I was traveling and in meetings most of the day. So unlike most every other day, I was almost totally off the news grid. I caught a few headlines here and there on my iPhone about the unfolding Newt implosion. But, my God, I couldn’t quite grasp the scope until I got back to my hotel room and started reading our stories. And now it comes out that this afternoon Newt was compelled to personally call Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) to apologize for questioning and criticizing Ryan’s Medicare phase-out plan. His spokesman publicly stated that Newt apologized. Publicly. On the record. Voluntarily.

I mean, wow. Watching TV just now, I see that South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) is now lashing out at Gingrich as some sort of GOP health care policy traitor. Read More

Newt on the David Gregory interview: “I didn’t go in there quite hostile enough, because it didn’t occur to me going in that you’d have a series of setups.”

“I didn’t go in there quite hostile enough.” Nope. Me neither.

Examining the Gingrich wreckage this evening, I’m starting to wonder if we might simply be in the filming stage of Gingrich’s own version of “I’m Still Here”, the in-character ‘mockumentary’ Joaquin Pheonix and Casey Affleck made about Pheonix’s phony descent into personal and professional self-immolation.

Who’ll give me 3 to 1 that Gingrich shows up in Cannes next year clean-shaven and lucid recounting how he had everyone going?

In a bold laying down of the gauntlet tonight on Fox News, Newt Gingrich banned Democrats from attempting to retrieve his Meet the Press quotes from the memory hole he’s spent the day consigning them to. And he formally decreed that “any ad which quotes what I said on Sunday is a falsehood.” Watch.

In the launch of this new Republican “Super PAC,” you get a taste of why — thanks to Citizens United and an emasculated Federal Elections Commission — 2012 will be the biggest election free-for-all since at least the Watergate-era reforms. Responding to watchdogs’ complaints that his new Super PAC is illegal even on the now-virtually-lawless campaign finance frontier, Republican uber-lawyer James Bopp growls (I’m imagining the chewed stubb of a cigar dangling from his lips): “The Supreme Court doesn’t care, and I don’t care, and the [FEC] doesn’t care. No one that matters cares.”

Newt: You have to understand, I didn’t support mandates in the ’90s, I supported “mandates.”

Esquire punks World Net Daily editor Joseph Farah with a slick satire imagining Farah convinced by the long form birth certificate that Obama is legit. In real life Farah is not only unconvinced but reacts to the piece with his usual aplomb and good humor … by threatening legal action against Esquire.

Beyond his erratic and intemperate personality, Newt Gingrich has always been burdened by a grandiose self-image in which he is a gallant figure standing athwart history. Narcissism among politicos is hardly a rare disease, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it channeled through a flack in as pure a form as Newt’s press secretary Rick Tyler does today, defending Newt from the gravest of all existential threats–political reporters:

The literati sent out their minions to do their bidding. Washington cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world. The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment’s cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods. Now they are left exposed by their bylines and handles. But surely they had killed him off. This is the way it always worked. A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won’t be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.

Armed sheep with cocktail napkins would have overcome a lesser man than Newt.

Our look back on the first seven days of the Gingrich candidacy in pictures:

WARNING: Since Newt has retracted much of what he said this past week, clicking the above link may expose you to multiple “falsehoods.”

Relying primarily on the comment of one New York financier made to the Wall Street Journal, Republicans have begun floating the notion that if the failure to raise the debt ceiling means the U.S. government misses a few interest payments on its debts, it won’t be that big of a deal. So we checked in with the ratings agencies to see what they thought of this. Short answer: It would be a BFD.