Government scientist Bruce Ivins killed himself last week, amidst reports federal officials were going to arrest him as a suspect in the anthrax-in-envelopes scares following 9/11. Ivins, who worked with scary molecules like Cholera before turning his attention to anthrax full time, basically went off the deep end as he was closed in on, and even his shrink was scared of him. With Ivins' death, though, comes new questions about Sept. 11's aftermath and the anthrax scare — namely, how ABC News might have contributed to government-planted misinformation about the situation. What type of misinformation? Say, for instance, that Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program was behind the anthrax scare. You remember Mr. Hussein, don't you? He's the late former Iraqi leader who was so evil the United States spent billions of dollars on a casualty-laden war, all based on various pieces of wrong information, like non-existent WMDs and now, perhaps, a non-existent link between Hussein and the anthrax.

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DEALS Saddam Hussein’s back-up yacht is for sale. A piece of Weapons of Mass Destruction history can be yours for a mere $34 million. Amenities include bullet proofing, gold faucets, missile storage and lifetime spying on by NSA and CIA. [NYP]

• Googling the new Atoosa is fun!

• An exhausted Britney Spears confuses rehabilitation center with relaxation spa.

• Diddy to form new boy band, striving for "Dick in a Box meets Yanni" look.

• Time Warner sells Progressive Farmer to a publisher who could tell you what it's about.

• CNN says sorry for the control room lackey who called Sen. Obama by his given name.

• Just like in the lockerroom, video cell phones at executions are frowned upon.

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Christopher Hitchens – Vanity Fair columnist and the man who told Rachel Sklar she wasn't funny – couldn't possibly pass up the opportunity to aim his cannon at those behind Saddam Hussein's hanging. Or, as Hitchens calls it, "lynching," though that's usually a term we reserve for people like Emmett Till — you know, men and women who didn't deserve a noose around their necks.

The shabby, tawdry scene of Muqtada Sadr's riffraff taunting their defenseless former tyrant evokes exactly this quality of hysterical falsity and bravado. While Saddam Hussein was alive, they cringed. Now, they find their lost courage, and meanwhile take the drill and the razor blade and the blowtorch to their fellow Iraqis. To watch this abysmal spectacle as a neutral would be bad enough. To know that the U. S. government had even a silent, shamefaced part in it is to feel something well beyond embarrassment.

Correct: Not embarassment. Hilarity is what you should be feeling. With no women around, it sure was a hoot, eh Chris?

If you were a video clip sharing outfit, what video would you be carrying? The Saddam Hussein execution video, of course, my horse. YouTube, Google Video, MetaCafe (ahem), and every other Web 2.0 hopeful overloaded with dot-com levels of VC funding had the grainy cell phone footage that CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News all knew you'd get around to seeing. So congratulations, Person of the Year. We knew you could do it.

With Saddam Hussein having already posted his farewell letter on the Internet, there's nothing left to do but kill him. But how – in this era of all things YouTube and the posting of insurgent murder videos all over BitTorrent, or something – are the media going to treat the assassination of this year's most hated man?

The execution could take place as early as today – Iraqi officials say they want Saddam hanged before a Muslim holiday begins on Sunday – which means John Reiss and his like rushed to reach policy decisions about what, if anything, they'll be showing American audiences. You know, 'cause the whole thing is going to be videotaped.

ABC and CBS said they wouldn't air the full execution if the video became available and might not air anything or show a brief, nongraphic portion. NBC and ABC plan to break into regular programming to announce that Saddam's sentence had been carried out. NBC News said it still was discussing what it would do, but it's clear it also won't run graphic footage.

Or, in a more likely scenario, the video clips will make their way to blogs, which will have a field day with the gruesome content, attract scores of new readers, and in the days and weeks to come the networks will have no choice but to show more graphic details of the execution. All in the name of meta media coverage of this whole blog phenomenon, of course.

Who would you rather be locked in a tent with, Saddam Hussein or Tom Cruise? If chose US enemy number one, you're not alone. Stuff readers agree: one night with Hussein beats one-on-one tent time with Cruiseazy.

In a recent poll, more people said they’d rather spend the night with Saddam Hussein than the “Top Gun” star. Stuff magazine asked its readers who they would least like to share a camping tent with, and 41 percent chose the couch-jumping star.

Homophobes are so funny.

The couch jumping continues [Jeannette Walls, MSNBC]