This may sound weird–but hear me out–I was relieved to see Osama bin Laden reappear again on the news today. After a long absence, he released a brief audio tape challenging our soon-to- be President Barack Obama to catch him (although he didn’t stoop to calling him a “house negro” like al-Qaeda honcho #2 ). No, I am not relieved he is alive and I will be much more relieved when he is dead, but I was just happy to see a villain in the news I can whole heartedly root against. Strangely, these days really evil villains are hard to come by.

First, there is Hot Rod Blagojevich who is everything a politician shouldn’t be, yet I can’t help but root for at least a prolonging of his political life. His crimes have been well reported and are too numerous to mention here, but put it this way–a person’s evilness is never in doubt when their least known transgression is trying to extort money from a children’s hospital. He deserves to rot in prison, but I still find myself looking forward to his inevitable circus-like appearances on the nightly news. Blagojevich knows he’s eventually going down–afterall he is caught on wiretaps trying to sell a Senate seat to the highest bidder–so he is relishing every minute in front of the cameras and bringing everyone along for the ride.

Last week after somehow outwitting the United States Senate Majority Leader into seating his tainted appointment Roland Burris (see I want to play poker with Harry Reid for more details), he was impeached by the Illinois House of Representatives. Instead of admitting defeat, he held one of his now famous surreal press conferences where he literally trotted out ten near death hospital patients behind his podium and declared, “The House’s action today and the causes of the impeachment are because I’ve done things to fight for families who are with me here today,” he said with the confidence and bravado of a righteous moral crusader. Yes, he actually accused every representative (except one, the vote for impeachment was 114-1) of being anti-sick people.

Throw in the fact Blagojevich has been ending these pressers by quoting poems from memory by Tennison and Kipling for no discernible reason and you have a much more entertaining and outragous soap opera than anything seen on daytime TV. As I have said before, you literally can’t make this stuff up.

But the other public enemy story in the news this week you can make up and apparently John Grisham already did. A financial scam artist named Marcus Schrenker was feeling the pressure of the Feds from one side and the clients he had swindled from the other, so he decided to fake his own death.

Schrenker flew alone on board a small plane that took off for Florida from Anderson, Indiana, on Sunday.

As the plane crossed over Alabama, he made the fake distress call, put the plane on autopilot and parachuted out, investigators said.

The empty plane then crashed in a swamp near a housing development in Milton, Florida. No-one was injured.

Meanwhile, Schrenker parachuted safely to the ground near the city of Harpersville, Alabama, where he got a police officer to drive him to a hotel.

He had already stashed a motorbike in a storage unit near that hotel and fled before local police learned of the plane crash.

An affidavit attached to the charges said that the red motorbike Schrenker drove carried saddlebags stocked with maps, survival paraphernalia, military ready-to-eat meals and what appeared to be a bullet-point script for his distress call.

Sure, he duped many people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, but a daring parachute jump from a prop plane before purposely crashing it into a mountain!? How can you not root for him to escape? Unfortunately for him, he jumped about two hours before the plane actually crashed, leaving time for the Air Force to scramble jets to see what the distress call was all about. Realizing the plane was empty, they figured something was up. Needless to say, he is now in police custody.

Here’s hoping he has enough dare left in him to attempt a prison break.