Cheney Shoots Three Presidents in Oval Office Mishap

Steve Martin offers his comedic take on Cheney’s recent shooting incident in HuffingtonPost:

Vice President Dick Cheney, while hunting wild geese in the Rose Garden, accidentally shot President Bush twice, once in the heart and once in the head. “I didn’t really shoot the President twice,” said Cheney. “The second time I shot him, I was president. It wasn’t until my third shot, where I accidentally shot my own foot, that I had shot the president twice. I was officially injured and unable to govern, when Dennis Hastert came in, and stepped on the butt handle of the rifle causing it to swing up like a rake and shoot his hair off. I guess I’m officially responsible for that too, meaning I shot the acting president for a total of three occupants of the oval office. I’m not proud, but it is a record.”

New Virus Images

virus modelScienceDaily reports that “Fifty years after MIT researchers pioneered the use of electron microscopy to study viruses, MIT scientists have helped produce the most detailed images yet of the tiny infectious agents.” Pretty wild…

The Privileged Still Rule On The Russian Road

Protests across Russia are taking place after a “Oleg Shcherbinsky, a railway worker whose car was hit from behind last summer by a speeding car carrying the Altai region’s governor,” was sentenced to four years in a labor colony. In case it’s not clear from the previous statement, Shcherbinsky was hit by a speeding, negligent driver making a dangerous and illegal maneuver, yet he was found guilty of “careless driving leading to the death of others and for not yielding to a car with priority.” As many of you may have heard, Russian traffic police are notoriously elitist and corrupt, and the privileged basically have free rein on the roads:

Nowhere is the privilege – and abuse – of power more visible to ordinary Russians than on the roads, where politicians and bureaucrats, who have special license plates and blue lights for their luxury vehicles, speed recklessly, force other drivers aside and generally flout the rules. At the same time, ordinary citizens are subject to constant harassment from traffic police, who routinely demand small bribes. These irritants have become the source of open anger because many motorists can easily imagine themselves suffering Shcherbinsky’s fate.

This is a crock of shit, and I hope that media scrutiny forces Russian authorities to rethink this shameful decision. Looks like not as much has changed in Russia as people think…