Today’s installment of campaign-related news items that wouldn’t generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers:<\/p>\n
* Fred Thompson made a campaign appearance in South Carolina yesterday, and received a warm welcome from a far-right audience, though activists apparently left the event unconvinced<\/a>. Asked “what do you believe in,” and about his “underlying principles,” Thompson said, “We can aspire to wonderful things.” Said one would-be supporter, “We drove an hour and a half to get here, and he didn’t say anything new.”<\/p>\n * Rudy Giuliani told Pat Robertson’s CBN that he was poised to become a priest, but changed his mind. “Frankly, in the Catholic Church, the vow of celibacy was something I wasn’t sure I could keep,” Giuliani said<\/a>. Given his three marriages and adulterous affairs, Giuliani might want to come up with a better line to that question, particularly for an evangelical audience.<\/p>\n * Speaking of Giuliani, the South Carolina NAACP is hammering the former mayor picking a state campaign chairman who a) considers the NAACP the “National Association of Retarded People”; and b) is unusually fond<\/a> of the Confederate battle flag.<\/p>\n * Mitt Romney rented Fenway Park in Boston for an event that was, shall we say, sparsely attended<\/a>.<\/p>\n * And speaking of Romney, the former governor has a new public-relations problem to worry about. Apparently, he strapped a dog carrier — with the family dog Seamus, an Irish Setter, in it — to the roof of the family station wagon for a 12-hour drive. As Time explained<\/a>, “Massachusetts’s animal cruelty laws specifically prohibit anyone from carrying an animal ‘in or upon a vehicle, or otherwise, in an unnecessarily cruel or inhuman manner or in a way and manner which might endanger the animal carried thereon.’ An officer for the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals responded to a description of the situation saying ‘it’s definitely something I’d want to check out.'”<\/p>\n