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In the Democrat's defense, it's unlikely Newt would have used it anyway. He still thinks the internet is just something hippies use to plot the overthrow of this blessed Christian nation.

O rly? www.newt.org must have been put up by the Democrats than too. How generous of them.

I think it's a little stupid too, since Newt Gingrich already has a web site with a much cooler 4-character name.

Then again, it's kind of bad on Newt's part too for not having preemptively bought it long ago and set it as a redirect.

This is not true, when fanatics become the plurality.

I disagree. I think Madison covered this issue in Federalist Paper No. 10. I'll quote Wikipedia's rendering of his argument:

Madison takes the position that there are two ways to limit the damage caused by faction: removing the causes of faction or controlling its effects. He contends that there are two ways to remove the causes that provoke the development of factions. One, the elimination of liberty, he rejects as unacceptable. The other, creating a society homogeneous in opinion and interest, he sees as impractical because the causes of faction, among them variant economic interests, are inherent in a free society. Madison concludes that the damage caused by faction can be limited only by controlling its effects.

Madison notes that the principle of popular sovereignty should prevent minority factions from gaining power. Majority factions are then the problem, and he offers two ways to check them: prevent the "existence of the same passion or interest in a majority at the same time," or alternately render a majority faction unable to act.

I think the argument that you are making here (and that Newt also makes) is that society is of homogeneous opinion or interest. I'd agree with Madison that in a free society, you cannot talk about society-wide values like you do when you say "American Values".

I would also suggest that the reason you don't see right-wing fanatics is because they are probably closer to your worldview. Pointing out the religious right (Christian Identity Movement) or right-wing radio (O'Reilly) is easy. A little less easy, but not much trouble, you could identify other right-wing fanatics from traditional racial hate groups (KKK, neo-Nazis), separatists (Montana Freeman, the Oklahoma City Bombing), primatives (Unabomber) to more traditional groups that might not be considered fanatics, depending on your outlook (Federalist Society, Cato Institute, The Minutemen).

What I find interesting here is that the Unabomber and the Oklahoma City Bombing did not leap to your mind first. I'd argue that right-wing fanatics have to far more to negatively impact other citizens than left-wing fanatics like those you describe. Why do you think that you missed these? Could it be an indication that it is harder to see that which is closer to your own beliefs?

We do not, however, have to accept EVERYTHING from EVERY culture because that is impossible and insane. Some cultural items from some cultures are mutually exclusive with another culture's items.

No one made this argument. It's a straw man. If you view culture as a heterogenuous mix of differences between communities, ethnic groups, cities, religions and so forth, you don't have this problem. If you insist on talking about an American culture, then you must talk about what is common among them - which as you point out can only be a few things, if any.

As for your assumption about "free speech", you should read the context of some other articles Newt has written.

I'd love to hear more about Newt's views on free speech. Unfortunately, it's not free for me to read them. However, I would say that clearly there is a problem with how the public airwaves are used during elections. I'd love to hear how Newt would propose to solve that particular problem.

Can you give me one good reason why some group can't run ads pointing out the values they hold and comparing them to the values others hold because it is within 90 (three months) of an election? ... Free Speech cannot ever be curtailed for any reason...

Yes, I can. Advertising is destructive to the political process. There needs to be some solution, so the winner of elections is not determined by the size of a candidate's advertising budget - or the budget of

And, my prediction to you is that ether before we lose a city, or if we are truly stupid, after we lose a city, we will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use the internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech, and to go after people who want to kill us to stop them from recruiting people before they get to reach out and convince young people to destroy their lives while destroying us.

  This is a serious problem that will lead to a serious debate about the first amendment, but I think that the national security threat of losing an American city to a nuclear weapon, or losing several million Americans to a biological attack is so real that we need to proactively, now, develop the appropriate rules of engagement.

And, I further think that we should propose a Genève convention for fighting terrorism which makes very clear that those who would fight outside the rules of law, those who would use weapons of mass destruction, and those who would target civilians are in fact subject to a totally different set of rules that allow us to protect civilization by defeating barbarism before it gains so much strength that it is truly horrendous.

