From the New York Post.

This has been a bad couple of weeks for Giuliani with the areas of his best strengths, the support of firefighters, the defense against terrorism, his experience with studying Iraq, all becoming liabilities to his campaign.

The New York Times is investigating potential 2008 candidate Fred Thompson’s lobbying efforts as well as his time in the Senate and finding out that previous allegations of profiting through lobbying and political influence might be a family business.

I still think its too complex of an issue and pretty standard Washington practice and so it won’t gain a lot of traction. Time will tell.

You know more than the fact that Barack Obama out-raised Sen. Clinton by a few million dollars, which is quite a feat don’t get me wrong, I am still amazed this quarter as I was last quarter that Democrats are raising so much money. Just a few years ago the conventional wisdom was that Dems could never got the support like Republicans saw with direct-mail and through talk radio, not to mention business support. Here we are since 2004 when Dems first started raking in the big cash and they now seem to be beating out the Republican candidates by an enormous amount.

Now I do feel like come general election time Republicans will rally their base and get behind one candidate and money will be raised to compete. With that said if the right combination of dems got together they could possibly launch a real assault on Republicans. A Clinton/Obama candidacy seems unlikely and come primary time when they get ruff with each other it might well be ruled out. Imagine though the massive amount of money that could be raised with the two. It could really be a sight to see.

In the end if I were a Republican strategist I would be starting to worry that something isn’t right ‘out-there’ and I would have to start thinking it is time to really move as far away from the last six years.

News has been slow lately but I am resisting the hesitation to simply post candidate press releases. There is article after article of “Candidate X did this amazing Y while being endorsed by Z” but frankly I don’t know how much if any those things actually matter either to people or the election in general. So I will wait until things heat up to really say much about them.

The highlight of my weekend, aside from a 15 hour bachelor party that kept me away from the computer yesterday, was getting a chance to play with an iPhone. I didn’t buy one (would love to have one, wouldn’t love to spent $600 for one) but I had to stop by the Apple store to pickup a new iBook battery and some accessories anyway. So I figured, why not spent twenty minutes playing with one.

Good times and I got to see what ElectionGeek looked like on an iPhone. Very nice.

I will use this news downtime to work on other aspects of the site and fix some bugs.

It is about where we thought. A to Obama said the Sen. raised $30, the Clinton campaign has said her haul would be about $27 million, Edwards did exceed expectations and raise $9 million undoubtedly thanks to Ann Coulter and the publicity the spat between her and Ms. Edwards received.

Gov. Bill Richardson took in a nice $7 million.

Unsure about Republicans but it looks like Romney will be lower than last quarter, Giuliani will have gained and McCain, well, he will be McCain.