Newt’s Freddie Mac History Gig

16 November 2011 |permalink | email article

Bloomberg News cited the kind of scrutiny that you draw when you want to be taken seriously as a presidential candidate. In the Nov. 9 debate Newt Gingrich said that he earned a $300,000 fee to advise Freddie Mac as a “historian,” warning that the mortgage company’s business model was “insane.” Former Freddie Mac officials familiar with Gingrich’s consulting work tell a different story. The former House speaker was asked to build bridges to Capitol Hill Republicans and develop an argument on behalf of the company’s public-private structure that would resonate with conservatives seeking to dismantle it. If Gingrich had concerns about the company’s business model he didn’t share it with Freddie Mac’s chief executive officer.

Eugene Robinson’s Washington Post column on the debate captured the moment on the subprime mortgage bubble Gingrich waded into. His Ph.D. thesis at Tulane University was titled “Belgian Education Policy in the Congo: 1945-1960.” Wrote Robinson: Who knew the job market for historians of colonial Africa was so hot?

Losing Altitude

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is trying to reboot what appears to be a doomed presidential candidacy, and it won’t be saved by some of his radical ideas. They include transforming Congress and the Supreme Court:  cutting Congressional salaries in half; creating a part-time “Citizens Legislature” who hold jobs outside Congress. While Congress would vote to reduce their pay, changes to the Supreme Court and 18-year term limits would require amending the Constitution.

L.A. Politic

The Hollywood moguls Steven Spielberg, Jeffery Katzenberg and David Geffen are endorsing and raising money for City Controller Wendy Gruel in her bid for mayor in 2013, not as erroneously stated in 2012. Dubbed the “Pothole Queen” she was an executive at DreamWorks from 1997 to 2002. This will be the largest candidate field in L.A. history with no clear frontrunners.

Quotes

(Clint) Eastwood says Hoover did some good work. But when I asked him if he was loco, the actor-director, in reference to ‘J. Edgar,’ replied,” He definitely marched to a different drummer.”—Maureen Dowd

GOP candidate Michelle Bachmann, in her new memoir, critizices President Bush and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson for a 2007 decision to abandon the free market and instead to bail out financial institutions and embrace what she calls a “kind of bailout socialism.”

Rush Limbaugh weighs in on NBC’s announcement that Chelsea Clinton will join its reporting staff: According to him Clinton was going to learn the “inner-workings of the communications branch of the Democrat Party…under to the guise of becoming a journalist.” There’s a single word to describe Limbaugh—disordered.

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