Callista Gingrich steps up presence on the trail (AP)

MOUNT PLEASANT, Iowa ? When his top aides walked out this spring and left his campaign in tatters, Newt Gingrich considered dropping out. But he says it was his wife, Callista, who persuaded him to soldier on.

"She told me to stay in the race," Gingrich said recently in eastern Iowa.

He listened.

Now as voting nears in the race to decide the Republican presidential nominee, Callista Gingrich has stepped up her presence on the campaign trail, especially in Iowa where social conservatives hold powerful sway. A visible reminder of her twice-divorced husband's past infidelity, she simultaneously serves as a symbol of his devotion to family. She gives some conservatives pause, and others assurance.

The Gingrich camp is betting that anyone who doubts whether the former House speaker truly has mended his ways need only look to his wife, who stands at his side, ramrod straight and smiling. Prim and petite with striking platinum-blonde hair, the campaign is dispatching her strategically: She appears with her husband, more than 20 years her senior, in a cheery Christmas campaign television ad, and the two frequently host his-and-her book signings after campaign events.

Her children's book about Ellis, a patriotic elephant that loves American history ? conveniently hit The New York Times best-seller list as her husband's White House bid was starting to take off. She is featured prominently on his website. And it is rare for Newt Gingrich to deliver remarks that aren't sprinkled with references to "Callista and I."

His devotion to her is apparent, some say distracting to his White House bid. As his poll numbers started to waver last weekend, he left the campaign trail in Iowa to take a seat at a holiday concert in Virginia, where she played the French horn.

Callista Gingrich was linked to upheaval early in the campaign. It was jewelry Gingrich bought for her that spurred days of bad press coverage focused on a no-interest line of credit at Tiffany's worth up to $500,000, reinforcing the image that he's out of touch with regular people smarting from the economic downturn. His trip with her to the Greek isles fueled the idea that he wasn't taking the campaign seriously.

Aides who fled the campaign earlier this year pointed to Callista Gingrich as the source of the tension between her husband and his staff.

Still, his rebound would seem to give credence to her value as a trusted adviser.

Yet for all her time in the public eye, she is largely unknown, having granted few interviews and rarely speaking from the podium at her husband's events. She works the crowd afterward, instead, posing for photos and shaking hands.

"I think she's just lovely," said 62-year-old Janet McDonald, after shaking Mrs. Gingrich's hand at a Hy-Vee Grocery Store in Mount Pleasant during a recent Iowa campaign swing. "They may not have started out right. But if they have made their peace with God, than there really is nothing else I need to know."

Gingrich, 68, has acknowledged having an extramarital affair with the woman who is now his third wife when he was speaker of the House and she worked for the House Agriculture Committee.

The scandal that colored the beginning of their relationship may explain her wariness of the media.

Callista Gingrich will chat with reporters about the bitter cold weather in Iowa, where she attended college, and discuss an upcoming Christmas celebration near her Virginia home. Questions about anything more substantive are met with a tight smile.

"You'll have to ask R.C," she says politely, referring to Gingrich campaign spokesman R.C. Hammond.

The campaign declined a request from The Associated Press to interview Callista Gingrich.

At a campaign stop in Oskaloosa, Iowa, Gingrich was asked about his wife as she looked on, perched on a counter surrounded by reporters the campaign refused to let her talk to. The former Georgia congressman proudly ticked off her resume as a concert pianist, professional singer, filmmaker and author,

"She's a very talented person who works very hard," he said. "We're waiting to unleash her."

Though she rarely speaks at her husband's events, Callista Gingrich made an exception at an informal gathering of high school government students in Sioux City, Iowa, who were listening to the candidate. One had asked what he should do to prepare himself to run for president himself. Newt Gingrich urged the teenager to gain broad life experience and work on a campaign.

Then his wife interjected. "You should study this country's history. I think that is very important," she said.

Her husband, of course, has done just that.

