Heartened

In a speech, part of his campaign for chief justice, “Fat Tony” Scalia has said that unelected judges have no business deciding issues like abortion and the death penalty. I assume this means he will no longer cast a vote in cases affecting those issues.

Guardian headline: “Man Who Ate Friend’s Brain Jailed for Life.” Just as well Britain doesn’t have the death penalty anymore, because his request for his last meal but pose a bit of a problem.

Sorry, I can’t leave the cannibal story without another tasteless joke: But it was still better than most British cuisine.

And to answer the obvious question: fried in butter.

Speaking of brains fried in butter, George Bush made a slightly off-kilter statement at a joint appearance today with the tiny king of Jordan, presented without comment: “We view Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, and I would hope that Hezbollah would prove that they’re not by laying down arms and not threatening peace.”

Bush also said how “heartened” he was that 2/3 of Americans think there is a problem with Social Security. Yeah, we’re all fucking heartened by that. “And I am mindful that when the public says there’s a problem, we’ve got to work to solve it.” Scare the public and when they’re scared, claim a mandate; circular logic at its finest. “I’m just getting started on this issue, Steve, and I’m enjoying every minute of it. I like to take big issues to the American people.” Should he really be enjoying this quite so much?

What turns the story about Halliburton charging $27.5m to ship $82,100 worth of heating and cooking fuel to Iraq turns from a smallish scandal into a big one, is that the Pentagon audit showing this came out in October, before the election, and was suppressed, even kept secret from Congress, which asked 12 times to see the audit. Oh, and speaking of UN oil-for-fuel scandals, more than 60% of Halliburton’s Iraq bills are paid by the UN, using Iraqi oil revenues, and the US withheld the audit from the UN too.

A new Holocaust museum opened in Israel today. After initial plans not to even mention that homosexuals were put in concentration camps, they reversed themselves a couple of months ago (too-little-known Holocaust fact: when the camps were liberated, the homosexuals were not released, but transferred into prisons; the Allies considered them not to have been put in the camps because of their identities, like the Jews and Gypsies, but because they were criminals, having broken the law — by being homosexual). Possibly this is why Elie Wiesel insisted on saying at the dedication that the Holocaust wasn’t man’s inhumanity to man, but man’s inhumanity to Jews.

(Update: just did a search at the museum’s website for “homosexual.” Nada.)

The president of Malawi insists that he is not afraid of ghosts, has never seen a ghost, and it’s all lies spread by his opponents, 3 of whom, a government official and two journalists, have been arrested.

The Tory candidate for Parliament for Slough, yes the place “The Office” is set in, has been forced out for saying the European Union is a big “Papist plot.”