[jeffkrol]

Newt Gingrich: "Governor Romney's made very clear that he favors absolute repeal of Obamacare and that he believes it's not accurate and not fair to try and compare the two and I think you have to start with that and I also think in all fairness to Governor Romney that he vetoed many provisions that the liberal Democrats in the Massachusetts state legislature added to the bill and they overrode his veto so I think if you're going to go back and look at the original Romney bill you'd have a much better bill and a much more practical bill than what the liberal Democrats did to the legislation because they literally overrode his veto on a whole series of items."

David Brody: "And so it's not as clear cut as people make it?"

Newt Gingrich: "Yeah. I think it's not but that will be part of the dialogue. People will talk about my record and they'll talk about Mitt's record and if others get in Palin, Huckabee, Mitch Daniels, Tim Pawlenty I mean it could be a pretty big crowd, Rick Santorum. Everybody's record will be up for grabs and it ought to be up for grabs. You don't pick the person to represent your party for the leadership of the most complex, most powerful and most prosperous country in history just out of a grab bag. You ought to have a chance to ask that person virtually anything and then you render judgment. You decide look is this the person I think can do that?"

The Page by Mark Halperin | Gingrich Defends Romney on Health Care

The U.S. Agriculture Department said Monday that 17.4 million U.S. households, or 14.7%, struggled with low food security in 2009, up 1.2% from 2008.

The USDA defines food-insecure households as those that have difficulty at some time in the year providing adequate food for all of their members.

The report, which is released each November, signals that the recession-fueled surge in hungry people probably hit a plateau in 2009. While hunger "remains a serious problem across the U.S.," said USDA Under Secretary Kevin Concannon, the survey "shows a stabilization."

For most of the decade before the recession, the percentage of U.S. households coping with food-insecurity in the USDA survey fluctuated around 11%. The number of these vulnerable households jumped 32% to 17.1 million in 2008 as the U.S. economy tanked and retail food prices jumped 5.5%.

The growth rate in food-insecure households slowed considerably in 2009, even though the national unemployment rate climbed to 10% by the end of that year, as Washington expanded federal food-assistance programs and food-price inflation slowed.

Roughly a fifth of the U.S. population participated in at least one federal food-assistance program, including what is commonly called the food-stamp program, which in an average month in 2009 had 34 million participants.

Still, the survey indicates that roughly one million children either personally ate less than they should have at some periods in 2009 because money was tight, or lived alongside a child who didn't get enough.

OK I get it...... SOME have it......

"There is a silver lining to some degree in the fact that this food insecurity did not increase," Kevin Concannon, undersecretary for Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services, told reporters. "Between 2008 and 2009, the number of unemployed people across the United States went from just under 9 million people to over 14 million."

The United States is increasingly a safety-net nation, with one in four Americans now enrolled in one of the 15 federal feeding programs. Forty-two million people currently receive monthly benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, more commonly known as food stamps. That's up by 10 million from a year ago.

Taxpayers buy breakfast and lunch for 30 million children.

Hunger Afflicts More U.S. Households - WSJ.com
One in Four Americans Is Enrolled in a Government Food Program - ABC News
So the "halves" grab more and more then complain when the "have nots" need more "handouts" to survive........
wonderful..... it's so obvious.