By Kerry TruemanMitt Romney was famously reluctant to participate in a YouTube-sponsored debate out of fear that he might get grilled on global warming by “Billiam the Snowman” , as the Democrats were”a prospect that Romney characterized as “undignified.” But Billiam didn’t make the cut, this time, and neither did climate change. In fact, if you were an alien”I mean the extra-terrestial kind”and you watched last night’s GOP debate, you would come away from it thinking that the single greatest threat facing our nation today is the influx of foreigners sneaking into our country to scrub our toilets and mow our lawns.Global warming, on the other hand, didn’t even register on the Republicans’ radar, as it clearly ranks well below such hot-button issues as illegal aliens, gays in the military, and gun control. Bill Maher summed it up nicely on Real Time a few weeks back:

As a species, we are failing at survival trick number one: prioritize the threats. Environmental catastrophe is going to visit all of us in the coming decades in one way or another, and when it does, I hope people like - oh, I don’t know, Lou Dobbs - says to himself, “Huh, maybe if I was going to spend my whole career obsessing about one issue, it should have been global warming. My skin just fell off my face, and it turns out that really wasn’t the fault of a Mexican.”