Businessman Herman Cain threw his support to Republican presidential contender Newt Gingrich late Saturday.
The move by the former GOP candidate and tea-party favorite comes three days before the Florida primary, at a moment when Gingrich is badly in need of something to rekindle the momentum he gained in the wake of his South Carolina primary victory.
[…]Cain is the latest in a series of popular conservative figures to back the former House speaker, while much of the GOP establishment is marshaling against him. Among Gingrich’s other recent supporters are former Alaska governor Sarah Palin; his onetime presidential rival, Texas Gov. Rick Perry; and former senator Fred Thompson (Tenn.)
[…]He remains popular today among grassroots conservatives. He demonstrated particular popularity in Florida, where he earned a surprising win of a straw poll last summer — and launched his dramatic, if short-lived, rise to the top of the field.
[…]Gingrich said he hopes Cain will co-chair a commission to lead the policy discussion on the economy and taxes. He compared the idea to his request that Perry lead a commission on the 10th Amendment, which he proposed when Perry endorsed him in advance of last weekend’s South Carolina primary.
“I realize that as a co-chair fo a commission like that, there would be a little thing called 9-9-9 that would be brought in and put on the table. So I fully expect that,” Gingrich said.
I still like Rick Santorum better than Gingrich, because of his activism on social issues, but I admire the way that Gingrich is attracting so many endorsements from high profile conservatives. Nobody wants Romney to be the nominee except for Democrats , Barack Obama and the mainstream media, including Fox News.
For almost a week, Nate Grant has sat cross-legged on a wall at the Occupy Wall Street encampment, holding a cardboard sign that bears his scrawled grievance: “Students Ought Not Be a Means of Profit.”
[…]It doesn’t take long before any conversation in the strikingly youthful crowd in Lower Manhattan turns to the loans many of the twenty-somethings have racked up. It’s not a central theme, like corporate greed and unemployment, but rather a subtext to all the chanting and marching.
Grant left Ithaca College in upstate New York in May with a degree in English and $90,000 in private and federal loans.
An honor student in high school, he could have had a “free ride” if he had gone to a public university in his home state. But he loaded up on student loans so he could enroll in Ithaca’s communications program to study film directing. Within a year, Grant became disenchanted with the program and switched his major.
Unable to find a good job that pays a decent wage using his degree, Grant decided this summer to join the military, hoping to take advantage of a student loan repayment program that could shave $60,000 off his debt.
“I just felt I had to do something to get this monkey off my back,” he said.
Since graduation Grant has been living with his parents in Little Egg Harbor, N.J., and doing odd jobs.
Oh, I hope this turnip doesn’t join the military. Although it would be good for him to get yelled at. It might help him to get his head out of his ass.
The entire student loan system should be privatized so that students who want to study subjects that are highly politicized cannot pay for it with anyone else’s money.
The use of taxpayer funds for college education has to be changed BEFORE the students can run up tens of thousands in debt. Loans should only be granted by corporations to students who are studying math, science, technology and engineering. It’s so easy for the government to hand out taxpayer money for degrees that are more about indoctrination than they are about producing a return on the investment. But it would be a lot less likely to happen if the person doing the lending actually expected to get the money back. We need to grow up as a society. There is no free lunch, somebody has to pay.
The former New York office for ACORN, the disbanded community activist group, is playing a key role in the self-proclaimed “leaderless” Occupy Wall Street movement, organizing “guerrilla” protest events and hiring door-to-door canvassers to collect money under the banner of various causes while spending it on protest-related activities, sources tell FoxNews.com.
The former director of New York ACORN, Jon Kest, and his top aides are now busy working at protest events for New York Communities for Change (NYCC). That organization was created in late 2009 when some ACORN offices disbanded and reorganized under new names after undercover video exposes prompted Congress to cut off federal funds.
NYCC’s connection to ACORN isn’t a tenuous one: It works from the former ACORN offices in Brooklyn, uses old ACORN office stationery, employs much of the old ACORN staff and, according to several sources, engages in some of the old organization’s controversial techniques to raise money, interest and awareness for the protests.
Sources said NYCC has hired about 100 former ACORN-affiliated staff members from other cities – paying some of them $100 a day – to attend and support Occupy Wall Street. Dozens of New York homeless people recruited from shelters are also being paid to support the protests, at the rate of $10 an hour, the sources said.
At least some of those hired are being used as door-to-door canvassers to collect money that’s used to support the protests.
Sources said cash donations collected by NYCC on behalf of some unions and various causes are being pooled and spent on Occupy Wall Street. The money is used to buy supplies, pay staff and cover travel expenses for the ex-ACORN members brought to New York for the protests.
In one such case, sources said, NYCC staff members collected cash donations for what they were told was a United Federation of Teachers fundraising drive, but the money was diverted to the protests.
Sources who participated in the teachers union campaign said NYCC supervisors gave them the addresses of union members and told them to go knock on their doors and ask for contributions—and did not mention that the money would go toward Occupy Wall Street expenses. One source said the campaign raked in about $5,000.
I should have known that this was not so much grass roots as astroturf.
ABC News says Michele won, and I can’t disagree, since she is my preferred candidate, by far. Go Michele!
Excerpt:
With her standing in the polls slipping, Michele Bachmann needed to find a way to capture the spotlight she held earlier this summer.
She just may have done that tonight at the Tea Party Express/CNN debate in Tampa, Florida.
Bachmann, the founder of the Tea Party Caucus in the House, knew her audience well and it showed.
Unlike former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Bachmann took a pass at criticizing front-runner Texas Gov. Perry on Social Security and she refused to weigh in on Perry’s comment last month that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke may be “treasonous.”
Instead she waited patiently to pounce on Perry when the debate turned to the issues she knew would connect with the audience in the hall.
She attacked Perry for his decision to require HPV vaccinations in Texas, calling it “a government injection through executive order” and a “violation of a liberty interest.”
She knows that while the Tea Party activists are not fans of the federal government, they don’t love big business either.
“We cannot forget that in the midst of this executive order,” said Bachmann, “there was a big drug company that made millions of dollars because of this mandate…The drug company gave thousands of dollars in political donations to the governor and this is just flat out wrong”
She also attacked Perry on illegal immigration – another issue that plays well in a GOP primary.
A longer review from the UK Telegraph emphasizes that Perry got beat up Monday night.
WINTERY KNIGHT 