PrairiePundit

Washington Examiner: ... Warrington also believes that the alleged campaign finance crimes aren’t actually crimes, and questions the legal guidance of Davis. “Lanny Davis had his client plead guilty to a crime that isn't a crime,” Warrington said. "Who’s Lanny Davis really working for, Michael Cohen or the Clintons?” Trump made the same argument Wednesday, tweeting, "Michael Cohen plead guilty to two counts of campaign finance violations that are not a crime." ... "The idea that this is a campaign contribution or expenditure is highly speculative," said attorney Cleta Mitchell, a Republican election law expert, saying that she believes Cohen's plea was not motivated by legal strategy, but by political motivations. Hans von Spakovsky, a former member of the FEC who works at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said that "I believe the Justice Department would have a hard time prosecuting any such claim" that payoffs were campaign ex...

Fox News: Report of Flirtation Behind Edwards Trial Jury Issue? Some of the alternate jurors have been wearing red dresses and trying to make eye contact with Edwards.  Is it too late to give them a sanity test?

The Daily Show Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes , Political Humor & Satire Blog , The Daily Show on Facebook Jon Stewart is on a roll with this one.

Director Blue:   Hilarious: 1,800-word article on John Edwards trial doesn’t mention the word ‘Democrat’, but manages to mention ‘Republican’ 5 times Funny how his name never comes up when liberals talk about the vetting process for vice presidential candidates.

Washington Post: Ahead of his trial, John Edwards is left to ponder his downfall alone His once meteoric rise has turned into a tale of isolation and “genuine sadness” as his longtime friends and associates abandon him. Why weren't his character flaws noticed before he was offered the Vice Presidential spot on the Democrat ticket?

Buzzfeed: Nicolle Wallace: Palin Will Shadow 2012 Veepstakes It is funny how the media forgets Democrat screw ups like Edwards and Joe Biden is no prize either.  I would still pick Palin over either of them.

Edwards turned down a deal.  Campaign funds were allegedly used to cover up the an affair.  He may also be accused of lying about the affair.

ABC News: Former John Edwards' aide Andrew Young , who covered up the Democratic presidential candidate's affair , said when he cleaned up his house after his role in the cover-up ended he found one more shocker. "There was one tape that was marked 'special,'" Young told ABC News' Bob Woodruff in an exclusive interview. "It's a sex tape of Rielle and John Edwards made just a couple of months before the Iowa caucuses." Though Young never saw the woman's face in the tape, he said she was "visibly pregnant" and was "wearing a bracelet" and a "thumb ring" typically worn by Rielle Hunter . "It's her jewelry," Andrew Young's wife, Cheri, told ABC News. "It could be on another woman with the same jewelry." Young gives his account of the sex scandal and the elaborate cover-up for the Democratic presidential candidate in a new tell-all book titled, "The Politician," which ...

Washington Times: A judge Thursday dashed embattled Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick 's brief hope of attending the Democratic National Convention by barring him from leaving Michigan , just hours after another judge had lifted his travel restrictions. Even if Mr. Kilpatrick, a Democratic superdelegate, is allowed to attend the Denver event, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama would consider his visit a "distraction," his campaign said. But the Obama campaign stopped short of saying the mayor shouldn't go. ... Mr. Kilpatrick said in a statement released Thursday afternoon that he was "focused on running the city" and didn't want to distract from Mr. Obama receiving the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. But Mr. Kilpatrick also declined to say whether he would appeal his travel restrictions so he could attend the convention. ... Perhaps Kilpatrick can get together with John Edwards and discuss affairs management and ...

NY Times: As tabloid reports of a sex scandal threatened former Senator John Edwards ’s presidential campaign last December on the eve of the Iowa caucuses, two lawyers surfaced with written statements that appeared to exonerate the candidate. One of them, Robert J. Gordon of New York, said that his client, Rielle Hunter , a pregnant 43-year-old filmmaker, was not carrying Mr. Edwards’s child. Shortly thereafter, the other lawyer, Pamela J. Marple of Washington, sent word that her client, Andrew Young, an Edwards campaign aide, was the baby’s father. Seemingly issued independently of Mr. Edwards, the statements appeared to deflate the anonymously sourced reports of an Edwards tryst. But what went unnoticed was that the two lawyers shared an important connection to Mr. Edwards that suggests they were part of an orchestrated effort to protect him, one that is continuing even after he admitted last week that he had an affair with Ms. Hunter but denied that he fathered her child. The lawye...

Nick Anderson at the Houston Chronicle captures the Edwards moment. Click on the image for a larger view. The Chronicle also reports that Edwards has dropped out of a fund raiser for the Harris County Democrats ... If Edwards had not voluntarily withdrawn from the event, the local party's steering committee would have discussed — at its regularly scheduled meeting Monday night — whether to go through with his participation, according to chairman Gerald Birnberg. "There's no way you can defend in particular John Edwards' lack of honesty with the American public," Birnberg said, referring to the former senator's previous denials about the affair. ... Birnberg was a classmate at law school and is a good guy. Too bad he is a Democrat. He does hit on why this affair was a story that should have been covered.

