I mentioned a while back a Catholic who doesn’t want to be in the small control room in the nuclear missile silo with women because of the temptation to sin. Someone has commented that perhaps we don’t want someone with his finger on the button without at least a little ability to resist temptation. (That did not start out to be a statement about Clinton.)

Christopher Hitchens has a column in Salon about George Dubya’s 93 executions. It certainly brings up the question of how much time he spends on them in addition to running the rest of the state. If you had to decide whether someone should die once every two weeks, on average, how much time would you devote to it? And still have a little spare time to fund-raise and run for the presidency. Hitchens mentions the juveniles and one case that from the wording may or may not have been in Dubya’s watch, of a gay man whose lawyer used words like queers and fairies. In court. When he wasn’t asleep. Court-appointed, don’t you know.

12 candidates for president were asked about past cocaine use. 11 denied it. Dubya, in the words of the London Times headline, sniffed at the question. (The Times was on a headline binge today. The obituary of the world’s oldest goldfish said something about him talking a last spin. The fish, if you were wondering, was 43. Tish, we hardly knew ye. And a story about a Japanese war museum that just opened said something about not mentioning the war, a line from Fawlty Towers you should all recognize, which the paper uses every chance it gets. The World War II museum is so sanitized that it doesn’t use words like war or bombing, much less comfort women, Pearl Harbor, Manchukuo... Those people still think they’re the victims of that war. The museum opened on Hiroshima Day.

Stalin’s grandson is barred from running for the Georgian Parliament. Cause he’s a Russian citizen.

Montenegro proposes autonomy, the papers all said today. If they bothered to read the document, they’d realize that Montenegro’s proposal was intended to be rejected, since it gives tiny Montenegro parity with Serbia in the federal government. The US policy, amazingly enough, is that Montenegro should remain within Yugoslavia.

In the death knell to the few non-network tv stations left in the country, companies are now to be allowed to own two stations in larger markets. As Scott Schuger points out in the Slate, this decision was made by 4 guys in the FCC, not by Congress.

Man wins drinking competition in Sydney, dies of alcohol poisoning. Stereotype lives on.

The Lee Harvey Oswald file from Russia has a document on a hunting trip. Oswald “shot very badly”. Sigh.