In a speech at a Republican Lincoln Day dinner in West Virginia earlier this week, Murray Energy Corp. founder and CEO Robert Murray decried the Obama administration's determination to, as described at the financial news site SNL.com (to be clear, no relation to Saturday Night Live), "bypass the states and their utility commissions, the U.S. Congress and the Constitution in favor of putting the U.S. EPA in charge of the nation's electric grid."

In the establishment press, Murray's speech was only covered in a single snarky paragraph by Darren Goode at the Politico titled "Don't Hold Back Now" — obviously attempting to paint Murray as unreasonable and extreme — and a writeup at the Wheeling (WV) Intelligencer. After all, what does Murray know? He's only the head of the largest company in an industry which is still responsible for fueling 39 percent of America's electrical grid, and the majority of it in many states. Who would want to give him any visibility, as if he has anything valuable to say? Well, I do.

On Tuesday, CBS Evening News promoted a new study by global warming alarmist and NASA’s former climate chief James Hansen that predicts a “dire forecast about the climate in the years ahead.” Fill-in host Charlie Rose introduced the broadcast by fretting “[a]n ominous forecast for more scenes likes this, surging floodwaters and rising sea levels.” 

Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change. Last week’s Supreme Court decisions on Obamacare and same-sex marriage. California’s new mandatory-vaccination law. What all these have in common, according to Michael Specter, isn’t merely that they’re correct, but that they’re manifestations of “rational thought.”

Three of those events, of course, were highly unpopular on the right (the vaccination issue is less ideologically clearcut) so it’s fair to say that Specter also sees them as defeats for the conservative movement, though he opines that the SCOTUS is “governed largely by conservatives” and that the pope certainly has some right-wing tendencies (“in many areas,” Specter snipes, Francis “adheres to tenth-century notions of justice”).

While the press looks to twist even the most innocuous statements made by Republicans and conservatives into something scandalous or outrageous (e.g., Mitt Romney's "binders full of women"), they routinely ignore intemperate remarks by leftist politicians and activists. If known, they would likely damage the credibility and public perception of those making such statements. Of course, the left-dominated media can't abide by that. So they censor it.

One recent example involves Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. Despite the unexplained and unexpected 18-year pause in global warming, the senator is convinced that the world as we know it will end without draconian measures to reduce carbon pollution and keep the earth from turning into a ball of fire. One of the strategies on his wish list is suing climate skeptics into poverty and silence.

More liberal media double standards: The New York Times, which would move, ahem, heaven and earth to get religion out of politics when it comes to companies that refuse on religious grounds to pay for birth control, eagerly embraces the perceived moral authority of Christianity when it comes to its leftist issues like global warming. Exhibit A: Avowedly activist environmental reporter Justin Gillis praising environmentalist Christians on the front page of Sunday's edition: "For Faithful, Social Justice Goals Demand Action on Environment."