• Yesterday happened! Recall its winners: Bloomberg, Owens, Christie, various Others. [New York Times]
• It was also yesterday in Virgina too, where Bob McDonnell defeated Creigh Deeds and is therefore the state’s new governor. [Washington Post]
• The state of Maine poured rock salt on gay marriage and voted to up the medical marijuana usage. [WSJ]
• Today is the 30th anniversary of the US Embassy takeover/hostage thing in Tehran, but if today’s mass demonstrations showed anything, it’s that people don’t even need any hostages to yell about hating America. [CNN]
• Bernanke and Friends are likely to decline raising the interest rate. [AP]
• An Afghan soldier literally went rogue and just cold killed five British soldiers with a machine gun inside a police checkpoint. No cheeky Nation polemic is expected to follow. [Times Online]

It took us so long to check it out, but we finally did, and guess what? Mitt Romney’s “Free and Strong America PAC” website has any number of funnies! There are all these videos of him yelling at Obama for doing things that Mitt Romney did like 20 times when he was governor of Massachusetts. And then he always asks for money to support whatever he needs money for. (The best is probably the one where he goes nuts about cap-and-trade supposedly costing every person $1,700 dollars, after which he requests $5,000 donations.) But let’s check out this dongle he links to at Human Events, an op-ed by Mittens himself: “Iran: Biggest Threat Since Soviets.” MORE »

• Hamid Karzai’s brother, a prominent opium dealer (!), has been receiving CIA paychecks for eight years. He will now be fired and replaced by a teenager and an iPhone app. Recession!  [New York Times]
• A car bomb killed 86 people in Peshawar a couple hours after Hillary Clinton left Peshawar. [AP]
• At least six UN-related people died in a bombing in Kabul. Predictably, the Taliban has claimed responsibility, for such is their schtick. [Washington Post]
• Those pilots who appeared to have totally forgotten to land the plane for an entire hour after they were supposed to have done so have lost their licenses. [CNN]
• “Consumer confidence”—evidently an actual metric and not something people just say—is up for the first time since 2007. [Reuters]
• It’s looking like Iran might outsource its uranium enrichment needs, which is exactly what Obama wanted. [Reuters]

• 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]

• In March, Obama will be sending 13,000 more mostly non-combat troops—in addition to the original plan of 21,000 combat troops—to Afghanistan. This is the stuff of surges, people! [Washington Post]
• Big changes afoot at your local mall, as Disney will be looking to revamp its store there, I Thought That Closed. [New York Times]
• Russia admitted that while yes, diplomacy is important, not having sanctions with Iran is perhaps even more important, and therefore more diplomatic? In a way? Like dialectically maybe? [AP]
• Do not miss the crucial deadline of this Thursday if you have yet to tell the government about your illicit off-shore banking goings-on! [Los Angeles Times]
• Switzerland is rethinking its whole neutrality schtick. You see, being so relied on is so boring. [WSJ]

By the Comics Curmudgeon
Did you know that no object in the universe is entirely unique? It’s true! Many things, it turns out, look like other things. Sometimes things don’t look like other things, but they’re like other things, at their essence, in what we call a “metaphor.” Sometimes you see a thing and you think, “That thing can’t actually be what it looks like,” but have no idea what it actually is! And sometimes, very rarely, you find out that one of your neighbors is keeping the president’s corpse in his refrigerator. MORE »

• TREASONOUS ‘TALKING’ WITH IRAN CLEARLY FURTHERS CASE FOR BOMBING IRAN: “GENEVA — Iran and the big powers opposed to its nuclear program appeared to make progress Thursday in talks that included the highest-level direct discussions with the United States in many years, with both sides agreeing to hold further negotiations and the Iranians pledging to allow foreign inspectors into a newly disclosed uranium enrichment factory.” Upcoming Washington Post column: Should America Arm the Inspectors With Suitcase Nukes To Drop Discreetly Across The Country, Or Some Other Cool 24-ish Death Thing? [NYT]

TODAY’S OFFERING FROM… A CERTAIN “COHEN, RICHARD”: Celebrated Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wants Obama to GET REAL now. You’re President, for the love of fuck — bomb Iran already! etc. etc. And it really was just a matter of time before Richard Cohen used this line, wasn’t it: “These Persians lie like a rug.” Amazing. [Washington Post]

• The US and Friends disagree over how many nuclear warheads, rounded to the nearest jillion, Iran is building right now. Israel’s estimate is quite a bit higher than that of the US, which doesn’t think Iran could make a single warhead even if it wanted to, which it does. [New York Times]
• Plus, unless Iran says it’s cool with letting weapons inspectors come check out just how many weapons it’s incapable of making, the US will FORBID everyone on Earth—LOOKING AT YOU Hong Kong and Dubai—from donating to Iran’s nuclear wish-list. [Washington Post]
• Barack and Michelle Obama are very committed to playing with awesome lightsabers for as long as it takes until Chicago wins the 2016 Olympics. [CNN]
• Najibullah Zazi, America’s famous captured near-terrorist, will be arraigned this morning in New York, where he will be charged with trying to blow it up. [WSJ]
• Almost 300 people have died or gone missing during the Philippines’ terrible flooding. Ugh, and there are literally two more storms on the horizon. [AP]
• Guinea soldiers engaged in horrible violence, rape, murder, etc. towards Guinea protesters, killing 87 people. Oh yes and also all this happened in a major sports stadium. [LA Times]

Obama, Sarkozy and Brown’s disclosure this morning of a secret “other” Iranian uranium-enrichment facility hidden under the ground (crafty!) will have one certain effect: an outpouring of Very Serious Centrism from the Washington Post’s stable of pundits. David Ignatius, as you can see, has already commenced the fappery for bombing and war. “It’s hard to see how this one will end short of military confrontation if the Iranians don’t start bargaining for real,” Ignatius writes, as though he knows what he’s talking about. He also compares the current situation to the Cuban Missile Crisis, which famously ended before people started bombing each other. [Washington Post]

• Hey Britain and France, whatcha up to today? OH NOTHING just accusing Iran of having the most secret and evil nuclear facility ever before the G20. There is also this Thai place in downtown Pittsburgh that we have been meaning to try. [New York Times]
• Najibullah Zazi is probably the most self-realized terrorist the U.S. has ever arrested: he was further along in acting on a more complicated plan than everyone since Osama’s guys in 2001. [New York Times]
• Tim Russert’s dad—the “Big Russ” of Tim Russert’s book, Big Russ and Me—has died. MSNBC is expected to play a four to six week-long Powerpoint in remembrance. [CNN]
• Didja hear?: An important young people activism protest went down in Pittsburgh’s East End last night! A few dozen people were arrested for smashing windows and frankly being rather unpleasant, especially considering what lovely weather we were having yesterday. [Post-Gazette]
• Gaddafi has been saying contradictory mood-swing-y things this whole week: First he called the U.N. a “terror council,” and then he called Obama his “son,” but then he was like, I get it, I get why everyone who had a family member die in the Lockerbie bombing is so upset with me about Lockerbie. [Wall Street Journal]
• Compared to 2007, fewer people are giving less money to the Democrats. This is because the Democrats have either annoyed or attempted to dwindle the fortunes of a lot of their big donors. [Washington Post]