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More bad news for Newt’s Gingrich’s foundering presidential campaign: His top two fundraisers have quit, bringing the count of deserters from his 2012 operation to a whopping 18, according to the AP. His fundraising is reportedly so anemic that the candidate has been reduced to giving up his corporate jets for commercial flights. (Hopefully they don’t seat him too far back.) Newt’s campaign so far looks like a pretty obvious fiasco. But only if you assume that victory was Newt’s exclusive goal. It’s also entirely possible that Gingrich–who has long demonstrated himself as a shrewd businessman and self-promoter–doesn’t mind lacking...

Republican Leadership Conference kicks off C.J. Ciaramella Top Republicans will flock to New Orleans today for the Republican Leadership Conference, where presidential hopefuls and GOP leaders will try to woo the party faithful during the three-day event. The annual conference, formerly the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, has become a bellwether for the Republican Party, especially because of its audience straw polls. Presidential candidates speaking this year include Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann Texas Rep. Ron Paul, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson and former Utah governor Jon Huntsman. (DNC chair looking forward to working...

No longer constrained by campaign advisers who insisted on such conventions as “message discipline,” Gingrich fulminated against President Obama, the news media, activist judges and assorted other liberal bogeymen for 41 minutes here Thursday night. It was classic Newt – slashing attacks, an array of ideas, and a few plugs for his website. All jumbled together with little cohesion. The former speaker, it seems, is very much enjoying the post-consultant phase of his candidacy. Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0611/57183.html#ixzz1PVO4yauY

Gingrich Fires Back, But Tax Expert Says He's in 'World of Trouble' By MATTHEW MOSK, BRIAN ROSS (@brianross) and ANGELA M. HILL June 16, 2011 GOP Presidential contender Newt Gingrich attacked the "elite media" Wednesday for running "hit pieces" against him, even as tax and ethics experts were telling ABC News that the recent reports on a charity Gingrich founded have spawned serious questions about the former House Speaker's business and charity empire. "I think he's in a world of trouble from a tax standpoint," said Marcus S. Owens, who ran the IRS Exempt Organizations Division for ten years, and...

"I thought NBC this morning, in a program that had nobody on camera, nobody quoted by name, that quoted reporters talking anonymously about cowardly people, who, frankly, lied about my wife..."

TMZ has obtained a photo of a glistening Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich laying topless on a beach in Greece ... days before his campaign staff quit over the timing of his two-week vacation.

... This week Gingrich also released his 24th book, with many of his upcoming campaign stops doubling as marketing events for his book and movies, raising more questions about the true intentions of the campaign. "If he's being driven by book sales, and movie openings and things like that, that doesn't fit into a traditional campaign," said Reed. Also raising questions from independent watchdog groups is the operation of a charity Gingrich founded, called Renewing American Leadership. Its website contained ads for Gingrich's books -- taken down after ABC News asked about them -- and posted his positions on political...

Space-policy analysts were as surprised as everyone else at one of the more obscure, but also more intelligent, questions asked in last night’s Republican debate. It was intelligent in both the nature of the question itself and in the candidate at whom it was directed. Space-policy analyst and journalist Jeff Foust has the story over at the Space Politics web site...

Mitt Romney easily survived his first debate of the 2012 primary with barely a nick to his early frontrunner status. Tarred as a flip-flopping phony during his 2008 White House bid, Romney looked at ease during the two-hour live forum, and none of his lesser-known rivals made him squirm. Eager to make pleasing first impressions on a national audience, they all passed when handed opportunities to attack Romney. A picture of the former Massachusetts governor and corporate executive in an open-collared shirt and tie -- posted on Twitter just minutes before the debate in an obvious attempt at campaign image-making...

Broadcast on: CNN Broadcast time: 8pm EDT/5pm PDT The Candidates:Michele Bachmann Bachmann is serving her 3rd full term in the U.S. House. Founder of the House Tea Party Caucus, she earned a Master of Laws degree, worked as a tax attorney, and was a foster mother for 23 teenagers. She is a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Herman Cain Cain is the former chief executive of Godfather's Pizza and former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. He lost the Georgia Republican primary for a U.S. Senate seat in 2004. He was recently the...

