I’m sorry that I just came across this excellent speech by Matthew LaClair recounting his experiences with David Paszkiewicz which was published in Freethought Today in October 2007, reprinted by the Friendly Atheist blog on January 6, 2008. It’s probably the best concise summary of what happened and the subsequent events.

Another negative review for the film, by Jeffrey Kluger. He specifically calls out the film for dishonesty: The man made famous by Ferris Bueller, however, quickly wades into waters far too deep for him. He makes all the usual mistakes nonscientists make whenever they try to take down evolution, asking, for example, how something as complex as a living cell could have possibly arisen whole from the earth’s primordial soup. The answer is it couldn’t–and it didn’t. Organic chemicals needed eons of stirring and slow cooking before they could produce compounds that could begin to lead to a living thing. More dishonestly, Stein employs the common dodge of enumerating all the admittedly unanswered questions in evolutionary theory and using this to refute the whole idea. But all scientific knowledge is built this way. A fishnet is made up of a lot more holes than strings, but you can’t therefore argue that the net doesn’t exist. Just ask the fish. ...

Scientific American: …it seems a safe bet that the producers hope a whipping from us would be useful for publicity: further proof that any mention of ID outrages the close-minded establishment. (Picture Ben Stein as Jack Nicholson, shouting, “You can’t handle the truth!”) Knowing this, we could simply ignore the movie–which might also suit their purposes, come to think of it. Unfortunately, Expelled is a movie not quite harmless enough to be ignored. Shrugging off most of the film’s attacks–all recycled from previous pro-ID works–would be easy, but its heavy-handed linkage of modern biology to the Holocaust demands a response for the sake of simple human decency. ...

XVIVO LLC has sent a copyright infringement warning letter to Premise Media about the computer animation that appears to have been based on XVIVO’s “The Inner Life of a Cell.” Some have speculated that “Expelled”’s release was moved from February to April because it had used the XVIVO film directly (just as William Dembski and other Discovery Institute fellows had been doing in public lectures), and they used the time to re-create the animation on their own. The letter says that XVIVO considers the segment in the film to still be close enough to be an infringement of their intellectual property rights, and demands: That Premise Media, Rampant Films, and its officers, employees, and agents remove the infringing segment from all copies of the “Expelled” film prior to its scheduled commercial release on or before April 18, 2008; ...

Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TIZA), a K-8 charter school run out of the headquarters of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota and run by an imam, Asad Zaman, teaches Islamic studies and has mandatory prayers led by a non-student. See, Christians–this is what the separation of church and state legally prohibits schools from doing with your tax dollars. Get it? UPDATE (April 11, 2008): Very many conservative bloggers, including Michelle Malkin and the morons at Stop the ACLU, are protesting TIZA and asking why the ACLU isn’t doing anything. In fact, the ACLU was on this issue before any conservative bloggers were, though they are hampered by the lack of a plaintiff. These bloggers are blatantly expressing their hypocrisy. If the ACLU was so much as sending a warning letter to a charter school promoting Christianity, they’d be protesting it. But since it’s Islam, the ACLU can’t possibly do enough. ...

From CNN: Federal employees charged millions of dollars to government credit or debit cards, according to a Government Accountability Office study released Wednesday. Those charges include Internet dating services, iPods, expensive clothing, a $13,500 dinner and lingerie to be worn during jungle training in Ecuador, the study said. The audit also found that government agencies could not account for nearly $2 million worth of items, which included computer servers, laptop computers, iPods and digital cameras. ...

Mike Beidler stopped by to post a comment on the post about “truth tickets,” and I’m very pleased to see his blog, “The Creation of an Evolutionist," which describes his personal journey from being a young-earth creationist to accepting the fact and theory of evolution. It’s people like Mike that are the most likely to have an influence on changing the minds of current young-earth creationists. Because of that, it’s also the case that people like Mike often get to take even more heat from creationist organizations than we atheists receive. Those organizations are premised on the assumption that Christianity requires creationism, and Mike is a living, breathing, and forcefully arguing counterexample. I, like Mike, used to be a young-earth creationist, but my journey continued on to the rejection of Christianity and theism. ...

The Center for Inquiry has released a detailed critique (PDF) of a U.S. history textbook by James Q. Wilson and John Dilulio, Jr., pointing out that it falsely claims that there’s doubt about the very existence of the greenhouse effect, falsely claims that the U.S. Supreme Court has banned prayer in schools (as opposed to teacher-led prayer), falsely claims that the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas overturned Texas’s anti-sodomy law on a close 5-4 vote (it was 6-3), falsely claims that the checks and balances of the U.S. Constitution were motivated by worries about original sin, and so on. (A summary can be found at the Friendly Atheist blog.) Wilson is Ronald W. Reagan Professor for Public Policy at Pepperdine University and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors of the American Enterprise Institute; Dilulio was the first head of George W. Bush’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The problems in this textbook were uncovered by Matthew LaClair of Kearny, NJ, who previously received a lot of press coverage for his exposure of a U.S. history teacher at his school, David Paskiewicz, who was using the classroom as a forum for proselytizing evangelical Christianity. That story broke in the mainstream media only after being publicized on this blog. ...

Roger Friedman at Fox News reviews “Expelled”: “Expelled” is a sloppy, all-over-the-place, poorly made (and not just a little boring) “expose” of the scientific community. It’s not very exciting. But it does show that Stein, who’s carved out a career selling eye drops in commercials and amusing us on sitcoms, is either completely nuts or so avaricious that he’s abandoned all good sense to make a buck.Looks like “Expelled”’s positive reviews are limited to those by right-wing political talk show hosts on whose shows they’re buying advertising. ...

John Lynch brought my attention this morning to HB 2713, the student religious freedom act, in the Arizona legislature. At first I thought this was like the “academic freedom” bills being pushed by the Discovery Institute (which I believe is also something that the film “Expelled” is being used to push), but those are about defending the ability of teacher to promote nonsense in the classroom, while this bill only defends student-initiated religious expression. There is one serious problem with the bill, however, and that is its conflation of religious and secular viewpoints: “Each public educational institution shall permit religious viewpoints in the same manner and to the same extent as secular viewpoints are permitted on the same subject matter.” If instead, this said merely that if one religious viewpoint is permitted, all religious viewpoints must be permitted, I’d have no problem with it. But this wording has the effect that where you can discuss anything at all, you can also discuss religion. In a science classroom, since science is secular, you can talk about religion. In a math classroom, since math is secular, you can talk about religion. That’s ludicrous. I think the bill will die, if not for the good reason I’ve just given, for the reason that it does also open things up to all religions and to anti-religion. If students are permitted to wear shirts with a Christian message, they must also be permitted to wear shirts promoting an Islamic message, an atheist message, a Satanic message, or a Pastafarian message. Likewise, if students are permitted to use personal viewpoints in writing an essay or giving a presentation to the class, they may use their viewpoints on religious matters as well. Again, atheism would have to be as welcome as Christianity. (And it’s not that atheism is a religion, only that it is a viewpoint on religious matters.) I suspect the authors and sponsors of the bill–State Representatives Clark, Anderson, Barto, Crump, Groe, Pearce, Robson, Tobin, and Yarbrough, and by State Senators Gorman, Gould, L. Gray, Harper, and Johnson–don’t really want that consequence. I think a few supportive emails are in order, thanking them for endorsing the right of students to argue for atheism in the classroom (and Satanism, and Scientology, a religion that Johnson, Gray, Gorman, and Pearce are familiar with, since they’ve previously sponsored bills on behalf of the religion).