Morning Constitutional – Friday, 24 September 2010

Good morning, everybody. Lady Gaga\’s meat dress will be made into jerky for archival purposes. Now, your morning constitutional:

Senate Democrats give up trying to vote on extension of Bush tax cuts before the November elections.

Senator Mary Landrieu has pledged to block the confirmation of President Obama\’s new budget director unless the administration ends the moratorium on deep-water oil drilling is lifted.

Ireland\’s economy contracted by 1.2%  in the second quarter of the year, surprising analysts who had expected it to grow.

British Queen Elizabeth asked if money earmarked for schools and poverty programs could be used to pay the heating bills at her palaces, but was rebuffed by ministers who thought it would be a public relations disaster.

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is surprisingly optimistic that a Palestinian state could be created within a year, citing as reasons the efforts of President Obama and his diplomatic team.

Even if the Republican Party followed their \”Pledge to America,\” it wouldn\’t touch the biggest pieces of the federal budget.

Thursday night, Teresa Lewis was executed in Virginia, becoming the first women executed in the United States since 2005. The execution could lead the way for more among the 60 condemned women in the U.S.

Yuri M. Luzhkov, who has been the powerful Mayor of Moscow for two decades, is in trouble after criticizing President Dmitry Medvedev.

The Italian soccer team finds a novel way to hide that it has no fans.

Paris installs the first carbonated water fountain in an attempt to wean the public off bottled water.

Two awesome new dinosaurs have been discovered in Utah.

You can find anything on that Internet: An archive of the questions, answers and results of every Jeopardy game played.

The real 24 movie: “The Clock” is a montage of clips from several thousand films, structured so that the resulting artwork always conveys the correct time, minute by minute, in the time zone in which is it being exhibited

Finally, a mention that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is giving $100M to Newark public schools.