Roadkill: OffTheBus's Ongoing RoundUp of the Awkward, the Ugly, and the Just Plain Weird

Edited by Richard Riehl and Denise Wheeler. Reported by Kirsten Anderson, River Curtis-Stanley, Jodi Lampert, Julie Pierce, and Debbi Plummer.

"Thompson speaks out against holding tail between legs": During a tour of a Dell computer factory near Austin in a campaign swing through Texas, Fred Thompson was asked if he's onboard with President Bush's forecast of American troops remaining in Iraq beyond Bush's presidency. Thompson's answer? "It depends on how things go. I think that what they're doing right now is the right approach...Leaving there wholesale with our tail between our legs is not the thing to do." If that's not good, how about leaving retail, holding our tails high?

"Paul pursues pepperoni paparazzi!": The Ron Paul campaign is reaching out to pizza lovers with a light-up car top sign. That's right. Just like the pizza delivery folks. As the campaign ad says: "Let your Ron Paul enthusiasm shine with this light-up President '08 car top sign." [Image from Ron Paul website]

"Ron Paul makes a huge splash": The Austin Ron Paul Meetup group has found a way to leverage their impact by quenching your thirst. A handful of volunteers distributed 3,000+ bottles of "Ron Paul water" to a large crowd at a music festival, and they plan to do it again at an upcoming college football game. It may not make them popular with the catering company holding the bottled water contract for the events, but that's hardball politics.

"Gravel discovers voter support, like love, can be blind": In his latest email to supporters, the candidate boasts of finally coming in first in a poll. It's a blind poll sponsored by VAJoe.com, a website for active duty military and veterans. In this poll you don't pick from a list of candidates. You mark your positions on the major issues and the website reveals which candidate matches your beliefs most closely. Gravel claims, "I won the poll by a significant margin!" How big a margin, you ask? He doesn't say, but a visit to the website revealed he got a whopping 17% of the matches, nearly five points higher than second place Dennis Kucinich. According to Gravel, "This, and other information I have access to, tells me soon voters will see that I am the best candidate to represent their positions in November." Now what do you suppose that "other information" could be? Perhaps a collaboration with Kucinich to eliminate the Electoral College, replacing the 2008 Election with a national blind poll? Stay tuned!

"Is that a rock in your sling, Mr. Huckabee, or are you just happy to see me?": In an NPR interview earlier this week, the candidate explains how he lost an election to widely popular Senator Dale Bumpers. "It was David goes against Goliath, and this time David forgot to put the rock in his sling," Huckabee said. What he had in his sling was slime, according to Hoyt Purvis, a University of Arkansas professor, who said attacking the liberal Bumpers for his support of the National Endowment for the Arts was, in effect, claiming he supported pornography. Huckabee said that taught him a lesson. Now what would that be? If you have to go negative be sure to pack rocks?

"When the taxes hit the fan...": Fred Thompson, who favors streamlining the tax code and dissolving the Internal Revenue Service, "as we know it," told donors at the Driskill Hotel in Austin that "if Democrats start targeting taxes, don't stand anywhere near the target because you're going to get hit."

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