The news cycle has been dominated by celebrity deaths - Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett and even TV pitchman Billy Mays - and President Barack Obama's health care initiative. Obama has used the compliant media to keep the focus to health care, and they are neglecting a critical largest news event that could impact the lives of every man, woman and child for the foreseeable future.

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a 1,200-page climate change bill known as the "American Clean Energy and Security Act" sponsored by Reps. Henry Waxman, D-Calif. and Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., by a narrow 219-212 vote on June 26.

Prospects for that piece of environmental legislation might have been hurt had reporters pointed out the scientific censorship taking place in the Obama administration. A veteran of the Environmental Protection Agency strongly questioned the theory of manmade global warming in a report that was then silenced by the administration. That's exactly the opposite of how many journalists handled a similar controversy during the Bush administration.

Managing Editor's Note: This was originally published at Andrew Breitbart's "Big Hollywood" blog. It looks like an entertaining conservatively-themed documentary. It's a shame the liberal MSM is likely to ignore it.

I’m putting the finishing touches on my feature film coming out later this year called “U.N. Me”  (unmemovie.com), a satirical documentary on the profound failures of the United Nations. Here’s the second of three clips that very much represent the flavor of my upcoming film. Hope you enjoy … ”Guns Don’t Kill People, Climate Change Does.”

You may know that there is a genocide taking place in Darfur (news to the U.N.).  You may not know who is the real culprit responsible for the raping, killing and burning down of Darfurian villages.

The Democrats spent years complaining that Republicans were questioning their patriotism, so now that they are in power, they certainly won’t question the Republicans’ patriotism just because their views differ on political issue?

Yes, that was a rhetorical question.

After cap-and-trade passed with just eight Republican votes, Henry Waxman, author of the bill, accused Republicans of “rooting against the country … even rooting against the world.”

Considering how much attention the media gave to Rush Limbaugh’s out-of-context quotes about how he wanted Obama’s policies to fail and how Obama was hurting America, I wonder how much attention the media will give to Waxman, an actual politician, for making such antagonistic comments?

Again, a rhetorical question.

With the recent narrow passage of the controversial Waxman-Markey “cap and trade” bill in the House and the ongoing debate over global warming, one should expect balanced coverage of both sides of the issue. However, much of the media has neglected to report on the alleged “hush up” of an EPA research analyst whose report on global warming prompted his supervisor to warn it could have had a “very negative impact on this office.”

At 8:45 a.m. EDT on the June 30 edition of "Fox and Friends," EPA Senior Operations Research Analyst Alan Carlin, told interviewer Steve Doocy that his 98-page study that questioned the science behind global warming and called for the EPA to stop depending on reports from the United Nations, was ignored by his supervisor who refused to forward the report on because Carlin’s “comments do not help the legal policy or case” for the EPA’s position on global warming.

Time magazine’s Michael Grunwald attempted in an article on Time’s Web site to make connections between two of the most prominent issues facing America and congress today, healthcare and energy. But he put forward a flawed argument that lacked balance and fell into the doomsday language so common in the main stream media.

“Everyone knows we use too much energy,” lamented Grunwald, “Our addiction to fossil fuels is torching the planet, empowering hostile petro-states and straining our wallets.” 

To justify his crisis language, Grunwald cited studies by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory which “suggest that more than half of our energy is lost through inefficiencies, calculations that don't even include the energy we fritter away through wasteful behavior like leaving lights on or idling cars.” He failed, however, to mention that Livermore is not an unbiased source. According to its Web site, “More than 40 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers were key scientific contributors to the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which, along with former Vice President Al Gore, won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.”

Via Hot Air's Ed Morrissey:

Barack Obama’s energy czar appeared on Fox & Friends this morning to discuss the cap-and-tax bill passed by the House last week on a razor-thin margin. Carol Browner got stumped by Fox’s Steve Doocy while questioning her ability to speak to the subject, which prompted her to declare Doocy “unfair” for blindsiding her. You be the judge — should Doocy have wondered whether Browner had bothered to read the bill she was promoting on national TV, or is that “unfair”?

Remember the good old days—when dissent was patriotic?  Fuggedaboutit.  Dissent isn't merely unpatriotic now.  It's downright treasonous.  Just ask Paul Krugman.

