• Your 2009 World Series will feature the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Phillies, two popular Northeast athletics organizations. USA! [New York Times]
• Baghdad had another suicide bombing: 132 people died, which is the most all at once since 2007. [Washington Post]
• The new new new health care bill will be submitted to the CBO as early as right now, or possibly even earlier this morning! [WSJ]
• “Tony Blair” is a name that’s being thrown about to be the new president of the EU. Michael Sheen is already prepared for this. [Times Online]
• College’s favorite singer, Morrissey, is A-OK after his collapse on a stage in London sometime a couple days ago. [CNN]
• Wall Street money financial fatcats would like to maintain their huge bonus system, duh and thank you. [Reuters]

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 »

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 »

You know what we love more than anything, at Wonkette? Birthdays! Love ‘em love ‘em love ‘em. And there’s nothing better than a sixth birthday. Even better than your fifth birthday! So grown up now, and all blown apart, and god knows how many hundreds of thousands of corpses, and we hanged your fuckin’ dad, ha ha ha. Happy sixth birthday, Iraq War! Weren’t you supposed to be over by now, what with the Hope and all? Maybe when you’re seven-and-a-half, little bitch. Who wants cake? MORE »

Our nation’s Presidents have a long and glorious history of promising “bipartisan healing” and such when it comes to Cabinet appointments. They say they will appoint members of the opposition party to important positions and then they give some toothless middle-of-the-roader an invisible Cabinet post that nobody cares about. Remember Norman Mineta, the Democratic transportation secretary in the early George W. Bush years? No? That’s because he was completely boring and unimportant. (He did have an airport named after him, though! A terrible airport.) Our future President Barack Obama plans to follow in this grand tradition, with one Clintonesque twist: Just like Bill Clinton did, he’ll let a Republican have the high-profile job of Defense Secretary. MORE »

• Last night the White House & Friends finalized Paulson’s $700 billion bailout plan. It’s a lot better than the original version, because both sides made Important Sacrifices. [Wall Street Journal]
• Oh hooray, the House is voting today on Paulson’s Famous Bailout Plan, with the Senate voting maybe as soon as Wednesday, and people for the most part think it’s going to pass. But still, all taxpayers in America hate Hank Paulson and his stupid plan. [Washington Post]
• Obama and McCain are pretending they’re fine with the plan, but Obama says he was holed up with Paulson in a bailout shelter filled with calculators for days while McCain was just pretended to do this thing. [AP]
• Thanks to the vagueness of his new Plan, Demigod of the Treasury Hank Paulson now has unseemly amounts of power, more so than every other financier, ever. [Los Angeles Times]
• Citigroup and Wells Fargo are said to be in competition over Wachovia, which is failing and up for grabs. [Reuters]
• Bombs killed 34 in Baghdad on Sunday, making it the bloodiest day in the city this Ramadan. [CNN]

SADDEST PROTEST EVER: “A group of about 20 veterans of the Iraq War have begun an unpermitted march from Cuernavaca Park to Civic Center.” [Denver Post]

Barack Obama’s had his big interview with Katie Couric, and we have excerpts! Somehow, he seems to let Katie Couric trap him, too, with regards to the Surge. She asks him, at one point, if, Given What We Know Now about declined violence in Iraq, he would’ve supported the Surge last year, hmm? Rather than offer his very logical strategic position on this, he tries to make it an economic issue, about how much these damn wars cost during a time when no one has a home in America. Move the debate back home, but let “The Surge Worked” live yet another day. FTW. MORE »

No timetables for leaving Iraq, declares our George W. Bush! The terrorists would dine out on a timetable! This is why we do not have a timetable for leaving Iraq, even though the Iraqi government wants one (although they have elections too and may be PANDERING to bums who will be killed upon withdrawal[!]). Today, however, “The United States and Iraq have agreed to set a ‘general time horizon’ for the ‘further reduction of U.S. combat forces in Iraq.’” Ooh, this is the ticket. It’s sort of like saying “nothing will change at all, and this crap should temporarily appease both of our stupid constituencies,” but with a different set and sequence of words. [NYT]

Here’s WALNUTS! on this morning’s Today show, fucking himself over. He says that getting our troops out of Iraq is “not too important” considering the fact that we have military bases in such places as Japan and Germany, still. You may recall this “permanent occupation” line of logic from the Republican primary season, as it was the single most horrifying thing a presidential candidate said all cycle. Ohhh, WALNUTS! [YouTube]

Barack Obama wants to leave Iraq, John McCain wants to keep it as a vacation home for 100 years. This is an important decision we must make in our Election. Except it’s not at all(!), because — according to a British newspaper — George W. Bush & Pals are negotiating a Secret Deal that “would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election in November.” Shocking! And once this deal is inked, Bush plans on declaring victory. Again! MORE »