• Total body count was 13—with another 30 injured—at Ft. Hood yesterday. The gunman survived after being shot four times. [New York Times]
• Speaking of the gunman, Army psychiatrist,  Maj. Nidal M. Hasan, here is a lengthy biographical portrait. [Washington Post]
• An important Afghan governor and his militia and their rocket launchers are challenging the legitimacy of new president Hamid Karzai.  [WSJ]
• British PM Gordon Brown—and his soldiers and their implied rocket launchers—also threatened Afghanistan to just, you know, it’s enough already with the corruption. [AP]
• The Pakistani Army invaded a Taliban alcove in lawless, mountainy South Waziristan, presumably also a stop on Sarah Palin’s book tour. [Reuters]
• So apparently a giant wall (of symbolism?) was blocking everyone’s view at the Jay-Z/Beyonce/U2 performance at the Brandenburg Gate at last night’s fall-of-the-Berlin-Wall-themed concert. [Daily Mail]

TOM COBURN’S (R-OK) MACABRE ANIMAL SLAUGHTERING HOBBY IS ALSO A METAPHOR, SEE? “Mr. Coburn spends as little time as possible in Washington, a place he seems to genuinely dislike. An ordained Southern Baptist deacon, he attends church every Sunday back in Muskogee and teaches a Bible study class. He tries to stop armadillos from tearing up his lawn. He pulls fat water moccasins from his pool. ‘I kill them,’ he said with relish, ‘by slicing their heads off with the sharp edge of a shovel.’” [New York Times]

It’s a sad-ass day for America when the Secret Service lets this dirty old robot eat the country’s first black president. [White House Flickr]

THE MOST FRIGHTENING IMAGE KNOWN TO MAN (AND WO-MAN!): It’s your Wednesday Fun Link, everybody. And… OH JESUS GAH!! Kathleen Sebelius’ face is on fire! “Sebelius had a basal cell carcinoma removed from her forehead on Tuesday during a successful standard outpatient procedure, according to HHS spokeswoman Jenny Backus.” Gross. Take it back to Wichita! If this is what they mean by “health care,” we don’t want any part of it. [Washington Post]

So Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol talked to some bigwigs over at Internet, who have finally agreed to publish KeepAmericaSafe.com! As soon as you can tear yourself away from Michael Steele’s A Man Got To Have A Code blog, your editor at Wonkette implores you to join us on a tour of this latest significant Republican contribution to the Internet. Never ever has there been so much torture in one place. Ha ha, this certainly is not true. But still! Wouldn’t you like to meet today’s Featured Gitmo Detainee? MORE »

BEN ALI, R.I.P.: Sad news for locals, as well as Kwame Kilpatrick: “WASHINGTON – Ben Ali, the founder of Ben’s Chili Bowl diner, a landmark in Washington’s black business and entertainment district and a frequent stop for politicians and celebrities, has died. He was 82.” [AP]

• New stimulus money is maybe on the way! This time they are calling it “an extension of the first stimulus package” and it does not care for nicknames. [New York Times]
• The U.S. gave Pakistan $1.5 billion/year, for the next five years, simply to stop doing a thing: namely, supporting terrorism. [New York Times]
• Obama’s headed to the counter-terrorism part of downtown McLean to hand out new offensive and defensive plays. [Washington Post]
• David Letter apologized to his wife, on television! How could she not trust something produced by the staff of the David Letterman Show? [CNN]
• How did our gal Sotomayor do yesterday, on Supreme Court opening day? She WON with 36 questions asked, and Scalia only batting 30. [LA Times]
• The International Energy Agency asked for a suggested donation of $10 trillion dollars over the next ten years. This is adorable. [WSJ]

Our dear friends in the Senate Finance Committee have voted down the Schumer/Cantwell “less cool but still cool” public option amendment as well, 13-10 (Dems voting no: Baucus, Conrad, Lincoln), so there will officially (we think?) not be a public option in the Senate Finance Committee bill. SURPRISE. MORE »

FINE, ‘ANY CONSPIRACY GOES’ COMMENTER IS BANNED: The commenter “nader paul kucinich gravel,” who likes all half-fringe politicians, right or left, has been banned. We thought it was funny (maybe six months ago) that all of his/her comments were shaped into little pyramids! Oh, well.

• Barack Obama demanded that Iran turn over blueprints to its underground ex-secret nuclear hideaway, and threatened to take away the US’s gas and oil investment money. Iran responded by test-firing a bunch of short-range missiles and then claiming they were medium-range missiles. Sassy/grim! [New York Times]
• NATO and the US have decided to side with current Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai in his quest to continue to be President of Afghanistan, despite very mean-spirited gossip about how the election was maybe a sham. [Washington Post]
• Angela Merkel and her party, the Christian Democratic Union, have WON THE COUNTRY OF GERMANY for another four years. Well, congratulations. [Wall Street Journal]
• Flighty auteur Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland of all places for the his famous sex crime of sex with a 13 year old in 1978. [Los Angeles Times]
• William Safire died this weekend. Before his noted death, he was also famous for writing a bunch of lies for Richard Nixon and as well as the New York Times‘ “On Language” column. [Reuters]
• The more Obama insists that New York Governor David Paterson not attempt to be governor again, the more committed Paterson is to doing exactly that. [CNN]

So overweight former baseball technician Curt Schilling will not be America’s new beloved Republican Ted Kennedy after all. Here are the known conditions that might have been factors in his proto-failure:

• He’s not even actually a registered Republican, which many political Beltway D.C. Boston insiders speculated would interfere with his ability to run on the Republican ticket
• Aggressive unpopularity

“Regardless of the amount of support and outreach that’s been given to me, it just did not make sense,” Schilling told someone at some point in response to all this. [CNN]