Am I the only one noticing that global warming, and all other environmental issues, are completely shut out of the presidential race? Check today's NYT piece on all the issues talked about by all the candidates, Democrat and Republican. The words "global warming" do not appear. From ANY candidate.

Here

So global warming and all other environmental issues are all well and good, but when it comes to getting votes, to "real" politics, it is not even in the building. Despite all the books, articles, prizes, movies, and activism.

I have been writing for for some time now on scientific reports that all share a common theme: when climate researchers actually go out and collect observational data, the data is even worse than current climate models predict as "worst case scenarios." This trend continued today. Just last year, observational data forced climate scientists to revise predictions to include the possibility that arctic ice could disappear by 2040 (previously they had thought of arctic ice disappearing over centuries). Now, just one year later, they have to admit that the ice could be gone by 2012. That is 5 years from now!

NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally says: "The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming," said Zwally, who as a teenager hauled coal. "Now ... the canary has died. It is time to start getting out of the coal mines."

If, in the space of a few years, climate modelers go from saying the ice will melt in a century or two, to a few decades, to 2040, and then to five years from now, an intelligent person who was not intellectually invested in defending the models would have to conclude that there are feedback mechanisms at play that the modelers do not comprehend. And that the "worst case scenarios" they talk about are not really "worst case scenarios" but simply the outer limit of the models they currently have. To call such scenarios "worst case" is deeply misleading. The only rational conclusion is that the real "worst case scenario" is that everything will happen much faster and be much worse than anything the present models anticipate.

Washington Post article here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/11/AR2007121101347.html

This graphic pretty much tells the story:
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003400/a003464/yearly_composite.mp4

Wow, these poor closeted homosexuals in the GOP just can't rein it in. Today the media found the story of Richard Curtis, a Washington state lawmaker and his encounter with a male hustler. Here we have a case where the Republican weirdo, who has voted against gay rights on multiple occasions, is discovered to have hired a hustler, taken him to a hotel room, dressed up in women's lingerie, then offered to pay him $1k to fuck him without a condom.

Now, I am a pretty open-minded guy, and all kinds of sexual activity which seems to disturb most Americans is just fine with me. But a politician who pays a young street hustler to have unsafe sex, trying to use the guy's need for money for the opportunity to possibly infect him with HIV, that is sick. I hope is all the hubbub about Republican hypocrisy this fact is not overlooked. It is the one part of the story that actually is criminal.

Of course, I have no idea whether Curtis is HIV+ or not. But given what we now know about how reckless and irresponsible his sexual activity is, the odds of him having HIV have got be to pretty good.

The other thing that gets me is how stupid Curtis is. I mean, this guy is a Republican politician, who hires a hustler to have kinky sex in a hotel room, offers the guy $1000 for sex unsafe, and then, when the hustler takes his wallet when Curtis won't pay up, Curtis goes to the police to try to get his wallet back, thinking this will not become a media story.

Forget about the whole issue of closeted homos voting against gay rights, how did this guy ever become a politician? He is an idiot! What Republican party hack recruited him to run for office? Who ran this guy's campaign? Didn't anyone notice he was a moron? How do people in the state of Washington feel about having a dunce writing the laws under which they will live?

CNN's coverage of it is pretty funny:
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/politics/2007/10/31/costello.gop.sex.scandal.cnn

MSNBC coverage is here:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21568392/