Today, former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich announced that he is taking steps to consider becoming the GOP nominee for president in 2012.

As Gingrich begins the long process of possibly running for President, he is likely to take every effort to mold his image to make himself palatable to American voters. Yet the public deserves to know every important detail about the history of the man who may seek to be their leader. ThinkProgress has assembled a list of ten things Gingrich probably doesn’t want you to know about him:

1. DESPITE BATTLING THE “SECULAR SOCIALIST” AGENDA, GINGRICH CHEATED ON HIS WIVES SEVERAL TIMES: One of Gingrich’s main themes in his columns and speeches over the past few years has been the need to stop the “secular socialist” takeover of America, which he blames for the demise of the family. Yet he had several of these affairs while attacking President Bill Clinton for his own. He justified his hypocrisy to his second wife once, telling her, “It doesn’t matter what I do.”

2. WHILE DEMONIZING GOVERNMENT LARGESS, GINGRICH POURED MORE FEDERAL MONEY INTO HIS DISTRICT THAN ALMOST ANY OTHER: The politics of the mid-1990′s was marked by the right’s attempt to decimate the social safety net. As Gingrich waged his campaign to destroy unemployment insurance and aid for needy families, he made his own district the recipient of huge amounts of federal aid. Under Gingrich, his district in Cobb County, GA received more “federal subsidies than any suburban county in the country, with two exceptions: Arlington Virginia, effectively part of the Federal Government, and Brevard County Florida, the home of the Kennedy Space Center.”

3. IN 2007, GINGRICH BACKED CAP-AND-TRADE, THEN FLIP-FLOPPED TWO YEARS LATER: Talking to PBS just four years ago, Gingrich said, “I think if you have mandatory caps combined with a trading system, much like we did with sulfur, and if you have a tax-incentive program for investing in the solutions, then there’s a package that’s very, very good. And frankly, it’s something I would strongly support.” He even cut an ad with House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) warning of the dangers of climate change. Just two years later, Gingrich ended all of his green advocacy in favor pandering to far-right views on the environment. “Imposing stunningly high taxes on an economy in the middle of a recession is fundamentally wrong. … [A]rtificially capping their economy is the wrong approach,” he said in testimony before Congress.

4. GINGRICH BLAMED THE MASSACRES AT COLUMBINE AND VIRGINIA TECH ON “LIBERALISM”: Showing that his cynicism knows no bounds, Gingrich blamed “the liberal academic elite, the liberal political elite” for the Columbine shootings in Littleton, CO. He followed the same script after the massacre at Virginia Tech, saying liberalism is responsible for the “dehumanization” that led to the killings.

5. GINGRICH WANTED THE RICH TO DECIDE WHEN THEIR OWN TAX CUTS WOULD END: During last winter’s debate over extending the Bush tax cuts, Gingrich said that we should “have the business leadership of the country describe the number” of months that the cuts for the wealthiest should last.

6. DESPITE RAILING AGAINST THE “PARTY OF FOOD STAMPS,” GINGRICH PROPOSED EXPANDING THEM: One of the memes Gingrich has pushed over the past year is that Democrats are the “party of food stamps” because they believe in federal food assistance for the indigent. Yet in 2002, when President George W. Bush proposed expanding some food stamp programs, Gingrich backed him, saying that the “welfare reform” law he helped author in the 1990s went too far in cutting food assistance.

7. FOR THE PAST FEW YEARS, GINGRICH HAS FRONTED FOR THE HEALTH INDUSTRY: Gingrich helped found a number of major businesses, including a for-profit health care firm called the “Center for Health Transformation” (CHT) and a communications firm called the “Gingrich Group.” CHT serves approximately 94 health industry corporations and lobby groups. Despite many meetings with Republican lawmakers to shape health care legislation, Gingrich refuses to register as a lobbyist.

8. GINGRICH REFERRED TO JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR AS A “LATINA WOMAN RACIST”: During the debate over the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor, Gingrich took to his Twitter account to say that Sotomayor, who is a “latina woman racist” should withdraw from the nomination.

9. GINGRICH FLIP-FLOPPED ON THE INDIVIDUAL MANDATE: In 2008, Gingrich suggested “insurance mandates for people who earn more than $75,000 a year.” Yet by 2010, he was blasting the mandate as unconstitutional.

