• Total body count was 13—with another 30 injured—at Ft. Hood yesterday. The gunman survived after being shot four times. [New York Times]
• Speaking of the gunman, Army psychiatrist,  Maj. Nidal M. Hasan, here is a lengthy biographical portrait. [Washington Post]
• An important Afghan governor and his militia and their rocket launchers are challenging the legitimacy of new president Hamid Karzai.  [WSJ]
• British PM Gordon Brown—and his soldiers and their implied rocket launchers—also threatened Afghanistan to just, you know, it’s enough already with the corruption. [AP]
• The Pakistani Army invaded a Taliban alcove in lawless, mountainy South Waziristan, presumably also a stop on Sarah Palin’s book tour. [Reuters]
• So apparently a giant wall (of symbolism?) was blocking everyone’s view at the Jay-Z/Beyonce/U2 performance at the Brandenburg Gate at last night’s fall-of-the-Berlin-Wall-themed concert. [Daily Mail]

• Yesterday happened! Recall its winners: Bloomberg, Owens, Christie, various Others. [New York Times]
• It was also yesterday in Virgina too, where Bob McDonnell defeated Creigh Deeds and is therefore the state’s new governor. [Washington Post]
• The state of Maine poured rock salt on gay marriage and voted to up the medical marijuana usage. [WSJ]
• Today is the 30th anniversary of the US Embassy takeover/hostage thing in Tehran, but if today’s mass demonstrations showed anything, it’s that people don’t even need any hostages to yell about hating America. [CNN]
• Bernanke and Friends are likely to decline raising the interest rate. [AP]
• An Afghan soldier literally went rogue and just cold killed five British soldiers with a machine gun inside a police checkpoint. No cheeky Nation polemic is expected to follow. [Times Online]

• Happy Election Day! Today Chris Christie could lose more than just weight, though really, he could lose some weight. [New York Times]
• Political capital, political capital Obama Corzine political politics-word capital. [AP]
• The North Korean Army has taken control of the economy, the country’s food supply, their natural resources, etc. [Washington Post]
• President of Irony (!!) Hamid Karzai—who, you’ll recall, won Afghanistan’s presidential election without even definitely receiving more votes than his opponent—is suddenly so concerned about corruption. Classic projection is what this is. [CNN]
• Two of Britain’s biggest banks—think: about the size of any random American ATMs, like right?—agreed to withhold executive bonuses in exchange for $40 billion “pounds.” (This is one of Corzine’s famous Christie Fatjokes.) [Times Online]
• Hillary Clinton has been really going the extra mile lately in terms of trying to convince all Muslims on Earth to refrain from hating her. [Reuters]

• After very possibly receiving fewer votes than his opponent, Hamid Karzai has won the presidential election of Afghanistan! [New York Times]
• Ford earned $1 billion in the third quarter and people are now thinking the company could be profitable by 2011. [Washington Post]
• Yesterday some American guy—originally from Eritrea, but still totally counts—won the New York City Marathon, which is the first time that’s happened since 1982. [CNN]
• A suicide bomber killed 30-ish people outside a bank in Pakistan, most of whom used to have something or other to do with the military. [AP]
• The New York Yankees baseball team has won another go-round in the baseball tournament, and look at this biased coverage from the New York Post. [New York Post]
• Everyone who’s anyone in the Arab world just despises Hillary Clinton. [Reuters]

• Last night’s baseball match went smashingly/terribly—depending on whether you were in a sports bar with mostly blue decorations or mostly red ones. [Reuters]
• Ahmadinejad implied that Iran would do everyone a favor and would indeed be enriching its uranium elsewhere. [New York Times]
• There’s not enough Tamiflu for all America’s children, which means Obama will have no choice but to murder off what’s left of all the vaccineless ones. [Washington Post]
• The Golden Gate Bay Bridge will be closed again today while engineers continue to make sure that it’s definitely, like 100% not going to randomly collapse. [CNN]
• Obama spent the morning in Dover, Delaware, honoring fallen troops who were recently killed in Afghanistan. [AP]
• The incompetence deepens: the FAA did not give the military a heads up so quickly after that commercial airliner and its unresponsive pilots went AWOL last week. [WSJ]