___

Follow Shannon McCaffrey on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/smccaffrey13

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/politics/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111223/ap_on_el_pr/us_callista_gingrich

rick perry gaffe graham spanier graham spanier penn state board of trustees joe pa joe pa brett ratner

Gingrich uses precious time to get on Va. ballot (AP)

ARLINGTON, Va. ? Newt Gingrich is frantically playing catch-up in the Republican presidential race, spending precious time trying to get on Virginia's primary ballot while his rivals campaign in crucial Iowa and New Hampshire.

The former House speaker is paying a price for his late start in organizing. Gingrich had to leave New Hampshire on Wednesday and race to Virginia, where he needs 10,000 valid voters' signatures by Thursday to secure a spot on the March 6 ballot.

Virginia is an afterthought for most campaigns at this early stage. They are intensely focused on the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses and the Jan. 10 New Hampshire primary, which will be followed by primaries in South Carolina and Florida.

But Gingrich's early-December rise in several polls gave him renewed hopes of carrying his campaign deep into the primary season. Failure to compete in Virginia, which is among the "Super Tuesday" primaries, would deal a huge blow to any contender who had not locked up the nomination by then.

Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, and Ron Paul, the libertarian-leaning congressman from Texas, want to knock Gingrich out long before Virginia. Their campaigns and allied groups are saturating the Iowa airwaves with anti-Gingrich ads.

The tone has gotten so nasty that Gingrich is calling on Romney to halt the ads, or at least defend them in a 90-minute Iowa face-off. Gingrich also mounted a separate petition drive, seeking signatures from voters who don't want to see Republican candidates ripping into each other.

"Attacking fellow Republicans only helps one person: Barack Obama," the petition says.

Republican insiders see Romney, in particular, as having the money, experience and organization needed to survive a long campaign. That makes it urgent for Gingrich to get on all the big-state ballots if he hopes to win the party's nod.

Gingrich said Wednesday he had enough ballot signatures, but he wanted to come to Virginia to deliver them personally. Taking no chances, his volunteers asked everyone to sign petitions before entering Gingrich's rally Wednesday night in Arlington, just across the Potomac River from Washington.

Gingrich, who arrived more than an hour late, planned to campaign Thursday in Richmond with Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, who has endorsed none of the nomination-seekers.

Romney, meanwhile, continued his bus tour of New Hampshire, the closest thing to a must-win state for him. For the most part, Romney is letting hard-hitting ads from the Restore Our Future "super PAC" do the ruffian's work against Gingrich. The PAC is made up of former Romney advisers.

On Wednesday, Romney taunted Gingrich, who has objected to the attacks as he falls in several polls.

"I'm sure I could go out and say, `Please, don't do anything negative,'" Romney told Fox News. "But this is politics. And if you can't stand the heat in this little kitchen, wait until Obama's Hell's Kitchen turns up the heat."

Gingrich shot back from Manchester, N.H., "If he wants to test the heat, I'll meet him anywhere in Iowa next week." He said Romney could "bring his ads and he can defend them."

In Arlington, Gingrich mocked Romney for saying he can't tell Restore Our Future to halt its ads because campaign laws require candidates and PACs to operate independently of each other. If Romney publicly announced his desire to see the ads stop, Gingrich said, those airing them probably would hear of it.

Gingrich vowed to stay positive, even as he said Romney had "no willingness to stand up and tell the truth."

Paul is campaigning this week in Iowa, a wide-open state he potentially could win. He drew large crowds at several town hall meetings in eastern Iowa on Wednesday.

But few campaign veterans think Paul, whose strong libertarian views give him an intense but limited following, can draw enough support nationwide to win the nomination.

Gingrich hopes to do well enough in the first two contests to make it to South Carolina and Florida. They border Georgia, which he represented in Congress for 20 years, ending in 1999.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/topstories/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111222/ap_on_el_pr/us_gop_campaign

xfactor prime rib frankincense mega millions the hobbit movie cloudy with a chance of meatballs joyful noise

Cuba travel language dropped in budget deal (tbo)

Share With Friends: | | Politics - Top Stories Stories, News Feeds and News via Feedzilla.

Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/175421663?client_source=feed&format=rss

extract extract bobby jindal bobby jindal talladega pumpkin carving texas tech football

Sky apples stun English motorists

Sky Apples? Motorists in England were pelted by apples falling from the sky, and were left to speculate as to the cause.

In the make-believe town of Chewandswallow, it rains soup and juice, and sometimes it snows ice cream. But who would have imagined that the world created by Judi Barrett in her bestselling children's book "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" would come true one evening in Coventry, England?

Skip to next paragraph

On Monday night, it started raining apples.

?I honestly don?t know where the apples could have come from,? Brian?Meakins, a retired truck driver told UK?s Daily Mail.?

More than 100 apples fell from the sky onto car roofs and windshields of motorists who were traveling through a busy intersection?in the English city.? The bizarre phenomenon caused traffic congestion, left many wondering what had happened.? ??

A motorist told the Daily Mail that the apples fell out of nowhere.? ?They were small and green and hit the bonnet hard,? she added.? ?Everyone had to stop their cars suddenly.??

Bewildered by the incident, Mr. Meakins speculated:? ?At first I assumed kids must have thrown them because we do get the occasional egg and apple thrown.? ?But there?s way too many for that,? he continued.

British media also puzzled over the rain of apples.

Some speculated that a mini-tornado sucked up the apples from an orchard and deposited the fruit over Coventry. Another theory was they the fell from a cargo crate in an passing aircraft.

BBC ?s Magazine reported that this is not the first time it has precipitated something other than H20. The site said that frogs had fallen from the sky in the past in Llanddewi, Powys as well as in Croydon, south London.? The? BBC also reported that back in 2000 scores of dead silver sprats dropped from the sky in the coastal resort of Great Yarmouth.

Paul Sieveking, co-editor of the Fortean Times, a magazine devoted to the analysis of strange global phenomena, told BBC that 300 apples came down in 1984? in Accrington, Lancashire.

However, Dr. Lisa Jardine-Wright, a physicist at Cambridge University described the event as unusual but not inexplicable.

?A tornado which has swept through an orchard will be strong enough to 'suck up' small objects like a vacuum [cleaner]. These small objects would then be deposited back to earth as 'rain' when the whirlwind loses its energy," she told BBC.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/csmonitor/globalnews/~3/d00M0-Q6YEc/Sky-apples-stun-English-motorists

greg jennings thanksgiving recipes thanksgiving recipes mashed potato recipe mashed potato recipe cranberry sauce oregon usc

Robert Teitelman: Credit Raters and the Conventional Wisdom

Why is the credit rating problem so difficult? Nearly everyone accepts the fact that failures of the big credit raters when it came to subprime mortgages was one of the major factors behind the financial crisis. Anyone who has been around Wall Street and the markets for more than a few years knows that subprime might have been a massive failure, but it hasn't been the only one; in fact, the credit rating agencies have never displayed any greater talent for prescience or market timing than risk managers and regulators, whether it was the implosions on Wall Street in 2008 or Enron and WorldCom, back into the decades of failure and breakdown that characterize the historical landscape of finance.

And yet there remain the expectations that credit raters should be able to see the future by analyzing the present. Much of this explains the contortions politicians, policymakers, pundits and regulators have put themselves through to try to explain how the credit rating process went wrong and what can be done to fix it. The primary critique involves conflict, bad faith and malfeasance. In this critique, subprime went off the rails because of the conflicted nature of the business: The raters sold their ratings to the very firms they covered, thus setting themselves up for Panglossian manipulation, ? la Wall Street research. Moreover, there wasn't enough competition. The oligopoly of credit raters set up a race to the bottom; the firm that offered the easiest ratings got the prize.

The secondary critique is more basic: The raters are just dumb and lazy.

Now all, some or none of this may be true, though it's interesting that these explanations don't surface when the credit raters get things "right," however that's defined. John Gapper in last week's Financial Times points out that the credit raters have actually done pretty well in forecasting European sovereign debt problems -- well, enough to stir up the ire of European politicians and technocrats who reject any implicit criticism of a downgrade.

