When it came to the major broadcast networks covering the full congressional passage of the Keystone XL oil pipeline on their Wednesday night newscasts, ABC’s World News Tonight with David Muir and the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley chose to ignore the story completely and left their viewers in the dark on this issue. Meanwhile, NBC Nightly News made it the second topic covered on its broadcast and while it was the first network evening news mention of Keystone since all three did on January 6
Oil & Gas Prices

At the recent meeting of the world's elites in Davos, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and former Mexican President Felipe Calderon circulated a proposal to ban cars in all major cities in the world by dense-packing their layouts. The cost, as I noted on Monday: a mere $90 trillion (that's right, trillion). It's telling in a foreboding sense that the pair's idea wasn't laughed off the continent.
Enviro-nutty ideas such as these trace their origin to Gore's 1992 book, "Earth in the Balance," in which Gore called the internal combustion engine "the mankind's greatest enemy." In reality, it is arguably the greatest enabler of human progress in the world's history. So readers should take some delight in articles appearing two years apart — one at Time.com, and another at the Wall Street Journal, where the authors predict that the odds seem to be in favor of the evil internal combustion engine continuing to outshine the enviros' favored alternatives for at least the next couple of decades. Gore and his media enablers surely wail and gnash their teeth when such inconvenient items rear their scientific heads.

The nation’s leading newspapers buried the Senate’s strong 62-36 vote for the "controversial" Keystone XL pipeline inside Friday’s newspapers. Nine Democrats joined unanimous Republicans in setting up an Obama veto. Other stories seemed more interesting to the papers -- like the president's budget plans.
House vote?
During her MSNBC show Now on Monday, Alex Wagner had on guest Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, who took advantage of the blizzard set to strike New York City and New England to invoke climate change and blame the “big oil industry” and Republicans for “voting down science” in a Senate vote last week.
Not to be outdone, Wagner took her own swipe at those who don’t subscribe to the view that the storm was bred by humans and climate change: “[J]ust with the flight delays, the economic impact of travel and travel cancellations, it seems like framing this sort-of changing climate in an economic context is a pretty powerful way to get people to start caring a little bit more about the changes that are happening to the Earth.”

Three results returned in a search at the Associated Press's national site on "Venezuela" tell us almost nothing about that country's deepening economic crisis.
An unbylined January 10 item reports on the visit of Nicolas Maduro, the country's de facto dictator, to Iran in hopes of "stabilizing" (i.e., raising) oil prices. A second unbylined report on January 9 tells readers that there's really nothing to worry (oh sure) about in China's growing Latin American influence. Only the faintest hint of the horrors everyday Venezuelans are now experiencing appeared on January 7. The following two paragraphs appeared at the very end of a report describing Maduro's visit to China:

An article about a dramatic decrease in the price of oil appeared in the Washington Post's WonkBlog. However a certain F-word is notable by its very obvious absence. So what is that word? "Fracking."

Here's a small window into a journalist's mindset.
In a report on how lower gas prices are affecting the companies operating retail gas stations, Associated Press reporter John Fahey revealed his apparent believes that there are millions of us walking around, perhaps including him, obsessed with getting back at gas station owners for charging us so much at fill-up time for years:

The dramatic fall of gas and oil prices meant relief for holiday travelers and more money in the pockets of shoppers. MarketWatch reported one estimate of the savings that equated it to a $75 billion tax cut for households.
But rather than let drivers enjoy the much needed respite from years of gas prices above $3-a-gallon, former governor of Pennsylvania, Democrat Ed Rendell said it was the time to raise the federal gas tax to fix the nation’s “crumbling” infrastructure. He touted a bill by Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., to raise the 18-cents-a-gallon federal gas tax by 12 cents per gallon in the next two years. That would be a 66 percent increase.
While all three major broadcast networks covered the failed vote in the U.S. Senate to approve the Keystone XL Pipeline on Tuesday night, ABC and NBC neglected to mention that political motivations were behind the vote to aid the reelection efforts of vulnerable Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana that will take place on December 6.
After previously being held up in the Senate for years, the vote was finally allowed early Tuesday night and fell one vote short of the 60 votes needed for passage as only 14 Democratic Senators joined with all 45 Republicans to approve the measure.

Earlier today in a press conference, Speaker of the House John Boehner made a quip about President Obama's veto threat of a bill to authorize the Keystone XL oil pipeline which indirectly referenced Jonathan Gruber's infamous "stupidity of the American voter" line regarding the selling of ObamaCare.
Hardball host Chris Matthews played the clip on his November 18 program, but seemed completely oblivious as to its meaning, instead using the remark as an opportunity to demand Keystone supporter Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) to denounce Boehner's supposed ad hominem attack on environmentalists who oppose building the pipeline.

CNN's Carol Costello surprisingly acted as a supporter of the Keystone XL pipeline on Friday's CNN Newsroom, as she interviewed left-wing Senator Bernie Sanders. The Vermont politician decried the project, since climate change is "already causing devastating problems in our country," and that it would "transport 800,000 barrels a day of some of the dirtiest oil on Earth."

So much for the left easing up on its pathological demonization of the Koch brothers after Democrats' withering losses in the midterms. Tired old habits are hard to break, especially for Jurassic liberals like Thom Hartmann.
Ever since Ed Schultz abruptly ended his radio show last spring to spend more time at his Canadian fishing lodge (buy American!), Hartmann has moved that much closer to becoming the top-rated liberal radio host, a distinction equal to being the tallest building in Topeka, to paraphrase William F. Buckley's take on Michael Harrington as America's leading socialist.
