• Today Iran began enriching its uranium for what are definitely nuclear-type purposes. [New York Times]
• Joe Jackson, the alive father of the dead pop star Michael Jackson, believes his son was killed in a conspiracy, which is a thing that commonly happens. [CNN]
• Childhood obesity is Michelle Obama’s new thing, as obese children are the #1 cause of obese adults. [WSJ]
• It’s going to snow again in D.C. Budget your weather puns accordingly. [Washington Post]
• Toyota has recalled half a million more Priuses, which means we are that much closer to a consensus on the Latin accusative plural of “Prius.” [AP]
• Oh thank heavens: the arbitrarily obstinate Richard Shelby has lifted his holds on Obama’s 70 nominees. [The Hill]

• Nobody’s entirely sure how many, if any, workers are still unaccounted for in the wake of a power plant explosion in Connecticut on Sunday. [Hartford Courant]
• The New Orleans Saints won the Super Bowl, proving that Barbara Bush was exactly right when she said that the city’s residents would benefit from Hurricane Katrina. [ESPN]
• Many Gazan civil servants have not been paid for their work in January, which makes some of them wonder about the solvency of their employer, Hamas. [Haaretz]
• Yulia Tymoshenko, the only world leader to be featured in a vaguely flattering light in Wonkette’s annual War On Xmas Gift Guide, has refused to admit defeat in the Ukraine’s recent election. [Times Online]
• Iran needs enriched uranium to help cancer victims. (?) [Los Angeles Times]
• The President has decided that the best way to deal with Republicans is to meet with them daily on teevee for hours at a time, in order to drain them of their precious bodily fluids. [Washington Post]

• The president of Toyota — a tiny but prosperous island nation in Southeast Asia — apologized for selling people murderous demon-cars, but nobody will be satisfied until actual heads roll. [New York Times]
• Another day of Shia religious festivals, another day of bombings. [BBC News]
• Here is some tasty fresh two-day-old news! Jon Stewart went on Bill O’Reilly’s show and it was … exciting? We will probably post a Phun Phriday Video Clip of this exchange as a service to you, the Public. [Los Angeles Times]
• The global stock markets are underwhelmed with the progress of economic recovery. [Washington Post]
• Turns out you cannot just leave Haiti with a literal busload of children and hope nobody will notice. [Washington Post]
• The menu at the NBC cafeteria for Black History Month had a discernible Negro dialect, which offended the drummer from The Roots, but not the black chef who created the menu. [New York Post]

• Let’s all play this game in which we try to guess Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s bonus. Won’t be depressing at all. [New York Times]
• Toyota recalled many Priuses (Prii?) because of brake problems. Although, if a car crashes and ceases to exist, can you even imagine how that will like erase its carbon footprint? [Washington Post]
• Scott Brown’s election will be certified today, which means he’ll be all set to swear-in. Ted Kennedy’s ghost is running out of time!! [CNN]
• Today the House will vote on whether it’s cool or not if America sinks deeper into debt. [AP]
• John McCain is pretending to be more conservative than he actually is in order to win his Senate race, which he could lose. What he needs is sassy, fresh-faced Vice Senator at his side, a real Phoenix outsider. [The Hill]
• January retail sales were better than expected. In other words, Americans gave some truly horrific and tasteless holiday gifts that needed exchanging immediately. [Reuters]

• Iran shot a rat, two turtles, and a worm into space. (This is what happens when Obama cuts the NASA budget.) [Los Angeles Times]
• Having fixed the economy and America’s health care problems, President Obama now turns his attention to energy policy. [AP]
• Admiral Mike Mullen thinks gays should be allowed to serve in the military. Is he aware that there’s a war on? [Wall Street Journal]
• The president has embarked on a campaign to make Republicans look as dickish as possible for not working with him. [New York Times]
• Illinois held a primary to determine who shall eventually replace the irreplaceable Senator Roland Burris. [Washington Post]
• A new study shows an increasing number of consumers placing a higher priority on credit card payments than on their mortgage because, as one of the authors of the study puts it, “You cannot buy groceries with your house.” [Reuters]

