A Inconvenient Newt

Various right-wing bedwetters are dampening themselves over this promo for Vice President Gore's appearance on 60 Minutes. Somehow, though, they failed to mention this tidbit:

[Vice President Gore] donated the $750,000 [Nobel Peace Prize] prize money to The Alliance for Climate Protection, the non-profit he started to help him on his quest. He and his wife, Tipper, tell Stahl they not only matched the Nobel money with their own, but they are also donating to the organization the significant profits from his book and Oscar-winning documentary film about global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth." The funds will help The Alliance for Climate Protection execute a new $300 million ad campaign on global warming set to start next week.

Some of the ads will feature unlikely alliances to drive home the message that people of all stripes are concerned about global warming. These include the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Rev. Pat Robertson, Toby Keith and the Dixie Chicks, and Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich.

I'm not sure Pat Robertson was a smart choice for this campaign, given his belief that the climate is ultimately controlled by a homo-hating Almighty. (And because he's one of the anti-Semitic preachers the right has no problem with.) But I imagine if this report is even remotely accurate, Newt's standing as the intellectual leader of the Republican Party is about to take a beating.

(No links to the incontinent.)

P.S. -- Vice President Gore's statements will also feature in a post about the Doughy Pantload coming to this site in the near future.

Frog March Madness

The chickens are coming home to roost for FOX News Analyst Karl Rove:

MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- Donald Siegelman, former governor of Alabama, was ordered released from prison on Thursday by a federal appeals court, pending his appeal of a bribery conviction that Democrats say resulted from a politically driven prosecution.

In its order, the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta, said Mr. Siegelman had raised "substantial questions" in his appeal of the case and could be released on bond from the federal prison in Oakdale, La., where he has served nine months of a seven-year sentence. The order did not say what those questions were, but his lawyers have argued for months that the bribery charge on which he was mainly convicted revolved around a transaction that differed little, if at all, from a standard political contribution.

In case anyone has forgotten Rove's involvement in this case:

A week ago, CBS' "60 Minutes" aired a segment in which a Republican political activist, Alabama attorney Jill Simpson, charged that Karl Rove was deeply involved in the effort to bring down Siegelman -- repeating many of the allegations she'd made under oath to the House Judiciary Committee last September.

According to Simpson, Rove relied on friends he'd made when he worked as a political consultant in Alabama in the 1990s, including William Canary, whose wife, Leura, is U.S. attorney in Montgomery. Her office drove the Siegelman prosecution; she didn't personally recuse herself until the investigation was well under way. Her husband, for his part, has run political campaigns for Siegelman's chief rival, current GOP Gov. Bob Riley. (Rove, of course, has denied the charges of interference, but he refused to testify before Congress under oath.)

If anyone needs another reminder of why the identity of the next Democratic President matters very little, this story should serve.

"Turn Back The Clocks Of Time"

I look forward to Chuck Norris' keynote speech to the Republican National Convention this summer.

Pumpkinhead Remembers It All For You

Tim Russert's memory hasn't been this, uh, selective, since he was forgetting Scooter Libby's phone calls to help out Dick Cheney and Karl Rove.

MR. RUSSERT: The psychology, so important. I remember in 1992, the economy grew in the fourth quarter some 4.7 percent, but the perception on Election Day was, "We're in bad economic times."

MS. BURNETT: Yeah, mm-hmm.

Perhaps Tim was confusing "the economy" with "the value of my real estate holdings on Martha's Vineyard." Because:

The economy grew at a faster-than-expected annual rate of 3.8 percent in the final quarter of 1992, the strongest performance in four years, the Commerce Department reported today.

...

But Mr. Moeller and other analysts point to lagging growth in jobs and incomes, as well as to related depressants -- a shrinking military establishment, poor conditions in commercial real estate and floundering economies abroad.

Indeed, the Labor Department today reported a third straight weekly increase in first-time claims for unemployment benefits, to the highest level since mid-November. Although the rise was only 2,000, analysts had been expecting a modest decline.

One of the many problems with Tim's memory is that his reporting on the economy is no different than his reporting on the White House. Pumpkinhead sits in his office and receives calls from the White House and its flacks and then dutifully spews out the fiction as remembered fact. Working people without multi-million dollar book contracts -- or even jobs -- perceived the economy as bad because it was bad for them and it had been bad for them for four years. (Perhaps the electorate would have been more optimistic if they'd been given more free rides on corporate jets.) But Russert's job is to put McCain in the White House, so he's gone to therapy and recovered some memories of the Bush economic miracle.

One more breakthrough and Tim will recall that he, personally, was on the receving end of Bill Clinton's cigar.

(Not to mention the fact that more than 60 percent of the fourth quarter in '92 occurred after everyone knew the long voodoo nightmare was over.)

Happy Easter

Or, as John McCain calls it, the Jewish Custer's Last Stand.

The Senator has no campaign events scheduled for today, as he will spend the entire holiday hunting, unsuccessfully, for the Easter eggs he hid last night.