That man is a dangerous lunatic. He’s got a theological dedication to insisting that the US must be run exclusively by the 18th century principles of the Founding Fathers — even when he’s willing to consider limitations on the ownership of weapons, he gives it an unbelievable twist.

The justice explained that under his principle of originalism, some limitations on weapons were possible. Fox example, laws to restrict people from carrying a "head axe" would be constitutional because it was a misdemeanor when the Constitution was adopted in the late 1700s.

What the hell is a “head axe”, I wondered. So I looked it up. Here’s a picture:

OK, that looks nasty. I’m glad the Supreme Court will think that casually carrying around a deadly looking thing like that is not reasonable behavior.

But then look where his reasoning takes him:

"What about these technological limitations?" Wallace wondered. "Obviously, we’re not now talking about a handgun or a musket, we’re talking about a weapon that can fire a hundred shots in a minute."

"We’ll see," Scalia replied. "Obviously the amendment does not apply to arms that can not be hand-carried. It’s to ‘keep and bear’ so it doesn’t apply to cannons."

Oh, good. We can restrict people’s ownership of cannons…because he interprets the Constitution with a Ken Ham-like literal-mindedness that says the only weapons that count are carried.

"But I suppose there are handheld rocket launchers that can bring down airplanes that will have to — it’s will have to be decided," he added.

So no head axes, and no artillery…but the right to keep and bear arms can be extended to fucking rocket launchers.

I give up. Our legal leadership consists of brain-damaged, narrowly literal-minded amoral morons who worship an 18th century scrap of paper.

Mitt Romney is off touring England like a boss, and he’s already pissing everyone off. And then this quote from one of his books has just emerged.

England [sic] is just a small island. Its roads and houses are small. With few exceptions, it doesn’t make things that people in the rest of the world want to buy. And if it hadn’t been separated from the continent by water, it almost certainly would have been lost to Hitler’s ambitions. Yet only two lifetimes ago, Britain ruled the largest and wealthiest empire in the history of humankind. Britain controlled a quarter of the earth’s land and a quarter of the earth’s population.

This is great! I hope he visits more strange little foreign countries before the election!

This could be a daily feature — but it won’t be, because I’m already gagging at the thought of it. The latest news from Romney is that he’s making political hay out of the fact that Obama made a speech declaring the importance of a national infrastructure — roads and bridges, for instance — to businesses, and he dared to say to businessmen that “you didn’t build that”. So of course Romney is lining up Republican businessmen to say, “I did too build my own business!”, a claim Obama did not dispute.

But here’s the funny bit: one businessman Romney featured in an ad is not only ignoring what Obama actually said, but is the recipient of millions of dollars in government loans. I guess he didn’t build his own business after all, but had an awful lot of help from us taxpayers.

And one more thing: Sally Ride has died, and we now learn something new: she’s been in a committed lesbian relationship for 27 years. Romney is now praising her, without acknowledging that his anti-gay policies would deny her the dignity and benefit of recognizing that relationship. What an asshole.

You’re not actually going to vote for that guy in November, are you? I’m extremely lukewarm about Obama, but I’m going to poke that paper ballot to spite Romney, if nothing else.

We won a poll to determine what questions Julia Gillard would have to answer — or try to slickly dodge — and she’s going to be doing it live on the web at 11am AEST … which is in about a half hour! Go to the Deakins University channel for live streaming.

Oh, by the way — while we voted entirely fairly and within the parameters of the poll, I am still getting a lot of hate mail and a few tweets from wingnuts bitterly complaining about how we “stacked the vote” (I think that means “outvoted”) and how it was more American imperialism. Sorry, guys, we voted on an atheist issue, and we atheists are global, and besides, atheists are a larger percentage of the Australian population than the American. So suck it up.

Also, your pal Andrew Bolt is an inflamed dingleberry denialist, so scientists (another international community) were quite happy to see his global warming denial FUD squeezed out of the victory circle. Ha ha and all that. Stuff it, pseudoscientists.