From Sam Stein at the Huffington Post, who obtained an early copy of the book:

Over the Christmas break of 2010, Mitt Romney and his family took an internal poll on whether he should run for president once more. Twelve family members cast ballots. Ten said no. One of the 10 was Mitt Romney himself.

The doubts that the former Massachusetts governor harbored before ultimately launching his second unsuccessful bid for the presidency are one of several attention-grabbing details in "Collision 2012," the newest book on the 2012 campaign.

In an interview with Balz, Romney said that he changed his mind when he realized how weak the other candidates were in the Republican primary field. "I didn't think that any one of them had a good chance of defeating the president," Romney said, "and in some cases I thought that they lacked the experience and perspective necessary to do what was essential to get the country on track."

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Santorum announced over the weekend that he's been named the new CEO of the Dallas-based EchoLight Studios, "the first movie company to produce, finance, market and distribute faith-based, family films across all releasing platforms," according to a press release.

"This is the right place and right time, and I've jumped in with both feet," Santorum said on Fox News's "Huckabee". "I often say that culture is upstream from politics, and I know entertainment also can be strength and light for people who want to be uplifted and reinforced in their values." He continued: "Dallas can become the Hollywood of the faith-and-family movie market. And the keys are great content and economic success using money from all over to build out the industry and distribute an authentic product truthful to the faith in people's lives."

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Citing his AEI colleague Stan Veuger’s research finding that the Tea Party generated 3 to 6 million additional GOP votes in House races in the 2010 midterms, Pethokoukis suggests that it might have added an additional 5 to 8 million GOP votes in the 2012 election, “if the groups had continued to grow at the pace seen in 2009 and 2010.” Which they didn’t, Veuger claims,  due to the extra IRS scrutiny to the movement’s claiming tax-exempt status for its “social welfare” activities.

Since that would have overcome the 5 million vote margin won by President Obama, Pethokoukis writes, “right around now, Mitt Romney would be pushing hard his tax reform plan, and #44 would be launching the Obama Global Initiative.”

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WVIR-TV reports:

In December of 2011 Newt Gingrich needed 10,000 signatures to get his name on the Virginia presidential primary ballot. Adam Ward, 28, collected more than 11,000 signatures according to prosecutors. More than 4,000 signatures could not be verified by investigators.

Tuesday night, Ward pleaded guilty to 36 counts of voter fraud and perjury in Augusta Circuit Court.

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“This train is running full speed down the tracks towards socialism and towards communism,” Cain said, The Washington Post reports. “Yes, I said it. Before we stop it and reverse it, we got to slow it down. That’s what we do in 2014.”

He continued that though he dropped out of the 2012 presidential race (amid sexual harassment allegations) because of the “viciousness of the media," he has no plans to leave the spotlight. "They thought I was going to be quiet. That’s not going to happen," Cain said.

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“Everybody thought it was great, but they were afraid to use it,” he told the National Review's Betsy Woodruff. “They thought it was too tough.”

From the National Review:

Trump also says he thinks the Romney campaign thought he was too controversial to be an asset in the general election. The star of The Apprentice and Celebrity Apprenticestumped for Romney in a handful of primary states and also made robocalls for him. But Romney’s campaign didn’t call Trump back once Romney won the nomination (a victory for which Trump takes partial credit). Not getting asked to make a repeat performance “was fine with me, because I do have lots of other things to do,” he adds, but he thinks he might have pushed Florida over to Romney in the general.

“I’m not unhappy about it,” Trump said, “but I think I would have made a very big difference for him, as I did in the primaries.”

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“I have decided next year I will not seek a fifth Congressional term,” she declared in a friendly eight-minute video on her campaign Web site. “This decision was not impacted in any way by the recent inquiries into the activities of my former presidential campaign or my former presidential staff.” Bachmann also insisted her departure had nothing to do with polls showing that Jim Graves, the Democrat she barely defeated last year, currently holds a two-point lead.

That’s so Bachmann: All smiles and chirpy optimism, she’s going to tell you up front that the swirling scandal and her dropping poll numbers aren’t the reason behind her departure – when they are precisely the reason.

