What a pair !!

Rush and Newt.   What a pair of over-inflated blimps -- and my favorite targets for skewering.

So today, it's Newt's turn.    This guy will not accept "no" for an answer.    He was just beginning to sort of, maybe acknowledge that he was not going to be the Republican nominee but was staying in the race so as to influence the debate and the platform.

And then it happened -- Santorum pulled out of the race, leaving Newt as the self-anointed conservative voice.    He's banking on luring Santorum's delegates and picking up steam again -- proudly crowing this morning that "It's my turn now."

Not gonna happen, Newtie boy.  The GOP establishment already has the long knives out, ready to finish you off.   A string of bad publicity about financial irresponsibility is rolling out today.  Who wants to turn over managing our complex economy to someone who doesn't even pay his own bills?

The Gingrich campaign is being trailed by a string of unpaid bills.  They're $4.5 million in debt, vendors are thinking they may never get paid, and yet they continue spending money they don't have.

On top of this is a news story that, while Newt manages to stay out of debt personally, the organizations he starts, and often abandons, wind up losing other people's money.  According to former colleagues and subordinates, Gingrich burns through money by repeatedly expanding his plans and ignoring warnings from staff about the finances of his projects. Now, the same pattern is threatening his presidential campaign.

Bill Allison, editorial director of a nonprofit political watchdog groups, says:

 "Part of the reason Gingrich employs nonprofits and 527s [political advocacy groups] so liberally is that the debts from these groups never attach to him personally, because they're incorporated. . . . That's the beauty of sticking to all these groups -- it's that they don't stick to Gingrich."

So Newt stays above the money battle -- but other people wind up losing money while he lives lavishly (corporate jets, Tiffany's).   A long article, detailing all the money losing operations Newt has started, and then abandoned, is in today's Huffington Post, written by Christina Wilkie.

This bad publicity (probably well orchestrated) is not a good way to try to revive a moribund campaign.   But Newt the Blimp just keeps trying to float above it all, inflated by his Big Ideas, and hoping he can fool people into thinking he is what we need.

He is not.

Ralph