You don't have to trust the news source. You can go to Newt's site and find quotes like these:

The very concept of America is under assault. The traditional notion of our country as a union of one people, American peoples, has been assaulted with multicultural, situation ethics, and values neutral model where Western values and American civilization are ignored, minimized or ridiculed.

The bottom line is pluralism acts as a brake on fanaticism. Newt is a fanatic. He wants all of us to recieve "patriotic education". He has no room in his worldview for different cultures, nuance, or values that differ from his values. He has all the answers, so why on earth would we need free speech? We don't have anything to talk about.

Luckily, we don't live in Newt's America, and hopefully, we never will.

Does anyone have the actual transcript of his speech there so we can figure out who's full of BS and who's not?

There's no transcript for this one on the Newt's website. Several articles listed by Google News are giving the context that the remarks were pertaining to limiting free speech, not just to Geneva treatment of terrorists. If he wants to restrict free speech, he's an idiot. Leave them recruiting on the internet; have the NSA start getting better at hacking into servers to identify where the recruits are located. If he wants the Geneva conventions to address terrorists, there's not much there that needs changing from what I see.

Glancing through the conventions, there seem to be two types of groupings: those based on physiological condition (the blind, women, pregnant women, children based on age), and those based on what they do. The latter in turn may be oversimplified as Civilians/Non-Combatants (civilian non-combatant populace, chaplains, doctors, journalists), Lawful Combatants (members of organized armed forces and guerrillas conforming to the conventions), and Unlawful Combatants (mercenaries, spies, non-conforming guerrillas, et cetera). Forcing someone into a category they have not claimed requires a competent tribunal.

I would propose adding the following rules:
1) Any prisoner before a competent tribunal must claim a status under the Geneva conventions.
2) Falsely claiming a non-Combatant status before a competent tribunal shall be considered an act of perfidy, and a grave violation of the conventions.

At that point, terrorists can be brought before "competent tribunals" to determine their status. If they claim unlawful combatant status, they're idiots. If they claim lawful combatant status, and you can prove they weren't lawful, you can treat them accordingly; if not, you can just lock them up until this mess ends (IE, indefinitely). If they claim non-combatant status, and you can prove they were combatants, they've just violated the Geneva conventions; in the case of guerrillas, that's a failure to follow the conventions, and renders them Unlawful Combatants thereby. In the case of anyone else, well, they just got a War Crimes charge to address.

Look, folks, let's think about this for a second. The talk was given to a group handing out an award for protecting freedom of speech. You would have to be heir to the throne of the Kingdom of Idiots to go in front of such a group and claim to want to restrict freedom of speech. Regardless of what you think of Newt's politics, he isn't an idiot, and above all he is a politician. Politicians just don't go around slapping their constituency in the face; it just wouldn't make sense.

The bottom line is that the article got it wrong, either through error or (as I personally would suspect) intent. Newt publishes transcripts of a number of his speeches on his web site, http://www.newt.org/ Maybe if it shows up there we'll know what was said.

(As an aside, I'm registered non-partisan, and lean towards libertarian, so I'm not here toting the Republican party line. I have heard Newt talk on C-SPAN, though, and I do respect a lot of what he says.)

He not only "sharply criticized" campaign finance laws, he calls the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law "the most systematic effort to censor and repress political speech by those in power since the Federalist overreach of the 18th century." The whole thing, if you have the masochistic desire to read it, can be found here: http://www.newt.org/backpage.asp?art=3079

I look at TFA with a little cynicism, since it's from a local paper and doesn't give any specifics (and I can't find a transcript online--then again I'm six hours ahead of the East Coast and it was only yesterday). But it's on CNN's Political Ticker site, so I guess somebody somewhere must have verified it.

Let's not be too hasty in discounting life there; perhaps life could have evolved in the form of giant alien gasbags.