• Eight soldiers were killed on Saturday in a region of Afghanistan that the U.S. was kinda already supposed to have left. [Washington Post]
• Obama has said NO THANK YOU to hanging out with the Dalai Lama. He will do this to impress his new popular friends, the Chinese, who hate the Dalai Lama like so much. [Washington Post]
• …and China will attempt to become better friends with North Korea. You see, they have communism in common! [Reuters]
• The socialists have won Greece’s national elections! Technically, now, Barack Obama is the first black president of Greece. [WSJ]
• October 25th is the big day for some U.N. inspectors, who will go to Iran and get to visit the newly un-secret underground weapons cave thing! [Los Angeles Times]
• Pay-per-minute telephone psychic Alan Greenspan says the following: unemployment will reach 10% in the third quarter, but the economy overall will grow 3%. [CNN]

• Happy New Year (or “Rosh Hashanah”) to all Wonkette’s Jewish friends! Traditionally one rings in the new year by dipping apples in honey and telling one’s parents that of course, one is absolutely going to synagogue tonight. [Washington Post]
• An alternative way to celebrate: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced earlier today that the Holocaust was a myth. Ok! [New York Times]
• And speaking of Iran, Obama is going back on all Reagan’s Cold War/Star Wars missile defense plans in favor of sending a signal to Israel and the Arabs that the US is well aware of what a bad scene Iran is. [New York Times]
• Max Baucus will do exactly whatever his new friend Olympia Snowe would like him to do to his health care bill, so long as it does not alienate his old group of friends, the Democrats, in the process. [Wall Street Journal]
• Apparently nostalgic for a time when people cared about this, the House and the Senate easily passed some crucial legislation BANNING the ACORNs from receiving federal money. [Los Angeles Times]
• Kim Jong-Il told some Chinese guy, an envoy, that no one had anything to worry about re: North Korea nuking the planet maybe. Despite this, for whatever reason, people are still worried. [Reuters]

• FINALLY: Famous dead Jackson, Michael Jackson, was buried in the ground outside Los Angeles last night. [New York Times]
• Some Obama cabinet members, like America’s Vice President Joe Biden, are hesitant about sending more troops to Afghanistan, while other people are not hesitant at all about doing this. A nation waits for George Will’s “tiebreaker.” [New York Times]
• California has officially created “Harvey Milk Day,” which honors Harvey Milk, who starred in last year’s overrated Sean Penn biopic. [Los Angeles Times]
• The terrible wildfire that has enveloped the entirety of northern Los Angeles is the work of an arsonist! And now this arsonist is technically a murderer! [Reuters]
• Congratulations to Ahmad Vahidi, Iran’s first lady defense minister and its first lady defense minister who also worked with Hezbollah. This is a crucial step in the struggle for women’s/alleged terrorists’ rights. [CNN]
• Having enriched a bunch of uranium as enriched as it will go, North Korea is THISCLOSE to making a nuclear bomb. [Washington Post]

You know how some business trips end up with everybody naked in the hot tub singing Don’t Stop Believin’, and others end with everybody awkwardly standing around making small talk while furtively glancing at their watches? Bill Clinton’s North Korea summer vacation trip likely falls into the latter category, which is a historical first for Bill Clinton. [The Awl via ... North Korea Propaganda Office, maybe?]

BILL CLINTON SAVES LADIES FROM NORTH KOREA: Uhh, hooray! In a “private mission” rife with secret diplomatic motives and back-door conversations with the U.S. government, Bill Clinton hopped on a jetplane to North Korea, talked up Kim Jong Il for a while, probably offered him exclusive bidding rights to various natural resource contracts in autocratic third-world countries, and won the release of those two American journalists who had been sentenced to HARD LABOR back in March. Okay, Bill Clinton! [CNN]

Oh hey did you hear crazy dwarf-alien Kim Jong-Il has been shooting rockets into the sea, by North Korea? No? ARE YOU SILLY AMERICANS SO OBSESSED WITH THE DEATH OF KING-POP MICHAEL JACKSON AS TO NOT FOLLOW NORTH KOREA’S MIGHTY THREATS? Well, Lil’ Kim wants you to know he is twice as weird as Wacko Jacko, with the additional freaky habits of kidnapping regional movie stars and starving his people, because why not, right? Dwarf motherfucker got to have his Cristal & ‘hos. MORE »

• A brilliant graduate student has compiled thousands of shocking photographs from North Korea, after visiting the country on Google Earth. How did we not know about North Korea’s trees and hills and stuff, which according to these photographs are practically everywhere, and how much longer before they’re auctioned off to the highest terrorist-bidder? [HuffPost]
• TIME Magazine’s Eunuch of the Year John Yoo will testify in court about how he purposely pees the bed every night. It’s true, John Yoo can’t sleep comfortably unless he’s covered in his own urine, and he really needs his rest because his Circadian rhythm is super sensitive to sleep deprivation. Good luck in court, John! [Think Progress]
• The Left loves Racial Profiling because they both adore Belle & Sebastian and have so many hilarious inside jokes that you just wouldn’t get and when they’re at work, they call each other every half hour. They are in love and every night they snuggle on the beach until the tide carries them away. And just because you can’t understand it, RedState — that doesn’t mean it’s not real. Because it is and it’s beautiful. [RedState]
• The Jews have ruined Ahmadinejad’s landslide victory by using Twitter to expose his terrible regime. Please appreciate this: “@BabakMehrabani is saying that he was beaten by a baton and his right hand is numb. He is twitting with the left hand.” [The Daily Dish]

Every human with a brain clearly understands that the best way to “deal with North Korea” at this point or really any point is to nuke Kim Jong Il in the butt, kill all of its civilians (children first, because what do they know?), donate the women to Wall Street banks which can use them as reserves against further drops in mortgage-backed securities, e-mail Texas’ oil to North Korean aquifers so that it might be drilled up, for profit, Establish Free Markets of dildo retail chains, and what else, oh right, let American colonizers vote for shit periodically. This is the respectable centrist opinion, and the government is ready to just run with it once it gets maybe 2 or 3 more specific details about how to actually carry out the invasion of this country. Fortunately, for them, a Pajamas Media columnist has UMM ALREADY DONE THIS? MORE »

Nomadic “lightning rod conservative” pundit Bill Kristol sees your North Korea and raises you a BOMB NORTH KOREA. Bomb what? Where? What in North Korea? Just bomb it? Yes! UPDATE: Oh look Sara already posted about this! Well this video is bigger. [Media Matters via Matt Yglesias]

Man, our Monday news is just such a bummer! You got your lost French airliner, your dead abortion doctor, a venerable car-maker going bankrupt, and now the Republicans have quit shouting “racist bigot” at the nation’s first Hispanic Supreme Court nominee, so there is pretty much nothing fun or funny to talk about today. Thankfully, Bill Kristol is still around for laughs. MORE »

Now that George W. Bush’s war secretary, Robert Gates, is making cuts in missile defense spending, he is officially a San Francisco liberal who wants America to get bombed — nuclear bombed, like on 9/11. Do you want to get 9/11ed again? asks the Heritage Foundation’s new movie, 33 Minutes, where a bunch of old farts say that Iran and North Korea will nuke us with ICBMs in 33 minutes if we make these missile defense spending cuts. The music is scary, very scary, and somewhat Muslin-sounding in the beginning, as we look at New York City. 9/11. [Heritage Foundation via Spencer Ackerman]