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- It's a relatively quiet Friday, but it seems Fred Thompson, at least, has awoken from his nap in his favorite rocking chair on the back porch long enough to launch a piece of negative direct mail against Mike Huckabee.
- Meanwhile, TNR's Eve Fairbanks reinforces Jon Chait's point that Huckabee has a worrying tendency to adopt his campaign positions from things he reads -- she notes that his immigration plan is lifted directly from a National Review article and we already know he adopted his Fair-Tax plan after reading a book promoting it. Maybe someone should slip him one of Ezra's pieces on health care and tell him it's an AEI report.
- Huckabee has also taken a lot of flack for writing that "during the Cold War, you were a hawk or a dove, but this new world requires us to be a phoenix." TNR's Christopher Orr (TNR really is going above and beyond the call of duty in the Huckabashing department) has a hilarious suggestion for how that sentence could have been improved.
- Thompson isn't the only one going negative. Mitt Romney is falling back on the time-tested standby of faltering front-runners -- making stuff up about your opponents.
- The most interesting news on the Democratic side (aside from the various polls) is that a Hillary Clinton campaign Iowa co-chair (one of 25) has defected to Obama because he was upset by Clinton's recent attacks on Obama. It's not a big deal in and of itself, but it may reflect a discomfort with negative campaigning in Iowa. Clinton certainly didn't go negative first, but since the attacks on her came from so many sources and she has responded mainly against Obama (since he's the main threat to her) he's managed to look like the high-minded one. At least I'd guess that would be the impression of someone only sorta following the race in an early primary state.
- Finally, some goodies for the weekend: Jessica Hagy of the nation's foremost ven-diagram, pie-chart, and graph-based humor blog indexed has a gallery of campaign 2008 themed drawings for McClatchy (make sure to read the titles on the right). This video is what I'd imagine would happen if the Books got hired to make a bollywood dance video starring Barack Obama. Finally, the creator of the amazing Rudgy Giuliani ad-parody has two new ones entitled "Ladies for Giuliani" and "Hillary's Open Letter to Obama."
--Sam Boyd
