Newsflash: White House doesn't get jokes.

New York Post Online Edition: gossip YESTERDAY, to lighten everyone's load, I shoved this joke in the column: "The White House is now concentrating on the economy. Vice President Dick Cheney has told subordinates: " 'The way to lick this recession is to get all those deadbeats out of the soup kitchens.' " From sea to shining sea, America the Beautiful has a sense of humor. It stops at the Potomac. Washington-types wanted to know the source of my item. The Vice President's office called to deny he'd ever said it. I said, "Of course, he never said it. It's a joke." They wanted me to take it back. I said I don't know how you take back a joke.

Europe reacts to Wolfowitz' admission that WMD claims were lies.

Yahoo! News - Comments Revive Doubts Over Iraq Weapons In Germany, where the war was widely unpopular, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeiting newspaper said the comments about Iraqi weapons showed that America is losing the battle for credibility.

"The charge of deception is inescapable," the newspaper said Friday.

In London, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, who quit as leader of the House of Commons to protest the war, said he doubted Iraq had any such weapons.

"The war was sold on the basis of what was described as a pre-emptive strike, 'Hit Saddam before he hits us,' " Cook told British Broadcasting Corp. "It is now quite clear that Saddam did not have anything with which to hit us in the first place."

God help us all- Badgers rampaging in bucolic English hamlet.

Thanks to Michelle for the tip.

Yahoo! News - Five Hurt in Badger Rampage "I have been involved with badgers for 24 years and I have never heard of anything like this, nor has anyone I have spoken to," Mike Weaver, chairman of the Worcestershire Badger Society told Reuters on Tuesday.

All Bush does is lie. Remember that.

Eric Alterman: Altercation It’s not that Blair’s not important; he is, particularly when compared to ”The Matrix.” But let’s keep a sense of proportion. George W. Bush deliberately misled the country to launch an unnecessary war that will embroil this country in what could be decades of chaos, mayhem and murder, and cost us hundreds of billions and quite possibly trillions, while destroying the nation’s fiscal health in the process. And Bush’s silly schoolyard boasts to the contrary, bin Laden is still free to kill our people and reconstitute al-Qaida, which remains a genuine threat to civilization everywhere. So I have to say that I wish people would pay a bit more attention to the fact that Bush’s lies actually killed people and will continue to do so. Take a look at this report and tell me you have confidence in the ability of these people to be the imperial masters of Iraq.

Yes, I want to be Paul Krugman when I grow up.

Man on Horseback Given that history, George Bush's "Top Gun" act aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln — c'mon, guys, it wasn't about honoring the troops, it was about showing the president in a flight suit — was as scary as it was funny.

Mind you, it was funny. At first the White House claimed the dramatic tail-hook landing was necessary because the carrier was too far out to use a helicopter. In fact, the ship was so close to shore that, according to The Associated Press, administration officials "acknowledged positioning the massive ship to provide the best TV angle for Bush's speech, with the sea as his background instead of the San Diego coastline."

A U.S.-based British journalist told me that he and his colleagues had laughed through the whole scene. If Tony Blair had tried such a stunt, he said, the press would have demanded to know how many hospital beds could have been provided for the cost of the jet fuel.

But U.S. television coverage ranged from respectful to gushing. Nobody pointed out that Mr. Bush was breaking an important tradition. And nobody seemed bothered that Mr. Bush, who appears to have skipped more than a year of the National Guard service that kept him out of Vietnam, is now emphasizing his flying experience. (Spare me the hate mail. An exhaustive study by The Boston Globe found no evidence that Mr. Bush fulfilled any of his duties during that missing year. And since Mr. Bush has chosen to play up his National Guard career, this can't be shrugged off as old news.)

Anyway, it was quite a show. Luckily for Mr. Bush, the frustrating search for Osama bin Laden somehow morphed into a good old-fashioned war, the kind where you seize the enemy's capital and get to declare victory after a cheering crowd pulls down the tyrant's statue. (It wasn't much of a crowd, and American soldiers actually brought down the statue, but it looked great on TV.)

Let me be frank. Why is the failure to find any evidence of an active Iraqi nuclear weapons program, or vast quantities of chemical and biological weapons (a few drums don't qualify — though we haven't found even that) a big deal? Mainly because it feeds suspicions that the war wasn't waged to eliminate real threats. This suspicion is further fed by the administration's lackadaisical attitude toward those supposed threats once Baghdad fell. For example, Iraq's main nuclear waste dump wasn't secured until a few days ago, by which time it had been thoroughly looted. So was it all about the photo ops?

Joe Conason on Rummy the Genius.

Rummy the Genius Forgot About Nukes According to The Washington Post, a newspaper that fervently supported the war, the Pentagon utterly failed to secure Iraq’s nuclear facilities at Kut and al Tuwaitha. The result has been wholesale looting, with unknown losses of such potentially dangerous radioactive materials as cesium, cobalt and partially enriched uranium. So far, Special Forces detachments have found at least two nuclear caches that were "plundered extensively enough that authorities could not rule out the possibility that deadly materials had been stolen."

Now Mr. Rumsfeld might regard this as yet another stupid question, but wasn’t the purpose of this invasion to secure and prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction? The biological and chemical weapons that the Defense Secretary and the President warned us were in Saddam Hussein’s possession have not been found so far. Teams of soldiers and technicians are scouring the countryside in vain, turning up barrels of pesticides and empty tractor-trailers. Looters have recently been seen running in and out of the Iraqi nuclear facilities, and they represent a deadly serious problem. Although the radioactive materials at those sites were useless to construct an atomic bomb, they would be more than adequate for a so-called dirty bomb. In theory, such a primitive weapon could be detonated in a major American city, spreading deadly isotopes over dozens of blocks.

David Corn on Lies, Deceit, and Iraq

Now They Tell Us Loose chemical and biological weapons. Nuclear material up for grabs. When-we-have-time WMD inspections. Those restive Shiites. Twenty billion bucks a year. None of this made it into Bush's prewar disclosure statement. War backers can--and will--argue that the outcome was worth the costs and the chaos. Indeed, the murderous Hussein is out; the Iraqi people are fortunately no longer at his mercy. Yet this was liberation by deceit and misrepresentation, and the scent of fraud hangs in the air. It's a swindle that, for the time being, benefited Iraqis but that undermined debate and democracy at home. And with projecting American power still a priority for Bush and his crew, a question lingers: What else are they not telling us?

Just Great!

Unemployment Rate Rises to 6 Percent in April (washingtonpost.com) The nation's unemployment rate jumped to 6 percent in April - its highest rate in four months - as companies slashed manufacturing, airline and retail jobs.

Last month's jobless rate was up two-tenths of a percentage point from March, with payrolls falling by 48,000, the Labor Department reported Friday. Economists had expected payrolls to fall by 60,000 last month.

The economy has lost more than half a million jobs in the past three months as the number of unemployed workers surged to 8.8 million. Nearly 2 million people have been jobless for 27 weeks or more.

One for our side.

Nomination Of Tex. Judge Is Blocked (washingtonpost.com) The Senate's Republican majority fell nine votes short of the 60 needed to force final action on the nomination of Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla R. Owen to the New Orleans-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. The vote was 52 to 44, largely along party lines, fulfilling a Democratic vow this week to filibuster -- or block -- Owen's confirmation.