Yer agin us. Not a healthy place to be.

Today GOP stands for Grandstand, Oppose and Prevent.

A startling announcement.

Westboro Baptist Church Organizes Homophobic Anti-Obama Protest Outside Sasha And Malia’s School I wish the rapture would hurry, rid us these animals.

Cookie Jill rounds up this week’s environmental news otherwise unseen:

polluters’ fear tactics on climate.- big polluting companies around the world, employing thousands of lobbyists, are exerting heavy pressure on governments to weaken climate change laws and slow progress on an international climate agreement in copenhagen, a global investigation reveals. – sydney morning herald

texaco still cleaning up old fillmore refinery site. – more than 50 years after a fillmore oil refinery was closed, texaco is still working to clean the soil and groundwater of benzene and other contaminants at the Superfund site. – ventura county star

the trail of dioxin and dow. – if you learned your town was polluted with toxic waste, you’d just want to get it cleaned up. dioxin’s been a problem for at least 30 years in central michigan, but dow, the federal government, and the state are just now hashing out final cleanup plans. – environmental record

For the conspiracy crowd:

jets’ trails suggest role in global warming. – planes already are blamed for 13 percent of the transportation sector’s human-generated greenhouse gas emissions, which act as insulation, holding warmth around the planet, according to a report this summer from the general accountability office. – nashville tennessean

can we manipulate the weather? – by the end of last month, farmland in the already dry north of china was suffering badly due to drought. so on saturday night china’s meteorologists fired 186 explosive rockets loaded with chemicals to “seed” clouds and encourage snow to fall. – london guardian

And, for a bonus, Cascadia sets the example:

could portland’s style of urban agriculture be the model that saves detroit? – historian and writer mark dowie says the nation’s most depressed metropolitan area, detroit, could be transformed by turning its burned-out blocks and abandoned factory sites into farms. – portland oregonian

Go. Read it all…

aimai aptly labels House Representatives “Squeakers“. I like it. It could take off, like “tweaker” for meth-heads. Or Boris the Banker, Ivan the Insurer.

House passes health care reform bill 200 – 215. It sucks. 39 Democrats voted “no”, 1 Republican voted “yes”. That makes it bipartisan, right?

If health care reform is to ride on the back of denying women access to critical health care, then I don’t want it. Fuck you christian daughter-fucking whores.

The economy lost 190,000 jobs in October, unemployment at 10.2%. The U6, the broadest measure of unemployment, hits 17.5%. Local numbers, as if I give a rat’s ass, are as yet unavailable, but throughout this “downturn” local unemployment has matched the national U6, leaving the local U6 somewhere around 24%.

Having joined, both Dawn and I, the couple of hundred thousand who lost their unemployment benefits last month we are solidly within the U6 measure and looking around the town I’ve spent five and a half decades in, been through four booms and five busts in, I am not at all uncomfortable with calling it one in three people in Bend is out of work.

We gladly feast on those who would subdue us.