Al Gore: world's first carbon billionaire?

Former Vice President Al Gore has a new book out. Called "Our Choice," it argues that the technologies exist to clean up the climate if the political will can be mustered.

But conservative critics such as U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) are making the case that Gore, who has long had a passion on environmental issues, stands to profit personally from the energy and climate bills he is lobbying Congress to enact.

Today's New York Times takes a look at the issue, noting that Bill Clinton's vice president makes a lot of money from supporting green companies.The Democrat who lost the 2000 election to George W. Bush by a few hundred hanging chad ballots in Florida has apparently become the world's first carbon billionaire.

The founder of Generation Investment Management, Gore earns a partner’s salary Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of Silicon Valley's top venture capitalists. According to the Times, last year Kleiner Perkins loaned a California company, Silver Spring Networks, $75 million to produce hardware and software to improve electricity grid efficiency. Last week the deal paid off big time when the Energy Department announced $560 million in smart grid grants to Silver Spring utility clients.

The upshot: Gore and his partners could recover their investment many times over in coming years.

For his part, Gore says that he is just putting his money where his mouth is.

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“Do you think there is something wrong with being active in business in this country?” he told the Times. “I am proud of it. I am proud of it.”

-- Johanna Neuman

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Bill Clinton's late-night White House bull sessions -- new book reveals secrets he tried to keep secret

Taylor Branch is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, a specialist on civil rights issues, who lives in Baltimore, about an hour's drive from Washington.

During the Clinton administration, he was down in Washington a lot. In fact, President Clinton called 79 times and asked him to come down and chat. The two were old pals, having roomed together in an apartment in Austin in 1972, managing George McGovern's presidential campaign in Texas.

Their candid conversations were so secret that Clinton put the tapes in his sock drawer. But Branch made notes, and as he drove home to Baltimore the historian would record his own impressions of their conversations, summoning every verbatim quote he could remember.

Now, Branch is reporting on the conversations in a new book, "The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President," due out next week. Clinton is apparently "nervous" about the results and, when he saw the page proofs, argued for some deletions. Branch said he made no concessions to presidential ego.

"The former president has been on the phone with Branch for hours since he got page proofs of Branch's new book," Susan Page reports in today's USA Today. Clinton is "running 'hot and cold' about the account based on Branch's recollections of their conversations."

In an interview today with Page, Branch laid out some of the book's highlights:

--Clinton said he did not want to talk about his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, except to say that he "cracked" under personal and political pressure.

--Clinton and former  Vice President Al Gore had an explosive conversation about the 2000 campaign. Clinton said that if Gore had utilized him to campaign for the ticket in Arkansas or New Hampshire he would have won the election. Gore blistered that Clinton's impeachment over his affair with Lewinsky had been a "drag" on the campaign. Branch reports the two "exploded" at each other in mutual recrimination.

--Russian President Boris Yeltsin, while staying at the government guest quarters at Blair House, once got so drunk he ventured out onto Pennsylvania Avenue wearing only his underwear, trying to hail a cab to get pizza.

-- Johanna Neuman

Photo: Former President Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore on Aug. 5 in Burbank after Clinton escorted back from North Korea two American journalists who worked for Gore's Current TV. Credit: Reuters

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Bill Clinton, Al Gore reunited as freed journalists set foot on U.S. soil

The photo of Euna Lee's 4-year-old daughter clinging to her mother was riveting.

Former Vice President Al Gore was crying as Laura Ling described how the two journalists "feared that at any moment we could be sent to a hard labor camp." Told yesterday that they were going to a meeting, they walked through a door and saw former President Bill Clinton. "We were shocked but we knew instantly in our hearts that the nightmare of our lives was finally coming to an end," she said. "Now we stand here home and free."

It was a scene that will stand as an emotional triumph in diplomatic history. It also marks the public reunion of the Clinton-Gore team.

Ever since the disputed 2000 election, which Gore lost by a whisker, the two have not been exactly tight.

Gore blamed Clinton's impeachment trial over an affair with White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky, which haunted the last years of his presidency, for souring voters on the Democrats. Clinton blamed Gore for not dispatching him to campaign in Arkansas and Tennessee, two states that went for George W. Bush.

