rise and shine

Sea Life Park, Waimanalo, Hawaii

****

Am I the last person to see this?

Steve Benen: I not only cringed watching it, at times I really wanted to just look away.

(Me too).

****

the jewel in the gop crown

Washington Post: Employees of presidential candidate Newt Gingrich grew increasingly concerned in recent years about their boss’s purchases from luxury jeweler Tiffany & Co., worried that if he followed through on plans to run for president it could become a political liability.

The purchases included jewelry items valued as much as $300,000 for his wife’s Christmas gifts, selected each year during a fall Potomac River cruise sponsored by the jeweler. On a smaller scale, Gingrich spent about $40,000 over four years buying Tiffany trinkets as Christmas gifts for up to 100 employees…

… Gingrich and his wife maintained a $250,000 to $500,000 personal credit line at Tiffany in 2005 and 2006 … The Gingrich campaign recently confirmed to The Post that Gingrich maintained a second Tiffany credit line for $1 million…

… Gingrich campaign communication director Joe DeSantis declined to address the details offered by the employees, and dismissed their accounts as trivial. “Class warfare does not create jobs,” he said in a written statement. “Newt’s Jobs and Prosperity Plan will.”

… The employees said the Tiffany cruises became an annual outing for the couple to choose Callista’s Christmas presents.

… Sixteen Gingrich campaign staffers resigned on June 9 , claiming that Gingrich was allowing his wife to dictate the terms of his campaign schedule. The disagreement between staff and the candidate came to a head when Gingrich insisted he would go on a Greek cruise that Callista Gingrich had been planning for the couple.

Full article here

😆

Thank you Loriah!

aw, bless

Newt Gingrich, who turned 68 last week, celebrated with a birthday party at his Atlanta campaign headquarters today.

Fixed that for ya Newt:

newt’s campaign is moving along nicely….

AP: The top fundraisers for Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign have abandoned his struggling bid amid anemic fundraising and heavy spending.

Campaign spokesman R.C. Hammond is confirming to The Associated Press that fundraising director Jody Thomas and fundraising consultant Mary Heitman have left the team.

The former House speaker’s campaign has been on life support since earlier this month when 16 top aides and advisers resigned en masse over disagreements with the Republican candidate. Gingrich has insisted that he will stay in the race.

Thank you Proud 😉

night everyone

A heartfelt apology to anyone who lost their lunch after viewing today’s picture (here) of Newt on vacation:

I promise, you will never see that picture here again – ie this one:

You won’t see this one here either – largely because it shows the President has a lot of work to do to match Newt’s physique:

See you tomorrow 😉

‘gingrich’s meltdown on the launch pad’

Richard Cohen (Washington Post): …The Fact Checker is possibly the most powerful force for good since Clark Kent encountered a phone booth. The other day it laid into Newt Gingrich, who had just announced he was running for president to save the nation from what would happen if he did not run for president.

Glenn Kessler had to use almost 2,000 words in the online version of his Sunday column – so many lies, so little newspaper space – to deal with just some of Gingrich’s exaggerations and wound up awarding him four Pinocchios. For most politicians this would be a titanic embarrassment, but for Gingrich it is not even a personal best.

….This core dishonesty is what separates Gingrich from the rest of the Republican presidential candidates, committed or not-quite-yet. Some of the others say things that are untrue – Sarah Palin’s “death panels,” for instance – but these untruths spill out of the mouths of ditzes. Not so with Gingrich.

He is a former history professor with a doctorate, someone who knows his way around the stacks …. He employs the ugly language of demagoguery not because he is oblivious to its history but on account of it. He mimics. He was, however, brilliantly original in explaining to the Christian Broadcasting Network why he had committed adultery. It had to do with “how passionately I felt about this country” – a genuine contribution to the annals of sexual fibbery….

…There is more than a little Richard Nixon in Gingrich – the same lack of place, the same keen intellect, the same petty fights and imaginary enemies, the same hallucinatory grievances, the same willingness to lie, exaggerate and smear. On a given day, Newt Gingrich could be a brilliant president. On any night, he could be a monster.

Full article here

Eugene Robinson: Newt Gingrich’s meltdown on the launch pad …. “I want to make sure every House Republican is protected from some kind of dishonest Democratic ad. So let me say on the record, any ad which quotes what I said on Sunday is a falsehood, because I have publicly said those words were inaccurate and unfortunate.”

A grateful nation thanks you, Newt Gingrich. The presidential campaign is just starting, and already you’ve given us a passage that will live in infamy – forever – in the annals of American political speech. Your delightful quotation shall be filed under “fiascos” and flagged with a cross-reference to “utter nonsense.”

I can’t remember when we’ve heard a politician plead so desperately to take back something he said. Then again, naked desperation is clearly in order. The favorite parlor game in Washington this week has been trying to remember a more disastrous campaign launch than the one Gingrich is having. Many candidates have stumbled coming out of the gate, but few have taken off like a shot in the wrong direction…..

Full article here

yikes … newt gets glitterized

Meanwhile….

….and:

oh dear

More at ThinkProgress

hey big spender….

GOPolitico: Newt Gingrich, a fiscal conservative? Not when it comes to Tiffany’s. In 2005 and 2006, the former House speaker carried as much as $500,000 in debt to the premier jewelry company…

Gingrich, who represented Georgia in Congress for two decades, retired in 1999. But his wife, Callista Gingrich, was employed by the House Agriculture Committee until 2007, according to public records. She listed a “revolving charge account” at Tiffany and Company in the liability section of her personal financial disclosure form for two consecutive years and indicated that it was her spouse’s debt. The liability was reported in the range of $250,001 to $500,000.

When asked by POLITICO whether Gingrich has settled this debt, and why he owed between a quarter-million and a half-million dollars to a jeweler, Rick Tyler, Gingrich’s spokesman, declined to comment.

Full article here

re-writing history?

Justin Elliott (Salon): Jackie Gingrich Cushman has decided to resurface the most damaging anecdote of her father’s political career: that Newt Gingrich demanded his first wife hash over details of their divorce while she was stricken with cancer in a hospital bed. Cushman suggests in a new column that the story is false.

But Cushman’s column, titled “Setting the Record Straight,” is directly at odds with the testimony of her mother from just a few years after the 1980 incident … the column is likely part of a conscious inoculation effort. Cushman writes a syndicated conservative political column and recently co-authored a book with her father.

Cushman doesn’t offer much in the way of details, besides saying that she was present during that 1980 hospital visit and that the media has repeated unspecified “untruths”… here is what Newt’s wife (also called Jackie) told the Washington Post in a Jan. 3, 1985, profile:

“He walked out in the spring of 1980 and I returned to Georgia. By September, I went into the hospital for my third surgery. The two girls came to see me, and said Daddy is downstairs and could he come up? When he got there, he wanted to discuss the terms of the divorce while I was recovering from the surgery … To say I gave up a lot for the marriage is the understatement of the year.”

Newt Gingrich’s spokesman, by the way, told me in March that Newt denies the “terms of the divorce” part of the story but acknowledges there was “an argument.”

The question becomes: Should we believe Gingrich’s wife from five years after the incident, or what his daughter claims 30 years later when Newt is gearing up for a presidential run?

Full article here