Sure, Che Guevara was a Hero of the Revolution. But did he like to jack off a lot? Director Steven Soderbergh has done a lot of research on this issue:

Charismatic Republican Governor of Louisiana Bobby Jindal told everyone sorry, but he's not running for president in 2012. Oddly, everyone seems to be taking this "announcement" seriously! Jindal just made a trip to Iowa and people are still taking him at his word! It's just a lie, everyone. The only people who ever announce they're not running this early and mean it are guys who make career-ending fuckups and guys smart enough to know they can't win. (Like goofy-looking Mark Warner, pictured.) [CNN]

About 200 laid-off factory workers are all having a magical sit-in in a closed plant in Chicago, because 1933 just broke out. The Republic Windows and Doors employees, members of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, have been occupying the window factory ever since management announced their abrupt, immediate layoffs, without pay, in violation of federal law. Republic Windows and Doors had their credit cut off by Bank of America, which just got a cool $25 billion from the Treasury, in order to help them, uh, unfreeze credit. But it's an old-fashioned labor/management standoff, with a big evil bank involed, and hey, Barack Obama came out in support of the workers this weekend. Maybe he will be a liberal!

Rahm Emanuel, as we all know, was Bill Clinton's political enforcer, and then he was a Congressman, and now he's Barack Obama's new Chief of Staff. The end. But wait, there was this part, in between Clinton and Congress, when Rahm was doing... something else? Turns out he was working for an investment bank. Scary!

Adventures in Obviousness. A helpful reminder from MSNBC for anyone who might have forgotten: "Movies no place to learn real history." Like Frost/Nixon? Their meeting never really happened! Spoiler alert! [MSNBC via MCN]

John Maynard Keynes is one of the most important economists ever, and after a lengthy period during which rejection of his ideas of government intervention led us directly to financial ruin, he is suddenly back in favor. Barack Obama's economic team, in particular, will be looking to Keynesian economics for a way out of the current crisis. But did you know he was a ravenous sex fiend who obsessively recorded each and every one of his hot gay hookups? It's true! And his secret second sex diary is in code!

Scientists have found a 2,700-year-old, two-pound stash of weed in a grave in China. Dude. [MSNBC]

Ron Howard, TV's Opie, just directed the film version of Frost/Nixon, because the man knows Oscar-bait when he sees it. And also, sure, because it's politically relevant or something. Howard, the very definition of American Middlebrow, is not a political director, though this year he endorsed Obama because he is a Hollyweird liberal (like his godless pal Andy Griffith). At a recent screening of the film, Howard mentioned how the lessons of Nixon became newly relevant during the Bush administration. Shocking! Good thing Fox News anchor and noted objective journalist Chris Wallace was there to set him straight! Nixon was a crook, see, and Bush is a hero.

The Pledge of Allegiance was written by, of course, a Socialist. But the good kind! Francis Bellamy was a late-19th century Baptist Utopian Socialist, not a Stalinist or one of those white kids with dreadlocks. Naturally his Pledge was different from the one we know: it doesn't mention God! Luckily Congress fixed that in 1954, adding the words "under God" right in the middle, disrupting the flow of the whole thing. The Commie-hating clergyman responsible for adding God to our pledge just died!

President Bush has long assumed, rather idiotically, that his universal unpopularity was just a fluke, and that historians would remember him kindly. The fact is there will almost certainly be revisionists at some future point who will say "he's not so bad" but torture and Katrina and Iraq kind of seal the deal for his future reputation. But, sitting down with, uh, his sister for an oral history interview on the end of his administration, Bush is sanguine and only slightly defensive. How would he like to be remembered? As a guy who "did not sell his soul." The rest of his answer veers off into patently untrue nonsense:

