The phrase “media bias” is flung about so freely we’ve become almost inured to its usage. It’s easy, far too easy, to slap it on every story we don’t like as a convenient means of dismissing its contents, be they pro or con. Sometimes, though, you run across something so egregious, so blatant in its willful ignorance of the truth, one has to speak out. Such is the case with today’s headline article from the San Francisco Chronicle, written by Carolyn Lochhead from the paper’s Washington bureau, about the triumph of that plucky local girl made good… er, Nancy Pelosi ramrodding through her cap and trade bill. Contemplate her deathless, sweeping prose as she begins:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke time and again of preserving “God’s beautiful creation”
There! See? If you oppose soaring energy prices with corresponding price increases on everything else, jobs being shipped overseas en masse, “reliance” on alternative energy sources that don’t work, and Pelosi making a killing on her natural gas investments you’re against God! Take that, you bigoted Christianists!
as she mustered all the skills she learned at her father’s knee in Baltimore
Don’t forget to bring in dear old Dad!
and in San Francisco’s liberal salons,
The beauty salons where she recuperates after each facelift?
to muscle sweeping climate change legislation to narrow passage Friday.
Thanks to some brainless Republicans… oh, wait, they’re the root of all evil. Best leave them out of it. Hail the hometown girl!
Pushing for the vote while uncertain she would win it was the highest-stakes decision of the San Francisco Democrat’s career.
High stakes? Like what, given the whipped status of Democrats if the bill hadn’t passed something more than maybe her next Botox injection being delayed might happen?
President Obama, joined by former vice president and greenhouse guru Al Gore, worked the phones to woo the backing of reluctant Democrats from coal states, farm states, manufacturing states and poor states.
Too cowardly to be there in person should their precious have gone down to defeat, eh?
Even
“Even?” What is this, a news article or a melodrama?
German chancellor Angela Merkel weighed in from the hallway off the Speaker’s balcony,
Where she clutched the money to pay the mortgage on the orphanage to her heaving bosom.
thanking “dear Nancy”
For fending off Sinister Snidley (who looks suspiciously like Dick Cheney) from foreclosing the orphanage’s mortgage. Or mortgaging America’s future. Or for turning her on to a good plastic surgeon. Or something.
for overseeing what Merkel called a sea change in U.S. policy on climate change.
“Sea change?” Sure. See your household budget destroyed, see the economy demolished, see your job sail across the bonny sea…
For all its muddy compromises,
“What – you mean you actually want to know what’s in the bill? And you want a complete copy of it? You want a complete bill period? God’s creation-hater!” But seriously… WHAT compromises?
and those to come in the more conservative Senate,
For as we all know, conservatives are the root of all evil. And drown puppies in their spare time.
the climate legislation would begin to tilt the equation of energy policy in the United States,
In favor of… so how much moolah you figure to get out of this, dear Nancy?
capping for the first time greenhouse gas emissions,
Shall we all call BS on this together? Laws regarding same have been on the books in California since 2006.
boosting production of renewable electricity,
Also BS.
investing in clean-energy technology
Yeah, never done that before either.
and attempting to loosen the vise grip that foreign oil producers hold on the nation’s economic and foreign policy.
Um… sure. Placing massive restrictions on the development and usage of domestic energy sources will cut oil imports. Explain how that one works, please.
The 219-212 vote was so close that Walnut Creek Democrat Ellen Tauscher, confirmed by the Senate the night before as the nation’s top arms control official,
As an aside, Tauscher’s job is with the State Department as Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security, a position for which she is eminently qualified… so we’re told. Her job entails negotiating arms reduction agreements. Let me know when North Korea returns your calls, okay Ellen?
delayed her resignation until after passage. Tauscher spent much of the day presiding over the historic vote, fending off GOP delay tactics
Such as asking to actually see the bill.
and taking an emotional moment to bid farewell to her colleagues and announce her wedding today.
Aww…
Tauscher was late to her pre-nuptial dinner after Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio staged what looked like an old-fashioned Senate filibuster, using his privileges as a leader to spend more than an hour ridiculing page after page of the bill and delaying the final vote until well into the evening.
The brute! How dare he actually READ THE BILL! Which in Ms. Lochhead’s world constitutes ridicule. So she’s saying the bill is ridiculous? As to Ms. Tauscher’s delayed dinner, considering the wedding was held at her house in Washington I somehow doubt it was much of an inconvenience. Anyway, congratulations to the bride. Hope this marriage goes better than your first two, both ending in divorce.
When he relinquished the floor, Pelosi gave a fist pump.
Hope it didn’t over-stretch her last facelift.
“No matter how long Congress wants to talk about it,” she said, “we cannot put off the future.”
Starting with your unemployment should this bill become law and the economy collapse. And it’ll all be on you.
Still, her decision to seize a brief window before the July 4 recess to push through the contentious legislation could leave Democrats at risk in next year’s midterm elections.
One can only hope so.
The legislation arrives as gasoline prices and unemployment are rising along with sea levels.
Well, two out of three aren’t bad. The sea level isn’t rising.
With the economy stuck in deep recession, the promise of fresh taxes on energy, the economy’s most basic input, is a big risk for Democrats and a potential opportunity for Republicans.
What, your girl Nancy can’t sell the “sure, you’re broke, but it’s good for you” meme?
Nor is there any guarantee the legislation will clear the Senate, where failure would leave vulnerable House Democrats hanging with nothing to show for a risky vote.
