Rick Santorum indicated that Newt Gingrich should drop out of the presidential race, arguing -- as Gingrich did during his surge -- that splitting the "anti-Romney" vote helped Mitt Romney win the Michigan primary and Washington caucuses and contributes to his overall success so far.
"It's always harder when you've got two conservatives running in the race as we have seen in Washington and we've seen in other states," Santorum said on Fox News Sunday. "We have the anti-Romney vote, if you will. Both Gingrich and I are slugging away."
Santorum stopped short of calling for Gingrich to exit the race, but he noted that their combined support would defeat Romney. "In Michigan, we would have won easily had those two votes been combined," he told Chris Wallace.
He also seems to believe that Gingrich will have to drop out, eventually. "I think Newt has got to figure out, you know, where he goes after Georgia," Santorum said. "And, you know, eventually hopefully the race will settle out and we'll go one on one [with Romney]. And once that happens, we fell very comfortable we're going to win this thing."
Gingrich said after his South Carolina victory that Santorum should drop out before the Florida primary, but Santorum refused and now Gingrich is returning the favor. "I'm taking Rick Santorum's advice," Gingrich told CNN's Candy Crowley this morning. "He stayed in, he was running fourth in every single primary, suddenly he very cleverly went to three states nobody else went to, and he became the media darling and bounced back."
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Santorum: I'll beat Romney if Gingrich drops out | Campaign 2012 | Washington Examiner
Jim Conrad's Naturalist Newsletter
AVOCADO TREES FLOWERING
Along the backstreets of Dzitas, a little Maya town maybe 20 minutes by car north of Pisté, branch tips of Avocado trees are loaded with diffuse, basketball-size panicles of small, yellowish flowers as shown at.
Up close, the blossoms reveal several interesting features, as seen at
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Avocado trees, PERSEA AMERICANA, are native tropical-American members of the Laurel Family, the Lauraceae. The above picture shows several features common to flowers in that family. (Other Laurel Family members Northerners might be familiar with include Sassafras, Spicebush and the Laurel itself.)
Flowers in the Laurel Family normally are yellow or greenish, with no corollas or petals, which is the case with this flower. In the picture, the fuzzy, petal-like things spreading from the flower's center are calyx segments adapted to visually attract pollinators, a job more commonly handled by a flower's corolla. The calyx has six lobes, but notice how the lobes overlap; at the left, one lobe practically lies atop another. This overlapping of sepals also is a Laurel Family characteristic.
