Good Morning, News!

BREAKING NEWS: Gallagher, the watermelon-smashing comic genius, had a heart attack just before taking the stage at a Texas club (You know the one. Down in Lewisville. Hat Tricks? C’mon, don’t act like you haven’t heard of it.) Don’t worry, though! He’s not dead! Yet! Of course, this means his upcoming shows in Oregon have been cancelled.

The former Rutgers student who secretly filmed his gay roommate having sex with another man—a shitty act that helped push the roommate into suicide—was found guilty this morning of invading Tyler Clementi’s privacy but not of “bias intimidation.”

Osama bin Laden, in the months before his assassination, had so little respect for VP Joe Biden that he was dreaming up big plans for the death Barack Obama. The scheming terrorist icon confided in his diary: “Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the U.S. into a crisis.”

The surviving president launched his official re-election campaign yesterday, sending that same “unprepared” VP out on the stump to mock the Republicans trying to dislodge them from the White House. The Obama campaign also released a 17-minute movie that it hopes will reverse a recent string of bad news for the president, conveniently forgetting that most Americans don’t have attention spans that long.

Rick “the Ayatollah” Santorum wasn’t thinking about the president’s hip, cool movie when he put out a call on his website to ban the distribution of pornography in America.

The soldier who shot and killed 16 Afghan villagers was sad because he saw a fellow soldier injured, his lawyer said, may have been drinking, and was probably feeling the stress of repeated combat tours after a decade-plus of constant war. It’s context, but nowhere near an excuse.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, meanwhile, says the probe of the massacre has him “at the end of my rope,” which I might not say in earshot of certain people. Might give ’em ideas.

After playing nice long enough to score some “food aid,” North Korea is testing its newfound detente by trying to test a long-range missile, but saying it’s only for satellites and totally, definitely, cross-your-heart-and-hope-to-die not for warheads.

Fucking Clooney. That handsome, goddamned Clooney.

Friends and relatives receiving mysterious and detailed emails from man who died several months ago don’t want to find out what’s actually going on, afraid it’s probably a hoax, which would bum them all out all over again.

In case you missed it on Blogtown earlier this morning, another shoe has dropped in the strange, sad story about the death of Oregonian opinion editor Bob Caldwell. The family friend who told the paper he died in a car, and not after sex with a college student he was paying, was another editor at the paper who has since been fired.

OH, ALSO! TAIWAN HAS HEARD ABOUT ALL THE DOONESBURY CENSORSHIP GOING ON THIS WEEK IN PAPERS LIKE THE OREGONIAN. THEY HAVE COME UP WITH A HANDY EXPLAINER.