Unlike some Washington Post ombudsmen (ahem, Geneva Overholser), Andrew Alexander deserves credit for raising the question of liberal bias, and reporters’ connections to the liberal movement, even by marriage. But he didn’t tell the whole story. At best, he gets an I for Incomplete. On Sunday, Alexander reported:

Post reporter Juliet Eilperin covers the contentious issue of climate change. Her husband, a noted expert on the subject, coordinates international climate policy as a part-time senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. She has quoted officials from the liberal think tank in her stories, although not her spouse. Climate change is discussed at home, she said, but a "church-state separation" exists for areas where their work overlaps.

This kind of spousal connection would not be easily tolerated by the Post if Eilperin was a married to an expert for ExxonMobil. She would be moved off the green beat. Alexander bows briefly to that notion, but doesn’t really buy it:

I believe the Washington Post knows perfectly well that the word "censor" does not belong in the lead of today's Juliet Eilperin story, but the editors left it in (or inserted it?) anyway.

The story, "Cheney Aides Altered EPA Testimony, Agency Official Says Ex-Administrator Says Official From Vice President's Office Edited Out Six Pages," begins:

Members of Vice President Cheney's staff censored congressional testimony by a top federal official on the health threats posed by global warming, a former Environmental Protection Agency official said today.

Bush and Cheney have been in office nearly seven and a half years now. That's time enough for the Post's staff and editors to get used to the fact that they were elected to run the executive branch, and thus they can alter any executive branch document, presentation or policy they darn well please.

That's not censorship; it's editing, policy-setting, or both.

Business as usual, when you run the government.

To be fair, near the end of the story, Eilperin's piece included this quote from the White House:

Washington Post environmental reporter-slash-advocate Juliet Eilperin penned a front-page piece in Monday’s Post on how John McCain is "instinctive" on environmental matters, pulling a "balancing act," which means insufficiently radical enough to please the Sierra Club and their media friends. Eilperin’s piece was loaded with the opinions of environmental "interest groups" without any group or any policy being labeled as liberal:

McCain's lifetime League of Conservation Voters score is 24 percent, compared with 86 for Obama and 86 for Clinton; Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund's conservation report card gave him 38 percent in the 108th Congress and 40 in the 109th.

When [LCV chief Gene] Karpinski tells audiences about McCain's environmental scorecard rating, he said, "jaws drop....I tell them, 'He's not as green as you think he is.' "

Shortly after reporting on her Web site that GOP presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain did not vote for George W. Bush in 2000, Arianna Huffington continued to denigrate the presumptive Republican nominee before a Washington, D.C., audience.

"Actually, you know what I think - the more I think of it, John McCain should not be allowed to hold sharp scissors," Huffington said. "[Y]ou know he wants to make the tax cuts permanent. He wants bigger corporate tax cuts. You know, it's an endless process. You know it's basically, exactly what this country does not need. It's expanding and deepening the last eight years."

Earlier, Huffington had charged that the media are playing "Pontius Pilate" when dealing with the issue of global warming.

I already knew Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) wasn't a clear thinker, but I still had to chuckle at her quote in today's Washington Post article on climate change:

The president's plan to have America stand by while greenhouse gases reach dangerous levels and threaten America and the world is worse than doing nothing -- it is the height of irresponsibility.

What's the difference between "standing by" and "doing nothing"?

Why, no difference at all.

The Washington Post reviewed Newt Gingrich and Terry Maple’s "A Contract for the Earth" on Sunday, but Post "national environmental reporter" Juliet Eilperin was torn. On one hand, she wanted to say that even the Republicans recognize and bow before the Global Warming Threat. On the other hand, she simply had to mock the idea that private-sector solutions would help rather than stringent government mandates: "This is no revolutionary manifesto. It's Gingrich as Smokey the Bear, rather than as the provocateur he used to play on the national stage." The Post illustrated the sentence with a graphic that crudely pasted a picture of Gingrich’s face on a Smokey Bear painting.

Ultimately, in the review's final paragraph, Eilperin dismissed the book as "greenwash," resembling a "corporate advertisement" from an op-ed page, designed for public relations rather than actual solutions: