It won’t be official for another two months, says the Denver Post, but Ken Salazar will leave Interior and return to Colorado.  The man who provided the obstruction to Gulf drilling and killed tens of thousands of jobs, even after a federal judge demanded that the Obama administration cease and desist, may be looking for a private-sector job himself:

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will step down from his cabinet position in the Obama administration and return to Colorado to spend time with his family, his office has confirmed to The Denver Post.

Salazar is expected to broadly announce his departure Wednesday. He has told President Barack Obama that he intends to leave his job by the end of March.

Salazar, 57, will have served a little more than four years in Obama’s cabinet after being plucked from his beloved U.S. Senate seat serving Colorado in 2008.

His decision on whether to stay on at the helm of Interior or return to Colorado — and likely the less-glamorous but more-lucrative private sector — has been weighing on Salazar for a long time.

The Boss Emeritus sends Salazar off with exactly the kind of valediction you’d expect:

Screw up, cover up, move up, pack up. After trampling the rule of law, defying court orders, doctoring scientific conclusions, threatening the media for asking inconvenient questions, and destroying countless jobs in the name of environmental protection, President Obama’s loathsome cowboy Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is finally headed for the exit door. …

Good riddance and DLTDHYOTWO. For the sake of my fellow Coloradans, let’s hope Salazar isn’t headed for the revolving door back into another position of power. We’ve had enough.

Of course, this leaves an opening for Obama to fill, which means opportunities for his agenda.  On the diversity front, I’d expect to see a woman get the nod, after all of the flack Obama took for his recent all-male revue in his Cabinet nominees.  Lisa Jackson would have been the obvious choice, except she’s flamed out at EPA in a scandal over using e-mail aliases to hide official communications.  “Richard Windsor” hardly soundsdiverse, anyway.

What kind of nominee can we expect?  Based on Obama’s choices over the last month for Cabinet replacements, I’d expect to see another in-your-face appointment of an activist and provocateur, rather than an appointment of someone who can actually build political support for Interior’s agenda.  Should be a fun four years, no?