Look kids, this is what 10% unemployment looks like — one Men’s Room sign out of ten is filled with warm piss! The very important New York Times graphic adds, “That’s 15.7 million people. If the unemployed lived in one state, it would be the country’s fifth largest.” Great! Move ‘em all to one state, nuke it a few times, problem solved. [NYT]

• UNEMPLOYED WILL SOON BE THE RICHEST OF ALL! The Senate just passed a procedural motion to bring a bill extending unemployment benefits to a floor vote, finally, after weeks of terrible Republican ACORN amendment obstruction. Just stave off the starvation a little bit longer, welfare queens, because soon enough you’ll be able to eat those fine mink coats that you’ll buy with your unemployment money! The procedural motion passed 97 to 1. Try to guess the asshole before clicking. [CQ]

• Obama gets a gold medal in the prestigious Kindly Requesting The Olympics For Chicago While In Denmark event. [New York Times]
• David Letterman slept with some people on his staff and some other lady turned around and performed extortion on him! [New York Times]
• Some ex-prosecutor on the Roman Polanski case now admits that he made a bunch of shit up for some documentary about Polanski. [CNN]
• Iran has agreed to start outsourcing its uranium to other countries for enriching purposes. (David Letterman’s intern is now extorting Iran.) [WSJ]
• GE and Comcast might go halvies on NBC Universal-ownership. Everyone should please check with Tina Fey to make sure this is doable, plotwise, before doing anything. [Reuters]
• When the Labor Dept. releases its unemployment report on Friday, America might tie some 1983 unemployment Olympic record. USA! [AP]

• You, the worker, have actually been getting paid more, not less, over the last year.* (*Except if you are unemployed. Salaries of the unemployed have been comparatively static.) [New York Times]
• The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has joined most of Congress in thinking Obama’s idea about a new surge in Afghanistan is in fact a terrible one. [Times Online]
• Bill Clinton, on one of his bimonthly goodwill visits to Earth, has endorsed attractive Californian Gavin Newsom for the position of Governor of California. [Los Angeles Times]
• Police announced that Blagojevich’s former gal Friday, Christopher Kelley, who died of an overdose last weekend had previously tried to die of an overdose. [Chicago Tribune]
• Some religious Southwesterners are fighting to keep Big Government from taking away their constitutional right to brew psychedelic tea, which … helps them with their God. [WSJ]
• Here is your CLOSURE: Kanye West has apologized to Hilary Duff for his failure to observe congressional protocol. She was like, “Fine.” The end. [CNN]

Poor Rhode Island is a wee state with a huge unemployment problem, horrible taxes, and an abysmally high cost of living. Fortunately, it’s also got a governor with a can-do attitude who sees one very obvious way to dig the state out of its current budget mess: just get state workers to take two and a half weeks off, unpaid, over the next year or so. MORE »

Remember all that talk about how the unemployment rate fell by .1 percent last month and this proved, definitively, that happy days were here again? Remember all the sailors kissing ladies in the streets, and the wonderful ticker-tape parades? Well, everything has gone back to being terrible, according to New Statistics. MORE »

In these difficult times, when it seems everything is declining — corporate profits, individual incomes, assorted varieties and levels of a thing we used to call “hope” — one thing grows ever larger and more robust: our unemployment rate. Let’s hear it for the magical number 9.5, for that is the percentage of Americans who currently don’t have jobs. MORE »

The young intern was hungry for some popcorn, so she put her intern badge in the microwave. Later she spilled some cranberry juice on her favorite pleated skirt, so she used her intern badge to rub the stain out. And after another long day of indexing toenail clippings, the exhausted young intern walked to Metro Center and swiped her intern badge over the SmarTrip reader. Why me? She thought to herself as she took the metro home. Why did God choose me? And for a moment she felt undeserving. [Spotted: DC Interns] MORE »

The good news is that new unemployment claims were down a bit from the previous terrible week. The bad news is that there were more new jobless people than dumb economists had predicted. The worse news is that we now have 6.66 million people getting unemployment benefits, which proves the Devil is not only a true thing, but He’s here in America, having fun. Oh also millions more have just completely given up even looking for work, and their unemployment payments ran out long ago. [Bloomberg]

Back in early February, before President Obama failed at everything (life), it seemed he could heal the lame and the halt simply by looking at them and saying in a dignified manner, “the stakes are too high.” For example, at a rally in Ft. Myers, he magically transformed the lives of two (2) paupers just by calling on them when they raised their hands. MORE »

You’ve done it, America! You have already shed so many jobs that you are running out of remaining jobs to lose. That means new unemployment filings for last week were not quite as awful as unemployment filings for the previous week, and were the lowest since late January! We have turned a corner, etc! MORE »