Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich dubbed the national debt a "burden for our children for life."

Ex-Rep. Dennis Kucinich vilified Republicans for adding, by his calculations, $4 trillion to it.

Rep. Michele Bachmann, meanwhile, predicted debt will precipitate a future of "indentured servitude to foreign lenders."

What unites these and other presidential candidates is that they themselves are in debt. Campaign debt.

It's a dubious distinction shared by Democrats and Republicans, eccentric nonagenarians and White House occupants.

Such debt isn't really hurting anyone but creditors — certainly not the nation nor its creditworthiness.

But it is a reminder that despite candidates' soaring rhetoric about fiscal responsibility, they often fail to follow their own prescription for sound budgetary management amid the relentless rush to remain competitive with political rivals during election seasons that are longer and more expensive than ever.

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From the FBI's press release on the arrest:

According to the affidavit, from May 2012 through February 2013, Adam Paul Savader sent anonymous text messages using Google Voice numbers to 15 women stating that he had nude photographs of the women and threatening to distribute the nude photographs to the women’s friends and family members unless the women sent him more nude photographs of themselves. Savader sent some of the victims links to a photo-sharing website where nude pictures of the victims had been posted.

From the New York Daily News:

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This is at this point pretty thin. "Talks" doesn't mean much. Gingrich and Cutter might be part of a whole bench of hosts. But it does suggest that CNN is going about a "Crossfire" launch in just about the worst way possible. Those hoping for a smarter version of the old show will definitely be disappointed.

Stephanie Cutter has spent her entire career as a campaign flack. Her job has been, for years, to spin reporters. (This job leads to becoming a political news media professional strangely often.) Regardless of her intelligence and her ability to speak extemporaneously on camera, she has never demonstrated an ability to be an interesting, independent thinker, and it is fair to predict that as a TV pundit she'd be representing "The Democratic Party" and not "liberalism."

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Although a source told Politico that CNN is only having talks with the Obama adviser and former speaker of the House, Twitter ran with the rumor:

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Sexual politics are changing, but we don’t see it happening. Gay marriage acceptance is one -– right now, very noticeable -– part of it. We are at a turning point, with or without a Hillary Clinton presidency. In her new, attention-grabbing book, "Lean In," Sheryl Sandberg points out how backward our country remains insofar as women are still being evaluated by more rigorous standards, and men are still given to commit acts that would not be tolerated from women occupying the same position.

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And yet, despite its dubious origins, the party's new approach is a striking statement regarding the political power — and numbers — of lower-income people in this country: Rather than dismiss, slur or divide poorer Americans (as in prior elections), Republicans have now made the political calculation that they've no choice but to talk directly to them and win their votes.

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Josh Green from Bloomberg Businessweek reports:

“We were close,” former Representative Bob Walker, a Gingrich ally, says. “Everybody thought there was an opportunity.” “It would have sent shock waves through the establishment and the Romney campaign,” says John Brabender, Santorum’s chief strategist.

But the negotiations collapsed in acrimony because Gingrich and Santorum could not agree on who would get to be president. “In the end,” Gingrich says, “it was just too hard to negotiate.”

“I was disappointed when Speaker Gingrich ultimately decided against this idea, because it could have changed the outcome of the primary,” Santorum told Green. “And more importantly, it could have changed the outcome of the general election.”

Read the full report here.

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“What I find sad about Sen. McCain’s recent comments both to Ted Cruz, when Ted Cruz was frankly raising legitimate questions [about Benghazi] and with Rand Paul, is, you know, when I first knew John McCain in the House — he was a maverick. In the Senate, for years, he was a maverick,” Gingrich said on Fox News on Thursday.

He added: "But I think frankly it doesn’t hurt Ted Cruz and it doesn’t hurt Rand Paul — it hurts John McCain. The country is moving on, we’re in a new era, people know that these are legitimate questions.”

McCain had criticized Paul's filibuster, quoting from an earlier Wall Street Journal Op-Ed and calling the Kentucky Republican's filibuster a "stunt" to "fire up impressionable libertarian kids in their college dorms." McCain also called some of Paul's claims "simply false."'

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Here are the highlights:

On MSNBC:

“M.S. is a damn disease”

On Rupert Murdoch:

“Does Rupert like me? I think so, but it doesn’t matter. When I go up to the magic room in the sky every three months, if my numbers are right, I get to live. If not, I’m killed. Our relationship isn’t about love—it’s about arithmetic. Survival means hitting your numbers. I’ve met or exceeded mine in 56 straight quarters. The reason is: I treat Rupert’s money like it is mine.”

On Newt Gingrich:

Brian Lewis, his spokesman, asked Ailes for guidance on how to respond to Newt. “Brush him back,” Ailes said. “He’s a sore loser and if he had won he would have been a sore winner.” Lewis nodded.

Ailes was silent for a moment and then added, “Newt’s a prick.”

On Obama:

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Recall that in 2011, California faced at the state level what the federal government faces at the national one. (With "trigger" mechanisms that made them even more sequester-like).

