That’s a quote from a Wasilla city council member 

Wasilla City Council member Dianne Woodruff hears the same lament about her town all the time. “Everywhere in Alaska, you hear people say, ‘We don’t want to be another Wasilla.’ We’re not just the state’s meth capital, we’re the ugly box-store capital.

I bet Wasilla looks just like my hometown.  

Energy Department spokeswoman Angela Hill said the department will review Warner’s letter but added, “If Congress is serious about addressing gasoline prices, they must take action on expanding domestic oil and natural gas production.”

Ever notice how every time gas prices comes out of the mouth of one of this administration’s puppets they always manage to link any situation to expanding domestic oil and natural gas production, “if we’re serious.” Even though most reputable sources say that domestic production increases will likely mean about 3 cents difference at the pumps a few years down the road, if we’re lucky. The Saudis bumping up their output isn’t even expected to have much of an impact on the price of oil. What we need is a transition from an oil-centric situation to a locally-sourced energy. You know, it’s like, it’s always cheaper to grow your own vegetables than to buy from the store. 1 tomato plant costs about 5 bucks. 4 ‘good’ tomatoes cost about 5 bucks. Do the math. Tomatoes are so easy a 20$ water timer will get you literally more tomatoes than you can eat in a year from one plant. Solar power is easy. It’s so easy, it only requires labor once every 30 years, and hosing down once a year or so.

Now, imagine a grid where the grid is the power source. Everyone could hook up with their neighbors, share power when they needed it - need to run the hairdryer for 5 minutes but it’s a cloudy day? Done. (Yes, I know solar charges batteries, yes, I know it works on cloudy days because clouds don’t stop UV, the major source of solar kilowatts, I’m oversimplifying.) Now - imagine solar on the top of all businesses. I’ll go you one better - imagine solar-roofed parking lots, finally we’ll ALWAYS be able to park in the shade, and then you can just plug in your electric car while you shop - every store will be a refueling station, and can make extra money that way. Go one step further, solarize our transportation grid with visible-light transparent solar films, we should be able to acheive that. If we pushed hard enough, we could acheive energy independence and then some.

Think about it. The current most prolific form of life on the surface of this earth is plants - they cover pretty much every square inch they possibly can. They are also the most efficient form of solar collection we currently know. A few pounds of plant matter will power a human for an entire day, which takes about 2000 calories - nutritional calories are actually kilocalories, so that’s 2,000,000 calories, now at 4.184 Joules per Calorie this give us 8300000 Joules per day - to get Watts per day we’ll have to devide the Joules by the time in seconds, 3600 to be precise, and we get 2.3 kilowatts per day. And that’s not even using all of it - you poop something out, right? If we cover the world in solar, not only will we be drowning in kilowatts, the ground will be a more pleasant, weather-protected experience, and stink less with no polluting vehicles.

I’ve heard bitchings lately from DemNow! and various random bloggers that mainstream media outlets don’t ever relate current weather phenomena to global warming - well, the iceberg has crested, my friends, witness:

Midwest floods show signs of global warming

Pretty lukewarm - just talks about how the Army corps of engineers doesn’t take any sort of planetary climate change effects into account for how the flood patterns may change over the years - yeah, of course they’re gonna change, I mean, all the continents used to be part of the same landmass, so yeah, things change.

Faced with a surge in the number of proposed solar power plants, the federal government has placed a moratorium on new solar projects on public land until it studies their environmental impact, which is expected to take about two years.

Absolutely astonishing.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” said Holly Gordon, vice president for legislative and regulatory affairs for Ausra, a solar thermal energy company in Palo Alto, Calif. “The Bureau of Land Management land has some of the best solar resources in the world. This could completely stunt the growth of the industry.”

It makes perfect sense in a dirty-fuel fueled economy whose dirty money has bought dirty politicians.

The Bush administration is likely to move its research on one of the most contagious animal diseases from an isolated island laboratory to the U.S. mainland near herds of livestock, raising concerns about a catastrophic outbreak.

Skeptical Democrats in Congress are demanding to see internal documents they believe highlight the risks and consequences of the decision. An epidemic of the disease, foot and mouth, which only affects animals, could devastate the livestock industry.

Because the UK totally didn’t have just this very same thing happen, a leak of hoof and mouth disease from a lab that triggered an outbreak. Oh well, the Democrats oppose it, but they’ll roll over for Bush again. Why not. I mean, if he can’t force them to he’ll get his way through reverse psychology no doubt.

Had that been the rule in place last month, consumers would not have been told if their supermarkets sold meat from a Southern California slaughterhouse that triggered the biggest beef recall in U.S. history.

