The political beat goes on

And the craziness continues:

Al Gore's Science Fiction, links to several reports disputing Gore's global warming claims from Competitive Enterprise Institute. Hmm. You don't suppose they have an agenda?

They must have prepped Sen. Inhofe.

At least you can read Gore's opening statement without interruption.

The Washington Post's David Ignatius has a wonderful column about the dedicated civil servants who are the heart of Washington and have a great loyalty to the government they serve, but are dissed by the current administration:

If you read the obituary pages of The Post each morning, you encounter the kinds of people who are being trashed by the Bush administration's contempt for public servants.
...The Bush political operatives have become the people the Republicans once warned the country against -- a club of insiders who seem to think that they're better than other folks. They are so contemptuous of government and the public servants who populate it that they have been unable to govern effectively. They are a smug, inward-looking elite that thinks it knows who the good guys are by the political labels they wear.

Meanwhile, the Pew Report on the American political climate is bad news for Republicans. Among the findings:

...an increasing number of Americans subscribe to the sentiment "today it's really true that the rich just get richer while the poor get poorer." Currently, 73% concur with that sentiment, up from 65% five years ago.

And, despite the 'support our troops' mentality that we're all supposed to have, it doesn't seem to apply to the army. A Nation report finds that some soldiers with difficult medical problems due to head wounds, etc. are being released under 'personality disorder discharges', which means the Army and the VA don't have any responsibility for their medical care. See How Specialist Town Lost His Benefits.

Meanwhile, Veterans for Peace is campaigning for recognition that the war diminished the response to Hurricane Katrina, as reported in Facing South.

And, The Huffington Post's Rachel Sklar scolds Tom Delay for not bothering to run a Google search related to an ...interesting...statement in his book.