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Why would Adelson spend so much money so haphazardly? Instead of spreading his wealth around or investing in candidates with the strongest win potential, Adelson did things like spend $20 million on Newt Gingrich, pumping in more cash even after it was clear he was going to lose?

For years, it’s been rumored that Adelson’s spending is, in addition to supporting his neoconservative ideological agenda, an attempt to insulate himself from looming government investigations into reported corruption at the Chinese holdings of his Las Vegas Sands Casino empire.

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That rise-fall-rise-fall cycle neatly reflects the role Gingrich plays in national politics. He has an enduring knack for attracting attention and making himself relevant to the political conversation of the moment, even if most opinion-shapers in his party ultimately aren’t comfortable with him being their public face. So it’s no surprise that even as he nears 70, Gingrich is a vocal participant in the debate over the Republican Party’s direction, one who’s made news recently by taking shots at Stuart Stevens, the architect of Mitt Romney’s ’12 campaign, and Karl Rove.

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So it’s tempting to dismiss the broadside he leveled against Karl Rove and his Conservative Victory Project earlier this week as typical Gingrich grandstanding. And to a degree, that’s all it is. In a Human Events Op-Ed, the former House speaker and failed 2012 White House candidate accused Rove of employing “the system of Tammany Hall and the Chicago machine.” Anyone who’s been following Gingrich for a while is surely familiar with this line of attack; here, for example, he is in the summer of 1993 castigating Bill Clinton and “the Democratic machine” for forcing a tax hike bill through the House (a bill that ended up playing no small role in the balanced budgets of the late ‘90s – but that’s a story for another day).

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It’s those lenses that interest me most. To be sure, multiple other factors feed polarization and congressional gridlock. Cable TV 24-7 news has broadened coverage, but the scramble for ratings favors short segments with guests representing both ends of the political spectrum, not the middle. These days, political campaigns never end; there is little breathing space for governing without looking toward the next election. Vast sums of money and highly organized groups create pressure on elected officials not to stray from the party line. House and Senate rules can be used for partisan purposes. Redistricting every decade creates chances for parties to draw lines that favor them for years. But in my experience, our greatest challenge is first to understand and then to bridge the gap between the dominant but incompatible worldviews of the two parties.

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But amidst the partisan fingerpointing and bickering, one core aspect of the way our government works gets a free pass. We hear a lot about campaign finance and gerrymandering, but single-member district elections – that is, having each House member represent one congressional district – are without doubt the single greatest cause of what is broken about Congress. They are the key reason why Republicans easily kept control of the House despite losing the popular vote to Democrats, and why the political center has lost out to partisans on both sides of the aisle. They turn four out of five voters effectively into spectators who have absolutely no chance of affecting their representation in Congress. They help keep women’s representation in the House stalled at less than 18 percent, and grossly distort fair representation by party and race.

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What long has been a nonstarter for Republicans -- raising tax rates on wealthy Americans -- is now backed by GOP House Speaker John Boehner in his negotiations with President Barack Obama to avert a potential fiscal crisis. Party luminaries, including Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, have started calling for a wholesale shift in the GOP's approach to immigration after Hispanic voters shunned Republican candidates. And some Republicans who previously championed gun rights now are opening the door to restrictions following a schoolhouse shooting spree earlier this month.

"Put guns on the table. Also, put video games on the table. Put mental health on the table," Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., said last week. Other prominent Republicans echoed him in calling for a sweeping review of how to prevent tragedies like the Newtown, Conn., massacre. Among those who were open to a re-evaluation of the nation's gun policies were Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.

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January: Newt Gingrich

To anyone who’d just been teleported from the year 1999, the scene in Charleston, South Carolina on the night of January 21 had to be impossible to fathom: There was Newt Gingrich, the man who’d been marched off the political stage by his own party after a disastrous four-year run as House Speaker, declaring victory in a Republican presidential primary. And not just any primary: South Carolina, a historically pivotal early contest. And not just a victory – an absolute landslide.

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For most of the 20th century, speaker of the House wasn’t a particularly important job – powerful committee chairs ruled, and speakers could do little about it. A long process of reform, however, removed most of the clout of those barons and strengthened party leadership, making modern speakers far more powerful than their mid-century predecessors. Since the modern speakership emerged in the 1970s, there have been three basic models of how to handle the office:

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“I believe this will lead to a recession next year,” Newt Gingrich said. “This is the Democrat machine’s recession. And each one of them will be held personally accountable.”

He still hasn’t come to terms with how wrong he was, and neither has his party. Nearly 20 years after Gingrich uttered those words, the debate in Washington carries echoes of that ’93 fight, with Barack Obama and congressional Democrats demanding a return to the Clinton rates for the top two percent of income-earners and with Republicans, who have not provided a single vote for a tax increase in all of the intervening years, doing their best to resist.

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"Every Republican should focused on what we just talked about," Gingrich told David Gregory on Meet the Press. "I mean, if their competitor in '16 ia going to be Hillary Clinton, supported by Bill Clinton, and presumably a still relatively popular President Barack Obama, trying to win that will be truly the Superbowl. And the Republican party today is incapable of competing at that level."

Watch, via Mediaite:

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