Where Did Kyoto Go?

I find the Kyoto treaty to be one of those small wonders of press bias and selective liberal concern. On July 25, 1997, the Senate passed a sense of the Senate vote 95-0 against the US taking part in the treaty. That is as close as it has come to being actually considered in this country. The Clinton administration never pushed it and we were led to believe by the press that the Republicans had it bottled up. When Bush took office, it became "Bush's fault" that the US was not a Kyoto signer, even though it had never been Clinton's fault.

Oddly though, I believe the Democrats took over both houses of Congress in '07 did they not? Where is Kyoto? Suddenly, it is nowhere to be seen. One could think it could easily be at least brought to a vote now, or the Republicans could be forced to filibuster to prevent it. Right? Certainly the fate of the planet is more important that some minor functionary in the justice department talking about 8 guys being fired? I mean wasn't "needless investigation" one of the horrors of the Republican Congress during the '90s? They were focused "on the wrong things", and the MSM pointed a lot of fingers at "time and money being wasted". Do I detect a small change in attitude?

Why is that? Bill Moyers seems to think that the press wasn't critical enough of WMD before the war. This is somewhat like the press not being in FAVOR of the idea that the USSR and communism could be defeated when Reagan stated it in the early '80s. Even though the MSM turned out to be wrong and Reagan turned out to be right, I don't call that "bias'--it was common knowledge that the USSR was going to be with us forever. Even secretary-killer Teddy said on the subject of WMD: "We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction." Sept. 27, 2002. Normally I only trust Teddy on issues relating to liquor selection, but the media seems quite fond of him, so I mention him here.

If there are no usual suspects to quote on the "other side", then it is tough for them to NOT be "biased". They are "biased against" a flat earth, for the US having landed men on the moon, and "biased for" many other things that are common knowledge. They were biased for the belief that there was global cooling in the early '70s, that we were out of oil in the late '70s, and that starvation was going to be the leading world problem at the end of the 20th century for a very long time. Prior to 2003, the poll numbers that assumed that Saddam DID NOT have WMD approximated flat earthers and moon landing hoaxers (but were well behind those that believe in UFOs). I'd call that a "bias to common knowledge"--a completely different form of bias that is quite different from an idealogical bias.

Explaining a "bias" for common knowledge is pretty easy--in fact the usual definition of a bias AGAINST it is somewhere between "iconoclast", "crumungeon", or "insane". Even making the claim that a bias for common knowledge is somehow "idealogical" shows how really far out there a Moyers and those that pay attention to him really are. Why the MSM would find Kyoto to be a huge issue with one party in Congress but no issue at all with another is a completely different type of bias, which I argue is best explained by ideology.