A choice bit of news today for terrorists and people who just seem like terrorists: Obama and his legal pals have decided that they will not be giving themselves any more pretend legal authority in order to detain suspicious people indefinitely. It turns out Bush and Cheney did a pretty comprehensive job of back in 2001 rounding up all the authority on Earth and renditioning the shit out of it in Gitmo and Bagram. MORE »

• Obama’s interference in governors’ races is upsetting to those who think that Obama’s desire to keep Democrats in power is soo partisan. [New York Times]
• Internet service providers are terribly angry with the FCC, which wants “net neutrality,” a concept of unimaginable injustice that would prohibit these Internet service companies from purposely slowing down connections and blocking access to their competitors’ content. [WSJ]
• Fewer troops in Afghanistan will be fighting in deserted actual desert areas and will concern themselves more with defending cities and humans. Except N.B. to the Taliban: this is not because America is weak! [Washington Post]
• Here are your MacArthur Genius Grant winners!  [Los Angeles Times]
• Bank of America just cold refuses to tell Congress all about its consensual hook-up with Merrill Lynch. The SEC is THISCLOSE to just subpoenaing the bank, the judicial equivalent of correctly guessing its Gmail password. [Reuters]
• Nancy Pelosi is going to send a health care bill to the floor by the end of the week. She’s like, “Fucking bet me.” [The Hill]

The journalistic newspapers have found a new business model! It involves begging the President to either:

• A. criminalize the Internet, or
• B. monetarily reward the newspapers, with American currency, for their Stockholm syndrome in broadsheet prisons of their own creation.

Every few months Robert Gibbs bothers to respond by asking them why they think anyone on Earth, much less the President, would give them money. WELL: today the newspapermen received a thrilling categorical “dunno, give it a shot?” MORE »

Are you ready for a dose of injustice this morning?  Ch-ch-ch-check out Obama, David Paterson and Jon Corzine’s Triangle of Racism, brought to you, straight up, from three-dimensional polygon of hip hop, RNC Chairman Michael Steele. See, Obama said that he would not encourage a certain black governor (David Paterson) to run for re-election, as David Paterson is historically unpopular with his own constituents. But Jon Corzine is just as hated by his own state (New Jersey—not even kidding), so why did Obama not include the white Jon Corzine in his grand total (1) of how many black governors he would tell to sit this one out?? MORE »

Sad whine, sad whine: Some of our nation’s saddest Republicans are terribly upset that Barack Obama will not put in an excruciating bad-faith appearance on some Fox News program this Sunday. You see, Obama will be stopping by the other major networks this weekend to talk about health care on “Meet the Press,” “State of the Union,” etc. etc. but has ostentatiously foregone Lou Dobbs’ highly rated Mexican vs. Lion vs. Rick Perry Gladiator Sports Match. Joe Wilson, bold idiot, decided this is unfair! “If people are going to be on the Sunday talk shows, they should be on all of them.” Joe Wilson is a public relations dare devil, he is! MORE »

Guess what Satanists? The honeymoon period is OVER and your Barack Obama is now going to actually have to work to manipulate crucial “swing voters” and “independents” and “actual human adult retards” that he has no plans to involve our troops in another war… against JESUS CHRIST!! This is no longer a given. [The Washington Independent]

• A BROKEN RECORD named Osama bin Laden released another tape. To review, likes: Islam, recording audio tapes, routine; dislikes: America, Israel, insolence. [Times Online]
• China is forcing the Chinese to pay very high taxes on, let’s see, American-made chickens and car parts. This aggressively random move is in response to Obama’s announcement on Friday that he was going to tax the shit out of Chinese tires. [New York Times]
• Green Revolution guy Dr. Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize after he showed billions of people how to grow wheat more efficiently so as to avoid starving to death, has died. “Fields of Gold” will be especially relevant when it is inevitably played at his funeral. [WSJ]
• President Barack Obama is visiting Wall Street today to tell everybody to take responsibility for their actions, because this will help him institute financial reform eventually. It is an invaluable form of legislative savvy he has mastered. [Washington Post]
• Police found a body in a campus building and they think it belongs to that gal at Yale who was missing and is now dead, probably. [Los Angeles Times]

Back in spring, Obama set up a special advisory science panel of scientists to find out exactly how cool it would be for NASA to send astronauts into space, like to Mars maybe. The panel’s findings indicate that this would be “pretty fucking cool,” or “quite brilliant, really” in metric units. Fantastiche! NASA will now be needing $3 billion a year on top of the $18 billion a year it already gets so it can send a guy or a clever monkey with a touching and uncanny capacity for human emotion to Mars. MORE »

The health care debate’s fifteen minutes are finally, finally up. Ugh, do you even remember all that? Anyway, Obama will now solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, America’s original synonym for “unable to be fixed with one swift gesture.” Obama’s (alleged!) new peace plan includes TEN swift gestures, which he will (allegedly!) present at a peace conference in Egypt at the end of the month. This does not leave much time for every person on Earth to begin absolutely despising each clause of the hated plan for quasi-personal reasons of varying legitimacy! Let’s begin immediately. MORE »

Awhile ago Barack Obama decided he was going to be America’s first Transparent President. This was fine because of how benign it was, for him to claim that. Like, sure! Anyway, then in June, things became ILLEGALLY OPAQUE when Obama announced that he, like Bush, would not be releasing the White House visitor log. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington didn’t think this deliberate withholding of information was so transparent at all actually, so they sued Obama, demanding he better start living up to the “Most Transparent” superlative that was awarded to him in good faith by the all the seniors on yearbook committee. Of course CREW did not win its lawsuit (obviously), but now Obama is releasing the White House visitors’ logs anyway. MORE »

It is understandable, of course, that right now everyone’s most immediate concern is protecting Trig Palin from Obama’s Human Productivity Freikorps. There is just no time to worry about specifics like reality. Enter Meg Stapleton, whose job it is as official spokesperson to an unemployed private citizen to concern herself with such horrid, gruesome detail, like how Obama will personally expel Trig to the alabaster, horizonless Alaska of the Sky. See “HR3200 p. 425 see ‘Advance Care Planning Consultation,’” clarifies Stapleton.  Hats off everybody, please—show some respect. MORE »