There’s a farm outside of Stockholm, Wisconsin — a jewel of a Mississippi River town just an hour or so from the Twin Cities — that does something I don’t think any other farm in America does.

Every Tuesday evening from March to around Thanksgiving, from 4:30 to 8:00, they turn their farm into a pizzeria, complete with brick oven.

An “Original Firebagger” t-shirt is pretty cool, but supporting independent media is even cooler.

Yes, it’s the end of an era. Pam’s House Blend has learned, from a trusted source in a position to know the details, that Joe Solmonese, President of the Human Rights Campaign, the largest national lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender civil rights organization in the country, will announce his departure next Tuesday. Solmonese will reportedly step down from the organization in December of this year.

The batch of US State Embassy cables recently published by the media organization WikiLeaks contain a few assessments of how other countries’ governments manage their terrorism watch lists. The assessments reveal much about how countries have tried to implement security regimes for travel in the aftermath of 9/11. And, each assessment is in the form of questionnaire.

There’s also reason to suspect that the anti-regulatory environment Republicans seek has nothing to do with job creation or allowing business investment to take off, and everything to do with allowing corporations to run away with profits that they’ll pocket from being allowed to act with no controls on its behavior.

As expected, the State Department essentially gave its environmental blessing to the Keystone XL pipeline today, which would stretch nearly 1,700 miles from Alberta, Canada to Texas, and which would deliver as much as 700,000 barrels of noxious tar sands oil every day. This is not a final approval on the project, but getting a favorable environmental impact study (EIS) is a necessary hurdle before final approval.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has ordered the city’s first hurricane evacuations in history in advance of Hurricane Irene, expected to hit the area over the weekend.

CREDO has become the first national progressive group, to my knowledge, to back New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman as he attempts to hold a full investigation into fraud in the securitization processes by the mortgage industry.

As one of the oldest-timers around these parts, though, here’s my answer: the most exciting thing in the Firedoglake community is the very next thing. Now that we have a real membership infrastructure in place, t-shirts and stickers and webinars and meetups, we never know what the next exciting thing is. Because it’s right around the corner.

And you, as a Firedoglake Member, get to help FDL decide what that will be.

I’m a bit stunned by Ben Bernanke’s morning in America speech, so let me try to recover by looking at Wisconsin. Yesterday was the first day that elevated contributions to pensions and health care came out of the paychecks of public employees, as part of the anti-union bill. So protesters returned to the Capitol in Madison by the hundreds, chanting and demonstrating against the policy. After closing time, the Capitol Police struck back.