But today, on a tarmac in California, the two re-bonded.

Triumphant in his whirlwind diplomatic mission to free the two U.S. journalists from North Korea, Clinton walked down the steps of the jet while Euna Lee and Laura Ling were embracing their families. The two journalists had been working on a documentary about human trafficking along the Chinese-North Korean border for Gore's Current TV when they either wandered or were lured into North Korean territory. Quickly tried, they were sentenced to 12 years of hard labor, which few survive.

At the bottom of the plane steps, Gore gave him a bear hug.

Thanking Clinton for "performing so skillfully," Gore called him "my partner and friend."

As the homecoming played out in California, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton tried to use her husband's successful breakthrough to coax the North Koreans back to negotiations over their nuclear program. In Washington, President Obama thanked his predecessors -- the 1990s successful political act of Clinton-Gore -- and especially Gore, for working "tirelessly in order to achieve a positive outcome."

-- Johanna Neuman

Photo Credit: Getty Images

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Sarah Palin's resignation makes sense to two journalists working on the upcoming book 'Sarah from Alaska' [Updated]

Last week, as pundits and political reporters stumbled around trying to account for Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's odd decision to resign before the end of her term, a couple of young journalists who are writing a book about her listened and shook their heads.

"They literally all admitted they have no idea why she did this, but Scott and I do," said Shushannah Walshe, 30, who is co-writing "Sarah from Alaska" with Scott Conroy, 26. It's all about the White House.

Though Walshe was coy about revealing any bombshells in the book, she and Conroy did post a juicy e-mail exchange last week between Palin and McCain's campaign strategist Steve Schmidt about Todd Palin's membership in the secession-driven Alaska Independence Party that called into question Palin's truthfulness.

(Palin urged the campaign to address the issue by making up a story about how Todd accidentally checked the wrong box when he was registering to vote. Schmidt also knocked down her claim that two reporters had asked her about Todd's involvement with the party.)

Walshe said Palin's abrupt exit was traceable to her deteriorated relationship with....

Al Gore likens global warming to Nazi threat

Al Gore is now comparing the battle against global warming to the fight against Adolf Hitler in World War II.

In a speech to students at Oxford on Tuesday, the former vice president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate  conceded that there is still work to do to convince political leaders that the threat of climate change is as urgent as that from the Nazis. The Senate is beginning debate on a cap-and-trade bill to curb emissions, predicted to be an even tougher fight than in the House, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi had to twist arms and trade votes to win a narrow victory. Gore seemed to acknowledge the difficulty of converting grassroots passion into political will.

"The level of awareness and concern among populations has not crossed the threshold where political leaders feel that they must change," he said at the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment. "The only way politicians will act is if awareness raises to a level to make them feel that it's a necessity."

Mindful of his British audience, Gore said the fight to cut carbon dioxide emissions will require a leader with the fortitude of Winston Churchill, who steered Britain through four years of hardship, bombings and economic deprivations to victory against the Nazis.

"Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilization in World War II," he said.
"We have everything we need except political will, but political will is a renewable resource."

Not everyone was impressed.  At Fox News, as you can see from the clip above, they're still worried about global cooling.

-- Johanna Neuman

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Analysis of Sarah Palin's strange move: Timeout or Flameout?

First, a few political givens:

These are different, changing times in U.S. politics.

The last three presidents each emerged from nowhere and achieved the White House on their first bid, though Bill Clinton and George W. Bush each had governor’s terms and reelections under their belts.

But what had Barack Obama ever accomplished as a freshman senator before announcing and achieving his desire for promotion? (And not finishing his first term either.)

The emergence of social media and online networking have created a whole new political environment beneath traditional media radar with untapped and unknown opportunities for unconventional politicians.

Sarah Palin is just such an unconventional politician, with surprising upsets in her past, a down-to-earth manner so different from the tired old suits you’ll see jabbering on morning TV this Sunday. And she has an astounding approval rate among her conservative base.

Most expected Palin not to run next year for reelection, like Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who now has the time and option to gear up for a 2012 presidential run.

Hardly anyone expected her to quit the governor’s office and turn it over to Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell on July 26, despite Palin’s slipped popularity at home. (Full Palin text here.)

