John Kerry manages to take center stage during the election's closing days as a bad October surprise for the Democrats. He clearly insulted everyone serving in the military today, reminding everyone how the top tier Democrat party elected officials "support the troops". The audio and video are everywhere; here is a roundup on Instapundit.

His press conference today in Seattle managed to make things worse for him and his party. It seems patently ridiculous to assert that his insult to everyone in the military--past and present--was any sort of failed joke aimed at the President. Kerry is a relic who was created by the old media; his presidential aspirations have been canceled by the new media. He just doesn't know it yet.

As today is Halloween, we're reminded of this "separated at birth" image.

Update: I like the Belmont Club's take.

National Review's Corner points to a bizarre story about the man who leaked the President's DUI days before the 2000 election.

Excerpt:
" South Portland police were notified around 9 a.m. that a man wearing a rubber Osama bin Laden mask was standing on top of a berm along the highway carrying a sign that said 'I Love Tabor,' and waving what appeared to be an assault rifle.

Four South Portland officers and two state troopers converged on the man. They drew their guns when he did not respond to their demand that he drop his weapon.

Police said instead he walked toward them dropping plastic hand grenades. His costume included fake dynamite and bandoliers, police said.

He eventually did drop the rifle, which turned out to be a toy and was arrested,..."

The Miami Herald reports on the latest call to entertainers to "just shut up and sing" in "Concertgoer pelts Babs with beverage".

Another milestone in the incredible rise and fall of AOL/Time/Warner/CNN: will Time be the next to go?

Roger Pielke fisks the Stern Report in Stern’s Cherry Picking on Disasters and Climate Change.

Excerpt:

"Why does this matter? The Stern Report uses the cherry-picked information as the basis for one of its important conclusions about the projected costs of climate change(on p. 138),

The costs of climate change for developed countries could reach several percent of GDP as higher temperatures lead to a sharp increase in extreme weather events and large-scale changes.

To support its argument the Stern Report further relies on a significantly flawed report from the Association of British Insurers, which we critiqued here. It’s (sic) presentation of the future costs of disasters and climate change is highly selective to put it mildly."

Update: A Second Hand Conjecture piles on with another thorough fisking. Stern must feel fairly meek by now.

The introduction of an advice column for uptight Seattle residents sparks two questions. First, why did it take so long for a newspaper to start one? Second, how will they have room in the paper for anything else without doubling the number of pages?

H/T: Sound Politics

Plenty of new climate change stories hit the web tonight, including "Tempest erupts over hurricanes: Global warming debate at conference spawns name calling", "Appalachians Triggered Ancient Ice Age", and--you knew there had to be a motive for all these politicians clamoring over global warming--"Pay up--or the planet gets it".

Not to be outdone, Al Gore makes an appearance in another story from the UK.

H/T: Free Republic and the ever vigilant Matt Drudge.

Euro-Humanity on the Wane is a scathing indictment of what has happened to public education in the UK, and how it has underperformed private and "black market" private schools in India.

Quoting from Christopher Chantrill's excellent article: "Contrary to the received notion, it appears that the urban poor are not too poor, or too ignorant, or too feckless to send their children to school—or to pay for it.

And we are idly tossing into the air another very small idea, as inadvertently suggested by the documentary Up Series. What if children suckled at the teat of government schools generally grow up to be adult adolescents, don’t bother to marry, and don’t bother to have children?

They would be well on the way to the status of H.G. Wells’ Eloi in The Time Machine, 'humanity upon the wane,' shortly to fall into the clutches of the Muslim Morlocks. For when society sets itself 'steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword,' it has no need to develop 'intellectual versatility… the compensation for change, danger, and trouble,' until it is too late."

Read the whole thing.

Ronald Bailey's article in Reason, "Climate Change Lemmings Jump Off The Cliff: California signs onto Kyoto Protocol just as it falls apart", contains this prediction by the author: "In any case, based on Europe's current difficulties, I predict that there will be no follow-on Kyoto Protocol-style global treaty and that California will never establish a market in greenhouse gas emissions."

I agree.

The American Thinker summarizes a story in Investor's Business Daily: Brazil points the way to independence from foreign sources of oil: drill domestically!

In "Swans deliver a climate change warning", we see a classic example of burying the lede. You have to read through four paragraphs and most of a fifth in this slanted opinion piece to finally see the following, "Experts said that the slow arrival was due to warmer than usual conditions on the continent, in particular the birds' other main wintering grounds in the Netherlands, and an absence of the north-east winds that aid their migration from the Arctic tundra of northern Russia."

Apparently remaining in the Netherlands over the winter isn't unusual for the swans. As for myself, I'd much prefer Florida.

