Fred Kaplan, who's no shill for the administration, argues for a bit about how this is good news for Bush. Personally, I don't buy the suggestion that this calls into question North Korea's nuclear program: working devices are apparently not much of a challenge for graduate students to build, if you don't want to fit into on a warhead. The threat of a nuclear North Korea has always been the threat of selling fissile materials, if not an actual bomb, and nothing that happened yesterday changes that a jot, IHMO.
   Otherwise, this all seems like some kind of deja vu nightmare, one that's terrible, but which has so many worse endings that continuation is the lesser evil.

Ex ignorantia ad sapientiam; e luce ad tenebras

Calls for a response.  And now that North Korea is developing nukes and testing long range missiles, Bush has to do the obvious: bomb Iran.

A true 'mad man' would surely be betrayed, killed, and replaced by a conniving underling/strongman so I think that Kim can be assumed to have a capacity for rational thought (longevity = minimal compotence).  'Some capacity for rational thought' isn't exactly saying much when the same can be said for many leaders around the globe with dubious/fatal results for everyone else.  With a minimum baseline of self interested venality and animal cunning as attributes necessary to be a world leader I would also assume self preservation as making it into a global leaders 'top ten list' of personal priorities/principles.

So with Kim looking to get something out of his lifelong career as a James Bond style villian I am thinking we might all be more interested in what the fuck it is he wants than in overheated knock-kneed hand-flappery about how he is going to blow up the world because HE'S TOTALLY NUTS! He isn't any more nuts than say a leader who thinks people would welcome a foreign invasion with bombs of democracy and depleted uranium freedom fragments blasting thier flesh into quivering chunks of western liberal  attitude...Kim Jong Il aka 'Dr. Claw' can't be that off his rocker, right?

He wants something - what is it?  Does anyone know?

If we reacted to a possible threat with a reasoned approach we might succeed in getting some effective reduction of the threat, but that would be a BORING movie (and ineffective political manipulation of the stampeding masses) - much better to freak everyone out then have our crazy nut swagger about in his best folksy cowboy impersonation before unleasing the demon of unintended consequences on the world  again.  

"...when theft and high crime becomes obscenely obvious to even the blindest beer sucking idiot, it is always the Republicans who are in office." -- Joe Bageant

Right now, the test failed.  It's not a concern right now, but is a major concern in the near future.  The missiles reach the Alaska and Hawaii states right now.

I wonder if Americans still have bomb shelters in their house nowadays?

What race card?

(pun unintended)

The international community is pretty united on this one for a change.  Most significantly, China has spoken out against it, and it looks like the tests were conducted without its consent (unless they are playing an even more inscrutable game than usual).

China needs Nth Korea as a buffer on its border, but not as much as N Korea needs China.  The last thing China needs is an armed and very dangerously paranoid neighbour.  Maybe this realisation has swung them into line behind the rest of the powers, and if so a negotiated moderation to NK's offensive capabilities looks more likely now than ever. Here's hoping.

the only reason some people get lost in thought is because it's unfamiliar territory.

The good news is North Korea gave us hard currency when we finally unloaded those Patriot missiles.

Couldn't hit the broad side of a barn.

The North Koreans hold most of the cards here.  I'm going to look at the issue point by point.

1.  North Korea is not Iraq.  Even though North Korea is probably the most legitimate possible candidate for a "preemptive strike" (certainly much more so than Iraq was), their army is strong enough and the terrain is mountainous enough that invasion would be very difficult.  It would not be a quick or easy war, even if we were able to mobilize twice the number of troops we used in Iraq.  In addition, conventional ground attacks must be ruled out because the North Koreans have enough artillery pieces pointed at Seoul to level the city in a few hours.

2.  Sanctions will not work.  North Korea is already in such bad straights that it's a stretch to think sanctions will modify their behavior.  The regime has already shown its willingness to let its people starve, there's no evidence that this has changed.  The humanitarian disaster caused by strict sanctions would simply be intollerable - it would cause starvation on a mass scale, without doing much to improve our position.  In addition, they know that we know that the more pressure we put on them, the more likely they are to try to sell their nuclear technology for hard cash.  

3.  They do indeed have nuclear weapons.  While the latest test may have failed, the North Koreans don't even have to have a launchable weapon to do a lot of damage to South Korea - all they have to do is load it on a flatbed truck and drive it up to the DMZ.  We can't even safely try to foment an internal revolution, because we can't risk the potential instability (and therefore the increased use risk of accidental detonation) that a North Korean civil war would cause.

4.  If you thought increased oil prices were bad...  East Asia is one of the lynchpins of the world economy - major instability in the region would cause destabilizing capital flight that would make the '97 Asian financial crisis look like a minor recession.  Japan, China, and South Korea are three of the largest economies in the world - and North Korea directly threatens all three.

In sum, they've got us strapped over a barrel, and right now they're starting to drop their trousers.

Ce n'est pas une pipe. C'est une signature.

North Korea is a dangerous authoritarian dungeon, but it does bohter me that the MSM keeps going on about how the Taepodong missile could potentially hit the U.S.

Yeah, assuming it doesn't self destruct on liftoff or disintegrate over the Pacific, a Taepodong could conceivably hit a barren Alaskan coastline, at which point the U.S. military would promptly annihilate the North Korean military and much of the country's pre-historic infrastructure, invade, put Kim Jong Il on trial for crimes against humanity and have him executed.

The MSM really needs to put things into perspective before it starts scaring people with tales of bronze-age missiles that could conceivably hit the U.S. if the bubble gum that's holding them together doesn't melt before they make the trans-pacific crossing.