A weekly roundup of the buzz from the Sunday talk shows

Fred Thompson weighs in on the handling of the Schiavo dispute. (Mario Tama - Getty Images)

Former senator Fred Thompson of Tennessee, a 2008 GOP presidential contender, reentered the debate over Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman in a "persistent vegetative state" at the center of a national debate two years ago over end-of-life issues, saying yesterday that he would have preferred that she had been kept alive.

A legal and political battle unfolded over whether doctors should remove Schiavo's feeding tube and let her die, as her husband wanted, or continue to sustain her, as her parents wanted.

Thompson, winning the endorsement of the National Right to Life Committee last week, was said to have made certain pledges about end-of-life issues.

Thompson said on ABC's "This Week" that when family members cannot agree, "the first recourse needs to be state government."

Referring to the Schiavo case, he said, "I would side with the parents in, you know, keeping that child alive."

He added, "How could you decide otherwise, if they told you that the child was going to continue to live?"

Pressed on the broader legal concerns surrounding end-of-life issues, he said he doesn't "have a legal position, other than it ought to be resolved in a state court system."

Blame It on Arkansas: Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, another GOP contender, said the ethics questions that have recently been raised about his tenure in Little Rock are masked political attacks.

"There's something Arkansas-esque about it," he said. "If you look at the politics of this state, the people who are not happy that I was governor -- remember, I was only the fourth Republican elected in 150 years," he said on "Fox News Sunday."

Huckabee was asked about his first Iowa television spot featuring his celebrity endorser, Chuck Norris. "It probably doesn't convince anybody," he acknowledged. "The spots we'll run next week will start doing that. But what it does do is exactly what it's doing this morning: getting a lot of attention, driving people to our Web site, giving them an opportunity to find out, who is this guy that would come out with Chuck Norris in a commercial."

What You Think, What You Know: Former senator John Edwards of North Carolina, a Democratic contender, said he doesn't know whether Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) could win the presidency.

"I think that remains to be seen. That's why we have campaigns," Edwards said on CNN's "Late Edition." "I mean, what I know is that I can. And I think the empirical evidence supports that."

He continued his recent line of criticism against Clinton and her candidacy.

"When I talk about shaking up Washington and making this place actually work for the American people, it is an interesting thing to watch that the people who are inside Washington, including Senator Clinton and her campaign, they circle the wagons and start protecting Washington politicians," he said.

On CBS's "Face the Nation," he rejected the notion that "this is mudslinging," saying, "I mean, we're talking about substantive issues of war that are going to face the next president of the United States."

By Zachary A. Goldfarb