Please, pass me the violin.
Such a course would parallel the infamous BTU energy tax proposed by President Bill Clinton nearly two decades ago. That tax cleared the House by a single vote cast by a hapless Pennsylvania first-term Democrat who promptly lost her seat after the Senate buried the bill.
This time through it’ll be eight “Republicans.”
Senate passage will be in the hands of California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, an ardent proponent of cap-and-trade limits on greenhouse gases who often clashes with conservatives.
They’re already planning their strategy. Every time they address her they’ll call her ma’am. She’ll lose it on the spot.
Boxer plans action in her Environment and Public Works Committee by the end of July and believes she laid a path through the minefield of regional interests in a trial run on a similar bill last year that secured 54 votes, before Democrats added to their Senate majority in November’s election.
Apples and oranges. The stakes are far higher this time, and the damage to the economy would be far greater if this bill passed.
Pelosi framed the legislation as a national security issue, a health issue and above all “a moral issue for us to pass on God’s beautiful creation to the next generation in a responsible way.”
Funny how someone who sees no problem with murdering unborn children, defying her church in the process, keeps bleating about God’s creation. Guess human beings don’t qualify for that definition.
Her opponents, including nearly every Republican and 44 Democrats, warned that the legislation is economic suicide, and the “most colossal mistake ever in the history of the United States Congress.” They warned that imposing caps on carbon dioxide will raise energy prices and force more manufacturing to China and other nations that do not limit greenhouse gases while doing little to limit global warming.
But who cares about that? Or that even Greenpeace says this bill is worthless? Nancy says it’s so, therefore it is so. Right?
The bill would raise energy costs for consumers a postage-stamp’s worth a day, according to Democrats relying on estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, or by $1,500 a year according to opponents who contend the costs are woefully underestimated.
Let’s see… a first class postage stamp currently costs forty-four cents. That would be $160.60 a year. By the way, the CBO’s estimate is a vile lie. The bill’s cost shoots up horrifically over time.
For all the politics at play on both sides, the debate was often emotional, pitting Democrats who believe they are opening a new, clean-energy frontier for economic growth against Republicans who pleaded with waverers to “save our country” from economic ruin.
The nerve of those people, trying to keep the economy from collapsing!
“Dozens of burgeoning companies at the cutting edge of green technologies are poised for an explosion in innovation,” said Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Palo Alto.
They have been working at this for thirty plus years and have yet to make a dent in this country’s energy needs. You expect this to change overnight?
Rep. George Radanovich, R-Fresno, in a reference to oil-rich Venezuela’s president, retorted: “If you like getting your oil from Hugo Chávez, you’ll love getting your breakfast, lunch and dinner from him too.”
Well, Obama might, seeing as how they’re such buds.
Democrats, some of them from the industrial Midwest,
From the land of the UAW. Now there’s some economic genius.
said jobs have already gone to China under GOP energy policies and reminded Republicans that former President George W. Bush bemoaned the U.S. “addiction to oil” in the same chamber.
He didn’t recommend destroying the economy to “rectify” this, now did he. He did recommend measures, including investing in alternate energy research, to alleviate this. The Democrats laughed.
The legislation split coastal Democrats from their newer colleagues in the more conservative interior from labor union and farm-heavy states such as Michigan and Missouri.
Um… let me check a map here… yes, Michigan and Missouri are in the interior of the country. Guess Ms. Lochhead wasn’t a geography major.
Working with Los Angeles Democrat Henry Waxman, the bill’s chief author, Pelosi was forced to accept key compromises with farm-state Democrats led by Collin Peterson of Minnesota, the Agriculture Committee chairman Pelosi bowed to last year to enact a costly and anachronistic farm bill.
But wait… I thought dear Nancy bowed to no one. And could someone kindly explain to Ms. Lochhead the difference between reporting and editorializing? You label a bill “costly” and “anachronistic” – as an aside, do you even know what that means? – without producing evidence of same. Pathetic.
Farm groups fear that higher energy prices could feed into their fuel and fertilizer costs.
Go figure.
Peterson won major concessions that could open a lucrative new agricultural market for carbon offsets gained through no-till farming and reforestation, as well as protection for corn-based ethanol.
You’d think the eco wackos would love that sort of thing.
In April, when Pelosi began cobbling together the fragile Democratic coalition behind carbon dioxide limits, she showed reporters a black desk statue of a coal miner, carved out of anthracite. She said it was a gift to her father, the late Rep. Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., D-Md., from a colleague in the coal-producing part of the state. Pelosi’s father passed it on to her when she was elected to Congress in 1987.
Oh, good. Human interest schlock.
She also displayed the statue to members from coal states, she said, to show them that their interests would not be ignored.
No word on how many hurt themselves laughing.
In fact, Pelosi gave what many Democrats felt were overly generous emissions allowances to coal-fired electricity plants.
She’s such a gal.
“We’re all going down that path together, or else we can’t go down that path,” she said. “And we must go down that path.”
So destroying your country’s economy is the path we must walk? Whatever, dear Nancy. Whatever.
Look, Ward Bushee, editor of the Chronicle. We know times are tough and your paper is teetering on the brink of going out of business. You probably can’t afford a lot of qualified writers. But if a collection of fangirl gushing is your definition of sufficient quality to be a lead story – or run period – you deserve to go out of business.
Quickly.
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