Found via The Corner an official statement from the Thompson Campaign:

In an interview with CNN today, former Senator Fred Thompson’s position on constitutional amendments concerning gay marriage was unclear.

Thompson believes that states should be able to adopt their own laws on marriage consistent with the views of their citizens.

He does not believe that one state should be able to impose its marriage laws on other states, or that activist judges should construe the constitution to require that.

If necessary, he would support a constitutional amendment prohibiting states from imposing their laws on marriage on other states.

Fred Thompson does not support a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.

As Hugh Hewitt points out this means Romney is the only top-tier Republican who supports a gay-marriage amendment.

Lisa Wangsness writes in the Boston Globe about Mitt Romney’s use of 1950’s slang to prove a point. I don’t quite know what that point is though other than she believes it is some part of a conservative mechanism to touch nostalgia in America. Which I think is the cats meow.

Actually I think its a pretty weak article with little point, not unlike that horrendous and offensive Hillary Clinton’s cleavage article I read not long ago.

Basically you can add this to the ‘dumb articles about presidential candidates’ file.

My ABC affiliate won’t be running the debate in real-time today and frankly these debates have become so status-quo I probably would have just Tivo’ed and fast forwarded anyway so that is what I will be doing.

Meanwhile if you want live-blogging check out:

Huffington Post | Chris Cillizza

This one was tipped off by Marc Ambinder with a statement now appearing on Senator Obama’s campaign Web site from David Plouffe:

We have just been thru a period of three debates/forums in six days and the outlook for the future holds more of the same. And, because of likely calendar movement, once we get past Labor Day the Iowa caucuses are less than 120 days away.

So far, Barack has attended seven Democratic debates and nineteen candidate forums. There are five remaining sanctioned DNC debates, which we are committed to attend and two Iowa debates normally held in January, which are being held in December, which we are also committed to attend. We will also be attending the Univision debate in Florida on September 9. This means that by the end of this year, Obama will have participated in a total of 15 Democratic debates…

Unfortunately, we simply cannot run the kind of campaign we want and need to, engaging with voters in the early states and February 5 states, if our schedule is dictated by dozens of forums and debates. Ultimately, the one group left out of the current schedule is the voters and they are the ones who ask the toughest questions and most deserve to have those questions answered face to face.

Therefore, after this week, we will only be attending the five DNC debates through the sanctioning period of December 10, Univision, and the two Iowa debates previously mentioned. Candidate forums - where candidates appear sequentially will be considered, but we are unlikely to accept many of these. Instead, Barack will spend his time answering questions directly from voters in places like Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada, and elsewhere. We simply cannot continue to hopscotch from forum to forum and run a campaign true to the bottom up movement for change that propelled Barack into this race.

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Big news this week out of Illinois where former House Speaker Dennis Hastert has announced he will not seek re-election.

Rep. Dennis Hastert became speaker of the House by a twist of fate, and ended up holding the post longer than any other Republican and throughout a tumultuous period of American history.

He announced Friday that he will not seek re-election, making official what had been suspected since last year’s Democratic takeover of Congress cost him the powerful speaker’s position.

“Together, we have made a difference. We have made history, and I thank you,” he told supporters in front of the Kendall County courthouse in the northern Illinois district he was first elected to represent in 1986.

He was certainly part of history. A former wrestling coach and history teacher, Hastert, like everyone else, expected Bob Livingston to become speaker after Newt Gingrich announced in 1998 that he was stepping aside.

But when Livingston abruptly announced he would retire following disclosure of marital infidelity, Hastert became speaker. It was a post he would hold from 1999 to 2007 - longer than any other Republican in American history. Democrat Sam Rayburn of Texas held the post for a record 17 years.