Dover Case
stcynic | August 11, 2006A reader emailed me a link to this post over at Dembski's blog, and I intended to reply to it today. Alas, Wes Elsberry beat me to it and probably did a better job than I would have done anyway.
stcynic | July 3, 2006I thought I was done pummeling DaveScot's immeasurable ignorance on this issue, but then I saw this comment where he interjects his thoughts in bold. It's just astonishing how someone can be so wrong about virtually everything and be totally unaware of it. It's like the perfect storm of stupidity. And you're gonna love how he's backpeddling now. After the commenter informs him of what I've already told him, that even if you got a jury trial the jury could only decide on the issie of damages, not on the constitutional questions, he now says he knew that:
This is my understanding as well.
Uh,…
stcynic | July 3, 2006Sandefur took a short break from his travels to briefly reply to DaveScot's terminal cluelessness in a post titled "Why DaveScot Should Stop Playing Lawyer". I'll just quote the first paragraph:
DaveScot is an especially belligerent idiot who was happily adopted as a co-blogger by the credibility-free Intelligent Design proponent William Dembski. Normally, I ignore idiots. But DaveScot has lately dragged my name into a dispute with Ed Brayton--a dispute Brayton was happily and handily winning, as usual--and I thought perhaps I should explain just why DaveScot should stop talking about things…
stcynic | July 2, 2006If DaveScot didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent him. Who could give up the constant amusement of watching him take brave leaps in the dark and land with a resounding thud? Here's his latest, where he entirely misreads a post by Sandefur at the Panda's Thumb and still doesn't get the distinction between what juries can and cannot judge. He's still trying to find some credibility for his claim that if the damages had been over $20 in the Dover case, then a jury would have heard the case and likely would not have ruled the way the judge did. He claims that Sandefur agrees with him and…
stcynic | July 2, 2006Dave and Larry don't always perform together, of course. Larry has his own act, which can be seen at his blog pretty much every day. And he's continued to peddle nonsense on this issue over there.
(1) The attorney fee awards that defendants must pay in establishment clause cases are often draconian. The Dover school board was soaked for $1 million in fees, though the board deserved little more than a slap on the wrist, if even that much.
But as I keep saying, they only claim the government agency - and that's what a school is - got "soaked" or was "intimidated" by the ACLU when they disagree…
stcynic | July 2, 2006DaveScot and Larry Fafarman really should take their act on the road, I think. I'd pay money to see these keystone cops try and explain legal concepts to each other and argue about it, wouldn't you? Dave's post on jury nullification continues to provide much amusement. As Dan said in a comment, when Larry is the voice of reason in a thread, that's frightening. Dave's claim is that there should be a right to trial by jury in such cases because of the 7th amendment. But even BarryA, an ID supporter and apparently an attorney, has debunked Dave's argument:
The phrase "suits at common law" is…
stcynic | June 30, 2006A new article in the York Daily Record about Judge Jones and how he's handled the aftermath of the Dover decision (okay, it's a few days old, but I just found out about it from Burt Humburg, and yes I've informed him that he really should be more on the ball and get me this information sooner). I particularly liked two quotes. The first:
On Thursday night's "Smart Talk," however, Jones characterized his judicial decisions as circumscribed by narrow parameters based on precedent and the law. And if that brings criticism from the "punditry," Jones said, it just goes with the job.
"They would…
stcynic | June 9, 2006You've gotta hand it to the DI Media Complaints Division - when their PR team gives them a catchphrase-laden response to something, they repeat it so many times that they begin to sound like Rain Man (just replace Judge Wapner with Judge Jones). Rob Crowther continues to beat this drum in yet another post calling him an "activist judge" and taking him to task for making a few speeches since the Dover ruling. And of course, he has to distort what he said in order to make his argument:
Judge Jones knew full well that the eyes of the world were upon him during the Dover case, and so chose that…
stcynic | June 6, 2006Okay folks, I'm going to make a prediction here on the substance of the next attack on Judge Jones. In an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer about Jones' recent speeches defending judicial independence, we find this little tidbit:
Edward Madeira, a senior partner with Pepper Hamilton L.L.P., which represented Dover plaintiffs, described Jones as the perfect ambassador for a more visible judiciary.
"God bless him," said Madeira, who serves with Jones on a state panel on judicial independence. "He came out of the case with a real concern about the lack of understanding of the role of the…
stcynic | June 6, 2006The more I see from Judge John Jones, the man who presided over the Dover trial, the more I like him. He recently gave a speech to the ADL and they've put the transcript of that speech on their webpage. I urge you all to read it. He doesn't get into the specifics of defending his ruling, which judges generally avoid doing, but he does make a strong and more general argument about precedent and the job of a district judge that is aimed squarely at the critics of his decision. Those critics are so driven by their anger at not getting the outcome they wanted that they have blinded themselves to…
stcynic | May 19, 2006A new ruling just came down from a Federal district court in North Carolina that mooted a case because the university changed its policy while the case was still pending. And because the plaintiffs' attorneys in the case of Alpha Iota Omega Christian Fraternity v. Moeser were from the ADF, I am anticipating that the DI and their fellow travelers will at some point use this to argue that the Dover case could also be mooted. So before they even head down that road, let me cut them off at the pass: this ruling is entirely different from Dover and does not support the argument for mootness in…
stcynic | May 19, 2006Joe McFaul is also critiquing Jonathan Witt's (latest) highly dishonest response to Judge Jones' ruling in Dover and he's found another, incredibly blatant lie by Witt. Witt wrote:
For instance, Jones suggests that the design argument began with St. Thomas in the Middle Ages. This was part of the judge's attempt to depict intelligent design as fundamentally Christian. The problem is that the design argument dates back much further, to the pagan philosophers Socrates and Plato.
