This is Al Franken's first week on the job, so he didn't have time to prepare actual questions for Sonia Sotomayor. Instead he talked about Perry Mason, and how that show made Sotomayor want to be a prosecutor.

He is talking about how Senators are lonely, and desperate for love, or something.

Ana Marie Cox is guest-hosting for Rachel Maddow tonight! She is so psyched! Or she was, until a certain someone had to go and die unexpectedly yesterday.

Earlier this week, we claimed some moron blogger was the first racist to publicly call Sonia Sotomayor "J-Lo" for no reason other than her ethnicity. We were incorrect.

Million-year-old gossipeuse Cindy Adams got the funniest email from her good friend Edward Elson! So she just reprinted it, in her New York Post "gossip" "column," because we can't all be Andrea Peyser, right? See, a guy goes to his doctor...

Press Secretary Robert Gibbs can't stop laughing!

Haha PUNK'D! Happy Day When Everyone Thinks They're Fucking Hilarious, guys! Let's all have a chuckle at the "hoaxes" and "pranks" and depressing stabs at heavy-handed jocularity that make up April Fools' Day.

David Letterman thought it was pret-ty funny to laugh at Alicia Ebaugh's story in the Cedar Rapids Gazette about a man caught sexing a blow-up doll. Why does David Letterman laugh at the unemployed?

George W. Bush's farewell tour is going swimmingly! We're all so thrilled to be rid of him that we're just letting him bumble around seeming kinda sad and relieved.

The Obama team has released its first transition donor list! Among the usual gang of employees of the nation's largest defense contractors (Boeing, Lockheed, and Raytheon have four donors between them!), trial lawyers, radical academics, and government employees, we found this transparent example of yet more illegal donations. Just look at who "Doug Berman," $500 donor, claims to work for.

America, as we've learned, has a big PR problem. The rest of the world doesn't like us so much! Our current president is something of a laughingstock, you see, and we have this problem with expecting others to live up to the ideals we espouse as we fail to live up to them ourselves. You can see how that might bug people, right? Thankfully we're done with the Bush administration. Listen to how little Bush is respected by the Russians and French:

This is a clip from Eddie Murphy's standup special Delirious, recorded in Washington, DC in 1983, back when Eddie Murphy was funny. He is joking about the first black president, who, back then, was going to be Jesse Jackson, but the joke still works. It works so well, in fact, that it is basically the only joke about The First Black President. The L.A. Times sent a reporter out to the comedy clubs this weekend to watch black comedians make their black comedian jokes about Barack Obama, the new black president.

Granted, most of the trends associated with the presidential campaign are morbidly depressing, from hateful posters to bigoted screaming at rallies to Sarah Palin's sad and frightening interview flubs. But in the last few weeks before the election, a flurry of campaign-inspired "yo momma" jokes have taken their rightful place alongside Tina Fey's Palin impression and Chris Rock's "Hillary Lost!" routine as among the rare bright spots. Tech executive Anil Dash got the ball rolling on his Twitter stream last week (see headline to this post!) and the jokes just kept snowballing. "Yo mama so fat, McCain refers to her as 'Those Ones,'" wrote loresjoberg. More:

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, the premier public intellectual of blindly cheerleading globalization, has been wrong about nearly everything, ever. He is hailed as a foreign policy genius, and of course he was dead wrong on Iraq. He is hailed as a brilliant economist, and maybe he is, but his magical flat global future looks increasingly like the wet dream of a guilty rich liberal who doesn't want to hear about inequality that can't be solved by internet access. His most stunning insights are banal cliches, often attributed to cab drivers in exotic (developing) foreign locales. But we have to hand it to him: his joke about Sarah Palin and oil drilling is pretty funny! It is so funny, in fact, that he delivered it 500 times last week, from Letterman on through the Sunday shows. Let's all congratulate Thomas Friedman on his very first joke! Chant with him: CARBON PAPER CARBON PAPER CARBON PAPER!

Hey, here's an idea: If you're a would-be inventor with more ideas than time or engineering skill or business sense, why not just start a blog with all your wacky ideas? Then if somebody actually takes one and invents it, they can give you a cut of the profits. Why, that's just clever enough to be an entry on "Ideas By Chuck," a blog which has much better ideas than many places that are actually paid to come up with things! Chuck admits "I don't have the resources or passion to make these ideas reality," but he does "hope this blog makes the world a better place." And how could it not? Three of our favorite of ideas from Chuck, below. Office supplies, porn, and fried foods all play a role!

"Kazakhstan's sole communication satellite, used by many of the nation's TV broadcasters, is out of control due to a computer glitch and may be lost altogether, officials said." At least they won't be able to see all the "Borat" jokes that are coming. Ha, who's running the space program over there, ha? [NYP]

Of all the people spotted by Page Six's army of loyal spies, readers, and publicists, they chose a photo of governor David Paterson to illustrate their "sightings." 'Cause he can't see! How delightfully witty! [NYP]

Here's an idea that was only clever the first 20 or 30 times someone did it: "The Worst Album Covers Of All Time." Ha, look at the ugly people! The first person who dug through crates and crates of old records to find the funniest 1973 dulcimer trio was a genius; pretty much everyone since is just a copycat. Blogger 33 1/3 points out that every freaking list like this just draws from the same pool of Google-able bad album covers already out there. Like AM NY and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel did this week. And the most popular bad album cover is a fake! A Photoshop joke! A years-old joke, which media outlets can't stop falling for. Like Very Short List, which marvels today, "Someone at VSL Headquarters was convinced that these were all elaborately executed jokes, fake records concocted the day before yesterday. But they are definitely real." No; here's the real version of "Can I Borrow A Feeling?":

The Observer covered NBC's press conference anointing never-funny (but cute!) former SNLer Jimmy Fallon the new king of late-late night. They included this anecdote: "Mr. Fallon claimed his kindergarten yearbook featured his photo above the caption 'Most Likely to Take Over David Letterman.' (Someone in the crowd, possibly auditioning to be Mr. Fallon's sidekick, let out an audible 'Wow' at this point.) When asked what kindergarten had yearbooks, much less ones with references to David Letterman, Mr. Fallon joked, 'It's a magical kindergarten. It's taught by a unicorn, a talking unicorn.'" See? He's doing some of that funny joking-around stuff the late-night comics do. But no one told the Associated Press, as you can see in the attached story. [NYO, AP]

Loud, shouty, occasional magician Penn Jillette was on MSNBC, talking about politics. Why? It's unclear. He had some misogynistic anti-Hillary joke that became a YouTube thing a while back. Now the joke is old and tired (like HILLARY CLINTON, right??) but Penn dutifully repeated, along with his claim that the fact that the joke went over so well with his crazy audience meant Hil was doomed from day one. He doesn't really seem to think that says anything too terrible about the nation, but whatever. Point is: arbiter of civility Joe Scarborough disapproved. And sad Mika Brzezinski said only, "I don't like that." Clip attached.