Up to 200,000 people will be attending a climate change rally on the National Mall on the same day that the Pope will be speaking to Congress. Wow! Such was the bold prediction reported by Washington Post reporters Juliet Eilperin and Michelle Boorstein on August 25. So what happened when Pope Francis did arrive at the Capitol last Thursday? Before we get to that sad reality, let us join Eilperin and Boorstein joyously wallowing in yuuuuuge numbers back in August:

Liberal Esquire political columnist Charles Pierce, formerly with the Boston Globe, joined MSNBC’s All In on Thursday during live coverage of Pope Francis’s visit to New York City and used the occasion of the Pope’s speech hours earlier before Congress to lash out at Ted Cruz and conservatives for not endorsing climate change or other liberal social issues as does the Pontiff. 

The competition for the most annoying aspect of establishment press business reporting is fierce. One which immediately identifies a reporter as hopelessly biased and ignorant is any reference to "laissez faire" as a condition allegedly present in any modern economy anywhere on earth.

"Laissez faire" is an economic concept involving "an economic system in which transactions between private parties are free from government interference such as regulations, privileges, tariffs, and subsidies." There are no true "laissez faire" economies of any meaningful size, because they are all regulated to some extent. As we will see shortly, some in the press even employ the obviously absurd term "laissez faire regulation."

In the wake of the ongoing controversy surrounding Volkswagen’s diesel car emissions controversy, MSNBC reporter Tony Dokoupil wildly proclaimed that Republican politicians were cheering on the German car maker for deceiving the Environmental Protection Agency. Dokoupil appeared on All In with Chris Hayes Tuesday night and insisted that “[i]f you’re a Republican, if you think the EPA goes too far on stuff like this, this is almost like a heroic act by Volkswagen.”

Applying bogus definitions of “fascist” and “fascism” to conservatives and conservatism has long been almost a cottage industry on the left. In a Friday post that mostly riffed on Rep. Paul Gosar’s intention to skip Pope Francis’s speech to a joint session of Congress, Daily Kos writer Hunter argued that the modern conservative movement may not be fascist right now, but easily could become so.

“All the elements for the ascension of true fascism are now in place among the top ranks of the American right,” wrote Hunter. “The adaptation of pseudo-‘Christian’ rhetoric to promote movement goals (expansionist interventionism, hyper-nationalism, xenophobia, a focus on ‘true’ members of the nation versus the undesirable intellectual, political, religious and ethnic ‘others’) while actual Christian thought is marginalized as ‘leftist’ and even dangerous ought to be good for a sub-essay of its own.”