If, like virtually all House Republicans and a handful of Dems, you don't agree with the likes of Henry Waxman on the need to take radical measures on the climate, you're guilty of . . . "a form of treason."  Treason against the planet, to be precise.

That was Krugman's formulation in his New York Times column of today, Betraying The Planet.

Krugman has obviously drunk deep from the carafe of Al Gore Kool-Aid, writing [emphasis added]:

The day before the House was to vote on a controversial energy bill destined to be the largest tax hike in American history, it was revealed that the Environmental Protection Agency had suppressed an internal report challenging the entire global warming myth.

Despite the importance of this study, and how it related to a debate about to ensue on the House floor, its existence and suppression went almost completely ignored by America's media.

This, of course, comes in stark contrast to regular and frequent news reports in previous years accusing the Bush White House of intentionally censoring the science of climate change.

Making matters worse, the media have no excuse for this current oversight for several House members held a press conference about this issue early Thursday afternoon (h/t NBer Joseph Johnson):

(Photo is of the martyred "Neda")

In a passionate Wall Street Journal op-ed this morning ("Silence Has Consequences for Iran"), former Spanish Prime Minister José Aznar who, in case anyone cares, serves on the board of WSJ parent News Corp., says that "It would be a shame .... if our passivity gave carte blanche to a tyrannical regime to finish off the dissidents and persist with its revolutionary plans."

Shaking off passivity requires visibility. America's media establishment almost across the board is providing very little. The Associated Press and the New York Times reports exist, but their distribution is dwarfed by the death of a pop star and a governor's infidelity.

Here are useful comparisons (all searches were done at Google News at about 8:45 a.m. for June 23-27, limited to USA sources):

Climate Progress's Joe Romm believes global warming caused all the rain at last week's U.S. Open golf tournament, and because favorite Tiger Woods was in the first draw of players most impacted by the inclement weather, it cost him the victory.

In his latest exhibition of Global Warming Derangement Syndrome, Romm conveniently ignored how New York is currently experiencing one of its coldest Junes on record.

Alas, as we've seen from Romm and his ilk in the past, facts are often inconvenient truths to be summarily cast aside when they conflict with the agenda (h/t Climate Depot):

The farms that supply much of America's produce are quickly becoming extinct.

On Friday, as I drove back from my southern California office north on I-5, I witnessed it firsthand seeing for myself what many are now calling the Congress-created Dust Bowl.

Of course, global warming obsessed media, when they bother to report this dire situation, typically blame the problem on California's drought.

Fortunately, Fox News viewers know the truth, as on Friday, for the second time in two months (see Brad Wilmouth's "FNC: Drought-Stricken Farmers Lose Fight for Water to Endangered Fish"), Sean Hannity informed the nation what the real cause is -- the Endangered Species Act and a federal judge's decision in August 2007 to save a little-known fish called the Delta smelt (video embedded below the fold):

NASA's James Hansen is looking to stir up trouble at a coal mining facility in West Virginia, and the CEO of the company about to be marched on isn't taking it lying down.

Quite the contrary, Massey Energy's Don L. Blankenship, whose company is set to be protested by Hansen and actress Daryl Hannah this coming Tuesday, has challenged the NASA official to debate him about global warming and West Virginia's economy.

As reported by WOWKTV.com Sunday, Blankenship issued the following statement concerning the matter:

ABC News is giving away free advertising! Or Sam Champion is, anyway. On the June 18 edition of “Good Morning America” the weatherman-when-he’s-not-busy-saving-the-planet did his best to help DVD sales of Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth,” and then proceeded to rave about Deutsche Bank Climate Change Advisor’s new “Carbon Counter.” DBCCA is a commercial concern, as is Al Gore. If other members of the global warming industrial complex get wind of this, ABC may have to make good.

Champion still hasn’t gotten over Gore’s 2006 movie and explained, “It’s the movie where he stood beside this giant graphic and rose on a scissor lift … [he] showed you how our rapid rise in fossil fuels would just go off the charts in greenhouse gases,” he reminisced. But the good times aren’t over, according to Champion. “Well there’s a whole new way to count this and what it will do to our planet if we don’t make some substantial changes.”

ABC Intern: Um, Mr. Champion, it's the head of the Florida Chamber of Commerce on the line for you, and he, uh, doesn't sound too happy.

Sam Champion: Tell him to go soak his head.

