Colorado GOP Chair Dick Wadhams calls it quits: “I’m tired of the nuts.”

From the New York Times Magazine:

An article on Jan. 16 about drilling for oil off the coast of Angola erroneously reported a story about cows falling from planes, as an example of risks in any engineering endeavor. No cows, smuggled or otherwise, ever fell from a plane into a Japanese fishing rig. The story is an urban legend, and versions of it have been reported in Scotland, Germany, Russia and other locations.

Christine O’Donnell says she’ll use her new PAC ChristinePAC to “investigate” left-wing groups.

When do you know there’s a problem with the contenders for the GOP presidential nomination?

When Politico has to run this feature headline: “That’s the ticket: GOP loves look of VP field”

Do the Veep contenders even get a field?

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) is planning on crashing a Tea Party town hall meeting tonight at the National Press Club to build up Tea Party cred in advance of next year’s Republican senate primary.

Democrats and a couple of dozen Republicans teamed up this evening to block renewal of key provisions of the Patriot Act. The measure fell short of the two-thirds majority needed for passage. House leaders can bring it back up later under a different House procedure that will require only a simple majority for passage. The final vote was 277 to 148.

Orrin Hatch gets buffeted in the merciless winds of Tea Party politics. Was he invited to tonight’s Tea Party townhall in DC, as he claims? Or did he show up uninvited, as the President of the Tea Party Express claims? Our reporter on the scene tries to get to the bottom of the situation.

To give some additional background, the gist seems to be that Hatch was the victim of infighting within Tea Party Express. The founder of Tea Party Express, Sal Russo, is a longtime GOP operative. And he’s recently come out in support of Hatch. He says Hatch was invited. But the actual president of the group does not seem down at all with the effort to Tea Partyize Orrin and seemed inclined to go out of her way to embarrass Hatch. Whether he was invited or just invited himself isn’t clear and is perhaps more of a semantic point. But it’s a heckuva position for a seventy-something six-term senator to find himself in.

The prime whistleblower in the Jack Abramoff scandal, Tom Rodgers, is miffed that the Feds are asking for so little time for Michael Scanlon, one of the men at the heart of the scandal. “Is two years justice?” Rodgers, a member of the Blackfeet Nation asked in an interview with TPM. “Justice for Native Americans who Michael Scanlon referred to as subhuman while he stole their dreams?…A reduced sentence for being the Judas even among his co-conspirators?”

We all know about fantasy football leagues. Good clean fun for people who love the game and wish they’d been able to play in the bigs. But as the 2012 presidential cycle starts to crank up I’ve been even more interested in this new phenomena that I’ll call Fantasy Campaigning. In a similar fashion, it’s — I guess — good clean fun for folks who love the game, are clearly sorry they’re no longer in it and — most importantly — have enough pals in the political press to give the fantasy a sense of reality. Read More

I’m not sure how I of all people could have missed this. But several readers have now pointed out that I somehow missed the ultimate 2012 fantasy campaigning candidate: John Bolton, the aspiring warlord who couldn’t get confirmed as Ambassador to the UN.