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Bumped — MB]
Hammered by ads from Super Pac spenders in Mitt Romney's camp, Rick Santorum's visit to all 99 counties in Iowa and Ron Paul's quasi-iconoclasm, Newt Gingrich's clever little book tour will soon be over. The Hawkeye state's GOP caucus-goers and New Hampshire's primary voters appear to be on the verge of giving him the thumbs-down this Tuesday and next. Struggling against the odds and Gingrich's scattergun approach to speechmaking, his reconstituted campaign team has sought to keep him from wandering from topic to topic, and they've pretty much succeeded. But he still seems determined to get in a few dumb licks before he's done.
The latest from this guy who fairly oozes with the belief he's the smartest fellow in the race was to dig himself deeper into the climate-change denier camp this weekend:
At a town hall meeting [in Atlantic, Iowa] Saturday afternoon, Gingrich delivered his neatly segmented remarks on taxes, regulations and an overarching economy, but when asked to explain his position on global warming, he delivered a new line.
“I’m an amateur paleontologist,” Gingrich said. “I spend a lot of time looking at the Earth’s temperature for a very long time. I’m a lot harder to convince than just looking at a computer model.”
As Brad Johnson chortled:
Professional paleontologists, who have spent a lot more time than Gingrich looking at the Earth’s temperature, are convinced. “Few credible scientists now doubt that humans have influenced the documented rise in global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution,” the American Quarternary Society wrote in 2006.
It's unlikely Gingrich really doubts it either. But that doesn't matter when you have the ethics of a goat and the ambition of a velociraptor. Last week, Gingrich told the media he was trashing the climate-change chapter in a new book of essays he's editing about the environment. Which was news to the suddenly angry woman who had been commissioned to write the essay.
This isn't about Gingrich's autodidactic-instilled scientific doubt. It's about getting as far away as possible from his previous more or less reasonable position on the subject, just as Mitt Romney has been doing.
It's not hard to figure out why. When science clashes with the views of the people you're counting on for votes, you have to decide what will have the greater impact—the disastrous consequences of climate change, or the personal disaster of losing the GOP nomination. Easy call for Newt and Mitt since only 43 percent of Republicans think there is solid evidence of global warming, down 6 points from 2008, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. Only 31 percent of conservative Republicans say there's solid evidence. No problem for Newt or Mitt. Just woo the jackasses. And be one. That seems to be ever more the Republican creed.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2006:
CNN reports today that U.S. forces "raided an al Qaeda safehouse ... killing six terrorists and capturing a seventh."
According to the U.S. military, as coalition forces moved in on a building intelligence indicated was being used as a possible safe house for al Qaeda in Iraq, they came under heavy fire from the rooftops of several nearby buildings and returned fire, killing two terrorists.
OK. So?
A Sunni lawmaker disputed the account, however, saying the raid was on his Baghdad office and that those killed included two of his guards and a family of four that lived next door.
Oh. I see.
But why the hell would that happen? (Duh.)
Salih al-Mutlaq said the raid was based on false information from his enemies in an effort to "settle scores with me" because of his criticism of the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government.
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