A lot of people have called me and emailed me to say that the original post that was here was too rough on former Speaker Gingrich. I’ll concede that this could be the case and replace the text with this instead.

For several weeks conservative leaders have been asking Mr. Gingrich to sit out of NY-23, knowing Pete Sessions and others were pressuring Gingrich to get in. I’ve been told by several that they thought they had an understanding with the Speaker. Today’s endorsement took many of them by surprise and a number feel betrayed.

An unconfirmed rumor is that the endorsement was in exchange for Dede Scozzafava pledging to support tax cuts. That should tell you all you need to know.

The conservative movement has made NY-23, like the Florida Senate race, a Hill to Die On. Here, in New York of all places, the conservative movement will tell the GOP that it will either win with conservatives or lose without them. Conservatives across the spectrum of conservatism from Fred Thompson to Mike Huckabee and on and on have told the GOP it is time to turn back to limited government and will fight the GOP in NY-23 for supporting a woman who embraces large government and destructive social policies.

It is unhelpful when people like Newt Gingrich break away from the movement to endorse candidates who are also supported by Planned Parenthood, NARAL, ACORN, unions,, etc. and a woman who has several hundred thousands of dollars of tax liens and business failures galore to go with them.

Perhaps I said more than I should have in my earlier post as I was rather angry about this turn of events when I wrote it. So let me now say that, at least, along with a great deal of the movement that has felt Newt to be one of us, I am disappointed.

Now that I may comment: former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has endorsed Michael Williams for Kay Bailey Hutchison’s soon-vacant Senate seat. It’s a strong endorsement, too (that link also leads to contribution information):

Having been a part of the last effort to retake the congressional majority, I am convinced we don’t have to wait 40 years this time to regain power. Democrats in Congress offer the same old, tired recipe of Democrats past — big government hand-outs, bloated bureaucracy and big-time deficit spending.

The kind of change they offer is simply a return to the discarded practices of the pre-Reagan era.

Our problem is not Americans are newly attracted to Democrat ideas, but that Republicans simply failed to live up to their own ideas.

Let me illustrate my point this way: while conservatives continue to embrace the conservative label, liberals have been re-marketing themselves as progressives. You can call a used car pre-owned all you want, but I will be just as worried about the engine going out.

We do not need to change our ideas, we need to live up to them. And when I talk about modernizing the Republican brand, I mean using tried and true Republicans principles in new ways to solve new problems.

The key to building a new Republican Majority is not simply branding Democrat policies as the destructive and discredited ideas of the past…but offering real alternatives that meet Americans where they are. And offering new leaders not bogged down by the old fights of the last decade.

We need conservatives willing to engage the Democrats on the field of ideas…willing to speak of a 21^st Century conservatism…willing to stand and fight on principle. We need leaders like Michael Williams.

The full endorsement is at Michael’s site.  And, obviously, I agree.

Moe Lane

Full disclosure: I am in regular contact with the Michael Williams campaign, and I endorse him as a replacement to Senator Hutchison, once she resigns her Senate seat.

The media loves to quote Newt Gingrich, because for every few insightful things he says, he always says something really, really off-planet.

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Newt Gingrich is out today with some helpful pointers for the Obama Administration. he wants an end to the bailouts that keep getting us into bigger messes.

Thanks to the Bush-Obama-Geithner policy of bailing out failing companies, we now have the worst of all possible scenarios: A taxpayer subsidized, government supervised private company; an unsustainable public/private hybrid that is too public to make its own decisions and too private to be responsible to the taxpayers that are keeping it alive.

Outrages like the fat cat bonuses currently dominating the headlines will only continue as long as the rule of politicians supplants the rule of law on Wall Street.

Congress should rethink this entire process. The dangers of a domino-like financial meltdown are real. But so, too, is the danger that the outrage of the American people will reach the point that we no longer trust the dire warnings — or the righteous indignation — coming from Washington.

You can check him out here.

Via RS’s sister site Human Events, it turns out that Speaker Pelosi’s office is working hard to react to yesterday’s strong, principled, and unanimous opposition to the Obama/Pelosi/Reid debt bill. The only problem is, knowledge of political history seems pretty limited in Pelosi’s circles, which is pretty bad since she was in office when the relevant events happened!

In other words, she’s wrong, and she’s not even predicting the kind of events that I think she wants to predict here.

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