JESUS CHRIST Republicans get away with everything when it comes to Warring, hmm? Barack Obama and Bob Gates raised defense spending by 4%, or $20 billion, for the new budget, but made cuts to missile defense programs — that would exist only so Sarah Palin could pretend that she’s shooting down Putin’s flying dick from outer space — and killed $140 billion in F-22 RAPTOR DEATH PLANE contractor looting schemes. The “new money” will be focused on Iraq and Afghanistan. And yet this has all been parlayed rather easily, on the teevee, into, “Why is Barack Obama not giving the Pentagon a single dollar, and why does he want to lose more wars?” [Washington Monthly, TPM]

Turns out Barack Obama is making some jobs for us, after all! Sure, none of those fancy Obama Administration positions really “trickled down” to you unemployed libtards with the Hope sticker on your MacBook, but that’s okay — the administration is now proposing all kinds of exciting foreign service civilian positions. Sexytime, right?! Romantic café dinners, wine-fueled fucking in the sweet spring grass of the Jardin du Luxembourg, getting high under Karlov Most in the summertime, etc. Well …. MORE »

• Tina Brown’s new Recovery.com, a popular new Internet Web-site in which users upload pictures of their cats and categorize them according to their appeal, is quite popular, making it all the more frustrating that America is not paid per pageview. [Top of the Ticket]
• Professor Obama will now give banks little “stress tests” that will determine their instability and whether or not the banks have been doing their secondary reading despite not participating in the seminar discussion.  [The Atlantic]
• More Americans think Barry is going to handle this economy thing okay, thanks to his big convincing speech and probably the comparatively spectacular failure of weird Bobby Jindal. [Daily Beast]
• There is literally nothing that displeases Republicans more than children with working parents receiving health insurance—watch their stillness conceal the hatred. Dusty old robot Ronald Reagan stayed still too, in his grave.  [Daily Kos]
• Congress’ own Uncle Junior, John McCain, boozily rolled out from underneath some umbrella in the Arizona desert to criticize the war effort in Afghanistan. [CNN Political Ticker]

By the Comics Curmudgeon
DAMN YOU, CRUEL FATE! The greatest cartoon-related controversy since a bunch of pissed-off dudes in Pakistan burned down a KFC to protest the marriage of Elizabeth to Anthony in For Better Or For Worse, the Great Obama-As-A-Dead-Monkey Contretemps Of Ought-Nine, has come and gone before your Comics Curmudgeon could get hold of it! And apparently the cartoonist also loves to portray the gays as mincing about with a toe stuck up just so, and also fucking sheep! I have to say that all the other, lesser cartoons sure looked bland this week by comparison. So today we’re going to play a little game called Could This Cartoon Be Improved With A Racist Monkey Or Mincing Gay? MORE »

• WE ARE STILL BOMBING PAKISTAN ALL THE TIME: Sure Syria was big news this weekend, but did you know that US-led forces or CIA drones have been involved in 12 air strikes in Pakistan in the last 10 weeks? The Pakistani president does not care for this one bit. [ABC News (the Australian one)]

What is this weirdness? Joe Biden was talking to some supporters this weekend, at a fundraiser, about how Barack Obama will basically turn into a totalitarian dictator after he’s elected, just like Hercules did when he rinsed all the horseshit out of Washington by diverting a few rivers. Plus there will probably be another war or something, which Obama supporters will have to get behind. MORE »

And now we fight into the third and final round of this hellish battle between the Black Knight and the jabbering old goon. Not very exciting, is it? Is the idea to keep Barry from offending anyone? Well, mission accomplished. Let’s get some bloodshed! Red meat! Eh, no, it’s a debate. Always boring, terrible, and oh lord of allah there is another half hour of this, let’s go. (Here is the Pre-Game and Part I and Part II.) MORE »

Sarah Palin’s speech was so nasty that she started shooting Canadian troops. Why would she do that? [Extreme Mortman]

Like so many McCain campaign disasters — choosing Phil “Poor People Suck” Gramm as financial adviser or announcing a press conference on an oil rig during a hurricane — it probably seemed like a terrific idea at the time: Harass Barack Obama into embarking on an international fact-finding mission thing, which would obviously provide so many embarrassing gaffes and make Americans scared to death of the Boy Muslim President. MORE »

The Obama campaign is all about IMAGE CONTROL these days and GOOD OPTICS, which is why nobody can wear a green Hamas shirt around the candidate. Now Barack Obama is stone cold ignoring the press on his Middle Eastern Hope ‘N Basketball Tour, leaving it to some military nobody to hold the camera while he shoots three-pointers when really such hard-hitting news coverage should be left to trained journalistic professional nobodies. MORE »

Hey did you hear Barack Obama is doing this worldwide terror tour with his senator friends? Look at those crowds, of soldiers! (Yes, also a lot of them are black. This is true in real life, too.) We can’t really hear what Obama is saying, but he gets a lot of applause, and then he makes a THREE-POINTER FROM DOWNTOWN and he hasn’t even changed into workout clothes. [YouTube]