The White House released its visitors’ log, which was something people cared about whenever everyone was earnest about Transparency like a few months ago. Obama released 481 names—which is actually only a selection of all the visitors—but the list is like the Oscars Red Carpet + a visitors’ log from a prison in the 70s + a random list of names X 100! Names after the jump: Nobodies will be briefly glossed, while status-y names will written in bold, for such is their wont. MORE »

• Last night’s baseball match went smashingly/terribly—depending on whether you were in a sports bar with mostly blue decorations or mostly red ones. [Reuters]
• Ahmadinejad implied that Iran would do everyone a favor and would indeed be enriching its uranium elsewhere. [New York Times]
• There’s not enough Tamiflu for all America’s children, which means Obama will have no choice but to murder off what’s left of all the vaccineless ones. [Washington Post]
• The Golden Gate Bay Bridge will be closed again today while engineers continue to make sure that it’s definitely, like 100% not going to randomly collapse. [CNN]
• Obama spent the morning in Dover, Delaware, honoring fallen troops who were recently killed in Afghanistan. [AP]
• The incompetence deepens: the FAA did not give the military a heads up so quickly after that commercial airliner and its unresponsive pilots went AWOL last week. [WSJ]

So Dick Cheney told Obama to stop “dithering”! Haha, oh, right! Yes, he’ll get right on that… ceasing to dither. This is a hilarious and formidable old man insult used to express one’s displeasure with the lack of bombs and troops and guns and bombs and shit currently being sent to Afghanistan. “Having announced his Afghanistan strategy last March, President Obama now seems afraid to make a decision, and unable to provide his commander on the ground with the troops he needs to complete his mission,” said Cheney. It’s like: is Obama scared? Scared of WAR? Ha! Dick Cheney didn’t realize the President was a GIRL who needs to write in her diary 10 times a day before deploying more American soldiers to Afghanistan. [Los Angeles Times]

• Two completely random European journalists are requesting credit for the fall of the Berlin Wall. See, they were the ones who asked tuff questions about it! No one had even THOUGHT about knocking it down—that is, before the quality of their journalism alluded to it. [WSJ]
• Actual winner of Afghanistan’s election, Abdullah Abduallah, might team up with Hamid Karzai in some sort of coalition of convenience, thus rendering a run-off election unnecessary. [New York Times]
• The latest iteration of the Democrats’ fantasy health care bill is $871 billion. Everyone will automatically love it because of how under Obama’s limit of $900 billion it is. [Washington Post]
• Apple has signaled it’s time for you to get a new computer by designing a much, much cooler-looking laptop than than the one you currently have. [CNN]
• Good—eh, well, relatively goodish—news for widow(er)s: Congress passed this new bill that eliminated the two-year marriage minimum of green card eligibility. [Los Angeles Times]
• Obama demanded that Big Finance JUST DEAL WITH his proposed banking regulations. He said this at a $15,000-a-plate DNC fundraiser at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Manhattan. [The Hill]

Good news! If you live any of the states that is not one of the lame ones—that is, one of fourteen that is cool with marijuana for medical whatever—then Obama will not arrest you for that. “Two Justice Department officials described the new policy to The Associated Press, saying prosecutors will be told it is not a good use of their time to arrest people who use or provide medical marijuana in strict compliance with state laws.” Bush did this exact thing actually: he would arrest people even if they were complying with their states’ own laws. Because that is stupid, Obama obviously thinks it is stupid, and will no longer do it. States’ rights: this is literally the Civil War!! [AP]

• Obama, to prove he does not hate New Orleans and has zero plans to willfully destroy it—as per the tradition of his predecessor—will visit this afternoon. [Los Angeles Times]
• Over 30 people were killed in a series of coordinated terrorist goings-on in Islamabad. [New York Times]
• The Arctic’s ice will be completely gone in 20 years. Add “carbon emissions” to “rock salt” on the national What Melts Snow list. [Times Online]
• Obama wants to give $250 to every senior and disabled person this winter, since there will not be the traditional increase on Social Security benefit checks. [Washington Post]
• Probationary Kennedy Maria Shriver has apologized for talking on her cell phone while driving, for such is illegal in California. This is like literally the third time this has happened. [CNN]
• Uhh… the Germans are constructing a new Berlin Wall, out of Styrofoam… because they want to knock it down again. Ha ha.  It seems this is how most things start, in Germany. [WSJ]

• WELL, WELL: Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize! For nuclear things! Anyway this is better than at least 3/5 of the summer Olympic events. [New York Times]
• The moon, well, most of it, managed to prolong its existence overnight despite NASA’s best efforts. [New York Times]
• 160-ish people were killed in mudslides in the Philippines. The last time things were this flood-y there was 40 years ago. [AP]
• A car bomb in Pakistan killed 42 people and injured 60 more. No one officially took credit but people are generally thinking “Taliban.” [Times Online]
• Olympia Snowe arguably still matters. This seems tenuous! Anyway, the LA Times has interviewed every known resident of Maine to prove it. [LA Times]
• Gen. McChrystal and the military people would like 40,000 troops sent to Afghanistan. [WSJ]

• 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]

Michelle Obama declared that no White House can successfully save the world unless it has its very own Farmers Market right in front of it. And so she set off on her plan to fix health care and stop all the world’s evils by encouraging people to skip work and come to HER Market to buy pastries, cheeses and vegetables. Only, she never shows up anymore… MORE »

A choice bit of news today for terrorists and people who just seem like terrorists: Obama and his legal pals have decided that they will not be giving themselves any more pretend legal authority in order to detain suspicious people indefinitely. It turns out Bush and Cheney did a pretty comprehensive job of back in 2001 rounding up all the authority on Earth and renditioning the shit out of it in Gitmo and Bagram. MORE »

• Obama’s interference in governors’ races is upsetting to those who think that Obama’s desire to keep Democrats in power is soo partisan. [New York Times]
• Internet service providers are terribly angry with the FCC, which wants “net neutrality,” a concept of unimaginable injustice that would prohibit these Internet service companies from purposely slowing down connections and blocking access to their competitors’ content. [WSJ]
• Fewer troops in Afghanistan will be fighting in deserted actual desert areas and will concern themselves more with defending cities and humans. Except N.B. to the Taliban: this is not because America is weak! [Washington Post]
• Here are your MacArthur Genius Grant winners!  [Los Angeles Times]
• Bank of America just cold refuses to tell Congress all about its consensual hook-up with Merrill Lynch. The SEC is THISCLOSE to just subpoenaing the bank, the judicial equivalent of correctly guessing its Gmail password. [Reuters]
• Nancy Pelosi is going to send a health care bill to the floor by the end of the week. She’s like, “Fucking bet me.” [The Hill]