• 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]

• Dick Cheney, a personified synonym of the desire to bomb Iran, has gone public with his desire to bomb Iran, and also retroactively bomb Iran. [Wall Street Journal]
• Environmentalist types have slacked off recently, in terms of not blogging various iterations of top ten “ways to go green lists” and other forms of non-violent protest, and this is why their cause is a lost one. [Washington Post]
• The Dalai Lama stopped by Taiwan and simultaneously comforted flood victims and avoided angering in Chinese government. Multitasking! [Reuters]
• Many of America’s largest banks are now turning profits, which was the cool thing to do in like 2007. [New York Times]
• The Democratic Party of Japan defeated the Liberal Democratic Party, their conservative (?) opponents, in today’s big election. Hooray!/our condolences. [The Guardian]
• That Angeles National Forest wildfire has destroyed 18 homes but it’s still only 5% contained. [Los Angeles Times]

Tipster “TJBeck” sends us this NASA Earth Observatory “Image of the Day” of Alaska, which is completely on fire. How very “Saddam Hussein” of an exit, Sarah Palin! And nice touch with the targeted scorching of “Little Black One.” [NASA]

HA HA HA: Silly Wonkette editor Ken Layne thought he could take a nice vacation from politics, completely unaware that he would be killed in hellish firestorms: “Just as my son and dog and I got back to the house, the power went out. It would flash on and off for the next hours, as hot white ash rained from the sky… Santa Ana gusts blew open the doors and windows. You couldn’t go outside without a wet towel clutched over your nose and mouth.” Blah blah blah, drama queen. [LAist]

Last Tuesday, as tornadoes swept the South and the Midwest struggled beneath a blanket of snow, the weather showed it would stop at nothing to foil the progress of Democracy. Now the weather has set its sights on Virginia and the Carolinas, sending down a plague of hellfire and howling winds–just in time to stop presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton from campaigning in the area. MORE »