The news shows were kinda interesting today. But I'm going to focus this piece on two things that were in the shows which I found most fascinating. The first was the piece on "To the Contrary" on a new bill that has been introduced or is going to be introduced soon to deal with the industrial carbon emissions. Of course the legislation that has already passed the House but has bogged down in the senate is called "Cap and Trade."

Cap and Trade is a concept in which the government puts a cap on total carbon emissions from all sources, and then assigns certain industries their share of the emissions. If they can cut their emissions and have some left over, they can sell those on a market.

The new CLEAR bill does a lot of that, from what I heard on To the Contrary in an interview with Sen. Susan Collins. She is apparently one of the main sponsors of this new approach. But really, interestingly, it doesn't seem that it is that terribly different from Cap and Trade. It still creates an overall cap of carbon emissions, at least according to what Collins said. That's huge, really, and what the big smokestack industries, like the coal fired power plants, don't want.

And then, each industry would be assigned a certain share of what they can emit. If they don't meet that share, they would be taxed on amounts they emit over that. But, instead of being able to trade for permission to emit more with industries that emit less, they would have to pay into a kitty, and that kitty would be distributed to the American people as a tax rebate. Sounds interesting to me. I hadn't heard about it before. I was glad that To the Contrary brought it up, because, as Collins admitted, Cap and Trade is dead in the senate for the moment, and something needs to be done.

The second significant thing was how wired and fired up that McLaughlin himself was on the McLaughlin Group. He started off the show with a discussion about the overplayed controversy about the mosque being built a couple blocks from "Ground Zero" in lower Manhattan. McLaughlin was vehemently defending Obama and what he had said - in both quotes - the original statement he gave in front of the Ramadan Muslim group where he said that they had the right to do it, and then the "clarification" where he said he wasn't commenting on the wisdom of putting the mosque there.

I agree with those that say that the clarification wasn't smart. But McLaughlin was firm and aggressive in defending both statements of Obama's. He spoke more than he had for a long time, and it was a little surprising to me. But he stood up strongly to Pat Buchanan and the others that Obama had been right to make his original statement and the clarification. He said that it was important for Obama to have made such statements because freedom of religion is such an important part of our constitution.

Kudos to Mr. McLaughlin for his energy and conscience. I really admire and respect him more for what he said on the show.