Newt.

You know, this was the guy who knew how to handle money and he wanted to handle it all because, you know, he’s so damn good at it.

The Gingrich Group bankruptcy proceedings spotlight the remarkable reversal of fortune of the half-dozen organizations associated with Gingrich. The presidential contender recently ended his campaign $4.8 million in debt. A political nonprofit he headed, American Solutions for Winning the Future, which raised $52 million between its founding in 2007 and its dissolution last July, also ended in debt.

The decline of the health policy center began earlier than previously realized. When Gingrich began considering a presidential bid in early 2010, “the membership began to drop off,” according to Nancy Desmond, who served as managing partner of Gingrich Group LLC, which did business as the Center for Health Transformation.

Businesses under Newt did as well as the country did under Bush.

I know you feel real bad about that.  I heard there’s a canned food drive for Newt and Calista because we’re sure those two deeply religious Catholics will want to pay back all their creditors.

I’m gonna send them a hill of beans because, of course, that’s how much I care.

Thanks to Carol for the heads up.

And you think I make typos?

Thanks to Fenway Fran for the heads-up.

So, Grover Norquist thinks it is oh so American to renounce your citizenship. I’m serious.

Chuck Schumer and Bob Casey introduced legislation last week that would penalize Americans who renounce their citizenship to evade taxes.

Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, had this to say:

“I think Schumer can probably find the legislation to do this. It existed in Germany in the 1930s and Rhodesia in the ’70s and in South Africa as well. He probably just plagiarized it and translated it from the original German.”

Wait, so it’s Nazi NOT to renounce your citizenship to avoid paying taxes?

Come on, Grover, set an example. Move your silly butt to the wilds of the Amazon forest where they have your kind of government.

Thanks to David for the heads up

I am sitting in Austin, Texas, supposedly the Cadillac of Liberalism, at the temporary platform committee meeting of the Texas Democratic Party.

I am watching. Bubba is participating. I am fully convinced that the only reason they put him on this committee was to give his progressive patootie a heart attack.

When Texas was a one party state, Democrats got pulled off the tracks by blue dogs. So, we politely asked the conservatives to form their own party. In the days of Ann Richards, the Texas Democratic Party stood for something. Well, the Republicans responded by sending a few of their own back to the Democratic party … as political consultants. Now the damn blue dogs even have their own caucus at the state convention, where they plot to keep the Democratic Party so vanilla that we seem to be an afterthought in the voting booth.

The blue dogs argue that if we stand for something like a moratorium on the death penalty or medical marijuana, or marriage equality, some damn Democratic sheriff in some damn rural east Texas county won’t get re-elected or some fool county commissioner in deep fool west Texas will leave the party if we let someone dying of cancer smoke a joint.

Whoop-de-damn-do.

They grabbed a little power and a regular paycheck where they don’t have to actually work for a living, and sit around all day playing with numbers trying to prove that if we don’t kowtow to blue dogs in Lufkin, we can’t win Texas.

That’s hogwash.

Trading the youth, urban, female, and progressive vote to win a county commissioners race in a county with 10,000 voters is …. Well, it’s gonna give Bubba a heart attack.

So, I’m fixing to take my seat and watch Bubba and a handful of other strong progressives get whipped by people who think the Democratic party in Texas needs to continue to stand for nothing, but this time we need to do it a little softer.

If you’re going to the Texas Democratic convention in June, please oh please elect someone from your senatorial caucus to the platform committee who is smart, tough, and progressive.

Changing the platform won’t change the blue dog culture, but it’s a damn start.

The meeting starts at 10:30. I’ll try to Tweet it. #tdpplatform. but, remember — tweeting is not natural to me. I can’t saying hello in 140 characters.

UPDATED: Maybe it’s the time and place of the meeting but out of 16 people here, I only see one person here under the age of 55, two South Asians, one Hispanic, 5 women. Every else is an OLD white male.

NOTE, State Rep Garnett Coleman, an African American, just showed up to lead the meeting. (He had been in a meeting at the Capitol.)

Momma, I know you can still outrun me with a bar of soap in your hand because you’ve had plenty of practice.  So, I am not going to put any information about this great story on my website except to say it has something to do with Twitter, Sandra Fluke, George Tierney of Greenville South Carolina, lawyers, Google, and is one of the funniest things I’ve read in along time.

Momma, do not click this link.  There are dirty words there.  And a damn hoot.

Thanks to Richard for the heads-up.

Republican Rep. Harold Rogers of Kentucky is head of the Appropriations Committee.  He is helping to shoulder the awesome responsibility of letting Americans know that the GOP is only joking about this whole cutting spending thing.

In the 1980s, the military had its infamous $800 toilet seat. Today, it has a $17,000 drip pan.

Thanks to a powerful Kentucky congressman who has steered tens of millions of federal dollars to his district, the Army has bought about $6.5 million worth of the “leakproof” drip pans in the past three years to catch transmission fluid on Black Hawk helicopters. And it might want more from the Kentucky company that makes the pans, even though a similar pan from another company costs a small fraction of the price: about $2,500.

He has been called The Prince of Pork by the Lexington Herald-Leader newspaper.  He defends these expenditures by claiming that the $17,000 drip pans “work well” and, he adds, “they save the taxpayer money.”  Well hell, that’s two more things than Rep. Harold Rogers does.

Thanks to David for the heads up.