It's OK, CNN. We all have our suspicions about which world leaders conspired to launch this "spontaneous" swine-flu panic. But we'd pair Bush with someone from PRI. At least you "fixed" the "error" quickly.

Rupert Murdoch's last biographer thinks his young wife is turning him soft and liberal. Maybe so: The mogul's pet tabloid went easy on party-switching Sen. Arlen Specter today, compared with Jim Jeffords in 2001.

Somali teen pirate sensation Abduwali Abdukhadir Muse (today's spelling!) went to court yesterday, and guess what, he cried. Will this give the NY Post the chance to use the term "Priva-Tears?" Let's find out!

They're not taking it so well.

Drudge: "ORGANIC: World's Deadliest Spider Found in WHOLE FOODS Produce..." Story: two experts dispute both the identification of the spider and that spider's deadliness. Plus:

This headline from the Trentonian is about some traffic accident. Just go with it. It was nearly as clever as this item from the Guardian's music blog, screen-grabbed by an alert reader:

Sorry, but this "quality of life" policing trend has really gotten out of hand. Talk about an invasion of privacy! [CBS/AP]

Lo: Remember the Good Old Days of journalism, when NYC precinct houses were full of dozens of grizzled, worldly reporters covering gritty city crime? Now it's just one 23 year-old from the Brooklyn Paper.

Oh no! Not the Swedish model! Look carefully at that terrifying blue and yellow Nordic Cross; it is our generation's hammer and sickle.

Ye gods, that much "bounty" could power the New York Media for a month! (Sadly—we checked—the story's not by our friend Chuck Blow.)

Obama's inaugural address was "a philosophic statement of high moral purpose," said Reverend Eugene Rivers on MSNBC just now. Everyone agrees: it was serious and somber.

Today's New York Post calls for death to all geese in New York City. Haha, we thought, until we remembered all the other funny Post front pages that got us into a war.

Commenter timeoutofmind wins our Hudson River plane crash headline competition. What a hero! Image by Steven Dressler.

I'm not sure I understand what the fuss is in this wire story about gays protesting same-sex marriage bans. Doesn't this happen every day?

We had a feeling, when we saw this million-point headline at Drudge saying Iran will get a nuke during Obama's first term credited only to a mysterious "paper," that the "paper" referenced would be either the Moonie-owned Washington Times or the Murdoch-owned Times of London. More amusing: in order to stop the evil Iranians, the Times insists that Obama must engage in the direct diplomacy without preconditions that John McCain (and Hillary Clinton!) called so naive and foolish. A more reasonable assesment of the report from Brookings and the Council on Foreign Relations is here. [Times via Drudge]

At some point last night, the Daily News fed the Web address above into its RSS feed. The XML file appears to have been subsequently cleansed, but Google Reader still has the original address, attached to the much tamer headline, "Side Dish: Juliette Lewis isn't into 'Gossip'." Clicking it is a dead end, of course, but we're now way more intrigued by what the tabloid's gossip section didn't say than by anything it could have possibly printed about Jared Kushner's girlfriend. Maybe it's a clever bit of reverse psychology, hyping tomorrow's Rush & Molloy. Anyone care to clue us in?

Poor sad Matt Drudge lost his influence this year, forever, and no one cares about him or takes him seriously anymore. This was his headline a couple minutes ago, until he lost the question mark. Still, the inference is there: this is an illegitimate win. Matt will now probably lead not the MSM but the crazier fringes of the opposition. Not so much the ones working to formulate a new, smarter conservatism, but the ones who just retreat further and further into conspiracy theories and nuttiness. Goodbye, Matt! We'll be back as soon as hurricanes threaten Florida! [Drudge Archives]

There's a limited number of ways you can make "election day" a front page, above the fold headline. Because, you know, nothing will be "news" until tomorrow. So you can "report," as many papers do, that people will choose someone (YOU DECIDE, YOU CHOOSE, IT'S UP TO YOU), today, with a big splash featuring both candidates' headshots. You can try to make some actual "news," as the Times and the Wall Street Journal do with stories on how historic everything is and what the winner will inherit. You can report on all the boring campaigning of yesterday, or predict electoral chaos, or, as the New York Post admirably did, just pretend there isn't even an old white Republican in this race. The papers in the attached image chose almost exactly as you might predict. A couple papers across the world went a different direction.

According to Drudge, Barack Obama and his wife Michelle have taken "more than 15 minutes to vote." Maybe they're undecided? His link goes nowhere. Ben Smith doesn't report anything about how long it took Barack Obama to vote. Meanwhile: "HILLARY POLITICKING INSIDE NY POLLING AREA, ADVOCATES FOR OBAMA, 5 FEET FROM BOOTHS... DEVELOPING..." Once again, no link! But this is really a "fuck you, too late to not vote for me" move by the Obamas. Look who else voted at their polling place:

Matt Drudge has lost it. Utterly, totally lost it. This is his headline, right now, the day before the elections. It links to a YouTube clip of Barack Obama scratching his face with his index and, yes, middle fingers. Just like he did to Hillary Clinton, once! Don't you remember? Now we know who the real Barack Obama is: he is a secret asshole. This is really the best anyone can do, because it turns out all those other secret things he is aren't true. Like, for example, Bill Ayers, radical domestic terrorist and respected professor, did not write Barack Obama's book. This was revealed when California businessman Robert Fox and his Republican Congressman brother-in-law paid an Oxford don to investigate similarities between Dreams From My Father and Ayers' Fugitive Days. The charges were "laughably unsubstantiated." But of course Obama is still a secret Muslim foreigner, right? He was totally born in Indonesia, right? Ha, the Director of Hawaii's Department of Health has actually bothered to respond to the lunatics. You may be shocked to learn that Barack Obama's birth certificate is real. So really all that's left is to basically accuse Obama of everything in the world, all at once, like in this 100% real robocall now being made in Pennsylvania.