10. GINGRICH SAID WE SHOULD ALLOW SOME TERRORIST ATTACKS TO REMIND US OF THE DANGER: During a book tour, Gingrich told an audience in a speech that was televised on C-SPAN that the Bush administration had been very successful at intercepting terrorists, but had not gotten credit for it, explaining that maybe we should’ve “allowed an attack to get through to remind” Americans about the danger of terrorism.

Throughout his career, Gingrich has devoted himself to constantly changing his views on a whim and trying to position himself relative to the political climate of the moment . While he claims to have changed, the facts haven’t, and ThinkProgress will keep you informed about his latest flip flops and turnarounds in the coming months.

Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) today introduced legislation with Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) to block the Environmental Protection Agency from implementing Clean Air Act protections against global warming pollution, rejecting the counsel of America’s public health advocates. A boon to Koch Industries and the other polluters who supported his campaign, Upton’s legislation would nullify the EPA’s Supreme Court-mandated scientific finding that burning fossil fuels is damaging our climate system. At a climate hearing on this week Upton justified his legislation by claiming the threat greenhouse gases pose to air quality and public health is a “myth”:

So let’s dispel a myth: air quality and public health will not be harmed or affected in any way by efforts to slow and then stop EPA’s expansive global warming agenda under the Clean Air Act. . . . . So we can stop the EPA from imposing cap and tax and the Clean Air Act will continue to make our families and communities healthier places. So let’s listen to the facts: this issue is not about air quality and public health, it’s about jobs.

Watch it:

By rejecting the clean energy economy, the only job Upton seems interested in saving is his own. Moreover, Upton’s denial of reality comes just days after the American Medical Association and the American Public Health Association warned policymakers of the grave threat global warming poses to the health our families and communities. Based on scientific studies, experts agree that the following are key health risks from carbon pollution:

– More than doubled asthma rates and lengthened asthma season
– Threatened access to clean drinking water
– Increases in airborne and insect borne illnesses
– Increases in morbidity and mortality due to heat waves and other extreme weather
– Increases in diarrheal, respiratory, and heart disease
– Increased risk of salmonella spread as average temperatures rise

The health risks of climate pollution are particularly severe among low-income communities, children, and the elderly. With this attempt to rewrite the Clean Air Act, Upton is protecting polluter profits at the expense of his own constituents. And that’s no myth.

Freshman Rep. Austin Scott (R-GA) took GOP EPA-bashing to another level Wednesday when he accused the environmental agency of using “Gestapo tactics” in its dealings with a landlord who used lead-based paint on his property, but failed to obtain his tenants’ consent:

Freshman Rep. Austin Scott (R-Ga.) was angered by a story he heard in his district last week. The constituent, who owns five rental properties, was fined $10,000 by EPA for each property for failing to have his tenants sign lead-based paint disclosure forms.

Scott might be thinking about the agency’s threat to triple those fines if he’s faced with a vote on rolling back EPA’s climate regulations.

“They told him essentially that if he wanted to argue with them that they’d fine him $30,000 per house,” Scott said yesterday. “Those are Gestapo tactics.”

While such rhetoric is outlandish, the underlying beliefs are increasingly common among hard-right conservatives. Eliminating the EPA has become a favorite target for some on the right, including GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, along with Reps. Joe Walsh (R-IL), Pete Olson (R-TX), and Rich Nugent (R-FL).

Many other conservatives want to drastically reduce the EPA’s ability to protect the environment. Last month, 236 Republicans and 13 Democrats voted for legislation that would effectively prevent any effort “to implement, administer, or enforce any statutory or regulatory requirement pertaining to emissions of greenhouse gases.” Despite this, conservative efforts to undermine the EPA are deeply unpopular with the American public, according to recent surveys:

- Two of every three Americans oppose Gingrich’s plan to abolish the EPA.

- 63 percent of Americans across party lines “want the government to be doing more than it’s currently doing” to hold polluters accountable.

- Nearly seven in 10 “believe that EPA scientists, rather than Congress, should set pollution standards.”

To be fair, Scott is not the first politician to see similarities between the EPA and Nazis. Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay once called the Agency “the Gestapo of Government.” More recently, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) deemed the EPA a “Gestapo bureaucracy” (and compared then-Administrator Carol Browner to Tokyo Rose).

– CAPAF Intern Cody McClelland