• After being prodded by basically everyone on Earth, soon-to-be-former President of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai is ready to admit that he did not actually win the re-election. [New York Times]
• A new poll says that most people think the public option would be a good thing, actually. [Washington Post]
• Swine flu has spread to this one actual swine in Minnesota. It’s hard to feel bad given how appropriate this seems! [WSJ]
• A US scientist was arrested for trying to sell important secrets to someone he thought was an Israeli intelligence guy, but was actually just an American intelligence guy about to arrest him. [CNN]
• Iran is two seconds away from doing something it might possibly regret to Pakistan—possibly bombing it, or possibly explicitly threatening it with bombs. [AP]
• Apple, Inc. shares are the highest they’ve ever been. There are still no available Genius Bar appointments. [Reuters]

David Brooks allows a made-up reader to address him as “Mr. Kierkegaard” today in his column. Here is what “Existential in Exeter” asks Søren Kierkegaard, who is David Brooks, about Culture: “All my life I’ve been a successful pseudo-intellectual, sprinkling quotations from Kafka, Epictetus and Derrida into my conversations, impressing dates and making my friends feel mentally inferior. But over the last few years, it’s stopped working. People just look at me blankly. My artificially inflated self-esteem is on the wane. What happened?” David Brooks gets high and then answers — oh man, does he ANSWER — this question (which he actually wrote to himself after getting high, too). MORE »

The economy is crumbling and very soon we will all be dead. For example, Apple expects sales to grow by 29% in its second fiscal quarter, and Wall Street is calling this a “disappointment” (Mr. Wall Street, he said it himself). But White House demon ice queen Dana Perino tells us “the long-term fundamental health of our economy is very strong,” which should ease the fears of the growing mortgage-default hobo brigade. [AP/Yahoo]

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While we had to say good-bye to Tom Vilsack’s beloved totalitarian police-state campaign, this video reminds us that Hillary Clinton is a much better police-state totalitarian war monster than old Winnie the Pooh-head. MORE »