Newts and Lizards, Oh MY!!!!

First: some Newts (ok, A “Newt”)
Paul Krugman isn’t so much surprised at Newt Gingrich’s pathetic performance this past weekend (ending with his “if you quote me you are lying” (paraphrased) statement). He concludes:

[...] I never thought I’d miss Newt Gingrich — and maybe I won’t have to; such people are amazingly resilient. But anway, between this and Gingrich’s earlier declaration that anyone who quotes him correctly is lying, he’s been giving great entertainment.

Now you may ask, how did a once-powerful figure become such a clown? But that’s the wrong question: what you see now is what he always was. The real question is why so many media figures pretended, for so long, not to notice.

Emphasis mine. But hey, Dick Morris likes him.

Lizards: Jerry Coyne blogs about a recent discovery (fossil) which provides a transitional from between lizards and amphisbaenians (worm lizards; surf to the blog for a photo)

A paper published in Nature today by Johannes Muller and colleagues (abstract only) goes a long ways towards constraining our speculations. In the paper, they describe a new species of lizard from the Eocene Messel shale of Germany (Messel is a famous lagerstatte: a deposit with extraordinary fossil preservation) as a transitional form from ‘normal’ lizards to the amphisbaenians.

The evolutionary tree continues to be filled out, even as the Republican tournament to lose to Obama continues to wither.