When former presidential hopeful Fred Thompson decide to returnto the entertainment biz, he turned to the William Morris Agency.

Paul Wolfowitz is never jobless for long.

The State Department announced yesterday that the former World Bank president will chair its International Security Advisory Board. He succeeds former Sen. Fred Thompson, who resigned last summer to launch his short-lived presidential campaign.

If traffic to a candidate’s web site is any indication of the candidates popularity in the Iowa caucuses, then Barack Obama and Ron Paul will be the winners of their parties caucuses after the votes are tallied this evening.

Web site traffic statistics provided by Alexa show Obama with a clear lead in the Democratic contest over second place finisher Hillary Clinton. John Edwards lands in third place with Joe Biden taking a distant fourth and Christopher Dodd finishing fifth. Bill Richardson’s doesn’t even break the top 100,000 websites, so there is little data on Alexa about their traffic trends.

Fred Thompson’s long-awaited announcement that he is running for president finally came last night, on The Tonight Show.

“You’ve been in the water for a while now,” host Jay Leno observed. “Are you starting to get a bit wrinkly?”

Thompson, 65, said his wrinkles did not come from water. “We’re where we need to be right now, and that’s one of the things I need to talk to you about,” he said. “I’m running for president of the United States.”

I. Lewis Libby Jr., convicted of perjury in the CIA leak case, appreciates better than most the importance of muckety.

His 30-month prison sentence was commuted yesterday by President Bush, who said he believed the term was excessive. Bush’s action was hailed by conservatives, who had organized a defense fund called the Libby Legal Defense Trust. Likely presidential candidate Fred Thompson was among the fundraisers.

Fred Thompson, who is fashioning himself as the folksy, outside-the-beltway candidate for president, is coming under increasing scrutiny for his family’s lobbying activities.

Before being elected to the Senate, Thompson was a lawyer-lobbyist whose clients included the deposed government of Haiti, the Teamsters Union pension fund and Westinghouse. He resumed his dual careers as lobbyist and TV actor after leaving the Senate in 2003.

Thompson’s lobbying disclosure reports, filed with Congress, show that he received $360,000 in fees between 2004 and 2006. His client was Equitas Ltd., a British reinsurance company that handles asbestos liability for Lloyd’s of London.