• Meet Harry Reid & the Senate’s Health Care Bill: $849 billion, 2,074 pages, no insurance for abortions or illegal immigrants, other characteristics, etc. [CNN]
• Despite really maxing out every copy editor’s patience with the word “contentious,” Hamid Karzai was sworn-in for another five-year term as President of Afghanistan.  [New York Times]
• Eric Holder took questions from 9/11 families about KSM’s trip to New York. [Washington Post]
• Obama wants to do a free-trade deal with South Korea. Give it a week after this thing goes through that “SKaFTA” is not the name of some 16-year-old’s Bouncing Souls cover band. [WSJ]
• Quarantining people isn’t doing much to stop swine flu from killing us all to death. [AP]
• Ireland will not be granted that Fifa World Cup playoff rematch, no matter how unfair the Irish justice minister thinks that handball thing was. [Guardian]

BLAZING SADDLES IS LIKE OBAMA’S STAR WARS FOREIGN POLICY, YEAH?: So exactly how little power does Obama have over Hamid Karzai?: “‘You know that scene in the movie Blazing Saddles, when Cleavon Little holds the gun to his own head and threatens to shoot himself?’ asked Ronald E. Neumann, a former ambassador to Afghanistan.” [New York Times]

• 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]

• Total body count was 13—with another 30 injured—at Ft. Hood yesterday. The gunman survived after being shot four times. [New York Times]
• Speaking of the gunman, Army psychiatrist,  Maj. Nidal M. Hasan, here is a lengthy biographical portrait. [Washington Post]
• An important Afghan governor and his militia and their rocket launchers are challenging the legitimacy of new president Hamid Karzai.  [WSJ]
• British PM Gordon Brown—and his soldiers and their implied rocket launchers—also threatened Afghanistan to just, you know, it’s enough already with the corruption. [AP]
• The Pakistani Army invaded a Taliban alcove in lawless, mountainy South Waziristan, presumably also a stop on Sarah Palin’s book tour. [Reuters]
• So apparently a giant wall (of symbolism?) was blocking everyone’s view at the Jay-Z/Beyonce/U2 performance at the Brandenburg Gate at last night’s fall-of-the-Berlin-Wall-themed concert. [Daily Mail]

• Happy Election Day! Today Chris Christie could lose more than just weight, though really, he could lose some weight. [New York Times]
• Political capital, political capital Obama Corzine political politics-word capital. [AP]
• The North Korean Army has taken control of the economy, the country’s food supply, their natural resources, etc. [Washington Post]
• President of Irony (!!) Hamid Karzai—who, you’ll recall, won Afghanistan’s presidential election without even definitely receiving more votes than his opponent—is suddenly so concerned about corruption. Classic projection is what this is. [CNN]
• Two of Britain’s biggest banks—think: about the size of any random American ATMs, like right?—agreed to withhold executive bonuses in exchange for $40 billion “pounds.” (This is one of Corzine’s famous Christie Fatjokes.) [Times Online]
• Hillary Clinton has been really going the extra mile lately in terms of trying to convince all Muslims on Earth to refrain from hating her. [Reuters]

• After very possibly receiving fewer votes than his opponent, Hamid Karzai has won the presidential election of Afghanistan! [New York Times]
• Ford earned $1 billion in the third quarter and people are now thinking the company could be profitable by 2011. [Washington Post]
• Yesterday some American guy—originally from Eritrea, but still totally counts—won the New York City Marathon, which is the first time that’s happened since 1982. [CNN]
• A suicide bomber killed 30-ish people outside a bank in Pakistan, most of whom used to have something or other to do with the military. [AP]
• The New York Yankees baseball team has won another go-round in the baseball tournament, and look at this biased coverage from the New York Post. [New York Post]
• Everyone who’s anyone in the Arab world just despises Hillary Clinton. [Reuters]

• 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]

• After being prodded by basically everyone on Earth, soon-to-be-former President of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai is ready to admit that he did not actually win the re-election. [New York Times]
• A new poll says that most people think the public option would be a good thing, actually. [Washington Post]
• Swine flu has spread to this one actual swine in Minnesota. It’s hard to feel bad given how appropriate this seems! [WSJ]
• A US scientist was arrested for trying to sell important secrets to someone he thought was an Israeli intelligence guy, but was actually just an American intelligence guy about to arrest him. [CNN]
• Iran is two seconds away from doing something it might possibly regret to Pakistan—possibly bombing it, or possibly explicitly threatening it with bombs. [AP]
• Apple, Inc. shares are the highest they’ve ever been. There are still no available Genius Bar appointments. [Reuters]

• 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]

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 »

Each week, veteran Condiwatcher Peter Huestis (also known as Princess Sparkle Pony) provides a summary of the searing wit and infinite wisdom of America’s Favorite Princess Diplomat™!

Last week, our plucky favorite asked for just over a thousand new secretaries, skipped off to London and then hooked up with dreamy David Miliband for an OMG SURPRISE trip to Afghanistan, but I had trouble paying attention because I kept getting distracted by touching artistic tributes to Madame Secretary scattered all over the web. Learn more about Condi’s week and the Condicentric art world after the jump!

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