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.