Headline Roundup, From The Sublime to the Ridiculous

Political news, everyone: Tom DeLay uses a Stephen Colbert video clip to raise money because he thinks Colbert is being serious. (When Colbert, with his tongue in his cheek, asks the guest "Who hates America more, you or Michael Moore?" apparently DeLay's people thought "Yeah, that guy's one of us.") The link, mind you, isn't to the clip itself but to a heartening rant at Firedoglake (one of the underrated lefty blogs) about why this sort of idiocy means we'll win in the long run. Whether that's true or not I don't know -- we've apparently underestimated the power of stupidity in numbers -- but the whole thing is too funny to go unnoticed.

Science Saturday: A bunch of lab mice, in a nod to completely forgotten genetic theorist and scientist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, have inherited a trait from their parents that they themselves don't have the gene for. This has been going on, quietly, for some time in labs and has turned genetics on its head.

"Monumental" blunder?: I warned you all about Belarus, but you wouldn't listen. I kept putting it on the list of countries with seriously awful governments that we should pay attention to, but no-ho-ho, they were "contained." They didn't have the scrap metal for it, you said. Well, looks like the nasty president-for-life, Aleksandr Lukashenko, may be getting his way after all: he just built a monument to the founder of the Soviet secret police. Think what it must be like to wake up in Minsk the day THAT headline hits the papers. A quote from a government stooge:

"We shouldn't be afraid of our history and people who gave birth to a new state, fought for it and were heroes," he said. "Dzerzhinsky was not an odious figure, he is someone who merits respect."

Sort of like Bush merits respect for giving birth to a new Iraq.