That apocryphal bit of dialogue might not be too far off the mark.  On today's GMA Champion warned Americans that "if you're thinking of retiring in Florida, think twice."  

The ABC meteorologist made his dire suggestion in the course of announcing the Obama administration's issuance of a report on the impact of climate change on the United States, which seems to cast matters in worst-case terms.

With a cooler-than-usual winter and a mild temperatures leading up to the beginning of summer, global warming alarmists are finding they are losing steam in the debate. But "NBC Nightly News" won't give up the fight.

On the June 15 broadcast, anchor Brian Williams noted the peculiar weather patterns along the East Coast.

"The weather along the eastern seaboard has been more like Scotland in October lately," Williams said. "Then came the first of the Internet stories, some of them written by learned people in the weather field, wondering if summer as we know it was just not going to happen this year in some areas because of the high up air currents over this country that we can't see."

Leave it to the British press to once again do the job of real reporting that U.S. journalists apparently won't do.

This time, it's Tom Leonard at the UK Telegraph. From Flint, Michigan, he tells us of a "pioneering scheme" that involves tearing down entire neighborhoods and simply abandoning them -- oops, I'm sorry, I meant to say, "returning them to nature."

This is apparently what passes for sophisticated urban planning these days.

Here are key paragraphs from Leonard's story. Especially note the breathtaking anti-progress hostility of the idea's champion (bolds are mine; Getty picture at top right is from that story):

Sometimes the numbers in a wire service report are so ridiculous, you just know that they're bogus.

On Wednesday, June 11, a duo of Associated Press reporters, Chris Kahn and Sandy Shore, with an assist from Tali Arbel, reported on a study "green jobs" study released by the Pew Charitable Trusts. In "The Clean Energy Economy: Repowering Jobs, Businesses, and Investments Across America," Pew made the growth in "clean energy" appear more impressive than it is by vastly understating job growth in the rest of the economy during the past decade -- by a factor of three.

None of the three AP "journalists" involved, and none of the alleged layers of fact-checkers and editors at the wire service, had the intuitive sense to detect an error by Pew so pathetically obvious that anyone following the economy at all -- and that includes the folks at Pew -- should have known the figure involved was false.

Here are the first few paragraphs of the AP story (bold is mine):

Have you ever read a newspaper article and walked away stunned that the writer seemed to be totally oblivious to the real story or left some significant questions unasked?

Conservative readers of the June 9 Washington Post could understandably answer yes to the aforementioned question after reading the front page story "Early Lesson in Eco-Activism Comes From Economics Book."

Writer Daniel de Vise begins:

Casting about for a cause, the Young Activist Club at Piney Branch Elementary settled on something close at hand: the hundreds of polystyrene trays and plastic utensils discarded daily in the school cafeteria.

In the second half of his op-ed in the Washington Post today, former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev entirely credits himself and fellow countrymen for the end of his country's Communist dictatorship, and claims that it's the Western capitalist model that is currently failing.

In the process, he espouses positions that seem to have been copied from the Democratic Party's past few platforms, as well as from U.S. Dear Leader Barack Obama's governing model.

Following Gobachev's ridiculous rewrite of the Soviet Union's final decade (you know it's ridiculous because the name "Reagan" never appears; he doesn't even believe that the break-up should have happened), here are key passages from the former dictator's admonishments of the West (the most obvious direct lifts from Obama and Dems are in bold):

In today's "Why Didn't Al Gore Think of That?" moment, a Russian climatologist is claiming global warming might have played a significant role in bringing down Air France flight 447 on Monday.

With this revelation, the list of things climate change is supposed to be responsible for has officially surpassed the list of things it's NOT been blamed for.

As hysterically reported by Russia Today Thursday (h/t Marc Morano):

The government is continuing to encroach on freedoms more and more in the name of climate change. Case in point: An ordinance that went into effect June 1 stating if you sell your home in Austin, Texas and you fail to get a clean energy "green" audit, you will likely face criminal charges.

According to an ordinance passed by the Austin City Council in November 2008, any home 10 years or older will require an "Energy Conservation Audit. Failure to comply - criminal charges as explained by the local community-owned electric utility:

What if I sell the house without having an audit?

Non-compliance with the ECAD ordinance is a Class C misdemeanor. Reported violations will be forwarded to the City of Austin Legal Department for review and action.

For years, NewsBusters has asked the question: when will media report Nobel Laureate Al Gore's global warming profit motive?

