Fred calls it quits
Fred withdrew his candidacy today. 
UPDATE: Mitt Romney issued this statement:
Throughout this campaign, Fred Thompson brought a laudable focus to the challenges confronting our country and the solutions necessary to meet them. He stood for strong conservative ideas and believed strongly in the need to keep our conservative coalition together. Ann and I would like to extend our best wishes to Fred, Jeri and their family and congratulate them on their efforts during this campaign.
UPDATE2: Fred would likely have won Louisiana:
Louisiana’s social conservatives created the winning “Pro-life, Pro-family” slate in early January largely because we didn’t know if Fred was still going to be a candidate at the time of our caucuses (turns out that he wasn’t, by a few hours). Because we had almost all the state’s social conservative leaders for Fred, we were also able to stave off Huckabee by use of this “pro-life, pro-family” slate. I was really pleased with the win last night, as it’s not easy to beat McCain, Romney, and Paul without a candidate, but that’s what we did.
About 90 percent of the pro-family slate was actually Thompson supporters. If Fred were to jump back into the race, he would almost certainly pick up all 47 of Louisiana’s delegates (the whole point of LA’s complicated system was to have an early vote while still not losing half our delegates like all the other early states have). That would put him AHEAD of McCain in the delegate count and only narrowly trailing Romney.
I know, I’m crying too.
It’s Freddie’s fault though. He should have capitalized on the buzz prior to his entering the race and hit the ground running, but he ran a limpy donged campaign, so much that I almost believed he wasn’t even all that interested in winning. Instead we had to see Huckabee racing ahead in the polls. Ah well, at least Schmuckabee ran out of money.