And, in fact, that's the real point here. Not only is the future that credit raters are supposed to forecast irremediably uncertain, but for long stretches of time raters simply have no reason, in terms of regulation, commerce or their own mental and career well-being, to buck the tide of conventional wisdom. The raters are the very embodiment of conventional wisdom: bureaucracies designed to mirror broad opinions and views of the marketplace and the times. They do this very well. Granted, sussing out current consensus views is easier than making accurate predictions about the future. But it's also safer, at least in most circumstances. And given the utility-like stature and size of these bureaucratic organizations -- and how could they not be given the sheer amount of analysis they must grind out? -- the gravitational pull toward the conventional wisdom was, is and always will be irresistible.

The credit raters are, in fact, a fascinating problem in democratic and market behavior. They sit uneasily, if stolidly, between those two phenomena, politics and the markets, which share powerful biases toward the conventional wisdom itself. (Let's go further: that pair, along with the media, defines the conventional wisdom.) Again, the motivating belief is that somehow financial analysis will allow raters -- or risk managers, regulators and value investors -- to peer through the opacity of the future and discern its shape. This cannot be done in large number over long stretches of time by any individual (even the esteemed Mr. Buffett, who missed the real estate bubble), not to say by markets or by hives of low-paid credit analysts in cubicles at Moody's or Standard & Poor's.

The future is always a guess (I can hear Jon Corzine singing that to Congress) and one that is inevitably going to go wrong now and then. In fact, this intense pressure to interpret not the "real" future but the future embedded in the conventional wisdom would be a great deal less if the raters didn't straddle those two worlds. But they do: They are blessed by regulators as necessary utilities, deeply entwined into markets, banks and the regulatory system. They are essential and influential; if they did not exist, they would be quickly reinvented with the same result. There is no escape. They are not free to make their "best" analytical decisions. They must always be aware of the political and commercial contexts. Or alter that: They are sensitive to the current wisdom without necessarily being aware of it. Just like most folks.

And so this is larger than just the poor, pilloried rating establishment. Consider the new plan, emerging from Dodd-Frank, to remove credit ratings from the process of setting bank capital standards. Instead, regulators will hand over to big banks standard algorithms that will use public information to determine risk levels. This resembles a kind of do-it-yourself ratings process. True, it removes "corrupt" raters from the game and makes the process more transparent to investors and the five voters who care.

But how good are these formulas? Where have they been hiding? Are they not manifestations of collective and current wisdom? What we will discover with all this is that these formulas can't predict the future any better than the raters, who undoubtedly use similar formulas already. If these analytical engines from regulators were so good, why didn't regulators have a clue in 2007 and 2008? My prediction: at some point when the sheer inadequacy of quantitative algorithms becomes obvious, regulators and politicians will toss all of this back to the credit raters. After all, one of the important, if furtive, purposes of credit raters is to give regulators and pols someone to blame when things go wrong.

Keynes saw all this many years ago, with his analogy of the markets as a beauty contest. What he did not pursue is that same process unfolds in democratic governance. Majority rule, like price discovery, is a mechanism not for accurately predicting an unknowable future, but for unearthing what most people think about the present. Viewed that way, the real problem with credit raters is not that they screw up, it's that they're used by everyone as a convenient bearer of responsibility.

Much of this is about size and scale. No banker or regulators wants to hire hordes to examine all those loans; they want raters to take up the burden, using formulas to extrapolate the whole from a few. No investor or trader can afford to analyze every position. No CFO or treasurer, particularly of a bank, a hedge fund or a large company, wants to judge every investment position and piece of collateral. No manager or investor of a collateralized vehicle can make judgments on every mortgage, loan or bond. And so they turn to sources that will make those judgments for them and shoulder the blame: the markets (meaning investors) and the raters. (Politically, the problem with blaming investors is that they're democratically sacrosanct, like blaming homeowners for the mortgage crisis. That leaves the credit raters.)

