Morning Maddow: Gay Oregon Bears Will Use Jeb Bush To Fight For Equality

Thursday's Rachel Maddow Show kicked off with a salute to Oregon, whose politics are strange and whose wildlife is uppity. There's the seemingly never-ending parade of weird in the state's minority Republican Party:  The party chair asked people to send him pee samples, and their 2014 Senate candidate, who ran her entire campaign against Obamacare, applied for a job running the state's Obamacare program after she lost the election.

And then there's Gov. John Kitzhaber, a Democrat who was just re-elected but who the state's top newspaper is calling on to resign, because of some seriously murky ethics in business deals involving Kitzhaber's fiancée, Cylvia Hayes.

Oh, yes. There's also the owl that's terrorizing people in a park in the state capital, Salem. The show's graphics team thought the city could use a more visually arresting warning sign, so they made one:

They also decided to do a design-your-own contest ! Send your submissions to Maddow, not Wonkette.

Finally, there are the high-tech bears, two loveable hairy gay men who have owned the web domain JebBushforpresident.com since 2008 and have decided that rather than sell it to a prospective Jeb Bush campaign, they'll keep it and use it to advocate for equality.

Thank you, Oregon.