Professionals watching a withdrawal like this conventionally and immediately wonder, what bad news don't we know about her that's about to come out? Is there some scandal, indictment or personal revelation that would cause her to step down even before its announcement? Friday, especially a pre-holiday Friday, is usually a time to announce what you don't want heard much.

But here’s why friends say she’s really doing it:

Palin is genuinely sick of, as she calls it, “the crap” that comes with national politics, especially the....

McCain aides trash Palin (anonymously) in Vanity Fair. What else is new...

Longtime friends and campaign workers for Arizona Sen. John McCain have been talking to Vanity Fair about what Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's candidacy as vice president did for the GOP ticket in 2008.

"A Little Shop of Horrors," said one unnamed aide.

Perhaps they want to keep the governor -- still a hot-button favorite among social conservatives -- off the ticket in 2012?

In a just-published piece by Todd Purdum in the August Vanity Fair, McCain aides said they still suffer a kind of survivor's guilt. (An earlier version of this post misspelled the author's last name as Purdam.)

"They can't quite believe that for two frantic months last fall, caught in a Bermuda Triangle of a campaign, they worked their tails off to try to elect as vice president of the United States someone who, by mid-October, they believed for certain was nowhere near ready for the job, and might never be," Purdam writes.

A former reporter for the New York Times and husband of former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers, Purdam has a few nuggets of news. Reports of tension between Palin and McCain are, well, true.

She maintained "only the barest level of civil discourse" with Tucker Eskew, the operative assigned to be her chief minder, Purdam reports. Mark McKinnon, a longtime McCain admirer and a former Democrat who told insiders he would never work against Barack Obama in the general election, signed on to be Palin's "whisperer," the calming influence. And Obama, on learning of Palin's selection, said Palin would never have time to get up to speed. "I don't care how talented she is, this is really a leap," said Obama, telling aides it had taken him four months to learn how to be a national candidate.

But for the most, the piece reads more like juicy political speculation than news. Many of the quotes are from aides who would rather not be named. And it's hard to read the title -- "It Came From Wasilla" -- as anything but an insult, at least to anyone who's a person who came from somewhere.

Palin refused to talk to Vanity Fair for the piece. At work on her own book about her life -- to be published jointly by HarperCollins and the Bible-publishing house Zondervan -- the self-described pit bull-with-lipstick  from Alaska will get plenty of ink for her rebuttal.

In the meantime, here come the knives.

-- Johanna Neuman

Photo credit: J.D. Pooley / Getty Images

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Dick Cheney talks some more, voicing support for gay marriage and denying Iraq was involved with 9/11

Dick Cheney was largely silent on the issue of gay marriage during his eight years as vice president under George W. Bush. In a 2004 vice presidential debate with Democratic candidate John Edwards, for example, Cheney wouldn't say what he thought about a constitutional amendment that would limit marriage to a woman and a man.

But in a speech today at the National Press Club, Cheney supported gay marriage, saying,  "I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish, any kind of arrangement they wish."

Cheney, who has a gay daughter, said he thought states should get to decide what constitutes marriage. For more on what he said, check out our colleagues at The Swamp. 

During the Bush years, Cheney made most of his political maneuverings behind the scenes. But he's been a veritable chatter-box since leaving office.

In a Fox News interview that will air tonight, Cheney dropped a few other lines that are sure to generate buzz. Among them: his denial that Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The Bush White House, you may remember, used Iraq's supposed ties to Al Qaeda as one of its justifications to invade the country in 2003.

The rest of the interview will air on "On the Record with Greta Van Susteren" at 7 p.m. Pacific.

-- Kate Linthicum

Jack Kemp, all-star quarterback, politician, father, dead of cancer, 73

(UPDATE: An update on the Kemp memorial service has been added below.)

Jack Kemp, the all-star college and pro quarterback who went on to serve nine House terms, as secretary of Housing and Urban Development and as Robert Dole's VP running mate on the 1996 Republican presidential ticket, died this evening.

Kemp also ran his own unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1988 against Ronald Reagan's vice president, George H.W. Bush, who would go on to appoint Kemp as his HUD secretary.