This meat is dangerous - so dangerous we have to not sell it anymore - but if you already bought it, that’s cool. At least, that’s what the food industry wants the government to tell you. I’m sick of people being able to buy their way out of not living up to their mistakes.

“This is an untenable position that runs counter to the party’s intent in establishing superdelegates in 1984,” the letter from the wealthy Clinton backers said.

“Superdelegates, like all delegates, have an obligation to make an informed, individual decision about whom to support and who would be the party’s strongest nominee,” said the letter signed by some of Clinton’s biggest fund raisers.

Actually, I do believe the regular delegates are supposed to vote the way the popular vote was split in their state, hence the ‘pledged delegates’ count we’re keeping. Superdelegates, however, were created for just this instance - where a popular candidate was desired by the people but not the power elite. They were created in response to McGovern and Carter, to keep a populist from being nominated for the Democratic ticket again, and instead keep the candidate that the money and power brokers of the ‘Democratic’ party in the running.

Some Democrats they’re turning out to be.  I’m still writing in Al Gore for President this November.

The problem is the layers of abstraction and obfuscation and secrecy between our government ‘of the people’ and the actual people.

Poor people in Florida, one of the states hit hardest by this economic disaster perpetuated upon the poor by those with money to burn, were turned away from Section 8 housing voucher applications by police in riot gear and SWAT officers. Some people had been in line since the night before, conditions are so bad there.

Hundreds of people, mostly mothers who had spent more than eight hours in line, were forced to leave the property at 2333 W. Glades Road by 30 Boca Raton officers, including SWAT team members, who held up shields as they advanced toward the crowd.

Angelica Rivera, 28, a mother of five who had pleaded with officers to let her drop off her voucher application, refused their orders to leave the property. She was handcuffed and dragged off to a police van, charged with disorderly conduct, disobeying a lawful order and resisting without violence. A second person was booked on similar charges.

Meanwhile, those blinded by their own sense of we’re fucking number one continue to spew lies to keep us in line.

“We’ve taken quite a clear position on this in saying that a strong dollar is in our nation’s interest and then recognizing that our economy like any other is going to have its ups and downs,” he [U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson] said.

The dollar hit fresh lows against the euro on Thursday in a continuing slide that has set European policy-makers nerves on edge as the euro strengthened against the dollar to $1.5644, posing a threat to the region’s ability to sell its goods competitively in America.

They’re worried about their ability to sell their crappy crap here at a premium because once it’s gone on a 5 thousand mile or so journey it’s an ‘import’ and suddenly way cooler than whatever exact same crap we grew in our own backyard. Yes, those fancy Europeans can be hypocrites too, read on:

The European Union sees itself as a world leader in the fight against global warming after EU countries agreed last year to cut emissions by 2020 and increase the share of wind, solar, hydro and wave power in electricity output by the same date.

Shipping shit thousands of miles to make a few extra bux well help fight global warming how, exactly? Personally, I think global warming is going to have a terrible impact on my life, not least of all because I have terribly dry skin that an endless summer is going to make into a nightmare for me. With the dollar in the toilet and all my tax money paying for shooting the asses off of non-threats in Iraq, how will I be able to afford fancy lotions that rely on crops no one in America can afford to grow anymore because my tax money only pays for useless crap to be grown? (And sometimes it pays for crops to not be grown.)

Instead of paying for farmers to grow, or not grow, certain crops, why don’t we pay farmers to put up greenhouses and hydroponic system to conserve water, increase output, and extend the growing season? Seems a logical idea for - oh, wait,

Also sad is that [crappy bottom of the barrel] goods from Europe that are sold here as extra fancy imports are usually cheaper than what was produced locally. Why is olive oil that had to be shipped over 5000 miles to get to my local grocery is half the price of olive oil made a few miles away? If something that had half it’s price taken up by the cost of shipping halfway around the world is only half the price of something produced nearby, that definitely must be a sign it’s top notch.

Well, at least I have a house, a computer, and an internet to do my bitching on. I guess it could be worse.

Amanda Palmer, 23, waited in line for hours with her 3-month-old daughter. Palmer is staying in a maternity home, from which she must move out by June.

“In my judgment, the impacts of global climate change in California, compared to the rest of the nation as a whole, are not sufficiently different to be considered ‘compelling and extraordinary conditions’ that merit separate state GHG (greenhouse gas) standards for new motor vehicles,” says the document signed by EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson.

Via Wiki: California ranks among the ten largest economies in the world, and were it a separate country, it would be 34^th amongst the most populous countries, just behind Poland, as well as the world’s sixth-largest economy.

Then I guess European nations are too small to be making their own decisions about global warming, huh?  I’m sick of this sold country.

Farming and human populations are causing male fish to grow eggs in their testes.

You don’t sit around arguing about who set the fire if you haven’t put the fire out yet.