And today's in-flight film is...

The video that got a grandma in trouble on a JetBlue flight

Ms Parver, a 56-year-old grandmother, taped two other passengers arguing about a misbehaving child. She says she was later taken from the plane in handcuffs when she refused to delete the recording...Ms Parver says that flight attendants wanted her to delete the video to avoid embarrassing the airline. Well, that backfired.

Please leave the bar. You're spreading that there homosexuality

Tattoo gay men with health warnings, demands Stock Exchange chaplain

The Rev Peter Mullen, chaplain to the London Stock Exchange, called for homosexuals to be tattooed with warnings about the perils of gay sex in a cigarette-packet-style health warning.

In his blog, Mr Mullen wrote: 'Let us make it obligatory for homosexuals to have their backsides tattooed with the slogan SODOMY CAN SERIOUSLY DAMAGE YOUR HEALTH.

'In addition, the obscene 'gay pride' parades and carnivals should be banned for they give rise to passive corruption, comparable to passive smoking. Young people forced to witness these excrescences are corrupted by them.'

Please, just put it away, sir.

It started with a classroom kiss...

Affairs between teachers and pupils can lead to a listing on the sex offenders register. Now a union wants to relax the laws.

Listen teachers. If you don't want to appear on the Sex Offenders Register it's very simple - keep your bloody pants on!

High five!

Nobody is safe from the long arm of EU law

When Britain signed up to the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) six years ago, critics pointed out that an individual could be extradited to another EU state to face prosecution for something that is not a crime in Britain and had not even been committed in the requesting country. Ministers dismissed such concerns as fanciful, but it has come to pass.

How we change! Derek Hatton, the militant capitalist

Derek Hatton, 60, is best remembered as a radical socialist when he was deputy leader of Liverpool City Council in the 1980s, and Neil Kinnock expelled him from the Labour party for being a member of Militant. Now he runs a property company selling villas and apartments in Cyprus

Bob Dylan names Scottish poet Robert Burns as his biggest inspiration

His powerful songs have inspired countless other musicians. Now Bob Dylan has named his own greatest inspiration as the Scottish poet Robert Burns. The American singer-songwriter was asked to say which lyric or verse has had the biggest effect on his life. He selected the 1794 song A Red, Red Rose, which is often published as a poem, penned by the man regarded as Scotland's national poet.

From Princess Di to the man who invented mini-roundabouts ...fifty people who have wrecked Britain

So much money, so many high-tech advances - yet today Britain is such an unhappy country, so drained of community, so robotic as it staggers towards oblivion. Who landed us in this mess? Who are the halfwits, the mooncalves, the clotpolls whose touches and yanks on the national tiller steered us onto the rocks?

Are there really Clinton supporters in the US who are planning to vote for Palin because she's a woman?

For many centrist voters in America, the desire to vote in more leftwing leaders may be outweighed by other considerations. On a recent visit to the US, I met one or two of that rare breed of American voter whose existence I had previously considered merely a myth: centrists who want to elect a woman candidate, would have voted for Hillary Clinton if she'd been running, but are now intending to vote Republican because Palin is on the ticket.

The cuntfree (I mean country) life for me!

Homeowner prosecuted after staging protest at binmen who refused to take his recycling bin

I have a wry smile to myself now when I read about stroppy binmen. I've no idea whether the cleansing operatives who trundle up the lane to my house would refuse to empty the bin if it wasn't close enough to the track or its lid was slightly ajar and, frankly, I don't give a toss. If I remember to wheel the bin out once a fortnight it will probably get emptied. Same goes for the once a month paper recycling collection. But it wouldn't bother me if they only turned up once a year. I've now got an incinerator, a compost heap and a waste-food digester so I can, quite legally, dispose of most of my rubbish on the premises.

Fact is, I recycle more now than I've ever done because it is easy to do. The local supermarkets have all got conveniently placed recycling bins and the household waste centre is just a few minutes drive away. Much easier than when I was in the city, where I had to carry the rubbish bags 200 yards to a roadside skip.

The other benefit of not living in the city is not having to pay to park our cars. Apart from the double garage I've got room for about six or seven more cars out front and it's all completely free. So, to the thousands of noisy, smelly, cars, trucks, buses and motorbikes that passed by my old house in Aberdeen I say - good riddance. And that goes double to the miserable traffic wardens too. Poop-poop!

Gated

More evidence that ethnic cleansing, not 'The Surge', has caused the drop in Iraqi violence

This is interesting. Buried in the new Quarterly Report from the Pentagon is this statistic: 74% of Iraqis feel safe in their own neighborhoods, but only 37% feel safe outside their neighborhoods. Iraq has become a nation of ethnically cleansed neighborhoods, separated by 12 foot concrete barrier walls.

Holy shit!

Don't flush, for Christ's sake!

Hundreds of people are being drawn to the Creation Museum by what they say looks like an image of the Virgin Mary in a toilet bowl.

As many as 300 people, some weeping, gathered outside the third stall of the Museum's men's room. They prayed, they took photographs, and they said the rosary.

