• Bank of America lost $1 billion—and your Wonkette editor’s debit card!!—in the third quarter. [New York Times]
• Do not read this, keep thy heart pure: Boy in the Balloon? Likely a publicity stunt. [New York Times]
• A weak dollar is good news for things that are made here and exported elsewhere. This is an important news article from a city’s major newspaper. [Los Angeles Times]
• The FDA would prefer that everyone not buy the powerful Swine Flu Antidote on the Internet for all the regular reasons buying drugs on the Internet, without telling your doctor, might be unwise. [CNN]
• A 6.1 magnitude earthquake hit Jakarta this morning and you know quite frankly everyone there is a bit sick of the earthquakes at this point. [CNN]
• UN Human Rights Council endorsed a report in which both Hamas and Israel were accused of war crimes in Gaza. [Guardian]

Congressmen Keith Ellison and Brian Baird have returned from their little excursion to the Middle East and will talk about What They’ve Learned in a panel discussion, “Thinking Through a U.S. Strategy Toward Gaza,” at 12:45PM on Thursday, March 5, at the New America Foundation. MORE »

• Mexican urban legend Alberto Gonzales is unable to find a job and is comically blaming the recession for this. After Barack Obama redistributes the world’s wealth to atheist hobos, a dog is expected to have eaten Gonzales’ new job. [TPMMuckraker]
• Howard Dean is doing that thing again, on the Internet, in which he gets all the “young people” to make blood pledges to keep creating Facebook groups until he is friend-requested as President of Hospitals. [Ben Smith]
• The evils of Bernie Madoff went unchecked for so long because of linguistically confused SEC-on-SEC fighting. One SECer used the following collection of similes, metaphors and analogies to “paint a picture” of said fighting: “The SEC roars like a mouse and bites like a flea,” “the relationship between the SEC’s Boston and New York offices is about as warm and cordial as the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry” and the ominously alogical “You need old foxes to come in and police the hen houses.” [Top of the Ticket]
• Sarah Palin has big plans to hunt romantic comedy lead Ashley Judd with guns from a helicopter. [CNN Political Ticker]
• Joe the Plumber has returned from journalist sleepover camp in Gaza! (Ahhh 8 weeks went by so fast you guys!) He will now work as an adviser to the GOP, a job for which it is required that other (non-children) humans go along with the conceit that Joe, the fake non-owner of a non-small plumbing business, has actual, insightful advice about a given topic. [Crooks and Liars]

Ha ha, the entire journalism/media/publishing industry is collapsing, there are no jobs, more and more of America’s best writers and reporters are permanently unemployed, and there’s not any reason for this typhoon of fiery “creative destruction” to roll back, ever, meaning it’s really just “destruction,” since the American economy does not “create” so much as it does “restructure, hide, and disguise short-term corporate debt.” Where were we going with this again? Oh yeah, Joe the Plumber got a reporter job with Pajamas Media to go cover Israel and the Muslims’ war on a small, shitty landstrip thousands of miles away. Suck on that, you mid-major American newspapers that’ve been forced to shut down your foreign bureaus! MORE »

UMM isn’t Bill Kristol’s mockery of a one-year contract with the liberal New York Times over by now, after one year, and he should not be writing anymore? Wait, what? “Stay the course” you say? Well then that’s good by us. Let’s check out the latest prose poetry from America’s “lightning rod conservative” about… Israel and Hamas, in which he argues that nothing short of an Israeli “victory” (undefined, as per usual) will lead to American war with the Iranians. MORE »