Posted by The ever intrepid DaveScot has responded yet again on this question of why the Dover school board didn’t rescind the ID policy on Dec. 5th, 2005. And while his prior messages were just based on ignorance, he’s now added lying to his bag of tricks. He writes:
Ed responded again this time his lame excuse is the board didn’t have time to discuss rescinding the ID policy at the first meeting.
Bzzzt. Thank you for playing, Dave, but this is either A) a lie or B) you’re just too stupid to understand your native language. Nowhere in my response did I say anything about the board not having time to discuss it. Of course they could have taken the time to discuss it, but you wouldn’t expect them to do so at the meeting at which they were sworn in, which had no policymaking questions on the agenda at all. The reasons should be obvious to anyone who has ever served on such a board.
I bet if you compared the minutes of that meeting with the minutes of any meeting at which a new school board is sworn in, you would find that they are very similar. The first meeting deals solely with those administrative tasks that set the groundwork for future policy decisions – swearing in everyone, electing your officers, ratifying hirings and appointments to new positions, getting reports from administrators on the state of the school system, set the meeting schedule for the next year, and so forth.
They also set a time for public comment, as would be expected for a new board, to invite their constituents to give them their perspective on what the board’s priorities should be and what they want to see done. Again, if you look at the minutes of the meeting, you’ll see that there were no policy questions considered at all, only technical votes (the kind that always go 8-0 because they’re just procedural stuff). And I bet if you looked at minutes of other such meetings, you’ll find the same thing. It would be highly unusual for the board to take up a policy or curriculum issue at their very first meeting.
Dave’s position is that the new board “campaigned on the issue of rescinding the ID policy” and therefore should have voted it out the moment they took power. But that’s false both in premise and conclusion. The new board members did not campaign on the issue of rescinding the policy, but on the issue of opposing the policy. They ran against the old board’s decision to put the policy in place because it was irresponsible to get the district into a lawsuit when their own legal counsel told them that they would get sued and that they would lose. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the moment they take power they will rescind that policy because rescinding the policy would have no effect on the lawsuit and wouldn’t actually change anything. Even the vote at the January meeting was purely symbolic, it changed absolutely nothing. Even if they had voted not to rescind the policy, it could not be enforced.
Dave and everyone else on the other side of this issue is still pretending, absolutely falsely, that a vote to rescind the policy at the Dec. 5th meeting would have actually changed the outcome of the case. That is pure nonsense and not one of them has had anything approaching a substantive response to all of the legal analysis and case law that we’ve produced to debunk that false claim. Which means their argument collapses down to the accusation that since the school board didn’t immediately take a purely symbolic vote on the issue in the first hour they were in office, something nefarious is afoot. You’d think they would be embarrassed to be defaming people on such a flimsy premise, but they seem to be impervious to such embarrassment. And you’ve gotta love Dave’s concluding sentence:
Keep trying Ed. When you get to the point where you agree with Manzari and Cooper your lameness will be cured.
For crying out loud, how many false claims have to be pointed out in their article before it’s no longer required that someone agree with them? They were wrong about practically everything in the article, but someone still has to agree with them or they’re “lame”? I’ll take rank stupidity for $1000, Alex.
April 6, 2006
April 6, 2006
April 6, 2006