On Monday, Reuters did.

In an article titled "Gore-backed Hara Sees Profit from Low-carbon Economy," author David Lawsky went where most climate change obsessed media members dare not (h/t Steven Milloy):

As Newsbusters has been covering for nearly a year, ABC developed and heavily promoted a nightmare "documentary" of our future (unless we listen to the einironmentalists). The Business & Media Institute's Dan Gainor watched "Earth 2100" when it aired last night:

ABC’s “Earth 2100” tried to tell the story of the future but ended up a documentary about the present. The global warming Armageddon-fest tried to scold and scare Americans into changing habits to prevent the deadly end. Instead, it told a tale of just how far journalism has descended from neutrality to bias to outright propaganda. That’s what host Bob Woodruff called “a different kind of journalism.”

The program focused most on the fictional character “Lucy” who he used to tell his equally fictional tale of the future. Immediately after viewers met Lucy, the first real human they saw other than Woodruff was John Podesta, president and CEO of the lefty-wing think tank Center for American Progress. Podesta also headed up the Obama transition team.

Since Earth 2100 was a two-hour, left-wing, Obama commercial complete with an early talking head appearance by the president, Podesta was an appropriate choice. But not so appropriate that he actually appeared in that part of the transcript, which ABC posted to go with its massive Web effort for the show. ABC had to add him in after the transcripts were completed. Apparently, the Obama connection wasn’t clear enough before that.

The world is about to end, or at least that’s according to ABC’s “Good Morning America.” The June 2 segment promoted a new special called “Earth 2100.” The program follows Lucy, a girl born in 2009, and her dramatic story about how if we don’t take drastic measures immediately climate change will cause droughts, floods, mass migration, and starvation.

This may sound straight from a science-fiction movie, but “Good Morning America” went to great lengths to assure viewers this wasn’t science fiction and that by airing this series they were changing journalism. Bob Woodruff, host of the special, called making up what will happen in the future “a different kind of journalism.” The segment quoted him saying, “not a prediction of what will happen, but what might happen.”

The clips shown from the “Earth 2100” premiere painted a devastating picture that resembled the science-fiction movie “The Day After Tomorrow.” The cartoon of Lucy and her family showed an invasion of dragon flies, people migrating away from climate-ravaged areas for a better life, and, of course, New York City flooding. Clips from previous natural disasters were shown as well.

After the preview, “Good Morning America’s” Diane Sawyer responded and tried to pretend the whole program had some news value. “Amazing someone born into 2009. We’re not talking about sci-fi here and to come up with a human voice for it, a family voice, for it.” ABC left out the necessary crystal ball from the segment, so the audience was left to guess how they could predict 2100 so accurately.

On March 26, I was watching the Kids’ Choice Awards with my 8-year-old twins on Viacom’s Nickelodeon, which for 30 years has been the No. 1 entertainment brand for kids. It was dedicated to the Big Green Help environmental campaign and “going green” for Earth Day awareness. Leonardo DiCaprio was honored for his green work. Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson was the host, and my fellow Hollywood stars and musicians came out in full force.

An impressive commitment was shown to keeping the message of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” as a battle cry for our youths’ participation in protecting Mother Earth from global warming and pollution. My children were enthusiastic. I was confused. Something bothered me, and I could not put my finger on why - until Memorial Day weekend.

It started on Saturday morning, when I took my 8-year-old son, Nicholas, who is a Cub Scout, to the Los Angeles National Cemetery. About 2,700 Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, from Cub to Eagle, convened to place flags on more than 84,000 gravesites of America’s finest. It was a moving, profound experience.

'The Goode Family,' a new half-hour animated comedy show which spoofs the politically-correct and environmental do-good thinking of a liberal family which considers its lifestyle superior to “abstinence people” who “wear flag pins,” debuted this past Wednesday night on ABC. The opening scene showed a “Support Our Troops...And Their Opponents” bumper sticker on the family's hybrid.

When the 16-year-old son who the parents adopted from Africa and presumed he'd be black, but to their surprise was a white South African, wants to start driving, the father cautions: “With greater emissions, comes greater responsibility.” In another scene, the mother declares “nothing brings a mother and daughter closer together than shopping at a high-end, organic grocery store.” And inside the store an intercom announcement alerts shoppers: “Check out the big board to see how you can limit the impact of your existence.”

