English Insurance Company Bans Practice of Passing Around Birthday Cards

Now some fresh pickings from the Political Grapevine:

Political Satire

Hollywood filmmaker David Zucker has produced a satirical political ad that depicts former Clinton administration Secretary of State Madeline Albright...giving a basketball to North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il and cheering for him in a game, mowing the grass outside a North Korean nuclear facility, painting a cave for Usama bin Laden, and changing a tire for a terrorist.

Republicans decided not to use it — but someone posted it on the video-sharing site Grist, an environmental magazine that in the past has featured interviews with Al Gore and Bill Moyers, is calling for war crimes trials against so-called climate change "deniers" who disagree with the theory that humans have caused global warming. David Roberts says: "when the impacts are really hitting us and we're in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards — some sort of climate Nuremberg."

The Holocaust references drew criticism from Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado's Center for Science and Technology Policy Research — who says he believes in human-caused global warming. He said "this allusion is an affront to those who suffered and died in the Holocaust. This allusion has no place in the discourse on climate change."

Mea Culpa

The news director for Knoxville, Tennessee TV station WBIR is apologizing for not including a supporter of Republican Senate candidate Bob Corker in an analysis of Corker's debate with Democrat Harold Ford Jr. Tuesday night.

Bill Shory says last minute changes beyond his control left the station with a Ford supporter on set — but no one from Corker's camp. He calls it "a failure of planning and judgment" and says the mistakes will be corrected.

Birthday Card Ban

And an insurance company in England doesn't want to run afoul of new age discrimination laws — so it is banning the practice of passing around — birthday cards. The company tells The Times Online its lawyers advised them that references to bus passes, old codgers and Viagra could cost them big money in court.

Employees at the company say the ban is stupid. And one employment law specialist says, "people who write some of these laws are do-gooders who don't really understand the true implications of them in the workplace."

—FOX News Channel's Aaron Bruns contributed to this report.