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]

Like many proud leaders of the Grand Old Party, Texas Sen. John Cornyn recently said something inappropriate and terrible and damaging to his country while defending something expensive, war-related, and unnecessary. Last week he argued against curtailing the Pentagon’s F-22 program on the grounds that we will need those bad boys to bomb various countries in the future. He then listed four countries that the United States currently has no intention of bombing, one of which was INDIA — the American ally — what with the “increased exercise of their military power.” Ha ha, eat an ICBM of dicks, India! But this was all just a misunderstanding, according to Cornyn’s spokesman. He meant to say that we need F-22s to bomb China soon. China. This just clears everything up! Cornyn/Santelli 2012… MORE »

Known lamer Hu Jintao, the President of China, had to cut short his stay at the boring, disorganized Italian G8 kegger today so as to “deal with” deadly riots in his country’s northwest Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, boo. (At least that’s his excuse; he just didn’t want to answer gay Europe’s treehugger questions about the new coal-fired power plants he opens every week — awkward!) 156 people have died in this latest bout of Uighur-Han Chinese violence centered in the city Urumqi, which is like China’s Seattle. So. Should Bermudans be worried that the four released Uighurs from Guantanamo Bay will kill them all? Violent deathbot Andy McCarthy of the National Review weighs in! MORE »

Every human with a brain clearly understands that the best way to “deal with North Korea” at this point or really any point is to nuke Kim Jong Il in the butt, kill all of its civilians (children first, because what do they know?), donate the women to Wall Street banks which can use them as reserves against further drops in mortgage-backed securities, e-mail Texas’ oil to North Korean aquifers so that it might be drilled up, for profit, Establish Free Markets of dildo retail chains, and what else, oh right, let American colonizers vote for shit periodically. This is the respectable centrist opinion, and the government is ready to just run with it once it gets maybe 2 or 3 more specific details about how to actually carry out the invasion of this country. Fortunately, for them, a Pajamas Media columnist has UMM ALREADY DONE THIS? MORE »

Here is a rather low-budget rip of “war correspondent” Michele Bachmann crying with Sean Hannity over how everyone makes fun of her for raising issues that literally do not exist. The actual elected Congressional legislator has judiciously spent her time introducing a constitutional amendment “to prohibit the President from entering into a treaty or other international agreement that would provide for the United States to adopt as legal tender in the United States a currency issued by an entity other than the United States,” because she thinks the United States is trying to replace the dollar. Again: she thinks the United States is trying to replace the dollar, as its currency. MORE »