The Democratic Party's protectionist make-over was completed yesterday, when Nancy Pelosi decided to kill the Colombia free trade agreement. Her objections had nothing to do with the evidence and everything to do with politics, but this was an act of particular bad faith. It will damage the economic and security interests of the U.S. while trashing our best ally in Latin America. Even if the free trade agreement is somehow removed from cold storage, Ms. Pelosi's cheating is a first-order strategic blunder. Colombia is one of America's closest friends in a hostile region menaced by Hugo Chávez's Venezuela. For all the talk of repairing the U.S. "image" in the world, the Democrats don't really mind harming that image if it pleases the AFL-CIO.

After a year of concentrated effort that includes a multimillion-dollar p.r. campaign on top of An Inconvenient Truth and slavish media coverage parroting the climate-alarmist line, recent polls show that public opinion on global warming has barely budged. Only about a third of Americans, according to a recent Gallup survey, are agitated about climate change, and even people who say the environment is their most important issue rank climate change behind air and water quality in importance.

Meanwhile a backlash in the scientific community has begun. New York Times veteran science reporter William Broad filed a devastating article about scientists who are “alarmed” at Gore’s alarmism; Gore’s account of global warming goes far beyond the evidence. The dissents from Gore’s extremism, Broad explained, “come not only from conservative groups and prominent skeptics of catastrophic warming, but also from rank-and-file scientists” who have “no political ax to grind.” It appears Gore refused to be interviewed directly for the article; he responded to e-mail questions only.

Rather than permit a vote on the Senate bill that would restore crucial overseas surveillance authority, House Democrats, along party lines, have rammed through an alternative proposal that grants new privacy rights to to terrorists overseas and preserves the multi-billion dollar lawsuits their trial lawyer pals are pursuing against the telecoms.

But the bottom line is: when the Protect America Act lapsed on February 16 due to House inaction, we lost the ability to monitor without restrictions emerging terrorist threats overseas. As National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell (a former Clinton Administration director of the NSA) has observed, we have lost intelligence. Thanks to today's action, that unacceptable situation will continue.

Handing out a wad of cash may not hurt, but it's no lasting cure to the economy's woes. Some principled Republicans in Congress have joined the stimulus debate with measures that go beyond feel-good fixes. The White House and congressional Republicans are clashing with the Democrats who control Congress over how to boost the economy. Along with rebate checks of $1,600 for most families proposed by the Bush administration as part of a $145 billion stimulus, Democratic leaders want food stamp relief, extended jobless benefits and social welfare spending.

Just as how and where money gets spent was of no concern to Keynes, it seems just as irrelevant in the minds of today's Democrats. The economic history of recent decades should teach us all that the private sector does not operate with such mindlessness.