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This afternoon I had the luck of being able to volunteer for an event hosted by Americans for Prosperity with Newt Gingrich. The whole afternoon was pretty cool, the brat’s were great, service was excellent, but Newt speaking put things over the top.

The event opened with a just a general bashing of Madison –of course well deserved- by Vicki McKenna of WIBA News/Talk 1310. (She’ll be hitting the Milwaukee airwaves soon). Basically she covered Diamond Jim’s latest tax increase of $1.75 billion. Most of the money to be wasted of course. Generally infuriating things for any Wisconsinite with half a brain. McKenna covered virtually every tax increase (including taxes on tobacco and beer) that’ll be taking place and reaffirmed that I need to get out of Wisconsin if I ever want to pay money. I really can’t wait to hear this woman when she hits Milwaukee, she’s pretty cool.

Onto Newt: Besides covering basic facts that the man is incredibly, ridiculously smart, he spoke at length about fiscal things and offered a lot of great ideas about how to improve government. He started off by talking about the immigration bill and how terribly the senate is running things there, then he went on to promote one of his own causes. He’s holding this workshop for elected officials at all levels. He’ll be holding one in Vermont –the goal is to have a thing in every town- and in Iowa, where the goal is to hold on in every county. I can’t really do justice to what this totally is, but check out the website.

Newt did mention some things that he first introduced at CPAC. He mentioned liberals calling medi-caid part D being too confusing and he related that to cruises and senior’s ability to choose one. There are many cruise ships, ports they sail from, room choices –etc and how instead we need to create Cruse A, B, and C and make sure no senior gets confused. He also added that Wal-Mart has over 250,000 items and seniors might just get confused there. He also spoke about NASA needed $240 billion to get to Mars. He suggested that we put up a $20 billion prize to see who can get their first. We’d get a man to Mars for 10% the cost, and prove that NASA is useless.

One of the things I wished Newt would have talked about more was Green Conservativism. He stressed that we need to promote a Green concept that was better than Al Gore’s but he didn’t go into that a lot, I would have liked to have heard his opinions more.

Newt took some time at the end to answer some questions as well as just hang around and talk to various people. I’d actually say that this speech gave me the opposite impression that the CPAC one did. I really thought that he was going to declare his candidacy for president, however the vibe I got from this one leads me to believe that he won’t run…odd

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