Like uncountable thousands of Windows users, I have been testing Windows Vista on a backup machine and using that platform to test IE 7. Sparked by a nasty virus/trojan/bho infection that I acquired by recovering files for a friend from his seemingly lost hard drive, I decided to test Firefox 2 on my production machine.

The scales have been lifted; I see clearly now. Download Firefox 2, make it your default browser, and put your browser troubles behind you. Click on the Firefox download button conveniently located in the left column of this blog to protect yourself from all too many nasty exploits and vulnerabilities in IE 6.

BTW, it took the better part of three full days to regain full confidence that my machine was clean again, despite the measures that I had taken prior to the infection. In a later post, I will explain the tools that I used to clean my machine and the new measures that I have taken to protect my production environment in addition to switching to Firefox 2.

"Bad climate science yields worse economics"

An excellent example of truth, succinctly expressed, by Steven Milloy, FoxNews.com's Junk Science columnist.

Mark Cuban does a great service for NBA fans and advances the understanding of the effect of the new synthetic basketball on play this season in his post, "NBA balls...".

The most powerful blog post/podcast combination of the year, if not the decade: President Bush speaks with eight reporters in the Oval Office. The blog post is here; the "podcast" is here.

I hope that the President and his associates, and the RNC at large, take note of the simple power of this format, and repeat it often.

One of the weaknesses that some leaders in the Democrat Party see in their party's infrastructure is the lack of a set of think tanks to help the party develop new policy ideas. One of the Republican party's think tanks, and thinkers, helps the democrats by examining the mishmash of environmentalist/anti-business/Gaia worship/neo-Luddite thinking that Al Gore and his fellow travelers are espousing, especially in "An Inconvenient Truth".

I recommend Steven F. Hayward's article, "The Fate of the Earth in the Balance: The Metaphysics of Climate Change" in AEI Online without reservation.

The Commons Blog links to a post at Dissident Voice that recounts the history of America's lack of support for the Kyoto protocol under the Clinton-Gore administration.

Over at Fausta's blog, we read Larwyn's post: Like teenage girls with "secrets" DEM's leak their own, too

What? They're letting us know that they intend to reverse all of those popular policies, plus give us the Iraqi version of the Vietnamese boat people and Pol Pot's killing fields as a bonus?

H/T: Dr. Sanity

I enjoyed reading Cato-at-Liberty on "The Kyoto Charade."

Quote: "One of the things I keep trying to hammer home to the media is the extent to which legislative promises to meet environmental goal X sometime in the future have almost always been, and likely always will be, meaningless blather.

The reason is simple. Voters love promises to accomplish wonderful things, but they don’t love burdensome policies to secure those wonderful things. Because the public’s attention span is quite limited to say the least, loud and vigorous promises to slay environmental dragons will harvest political capital while subsequent failure to actually slay those dragons will go relatively unnoticed and cost politicians little."

That sums up the entire environmental/global warming movement: make promises impossible to keep, but let everyone feel good about having made them, regardless of the consequences.

Hurrah! A victory for common sense, commerce and the Panamanian people (not necessarily in that order)! Publius Pundit: World Watches Panama Amid Big Victory for Trade

H/T: Instapundit.

In the UK Telegraph, John Keegan writes, "Bush is wrong: Iraq is not Vietnam"

Keegan sums up by saying that "The Vietnam war was not lost on the battlefield, but in the American media's treatment of news from the front line." That is exactly right. Our present day enemy is attempting to follow the same template, as is the MSM.

With a hat tip to James Taranto, what would we do without studies? Probably worry less about global warming and more about whether the Cardinals have a chance against the Tigers.

Tom Evslin can make even a discussion of how to choose replacement windows sound interesting.

Lileks does it. Again.

One of the first Americans to lose his life fighting in post-WWII combat in Vietnam is finally coming home.

Rest easy, "Earthquake."

Kim Jong-il, "Korea's Dr. Strangelove."

"The most common question I get is, 'When are we going to run out of oil?' The correct response is, 'Never.'"

Eric Cheney is a University of Washington economic geologist. He's not related to the other Cheney, although I imagine that they agree on the answer to the question that Eric Cheney answered.

I'm sure that both are correct. Science and technology will provide answers if we are willing to apply them to any problem.

Attention gooks, camel jockeys, and future North Korean losers: your ticket is going to be punched--harder Upgrades Give A-10s New Capabilities

The A-10 is one of my favorite aircraft of all time, along with the "Buff". The B-52 is getting an upgrade as well; even worse news for the bad guys.

Tim Blair's post, "Cease All Movement, captures a big issue in the global warming kerfuffle: "environmentalists" say that scientists are all in agreement that global warming is real, and is due to human industrial activity.