Newt Gingrich vowed on Friday to campaign for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination on his own terms, saying he would do “whatever it takes” to remain in the race despite the exodus a day earlier of nearly his entire senior staff. “There is a fundamental strategic difference between the traditional consulting community and the kind of campaign I want to run,” Mr. Gingrich said. “Now we’ll find out over the next year who’s right.” Even as some prominent Republicans, including Gov. Terry Branstad of Iowa, questioned his viability, Mr. Gingrich made plans to deliver a foreign policy speech in Los...

Talk about demonizing your political opponents, Chris Matthews has literally done it to Newt Gingrich. . . On his MSNBC show this evening, Matthews said that Gingrich "looks like the devil," reminds him of the warlock in Rosemary's Baby, and "is evil." View video here.

The problem was the wife. Aides to Newt Gingrich have resigned from his presidential campaign in protest of what they felt was a takeover by Callista Gingrich, the candidate’s wife since 2000. The euphemism offered by departing staffers was they disagreed with Gingrich’s “strategy” for the campaign. Indeed, they did disagree. But it was a strategy – a part-time campaign, in effect – that Gingrich’s wife favored. Several aides, including campaign manager Rob Johnson, met with Gingrich on Thursday morning and told him of the senior staff’s unanimous decision to quit. Gingrich later put out a statement saying he was...

Pawlenty Snaps Up Former Gingrich Co-Chair June 9, 2011 5:49 P.M. By Katrina Trinko While there’s plenty of buzz over what Newt Gingrich’s team resigning means for Rick Perry, Tim Pawlenty’s team has already added Gingrich’s former national co-chair, former Georgia governor Sonny Perdue. “Tim Pawlenty is a great man, he was a phenomenal governor, and he is the person I now believe stands the greatest chance of defeating President Obama. He is the only candidate who has laid out a real plan to grow the American economy, and his track record in Minnesota is proof he’s the right man...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Newt Gingrich says he's staying in the race for the Republican presidential nomination despite an unprecedented mass staff exodus. In a posting to his Facebook page, the former House speaker says he will run the "substantive, solutions-oriented campaign" that he set out to run earlier this spring.

Seven potential Republican presidential nominees have agreed to meet this month in the first New Hampshire debate of the 2012 election. The event is sponsored by the New Hampshire Union Leader, CNN and WMUR. Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, businessman Herman Cain, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Texas Rep. Ron Paul, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum will debate on June 13 in Sullivan Arena at St. Anselm College.

Which brings us to Monday, when Mr. Gingrich addresses an Alzheimer's Association forum, demanding treatments and a cure, but framed in financial and “moral” terms. “Over the next 40 years, Alzheimer’s disease will cost American society $20 trillion, $15 trillion of which will be in Medicare and Medicaid,” the candidate says, adding that a treatment that delays the onset of Alzheimer’s by five years would “cut government spending on the disease nearly in half in 2050.”

According to Gallup’s latest positive-intensity survey among Republicans and independents, Newt Gingrich … doesn’t have much. Calculated from the difference between strongly positive and strongly negative responses, Gingrich fell to his lowest level of the spring at 6 points, down from a peak of 19. Gingrich now trails almost the entire GOP field in this measure: Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s Positive Intensity Score dropped to 6 in the two weeks spanning May 16-29, down from 11 for May 9-22. Gingrich’s current Positive Intensity Score is his lowest to date, off from a score as high as 19...

Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney make me think of Dorothy Jones. "Aunt" Dorothy, my mom's closest friend, was a warm, smart, comedienne-quick funny woman from a large family. Unlike my mom's other friends, Dorothy was single and remained so until she died. I once asked her, in the rude way only children can, why she never married. "You know," she said while pointing, one by one, at four imaginary men lined up in front her, "if you took the best qualities from all my sisters' husbands and rolled them up into one man -- you'd still come up short." This...