Here is something commonly called a satire: "In the summer of 2010... an asteroid struck the East Coast. Early warning systems permitted most of the region's population to be evacuated, so that only a few lives were lost when the meteor fragmented and exploded above lower Manhattan, leveling Wall Street.... While the cloud of dust was still clearing above the flooded crater that had once been Wall Street, in Washington, a bipartisan group of fiscal conservatives, Citizens for Understanding Taxation (CUT), held a press conference and called for immediate, drastic cuts in public spending." Ohhhkay. Is there anyone else, besides the New America Foundation wonk who wrote this, who needs it explained to them that what happened on Wall Street these last few years was nothing like a random act of an uncaring universe? And that such an attempt, however charming, to cast the stupid political maneuvers of those fatheads in the Senate as therefore nonsensical, doesn't really, like, add up?

To Britain, where beleaguered Prime Minister Gordon Brown just cannot catch a break: "The launch of a new Labour poster campaign was interrupted by a car crash close to where cabinet members were giving their speeches." Apparently a Volkswagen Golf tried to avoid garbage truck and wound up hitting a bus shelter. In perhaps the only bit of good news the Labour party will receive during the duration of The Race To Run Knifecrime Island, "the Golf's driver, unemployed Omed Rashid, 27, said he would be voting Labour next Thursday." Labour strategist/Business Secretary Peter Mandelson denied that the crash was a metaphor for the party's campaign, but that's probably only accurate in that no one was injured and the whole thing did not end with a gigantic fireball.