• 50% increase in 1st-quarter sales for tablet-bound Apple source

• I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president. … You know, there is a tendency in Washington to believe our job description, of elected officials, is to get reelected. That’s not our job description. Our job description is to solve problems and to help people.
• Barack Obama • In an interview on ABC News. The president seems awful headsure about his selflessness of late, and it’s pretty impressive that he can say this a year after his election. The problem, of course, is that two years from now, he’s going to have a hard time not eating his words when he’s trying to get reelected. Will he regret saying this when he’s taking on a tea-addicted Sarah Palin in 2012? source

• The merger has been approved after a yearlong investigation. This nightmare merger had been what many music fans had been fearing, but it appears the Justice Department found some common ground. “We were prepared to litigate this case, and I told the parties that,” said Justice Department antitrust representative Christine A. Varney. “The required divestitures and behavioral prohibitions alleviate our concerns.” Ticketmaster has to ditch a ticketing division and license its software to a competitor. Oh, and the boys at Justice will be watching them like a hawk for 10 years. Good idea – music fans will thank you. source

• 17% of the budget will be affected by the cap

• » Subject to cuts: Reports say that the departments of Housing and Urban Development, Justice, Energy, Transportation, Agriculture, and Health and Human Services will be affected by the cuts. Guess what, kids? D.C.’s about to have a three-year recession.
• » Unaffected by cuts: Social Security and Medicare (he couldn’t touch those even if he wanted), and organizations affected by military, veterans, homeland security and international affairs. The cuts only take on discretionary spending.

A douchey comment by Michael Steel:

• Given Washington Democrats’ unprecedented spending binge, this is like announcing you’re going on a diet after winning a pie-eating contest.
• Rep. John Boehner’s spokesman Michael Steel • Regarding the budget cuts. Considering the year of controversial spending that the Obama administration has just had, we imagine any cuts in the nature of this would be welcomed by the right. Or maybe they’ll make jokes about pie contests. We’ll see. source

• Note: in an earlier version of this story, we mistook Michael Steel for RNC chair Michael Steele. We apologize. We’re sure he gets that a lot. At least we’re not alone in making this boneheaded mistake.Thanks to Joel McDonald for correcting us below. Much appreciated.
  

• three
  years amount of time Obama plans to stop growth in domestic spending
• $250
  billion amount of money the government would save with the measure source

• “Pleasure doing business with you. Ow! Ow! Julius, what are you doing? Are you SHOOTING PENNIES AT ME? Why, I’ll never work with ShortFormBlog ever again. You guys are ShortFormJerks!”

• NO something about being the president, y’know source

• He’s not running for his dad’s old Senate seat. Despite probably having a better chance than any other Democrat in Delaware of winning the seat, Vice President Joe Biden’s kid Beau has chosen to remain Delaware’s Attorney General, claiming he still has lots to do there. “Therefore I cannot and will not run for the United States Senate in 2010. I will run for re-election as attorney general,” said Beau. Let’s just hand the seat to the GOP now! source