However, lack of debate and continuing research isn't scientific. Scientists haven't given in to demands that they stop research--even under penalty of death. Otherwise, the example made of Giordano Bruno would have "settled" the question of whether the earth was the center of the universe.

More on the chilling effects of scientific censorship here.

H/T: Instapundit.

Now they're calling John Murtha a "mouth breather". This article, entitled 'Confessions of a 'Defeatocrat' in the Washington Post today, is credited to Congressman Murtha but reads like it was ghost written by the "democratic underground", appears to make the case for Instapundit's correspondent.

Republican election angst roundup over at Instapundit.

I'm no expert. I agree that the Republicans have done less than their majorities in both houses could have enabled them to do. However, it's hard for the Democrats to establish that they offered anything other than "no" to any new thinking on entitlements and other real problems, and certainly no serious alternative on Iraq other than "redeployment."

It's a dangerous world. We need serious people in government. If all the Democrats were like Senator Liberman, I'd say that the outcome wouldn't matter too much in the sense that national security would be assured in any case. However, the Democrats gloat over kicking Liberman out of their party. That and their other pronouncements on Iraq and the the war on terror gives me no reason to be comfortable with them influencing national policy at any level.

Often, when reading a post on The Belmont Club, the best comment is simply, "Yeah, that's right--what he said."

This post, on the NYT belated awakening to the crisis in North Korea, is no exception.

Jeremy Lovell of Reuters writes, "Failing to fight global warming now will cost trillions of dollars by the end of the century even without counting biodiversity loss or unpredictable events like the Gulf Stream shutting down, a study said on Friday.

But acting now will avoid some of the massive damage and cost relatively little, said the study commissioned by Friends of the Earth from the Global Development and Environment Institute of Tufts University in the United States."

Gee, the Friends of the Earth paid for a study, and it spells disaster unless we do what they say.

Meanwhile, the guys over at Climate Audit continue to poke holes in the "settled science" around global warming.

George Soros goes on Neil Cavuto's show on Fox News, demands that the conversation turn away from tax shelters to "Policy" as described by the Media Blog on National Review Online: Soros Blows Fuse, Rants At Cavuto for Getting "Personal".

I think that the perfect follow up question would have been, "All right, Mr. Soros, what's your policy on tax evasion?"

If Drudge is right, the Foleygate mess is a terrible prank gone awry, and a terrible indictment of the press and the Democrat party.

Again, if Drudge is right, one wonders how the electorate will react, and whether the Democrats will suffer in November.

Now this is funny: "Mexico warns U.S. of referral to UN over border fencing plan."

I mean, how dare the U.S. enforce its border!

Victoria Crater on Mars.

H/T: The Corner on National Review Online.

On Foleygate, I agree with this emailer to the National Review Online.

Update: Hugh Hewitt links to a Drudge Report post that reports a leak from ABC that included the identity and age of the young recipient of the IMs in question.

One of my favorite sites, Betsy's Page, links to a post entitled "CBS 'FreeSpeech' a barn burner" over at The Anchoress.

The Left's schadenfreude over the Foley scandal is, in part, based on the impression that the Republicans claim the mantle of the party of values, and that scandals like the Foley scandal expose at least one elected Republican as a hypocrite. However, as Betsy points out, Republicans have been punished more and have done the honorable thing and resigned, while Democrats who have engaged in worse conduct--actual sex in a sex scandal, for example--have survived and been reelected.

Of course, this brings to mind that old saw that the public gets the government that it deserves. We deserve better--campaigns that deal with issues and a press that reports them honestly. If we allow the politics of personal destruction to succeed in moving the electorate from the issues and the lack of real plans from the Democrat party to do anything other that undo the progress made by the Republicans and to reinstitute the same failed policies that lead to economic and foreign policy malaise, then we will have failed the country as an electorate.

So now we know the difference between a Meteorologist and a Weatherman.

H/T: Climate Audit.

Could anyone want Hillarycare after reading this? Deroy Murdock on Stethoscope Socialism by Amy Ridenour.

Here's a topic that we can all enjoy: The Longneck Tail A revolution in American beer, by Jay R. Brooks.

I'll have to think about this article by Pete Hegseth, a former officer in the 101st Airborne on the need for more troops in Iraq.

According to OpinionJourmal.com, First Lt. Hegseth served as an infantry platoon leader and civil-military operations officer in Iraq with the 101st Airborne Division.

There's an interesting article at Yahoo News entitled, "Did Democrats Page Mark Foley?"

Clarice Feldman writes at The American Thinker about the incredibly propitious timing of the Foley affair in "Investigate This". The incredible comparisons with the record of the Democrats that she includes, courtesy of Gateway Pundit, makes this a must read.