Virginia Postrel, on recent “achievements” of the GOP in Congress:

By jetisoning any pretense to free-market principles, the GOP is defining itself entirely as the party of the religious right.

I’ll grant that the energy and transportation bills were pork-fests (a cornerstone of Hill bipartisanship for the past, well, 200-odd years), but the third example cited by the WaPo—the passage of CAFTA—seems pretty “free-market” to me. And, to my recollection, none of these bills are platform planks of the Religious Right—indeed, CAFTA may antagonize social conservatives against the GOP in many states hit hard by declining trade protectionism.

Mind you, Howard Dean’s Party of National Lameness Liberalism doesn’t seem very well positioned to capitalize on the GOP‘s weaknesses.

W comes out in favor of teaching Intelligent Design (a.k.a. Creationism with the serial numbers filed off) in public schools. Someone really needs to tell the president he can’t run for reelection, and thus no longer needs to behave like an idiot to gain votes. I take it all back—although, in my defense, I was discussing Congress and not the executive branch.

Unfortunately, the Democrats will fail to extract the correct lesson from this: teachers*, not politicians, should decide what should be taught, and the only way to stop politicians from deciding what gets taught is to get the government completely out of the education business. Instead, they will attempt to back evolutionary theory ad nauseum and further alienate the crowd in Kansas (and the rest of rural and suburban America) which they can’t figure out what’s the matter with.

þ: TigerHawk.

Update: Alex Knapp is sharing my wavelength today.