Every November 25, New York celebrates its independence from the British. What, you didn't know about Evacuation Day? It is a much more awesome holiday than Thanksgiving, because it involves gunfire, greased flagpoles, and indignities being visited upon English people, one of the fundamental tenets of comedy. The British never made very likely imperialists because, as we all know, they're a fey bunch of ninnies who enjoy dressing in ladies' clothing and tending to their gardens. But they did run United States for a time, and their terrible despotic rule was marked with grievous injustices like asking that we pay an extra ha'penny (which in modern dollars is nearly a tuppence!) to drink our precious tea. So after some mooks in Boston got wasted, dressed in racist costumes, and engaged in some reckless property damage (some things never change, right?) we all decided that meant war, and a couple years later, the rest of the colonies had beaten the British and all that remained was for them to finally leave New York, where we never really minded their presence that much, as they were certainly preferable to those mooks in Boston. Still, the British were a little bitter about having to leave New York and go back to London, where the ladies all had comically screechy voices and sometimes chased you around at high speed while wearing frilly lingerie. So on their way out of town, they acted quite the cads!

Former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin is basically one of the most respected men in the entire Democratic Party. The Citigroup "Senior Counselor" (he joined Citigroup as temporary chair after legislation he shepherded through congress allowed Citigroup's creation, natch) has close ties to just about every other Democratic economic policy guru with influence, and he's especially close to just about all of President-elect Barack Obama's proposed economy-fixing team. Of course, until about a year ago, there'd never been a bad word written about Rubin in the press, but the guy should probably be exiled to an island somewhere and forced to think about what he's done to our fine nation. What did Rubin do in the Clinton White House? He and Alan Greenspan joined forces to swing the Democratic Party's economic policies so far to the right that the terms of the debate never recovered. Now, economic leftism is Eisenhower Republicanism and the right-wing's economic policy is basically to hand over as much Treasury money and tax cuts as possible to the wealthy and occasionally force some underfunded mandates through congress because why not? Rubin encouraged Clinton to pass NAFTA before tackling health care, to this day he shudders at the idea of demanding worker protection before passing more free trade pacts, and then, for his final act before returning to the private sector, he resisted calls for the regulation of derivatives and strongly encouraged the repeal the Glass-Stengall act, thus leading directly to our current economic crisis. Of course he is still the Democratic party's most respected and powerful economic thinker. Then he left to join Citigroup, and we all know how well that went. So Barack Obama's economic policy team is probably made up of long-time free-market critics like James K. Galbraith and Joseph Stiglitz, right? Hah.

Barack Obama was elected just a few weeks ago, and he does not take office until late January. But everyone is so excited! He got his transition website up and running right away, and everyone in America immediately clicked on the "jobs" tab, because everyone in America needs a job. Sorry, guys—they've already received 200,000 applications. Which is unprecedented for an incoming administration. We did the research! In December of 2000, right after it finally became clear that George W. Bush would be our next president and the world was therefore doomed, the New York Times reported that there was a surge of applications for jobs in his administration too. That surge was totally pathetic, though, in retrospect:

Remember Eugene Allen, the White House butler? The Washington Post put his story on the front page the Friday after Election Day. Allen, a black man, worked at the White House for 34 years, starting during the days of segregation and retiring during the Reagan years. He cast his vote for Barack Obama the day after his wife of 65 years died. It was a wonderful little piece of journalism that made everyone in the country cry. We're choking up just thinking about it again. So now it will become a mawkish, sentimental movie, probably starring Morgan Freeman. Sony purchased the rights to the story and Allen's life. It will be produced by Laura Ziskin, who is behind such classics as As Good As It Gets, Pretty Woman, and Spider-Man. We're thrilled Allen will get yet more recognition, and a little money, but still, ugh. We can't believe we weren't cynical enough to predict this quiet, moving story would soon become yet more manipulative pop trash. [THR, Variety]

