The media company co-founded by Al Gore and Joel Hyatt five years ago plans to go public.

Current Media, which operates a TV network and a web site aimed at young audiences, notified the SEC of its intentions today.

Democrats are quick to criticize President Bush’s handling of the economy. However, at least one top Democrat has done pretty well during the last eight years.

Former President Bill Clinton made $9.2 million in speaking fees in just his first year out of office in 2001. He later got a reported advance between $10 million and $12 million for his memoir, My Life.

All this money adds up. Clinton and his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-NY, listed their assets as between $17.4 million and $53.7 million, in the most recent report made public.

And now it appears that Bill Clinton is eligible for a $20 million payout for his relationship with a private equity firm.

Things are getting a little tight in Iowa, so it may not be the right time for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to roll out her presidential cabinet.

But should she ultimately get the nomination and then win the presidency, odds are that she might ask the New York City power couple of Joel I. Klein and Nicole K. Seligman to join her team.

And she could also keep things all in the family and sign on Stephanie Seligman, Nicole’s sister, to work at the White House or just about anywhere else.

“Image is everything,” a shaggy-haired Andre Agassi proclaimed as he hawked Canon cameras as a teenager.

Over the next 20 years, the tennis superstar traded handsomely on his world-famous name and image, earning an estimated $200 million through deals with Nike, Adidas, Head, Genworth Financial, Aramis and American Express, among others.

In the early 1970s you couldn’t have a better opponent than Richard Nixon.

Indeed, when the embattled president’s
Enemies List became public, there was no complaining from those who made the cut.

Newsman Daniel Schorr and actor/activist Paul Newman treated their inclusion like a badge of honor. To have Nixon against you was to have the world for you.

These days, the best possible seal of disapproval might come from Christopher Hitchens, the erudite, outrageous, provocative, witty and indefatigable contrarian.

The radio business has been very good to Lowry Mays and Billie Joe “Red” McCombs.

In 1972, they formed the San Antonio Broadcasting Company to buy an FM station for $125,000.

Thirty-five years later, that company is called Clear Channel Communications and it owns more than 1,000 stations. Its shareholders recently approved a $19.5 billion private equity buyout that values Mays’ stock at more than $1.1 billion and McCombs’ shares at about $190 million. The deal is expected to close before the end of the year.

In early 2000, when Clear Channel shares hit $95, the founders’ stock would have been valued at more than twice as much as now.

The recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the nomination of Michael Mukasey to be U.S. attorney general might have passed for a meeting of the Yale Law School alumni association.

Mukasey, class of 1967, was introduced to the committee by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., also Yale Law class of ‘67.

The script has changed.

Pointing to Al Gore, parents throughout the country may be telling their children that if they study hard, lead good lives and not become president they could be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Gore is the co-winner of this year’s Peace Prize for sounding the alarm on global warming. He shares the prize with the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

While Gore may have fashioned a grand comeback, a look at the post-defeat careers of other recent unsuccessful presidential wannabes shows that there can be life, a good life at that, after losing. All have found things to do, sometimes lucrative things, and many have held elective office, most often in the U.S. Senate.

All have continued in public life and some have remained in politics, most especially in the U.S. Senate.

It’s the sort of windfall that not-for-profits don’t receive every day.

A little more than a year old, the Alliance for Climate Protection gained $750,000 when former Vice President Al Gore was named co-recipient of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize Friday.

Gore announced that he would give his share of the prize to the alliance, a Palo Alto, Calif., organization he formed last year.

The group’s goal is to increase awareness about threats to the environment from global warming.
It helped put on this July’s Live Earth concerts in seven cities around the world.

Billionaire Ron Burkle has a new crash pad in New York, complete with a heated swimming pool and a panic room.

Burkle, one of former President Bill Clinton’s best friends, has purchased a swank Manhattan apartment for a whopping $17.5 million, plus nearly $100,000 a year in maintenance fees. Burkle already owns the lavish Green Acres estate in Beverly Hills, where frequent Democratic fundraisers are held.

The three-level apartment with 5 bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms doesn’t have a doorman and is situated in a fairly uninteresting part of lower Manhattan.

While controversial tech entrepreneur Vinod Gupta
widely cultivates political alliances around the country, he stays
close to home when he picks board members for his Omaha-based company,
infoUSA.

Six of the company’s eight directors, including Gupta, have strong ties to Omaha or Nebraska, a Muckety analysis shows. A seventh is a name partner in a law firm that did more then $1 million in business with infoUSA last year.

Truly independent directors are a key to responsible corporate governance, experts say. If directors are too close to a CEO, they can’t properly oversee his actions.

Gupta’s lavish spending on his political connections, including naming buildings after Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton in one of his India projects, have caused a backlash. Some infoUSA shareholders sued Gupta for wasting company money.

There’s no doubt that Ron Burkle loves newspapers.

In the past year or so, he has explored buying the Tribune Co. and several former Knight Ridder papers. Today, the California billionaire
is scheduled to meet with directors of Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

None of Burkle’s previous media flirtations has led to anything and some analysts don’t give him much of a chance with Dow Jones. Some members of the company’s controlling Bancroft family, though, are desperately seeking an alternative to a takeover by Rupert Murdoch. Burkle is a Democrat with strong ties to the Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Democrats and Republicans did their best this week to draw distinctions between Bill Clinton’s pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich and George Bush’s commutation of Lewis Libby’s prison sentence.

“I think there are guidelines for what happens when somebody is convicted,” Clinton said in a radio interview Tuesday. “You’ve got to understand, this is consistent with their philosophy; they believe that they should be able to do what they want to do, and that the law is a minor obstacle.”