Inside Politics

Blogger quits

Feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte last night announced her resignation from the staff of former Sen. John Edwards‘ 2008 presidential campaign, blaming Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, for the two-week uproar over her hiring by the North Carolina Democrat.

“I resigned my position today, and they accepted,” Miss Marcotte wrote at her site, www.pandagon.net, saying that she “was creating a situation where I felt that every time I coughed, I was risking the Edwards campaign.”

Mr. Donohue had urged Mr. Edwards to fire Miss Marcotte and a second campaign blogger, Melissa McEwan, whom he called “foul-mouthed bigots” for comments at their personal blogs. Miss Marcotte was widely criticized for a blog post in which she said that if the Virgin Mary had taken contraceptives, Christians would “have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology.”

Kate Bedingfield, a spokeswoman for the Edwards campaign, confirmed that Miss Marcotte was “no longer working for the campaign.” She declined additional comment to the Associated Press.

The conservative blogger known as Ace of Spades (http://ace.mu.nu) expressed suspicion that the resignation — four days after Mr. Edwards publicly defended both bloggers — might not have been Miss Marcotte’s idea: “If it’s really her own decision, why is she so angry about it? Couldn’t such anger have been avoided by, you know, not resigning? I know I’m going to be called crazy on this, but I have this weird conspiracy-theorist notion that sometimes people aren’t completely straight with us about the reasons for their separations from their employers.”

Mocking Gore

Czech President Vaclav Klaus, calling global warming a myth, criticized a U.N. panel as “a political body” with a “green flavor,” and suggested Al Gore is less than rational in his approach to the issue.

Mr. Klaus made his remarks in an interview with Hospodarske Noviny, a Czech economics daily.

He said the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is “neither a forum of neutral scientists nor a balanced group of scientists. These people are politicized scientists who arrive there with a one-sided opinion and a one-sided assignment.”

Finally, the interviewer asked the president, “Don’t you believe that we’re ruining our planet?”

“I will pretend that I haven’t heard you,” Mr. Klaus replied. “Perhaps only Mr. Al Gore may be saying something along these lines: A sane person can’t.”

The interview was translated into English by Harvard professor Lubos Motl.

Sen. James M. Inhofe, Oklahoma Republican, praised the Czech president yesterday.

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