Giuliani released from hospital, will resume campaigning in N.H.

ST. LOUIS - Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani was released yesterday from a St. Louis hospital after spending the night to undergo tests for flu-like symptoms.

"I'm feeling fine, thanks to the hospital. They did a good job," a smiling and waving Giuliani said as he left Barnes-Jewish Hospital en route to New York.

His campaign said he would make planned stops in New Hampshire tomorrow and Sunday.

The former New York mayor felt the symptoms while campaigning Wednesday in Missouri, and they soon became worse, his campaign said. The campaign said that doctors had performed a series of precautionary tests and the results were normal.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - Mike Huckabee's Republican rivals, fighting back as he surges in the presidential race, are tagging him as soft on crime because of a law he signed as Arkansas governor that gave some methamphetamine offenders more credit for good behavior.

"Mike Huckabee’s solution? Early releases for meth dealers," Fred Thompson's campaign proclaims.

Huckabee's home state, as well as Iowa where voters will caucus in two weeks in the first nomination contest, has passed legislation restricting access to the principal ingredient in methamphetamine. The law Huckabee's rivals are referring to meant that some meth offenders, instead of serving 70 percent of their sentences would have to serve at least half if they behaved.

He answered critics of his record on methamphetamine yesterday, singling out Romney-Sentences "for meth dealers in my state are more than twice as harsh as they were in his state," Huckabee told an audience said in Marshalltown, Iowa. "When people get desperate, they say desperate things, and sometimes dishonest things."

Romney tried to keep the heat on.

He pledged in Des Moines yesterday to stop a "plague of meth" in the United States.

"I'm very proud of the fact that we, in my state, when I was governor, made it tougher for people with meth labs," Romney told about 60 people at a forum at a country club.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

John McCain aired his holiday TV ad yesterday, and not surprisingly it has to do with a Christmas he spent as the involuntary guest of the Hanoi Hilton.

The spot, titled "My Christmas Story" and unveiled yesterday in press conferences in Manchester, N.H., and Columbia, S.C., reminds primary voters that he was a war hero and a prisoner of war during Vietnam.

"One night, after being mistreated as a POW, a guard loosened the ropes binding me, easing my pain," McCain says in the ad. "On Christmas, that same guard approached me, and without saying a word, he drew a cross in the sand. We stood wordlessly looking at the cross, remembering the true light of Christmas.

"I will never forget that no matter where you are, no matter how difficult the circumstances, there will always be someone who will pick you up."

FOON RHEE

NEW YORK - MTV has recruited 51 youths to cover the 2008 elections throughout the country with weekly reports that will include short videos, blogs, and animation.

The reports will be distributed through Think.MTV.com, an issue-based political and community website run by MTV, to mobile devices through a soon-to-be launched service called MTV Mobile; and through The Associated Press's Online Video Network, a video news service that is hosted by more than 1,800 websites.

ASSOCIATED PRESS