Same as everyone else

Greg Sargent reported last night that the Huckster did exactly what he said he wouldn't do -- he played the negative ad against Romney. You may recall a bizarre press conference a few days ago in which the Huckster pulled the media together to say he wouldn't air negative ads. He then proceeded to air the exact ad he promised he wouldn't air. The presser backfired because the media didn't take the bait.

Well, apparently the Huckster tried to get a little more out of the ad his campaign produced. Sargent has a reader who claimed the ad was aired during Law & Order:

This morning, a reader reported to us that the ad ran last night in Cedar Rapids, on TNT, during a rerun of Law and Order. And a day of run-arounds by the local cable company and unreturned calls by from the Huckabee campaign makes it pretty clear our reader is right.

We've spent a fair amount of time trying to track this one down. First we checked in with a low-level official at the cable provider, an outfit called Mediacom. They put us in touch with the people who do their ad booking, a company called Onmedia. The people at Onmedia were friendly and helpful and went back to check for us -- but once they did, the higher-ups abruptly clammed up and stopped returning our calls.

Then we went to a higher level official at Mediacom. This official, Thomas Larsen, would not confirm or deny that the ad had run. But he did confirm that on Monday they received an order from the Huckabee campaign to yank an ad -- and that the ad hadn't in fact been yanked until today. So was it the ad Huckabee ostentatiously announced he was yanking at his news conference on Monday? Larsen refused to say. To the best of our knowledge there wasn't any other ad the Huckabee folks yanked on Monday. And the Huckabee camp has refused to answer our queries.

So the mystery still remains. Did a bunch of techies forget to yank the ad because of extreme New Year's festivities. Or did Huckabee's media folks fail to put a rush on the yank order? No one's talking.