• A BROKEN RECORD named Osama bin Laden released another tape. To review, likes: Islam, recording audio tapes, routine; dislikes: America, Israel, insolence. [Times Online]
• China is forcing the Chinese to pay very high taxes on, let’s see, American-made chickens and car parts. This aggressively random move is in response to Obama’s announcement on Friday that he was going to tax the shit out of Chinese tires. [New York Times]
• Green Revolution guy Dr. Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize after he showed billions of people how to grow wheat more efficiently so as to avoid starving to death, has died. “Fields of Gold” will be especially relevant when it is inevitably played at his funeral. [WSJ]
• President Barack Obama is visiting Wall Street today to tell everybody to take responsibility for their actions, because this will help him institute financial reform eventually. It is an invaluable form of legislative savvy he has mastered. [Washington Post]
• Police found a body in a campus building and they think it belongs to that gal at Yale who was missing and is now dead, probably. [Los Angeles Times]

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 »

JOHN McCAIN cut himself (”down the highway” not “across the street”) after NAVY lost to Ohio State, at American collegiate football. Hardly a surprise, considering those dapper Navy midshipmen can’t even beat a bunch of dirty beatnik bookworms at croquet. Can you even begin to imagine how disastrous it would be if MIT challenged Navy to a game of MARIO KART? … MORE »

Well, this is sort of what we all imagined, in our darkest & drunkest moments. Here’s a Fox News show featuring a weird jabbering middle-aged baby with hair plugs on the left side of the screen and some guy who claims to be a Bush Administration-era anti-Bin Laden agent on the right, and, well, they both share a certain dream for America, which involves the nation being horribly attacked by Osama bin Laden’s secret arsenal of nuclear weapons, from Mexico. THAT WILL LEARN US, RIGHT? MORE »

VAMPIRES ARE A LIBERAL TERRORIST SEX PLOT: Bram Stoker never imagined that his story of a seductive count who necks with young virgins at night might be interpreted as something sexual, but now that dirty-minded liberals have gotten their paws on the vampire story, the terrorists have won. “I’m all for multiculturalism, but this is too much. As Freud is supposed to have said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Likewise, sometimes the Other isn’t a cool countercultural rebel who puts a thrill up your leg, he is a monster who wants to suck your blood or, if he is technologically savvy and has a religious ax to grind, blow up your kids’ school bus.” Dracula: the Western world’s first Islamic jihadist. Discuss. [National Review Online]

Well, well, let’s take a look-see at the New York Review of Books. There’s some political stuff in here, yes? Sure there is. Besides, in a few months, the only magazines left in America will be a receipt for rice and dried fruit, and even that will be probably be a blog, and owned by Tina Brown. And plus, Steve Coll, a member of the original cast from last week’s magazine discussion, has returned. MORE »

• After going out to dinner with the Conservative Columnists, Obama took Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, Rachel Maddow, Eugene Robinson, etc. out to lunch. Tomorrow he will drunkenly text Ron Paul and Wayne Allyn Root at 1 AM and invite them over to “watch a movie.” [The Caucus]
• Osama bin Laden has made his own YouTube fireside chat in which he sort of teases Barack Obama, but the subtext is “I’m not dead.” [Crooks and Liars]
• Andrew Sullivan wants you to know he has received a lot of emails asking about his off-the-record tryst with Obama but all he will say is that he feels “relief.” Ew. [Andrew Sullivan]
• Bush and Co. have been ordered to surrender their emails from March 2003 to October 2005 to America. This order comes on the heels of concerns that the administration has probably deleted most emails from March 2003 to October 2005. [HuffPost]
• Apparent human-in-beta Caroline Kennedy is the most unpopular person in the history of New York. [CNN Political Ticker]

What is this weirdness? Joe Biden was talking to some supporters this weekend, at a fundraiser, about how Barack Obama will basically turn into a totalitarian dictator after he’s elected, just like Hercules did when he rinsed all the horseshit out of Washington by diverting a few rivers. Plus there will probably be another war or something, which Obama supporters will have to get behind. MORE »

Oh Lordy be. Whenever there’s a slow news cycle, we need only look to our friends in South Carolina for a little pick-me-up. Here’s a bit of hilarity from State Senator Kevin Bryant, who put up this post a few days ago. Judging from the URL and one of the comments, it was originally titled “vacation and funny picture.” Now it’s been changed to just “picture” because apparently SOME PEOPLE CAN’T TAKE A JOKE. [Senator Kevin Bryant via Snead]

Maybe it’s true! After all, Osama bin Laden would’ve never known about New York’s big Jewish population had Jesse not called it “Hymietown.” EVERYBODY WILL BE ISSUED NEW NAMES AT THE CONVENTIONS. [Morning Joe/MSNBC] UPDATE: Oh what the hell, Newell posted this like twelve hours earlier. Oh well, no way to take the post down now ….

Here’s beloved liberal Dan Rather responding to a comment from former NFL star Tiki Barber on today’s edition of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, about Jesse Jackson’s influence in politics. We did not see the show as it aired, so we aren’t sure why arbitrary celebrity bums were picked off the street to host today. Point is, Dan Rather says he appreciates Jesse Jackson and that Jackson was importantly “paving the way for an Osama bin Laden to appear.” Our friends on the right would agree! We think he meant “Barack Osama bin Laden,” however. [YouTube]