• Last night the Yankees baseball team won the competition that determines the best baseball team of all the other baseball teams! [New York Times]
• 600 UN staffers in Afghanistan will leave the country for a few weeks while the UN works to find them housing that will be harder to blow up. [Washington Post]
• Hurricane Ida is currently in the midst of hitting Nicaragua. It’s expected to bring with it 25 inches of rain, mudslides, all the tradition hurricane accoutrement, etc. [CNN]
• Exxon Mobil and Shell have won the World Series of receiving the rights to oil fields in southern Iraq! The Phillies did not win this either. [WSJ]
• Cash bonuses on Wall Street will be up 40% this year. [Reuters]
• Later this week, Toyota will be sending out a drivers’ mat recall, as the acceleration pedal can get caught in drivers’ mats in certain models. [Los Angeles Times]

• Big Oil and Big Natural Gas are fighting, like they always do! It’s about energy policy, like it always is! [New York Times]
• David Axelrod and all his friends are preemptively very offended—on behalf of America—by Wall St.’s big bonuses. [Washington Post]
• Pakistan soldiers cornered a bunch of Taliban people in South Waziristan, which is a place they really wanted to be for whatever reason. [WSJ]
• A suicide bomber interrupted a meeting between Shiite and Sunni tribesman in Iraq by blowing it up and killing six military commanders. [Los Angeles Times]
• The sheriff who has jurisdiction in Evil Balloon County, Colorado, confirmed the hoax and will now be doing everyone on Earth a favor by pressing charges against the hellish Balloon Parents. [CNN]
• Three people died of non-Detroit-related reasons while running the Detroit Marathon. [Detroit Free Press]

• BEST LINE SO FAR, FROM ‘ACCOMPLISHMENTS’ SECTION: “Operation Iraqi Freedom ousted the dictator from power and liberated more then 23 million people.” [GOP.com]

We were going to do another Children’s Treasury to “honor 9/11,” to remember the most cosmically mind-fucking outbursts that various still-to-this-day-employed pundits said about death & war between 2001 and 2003, but why not just give the full stage to The Mustache of Truth and his famous “Suck. On. This.” Manifesto from May 30, 2003? You know, the most evil thing anyone has ever said about anything! MORE »

George Will is such a hot potato right now! BUT A SPINELESS POTATO? He received so much publicity for his other column a few days ago — when he “stunned” Washington by “going Galt” and calling for an end to the millenia-old Afghanistan war, making him the first very serious important pundit to do so, ever — that now he’s like, “Iraq is also no good.” Hmm where’d he get that idea? Probably the Huffington Post or Al Gore one of the other Internet places. MORE »

A number of you have been sending us this amazing thing out of the blue — Ahh, it was on Sullivan this morning, GOT IT — about a secret chat between French queer Jacques Chirac and American dynamo George W. Bush before the Iraq war, the details of which Chirac has supposedly confirmed: “Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.” MORE »

You know how many fun things there are to do in Iraq these days? Not so many! It used to be that, if you were a man, you could just chill out in public cafes and smoke your hookahs with other mustachioed dudes while you awaited the next random suicide bombing. But now the Iraqi cabinet is putting a stop to that nonsense — the smoking nonsense, anyhow. MORE »

This “mini-Katrina” of a Fox News gem is a few days old, but we want to ensure that everyone on the Internet sees it. What’s more interesting is how Iran, Israel, Syria, and Jordan hover as parallel planes 10,000 miles above the Earth’s surface. Also, there is no country named “Jordan,” come on, that can’t be real. [Washington Independent]

Here, kiddies. Masturbate to this Friday Liberal Pornography while we look for some “real news” to make fun of. [YouTube]

Many Wonkette readers may “moonlight” as viewers of the Stephen Colbert television show, hooray. In recent weeks Colbert has made jokes about the security situation surrounding his trip to the vague “Persian Gulf” area at some point in the next few months. Thanks to Sarah Palin, we now know that this will be in Iraq, in June. Which was obvious enough (maybe?) but still… Twitter + Sarah Palin. [Videogum, Twitter]

Oh hey has everyone seen that GQ article by the perpetually awesome Robert Draper about how completely insane the Defense Department went under the crazed leadership of lilliputian despot Donald Rumsfeld? GOOD GOLLY, as Rumsfeld would say. MORE »