General Electric CEO Jack Welch tries to explain a controversial tweet he sent on the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page this morning. The tweet accused the Obama administration of making up the September jobs number to boost its election campaign. Welch pulls back a little, saying he was raising a question, not making an accusation: “If I could write that tweet again, I would have added a few question marks at the end.”

President Obama is catching a lot of flack for using Big Bird in a recent campaign ad. Lots of papers discuss the decision this morning, but the New York Post goes ahead and puts the Sesame Street icon on its front page, writing that the president “tried to give the bird to Mitt Romney — but wound up laying an egg.” SEE THE AD

Expect to see quite a few Big Birds as you make your trick-or-treating rounds this year. The New York Times says “Big Bird — singled out by Mr. Romney during the presidential debate last week as the embodiment of wasteful federal spending — is the flavor of the moment.”

A resort town in Maine is the subject of a bizarre prostitution scandal, reports the Portland Press-Herald this morning. Kennebunk is the town next to Kennebunkport, best known as the summer retreat of the Bush family. It’s also where prosecutors say a Zumba instructor and an insurance agent were running a prostitution ring out of a dance studio and secretly taping their clients.

Want to experience “4 million volts of electricity coming at you while you sit in a metal cage?” (My answer: no.) The Seattle Times says the Spark Museum of Electrical Invention has finally got its megazapper up and running. Organizers say the exhibit was a hard sell to their insurance company, but it was finally approved. The electricity doesn’t enter the cage, just rolls along the metal, illustrating why it’s safer to stay in a car during a lightning storm.

Anchorage Daily News columnist Julia O’Malley got to spend time with some YouTube stars yesterday. Pakak and Mitik are baby walruses rescued from the North Slope earlier this month. The pair has found fans all over the world after VIDEOS of them went viral. O’Malley, who calls them “obsessive spooners,” describes snuggling with a walrus like this: “[It] feels like being pinned under a warm, very chubby person who is wearing a damp velour jumpsuit that smells faintly, almost pleasantly, like low tide.”

Sarah Palin is barely recognizable in the New York Daily News this morning. She’s lost an astonishing amount of weight since she was last photograghed—so much that she apparently had to email People magazine and say it was part of a healthy diet.