• Obama is demanding that the companies that received the most bailout money pay their highest-earning employees 10% of what they normally do. [New York Times]
• Oh here’s something new: everyone is worried about getting sick but is too lazy and/or too terrified to actually get a flu shot. [Washington Post]
• The weird Jett Travolta/Bahamas were not really so fun that one time/extortion case has been declared a mistrial. [CNN]
• Terrorists fired mortars at an airport in Somalia in hopes of killing the country’s president as he boarded a plane. They killed 20 people, but none of them were the president. [AP]
• Larry Summers has a good feeling about the the strength of the economy in general and the value of the dollar specifically. [Reuters]
• AT&T is really pulling out all the stops trying to keep this net neutrality thing from happening. [The Hill]

• Hollywood talkie star Patrick Swayze, who famously had cancer, has died from the aforementioned cancer at the age of 57. [New York Times]
• “Led by their most senior black lawmakers” (?), Democrats have decided to importantly vote on whether or not to sanction Joe Wilson and whether or not to make this an issue about race. [Washington Post]
• America has blown up a car in Somalia! But what counts is what’s inside the car, namely, Al Qaeda’s most talented terrorist. [WSJ]
• The American Medical Association never likes health care reform except just now it has announced that it likes Obama’s health care reform, perhaps because it stands to gain like $200 billion as cuts to Medicare are stopped. [LA Times]
• Today on Obama’s Everyone Should Be Taking Responsibility For Things tour: Midwestern auto-workers, whom he will tell to be responsible with their jobs and savings, should they ever have these things again. [AP]
• The Senate will NOT be giving Obama’s friends the ACORNS any federal housing money, and the US Census doesn’t want their stupid help either, in counting people. [Reuters]

The first thing wrong with this video is it shows a mixed-race couple, which must still be illegal somewhere in the “Real America,” maybe Alabama or Texas? But the rest teaches our children a valuable lesson about why they can’t have nice things: Because that’s socialist! So if you want to go to the beach, try the “American way” and earn millions of dollars, and buy some beachfront property, and shoot any mixed-race couples you catch trying to use your beach, the end. [YouTube via Wonkette tipster Curt]

Over Easter weekend while the rest of America was busy gaining 10 pounds eating ham and Peeps, President Obama occupied himself authorizing military action that left three Somali pirates dead and one kidnapped American captain alive. This feat of daring means that nobody can call Obama a pussy anymore. MORE »

This American president, he has fleets of destroyers and an army of fearsome AT-AT walkers at his disposal and still he cannot contend with a very organized band of Africans trolling the waters off the Somalian coast. What gives, Obama? Why do you love pirates so much? MORE »

Those crazy Kosovars! Their little declaration of independence has caused quite the shitstorm — not just among the great powers who are wrangling over whether to recognize them or not, but among the world’s other pissant quasi-countries, who are mad that they didn’t get to do it first. Palestinian presidential aide Yasser Abed Rabbo whinily declared that “Kosovo is not better than us. We deserve independence even before Kosovo!” — and it’s probably more true for his blighted semi-occupied wasteland than most. This week, The Foreigns will take you on a tour of the world’s saddest unrecognized not-countries. MORE »

Each week, veteran Condiwatcher Peter Huestis (also known as Princess Sparkle Pony) provides a summary of the searing wit and infinite wisdom of America’s Favorite Princess Diplomat™! Last week was totally topsy-turvy in Condiland, but not really in a fun way. There was that NIE thingy which made a lot of people uptight, an absolutely awful trip to Africa, which experts tell us is the land of her ancestors, and then on to Brussels, where half the people wouldn’t shut up about Iran, and the other half nagged her about the possibly fictional land of Kosovo. But first! Gay rumors! Relive the memories of photo-ops past after the jump!

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OK, a guilty admission on our part: this site has never been known for being a hotbed of intelligent analysis of the day’s events re: “all things political”, so much as being a hotbed of who’s bedding Washington hotties (The answer? Me, of course. A sex-laced shout-out to Nicole W. in Rep. Jan Schakowsky’s office (D-IL). See you tonight, babe!). With that in mind, then, we thought we’d take a stab at being solemn, as opposed to sex-obsessed. Ain’t that noble? Here goes. MORE »