the Clinton impeachment.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich acknowledged he was having an extramarital affair even as he led the charge against President Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair, he acknowledged in an interview with a conservative Christian group.

"The honest answer is yes," Gingrich, a potential 2008 Republican presidential candidate, said in an interview with Focus on the Family founder James Dobson to be aired Friday, according to a transcript provided to The Associated Press. "There are times that I have fallen short of my own standards. There's certainly times when I've fallen short of God's standards."

Gingrich argued in the interview, however, that he should not be viewed as a hypocrite for pursuing Clinton's infidelity.

"The president of the United States got in trouble for committing a felony in front of a sitting federal judge," the former Georgia congressman said of Clinton's 1998 House impeachment on perjury and obstruction of justice charges.

The Republicans in Congress didn't pursue the infidelity; they pursued the perjury. It was perjury that got President Clinton impeached, not the chasing of the intern, the sexual harassment of Paula Jones, etc.

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Eye of Newt on the White House?

The Washington Times is reporting former House Speaker Newt Gingrich finished tied for second at the Conservative Political Action Conference's presidential straw poll.

Mr. Gingrich, who won't decide whether he will run for president until after September, tied former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney for second place in the conference's combined first- and second-choice straw poll with 30 percent each, trailing only former New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who won with a combined 34 percent.
"We will not defeat the Clinton machine by being negative," Mr. Gingrich said, referring to Democratic front-runner Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York. "We will defeat the Clinton machine by offering better solutions based on better values with a deeper reach into the American people's lives and psyche."

Newt Ginrich, rock star?

"Newt Gingrich is probably the only rock star in the conservative world right now," Georgia Republican activist Phil Kent said. "You saw the energy when he entered the ballroom. I didn't see that for any of the others."

For the last six years we've heard the whining from the other side about how we need an intellectual in the White House. Let's give them an historian, a former Speaker of the House, and a novelist, all in one candidate.

Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract with America