Updated from the top. Please treat this as a blog-within-a-blog, come back often, and scroll down till you hit something you saw on your last visit.

• Fred Thompson, Man Alone
• For What It's Worth (Moran on Moran)
• Factor highlights--and the real Al Sharpton
• Video: Jason Whitlock calls Jackson and Sharpton “terrorists”
• Is Fred 'Someone Else'?
• From the Courthouse to the White House

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Fred Thompson, Man Alone
By Neil Cavuto

One final footnote on Fred Thompson. It's a little thing, but it struck me and my executive producer Gary Schreier as we greeted him this week: He came alone.

Alone — no handlers, no enablers, no key people, no any people.

Just Fred, by himself.

And Gary and I are thinking, hey this guy is tracking sometimes second in GOP polls for president.

For president! Of the United States!!

And we're looking for his entourage, his hangers-on, you know, the guy who holds his briefcase.

Another, his cell phone, still another his coat.

Someone who polices his words, advises him on statements to the press.

Nope. No briefcase guy. Or cell phone dude. No policy wonk or statement checker.

No people at all.

Get this: I had more people than he had people.

Which tells you something about Fred, I guess: The image things that seem to matter to others don't much matter to Fred. ...

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For What It's Worth
Rick Moran

Yesterday, my brother really stepped in it by penning perhaps the most lopsidedly unpopular post in the history of blogdom. Technorati lists 78 blog posts and counting this morning on Terry’s article, all of them – both left and right – highly opposed. Some conservatives are approaching apoplexy. For a pretty reasoned takedown of what Terry wrote, you can’t do better than J-Pods at The Corner. And my friend Tom Lifson at The American Thinker also offers a rational rebuttal to Terry’s words.

J-Pod and Tom are in a distinct minority. Out of the thousands of comments at Terry’s site, there may be 50 that attempt to respond in a reasonable manner. The rest should be studied by some college kid majoring in Deviant Psychology. ...

Perhaps down the road, when some of the sting from the poisoned barbs let loose by the more than 6,000 commenters at his site goes away, I’ll have something suitably snarky and ironic to say to Terry. Perhaps I’ll bake him a congratulatory cake or something.

But today I feel compelled to rise from my sickbed and stand with him. Not in defense of what he wrote but in solidarity with his right to say it. For you see, in all the words written against him, no one has said the simple truth that you can say something with which every one else on the planet disagrees. But as long as you don’t employ hate speech or bigoted language to get your point across, you should be reasonably safe in saying it. ...

No, I won’t defend what Terry said. But when all hands are raised against him, I think it important that he know that his family will stand with him. And I will say this; whatever his reasoning in writing that post, it came from someone with a good and true heart. And I would grant him more intellectual honesty in his little finger than is present in the many thousands of his critics combined. This has come through in his reporting time and time again and has earned him the respect of his colleagues and the admiration of many, many Americans – including this one.

Read the whole thing, and the NRO at American Thinker posts Rick links to, and the Bookworm post AT links to. Note to self: Be glad Bookworm's your friend, be careful to never piss her off.

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Factor highlights--and the real Al Sharpton 
Michelle Malkin

I think I was about to hurl when Geraldo called Al Sharpton a "great man" and one of the nation's top "civil rights" leaders. You can hear me mutter "whose civil rights?" Certainly not the rights of innocent prosecutor Steve Pagones, who was truly scarred for life by the lying, conniving Sharpton machine. Jeff Jacoby summarizes Sharpton's "great" record:

1987: Sharpton spreads the incendiary Tawana Brawley hoax, insisting heatedly that a 15-year-old black girl was abducted, raped, and smeared with feces by a group of white men. He singles out Steve Pagones, a young prosecutor. Pagones is wholly innocent -- the crime never occurred -- but Sharpton taunts him: "If we're lying, sue us, so we can . . . prove you did it." Pagones does sue, and eventually wins a $345,000 verdict for defamation. To this day, Sharpton refuses to recant his unspeakable slander or to apologize for his role in the odious affair.

1991: A Hasidic Jewish driver in Brooklyn's Crown Heights section accidentally kills Gavin Cato, a 7-year-old black child, and antisemitic riots erupt. Sharpton races to pour gasoline on the fire. At Gavin's funeral he rails against the "diamond merchants" -- code for Jews -- with "the blood of innocent babies" on their hands. He mobilizes hundreds of demonstrators to march through the Jewish neighborhood, chanting, "No justice, no peace." A rabbinical student, Yankel Rosenbaum, is surrounded by a mob shouting "Kill the Jews!" and stabbed to death.

1995:  ...

There is, contrary to Geraldo's assertion, a world of difference between Imus's career of dumb remarks and Sharpton's career of malicious racial demagoguery.

