THESE COUNTRIES ARE WITH THE TERRORISTS: Ooooh scary, NATO! “This month five European foreign ministers from Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, and Luxembourg called on NATO to take steps to remove US tactical nuclear weapons from European soil.” Again Europe is hating our American imperial freedoms, specifically the freedom to stash hundreds of red-white-and-blue nuclear bombs in their sovereign countries, to ensure global freedom and Christianity. The American military empire is hilarious. Imagine if some foreign country kept hundreds of its operational nuclear weapons in Missouri or Ohio or wherever! Because you know those foreigns — loud, irritable… twitchy. Maybe life would be a little more exciting. [Matt Yglesias]

Barack Obama is snubbing the European continent of Europe by declining to attend a US-EU summit in Europe’s Madrid. The Spanish Prime Minister spent all last night telling Obama how much he hated him, likely in Spanish: “The Spanish prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero [...] was described as angry and embarrassed, and European officials said there was a set of high-level diplomatic exchanges overnight.” Obama did not respond to any of Zapatero’s probable upside-down exclamation mark-laden text messages, because he’s like, I never said I was doing a semester abroad. Drama! MORE »

• Obama is just pretending to have any sway within the Obama/Hamid Karzai powercouple. [New York Times]
• A bunch of people in the Army were very encouraging of Nidal Hasan’s religious phase, and some even suggested he take college courses about Islam. Should we purge the Army of anyone who self-identifies as a “supportive friend” too?? [Washington Post]
• The Malevolent Balloon People of Colorado will plead guilty when they are charged with being the worst parents ever not even in the usual hyperbolic sense. [CNN]
• Americans might not buy as much useless garbage for their loved ones this holiday season. [AP]
• Obama may dip into TARP funds to help out with the huge deficit. [WSJ]
• The weak dollar has consequences other than all the rich Europeans coming to New York to shop “because it is so cheap here”: oil prices could go up, like way up. [Reuters]

War-loving Bill Kristol — in his terrifying “Quick take from The Post’s opinion writers” — thinks that it is so hilarious for Barack Obama to receive and accept the Nobel Peace Prize that he need not even write about how hilarious it is, it is just that hilarious. He has a better suggestion for a recipient, though, and that would be the person who loves war most of all: “We could note that, if the Swedes Norwegians wanted to give the Nobel Peace Prize to an American, it would have been been better to give it to Sen. John McCain for having the guts to push through the surge in Iraq, which has brought relative peace to that country. But that would be overkill. The choice is so self-evidently Not a Parody that no explanation is required or possible.” Oh, pardon moi — “ha and/or ha.” Now he will have his afternoon tea. MORE »

South Carolina, what a poop pile, right? It is no wonder the governor, Mark Sanford, never wants to spend any time in that goddamned place. Have you ever been down there? It is this awful fetid swamp, most of it consisting of nuclear waste dumps (in the rivers!), and one-in-five adults are jobless, forever, when things are “good.” Really, who can blame Sanford for wanting to jet all over the world all the time, banging rich latinas? He’ll even go on European Holiday with his hated wife and children, anything to get the hell out of South Carolina. MORE »

Italy was a pretty important country or whatever about 2,000 years ago, but since then it’s gradually deflated to its current status as a wacky do-nothing ice-cream colony of back hair and male capri pants and trash and rats. Pompey was lucky to die when he did! Now the person running this ancient land-phallus is a naked orange clown who spends all of his time ringleading orgies with young non-wife girls or fiddling around with the roster of the soccer team he randomly owns. Which is great for him! But unfortunately for this Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, he signed Italy up as the host of tomorrow’s latest G8 conference a while back without realizing that he and his minions would have to “do preparation stuff” in advance, so they just did nothing, and now “Washington” is trying to kick this embarrassing pizza-bagel of a country out of its Rich Nations Club once and for all. MORE »

One of the worst things about America is how much of it you have to deal with, just to get from Worthwhile Point A to Worthwhile Point B. What if you were, for example, having a nice breakfast in New York at Balthazar or whatever, and you needed to go to Los Angeles for a meeting at the Hotel Figueroa, and then after that you wanted to spend a few days at the Ahwahnee in Yosemite Valley, and then maybe head to New Orleans for the Jazz Festival. Well dear god you would have to deal with so many cretins, rednecks, guidos, crackers, lamers and other teabaggers along the way, it’s just barely worth going at all. MORE »

Here’s Barack Obama and his “commie posse” in Europe, testing incredible new Marxist technology which will allow the reading of prepared remarks from the inside of these health-care umbrellas. [White House]

The Czech government collapsed, which means current prime minister — and current president of the European Union, whoops! — Mirek Topolanek is now powerless and will soon be jobless, but that doesn’t mean he can’t deliver an apocalyptically Slavic-ly gloomy sermon against the United States and its terrible bailout plan, which is just like the American response to the previous Great Depression, which sort of led to … Hitler? Yes, Hitler. Depression + Czech troubles = Hitler. Works every time. MORE »

For the past seven million hours, conservative aggregateur Matt Drudge has been blaring the main headline, “OBAMA MOVES TOWARD ‘SWEDISH MODEL’ FOR BANKS,” replete with a sacrilege photo of the profane Swedish flag. The “Swedish Model” is “code” for the evil thing the Swedish government did in the early 1990s after a major real estate and financial bubble: nationalized the biggest insolvent banks, fixed them, and put them back on the market, the end. In other words, it is basically Red Marxism and Islam combined. And now, free-market fappers Lindsey Graham, his “live-in” John McCain, and even Alan Greenspan — who caused the entire crisis, for fun — are voicing their support for Swedish Communist Revolution! MORE »

• AWESOMEST SCULPTURE EVER: It’s a map of Europe! “Here is Bulgaria, represented as a series of crude, hole-in-the-floor toilets. Here is the Netherlands, subsumed by floods, with only a few minarets peeping out from the water. Luxembourg is depicted as a tiny lump of gold marked by a ‘for sale’ sign, while five Lithuanian soldiers are apparently urinating on Russia.” [New York Times]

• WE’RE RICH AGAIN!: Ha ha, gay Europe is now bailing out all of its banks too, meaning the dollar is somehow rising like a biotch against their fancypants “pound” and “euro.” AMERICA FUCK YEAH, now let’s go buy all of their stuff and burn it because fuck fucking Europe, losers. [Bloomberg]

We have listened to this recording of John McCain’s interview with Radio Caracol Miami where he appears not to know who the prime minister of Spain is, or whether or not he’d be willing to meet with him. It is just … weird. MORE »