Everyone in the world is thrilled that America elected Barack Obama! There was dancing and American flag-waving on streets that more recently have been burning American flags (both abroad and in San Francisco). It looks like America will have a President who'll, you know, be diplomatic and respect international law and maybe not be so much of a terrible American stereotype! This is all bad news for terror network al-Qaeda, who rely on American aggression and foreign affairs incompetence to keep that anti-Western fervor up. So they quietly talked up a John McCain presidency on their message boards while publicly endorsing Barack Obama in order to pull the old reverse psychology trick they tried against Kerry. It didn't work! So now they're just calling Obama names. They released a stupid video, of course, in which Ayman al-Zawahiri calls Obama a "house negro" and quotes Malcolm X! They have some legitimate policy grievances with Obama, of course, because while the Bush strategy was to use the 9/11 attacks as a pretense to go ahead with a pre-planned invasion of non-al-Qaeda secular dictatorship Iraq, the Obama plan is to go back into Afghanistan—and Pakistan!—and kill all of them. (Bush thought this plan so clever he secretly instituted it himself at the very, very end of his presidency.) Still, even with the threat of ramping up that particular war, Obama is simply not a very good recruiting tool for Islamic Extremists! So they are kinda reduced to just needling the President-elect, with this Malcolm X talk. Obama, of course, has written at length of reading Malcolm X: "Only Malcolm X's autobiography seemed to offer something different. His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me." Who knew al-Qaeda seconds-in-command were reading Dreams From My Father? But, of course, their invocation of Obama as a "house Negro" is a total misreading. As Malcolm said:

Guess who the new Attorney General will be? Eric Holder! He was an assistant AG back in—wait for it—the Clinton Administration! Yay, change! Hah, see, this is what happens when you only had an eight year vacation from your 40 years of desert wandering. Holder will help close Guantanamo Bay. Thankfully, Holder has a lot of experience freeing evil criminals, because he totally signed off on the Marc Rich pardon! Let's all take a magical trip back to that wonderful story, shall we? Marc Rich founded Glencore, a commodities supplier that does lots of business with "rogue states" and so on, back in the wild 1970s. Rich was a fantastically wealthy commodities trader and decided one day to evade some taxes and also to do some illegal business with Iran, during the oil crisis. He bought some cheap oil, from Iran, and sold it in the US for double the price. Some of this oil dealing happened while Iran was holding a couple Americans hostage. Whoops! Then Rudy Giuliani indicted him and Marc forgot to come back to America from Switzerland and he ended up on the Most Wanted List for a while. Some time later, Marc's lovely wife Denise donated millions of dollars to Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, and she ponied up $450k for the Clinton library. One day, as his presidency ended, Bill pardoned Marc. Denise was thrilled! Some mean Republicans wanted to indict Bill, because honestly they'd just had a lot of fun hounding him for bullshit and were sad to see that wonderful time come to a close. But, you know, the president can pretty much pardon anyone he wants for any reason he wants. Pardoning an asshole millionaire because his socialite wife gave you money is probably more defensible than pardoning Nixon so the nation can heal or whatever. Still, it was gross and dumb, because no one liked Marc Rich besides his wife and some Israeli charities he donated to and the King of Spain. Not even his old lawyer, noted asshole Scooter Libby, actually liked him that much, though he defended the tax evasion, which was, oddly, the thing Bill didn't pardon him for. Anyway! Bill didn't seriously ask anyone in his Justice Department about whether or not he should pardon Marc Rich, but he did ask then-deputy AG Holder for his opinion, and Holder said he was "neutral, leaning towards favorable." So it's all his fault and he will be the worst Attorney General ever, as long as you pretend not to notice that the last three guys to do it have probably been the worst in history, or at least since Ed Meese. The Clinton scandals were fun because no one actually got hurt or was tortured and most American cities survived more or less intact.

We're back from vacation and need to learn to hate again, so let's check in with famous New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks, shall we? Today, the last conservative intellectual in America is writing about this new recession we're in, and how it will make so many people sad, and mad. There is no money! Where is the money? This thing called "the market" was supposed to make the money get bigger and bigger every year forever until Jesus came back, but instead it just ate all the money, but David Brooks doesn't really want to talk about that. He wants to talk about The Middle Class! There isn't one, anymore.