There is no ideological difference between the hate-mongering likes of Malik Shabazz and Al Sharpton.

Sharpton, with the help of willing media, is exploiting the Imus matter to further rehabilitate his image without having to renounce any of his past poisonous behavior. Now, he's playing martyr with the latest reports of death threats against him.

If the media--broadcast, cable, print, and radio--really wanted to do something to "heal" race relations, they'd keep this charlatan (and all his mini-mes like Shabazz) off the airwaves and off their news pages. The only place they deserve to be is under the headline "Most Ridiculous Item of the Day." ...

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Video: Jason Whitlock calls Jackson and Sharpton “terrorists”
Allahpundit

Whitlock’s a sportswriter at the Kansas City Star whose recent column about the Imus affair has been making the rounds. I confess I hadn’t heard of him before Bryan linked him on Wednesday, but I’ve heard of him now. Have I ever.

He goes way over the top by calling them terrorists, but the rest is gold. And when the nutroots gets wind of it, the reaction — particularly among black progressives — will be ferocious. Expect the first minstrel-face photoshop of him to hit the ‘Net sometime Monday or early Tuesday. Click the image to watch. ...

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Is Fred 'Someone Else'?
Ed Morrissey

The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes takes a look at the Fred Thompson phenomenon in the Republican presidential primary race and concludes that he embodies None of the Above, at least for the moment. Make no mistake, Hayes warns -- he won't play that role for long. If conservatives find themselves disheartened by the passive (or nonexistent) conservativism of the Bush era, Thompson promises a more assertive, robust form that could hearken back to Ronald Reagan: ...

I'm gonna stick with a really short excerpt here lest I tempt you to not read the whole thing. After you read Ed's piece, read Scott Johnson's here.  They're both based on this Weekly Standard piece:

From the Courthouse to the White House
Fred Thompson auditions for the leading role.
by Stephen F. Hayes

A strange thing happened a few weeks back when I went to the Café Promenade at the Mayflower Hotel for an off-the-record interview with an unpaid adviser to the non-campaign of unannounced presidential candidate Fred Thompson.

Fred Thompson showed up.

Thompson was there to have lunch with Ed Gillespie, former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a powerhouse consultant with ties to the White House. The two men worked together in the fall of 2005 on the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee John Roberts. Thompson had invited Gillespie to lunch to discuss a potential presidential bid.

On March 11, just a week before, Thompson had appeared on Fox News Sunday and told Chris Wallace that he was giving "serious consideration" to running for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. Ever since, advisers on other campaigns have tried to figure out how he'll affect the race if he runs. ...

All of this, for a candidate who has not yet announced for anything.

Last week, I went to Thompson's home in the verdant Washington suburb of McLean, Virginia, to talk to him about his prospective presidential run. We spoke for more than four hours about his life in Tennessee, his family, his acting career, his foray into politics, and his future.

I was 30 minutes late. Thompson, who was on the phone with Howard Baker, his political mentor, didn't seem to care. He hung up, extended his large hand, offered a friendly greeting, and led me to his office. We were alone. Thompson's work space looks just like what the home office of a successful politician or CEO should look like--though a little messier: a large desk, dark wood, leather furniture, lots of books and magazines and newspapers, a flat-screen TV, and box upon box of cigars--Montecristos from Havana.

The presence of the cigars and the absence of a press chaperone were clues that Thompson is taking a different approach to his potential candidacy. A campaign flack would have insisted on hiding the cigars--Senator, how did you get those Cuban cigars? Isn't there a trade embargo?--and might have dampened Thompson's natural candor. On subjects ranging from Social Security to abortion, the CIA and to Iran, there would be lots of candor over the next several hours.

And by the end of the conversation, two unexpected realities had emerged. If he joins the race for the Republican nomination, and if he campaigns the same way he spoke to me last week, Fred Thompson, a mild-mannered, slow-talking southern gentleman, will run as the politically aggressive conservative that George W. Bush hasn't been for four years. And the actor in the race could well be the most authentic personality in the field. ...

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Did you come by yesterday?

• 2007.04.13 Politics/1st Amendment Roundup
  • Nancy Pelosi's First 100 Days
  • Barry brings up the rear
  • Hasta la Free Speech
  • ACLU To Defend Nazis Again
  • Democrats in Congress to Consider Making Laws
  • The Law Of Unintended Consequences
  • The Incredible Shrinking Candidates

The more I learn about this guy the more I like. Of everyone who's shown an interest in being our next President I'd still choose Duncan Hunter if I had it in my power, but that isn't a realistic hope.  Fred Thompson is, and Hunter'd make a good VP, then a good candidate for the top job 8 years later. Thompson/Hunter '08!