By the Comics Curmudgeon
As your Comics Curmudgeon demonstrated earlier this year, political cartoonists love butts. Just love ’em! The ass is the most polysemous of images, representing everything from sex appeal to debasement and humiliation to an actual butt. So we’re presenting a panoply of ass shots this week, with a greater emphasis on sodomy. But those of you who aren’t butt fans (even though such a person is scarcely imaginable), fear not! There will also be severed limbs. MORE »

• Matt Yglesias dabbles in some parliamentary role playing. [Matt Yglesias]
• A thousand years from now, historians will agree that Barack Obama was the worst military strategist of all time. They will write heavily footnoted volumes about how even Bo could beat Barack in a simple game of Stratego. Yes. Barack Obama is a disgrace to America’s proud military might. [RedState]
• The port-drinking snooty-britches at Oxford quite nearly made “teabagger” the Most Beguiling Word Of The Year. [Think Progress]
• The terrible SEIU surrounded Joe Lieberman’s home and cut his power and teepeed his lawn and now who will rescue poor, fragile Joe Lieberman? Who will save him from these godless brutes? [Gateway Pundit]
• The Weekly Standard curates a Chinese “Flaming Barack Obama” exhibit. [Weekly Standard]

• Obama told Chinese teenagers about the uncensored Internet, a mediocre collection of re-purposed AP articles and some videos that generally people only like when it’s not available.  [New York Times]
• Over at some United Nations summit, everyone bonded about how much they hate hunger but declined to throw any money at the problem. [AP]
• Starting in January, GM will start giving the US $1 billion per quarter to pay off the company’s debt. [Washington Post]
• Late Friday, when no one was paying attention, Robert Gates whispered in the Supreme Court’s ear that the Pentagon is forbidding the release of those US military-terror suspect photos. [CNN]
• Some Democrats are working on a bill that would compensate everyone whose hours were cut so their companies wouldn’t go out of business immediately. Wonkette Games: what will Democrats and Republicans do to convince everyone on Earth to hate this idea in just a few weeks? [The Hill]
• Palestinians might ask the UN for their own state because they are very frustrated with the US, Israel, and not having their own state. [WSJ]

• If you were hoping to buy or rent a bunch of abortions and charge them care of whatever new health care bill ends up passing, this will not be possible! [New York Times]
• China is very upset with the Dalai Lama for going to some Himalayan town that is not technically a part of China but is so close it’s probably at least entertaining the notion. [Washington Post]
• It’s probable that Nidal Malik Hasan acted alone at Ft. Hood. Oh plus President Barack Obama, but other than that, alone, yes. [Wall Street Journal]
• So guess now’s as good a time as any to take a look at mental health policy and practices in the military. [Los Angeles Times]
• Even though Tony Blair will never admit it, he still wants to be the president of the EU. [Times Online]
• Hurricane Ida is the first hurricane to hit America this year. It struck parts of Mississippi, Florida, and New Orleans. All three still exist.  [AP]

The CNN Political Ticker has a cute story about those silly Chinese and one of their very primitive thinker-people and Congress and stuff. What wacky bad jokes can be made here? “WASHINGTON (CNN) – In a belated celebration on Wednesday, the House marked last month’s 2,560th birthday of Chinese philosopher Confucius by passing a resolution recognizing ‘his invaluable contributions to philosophy and social and political thought.’” Next sentence… wait for it… “But some members apparently prefer their Confucius confined to a fortune cookie rather than on the House floor.” HEY-O! Take that, railroad workers. [CNN via segue-monitoring operative "Josh G."]

• One of the winners of the Nobel Prize for Economics is some American gal, Elinor Ostrom, who is the first lady economist ever to win. Something about communities and resources, anyway it was uncontroversial! [CNN]
• So our government is still working out the kinks in its system of telling when foreign people who visit here actually leave. [New York Times]
• Bombings, bombings, bombings all weekend in Pakistan, all thanks to the Taliban. [WSJ]
• There is a new song on the Internet from the dead, apparently self-referential pop star Michael Jackson called “This Is It.” [LA Times]
• A gang of British Greenpeace people had a sleepover party on the roof of the Palace of Westminster to let everyone know how much they despise climate change, and also politics. [Guardian]
• China is so excited to be able to sell Hummers soonish! There are some minor “regulatory emissions things” to figure out, but other than that, just pure excitement. [Reuters]

