$ $ $

I find this rather amazing. Mitt Romney really wanted to win the Ames Straw Poll, so he shelled out the big bucks to rally a small army of Iowegians (or whatever...) to come on out to the big show and vote for their man. All total he may have spent $442.87 per voter on the effort.

Assuming that he needs to collect as many votes as Pres. Bush did in 2004 to win the Oval Office (never mind the whole nominating thing...), which was 62,040,606, Romney would have to raise $27,475,923,179.22 before election day if he used the same burn rate during the general election.

That's more than the total gross national product of Sri Lanka.

...Oh, and Tommy Thompson dropped out of the race and some guy in some job somewhere in the White House decided he wanted to spend more time with his family ... or something.