CPAC, the premiere annual conference for establishment movement conservatism starts Thursday. And we’re going to have three reporters on hand covering it for you. Each year CPAC is a big hit at TPM. But it sort of creeps up on folks. So in the interests of getting you back in the CPAC watching mindset here’s our slideshow from the scene last year.

Part Two of our slideshow tomorrow.

Virginia governor bragging on stimulus money from stimulus bill he said represented end of the universe.

Last we heard James Anderson, husband of accused triple murderer Amy Bishop, was telling members of the media that not only did he have no idea his wife was going to go on a shooting spree but that he didn’t even know his wife had or owned a gun.

Now he says that yeah, he knew she had a gun and the two of them actually went to a shooting range for practice a few weeks before the killings.

In other news, retired Braintree Police Chief John Polio, is now changing his tune, saying something may have been fishy after all about Bishop’s shooting of her brother in 1986.

Our Eric Kleefeld has spent the morning trying to make heads or tails of what’s going down in Indiana. Thing are still a bit hazy, but it looks like Democrats have avoided ending up with a political unknown as their nominee to succeed Evan Bayh in the U.S. Senate.

Today is the deadline for prospective candidates for the Democratic primary to file with each county clerk the petitions required by law in order to appear on the ballot. Earlier this morning Tamyra d’Ippolito — calling her a longshot is probably too generous — told us she already had all the signatures she needed to qualify. But shortly thereafter she told Greg Sargent that she didn’t really have them but she would have them by the noon deadline. Read More

As some of you know, Evan Bayh didn’t get started in politics on his own. His dad, Birch Bayh, was a big-deal senator from Indiana before him and a presidential hopeful himself. A bit of bonus trivia, it was Sen. Birch Bayh who was in that plane that crashed almost killed Ted Kennedy back in 1964. Bayh dragged the almost-dead Kennedy out of the wreckage of the plane. Ironically, Bayh got driven from office by none other than Dan Quayle in 1980. In some ways, Bayh’s whole career and politics are built around a reaction to that election.

We’ve put together a great slideshow of other pols and the parents who gave them their ticket. Many you’ll know and others you may not know as political legacies. Click the photo to see the whole slideshow.

That until-now little known, minor candidate in the Indiana Democratic senate primary, Tamyra d’Ippolito, just told our Eric Kleefeld that she now has the requisite number of signatures to get on the primary ballot.

Bear in mind, the deadline for filing the signatures is today. So if d’Ippolito has the signatures and as long as too many of them aren’t thrown out (a real question), that would leave her as the only name on the ballot in the Democratic primary, effectively making her the Democratic nominee. Holding this seat this year is going to be a serious challenge regardless of who they field. But observers don’t seem to think d’Ippolito would have a shot even in the best of years.

The logical fallback for Dems is to consolidate around an alternative candidate and mount a write-in campaign. That’s doable but not an easy road.

Another remaining question is what role if any Republicans may have played helping her get those signatures lined up on 18 hours notice.

John Podesta: The health of America’s political system “sucks.” That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.

After the triple murder in Alabama last week, it emerged that the accused shooter had shot and killed her brother back in 1986 in an incident that was officially designated an accident. Over the weekend I noted that even the undisputed facts of what happened made it very difficult to believe it was a simple accidental discharge of a firearm, as was then claimed. And here’s more new information tending toward the same conclusion: in this case, a guy she allegedly held up at gunpoint down the street from her house as she looked for a getaway car. Read More

Okay, people. Can you help us get to 19,000 fans on Facebook this evening? We’re a mere 102 fans short. You could be one. Heck you could be number 19,000. For the next twelve minutes it’s still my birthday. So think of it like a present. Just click the button below. So simple.

Mitt Romney was the victim of an apparent air rage attack on a flight back from the Vancouver Olympics this afternoon. Romney, reports say, “did not retaliate” after the man in question became physically violent in response to Romney’s request that he put his seat up for takeoff.

Thankfully, the reports do not suggest that Romney was injured in any way. But my question is: can Romney’s national security cred in the 2012 GOP primaries survive not retaliating against an unprovoked foreign attack? Perhaps even by a Canadian?