• 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]

The “godfather of neoconservatism,” Irving Kristol, died at 89 today. Although he has been quieter in recent years, Kristol’s personal political history is famous, and probably over-exaggerated, but goes something likes this: when he was an undergraduate at the “radical” City College of New York, from which he graduated in 1940, his small group of Trotskyite (or at least anti-Stalinist) leftists held ferocious debates from Alcove 1 of the college’s lunch room with the pro-Stalinist leftists in Alcove 2, about politics. MORE »

The official White House Flickr photo-porn stream has crassly brought POLITICS into the death of famous politician Ted Kennedy, by posting a set of pictures titled, “Remembering Senator Kennedy.” Yeah, more like “Remembering the Politician Ted Kennedy, instead of the apolitical national mascot we all loved as our own sort of Col. Sanders or whatever.” God, these Obamas …. [White House Flickr]

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 »

Beloved Utah Republican Orrin Hatch loves to sing, and he loves to compose songs, so he can sing them! The songs are often about the Mormon God, but this time the song is about the Liberal God, Ted Kennedy, who has tragically died of old age and sickness. Enjoy! [YouTube via "Scott R."]

To the nation’s shrinking pool of 80-year-old bitter white wingnuts, there is only one thing to know about liberal Taxachusetts leftist liberal Ted “Edward” Kennedy: Forty years ago, he showed the ultimate disrespect for Republican Political Traditions by getting in the car with an attractive girl …. And then he drove off a bridge and accidentally drowned the girl and spent several hours trying to sober up/get his story straight. But let there be no confusion. The only reason Wingnuts have ever been upset about Kennedy is a) He didn’t hate black people, like they do, and b) He perhaps had a secret sexy time with a girl. There are other facts about the “Actual lion loose in the Senate,” too! MORE »

So long, old fella. [NYT]

The Summer of Celebrity/News Death continues! Don Hewitt, the guy who created famous old-people program 60 Minutes, is dead at 86. He, like all people who died this summer and got obits in the NYT, is/was a legend. Legend of what, you ask? TeeVee! Before this guy, we hear, there was no such thing as the TeeVee News Magazine. We don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing — well, on second thought, it was probably a bad thing. The television news killed the important newspaper industry, remember? And now look where we are! [CBS News]

He hadn’t anchored the Evening News in nearly three decades, but Walter Cronkite set the standard for serious, authoritative network news. The stuff he covered was the biggest stuff of the 20th Century: from WWII to JFK, Apollo to Vietnam, Chicago ‘68 to Watergate and the slow rot of America beginning in the mid-1970s. MORE »

Robert McNamara accomplished many things in his long life, from revitalizing Ford Motor Co. with a new line of safe compact cars to decades of work to alleviate global poverty and reduce the risk of nuclear war. But he dies today as the “architect of the Vietnam War,” and it seemed the whole rest of his life was a good faith attempt to make up for that awful karma. MORE »

SO LONG, JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN: The revered historian died yesterday at 94. He had a good run, at least! Here, spend the 53 minutes you would otherwise spend today looking at horse porn watching this lovely 2005 interview with Charlie Rose. He was just great in every way. [Washington Post]