Weekly round up Sunday 26 February

I've met Pierre Lellouche (who's name ironically translates as "the shifty Peter" or "cross-eyed Pete"!), I reckon he's probably a good candidate. However, I gather the primaries for the Paris mayoral elections are likely to go to Françoise de Panafieu, a good aristocratic name! She's the former mayor of the arrondissement in Paris I lived in during 2001, the XVIIème. It seemed well run. Maybe she's the one to take on Bertrand Delanöe.

Meanwhile, London's Mayor is in Holocaust denial mode: at least he denies that making Nazi jibes to a Jewish reporter is antisemitic. Ken Livingstone got all those votes for being a nice politically correct anti-establishment type. It turns out he has the same political opinions as Colonel Blimp.

The bit of the puppet show where all sides start hitting the election official. I can think of more countries than Haiti where this story deserves to happen.

No mention of Justice Souter's home being targeted by campaigners (the source is the New York Times), but it's an interesting report nonetheless about the backlash across the U.S.A. about "eminent domain" the practice of nationalizing land under the pretext (not always real) of an overriding public interest, such as building a dam, an airport, or a friend's property development.

Uganda's election was predictable. Voting was on tribal lines.
The official line is that "there was no intimidation or cheating, and anyway the opposition are terrorists who deserve it," (or words to that effect). Apart from this. And this. The problem being that I doubt if either side would have been squeaky clean if they had the upper hand. And who can blame them! You lose the election and you're liable to get killed and tens of thousands of your people could be driven out of the country or massacred. Who wouldn't stuff ballot boxes with those stakes? You'd almost have to have a criminal lack of responsibility for your own people to not make sure of victory by all means available.

Officials results here.
I've said it before:

Syria's stooge in the Lebanon accuses French President Jacques Chirac of trying to cause his overthrow [in French]. If they take out contracts on each other, it's a win-win.

I never realised that Chirac had such support in "the Arab street".

Jonathan Singer on MyDD tries to get the point across to his readers that the U.S. Supreme Court is in danger of becoming an entrenched Conservative institution for the next decade or so. He's right to be worried. The ages of the existing Supreme Court justices are such that the next two most likely to retire are both liberals.

As one bitter American conservative told me recently about the U.S. President: "[George W.] Bush may be a shit on spending and welfare reform, but if he puts three conservatives on the Supreme Court, he'll have done alright."

Well what do you know?
Venezuela's Socialist leader, who tried to take power in a coup d'état before winning elections with physical intimidation, wants to abolish term limits. As Hugo Chavez is already rigging votes, he doesn't need to abolish elections.