The Supreme Court allows an execution of someone for a crime committed when 16, on the urging of the Clinton admin.

Christopher Hitchens, in Salon, suggests having international monitors evaluate how free and fair American elections are. Personally, I not only went to the polls to vote for the empty suit of my choice today, but I walked there, enabling me to feel doubly self-righteous. Since it was two days after Halloween, a holiday which always pisses me off, especially as a former black cat owner, I voted against a parcel tax for the local schools. Take that, you little creeps!

It is with great restraint that I don’t report the crash of the EgyptAir plane off Nantucket in the form of a limerick. Or mention that today’s workplace shooting is identical to the one that happened yesterday in the Xerox office. That would be just too early. By the way, the guy yesterday shot 7 co-workers because he thought he was about to be laid off. I’m just guessing this won’t help his chances of avoiding a pink slip.

I just started writing something else, but suddenly realized that my use of the term pink slip was probably an unconscious tribute to Tom Amiano, whose last-minute write-in candidacy stopped Willie Brown’s re-election. I remember when Amiano, a gay stand-up comic, was first running for school board, and said that laying off teachers would be hard because he’d rather
wear pink slips than hand them out. And now he could be the next mayor of SF, a city like no other. The current DA was running ads for his re-election bragging about how much the police hate him. Where else in the country would that be an effective tactic?

Speaking of elections, Australia is voting on whether to abolish the monarchy. And they may well not do it, oddly enough, because as irrelevant as the Queen is to Oz life, they looked around and realized that no Aussie has the dignity, the gravitas, to be president. The monarchists have been using Clinton and Lewinsky as an example of why presidents are undignified, although since the next King will be Prince Tampon, you have to wonder.

The US has changed its sanctions policy on Serbia, according to the paper. We will no longer require that Milosevic be ousted (Milosevic, by the way, is president of Yugoslavia, not Serbia, but tell the papers that), but that there be free and fair elections, even if Milosevic is re-elected. However, our definition of free and fair elections is that if Milosevic is re-elected, it can’t have been free and fair.