Nation IN BRIEF : GEORGIA : Gingrich Welcomes Even Bad Coverage

House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said statements he has made in his college lecture have been taken “grotesquely out of context” but conceded that even bad coverage has been good. “Frankly, even the things that were the least in context did send a signal to lots of people: ‘Oh, there’s a course,’ ” Gingrich said at Reinhardt College in Waleska. Still, Gingrich said he has been “tactically ridiculed” for injecting what appear to be policy statements into his weekly lecture. Among remarks from his two-hour lecture: He blasted the U.S. education and health care systems as models of inefficiency, he said the poor will probably be left behind in the Information Age because only wealthy parents can ensure that their child gets a personal computer “at 5 years of age,” and he wondered whether it’s fair to children in the Brazilian rain forest “to not let them have a laptop, not give them a vaccination against polio.”