United States President George W. Bush gave a speech today about the perilous financial crisis that threatens to plunge our nation into a prolonged recession from hell. As you'll see when you click to watch this skillful video compilation, Mr. Bush has a genetic inability to deliver a single god damn sentence containing Very Serious News without adding his stupid smirk at the end. In and of itself it's sort of a tragicomic statement on the nature of the last eight years. But it's much scarier when you consider the reality of our situation: we don't really even have a president right now. Obama's people have been repeating the mantra "One president at a time" over and over, like some sort of magic political talisman. Barack has no desire to get too involved at the moment, because politically that would mean taking on lot of responsibility without technically having any power. And Bush is just sleepwalking through his last few months. He's not just a lame duck, he's a lame duck who everyone despises. He couldn't get anything accomplished even if he wanted to. Which he doesn't. He wants to play with Barney and keep quiet enough to maybe land that Commissioner of Baseball gig a few years down the line. Neither of those things would be all that bad if we weren't mired in a financial crisis of epic proportions. Because when a crisis happens somebody has to be in charge. And if Bush isn't, and Barack isn't, you know who is? Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson! John Crudele has already taken to referring to him as "de facto president of the US." Which is not too far off the mark! And hey, maybe it's not such a bad thing to have a guy like Paulson in charge of all the most important decisions, considering they're in his field of expertise? Psht! This is the same guy whose original idea for solving this mess was to give all power to the Treasury to do whatever it wanted, with no challenges permitted. Paulson changed the focus of the bailout package for the third time yesterday. Third time! It doesn't inspire confidence, nor should it. In conclusion, our fake-elected bad president has no desire or incentive to do anything. Our actual president-elect: the same, until January. Our de facto president is incentivized and predisposed to focus solely on helping Wall Street. And everyone's money is disappearing in the meantime. Also, Iran. Hope nothing bad happens for the next three months!

You know, it would be a totally awesome Veteran's Day segment, says the bleary news producer, if we recreated that famous photo of the nurse kissing the sailor in Times Square. We think our ideas sound great when we're drunk, too. But soon, the painful truth sets in. This morning Fox & Friends decided to trot the actual nurse from the photo, Edith Shain, 90, in front of the cameras to kiss one of their interns wearing a paper sailor's cap. Witness the awkward Fox & Friends-intern-on-nanogenarian embrace after the jump.Shain's been through this before, however. Here she is with some actor-sailors from Broadway's South Pacific, recreating the kiss just a bit less awkwardly:

Good news, Fake America—we've marginalized The South! The New York Times reports today that based on the totally conclusive 2008 election results, no longer will The South have any impact whatsoever on National Politics, and we can safely ignore them. Here, look at this map: it is the counties that voted more Republican in 2008 than in 2004, versus the counties that voted more for Barry Obama than John Kerry. As you can see, most of the country decided they liked Obama more than they liked Kerry, except for this mysterious belt in the old Confederacy that found something... unappealing about this Obama character. What's up with that? After the 2004 elections, a website called "Fuck the South" became popular among us liberal godless coastal elite types. It is a long rant about how the fat idiots who voted for Bush are stupid fat idiots, with some "facts" about how America is basically a giant welfare system whereby New York's money is redistributed to Mississippi for some reason. It was a nice bit of angry post-election catharsis, even if it is indefensibly classist, because, you know, these states we're ranting against are often full of terribly impoverished people and no one has done anything at all to help them since LBJ, basically, and look how well that worked out for him. But! Four years later, the Democrats won the presidency! The electoral map was totally different this time, too! So the Times declares the end of Democrats having to be Southern, or having to hate Welfare. The end of The Southern Strategy too! The Southern Strategy was Richard Nixon's cunning plan to convince racists to support him, helped along by LBJ's cunning plan to be less racist, which lost the South for Democrats for a generation. Now it doesn't matter! The Republicans are finished, forever! Right?