• Eight soldiers were killed on Saturday in a region of Afghanistan that the U.S. was kinda already supposed to have left. [Washington Post]
• Obama has said NO THANK YOU to hanging out with the Dalai Lama. He will do this to impress his new popular friends, the Chinese, who hate the Dalai Lama like so much. [Washington Post]
• …and China will attempt to become better friends with North Korea. You see, they have communism in common! [Reuters]
• The socialists have won Greece’s national elections! Technically, now, Barack Obama is the first black president of Greece. [WSJ]
• October 25th is the big day for some U.N. inspectors, who will go to Iran and get to visit the newly un-secret underground weapons cave thing! [Los Angeles Times]
• Pay-per-minute telephone psychic Alan Greenspan says the following: unemployment will reach 10% in the third quarter, but the economy overall will grow 3%. [CNN]

• Nearly a hundred were killed in flooding caused by an 8.0 undersea earthquake (and a bunch of diligent, follow-up tsunamis) in Samoa and American Samoa. [New York Times]
• New evidence suggests that the terrorist group responsible for last year’s Mumbai hotel violence is still way into terrorism, despite the fact that this makes them kind of boring, doesn’t it? Anyway, some American intelligence people think that Pakistan’s secret spy police, the ISI, is more or less okay with this. [New York Times]
• The popular Asian country of China is only pretending to be a good friend to the US and sit there quietly and listen as Obama goes on about Iran, and how terrible Iran is, when really, China will still import oil from Iran, as China’s #1 priority is not messing up its own economic boom. China is sort of undermine-y, is the point. [Washington Post]
• Pedro Almodovar, Martin Scorsese and… Woody Allen—Woody Allen—have DEMANDED that authorities release known sex pervert Roman Polanski. See, he was captured on the way to a film festival at which he was being honored, so, to arrest him there was a bit déclassé. [CNN]
• After an apparently successful “Distracted Driving Summit,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood might propose criminalizing texting while driving, or banning handheld cell phone use in the car, or making teenagers illegal. [AP]

Treachery! The wingnuts have a new thing to type about: “We now have solid confirmation that the communist government of China did in fact raise their flag above Washington, DC for the first time this past Sunday, September 20, 2009.” Obama, OPEN YOUR EYES! “The communist government of China now owns a great deal of US debt and factions of their military threaten to launch a nuclear strike against the United States over possible conflicts involving our allies in Taiwan. They used to only be able to threaten to destroy the west coast of America, but due to the theft of our two stage missile technology, during the Clinton administration, China now has the nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and delivery systems to attack every major city in the United States.” These strikes will of course happen tonight, during Jay Leno or whatever, because of the flag thing. [WorldNetDaily, ALIPAC]

• A BROKEN RECORD named Osama bin Laden released another tape. To review, likes: Islam, recording audio tapes, routine; dislikes: America, Israel, insolence. [Times Online]
• China is forcing the Chinese to pay very high taxes on, let’s see, American-made chickens and car parts. This aggressively random move is in response to Obama’s announcement on Friday that he was going to tax the shit out of Chinese tires. [New York Times]
• Green Revolution guy Dr. Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize after he showed billions of people how to grow wheat more efficiently so as to avoid starving to death, has died. “Fields of Gold” will be especially relevant when it is inevitably played at his funeral. [WSJ]
• President Barack Obama is visiting Wall Street today to tell everybody to take responsibility for their actions, because this will help him institute financial reform eventually. It is an invaluable form of legislative savvy he has mastered. [Washington Post]
• Police found a body in a campus building and they think it belongs to that gal at Yale who was missing and is now dead, probably. [Los Angeles Times]

While the Main Stream Media (MSG) was wrapped up in the pointless, breathless, click-y coverage of Barack Obama serving beer to a Harvard professor, his vice president and some dumb mick cop, the real story was Obama’s secret meeting with the Chinese, as photographed here by Pete Souza’s spy camera. Why is Barack Obama giving our nation’s legacy (a basketball) to this combover fellow from China? [White House Flickr]