For the Wall Street Journal's editors, fear of a bigger government outweighs the fear of a warmer planet.

John Miller, Dollars and Sense

The Wall Street Journal's editors are celebrating having dodged a big- government bullet when the cap-and-trade global warming bill sponsored by Joe Lieberman and John Warner, as amended by Barbara Boxer, went down to defeat this June in the Senate.

But the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act of 2008 was a fairly low caliber munition in the fight against global warming. While undoubtedly the most comprehensive global warming bill ever to reach the Senate floor, its emission reductions fell well short of those called for by environmental groups or by the Clinton and Obama campaigns.
Inside Cap-and-Trade

"Cap-and-trade," introduced in the 1990 Clean Air Act to regulate sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions or acid rain, is now the favorite form of environmental regulation for politicians and big business. They find it far preferable to either command-and-control regulation, such as federal directives ordering electrical power plants to install smokestack scrubbers, or emissions taxes, such as a broad-based carbon tax.

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The significance of the Comcast decision...cannot be understated: the Commission’s assertion of authority to protect Internet users from broadband providers discriminatory tactics.

Gigi Sohn, Public Knowledge

Later this month I will celebrate 20 years as a public interest communications lawyer. After two unhappy years in a private law firm, I walked into the small and cluttered offices of Media Access Project in August 1988 and never looked back. We spent most of our time in those early days trying to get broadcasters and cable operators to live up to their public responsibilities – impossible work in the laissez-faire Reagan-Bush I years. It was all mass media reform then. There was no technology policy, and the Internet was the stuff of geeks and academics, but the goals we had then were the same as they are today – to ensure a communications system that promotes creativity, civic discourse and democratic self-governance.

Last Friday (August 1) I sat in the second row of the FCC’s meeting room to hear a divided, but bipartisan Commission announce that it was reprimanding Comcast for interfering with certain peer-to-peer services and thereby upholding a complaint against the company filed by Free Press and Public Knowledge. The feeling of joy and relief was completely foreign to me – I remembered sitting in an older version of that meeting room (at 20th and M Streets, NW) dozens of times from 1988-1998, and recalled how my face would flush with anger and frustration as the requests of the public interest community were denied again and again.

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Will Maddow's unlikely success, reliant on her ability to defy cliche, signal a move in punditry away from the thuggish and toward the sophisticated?

Rebecca Traister, The Nation

In a year bursting with memorable moments in televised political punditry, the first may have come on January 8, when MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow explained one of the quick-spreading theories behind Hillary Clinton's victory in New Hampshire, a surprise win that had knocked many of Maddow's on-air colleagues on their asses.

"You want to know who they're blaming for women voters breaking for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama?" a delighted Maddow asked co-panelist Pat Buchanan and host Chris Matthews, her eyes flashing. "They're blaming Chris Matthews! People are citing specifically Chris ... not only for his own views but also as a symbol of what the mainstream media has done to Hillary Clinton."

Matthews sputtered dismissively, but Maddow wasn't done yet. "People feel the media is piling on Hillary Clinton," she said, "and they're coming to her defense with their votes." For Matthews, who'd been enjoying near rapturous pleasure over the presumptive early-season thumping of his personal hobgoblin, there could not have been worse news than that his own commentary might have paved the way for Clinton's triumph. Yet here was just this headline, delivered by Maddow, looking like Sylvester the Cat, practically licking yellow feathers from the corners of her mouth.
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Hateful language is too often the standard for mainstream media while discussing undocumented immigrants and minorities.

Cristina Jimenez, Drum Major Institute

John Cole

Last month (June) I wrote about a Media Matters report that revealed that when it comes to immigration and undocumented immigrants, instead of news and/or facts, we are getting a bunch of lies and misinformation. Cable news anchors like CNN's Lou Dobbs and Fox's Bill O'Reilly use their "news shows" to promote a message of fear and anger, creating and encouraging hate and a strong sense of resentment against undocumented immigrants.

The result: (nothing positive of course) hate groups in the United States have increased by half since the year 2000 and the number of new anti-immigrant groups increased to 300.

What is CNN doing interviewing the founder of an online discussion forum that promotes selective breeding of the human species?

David Holthouse, Hate Watch

As part of its ongoing "Black in America" project, CNN posted a story to its website earlier this week titled "Could an Obama presidency hurt black Americans?" Credited to CNN correspondent John Blake, the piece quotes the wit and wisdom of Steve Sailer, identified only as "a columnist for The American Conservative magazine."

Specifically, the CNN story quotes a column by Sailer first published last year in which he opined that Obama offers voters "White guilt repellent."

"So many whites want to be able to say, 'I'm not one of them, those bad whites. Hey, I voted for a black guy for president,'" Sailer wrote.

What the CNN article fails to note is that in addition to writing columns and movie reviews for The American Conservative, Sailer is the founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute, a neo-eugenics online discussion forum where right-wing journalists and race scientists have promoted selective breeding of the human species. He also writes frequently for the anti-immigrant hate site Vdare.com, named for the first white child born in America, and runs a website, isteve.com.

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