Kansas Not Totally Stupid

Good news from Kansas — enough smart people voted in the school board elections yesterday to defeat the previous stupid-supported majority:

Moderate Republicans scored key primary victories in State Board of Education races, wrestling control from conservatives in a battle shaped by the debate over the teaching of evolution.

Conservative Republicans began Tuesday with a 6-4 board majority. However, one of their incumbents lost, and a pro-evolution moderate won the GOP nomination for a seat held by a retiring conservative.

The results left only four board members who voted last year to adopt science standards that questioned the validity of evolutionary theory.

Best of all, Connie Morris, Queen of the Stupid People, lost her seat. In celebration, I'm proudly wearing my FSM t-shirt.

But my exuberance is tempered by this write-up by John Hanna of the AP. He closes with this:

The [Kansas] standards say that the evolutionary theory that all life had a common origin has been challenged by fossils and molecular biology. And they say there is controversy over whether changes over time in one species can lead to a new species.

And the part where he reports that evolution represents the consensus view of the scientific community, that these "challenges" and "controversies" are coming from a few crackpots, that fossils and molecular biology support evolution, not undermine it, that evolution is one of the richest and well-supported theories that science has ever produced, a landmark achievement in the history of human reason… oh, he didn't put that in. This story doesn't even rise to the level of he-said-she-said reporting so common in bad science writing. Here we just have one side, and it's the wrong one.

But Hanna does get a point back for including this wonderful self-refuting quote:

"I feel like if you give two sides of something, most people are intelligent enough to make up their own minds," said Ryan Cole, a 26-year-old farmer and horse trainer from Smith County, along the Nebraska line.

Sorry Ryan, better luck next time.

Sacrebleu!

Bad news from Capitol Hill — the noble stand against the insouciance of "Old Europe" that many of our fine elected officials (e.g. Bob Ney, R-SCANDAL) took near the start of the Iraq War has fallen victim to a "cut-and-run" flanking maneuver by some unnamed fifth column in the House cafeteria. The Washington Times has the scoop:

The fries on Capitol Hill are French again.

So is the breakfast toast in the congressional cafeterias, with both fries and toast having been liberated from the appellation "freedom."

Three years after House Republicans trumpeted the new names to get back at the French for snubbing the coalition of the willing in Iraq, congressmen don't even want to talk about french fries, which are actually native to Belgium, and toast.

Neither Reps. Bob Ney of Ohio nor Walter B. Jones of North Carolina, the authors of the culinary rebuke, were willing this week to say who led the retreat, as it were, from the frying pan. But retreat there has been, as a casual observer can see for himself in the House's basement cafeterias.

I can't help but worry that this means the terrorists have won, but maybe I'm not giving proud patriots like Ney and Jones the benefit of the doubt. What if Ney and Jones are playing it close to the vest for reasons of national security? What if this is all part of some top-secret operation to identify al-Queda operatives working at our breakfast bars and lunch lines?

As a proud patriot myself, I know I shouldn't really ask any questions. But at the same time, thousands of greasy-spoon diners throughout the country need the critical culinary nomenclature guidance that only Congress has the time and resources to offer. Without endangering our troops in the field, we need to conduct an immediate classified investigation, and then quietly disseminate the results through a organization with the proper clearance and protocols, like the CIA or the CIA.

If we have to go back to calling them French Fries to better wage the war on terror, so be it. I wouldn't be happy about that, but war is hell.