One thing you can never fault Newt Gingrich on is not having ideas, the man is full of them. They aren’t ALWAYS the best of ideas, but they are ideas none-the-less. Two I found intriquing recently were on completely different topics.

The first was on his belief that Republicans will face massive losses, including the presidency, in 2008 if they continue to run stand by the president. This is interesting to someone watching the race for any number of reasons and you can take from it what you like.

The second is his plan for using government. While many of the Republicans during the debates scorned the government for spending money on research and other high priced items and using a leave the market to decide policy Newt sees things a little different. For instance Mars.

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Colin Powell confirmed a story that has been going around for awhile now that he has given advice to Senator Barack Obama. Contrary to what some of the accounts have reported (or the impression they gave) Powell did not cite this as evidence he is endorsing the Obama campaign OR that it was advice exclusively given to him. Powell said the following yesterday on NBC’s Meet the Press:

Powell said he has met twice with Obama, the Illinois senator. “I’ve been around this town a long time and I know everybody who is running for office. And I make myself available to talk about foreign policy matters and military matters with whoever wishes to chat with me,” Powell said.

How is that for a headline?

Last week I noted how two competing online Web sites were reporting conflicting news about Hillary Clinton’s fund raising. Today I bring you the latest bit of monetary cognitive dissonance only this time involving John McCain.

According to Bob Novak of the Chicago Sun Times John McCain’s campaign is lagging behind in Q2 and is likely to fall short of the $10 million goal.

Not so says another report from Marc Ambinder who talked to John Weaver, chief strategist of the McCain team, who says not only will the campaign meet their goal but will exceed it, potentially by $2.5 million.

So which one is it?

My guess is the official campaign response, though we will see. McCain was pretty candid about his lack of fund raising prowess last quarter and also candid about why that was. Namely he wasn’t going out and doing his job as a candidate. Looking back at McCain’s schedule over the last three months he has been packing in fund raising events as often as possible. Now that isn’t a guarantee that they are filled to the brim with people handing out cash but it is a sign the campaign is trying.

Still I have no insider information and I am not sure where Novak got his, so let me qualify what I just said and say I have no idea if I am right and only time will tell. Still it is a lesson to bloggers and the public to not just read a headline or the first paragraph of an article and run with it. Always look for the mention of more than one source (when possible) and consider what other factors might be involved in the writing of an article. Also consider that the rebuttal might well be a total mountain of bull flop as well.

I have been fighting off a nasty virus of some kind all week which has left me little time to get anything done. With that said, I am trying.

Right now I have a very specific to-do-list of things needed for the site which I thought I would share. I just got done updating the 2008 Presidential Money section. I now need to update ALL of the candidates bio pages with more detailed information about their Q! earnings. The end of Q2 is on its way so I need to get this done asap.

In addition I need to:
1) Update all the candidates bio pages and CREATE those that are missing. There are a lot of them and I need to get on that
2) Update the primary section of the 2008 President section to reflect recent changes and add more detailed information
3) Spend some time with the calendar system. I need to get to know how it works better than I currently do and figure out ways of integrating it into the site more efficiently
4) Finish building a polling tracker database and then plug in as much information as I possibly can. This is going to be a big project
5) Get myself on a more regular update schedule with things like the calendar, the blog etc.

I plan on having all of that worked out by the end of Summer. Then during the Winter I can focus on just updating information while building the Senate tracking section of the site. I don’t even know if I can efficiently get to following House races this election year. We will see.

There is so much information out there and so much to do! The only good thing is I have no shortage of content to put here, just a shortage of time to get it to you.

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George W. Bush Gets Little Love At GOP Forum

McCain Trails in Florida, Plans to Skip Iowa Straw Poll

Immigration bill costs McCain county chairman