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
* John Edwards thinks he’s found a weak point in Hillary Clinton’s armor: Fox News<\/a>. “Edwards criticized [Clinton] for taking more than $20,000 in donations from News Corp. officials, arguing that the company’s Fox News Channel has a right-wing bias and Democrats should avoid the company…. ‘The time has come for Democrats to stop pretending to be friends with the very people who demonize the Democratic Party,’ Edwards said in a statement.” News Corp. responded<\/a> by noting that Edwards’ publisher, HarperCollins, paid Edwards for his 2006 book. Edwards responded to that by noting he donated the book payments to charity.<\/p>\n * In light of the Minnesota bridge tragedy, Democratic Senate candidates Al Franken and Mike Ciresi both suspended<\/a> all campaign activities. The Republican National Committee, however, is continuing<\/a> with its summer meeting in Minneapolis.<\/p>\n * I’m still paying almost no attention to national polls on the presidential primaries, but state polls in early primary states are at least mildly interesting. The latest WaPo\/ABC poll<\/a> out of Iowa shows the top three Dems in what is effectively a three-way tie: Obama 27%, Clinton 26%, and Edwards 26%.<\/p>\n * In case it was unclear why former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign is struggling to break through, the far-right Club for Growth makes it clear with a new ad<\/a> in Iowa. It accuses Huckabee for raising “sales taxes, gas taxes, grocery taxes, even higher taxes on nursing home beds.”<\/p>\n * There’s been a bizarre, over-the-top fight lately between Huckabee and Sam Brownback, both of whom believe they deserve support from the GOP’s religious right base. The details are kind of irrelevant — neither is gaining any real traction — but yesterday it crossed into the silly<\/a> threshold when the Huckabee campaign relied on Baptists for Brownback, a parody<\/i> website, to launch its latest attack.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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: * John Edwards thinks he’s found a weak point in Hillary Clinton’s armor: Fox News. “Edwards criticized [Clinton] for taking more than $20,000 in donations from News Corp. officials, arguing that the company’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12420\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}