}

• The Tea Party Convention thing in Nashville will be broadcast on teevee, for a reason that apparently exists. [New York Times]
• Abstinence-only education works after all, which means the government will probably deploy a slightly re-worked “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (Anything)” policy in our nation’s middle schools. [Washington Post]
• Obama’s asked for $230 million in order to ship the Gitmo detainees to New Gitmo, in New Gitmo, Illinois. [CNN]
• Haitian orphans that had been adopted pre-earthquake are now being sent to their new foreign adoptive parents. [WSJ]
• Noted celebrity Anne Hathaway woke up so early today to read a list of every movie that came out this year just to prove she could. [Los Angeles Times]
• China will hate Obama so much if he hangs out with the Dalai Lama. This is true of anyone hanging out with the Dalai Lama. [Times Online]

• President Obama has a tasty new budget cooked up for us and it is full of deficits, even though President Bush handed him a booming economy with a $200 billion surplus just one year ago. [AP]
• A popular Shiite holiday featuring a pilgrimage to Karbala proved irresistible for a suicide bomber, who killed herself and at least 41 people in northeast Baghdad. [BBC News]
• Capricious Barack Obama exacted revenge on George W. Bush’s native nation of Texas by punishing its energy producers with reduced tax incentives. Then he pooped all over NASA, too! [Houston Chronicle]
• Oh ho ho ho, two whole Israeli soldiers have been “disciplined” for firing on the UN compound in Gaza last year! Verily, this is a victory for international peace and justice. [Guardian]
• The recession really has caused some cutbacks. Last year, a pilot hero landed a motherfucking passenger jet on the motherfucking Hudson. This year, a pilot hero landed a single-engine Cessna on the New Jersey turnpike. [NorthJersey]
• Toyota will start fixing its Sticking Accelerator Pedals of Doom this week, with apologies. [New York Times]

• Quelle surprise, Ben Nelson and other senatorial douchebags are holding up the bill that would encourage direct lending to college students instead of shoveling money into private banks. [Washington Post]
• The Haitian situation is no longer in its “urgent” phase, so George Clooney will just have to find some other nation to save. [Bloomberg]
• President Obama is crashing the Republicans’ secksy retreat in Baltimore today, and they are going to give him an EARFUL. [ABC News]
• Amazon is the last company in America to still be earning a profit. [ABC News]
• Tony Blair insisted in front of an Official Panel that he was not George W. Bush’s lapdog or poodle or whatever, despite all evidence to the contrary. [New York Times]
• Bill Gates plans to save the lives of eight million children in the next decade. YOUR MOVE, STEVE JOBS. [New York Times]

• For the record, Obama is totally into jobs now, not health care. [New York Times]
• Obama also called for a repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which means all those Facebook petitions worked!! [Los Angeles Times]
• Meet this latest thing you will own! It is called the iPad, and has literally no function other than making iPod Shuffles look useful by contrast. It would be awesome if it came in white, though! [Washington Post]
• The iPad is also very misogynist for reminding everyone on Twitter that women get their periods. [CNN]
• Hey hey: Ford announced its first profitable quarter since 2005. This is George W. Bush’s adult-onset economic boom! [Wall Street Journal]
• Good news, from Haiti of all places! This teenage girl who was trapped and missing for 15 days is trapped and missing no longer! [Times Online]

• President Obama will fix the crushing economic woes facing America’s middle class with TAXCUTSTAXCUTSTAXCUTS. He will announce this in his first State of the Union address. [ABC News]
• Toyota has stopped production and sales on its eight most popular models, due to the “sticking gas-pedals of death” problem. [Washington Post]
• Everyone in Haiti is screwed, but children get an extra dose of Sad. [New York Times]
• CNN Poll Shocker: Survey finds that writing billions of dollars directly to the financial sector, which magically turned into bonuses for wealthy bankes, did not help the middle class, in the middle class’s opinion. [CNN]
• Happier news from Haiti: A man was stuck under a collapsed building for TWO WEEKS and was finally pulled from the rubble, dehydrated but alive. [Fox News]
• Quirky indie carmaker Saab has found lasting love with a wealthy Dutchman. [BusinessWeek]

