Ok, first off the author takes a huge chunk out of his credibility when he states that the Bush administration, "gave up a campaign promise to control emissions of carbon dioxide and withdrew U.S. support for the Kyoto Protocol." Bush has not stated that he is abandoning effective and fair measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, but the Kyoto treaty was ridiculous and would have cost this country billions of dollars worth of productivity. The author goes on to state exactly why abandonment of Kyoto is wise: "its emission targets represent a diplomatic agreement rather than any careful weighing of cost and benefit." Well, nitwit, why don't we actually work on a treaty that makes sense rather than going gangbusters for something that is patently biased against the US while favoring to countries such as India and China, no slouches for CO2 production?
The author decries the Bush administration for a lack of consistency and then blatantly supports inconsistency in the exact oppposite manner from the administration! How's that for hypocrisy? Allegedly protect the environment based on questionable science and an imperfect treaty, but damn it all if we can't pursue a system to protect ourselves against nuclear annihilation because of questionable science (for which we can't spend any more money to come up with strong science, of course) and an outdated treaty agreed to by a now-dismembered country.
Anyway. What I enjoy about the NMD debate is that the opponents of the system seem to say that while current technology is inadequate to build such a system, we should not spend any money to develop an effective system with new technology. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? If they had said the same thing back in the '60s, perhaps we would have never landed anyone on the moon.
Incidentally, there was a recent test of the Patriot system, and it shot down two out of three targets. Oh, it failed once -- cancel it! Sure, let's forget about trying to improve it. Let's just quit. Nice.