Newt Gingrich and the "Ideas Factory"

The other night New Gingrich had this to say about his Presidential ambitions:

I am asking you to embark with me on a voyage of invention and discovery, to be as bold and as brave as the Wright brothers.

I certainly agree that trusting the nation to Gingrich would be a very, very brave act.

He then followed up with some of the magical thinking that makes serious people so skeptical of his "ideas factory":

Gingrich began his speech with remarks in which he predicted an economic recovery “literally” the night Republicans would send Barack Obama home.

Well, that was easy! Just elect Newt and our problems are over. As a critic of his citizen boards who would review illegal immigrants said,

It’s the kind of thing that sounds right, maybe, when you sit on your couch and hear it. But boy, when you take it all apart and think about how all this works in practice, it’s like, ‘ugh.’

Among the things Newt has proposed are firing judges who disagree with the President (by eliminating their jobs), creating a new class of laws that cannot be reviewed by the courts, having two, side-by-side retirement systems (both Social Security and a 401k-like investment scheme), having two tax codes, banning the construction of mosques, and cutting income taxes by nearly half, which will (he says) generate more government income because of the vast economic growth that would be unleashed.

As brave as the Wright brothers, indeed.