The cause of death was cancer. He was 73 years old and had allowed his office to release the news of his terminal illness only in early January. But there were no details at the time of treatment or what type, only word that he would continue his charitable activities.

(UPDATE: Tonight a former aide revealed that Kemp had cancer in the hip that was believed to be a secondary infection. The origin of the cancer was unknown, which made targeted treatments difficult. Kemp did undergo extensive chemotherapy and radiation treatments at Sloan-Kettering that ended only recently.)

Moments ago, the Kemp family released a statement:

Jack Kemp passed peacefully into the presence of the Lord shortly after 6 o’clock this evening, surrounded by the love of his family and pastor, and believing with Isaiah, “My strength and my courage is the Lord.”

During the treatment of his cancer, Jack expressed his gratitude for the thoughts and prayers of so many friends, a gratitude which the Kemp family shares.

Funeral details were incomplete tonight and expected to be released Sunday.

Kemp's condition had been declining rapidly since the announcement and friends knew the end was near for the devoted father and politician. He was famed for predictably breaking off Friday business meetings to fly overnight to watch his two boys, Jeff and Jimmy, also quarterbacks, play college or pro football on the weekends.

"So sad," said Karl Rove, longtime Republican strategist, in a cellphone text message.

The troubled GOP could have used the friendly, empathetic and well-spoken southern Californian in its national rebuilding now. Kemp was known as a bleeding heart conservative for his interest in social issues and bettering the lives of average citizens. And he was well-liked by teammates, both the athletic and political kind.

A West Los Angeles native and graduate of celebrity-strewn Fairfax High School, until last year Kemp was probably the most famous politician to attend Occidental College. No longer.

Now, Barack Obama is. The president is four inches taller than Kemp, but did not play quarterback, safety, punter and place kicker on the school's football team.

Kemp's 13-year football career involved the National Football League, the Canadian Football League and the defunct American Football League, where Kemp was an all-star for seven of the league's 10 years and played in five of its championship games.

Our blogging buddy, the ever-alert Larry Harnisch over on The Daily Mirror, has quickly come up with an op-ed item here written 16 months by Kemp for The Times on bankruptcy laws and homeownership. It's so prescient it could have been written today.

(UPDATE: The Kemp family has announced details of the memorial service at Washington's National Cathedral on Friday, May 8 at 2 p.m. "The memorial service is open to family, friends, former colleagues, and all those who would like to attend. Seating for the service begins at 1 pm, and attendees should plan on arriving as close to 1 pm as possible.

(The service is closed to media; however, media organizations are allowed outside, near the west end entrance to the Cathedral for arrivals and departures. Since all Cathedral schools are in session, no surface parking will be available. Media are asked to drop off at Wisconsin Avenue and South Road.)

Now, watch this brief video recap of Kemp's career and check out the old Kemp trading card from his Buffalo Bills playing days.

-- Andrew Malcolm

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Photo: Cliff Schiappa / Associated Press (Kemp and Dole); Reed Saxon / Associated Press (Kemp speaks in a Santa Ana, Calif. church during the 1996 presidential campaign).

Levi Johnston's shockingly candid answers to CNN's Larry King

Well, once again Larry King's bookers have got the big get -- Levi Johnston is scheduled to be on the CNN show tonight, unless his pickup breaks down in Saskatchewan.

It's billed as an "exclusive" -- at least for this week.

Johnston's such a huge star that LK actually had to wait until after Johnston did the Tyra Banks Show.

But the nation is pretty gosh-darned excited to get maybe its ninth look at this high school dropout hockey player who is said to have impregnated Bristol Palin, the Alaska governor Sarah Palin's teenage daughter. What better reason to put someone on prime-time TV for millions to not watch?

There's nothing like the word "former" to help splinter families wide open, which is great TV entertainment. Watching other families squabble and pretending we don't.

So the former future son-in-law of the former future Republican vice president will undergo probing interrogation by the suspendered one, who's been getting married and remarried and remarried and doing this interviewing gig thing since even before Joe Biden became a senator.

Wardrobe note: On tonight's show everyone will probably be wearing a shirt, unlike on "Cops."

Because most of the nation's TiVos have already been set to record both of the Billy Mays specials tonight, as a public service the Ticket has collected virtually all of Levi Johnston's answers in ...