FINE, ‘ANY CONSPIRACY GOES’ COMMENTER IS BANNED: The commenter “nader paul kucinich gravel,” who likes all half-fringe politicians, right or left, has been banned. We thought it was funny (maybe six months ago) that all of his/her comments were shaped into little pyramids! Oh, well.

• Barack Obama demanded that Iran turn over blueprints to its underground ex-secret nuclear hideaway, and threatened to take away the US’s gas and oil investment money. Iran responded by test-firing a bunch of short-range missiles and then claiming they were medium-range missiles. Sassy/grim! [New York Times]
• NATO and the US have decided to side with current Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai in his quest to continue to be President of Afghanistan, despite very mean-spirited gossip about how the election was maybe a sham. [Washington Post]
• Angela Merkel and her party, the Christian Democratic Union, have WON THE COUNTRY OF GERMANY for another four years. Well, congratulations. [Wall Street Journal]
• Flighty auteur Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland of all places for the his famous sex crime of sex with a 13 year old in 1978. [Los Angeles Times]
• William Safire died this weekend. Before his noted death, he was also famous for writing a bunch of lies for Richard Nixon and as well as the New York Times‘ “On Language” column. [Reuters]
• The more Obama insists that New York Governor David Paterson not attempt to be governor again, the more committed Paterson is to doing exactly that. [CNN]

So overweight former baseball technician Curt Schilling will not be America’s new beloved Republican Ted Kennedy after all. Here are the known conditions that might have been factors in his proto-failure:

• He’s not even actually a registered Republican, which many political Beltway D.C. Boston insiders speculated would interfere with his ability to run on the Republican ticket
• Aggressive unpopularity

“Regardless of the amount of support and outreach that’s been given to me, it just did not make sense,” Schilling told someone at some point in response to all this. [CNN]

• Happy New Year (or “Rosh Hashanah”) to all Wonkette’s Jewish friends! Traditionally one rings in the new year by dipping apples in honey and telling one’s parents that of course, one is absolutely going to synagogue tonight. [Washington Post]
• An alternative way to celebrate: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced earlier today that the Holocaust was a myth. Ok! [New York Times]
• And speaking of Iran, Obama is going back on all Reagan’s Cold War/Star Wars missile defense plans in favor of sending a signal to Israel and the Arabs that the US is well aware of what a bad scene Iran is. [New York Times]
• Max Baucus will do exactly whatever his new friend Olympia Snowe would like him to do to his health care bill, so long as it does not alienate his old group of friends, the Democrats, in the process. [Wall Street Journal]
• Apparently nostalgic for a time when people cared about this, the House and the Senate easily passed some crucial legislation BANNING the ACORNs from receiving federal money. [Los Angeles Times]
• Kim Jong-Il told some Chinese guy, an envoy, that no one had anything to worry about re: North Korea nuking the planet maybe. Despite this, for whatever reason, people are still worried. [Reuters]

The British are terribly, terribly cross with America’s former Vice President Dick Cheney. The meddlesome Cheney somehow found himself all mixed up in counter-terrorism investigations over there! It seems he almost totally botched the UK’s arrest of three British guys who were plotting to blow up seven airliners headed for North America. Specifically, Cheney tried to have them arrested before they even bought plane tickets on the planes they were going to bomb. Ha ha! It’s cute, how anxious he is. MORE »

Police found some new dead guy being dead last Friday in Rock Creek Park, Washington’s #1 secret murder location. Was he just some hobo, or was he… A CIVIL LIBERTIES LOBBYIST? He was a civil liberties lobbyist! “The man who was found dead in Rock Creek Park on Friday has been identified as Larry Frankel, 54. Frankel was State Legislative Director for the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office, and previously served as executive director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania. Sources say Frankel had been missing since at least Wednesday, and preliminary word is that he died of natural causes. D.C. police found Frankel face down in a creek in the park on Friday morning. He was dressed in jogging clothes.” Why would Gary Condit do this again? [DCist]

First Chandra Levy. Then killah bees. Now this. What could possibly make Rock Creek Park more murderous and cruel? Suggestion: unmarked mine fields. [DCist] MORE »

By the Comics Curmudgeon
If there is one thing guaranteed to enrage America’s arbiter of good taste, it is making any kind of snide remark about Ted Kennedy when he is ill or, in the current case, dead. Naturally, this rule has been flouted relentlessly for the past two days by the crassest, most awful people in the world, which is to say political cartoonists. Who are these heartless monsters, and why do they try so very hard to ruin our national conversation about how much we love Ted Kennedy? MORE »

• THAT WAS LIKE HIROSHIMA AND RWANDA AND ANTIETAM COMBINED, TIMES DRESDEN, SQUARED: If you put your ear close enough to the monitor, you can actually hear the screams of devastation and carnage. The smoke from the wreckage can be seen from several Internet towns away. We ultimately decided not to include this warning to Kristen at the end of that post, and it’s definitely too late now, but for good measure: KRISTEN: If you’re one of those people who gets offended when anonymous commenters on one of the Internet’s blogs say mean things about you, then you simply should not read this thread. Also, George W. Bush ruined the country/world.

ROBERT NOVAK, WASHINGTON REPORTER FOR 666 YEARS, IS DEAD: Didn’t this happen like a month ago? Oh, that was Walter Cronkite. Hmm! Well, Robert Novak is dead now too. Sail on, sail on, sailor. [Huffington Post]

A shocking new study proves (or weakly suggests) that beloved composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died not of Pig AIDS or Night Horrors, but from common strep throat. Mozart perished at age 35 — and not as a six-year-old muppet child as suggested by the movies — and was buried in a Vienna trash pile behind Hitler’s art school. But what killed the genius has long vexed whoever did this study, we guess. MORE »