• In his State of the Union Wednesday, Obama will announce a spending freeze for many of America’s domestic programs. As these programs do not include Lost, no one will care. [New York Times]
• The US is holding a conference at the UN in March in which ten countries will try to figure out how to use money to fix Haiti’s crippling lack-of-money problem. [Wall Street Journal]
• Death: Charles McC. Mathias, Jr., a 60s-era three-term Senator from Maryland, has died from Parkinson’s disease. [Washington Post]
• More death: A suicide bomber killed 18 people at the Iraqi Interior Ministry yesterday. [Los Angeles Times]
• No more death after today: Drivers of commercial trucks and buses are no longer allowed to text behind the wheel, which means that drivers of commercial trucks and buses were, up until today, allowed to text while driving. [CNN]
• Lady Muslims will no longer be allowed to wear their veils in France on state-owned property. The idea is that Nicolas Sarkozy respects women so much that he will just decide what they will wear. [Times Online]

• People got all mad at President Obama waiting three days to make a statement about the Underpants Bomber, so they will no doubt be infuriated that it took Osama bin Laden a whole month. [New York Times]
• In other Al Qaeda news, militants belonging to this organization bombed a checkpoint in Yemen. [Reuters]
• Thank Sweet Suffering Christ on a Popsickle Stick that some senators bravely came out over the weekend and said they’d support a second term for Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, because otherwise the stock market might have continued to decline slightly, which would have been DISASTER. [FOXBusiness]
• Q. Why is it so difficult to pass a healthcare bill even though both the Senate and House have already approved similar versions of the thing? A. Good question! [Los Angeles Times]
• This article on the salami recall has an extremely helpful diagram showing where diarrhea goes. [dBTechno]
• The government is about to end several key programs propping up the mortgage markets, which means WHEEEE another wave of foreclosures and bankruptcies and DOOM. [Washington Post]

• Kindly ancient giant Paul Volcker, a nearly invisible member of the Obama administration for its first year, may be gaining in prominence as the pinstriped weasel Tim Geithner fades. [The Big Money]
• U.S. stocks had a hissy fit over President Obama telling the banks they could not do whatever they want forever. [Washington Post]
• Say goodbye to any Democratic majority anywhere ever again, now that the Supreme Court has allowed the evil Corporates to spend bazillions of dollars on political ads. [New York Times]
• A wee problem with sticking accelerator pedals has caused Toyota to recall 2.3 MILLION of its potentially murderous vehicles. [MSNBC]
• Scott Brown said that Ted Kennedy’s shoes were “very, very big,” and we all know what that means. [Wall Street Journal]
• This might be the year that inflation finally comes to bite the enormous Chinese economy in its enormous, inflated ass. [Los Angeles Times]

• Everyone’s threatening Facebook statuses worked!! NBC will pay Conan O’Brien $33 million dollars, and he can go back home to the television in eight months. [Los Angeles Times]
• Obama has decided that our country’s commercial banks can’t be as big as they want or trade for their own accounts, which is a thing that’s problematic, because of economics. [New York Times]
• The new post-Scott Brown health care bill will have to take Scott Brown’s existence into account. Sad. [AP]
• The Prince of Dubai restructured his country’s government. It will be organized vertically, and will now be the world’s tallest legislative body. [Wall Street Journal]
• Obama’s first-round draft pick for Transportation Security Administration leadership has withdrawn his name from consideration. He used a federal database to stalk his wife’s boyfriend, is the thing with him. [Washington Post]
• 23 Mexican prisoners died at a riot in a Mexican prison. [CNN]