Must explain why he hasn’t announced for President yet.

The joy boys at the Los Angeles Times’ political blog Top of The Ticket are giddily following every Al Gore missed announcement event.

Here’s their latest:

Al Gore, the former vice president and losing Democratic presidential nominee, is in Los Angeles this weekend for the wedding of his youngest daughter, Sarah.

The bride, who is 28, married Bill Lee, identified by a family spokeswoman as a 36-year-old Los Angeles businessman. Sarah is a medical student at the University of California, San Francisco. The ceremony was held at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

As he did at last weekend’s Live Earth concert in New Jersey, Gore made no announcement during the wedding about any plans for a presidential campaign.

It’s kinda like the opposite of that old “Saturday Night Live” gag: Francisco Franco is still dead.  Despite his death, doctors say his health has taken a turn for the worse.

We learn that one of the bands performing in Al Gore’s Live Earth concert in DC is a funk-rock band from the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario, Canada.  The band is called The Breaking Wind.

The Breaking Wind?  Clearly a cheap knock-off of these giants:

I know, I know.  What can you say about Al Gore’s son getting popped for drugging and driving that hasn’t already been said about Marion Barry?

Well, here’s one thought to add.  As a blogger, reading the names of the medications he was found with – Xanax, Valium, Vicodin, Adderall — made me think, “Good Lord, his glove compartment sounds just like my blog spam filter!”

It’s true.  Every one of those drugs the cops found is pushed by untold numbers of spammers to untold numbers of blogs.  In fact, I’m sure that because I merely mentioned those drugs in this post, some spam company will already meet its revenue targets for the month.

Let young Gore be a global warning: “Just say no — to Pediacare.”  And let’s thank our lucky feverish stars that he wasn’t caught offering low cost mortgage refinancing. 

Think you’re none too bright because you don’t buy into Al Gore’s superhuman  intellectual brilliance?  No worries — the folks who get letters published in the Washington Post have that same inferior thought about you.
A letter in Sunday’s Book World:

“The only things men like Gore have to offer us are truth and intelligent thought.”

And from Saturday’s letters to the editor:

“How sad is the contention that Al Gore is unelectable because he is too intelligent? Yes, let’s elect an inferior mind to be president of the United States.”

That settles it.  I’ll show them.  I’m writing in Aristotle.

Best response to Al Gore’s book?  Tony Snow:

Unfortunately, the former Vice President probably has been listening to people who have deliberately misled him. The President has made it clear over and over and over that there was no relationship between Saddam Hussein and September 11th. And again, from my own personal experience, when we would go on the day of the State of the Union address — the State of the Union address in 2002 I guess, or 2003, the question arose, “Do you think that Saddam is linked to September 11th?” The President said, no, we have no intelligence to link Saddam directly to September 11th. So he has never tried to make that tie.

And what the Vice President is doing — it’s been tried by a lot of other people — which is to take something the President hasn’t said, expose it as a “lie” and then beat him up for it. The President told the truth. So I don’t know — I don’t know if they’re going to do a reprinting of the book to try to get the facts straight; fact checkers may have to take a look at it. These are highly complex publishing issues, and I can’t be an expert on them.

Jack Tapper brings back the harsh 1992 memories with this anecdote at the end of his Al Gore story at ABCNews.com today:

After Random House published 200,000 copies of “Putting People First: How We Can All Change America” — the soporific campaign tome purportedly written by then-Gov. Bill Clinton and then-Sen. Al Gore — the ill-fated re-election campaign of then-President George H.W. Bush filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission. Republicans alleged that the book deal constituted an illegal corporate contribution to the Democratic ticket, which didn’t directly profit financially from the book though the publicity certainly didn’t hurt. How quaint that book must now seem to those Republicans.

The Washington Post seems very concerned these days about government waste.  Actually, government waist — as in Al Gore’s.

Al Kamen:

At times the book, due out May 21, has the feel of a “goodbye to all that” reminiscence, we’re told. Well, keep an eye on the waistline just in case.

Sunday’s paper:

Yes, we’ve certainly seen a lot of Al Gore lately. And there’s a lot of Al Gore to see. Calling Planet Girth!

Of course, Tom Shales wrote this after the Academy Awards:

Al Gore, looking larger than life, took to the stage twice, once to chew the fat with Leonardo DiCaprio.

If Gore runs for president, perhaps they might trot out a Super-Sized Tuesday joke.

We won’t give away the punchline, but check out why Pat Cleary, the Mongolia of bloggers, is taking Al Gore to task for calling China “the Saudi Arabia of manufacturing.” It’s all on Pat’s blog, the Laos of the Internet. OK, that one was Laos-y.

John McCain announces for president on the Late Show With David Letterman.

Arnold Schwarzenegger announces for governor on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.

John Edwards announces for president on the Daily Show with John Stewart.

That just leaves Al Gore announcing for president on The Weather Channel.

Apparently, not much.  New Media Strategies looked at Web 2.0 buzz surrounding Al Gore’s Academy Award win for best documentary, on global warming.

As of 3 p.m. Monday, ten video clips of Al Gore at the Oscars had been uploaded to YouTube.  But none of them had gone viral, meaning no one was e-mailing them around, or received any traction online.  A total of only 384 views for all 10 clips.

Gore’s online social networking numbers are a bit a bit better, but not by much.  Comparing the numbers for the “Draft Gore” MySpace page and the five largest Gore Facebook groups before the Oscars (1 p.m. Saturday) and after (3 p.m. Monday), we found a bump of 8%.  That’s respectable, but the hard numbers are tiny: friends/members increased from 4,649 to 5,019, up 370.

With Web 2.0 dominating politics these days, that might not be enough to launch an Al Gore presidential campaign.  Oscars may mean something to the billion TV viewers, but for online activists, it’s less impressive.

Today’s “Reliable Source” column in the Washington Post has more.  Click here.