IN CLIMATE DENIAL, AGAIN Former Vice President Dick Cheney has to be smiling. With one exception, none of the Republicans running for the Senate -- including the 20 or so with a serious chance of winning -- accept the scientific consensus that humans are largely responsible for global warming. The candidates are not simply rejecting solutions, like putting a price on carbon, though these, too, are demonized. They are re-running the strategy of denial perfected by Cheney a decade ago, repudiating years of peer-reviewed findings about global warming and creating an alternative reality in which climate change is a hoax or conspiracy. Some candidates are emphatic in their denial, like the Nevada Republican Sharron Angle, who flatly rejects 'the man-caused climate change mantra of the left.' Others are merely wiggly, like California's Carly Fiorina, who says, 'I'm not sure.' Yet, overall (the exception being Mark Kirk in Illinois), the Republicans are huddled around an amazingly dismissive view of climate change. A few may genuinely believe global warming is a left-wing plot. Others may be singing the tune of corporate benefactors. And many Republicans have seized on the cap-and-trade climate bill as another way to paint Democrats as out-of-control taxers. In one way or another, though, all are custodians of a strategy whose guiding principle has been to avoid debate about solutions to climate change by denying its existence -- or at least by diminishing its importance. The strategy worked, destroying hopes for congressional action while further confusing ordinary citizens for whom global warming was already a remote and complex matter. It was also remarkably heavy-handed. According to congressional inquiries, White House officials, encouraged by Cheney's office, forced the Environmental Protection Agency to remove sections on climate change from separate reports in 2002 and 2003. (Christine Todd Whitman, then the EPA administrator, has since described the process as 'brutal.') The administration also sought to control or censor congressional testimony by federal employees and tampered with other reports in order to inject uncertainty into the climate debate and minimize threats to the environment. Nothing, it seemed, could crack the administration's denial -- not Tony Blair of Britain and other leaders who took climate change seriously; not Whitman (who eventually quit after being undercut by Cheney, who worked for the energy company Halliburton before he became vice president and received annual checks while in office); and certainly not the scientists. In 2007, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its most definitive statement on the human contribution to climate change, Cheney insisted that there was not enough evidence to just 'sort of run out and try to slap together some policy that's going to try to solve the problem.' To which Whitman, by then in private life, said: 'I don't see how he can say that with a straight face anymore.' Nowadays, it is almost impossible to recall that in 2000, George W. Bush promised to cap carbon dioxide, encouraging some to believe that he would break through the partisan divide on global warming. Until the end of the 1990s, Republicans could be counted on to join bipartisan solutions to environmental problems. Now they've disappeared in a fog of disinformation, an entire political party parroting the Cheney line. STEALTH MONEY We can't turn on the television these days without being assaulted by ads anonymously savaging candidates. Welcome to politics in post-Citizens United America. The Supreme Court allowed unlimited campaign spending by corporations and unions but didn't require the folks picking up the tab to stand behind their words. It is too late for this campaign. The House approved a measure requiring phantom check writers to identify themselves on their ads and barring money from overseas corporations. Senate Republicans blocked it. Voters who say they're fed up with negative politics -- and sleazy back-room deals -- need to demand better. Republicans, so far, have the advertising whip hand as partisan operatives solicit and spend large under the cover of blandly named 'good citizen' committees. There is good reason to fear that foreign corporations are also taking advantage of the new no-tell rules. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has unleashed a barrage of attack ads against Democratic candidates and the White House, denies that offshore moguls are anteing up. That would be more credible if the chamber disclosed its donors. Shareholders of the chamber's corporate members should demand that. Even as it loosed this destructive new era, the Supreme Court stressed that disclosure was the appropriate alternative to limiting political money. Republicans, led by the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, once touted that approach. They dropped it once the lion's share of the lucre began rolling their way. A campaign finance bill, the Disclose Act, fell a vote short in the Senate last month. Another vote is promised after the election, with Democrats offering to negotiate changes that keep the focus on transparency. Might voters dare to hope that the frenzy of stealth spending could prompt support from Republicans prized for their supposed independence: Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine and Scott Brown of Massachusetts? If not, the three and the entire Republican Party should explain why they prefer McConnell's diktat that voters are best left in the dark. DEATH, DNA AND THE SUPREME COURT In an age when DNA technology can help identify the guilty and avoid grave miscarriages of justice, states should not be allowed to block testing of available biological evidence before executing someone. The Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday over a request by Henry Skinner, a Texas death row inmate, for DNA testing of blood, fingernail scrapings and hair found at the scene where his girlfriend