Al Franken will return Tuesday night (March 14) to the Late Show with David Letterman on CBS for the first time since his October 21 appearance where, in the wake of the Valerie Plame case, he “joked” about how “what it looks like is going to happen is that [Lewis "Scooter"] Libby and Karl Rove are going to be executed” because “outing a CIA agent is treason.” Franken qualified his hard-edged satire: "Yeah. And I don't know how I feel about it because I'm basically against the death penalty, but they are going to be executed it looks like." Franken later suggested that President Bush is at risk of receiving the same punishment, since Karl Rove likely told him what he did, but he added a caveat: “I think, by the way, that we should never ever, ever, ever execute a sitting President." For full quotations and video of those outbursts, check this NewsBusters item.

Franken is likely appearing on Letterman, where he'll be the second guest after the much better-looking Natalie Portman, to promote a new documentary about him, Al Franken: God Spoke.