I won't give away all that's in the accompanying video in which I cobbled together a little under three minutes of what I thought were the funnier and most-damning parodies of liberal thinking .

On Thursday’s CBS Early Show, co-host Julie Chen teased an upcoming segment on a new way to combat global warming: "Up next, if you could do one thing to fight global warming, would you do it? How about painting your roof white? We’ll explain." Fill-in co-host Chris Wragge later introduced the report: "Could painting your roof white be the best defense against global warming? Some very important people think so. So Early Show national correspondent Hattie Kauffman put that idea to the test."

Kauffman explained: "In any given city, most rooftops are black. And that's the problem. The darker the surface, the more heat it retains...the lighter the surface, the better it is for the environment." Kauffman talked to Bill Nye, ‘The Science Guy,’ who further explained: "The building doesn't get as hot so you don't need to run the air conditioner nearly as long."

Later, Kauffman cited Obama Energy Secretary Steven Chu: "[he] says if all rooftops and roads in the world were made white it could combat global warming." A clip was played of Chu claiming: "That would be the equivalent as if you took off all the automobiles of the world for eleven years." Kauffman added: "Think of it this way, every year you would keep out of the atmosphere 2.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide or the emissions produced by 60 million cars. There’d be even more savings if roads and parking lots were not covered in black asphalt." Nye declared that asphalt was: "...absorbing more heat...squandering billions of tons of carbon dioxide every year."

With television hosts unwilling to joke about President Barack Obama as those comedians regularly ridicule conservatives, there’s a bright spot coming up this week in a new TV show set to debut on ABC which will mock leftist environmentalism. The Wall Street Journal reported Friday:

The new animated television series ‘The Goode Family’ is a send-up of a clan of environmentalists who live by the words ‘What would Al Gore do?’ Gerald and Helen Goode want nothing more than to minimize their carbon footprint. They feed their dog, Che, only veggies (much to the pet's dismay) and Mr. Goode dutifully separates sheets of toilet paper when his wife accidentally buys two-ply. And, of course, the family drives a hybrid.

The series, from Mike Judge who created Beavis and Butt-Head for MTV and King of the Hill for Fox, will debut Wednesday night at 9 PM EDT/PDT, 8 PM CDT/MDT. The May 22 Journal article, “Making a Mockery of Being Green -- The creator of ‘Beavis and Butt-Head' and ‘King of the Hill' has a new target: environmentalists,” observed: “Much as Mr. Judge's series King of the Hill finds humor in the dramas of a working-class Texas family, Goode lampoons a liberal Midwestern household. In Goode, the characters are often mocked for being green just to fit in with their friends and neighbors.”

After 120 days of the new presidency, the automobile industry provides some of the best evidence of an administration that favors the heavy hand of government meddling in the private sector. And as is the case with mostcoverage of President Obama and his policies, criticism of his automotive tinkering has been sparse.

On May 19, Obama announced a 30-percent increase in Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, which would come to a 35.5 miles per gallon (mpg) average for both cars and light trucks. It will equate to a higher percentage increase for cars, up from its current level of 27.5 mpg standard to 39 mpg starting in 2016. And the average for light trucks would rise from 24 mpg to 30 mpg.

"We have set in motion a national policy aimed at both increasing gas mileage and decreasing greenhouse gas pollution for new trucks and cars sold in the United States of America," Obama said during his May 19 announcement.

During his Saturday, May 16, commencement speech at Fordham University, former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw fretted that the "vital signs" of "Mother Earth" have "taken a turn for the worse," as he cited global warming as a problem this year's graduating class would need to help solve. He also used the term "economic justice," a term commonly invoked by the Left, as he called on graduates to "restore economic justice." Brokaw: "We need you to celebrate one another in a common cause of restoring economic justice and true value, advancing racial and religious tolerance, creating a healthier planet."

Early in his speech, Brokaw referred to the current economic problems that largely originated in the financial sector as he argued that "the economic model that has defined your lives was, in too many ways, a house of cards," and referred to "greed and avarice" in that sector, before he more optimistically praised America as a relatively more prosperous place than the rest of the world. Brokaw: "America remains a land of unparalleled economic opportunities with a standard of living that even in these constricted circumstances is well beyond the hope of hundreds of millions in less developed countries."

Update: Brokaw also spoke at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, on May 17, and made similar comments.