and her two sons were murdered in 1993. In March, less than an hour before he was scheduled to die by lethal injection, the Supreme Court granted a stay of execution to consider taking up the matter of the untested evidence. Seeking to avoid the legal doctrines and deadlines imposed by the Supreme Court and Congress to limit post-conviction appeals, Skinner filed a civil rights action rather than a habeas corpus challenge. Sparring over that mechanistic distinction dominated much of Wednesday's argument and nearly obscured the larger problem of prosecutors' selectively testing some DNA evidence but not all in a capital murder case. Justice Sonia Sotomayor correctly noted that Skinner's trial attorney made a strategic decision not to request DNA testing of the contested material in preparation for his trial, likely fearing the testing would further implicate his client. But to disqualify Skinner now from obtaining the testing would elevate game-playing over truth-seeking and ignore the need to ensure, best as possible, that the right person has been convicted. Testing such evidence should not be left to a strategic decision; it should be standard in a serious criminal investigation. There is a value in criminal law to the finality of verdicts and not permitting prisoners endless legal challenges to their convictions. The state should not execute prisoners. But since it does, the justices should be more concerned with the finality of executing someone when untested DNA evidence might shed light on his culpability and the state cannot be completely certain of his guilt. In a lamentable 5-4 ruling in 2009, the court denied a free-standing right of prisoners to obtain post-conviction DNA testing that might prove their innocence. The new case is a chance for course correction. FOR A SUBURBAN TEA PARTY, ANGER IS ALL THE RAGE A loudspeaker was blasting rebel songs along Jericho Turnpike on a day as crisp and perfect as fall gets on Long Island. A couple dozen members of the Conservative Society for Action, or CSA, a local Tea Party affiliate, with tricorn hats and yellow rattlesnake flags, held their positions on both banks of a river of cars. They waved signs and bellowed through bullhorns, oblivious to John Lennon's mockery of revolution. 'You say you got a real solution, well, you know. ... We'd all love to see the plan.' Well, you know, the plan is to get rid of Democrats, elect insurgents, cut taxes and rescue America from socialist tyranny. Nobody has explained how that's supposed to work; everyone is still in the fun part, the part with artillery. The CSA is training most of its fire on Long Island's congressional Democrats: Timothy Bishop, Steve Israel, Carolyn McCarthy and Gary Ackerman. Wednesday's theme was dump Israel. Thursday was dump Bishop, and Friday was dump Israel again. Saturday and Sunday were dump Israel, and Tuesday was dump Israel, McCarthy and state Sen. Craig Johnson. The CSA's founder is Stephen Flanagan, an affable man to whom the most garish Tea Party stereotypes do not apply. He looked like a school board member, which he was, years ago in West Islip. He admits to a libertarian streak but says he is mostly just a fiscal hawk. The heyday he longs for is not the 18th century but the 1990s, when a Republican Congress and Democratic president kept deficits at bay. Ask him for solutions, and he talks about staffing efficiencies and new technology at, say, the Federal Aviation Administration. The group he leads, on the other hand, can be as rabid as any Tea Party, its members awash in fear and resentment. They proudly shout down candidates, like at the town-hall meeting where Bishop tried to use the Pledge of Allegiance to explain how Social Security works. BISHOP: Let me tell you what indivisible means. What indivisible means is that we're all in this together. MAN: No. BISHOP: Yes. Yes. Shouting soon ensued, and it was downhill from there. These rebels recite the talk-radio fear agenda with disciplined precision: Obama is a socialist Muslim. Federally mandated infant blood tests will lead to medical rationing. Congressional Democrats are all radicals, in league with the devilish Nancy Pelosi. Fire them all. It's a strange switch for Bishop and his counterparts, who, before the rage machine kicked in, were seen as decent, moderate, well suited for their districts. Forcing incumbents to fight for their seats is a good thing. But the Tea Party's hatred for both baby and bath water is not going to solve anyone's real problems. It's not going to help people like Jo Ann Riggio, who greeted me at the rally with a smile and readily agreed to chat. Riggio, a registered nurse from Deer Park, was new to politics, moved by disdain for President Barack Obama and love for her brother Joseph, a Marine colonel who died too young. She said Christ sent her a vision: 'Stand up. Carry on,' it said. 'March forward.' Someday, Riggio said, when death panels kick in, 'the people that voted for Obama will get down on their knees and pray for forgiveness.' Obama is a Muslim, she said, and not a citizen. She said it was his fault that troops overseas weren't getting the protection they needed. Wasn't that Bush's problem? I asked. No, it's happening now. Didn't Donald Rumsfeld take heat for that? Behind her eyes a curtain went down. She said: Stop blaming Bush! Obama is commander in chief now! She was screaming. I backed down. I didn't mean to get you mad, I said. She relaxed, and said she was glad we could talk to each other anyway. She reached in to hug me and I hugged her back. 'Democrats and Republicans -- on a human level, we are all the same, right?' she said. Right. But not right now for Riggio, or the electronics salesman who was down to working three days a week, or the man who feared his grown children would be forced from Long Island by property taxes and joblessness. Which is too bad. All that energy and pain, potential for positive change, lost in the service of Republican nihilism. -- LAWRENCE DOWNES 