This is the fiction we live by. Viewed this way, there is no way to "fix" the credit raters, just as there is no way anyone in his right mind believes that the price of a stock today will last more than a few minutes. They are extensions of an imperfect democratic us. Instead, we take refuge in two unprovable beliefs: that a few unconflicted formulas will tell us the future (the American way) or that we don't really need to try at all because politics trumps markets (the European tendency). What we really need to do is rein in our expectations about our abilities to master information and, most importantly, to know the future.

Robert Teitelman is editor in chief of The Deal magazine.

?

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-teitelman/credit-rating-banks-markets_b_1140269.html

gabby giffords hunger games trailer hunger games trailer gabrielle giffords austin rivers austin rivers ows

Just Show Me: How to find apps and games on your Kindle Fire (Yahoo! News)

Welcome to?Just Show Me on?Tecca TV, where we show you tips and tricks for getting the most out of the?gadgets in your life. In today's episode we'll show you how to find apps and games on your?Kindle Fire.

Finding apps and games is an important part of owning a tablet. After all, what good is a tablet without great things to do on it? The Kindle Fire makes it easy to find these apps, and we'll walk you through it in our video.

If you'd like more information on Amazon's tablet, check out our?Kindle Fire guide.

For more episodes of Just Show Me,?subscribe to Tecca TV's YouTube channel and?check out all our Just Show Me episodes. If you have any topics you'd like to see us cover, just drop us a line in the comments.

This article originally appeared on Tecca

More from Tecca:

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/tech/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_technews/20111214/tc_yblog_technews/just-show-me-how-to-find-apps-and-games-on-your-kindle-fire

sveum benetton ads cornucopia best buy black friday deals thanksgiving crafts matt cassel snowman

Anonymous donors pay strangers' layaway accounts

Kmart store manager Ted Straub talks Thursday Dec 15, 2011 in his Omaha, Neb store. Dozens of Kmart customers across the country have had their layaways paid off by strangers. (AP Photo/Dave Weaver)

Kmart store manager Ted Straub talks Thursday Dec 15, 2011 in his Omaha, Neb store. Dozens of Kmart customers across the country have had their layaways paid off by strangers. (AP Photo/Dave Weaver)

Dona, Matt, left, and Bryce Bremser, sit for photos at their Omaha, Neb. home Thursday Dec 15, 2011. The Bremser's had their layaway at Kmart paid off by an unknown good Samaritan. (AP Photo/Dave Weaver)

Kevin, center, Jolie, right, and Alex Lewis shop for a family they adopted for Christmas, Thursday Dec 15, 2011 at a Kmart in Omaha, Neb. The Lewises had their layaway paid off at Kmart by an unknown good Samaritan. (AP Photo/Dave Weaver)

Kmart store manager Ted Straub talks Thursday Dec 15, 2011 in his Omaha, Neb store. Dozens of Kmart customers across the country have had their layaways paid off by strangers. (AP Photo/Dave Weaver)

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) ? The young father stood in line at the Kmart layaway counter, wearing dirty clothes and worn-out boots. With him were three small children.

He asked to pay something on his bill because he knew he wouldn't be able to afford it all before Christmas. Then a mysterious woman stepped up to the counter.

"She told him, 'No, I'm paying for it,'" recalled Edna Deppe, assistant manager at the store in Indianapolis. "He just stood there and looked at her and then looked at me and asked if it was a joke. I told him it wasn't, and that she was going to pay for him. And he just busted out in tears."

At Kmart stores across the country, Santa is getting some help: Anonymous donors are paying off strangers' layaway accounts, buying the Christmas gifts other families couldn't afford, especially toys and children's clothes set aside by impoverished parents.

Before she left the store Tuesday evening, the Indianapolis woman in her mid-40s had paid the layaway orders for as many as 50 people. On the way out, she handed out $50 bills and paid for two carts of toys for a woman in line at the cash register.

"She was doing it in the memory of her husband who had just died, and she said she wasn't going to be able to spend it and wanted to make people happy with it," Deppe said. The woman did not identify herself and only asked people to "remember Ben," an apparent reference to her husband.

Deppe, who said she's worked in retail for 40 years, had never seen anything like it.