Maureen Dowd: ... The stunning admission Edwards made to ABC’s Bob Woodruff, and in a written statement from Chapel Hill on Friday afternoon, was that he’s a narcissist. He admitted that wallowing in “self-focus” out on the trail and thinking you’re “special” can result in a solipsism that “leads you to believe you can do whatever you want, you’re invincible and there’ll be no consequences.” Auto-psychoanalysis by the perp. That’s really rich. When Bill Clinton acknowledged an affair, after equally adamant denials, he simply went into an old-fashioned spiral of penitence, his allegedly long, dark night of his alleged soul. Even in confessing to preening, Edwards was preening. His diagnosis of narcissism was weirdly narcissistic, or was it self-narcissistic? Given his diagnosis, I’m sure his H.M.O. would pay. The creepiest part of his creepy confession was when he stressed to Woodruff that he cheated on Elizabeth in 2006 when her cancer was in remission. His infidelity was oncologi...

Kristen Powers: JOHN Edwards "shocked" the political world yesterday by admitting he'd cheated on his wife of 30 years with a campaign aide, Rielle Hunter. If it looks like a phony, walks like a phony, quacks like a phony, it's a phony. There's nothing particularly shocking about a politician cheating, and there's even less shock in learning that Edwards has been lying through his teeth about his own affair. In fact, we should assume that his detailed timeline about the affair is likely just another lie. As is usual with people who've been unfaithful, he's already told a string of lies. On July 23, Edwards denied the recent allegations and called the National Enquirer story "tabloid trash." Last October, he said: "It's completely untrue, ridiculous. I've been in love with the same woman for 30-plus years and, as anybody who's been around us knows, she's an extraordinary human being, warm, loving, beautiful, sexy ...

Washington Post: Saying he was "ashamed of my conduct and choices," former North Carolina senator and onetime Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards today admitted publicly that he had an affair with a campaign videographer in 2006, but he emphatically denied a tabloid newspaper's report that he fathered the woman's 5-month-old child. In a written statement issued hours after ABC News quoted Edwards as having admitted the affair in an interview to be broadcast tonight, the 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee said apologies to his loved ones and supporters were "inadequate," and he berated himself in striking terms. "In the course of several campaigns, I started to believe that I was special and became increasingly egocentric and narcissistic," Edwards wrote. "If you want to beat me up -- feel free. You cannot beat me up more than I have already beaten up myself. I have been stripped bare and will now work with everything I have...

From the Boston Globe: Elizabeth Edwards to have Obama's ear I think an ear that size would look funny on her.

Steve Chapman: People who are under the influence of alcohol often are seized with impulses that seem brilliant at the time but end up looking like horrible mistakes the next day. We are now at the stage of the presidential election when intoxication at the prospect of the fall campaign produces ideas that, if adopted, will lead only to regret. One came in an article on the influential op-ed page of The Washington Post, proposing a simple way to reconcile Hillary Clinton and her supporters to Barack Obama's looming victory. "It's likely that the next president will face at least one Supreme Court vacancy," wrote James Andrew Miller, formerly an aide to Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker. "Obama should promise Hillary Clinton, now, that if he wins in November, the vacancy will be hers, making her first on a list of one." In Miller's view, it would guarantee a quick Senate confirmation, gratify her supporters by assuring her life tenure in a job more...

NY Times: John Edwards gave his long-awaited endorsement to Senator Barack Obama on Wednesday, bolstering Mr. Obama’s efforts to rally the Democratic Party around his candidacy and offering potential help in his efforts to win over working class white voters in the general election. ... Who is the Times' Jim Rutenberg trying to kid? Have any of the voters that have been rejecting Obama said they would change their mind if only Edwards would endorse him? Edwards did not get their votes to begin with because he sold out early to the MoveOn.org wing of the party which is even further to the left than Obama. The fact is that the voters who are moved by an Edwards endorsement were already in Obama's column. Edwards is just trying to hitch a ride on the caboose of Obama's campaign.

Chris Cillizza: Former senator John Edwards (N.C.) will end his bid for the presidency today in New Orleans, bringing to a close a five-year quest for the nation's highest office. Edwards will be joined by his wife, Elizabeth, as well as his three children on stage. He is expected to take part in a Habitat for Humanity event following the announcement. Edwards will not endorse either Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) or Barack Obama (Ill.) today and has no plans to weigh in for either candidate in the immediate future, according to aides. ... It is not clear who this helps on the Democrat side. There have been whispers that he was helping Obama by staying in the race and that he would be awarded with an appointment as Attorney General. It has been clear for some time that he could not win.

All the media called the primary in South Carolina for Barack Obama as soon as the polls closed. His victory appears to be overwhelming at this point. We will have to see if the votes match the exit polls. Obama got 81 percent of the black vote and about 17 percent of the white vote. It appears that the real fight is for second place between Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. Both CNN and Fox say Obama will win by a substantial margin. Hillary gets second and John Edwards is even further back. Current projections point to Obama being the first candidate to actually get a majority of the votes in any of the primaries this year by either party.

Charles Krauthammer: There's losing. There's losing honorably. And then there's John Edwards. Mike Huckabee is not going to be president. The loss in South Carolina, one of the most highly evangelical states in the union, made that plain. With a ceiling of 14 percent among nonevangelical Republicans, Huckabee's base is simply too narrow. But his was not a rise and then a fall. He came from nowhere to establish himself as the voice of an important national constituency. Huckabee will continue to matter, and he might even carry enough remaining Southern states to wield considerable influence at a fractured Republican convention. Fred Thompson will also not be president. His campaign failed, but quite honorably. He never tacked. He never dissimulated. He refused to reinvent himself. He presented himself plainly and honestly. Too plainly. What he lacked was the ferocious, near-deranged ambition (a.k.a., fire in the belly) required to navigate the bizarre ordeal that is...