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.