"It was like an angel fell out of the sky and appeared in our store," she said.

Most of the donors have done their giving secretly.

Dona Bremser, an Omaha nurse, was at work when a Kmart employee called to tell her that someone had paid off the $70 balance of her layaway account, which held nearly $200 in toys for her 4-year-old son.

"I was speechless," Bremser said. "It made me believe in Christmas again."

Dozens of other customers have received similar calls in Nebraska, Michigan, Iowa, Indiana and Montana.

The benefactors generally ask to help families who are squirreling away items for young children. They often pay a portion of the balance, usually all but a few dollars or cents so the layaway order stays in the store's system.

The phenomenon seems to have begun in Michigan before spreading, Kmart executives said.

"It is honestly being driven by people wanting to do a good deed at this time of the year," said Salima Yala, Kmart's division vice president for layaway.

The good Samaritans seem to be visiting mainly Kmart stores, though a Wal-Mart spokesman said a few of his stores in Joplin, Mo., and Chicago have also seen some layaway accounts paid off.

Kmart representatives say they did nothing to instigate the secret Santas or spread word of the generosity. But it's happening as the company struggles to compete with chains such as Wal-Mart and Target.

Kmart may be the focus of layaway generosity, Yala said, because it is one of the few large discount stores that has offered layaway year-round for about four decades. Under the program, customers can make purchases but let the store hold onto their merchandise as they pay it off slowly over several weeks.

The sad memories of layaways lost prompted at least one good Samaritan to pay off the accounts of five people at an Omaha Kmart, said Karl Graff, the store's assistant manager.

"She told me that when she was younger, her mom used to set up things on layaway at Kmart, but they rarely were able to pay them off because they just didn't have the money for it," Graff said.

He called a woman who had been helped, "and she broke down in tears on the phone with me. She wasn't sure she was going to be able to pay off their layaway and was afraid their kids weren't going to have anything for Christmas."

"You know, 50 bucks may not sound like a lot, but I tell you what, at the right time, it may as well be a million dollars for some people," Graff said.

Graff's store alone has seen about a dozen layaway accounts paid off in the last 10 days, with the donors paying $50 to $250 on each account.

"To be honest, in retail, it's easy to get cynical about the holidays, because you're kind of grinding it out when everybody else is having family time," Graff said. "It's really encouraging to see this side of Christmas again."

Lori Stearnes of Omaha also benefited from the generosity of a stranger who paid all but $58 of her $250 layaway bill for toys for her four youngest grandchildren.

Stearnes said she and her husband live paycheck to paycheck, but she plans to use the money she was saving for the toys to help pay for someone else's layaway.

In Missoula, Mont., a man spent more than $1,200 to pay down the balances of six customers whose layaway orders were about to be returned to a Kmart store's inventory because of late payments.

Store employees reached one beneficiary on her cellphone at Seattle Children's Hospital, where her son was being treated for an undisclosed illness.

"She was yelling at the nurses, 'We're going to have Christmas after all!'" store manager Josine Murrin said.

A Kmart in Plainfield Township, Mich., called Roberta Carter last week to let her know a man had paid all but 40 cents of her $60 layaway.

Carter, a mother of eight from Grand Rapids, Mich., said she cried upon hearing the news. She and her family have been struggling as she seeks a full-time job.

"My kids will have clothes for Christmas," she said.

Angie Torres, a stay-at-home mother of four children under the age of 8, was in the Indianapolis Kmart on Tuesday to make a payment on her layaway bill when she learned the woman next to her was paying off her account.

"I started to cry. I couldn't believe it," said Torres, who doubted she would have been able to pay off the balance. "I was in disbelief. I hugged her and gave her a kiss."

___

Associated Press writers Michael J. Crumb in Des Moines, Iowa; Matt Volz, in Helena, Mont.; and Jeff Karoub in Detroit contributed to this report.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2011-12-16-Layaway%20Santas/id-5864a8851fe748179224a330e9a7ab99

colorado weather alcohol poisoning alcohol poisoning mark ingram mark ingram between two ferns joe the plumber