Good Morning, News!

The Middle East has erupted with widespread anti-American protests over the same hacky anti-Islam video with semi-mysterious California origins that prompted, earlier this week, a fatal attack on the US Embassy in Libya and another attack on our embassy in Egypt. So far, four people have been arrested in the Libyan attack.

And here’s the roll call of unrest: Palestine, Sudan (where they’re going Germans, for some reason), Yemen, India, Tunisia, Lebanon, Bangladesh, Qatar, Kuwait, and Iraq.

It’s gotten ugly enough that even fast-food restaurants—the purest symbol of America’s virus-like exceptionalist spread—are being torched. Now comes word that Google, in Muslim countries, has begun blocking access to the shittily produced YouTube video at the heart of it all.

In Egypt, a country seen as way more important to American interests, a wee-hours phone call from a pissed-off President Obama has placed its Muslim Brotherhood-led government in the very awkward position of keeping up its street cred with the angry partisans throwing rocks in the streets while at the same time apologetically kissing up to a superpower that showers the place with billions of bucks in aid.

Someone claiming Al-Qaida ties, meanwhile, rang up the University of Texas-Austin to warn that bombs had been placed inside buildings all over campus (apparently a new strategy for the terror group: publicity-making early warnings!), prompting a campuswide evacuation affecting thousands of students, staff, and faculty. Someone also did the same, inexplicably, at North Dakota State University, affecting no one. Ever.

Willard Romney’s operators are telling the world that none of this unrest would be happening if his simulacrum were popularly acclaimed as president. Probably because they already would have been dropping bombs and deploying more drones than the drone-happy President Obama could ever dream of sending.

Willard’s handlers, however, are fumbling their way to defeat this fall, at least according to dismal new polls in several key swing states whose electoral votes they’d need to win.

Not helping Willard? The loudspeaker inside his mouth had the gall to define middle-income Americans as making, you know, a paltry $200,000 to $250,000 a year.

That’s all music to the ears of fossil-fuel titans, who have spent $26 million so far in anti-Obama campaign ads they hope will usher in a wave of deregulation so glorious that everyone, including Mitt’s Middle Americans, wakes up every morning covered in the sludge and dust and soot of our inexorable progress toward “energy independence.”

China’s next designated leader has gone missing this month. Is he dead? Probably not. Seems he’s just resting a bad back. Out of sight. For days.

Guatemala’s “fire volcano” is hissing and spitting and generally making thousands of nearby residents very nervous.

Obtaining the newest inhumanely manufactured iPhone will now take as long as two weeks. Pre-orders are sold out because Apple clearly doesn’t whip its cowed, frantic labor force hard enough.

UP, UP, DOWN, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, B, A, B, A, START…