Via J-Walk

Love him or loathe him, Littlejohn has hit the spot today

Richard Littlejohn on Gordon Brown's appointment of Peter Mandelson (or Lord Mandy as he will become) as 'Business Secretary':

Malignant, malevolent, mendacious - this creep is a cancer on British life

Trust me, this was the act of a madman. Brown came into office promising to draw a line under the spin, sleaze, dishonesty and division of the Blair years. It was always nonsense, but enough people fell for it. Yet he has now recalled into his Cabinet the living embodiment of all that is rotten and disreputable about New Labour.

Short of Call Me Dave making Jeffrey-Archer his new Tory Party treasurer, it is difficult to think of a more outrageous political appointment.

Putting this odious, discredited creep back into one of the great offices of state is an affront to any definition of decency.

The only consolation to be drawn when Blair handed Mandelson a first-class ticket on the Brussels gravy train was that at least the most malignant tumour on Britain’s body politic had been cut out.

No one, with the possible exception of Alastair Campbell, has done more to poison the well of public life. Campbell was the sewer, but Mandelson was pure sewage.

Gotcha! At last, 'The Juice' faces serious jail time

OJ Simpson guilty of armed heist

OJ Simpson has been found guilty on 12 charges of armed robbery, conspiracy to kidnap and assault with a deadly weapon by a court in the US city of Las Vegas.

The former US football star and actor was accused of robbing two sports memorabilia dealers a year ago.

The armed robbery charges carry a mandatory jail sentence, and kidnapping carries a possible life term.

Intellectual constipation

Extracts from an interview with Daniel Finkelstein who was denied tenure at DePaul University because of a campaign of intimidation led by Harvard professor, O J Simpson defender and all round little shit, Alan Dershowitz,

Jews sans frontieres: Fun with Finkelstein

There's no "intellectual" battle with Dershowitz. On his part there's no summoning of facts or elegant use of logic. It's just bar mitzvah speeches. He doesn't know anything, I doubt if he's read more than a half-dozen books on the topic. I don't entirely fault him. You can't defend high profile spousal murderers like O.J. Simpson, high profile sexual predators like Jeffrey Epstein, and high profile mass murderers like Radovan Karadzic, yet still have time left over to do serious scholarship. What he does is entertainment; it's a circus. He's like Hitchens. No one really cares about the facts Hitchens brings to bear. He could be making one case today and the opposite case tomorrow. Would anybody notice? They're just interested in the rococo tapestry he weaves around the facts. You don't walk away saying, "I've learned X, Y or Z from Hitchens," you walk away saying, "Wasn't that a witty line? Wasn't that a clever repartee?"

It's the same thing with Dershowitz -- of course, Dershowitz is not witty or clever. You don't learn anything and you don't expect to. I live near Coney Island. It's like the popular sideshow "Shoot the Freak." I haven't read a journal of intellectual opinion in years. Gandhi's collected works come to 90 volumes. Most of it consists of letters, quite a few on diet. There's more moral seriousness in one Gandhi letter to an anonymous correspondent on treating constipation than nearly the whole of our intellectual life.....

Everybody is terrified of Dershowitz because he wields a lot of power and is a very vindictive little man. I wasn't afraid and, I think, did a pretty solid job of demonstrating he is a preposterous charlatan. So he got his revenge by driving me out of academia, although -- in his mind -- not enough to compensate for the damage I did to his name.

It's all the fault of those lesbians! (And Clinton)

Clinton Democrats are to blame for the credit crunch

Let’s wind back to 1993 and Roberta Achtenberg’s arrival on the Washington political scene. Achtenberg had made her name in San Francisco as a civil rights lawyer and activist, campaigning to keep open the city’s gay bathhouses, and (I promise I’m not making this up) pressing for an increase in the number of gay Scoutmasters. Bill Clinton offered her a job in his new administration, and Roberta Achtenberg became the first openly lesbian nominee ever to receive a Senate confirmation. She duly took up her post as Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

The main thrust of the Clinton housing strategy was to increase home ownership among the poor, and particularly among blacks and Hispanics...But standing in the way of the realisation of this dream were the conservative lending policies of the banks, which required such inconvenient and old-fashioned things as cash deposits and regular repayments — things the poor and minorities often could not provide. Clinton told the banks to be more creative.

Meanwhile, Ms Achtenberg, a member of the kickass school of public administration, was busy setting up a network of enforcement offices across the country, manned by attorneys and investigators, and primed to spearhead an assault on the mortgage banks, bringing suits against any suspected of practising unlawful discrimination, whether on the basis of race, gender or disability. Achtenberg believed racism was a big factor in keeping minorities from enjoying the same level of home ownership as whites. She doubted if much could be done to change people’s attitudes on racial matters, but she was confident she, in cahoots with Attorney General Janet Reno, could use the law to change the behaviour of banks.

Obama Half-Breed Muslin (sic)

The finely woven presidential candidate.

Great for straining cottage cheese.