Lesbian Annise Parker elected as mayor of Houston

Great news from the nation's fourth largest city.

Annise Parker was just declared the winner in the runoff to be Houston's next mayor. Parker is a lesbian with a strong record of serving her city as controller and a city councilor. More here. Read the rest of this post...

Cool science stuff from DailyKos

I should have posted this on SciFi Friday (now SyFy Friday, not sure what the difference is). Read the rest of this post...

I've been doing a bit of research on climate change for my CNN appearance tomorrow...

And it's been very interesting. I'm going on Howie Kurtz's show on CNN tomorrow (Sunday), I think our "hit time" is around 10:40am Eastern. We'll be talking about the climate change debate, and Sarah Palin's op ed and Al Gore's interview, and then we'll also discuss press coverage of Obama's Nobel.

I did a bit of research on something in particular - the claim by climate change denialists that some stolen emails from climate change scientists in Britain "prove" that climate change is a hoax. Well guess what - it doesn't prove that it's a hoax, and in fact both AP and FactCheck.org agree on this one. Climate change is real, and the emails do nothing to change that fact.

AP:

E-mails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data — but the messages don't support claims that the science of global warming was faked, according to an exhaustive review by The Associated Press.

The 1,073 e-mails examined by the AP show that scientists harbored private doubts, however slight and fleeting, even as they told the world they were certain about climate change. However, the exchanges don't undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

Factcheck.org:

Hacked e-mails show climate scientists in a bad light but don't change scientific consensus on global warming....

The messages, which span 13 years, show a few scientists in a bad light, being rude or dismissive. An investigation is underway, but there’s still plenty of evidence that the earth is getting warmer and that humans are largely responsible.

Some critics say the e-mails negate the conclusions of a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but the IPCC report relied on data from a large number of sources, of which CRU was only one.

E-mails being cited as "smoking guns" have been misrepresented. For instance, one e-mail that refers to "hiding the decline" isn’t talking about a decline in actual temperatures as measured at weather stations. These have continued to rise, and 2009 may turn out to be the fifth warmest year ever recorded. The "decline" actually refers to a problem with recent data from tree rings.

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UK prepares for Tory rule

The days of "call me Tony" are just about over and will revert back to the traditional "yes, minister." Blair made a mess of just about everything he touched and even managed to give relaxed interaction a bad rap. For those not familiar with the traditional distance between bureaucrats and politicians, check out the classic BBC show "Yes, Minster" and later "Yes Prime Minister" on YouTube. Does distance really make a difference or is it all about show?

In a return to the Whitehall traditions lampooned in the 1980s television comedy Yes Minister, Britain's most senior mandarin has ordered all civil servants to refer to ministers by their formal titles after the general election.

Sir Gus O'Donnell, the cabinet secretary, has said that new members of the cabinet should be greeted as "secretary of state" when they take up their posts.

Middle ranking and junior ministers will simply be called "minister". Should a minister ask to be called by their first name, they can expect an echo of the response the fictional Jim Hacker received from his permanent secretary in the BBC comedy series. "Yes minister," Sir Humphrey Appleby replied to Hacker's request to call him Jim.

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Gingrich wants Rs to commit to repeal health care reform when they take back Congress

Oh and they probably will. Which is why it's imperative that the legislation not take four to six years to go into effect, and that it actually have immediate observable benefits for all Americans, such as lowering all of our premiums, or more generally, giving all of us access to a cheaper, better plan. Read the rest of this post...

Senate Dems promise to address progressives' concerns about health care bill AFTER it passes

I promise to stop beating you next week.

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An amazingly sexist ad from Levi's

The question is whether this new ad from Dockers is somehow tongue in cheek. If it's serious, it's sexist as hell. No? (You can click the image below to see a larger, more readable copy.)

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Saturday Morning Open Thread

Good morning and Happy Hannukah.

It's a work day for the U.S. Senators. While they're waiting for the CBO score on the health care bill -- and trying to sort out issues like drug importation, the Senate is debating the conference report for the Consolidated Appropriations bill.

It's election day for voters in Houston. They're choosing a new mayor in a runoff between Annise Parker and Gene Locke. Both are Democrats. Parker, the city controller, is a lesbian. Locke's supporters provided funding to some of the worst homophobes in Texas, who ran a very ugly anti-gay campaign against Parker. Polls close at 7 PM Central Time. We'll find out if homophobia works in Houston. Hopefully, it doesn't.

So, there'll be news today. Read the rest of this post...

Bob Dylan - Must be Santa

It's the season, after all. The chilly weather is finally arriving here. No snow like you've had stateside but we're finally dropping down near freezing. Yuch. I've been dreading this season but am bundling up for a long bike ride far away from the crazed shoppers coming into town. Only three more months of this weather. Read the rest of this post...

Rolling Stone: Obama's Big Sellout

It's the weekend, so if you have the extra minutes (and a strong stomach) this is well worth your investment of time. It details the change from Obama's populist pitch on the campaign trail to the Citi/Wall Street/Robert Rubin takeover. One of Obama's first moves was to bring in the same old crowd who created the financial crisis and let them run the show. There has still not been any recognition that the system was wrong. Even with the mild reform just passed in the House, there is a belief that yes, the system is fine so don't rock the boat. (Forget that the boat is taking on water and sinking.) How can anyone in their right mind think that throwing almost $24 trillion at the banks suggests it's a system that works?

In Congress, we've come to expect little because they've been there all along for Wall Street. The poor excuse for reform only reinforces that point. In the case of Obama, we expected so much more after hearing about "change" every day. If anything, it looks as though there's a terrible fear of change. Here's the start of the Obama economic team and it only gets worse. Read on...

That was the day the jubilant Obama campaign announced its transition team. Though many of the names were familiar — former Bill Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, long-time Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett — the list was most notable for who was not on it, especially on the economic side. Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist who had served as one of Obama's chief advisers during the campaign, didn't make the cut. Neither did Karen Kornbluh, who had served as Obama's policy director and was instrumental in crafting the Democratic Party's platform. Both had emphasized populist themes during the campaign: Kornbluh was known for pushing Democrats to focus on the plight of the poor and middle class, while Goolsbee was an aggressive critic of Wall Street, declaring that AIG executives should receive "a Nobel Prize — for evil."

But come November 5th, both were banished from Obama's inner circle — and replaced with a group of Wall Street bankers. Leading the search for the president's new economic team was his close friend and Harvard Law classmate Michael Froman, a high-ranking executive at Citigroup. During the campaign, Froman had emerged as one of Obama's biggest fundraisers, bundling $200,000 in contributions and introducing the candidate to a host of heavy hitters — chief among them his mentor Bob Rubin, the former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs who served as Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton. Froman had served as chief of staff to Rubin at Treasury, and had followed his boss when Rubin left the Clinton administration to serve as a senior counselor to Citigroup (a massive new financial conglomerate created by deregulatory moves pushed through by Rubin himself).

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