Bob Dylan will have to write his next album about the terrible mice plague sweeping the nation of Australia, and by “the nation” we of course refer to “a single nursing home in Queensland.” Still, we must ask the important question: if the pig AIDS doesn’t kill us, will the mouse plague do it instead? MORE »

Several months ago Rahm Emanuel left his post in the House of Representatives and temporarily abandoned his ambitions to become the first nine-and-a-half-fingered Speaker of the House in order to crack skulls for Barack Obama. Today, the specialest of all special elections determines who will “fill his seat.” MORE »

Hey, this is nifty! If you see a 20- to 30-foot fireball on the Potomac, fear not, it is just some special effects crew working on a teevee show about our exciting FBI. Filming is set for 9:30 AM till noon on Wednesday near the Key Bridge. MORE »

Your friendly neighborhood Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation — the nice people who insure consumers’ bank deposits — has been having a sort of a rough time lately, what with all the banks constantly going broke. The insurance fund was pretty heavily depleted over the past year, thanks to horrific failures like IndyMac which cost the FDIC more than $10 billion. And it’s not like we have seen the end of bank failures, nosir! MORE »

Did you hear about the stock market? It’s now at a 10-year low, again, hooray! And the news just keeps getting worse, every fucking day. And maybe it just continues to get worse, every fucking day, until … who knows, 2015? And then another terrible recession-within-the-depression recession in, say, 2017? And then we are finally pulled out by the war against the Space Monsters, which kills off most of Earth’s population but does, at least, revive manufacturing. (Which is done by robots.) MORE »

The way this Barack Obama character is always on the teevee, you’d think we live in a country of sadsack losers who plop down in front of the teevee the moment they get home from the unemployment office. And you would be right! So, fancy Internet and Facebook and whatever to get the money, from the elites, and then prime-time propaganda to win over the other 270 million Americans. Let’s do pre-game coverage, now! MORE »

MURDER & DEATH: “In 2008, this undercurrent of dread is more powerful than ever … and not only because of persistent fears that Barack Obama, potentially the first African American president, might be assassinated. National polls have consistently shown that large numbers of voters are concerned about the health of Obama’s opponent, John McCain, a four-time cancer survivor who at 72 would be the oldest president on Inauguration Day.” [Obit Magazine]

Oh hey Hank Paulson is talking to some lawmaker types, and a reader wrote in and was like, “Could you liveblog this?” and we thought, aw hell, we have already ripped all the hairs out of our ears and marinated in salt this morning, so why not engage in the last unpleasant activity available to us. How many drawers are being soiled in the Senate Banking Committee right now? Let’s check it out! MORE »

ELECTION DAY OF THE APOCALYPSE: “What hellish skeleton of the American Dream will remain when we finally drag ourselves to the polling place on November 4?” [Political Machine]

Are you reading this at work? Lucky you! The national unemployment rate saw its biggest month-to-month jump in 22 years, and is now at 5.5%. Department of Labor numbers show 49,000 fewer jobs in May, due to General Economic Horror and the Growing Panic. When you’re done screwing around with the political news, here’s a fun article about how to survive unemployment. [Wall Street Journal]

From the New York Times to the, uh, New York Sun, newspapers are reporting the hot new American trend: survivalism. The NYT was first to note the fad earlier this month in its Fashion & Style section, but the Sun has the news angle. Want to stock up on sacks of rice and cooking oil and flour and other such staples to survive the Coming Shitstorm? Too late! CostCo is limiting how many sacks of rice you can buy! MORE »