"We are not asking you to agree with... homosexuality—we're asking you to do your job, to protect the Constitution," says Lady Gaga in a new message to the US Senate about repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." Watch inside.

Thursday was International Beer Day! Did you raise a glass of beer to former president Jimmy Carter? You should have: Carter's actions as president helped start the brewing renaissance that helps keep your local stocked with delicious craft beers.

This afternoon, Glenn Beck went off on a tangent about his belief that unwise government spending leads to the decay of cities. Then, he used some very energetic—and delicious!—metaphors, comparing public funding for the arts to junk food.

Faced with a government shutdown at 12:01am tomorrow, Governor Paterson said if lawmakers don't go along with his budget plans, he will "veto everything." Paterson wants to cut $500 million in new spending the legislature added to his budget proposal.

The New York Forum, a conference focused on the "continuing economic crises," started yesterday! And good ol' Rupert Murdoch, President and CEO of Fox News' parent company News Corp, kicked things off by calling President Obama "irresponsible." Sounds fun, right?

Eight federal buildings in Washington, Idaho and Utah received envelopes containing non-hazardous white mystery powder yesterday.

None of the agency's 28 known masturbators have been fired for looking at kiddie porn on the job, says the SEC's inspector general. But don't worry, Senator Chuck Grassley cares all of a sudden and is looking into it. [WP]

Most people would not buy a used car from "The Government." According to a new Pew poll, just 22 percent of Americans say they trust the government "just about always" or "most of the time." Stupid government. [Reuters]

Happy Census Day! The government hopes you've already sent in your 2010 census form. (Census Day should've been before the due date though, right?) Even the president had to. But some people are scared of getting counted by the government.

Healthcare reform moved closer over the weekend. Unbelievably it's taken decades to get to this point. Here are ten other policies that are equally sensible but would take similar efforts to pass because people are stupid.

After a long, hard, bloody, awful debate that brought out the worst in our national conversation, the Democratic health care package just passed by a House vote of 220-215. An anti-abortion federal funding amendment sealed the deal. So: now what?

There's much chatter about upcoming final votes on the Health Care bill we're basically sick—ahem—of hearing about because when people talk about health care they apparently start to go slightly insane. As evidenced by this baby-assisted floor speech.

Ugh. We knew the whole scene was getting lame when the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Statistics Service moved into the McKibben Lofts.

Were you looking for a job, maybe with President Obama? Hah, you just got identity thefted! USAJOBS, the government's online job database, has been hacked.

A couple years ago, the CIA was instructed by the Justice Department to waterboard and torture all the al-Qaeda members they secretly detained in illegal prisons. But the CIA got a bit worried! Because, you see, administrations come and go, but the CIA is forever. They've become quite skilled as ass-covering. So they pressured the White House to give written policy approval of "enhanced interrogation techniques." Why? So they could leak the memo to the Washington Post in case someone like Condi Rice tried the "it was all the CIA's idea and we knew nothing" line. Which she did! Condi told Congress last month that the Bush administration was "initially uneasy about a controversial CIA plan for interrogating top al-Qaeda suspects." She says she asked someone to look into whether the torturing was legal or not. But the CIA remembers it differently.

>The hacker who broke into Sarah Palin's email account has, of course, been roundly condemned for his actions, but he has for the moment succeeded in reviving the unanswered question of why the Alaska governor had two quasi-official email addresses, gov.palin@yahoo.com and gov.sarah@yahoo.com. So central were the private accounts to Palin's state office that her secretary admonished a government aide who accidentally used a government email address instead. This use of the accounts is a naked affront to public records laws in Alaska. But it's not exceptional: It's one battle in a 30-years war between conservatives and civil libertarians over government openness, during which the current presidential administration itself blurred the linese between public and private email. Is there any way to finally stop these hijinks?

Sick of the negativity rampant in the liberal mainstream media, the Cook County (IL) Board paid $25K to produce its own magazine-one that would ensure "regular, positive press." But the initial run of 5,000 copies (which has already been printed) will never be distributed, because the magazine had too many misspellings and grammatical errors. Your government at work, ladies and gentlemen. "I have to find a way to get rid of them," said the county's spokesperson. Build a fort? It probably won't be too much of a loss, considering:

The UK government body that regulates advertising passed new rules this month banning TV commercials that are too loud. That's right; ads shouldn't be "excessively noisy or strident." Nor should they be excessively blaring, deafening, roaring, or stentorian, if the thesaurus has anything to say about it. The ostensible reason for the rule is to prevent your neighbors from hearing commercials on your television. "This might sound straightforward," says the New York Times. Um, no it doesn't. Has the British government come up with a magic volume button-disabling law?

Slate found this 2005 State Department brochure on car bombs at the closed and then re-opened Wikileaks. Its amazing subtitle speaks for itself. Perhaps we could've averted a national catastrophe if, back in 2001, President Bush had been handed a national security briefing headlined "Bin Laden Determined to Make US E'Splode!"

NICK DOUGLAS — Wasn't it sci-fi author William Gibson who said "The future is here, it's just unevenly distributed among pithy sci-fi authors"? The future is indeed inevitable, but before it brings us a 24/7 carnival of worldwide post-scarcity, cyborg bodies, and Starbucks on Mars, it must fight enemies like the following five: Baby Boomers, the movie industry and music industries, cell providers, the government, and Web 2.0.