Do you know what’s worse than a LEVEL FOUR flu pandemic freakout? A LEVEL FIVE flu pandemic freakout — it is like four, but plus another, to equal five. Things can only get one more number worse than what will soon be announced, the Level 5 — and that, as you probably already suspect, is a Level SIX (6) pandemic freakout. Stocks ended sharply higher. [EuroNews]

So what’s been going on with our greatest Vice President, Richard “Dick” Cheney, since we last spoke? Nothing much, just some new revelations about Cheney bein’ Cheney, hatin’ on the environment and such. In this latest news cycle, we have the tale of that time Cheney’s office once edited out six pages of the CDC director’s testimony to Congress regarding this: “CDC considers climate change a serious public health concern.” Silly egotistical CDC director. She’s obviously one of those people who gets pissed when her editors shake things up a bit — cutting commas, switching grafs, deleting major theses about climate change killing everyone, correcting split infinitives even if they do “sound” better. Any editor has dealt with these twits. We sympathize, Dick. [Washington Post]

* CDC screwed up; that guy didn’t really have super drug-resistant tuberculosis. [Reason]

Hey everybody, the Plague has begun! There’s even a guy locked up in the CDC’s “respiratory isolation” cell in Atlanta. Oh, and he probably infected two planeloads of passengers flying back and forth to Europe, plus whoever else he came across between Paris and Prague, and then Montreal and New York. Dude’s got “a rare and exceptionally dangerous form of tuberculosis.” MORE »

First it attacked John Edwards’ virtual computer-world campaign headquarters, and now the Feces-Spewing Obscenity has sickened 150 people at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the official name for the monster is “Norovirus.” MORE »

Today in public masturbation by sometime government employees news: MORE »