Bachmann came to national public attention when she told Hardball’s Chris Matthews in 2008 that she thought the media ought to investigate the anti-American views of the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama. That wasn’t all: "I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out: Are they pro-America or anti-America?" Our 21^st century Joe McCarthy had arrived, in a perfectly highlighted helmet of hair and bright lipstick.

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The Minnesota Post reports:

The FBI joins the Office of Congressional Ethics, the Federal Elections Commission and an Iowa state Senate ethics committee in probing whether Bachmann's presidential campaign paid an Iowa state senator from her MichelePAC, a fund that should not have been used for campaign expenses, and whether the state senator stole the email list of an Iowa home-school group from another Bachmann staffer, Barbara Hekki, prior to the Iowa caucuses in January, 2012.

Andy Parrish, former Bachmann chief of staff and one of the directors of Bachmann's Iowa GOP presidential campaign, will be interviewed by the FBI, according to his attorney, John Gilmore.

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In a statement obtained by the Washington Post, Fox News Vice President Bill Shine said that “Representative West’s congressional and military experience along with his fearless approach to voicing key issues will provide a valuable point of view to the FOX News lineup."

Since losing his race, West has been hosting an online show on Pajamas Media on which he's described NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg as a “gnome,” called MSNBC host Touré a “coward,” and mocked Fox News’ own Brit Hume for wearing a salmon-colored shirt.

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True the Vote, a Houston-based Tea Party group that bills itself as anti-voter fraud, will acquire voting records from the St. Lucie County supervisor of elections in Florida, including 2012 voting records from West's race, as well as voter registration records since 2009. In a press release, True the Vote said that it will conduct a "reconstruction and review" of the race to determine "exactly what happened before, during and after," which will be "unprecedented in that it will be led not by government entities or political parties, but by concerned citizens."

The Broward-Palm Beach New-Times reports:

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The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports that Bachmann went to Des Moines earlier this week to meet with lawyers for Barb Heki, the woman behind the lawsuit, who alleges that senior Bachmann staffers stole the contact list for a network of Iowa home-schoolers.

From the Star-Tribune:

The campaign has previously called the use of the list “inadvertent,” a view that Heki and campaign whistleblower Peter Waldron, a Florida pastor, have disputed publicly. Campaign officials eventually negotiated a $2,000 payment to rent the list from the Network of Iowa Christian Home Educators (NICHE).

Heki said she was blamed for misappropriating the database and was removed from the nonprofit’s board. One of the counts in her suit alleges libel and slander.

Former State Sen. Kent Sorenson, who chaired Bachmann’s campaign in Iowa, has been accused of stealing the list, and is also being investigated for possibly accepting improper payments for his work on the campaign.

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He continued that Mitt Romney in particular was one of those bad candidates. “Mitt Romney appeared like a kid who showed up for his science project and the teacher said, ‘Explain it,’ and Mitt couldn’t do it,” Sessions said. “His ‘dad,’ Paul Ryan, explained it to him, but Mitt didn’t get it. … That’s why we lost the last election.”

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From the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

An affidavit reviewed by the committee on Wednesday showed that former Bachmann chief of staff Andy Parrish said Bachmann approved plans to indirectly pay Sorenson $7,500 a month to work on her campaign. The alleged payments could violate an Iowa Senate ethics rule that prohibits members from accepting payments for work on political campaigns.

Parrish’s affidavit included copies of e-mails between him and other staff members discussing plans to use a company run by Bachmann’s then-national political director, Guy Short, to funnel payments to Sorenson. Sorenson has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. He filed an affidavit from an attorney who claimed to have reviewed his bank account and found no payments from the Bachmann campaign, her political action committee or Short’s company, C&M Strategies.

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Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich dubbed the national debt a "burden for our children for life."

Ex-Rep. Dennis Kucinich vilified Republicans for adding, by his calculations, $4 trillion to it.

Rep. Michele Bachmann, meanwhile, predicted debt will precipitate a future of "indentured servitude to foreign lenders."

What unites these and other presidential candidates is that they themselves are in debt. Campaign debt.

It's a dubious distinction shared by Democrats and Republicans, eccentric nonagenarians and White House occupants.

Such debt isn't really hurting anyone but creditors — certainly not the nation nor its creditworthiness.

But it is a reminder that despite candidates' soaring rhetoric about fiscal responsibility, they often fail to follow their own prescription for sound budgetary management amid the relentless rush to remain competitive with political rivals during election seasons that are longer and more expensive than ever.

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The New York Times reports on the Kochs' recent conference in Palm Springs, Calif., during which the Kochs reportedly discussed strategy for the next election cycle:

They have not yet decided whether to intervene in Republican primaries, people involved in the discussions say. But the brothers want their network to play a bigger role in cultivating and promoting Republican candidates who hew to their vision of conservatism, emphasizing smaller government and deregulation more than immigration and social issues. They are also seeking closer control over groups within their network, purging or downgrading those that did not deliver last year and expanding financing for those that performed well.

Also in attendance at the conference were Republican superstars like Dr. Ben Carson, Nikki Haley, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and John Kasich, the Times reports.

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"Of course you regret it," he said in the interview. "You think, what it would have been like if I hadn't done that."

Akin also took the opportunity to make a dig at Karl Rove, whose Super PAC American Crossroads launched a new project to make sure that another candidate like Akin doesn't win the Republican primary, only to prove unelectable in the general election. "Karl Rove has made himself an expert," Akin said. "I think I lost one race. He managed to lose about 12 of them in one night."

Watch:

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From the FBI's press release on the arrest:

According to the affidavit, from May 2012 through February 2013, Adam Paul Savader sent anonymous text messages using Google Voice numbers to 15 women stating that he had nude photographs of the women and threatening to distribute the nude photographs to the women’s friends and family members unless the women sent him more nude photographs of themselves. Savader sent some of the victims links to a photo-sharing website where nude pictures of the victims had been posted.

From the New York Daily News:

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David Ottenwess, an attorney for McCotter, who represented Michigan, filed a suit against Don Yowchuang and Dillon Breen on Thursday. From the Associated Press:

Elections officials discovered bogus signatures on the Livonia Republican's petitions, keeping him off the 2012 primary ballot. McCotter quit Congress in July. Yowchuang pleaded no-contest to forgery charges and was sentenced Jan. 18 to probation and community service. Breen was not charged.

In a statement, Ottenwess said the two men "purposefully submitted forged petitions in order to keep McCotter off the ballot and, thereby, denying him the opportunity to appear on the August 2012 Republican Primary ballot." The lawyer said he said he would use the subpoena power in the civil proceeding to "get to the bottom of what really happened to sabotage ... McCotter."

As Salon's Steve Kornacki wrote last May, the four-term congressman was "the first incumbent congressman in seven decades not to qualify for his party’s primary ballot."

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Obama didn’t talk about it when he first campaigned for the job -- if he had, he surely wouldn’t have won the Democratic nomination, and may not even have beaten John McCain, since not even Republican presidential candidates publicly campaign to weaken what their party calls “entitlements.” Everyone sensibly had assumed that no Democrat would want to weaken or reduce the crowning achievements of Democratic Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, not to mention of the Democratic Party itself. But immediately after getting elected, Barack Obama admitted he wanted to do just that.

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The press conference with Nienow, R, was "to discuss problems with Medicaid reimbursement rates paid to doctors in Minnesota.  Both are introducing legislation increasing accountability and transparency," according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

But when reporters tried to ask about a Congressional Ethics probe into alleged campaign finance violations by Bachmann's 2012 presidential campaign, Bachmann, R-Minn., darted away, assisted by aide Deb Steiskal, who blocked reporters. You can see pictures taken by the Star Tribune here.

Bachmann has recently made similar moves to avoid questioning by CNN congressional correspondent Dana Bash, who tried to ask about seemingly erroneous statements in Bachmann's CPAC speech.

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