EVERY evening, TheJournal.ie brings your Daily Fix: our pick of the highlights (and some of the lows) of today’s campaign trail.

GOOD DAY FOR:

• Bickering – the main political parties engaged in some heated back-and-forths today over the familiar, thorny topic of the bank guarantee. They also managed to touch on new topics, however, with every political party changing gear on their policies.
• Independents – who formed a new group today called New Vision. Frontline fans might remember NV member Eamonn Blaney’s contribution to the programme last year…
• Twitter fans – who got another tool to monitor who (and why) social media users are really thinking and tweeting about on the General Election 2011 campaign trail, in the form of TheJournal.ie’s live tweet-analysis tool. Today, Enda Kenny is the most talked about politician on the microblogging site – and as for the top word associated with Micheál Martin? Santa. Yup, santa.

BAD DAY FOR:

• Charlie Flanagan – who tweeted: “Alsatian took a lump out of my face…. On car door!! I got out of the car for the vote though!” You try to put on a brave face when an Alsatian has just had a go…

JIBES OF THE DAY:

• Greens – Dan Boyle has called the Labour party “either cynics or fools” adding that they display “an immature macho attitude that might lead the Irish people to question whether they are fit for office”. Tell us how you really feel, Dan…
• Fianna Fáil – John Curran has accused Fine Gael’s Leo Varadkar of having “a brass neck”… Some of the cynics among us might have the words “pot”, “kettle” and “black” pop into their heads upon hearing that from a FF candidate.

ELECTORAL FROLIC OF THE DAY:

• In a true display of the Christmas truce spirit that led German and British soldiers to leave their trenches and play a game of footie on no man’s land in WWI (well, kinda), general election candidates put down their arms today and got down to the serious business of burning up the pitch in a cross-party game. The match was organised for the Newstalk General Election Charity Football Match in aid of Barnardo’s at Ringsend in Dublin.