Dear reader(s), this is where I will be posting news items in the morning in the abbreviated, minimal value-added format that is pretty much the best you are going to get from me before my third red eye. It will usually be up earlier, but take it easy on a senior citizen here. Please feel free to make my job easier by emailing me links and/or a possible clever name for this terribly innovative daily feature at mtkacik@washingtoncitypaper.com

The Great Recession is over. OH SHIT CRAP. Does this mean John Cassidy and Josh Green and Talking Points Memo(?) and Fareed Zakaria and that Politico guy who writes way too goddamn much for him to be right about anything…were onto something when they wrote all those fawning pieces about how Tim Geithner is the Michelle Rhee of global economics???

Well yes! By cannily recognizing that the top hundredth of a percent of households control between five and seven percent of all economic activity in this country, and showering money on their favorite “industry” with laserlike focus, the Obama Treasury Department saw a brilliant opportunity to lead the nation out of its statistical funk, and since even the one in five Americans who are unemployed can tell you that it is not actually a “recession” if the GDP is not continuing to contract on a year-over-year basis, there is really nothing more we “progressives” can really say about it.

Chuck Grassley’s retiring pharmaceutical industry investigator, who is leaving for a job at the Project On Government Oversight, give an interesting exit interview that is worth reading if you like to depress yourself with stories of well-intentioned, intelligent and intellectually honest people who are no longer working for the government.

El Diario ran a front-page editorial leveling with the drug gangs in Ciudad Juarez who just killed one of their interns.

Howard Kurtz: “But if see the 11-year-old Bill Maher clip one more time I’m going to feel like making my TV set disappear.”

OMG Lady Gagais tweeting with Harry Reid! In other news, “Gaga” appears four times on the Post homepage right now.

“This is a warrior woman! This is a warrior woman!” Oprah declared.

Some arts writer in Houston wrote a somewhat fussy but basically helpful mass email to gallery publicists and Gawker mocked him for assuming publicists actually know how to read. TBD’s Maura Judkis responded by tweeting “Life is so terribly hard for this arts writer. I have no sympathy for him.” Does someone have a gig as an irritating publicist in her past? Anyway, worry not, Maura, this guy’s insistence on not caring who’s buying what or how much it’s selling for totally misses the point of art. (Money laundering.)

Speaking of, some big Vatican official (not Rafaello Follieri) is being investigated for that.

The FBI has also for years been investigating Catholics—and also, PETA and Greenpeace, but duh—as potential terror threats, but a new 209-page Inspector General report says some of this was maybe “improper.” Here is the whole report, if you’re sick of Christine O’Donnell or other Vatican controversies already.

Jeffrey Stephan(s), an employee at the majority taxpayer-owned GMAC which for whatever reason recently changed its name to Ally (reminding me of the short-lived anal leakage drug Alli) has singlehandedly ground the company’s foreclosure activities to a halt in 23 states, though that probably was not his intention! Stephan/Stephans has apparently testified to having signed off on tens of thousands of foreclosure actions without actually looking at any of the files or doing any of the other red-tapey big government ordered “legal” type stuff you are supposed to do before you send the cops in to throw lazy freeloaders out of their houses these days.