And McFaul compares this to what Judge Jones actually said:
We initially note that John Haught, a theologian who…
stcynic | May 18, 2006DI flak Jonathan Witt is back with yet another criticism of Judge Jones' ruling in Kitzmiller, this one no more compelling than the 13,582,196 criticisms the DI has already offered (many of them contradictory, of course). It's chock full of bad arguments and nutty goodness, so let's get started.
In keeping with that trope, Jones suggests that intelligent design is just biblical creationism repackaged after a 1987 Supreme Court decision against biblical creationism.* If Jones had read key briefs submitted to him, he would know that the intelligent design arguments in biology pre-date that…
stcynic | May 11, 2006I'm sure some of you remember the brouhaha a few weeks ago over the accusation made by Seth Cooper, Joe Manzari and Michael Francisco that the new Dover school board, voted into office in November, intentionally delayed rescinding the policy because they were in collusion with the ACLU. Well now Francisco is back on the DI blog still trying to defend his views. So settle in, folks, this could get fun. Referring to my reply, he writes:
One critic stated that the AEI article, and my commentary, "appear to be utterly ignorant of the voluntary cessation doctrine" and "there was virtually no…
stcynic | May 8, 2006Casey Luskin has responded, apparently, to my post about his seemingly conspiratorial question for Judge Jones. I noted that he had clearly implied that Judge Jones had allowed someone else to write his ruling. The only alternative was that Luskin was making a terrible analogy. Now he says the latter was correct:
[Note added 5/5/06: Apparently this question has caused some controversy so I want to clarify: This post was a parody. My intent is not to imply that Judge Jones plagiarized, nor do I think he did. The point was that the arguments in his decision so-closely resembled those of the…
stcynic | May 5, 2006Just when you thought all of the clowns had exited the ID car to compare Judge Jones to Hitler and Stalin, Samual Chen of Baylor jumps out of the trunk to add his 2 cents to the fun. Only he's even more blunt about it. He cites the exact same four bad guys from Time's previous lists - ignoring, of course, all the good guys they've honored like Ghandi, Churchill and Martin Luther King - and says:
Either way, congratulations to Judge Jones on joining a long line of famous, or infamous, leaders. Hopefully the dictatorship he aims to set up in education falls like the dicatorships set up in…
stcynic | May 5, 2006Boy oh boy, Judge Jones being named as one of the 100 most influential people of recent times sure has the ID crowd's panties in a bunch. First we had Casey Luskin's inane and shameful insinuation that he didn't write the Dover ruling himself. And now we have DaveScot's even more shameful reaction to it. He arbitrarily picks out bad guys that Time has named "Person of the Year" in the past in order to denigrate Jones:
The magazine who made these men "Man of the Year"
1938 - Adolf Hitler
1939 - Joseph Stalin
1942 - Joseph Stalin
1957 - Nikita Krushchev
1979 - Ayatullah Khomeini
now brings you…
stcynic | May 4, 2006Casey Luskin has posted a "dream interview" with Judge Jones, all the questions he'd like to ask him. Included in that list is this one:
When will you be releasing pre-publication, unpublished drafts of your decision so we can decide who really wrote your published decision?
Wow. I didn't know there was any mystery about who "really wrote" his decision. One would assume it was written by Judge Jones and his clerk(s) in some configuration, the way every other court ruling is written. If Luskin is implying, as he clearly is, that Jones let someone else write the ruling (like me, perhaps, or…
stcynic | April 26, 2006The Seattle Times has an article about the Discovery Institute and its struggles in the wake of the Dover trial. Prompt the whining from the DI Media Complaints Division in 3...2...1.
The most interesting thing in the article, to me at least, was this statement about Bruce Chapman:
Chapman said he asked Discovery fellows not to testify in the Dover case. But Scott Minnich, a microbiologist, and Michael Behe, a biochemistry professor, did and were asked in court who they thought the designer was.
That actually answers a question that Wes and I had wondered about. We know that 3 DI fellows were…
stcynic | April 24, 2006Pat Hayes of Red State Rabble has written a nice post about Barbara Forrest that is partly a biographical sketch and partly an analysis of the sometimes ridiculously over the top reaction to her from the ID crowd. I've had the pleasure of working with Barbara for many years now and Hayes is certainly correct to say that this tiny little southern belle is about the last person you would expect, based solely on appearance, to become public enemy #1 to the ID movement. Pat writes:
Despite her tiny physical stature, personal warmth, and old-fashioned Southern manners, Forrest seems to bring out…