You can feel the excitement in the air in Thursday's report by Felicity Barringer and environmental reporter Andrew Revkin on the new Democratic Congress taking on climate change ("Measures [1]on Global Warming Move to Spotlight in the New Congress [1].")
The Times piles up anecdotal evidence to suggest global warming is for real and that regulation is inevitable: "Many events have combined to create the new direction - forsythia blooming in lawmakers' gardens in January, polar bears lacking the ice they need to hunt and Al Gore's movie, 'An Inconvenient Truth,' along with pragmatic executives seeking an idea of future costs and, especially, the arrival of a Democratic-controlled Congress. There was evidence of the changed mood all over Washington this week.
"On Wednesday, leading scientists and evangelical pastors jointly declared their intention to fight the causes of climate change and the public confusion on the subject. Cheryl Johns, a professor at the Church of God Theological Seminary, called that problem 'nature deficit disorder.''
The story succumbs to the liberal media's Obama-mania: "To add excitement, the man of the moment, Senator Barack Obama [2], Democrat of Illinois, lent his name to the best-known brand in climate-change legislation, a measure by Senators John McCain [3], Republican of Arizona, and Joseph I. Lieberman [4], independent of Connecticut."
Also on Thursday, Jeff Zeleny contributes a think piece to the pile of Obama speculation, "Obama Knows Novelty Goes Only So Far as an Agent of Change." Zeleny gives the young Illinois senator a bit of the old Hillary Clinton "centering" treatment.
The liberal Obama (the American Conservative Union awardshis voting record [5]an 8 out of a possible 100) is not called a "liberal," and Zeleny emphasizes his "occasionally stepping across party boundaries." Zeleny's example is less than convincing - Obama avoided the word "Democrat"upon opening his presidential exploratory committee on Tuesday.