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December 22, 2011 | | FAMILY HISTORY Gingrich’s painful childhood was scarred by his mother’s manic-depression—and a distant, violent stepfather. The Daily Beast’s Gail Sheehy draws upon dozens of interviews with family members to trace the former speaker’s path, including his mother’s assertion that she “almost didn’t” survive his childhood and his stepfather’s admission that he once “smashed [Newt] against the wall” for breaking curfew. ULTIMATUM Looks like John Boehner is getting an ultimatum for the holidays. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell issued a statement Thursday urging the House Republicans to pass the Senate’s compromise that will extend the payroll-tax cut—and President Obama has backed McConnell's ultimatum. While McConnell acknowledged Republicans’ complaints about Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s refusal to send negotiators to the House GOP to create a new bill, McConnell clearly calls for the House to pass some form of the Senate's bill. In a speech Thursday, Obama told the House Republicans that “we should go ahead and get this done” and urged them to follow McConnell's deal. The comment comes only hours after GOP strategist Karl Rove told Boehner to cave and pass the Senate’s compromise. CHECKUP As Syria’s crackdown gets even more brutal, a team of Arab League observers has finally entered the nation in an attempt to broker a peace deal. The small team will lay the groundwork for a larger group of 150 observers. They’ll be charged with enforcing an Arab League mandate that calls for President Assad to end violence against citizens and release political dissidents from prison. Estimates of the crackdown’s death toll hit 6,200 on Thursday, according to British-based human-rights group Avaaz. Over the past two days alone, up to 250 people have reportedly been killed for defying the regime. BLAST FROM THE PAST Ron Paul’s claim that he didn’t know about the racist content of the newsletter published under his name in the 1980s and ’90s is looking shaky a day after he stormed out of an interview with CNN’s Gloria Borger. “Why don’t you go back and look at what I said yesterday on CNN and what I’ve said for 20 something years, 22 years ago?” he told Borger when asked about the newsletter. People did, and they found a 1995 C-Span interview in which he described the newsletter as a passion project after his career in Congress, a “political type of business, investment newsletter.” And in a 1996 interview with the Dallas Morning News, he didn’t deny authorship of the racist statements but said they had to be read in context. REPUBLICANS Former President George H.W. Bush threw his support behind Mitt Romney, an old family friend, on Thursday—but he stopped short of giving an official endorsement. Bush called Romney “a fine person” and said the former Massachusetts governor is “mature and responsible—not a bomb thrower.” While Bush wouldn’t speculate on any “bomb throwers” in the race, he did admit to a “conflict” with Newt Gingrich, recalling an incident when the former congressman was supposed to appear at a Rose Garden press conference when Bush had to renege on the “no new taxes” pledge, but instead Gingrich went to Capitol Hill to lobby against the president’s bill. Bush admitted he liked his fellow Texan, Rick Perry, but said Perry didn’t “seem to be going anywhere; he’s not surging forward.” | | 
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