• 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]

Michael Steele was so enraged by RNC Chairman Michael Steele’s original endorsement of Scuzzlebutt, the Maoist “moderate Republican” candidate in the NY-23 special election, that he has killed that Michael Steele and invented a new Michael Steele to dress up and run around on television as. This Michael Steele despises any semblance of moderation and promises to go Stalin on those moderate motherfuckers he’d already selected to run in various 2010 races. Moo moo, baby, motherfuckin’ cow on the tracks, can’t catch me, I’m on fire… MORE »

We’ve been waiting to write a headline like that for years! People are now EATING EACH OTHERS’ DIGITS over health care reform and other pieces of legislation and whatever that none of them probably understand. MORE »

This guy. Here he is at the 2009 “RightOnline” conference, which took place in Hell over the past weekend. In Joe’s speech, he said that his “size twelves” ensure the edumacation of his children. He stomps on his kids when they get bad grades! He also told an AlterNet reporter that back in the day, when he would run across the likes of Nancy Pelosi, “Those kind of people I usually took behind the woodshed and just beat the livin’ tar out of ‘em.” What an unlikely success story! And this concludes your update on Joe the Plumber. [YouTube, Think Progress, AlterNet]

Things are so fucked up right now in America. The atmosphere surrounding these health care town halls is evolving faster than the HIV virus on cocaine, and steroids. Last night we saw the first fights break out in St. Louis and Tampa, over proposed legislation to reform an inefficient, costly sector of the domestic economy. For a heartwarming account of the Tampa event, read the delightful e-mail Ta-Nehisi Coates received today! As for St. Louis, things went so well yesterday, violence-wise, that they’re all getting back together tomorrow to murder each other. MORE »

Hey college students! Want to shoot your friends? Transfer to one of Texas’ many fine public universities! MAYBE, soon, once this diddly gets passed on to the Texas House and the secessionist state president Rick Perry: “AUSTIN — A bill to allow college students and employees to carry their concealed handguns on campus won final passage today on a 19-12 vote in the Senate.” Damn right it did, and if there’s anyone to thank, it’s that mentally disturbed Virginia Tech kid who shot up his school a couple of years ago, with guns, on campus. MORE »

Sweet lord Jesus, Gilbert Genn must love lobbying more than life. This proud lobbyist and former Maryland state delegate was leaving his house in Gaithersburg to go walk his dog and the next thing you know a terrifying deer wandered into his yard and started ramming him in the groin with its Antlers of Doom. And do you know what this valiant Democrat did? He tended to the bloody wound with a frigging BINDER CLIP so that he could go lobby the Maryland House Speaker. (After the meeting he finally dragged his bloody ass to the hospital.) MORE »

So here’s a terrible thing to happen one week before one’s re-election bid: a CANING caught on video! This choppy video is produced by a staffer for Judy Feder, the Democrat challenging Republican Rep. Frank Wolf in Virginia. The staffer is an annoying twit who gets in the face of Wolf and his little lady in some coffee shop or other. Then there’s a THWAP, and the staffer cries like a baby, and then another THWAP outside. As everyone knows, “THWAP” is the sound you hear when an 83-year-old campaign spokesperson strikes a young liberal whippersnapper with his cane. Until now, this sound had not been heard since the mid-19th century. [Washington Post, Raising Kaine]

This is great news: “In an unusual move, Hillary Clinton’s staff is creating a 40-member ‘whip team’ at the Denver Democratic convention to ensure that her supporters don’t engage in embarrassing anti-Obama demonstrations during the floor vote on her nomination.” Whipping unruly Hilltards on the floor of the Democratic convention, well boy howdy. We want in. Imagine: some Bitter starts shouting about Nobama until you walk up, unfurl, then *WHOOSH* *CRACK* and it’s off to the races. Hillary & Barry cackle from afar, approvingly, as one. So where, pray tell, is the sign-up sheet? [Politico/The Crypt]

Barack Obama today revealed that he hates John McCain’s tax plan and will therefore kill him with guns: “Obama jokingly claimed that Wild Bill Hickock, a famous old Western gunslinger, was a distant cousin of his so McCain should be on the alert. ‘I’m ready to duel John McCain on taxes. Right now, right here. I’m a quick draw,’ Obama quipped.” OK, we get it Hussein, YOU HAD WHITE ANCESTORS. McCain responded that he knew Bill Hickock and you, sir, are no Bill Hickock. [ABC News]

The fallout continues over last weekend’s Paultardpalooza festival in Washington D.C., which your Wonketteers bravely attended for seven minutes between episodes of drinking. If you can imagine, many hobbits on Ron Paul Forums are making strained “mental leaps” between fiction and reality. They were already convinced that our Wonkette faction was a deranged militia of “addicts and derelicts” who — much like the British Army several hundred years ago — would shoot at them with muskets, if necessary, to protect George W. Bush’s tea tax. Now they’ve assumed something far more profound: that one of us was this fat, shirtless lout who went around beating up their women and children. And our punishment shall be swift and merciless: they tell us that we are “on the list.” Anything but the list! MORE »