Hot on the heels of yesterday’s impossibly exciting news of the opportunity to pay at least $70 to hear Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton sitting in adjacent armchairs and mumble talking points in a vaguely conversational rhythm: a cancellation of that exact thing! Apparently everyone was too into it, and this is why it had to end before it began. According to some Clinton spokesperson: “This event … was supposed to be a discussion between the two former presidents, and has been cancelled because it was not being billed as such by an overeager promoter.” How dare the promoter describe the event in such a way as to attempt to convince people to attend?  [New York Post]

Bill Clinton and George W. Bush will simultaneously perform impressions of relevance at Radio City Music Hall, where in February they will “debate topics ranging from the economy, to foreign policy, to the current administration.” Details are still fuzzy re: why anyone suggested this in the first place, what anyone believes the stakes to be or hopes to gain from this, or what’s in it for absolutely anyone—Clinton, Bush, the audience, Radio City Music Hall, or you, simply hearing in passing that this thing even exists. MORE »

Has anyone else had recurring nightmares about being forced to read this exact PoLiTiCo article over and over, for eternity? You wake up in sweats, trembling. You have just experienced the nearest thing the political Internet can offer as an equivalent to the Sisyphean Task. Just as you reach Peak Politico, it rolls back and starts anew. MORE »

This is one of those Jake Tapper-esque “Just sayin’, it’s a fact, just sayin’…” style twats from CBS’ Mark Knoller, who probably doesn’t mean to imply anything, but is just sayin’, this is a statistic, just puttin’ it out there, interpret it how you will, just sayin’. [Twitter]

FUCK YEAH GET AMP’D! BUSINESS! MAKING BILLS, A FORM OF AMERICAN CURRENCY! MORE »

• HEY GAYS, HERE’S A ‘BIG VICTORY’ FOR YOU: HA: “WASHINGTON — An administration official says President Barack Obama plans to nominate an openly gay lawyer as the United States’ ambassador to New Zealand and American Samoa.” Ooh, big important job there! Even George W. Bush’s first openly gay ambassador appointee was for Romania, which is somehow gutsier. They have so many homophobic vampires there, just really dangerous. [AP]

New information has arisen concerning former mid/lower-level no-name douchey excerpt-mongering George W. Bush speechwriter, the very smart conservative person Matt Latimer! Last week we examined the useless, exploitative heap of self-preserving, unconfirmable anecdotes he passed along to GQ to publicize the release of his douchey tell-all piece of crap book, Speechless, which chronicles the Bush Administration’s greatest failure of all: tainting this wide-eyed Michigan conservative’s idealism, with its embrace of PETTY WASHINGTON POLITICS! Poor Matt! We hope this shittily written after-the-fact account of nothing makes a lot of money for him; he’s suffered enough, having to work (= eavesdrop on private conversations) at that STUPID Bush White House for like two days… Anyway, that new information: so the guy who hired this punk at the White House has written an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal slamming Latimer and more or less calling him gay for Donald Rumsfeld. MORE »

• All George W. Bush wanted was to build a missile shield in the Czech Republic or Poland but Obama—because he doesn’t want the typical semester abroad experience—would rather the shield be somewhere less like, banal, like Turkey or southern Europe. [New York Times]
• The lab worker fellow who is now a “person of interest” in the murder of the Yale lab worker gal will probably be promoted to “suspect under arrest,” as there is new DNA evidence that’s literally incriminating. [Hartford Courant]
• The White House is hesitant to make the Joe Wilson thing about race, despite the best efforts of the “Carter White House” to do so. [Washington Post]
• Twitter, the Internet company that publishes the perverse away message library Twitter, is worth $1 billion. It could buy itself a 141st character with that sort of money. [Reuters]
• Mary Travers, a 1960s person who performed in the musical rock group Peter, Paul and Mary, is dead now from leukemia. [Los Angeles Times]
• Some German teenager brought Molotov cocktails and an ax to school on Thursday and killed very seriously injured! nine people with the Molotov cocktails and ax. [AP]

You may have seen on the Internets this morning various excerpts from what appears to be GQ’s answer to Vanity Fair’s Levi Johnston article, in terms of the great “which major New York magazine can publish the weirdest and least fact-checkable 10-page fart of targeted-readership porn” journalism wars. “Matt Latimer,” a late-term speechwriter for George W. Bush, has written a snippy sack of anecdotes from his time in/near the White House during the 2008 presidential race, the Wall Street collapse, etc etc. It could have been an interesting read, but here’s the problem: it’s not. It is one of the shittiest pieces of writing, ever, or at least since Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Did you know that not a single person in the White House knew anything about anything except for smug mid-level stenographer “Matt Latimer,” according to Matt Latimer? MORE »

ALL OF THIS IS FACTUAL TRUTH: “So thank fucking christ that the Commander in Chief is no longer subjecting the nation to death porn. No, this year it’s limited to a nutty little cult leader on basic cable who is encouraging his radicalized band of fanatical followers to invade the cities where the tragedy actually happened in order to shock the populace back into fear. Glenn Beck is an actual terrorist, and the people attending his rally in DC tomorrow are al-Qaeda in America.” [Alex Pareene]

By the Comics Curmudgeon
The September 11 attacks were terrible for any number of reasons, with the exploding and the wars and the death, and so it’s obviously petty to bitch about the many terrible cartoons they spawned, with the Statue of Liberty, crying, but when it’s your JOB to think about cartoons, as it has, somewhat improbably, become mine, then this is the sort of thing you think about, sometimes, when you think about 9/11. And there were no 9/11 weeping Statue of Liberty cartoons this year, so, VICTORY, in that extremely limited sense! But there was still a bunch of other crap. MORE »