CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: The New Socialism. This time, without Reagan and Thatcher to beat it back. “One of the major goals of the Copenhagen climate summit is another NIEO shakedown: the transfer of hundreds of billions from the industrial West to the Third World. . . . Politically it’s an idea of genius, engaging at once every left-wing erogenous zone: rich man’s guilt, post-colonial guilt, environmental guilt. But the idea of shaking down the industrial democracies in the name of the environment thrives not just in the refined internationalist precincts of Copenhagen. It thrives on the national scale, too. . . . Socialism having failed so spectacularly, the left was adrift until it struck upon a brilliant gambit: metamorphosis from red to green.”

I’d take them more seriously if they had any proposals that didn’t transfer wealth and power to . . . them.