• Hamid Karzai’s brother, a prominent opium dealer (!), has been receiving CIA paychecks for eight years. He will now be fired and replaced by a teenager and an iPhone app. Recession!  [New York Times]
• A car bomb killed 86 people in Peshawar a couple hours after Hillary Clinton left Peshawar. [AP]
• At least six UN-related people died in a bombing in Kabul. Predictably, the Taliban has claimed responsibility, for such is their schtick. [Washington Post]
• Those pilots who appeared to have totally forgotten to land the plane for an entire hour after they were supposed to have done so have lost their licenses. [CNN]
• “Consumer confidence”—evidently an actual metric and not something people just say—is up for the first time since 2007. [Reuters]
• It’s looking like Iran might outsource its uranium enrichment needs, which is exactly what Obama wanted. [Reuters]

• What happens when a soulless pagan forest pixie asks to be removed from the RedState listserv? Well, to quote Christ… [RedState]
• Tinker Bell is a fucking whore. [Michelle Malkin]
• Dear Barack Obama: Focus! Focus on Afghanistan. Glue a map of Afghanistan to the back of your eyelids, so that you can focus on Afghanistan whilst you slumber. What are you doing right now? Eating lunch? You mean, not focusing on Afghanistan? See? Do you see the problem here? [Hot Air]
• What America needs now more than ever is some good ol’ fashioned conservative pessimism and/or some classic doomsday scenarios — both, if at all possible. Thank you. [Powerline]

So Dick Cheney told Obama to stop “dithering”! Haha, oh, right! Yes, he’ll get right on that… ceasing to dither. This is a hilarious and formidable old man insult used to express one’s displeasure with the lack of bombs and troops and guns and bombs and shit currently being sent to Afghanistan. “Having announced his Afghanistan strategy last March, President Obama now seems afraid to make a decision, and unable to provide his commander on the ground with the troops he needs to complete his mission,” said Cheney. It’s like: is Obama scared? Scared of WAR? Ha! Dick Cheney didn’t realize the President was a GIRL who needs to write in her diary 10 times a day before deploying more American soldiers to Afghanistan. [Los Angeles Times]

• After being prodded by basically everyone on Earth, soon-to-be-former President of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai is ready to admit that he did not actually win the re-election. [New York Times]
• A new poll says that most people think the public option would be a good thing, actually. [Washington Post]
• Swine flu has spread to this one actual swine in Minnesota. It’s hard to feel bad given how appropriate this seems! [WSJ]
• A US scientist was arrested for trying to sell important secrets to someone he thought was an Israeli intelligence guy, but was actually just an American intelligence guy about to arrest him. [CNN]
• Iran is two seconds away from doing something it might possibly regret to Pakistan—possibly bombing it, or possibly explicitly threatening it with bombs. [AP]
• Apple, Inc. shares are the highest they’ve ever been. There are still no available Genius Bar appointments. [Reuters]

Erm so earlier this month someone asked Gen. McChrystal to talk about some of the weird shit that people tell him to do, all the time, re: Afghanistan. He was like, “Oh get this: Chaosistan,” which basically involves letting Afghanistan just become a “Somalia-like haven of chaos that we simply manage from outside.” And everyone laughed and laughed, because how tenuous does that sound? Rather tenuous, is the answer. Oh but anyway, turns out “Chaosistan” was an actual classified CIA document. Ha ha: “Somalia-like haven of chaos”—a regular Sy Hersh this McChrystal.  [Newsweek]

By the Comics Curmudgeon
What is the most amusing part of the human anatomy? While there are a lot to choose from, I’d have to say the butt, mostly because asses and humor occupy the exact same overlap in the Venn diagram between “sexy” and “gross.” Because our dying media establishment is still clinging to antiquated concepts like “dignity” and “morals” and “for Christ’s sake people don’t want to see naked asses in the newspaper,” most political cartoons do not feature naked asses per se (though there are horrifying exceptions). Nevertheless, political cartoons cannot resist the laugh riot that even the fully clothed booty brings to the table. MORE »