How dare Osama bin Laden enter into the election process?

Maine and Alaska will be voting on whether hunters can lure bears with pizza and donuts.

I got a robo-call from Governor Ahnuld today (the machine pretending to be him did a better acting job than he ever did pretending to be a machine) asking me to vote against requiring WalMart to provide insurance for its employees (and restaurants, who paid for the call--it’s very strange to hear financial disclosure information at the end of a phone call).

Der Arnold, by the way, has been talking about getting the Constitution changed so he can run for president. No one ever asks him when he’s going to give up his dual Austrian citizenship.

Kerry today, evidently feeling a need to distance himself from Osama: “How dare Osama bin Laden enter into the election process in the United States of America? I think Americans are smart enough not to let this thug get in the way of decisions that affect health care, schools, jobs, Social Security, Medicare, the future of this country.” Yeah, Osama should butt out and stick to his own business: planning terrorist attacks on Americans. No, wait....

Speaking of slightly misplaced outrage, the latest suicide bombing in Israel was by a 16-year old Palestinian with ridiculous eyebrows, and there’s been some condemnation of the recruitment of youths (including by his mother, who pointedly did not condemn suicide bombings per se).

The deputy head of Russia’s long-range nuclear bomber fleet has been shot dead by a hitman. The London Times reassures us that the hitman wasn’t aiming at him but at the man he was traveling with, whose son has been accused of being in the mafia. Somehow, that reassurance opens up whole new areas of worry.

Farmers in India have found a cheap and effective pesticide: Coca Cola. The same story says, “Uncorroborated reports from China claimed that the ill-fated New Coke was widely used in China as a spermicide.”