Uh-oh…Casey Luskin made a significant gaffe. He claimed that Florida’s “academic freedom” bill would specifically allow public school teachers to offer instruction in Intelligent Design, and he said it with the microphones on where newspaper reporters could catch it. As Wesley says, it’s obvious that the DI is recruiting “lawsuit fodder” from the ranks of deluded schoolteachers. The DI won’t have any liability, so they can sit and provoke and let poor school districts eat the expenses of any legal cases. (Maybe the next big creationism court case ought to somehow assign blame so these criminal jokers at the DI and AiG can pay the cost of their lies, rather than the tax payers of victimized school districts.)

Now here’s the funny bit: John West of the DI rushed to spin Luskin’s comments.

Isn’t that odd? When Luskin says something stupid about the law or about the DI’s devious designs, the ideologues at the institute know they have to quickly police the message and make sure it’s twisted to conceal their motives. When Luskin says something stupid about science, though, that’s clearly less important, and silence is all that is heard from his cronies. Perhaps it’s not so odd, though: DI fellows are highly unqualified to assess the scientific evidence, while they are world-class experts in lying for Jesus. Perhaps they feel a strong personal obligation to improve young Mr Luskin’s expertise in obfuscation.

I complained before that Florida lawmakers were being treated to creationist propaganda at a facility of Florida State University. Perhaps I should have had more confidence in the people of Florida. The movie was shown, and…

But the evening at downtown’s IMAX Theater, which was rented out to Mr. Stein’s group for $940, was a bust, with only about 100 people attending the movie.

They paid to have people attend for free, and they still couldn’t get a decent crowd.

They couldn’t even get the title right: A Meeting of Minds. It’s more like a meeting of the mindless. Ben Stein has had a friendly meeting with that old fraud, Ken Ham, and apparently they were perfect for each other. The sexual tension is palpable in the accompanying photo; the mutual praise flowed like champagne between the two of them, although Ham finally won the prize for high sycophancy.

Expelled is hosted by the brilliant Ben Stein, actor/economist/lawyer/presidential speechwriter/science observer—a 21st-century Einsteinian figure.

Einstein? They’re comparing a 3rd rate actor best known for playing the most boring high school teacher ever to Einstein? I think there must have been a few typos in that article. Here, I fixed them.

Expelled is hosted by the soporific Ben Stein, character actor/failed economist/eyewash huckster/Nixon apologist/creationist—a 21st-century Pecksniffian figure.

People, I know it’s really hard sometimes to tell the parodies from the sincerely held beliefs of the faith-heads. That last post was humor; sure, there are people out there who think they can spot atheists by their degenerate, evil ways, but that was clearly a spoof of such attitudes. This, on the other hand, is the real thing, a loving work of ignorant inanity by a couple of liars for Jesus:

See the difference? That little video makes assertions of fact that are entirely false, but really aren’t at all funny. When someone accuses atheists of wearing comfortable footwear because it “encourages moral decadence,” that’s silly and makes us laugh. This, on the other hand, doesn’t sound like the punchline to a joke:

Carbon dating and all other forms of radiometric dating are so flawed that scientists don’t even want to use them any more to determine the age of fossils.

There isn’t even a grain of truth to that sentence; it doesn’t make me want to laugh (except, maybe, in a mean-spirited way at the peckerwood making the claim); it reflects a deep-seated ignorance about the scientific tools used for dating; and it is nothing but a rallying cry for like-minded pissants to nod their head in agreement that someone has confirmed their biases.

(Seriously, that claim is so damned stupid it’s more likely to make me angry than amused. I am surrounded by geologists here at UMM, and one of them gave a presentation on radiometric dating just last month. They’d love to date everything, and the reason that they don’t is that it takes a fair amount of work to prepare samples, and it isn’t cheap to ship them off and get isotopes assayed. I want these creationist frauds to read Turney’s Bones, Rocks, and Stars so their delusions aren’t quite so idiotic.)

It helps to be familiar with actual creationist arguments. When you see something that parrots the claims they do make, unleavened with a hint of satire or a pointer to a refutation, then you’ve got the real thing.

That video does cut it close in one place, when it tries to propose it’s positive support for Christianity over other religions, and it claims that their distinguishing feature that makes their religion the one true belief is that it values faith over works. That sounds like such a breathtakingly ridiculous claim that it approaches self-satire, but if you know that Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron in their “Way of the Master” series actually make that argument with straight faces, it stops being funny.

While I’m at it, let me mention to everyone who hasn’t figured it out yet that the Objective Ministries Creation Science Fair page is a parody, just not a very good one, or perhaps too good. I still get email about it every once in a while from people who think it’s true. Its problem is that it treads the line too finely; it uses arguments that are just too darned close to actual creationist arguments, which makes it more of a pain in the ass than something to amuse.

Florida also has an “academic freedom” bill in the works, and they’re using Ben Stein’s sillly movie to promote it … and if you want to find legislators with cobwebs in their cranium, Florida is the place to go.

Neither Hays nor his co-sponsor, Brandon Republican Sen. Ronda Storms, could name any teachers in Florida who have been disciplined for being critical of evolution in the science classroom. Better known for his ”Win Ben Stein’s Money” game show, Stein made the documentary to document how evolution critics have supposedly run afoul of mainstream science in higher academics.

”I want a balanced policy. I want students taught how to think, not what to think,” Hays says. “There are problems with evolution. Have you ever seen a half-monkey, half human?”

No comment.

The New York Times has taken notice of the promotional tactics being used for the creationist propaganda flick, Expelled. As you all know, they are trying to filter screenings, allowing only ideologically friendly people to see it, and keeping out the serious critics who might actually evaluate it on its merits, rather than as a media echo of what the viewers want to hear.

There were nondisclosure agreements to sign that day, but Mr. Moore did not, and proceeded to write perhaps the harshest review “Expelled” has received thus far. The film will open April 18, but has been screened several times privately for religious audiences. Mr. Moore deplored what he perceived as “loaded images, loaded rhetoric, few if any facts” and accused Mr. Stein of using a “Holocaust denier’s” tactics.

Which, of course, was exactly the reaction the moviemakers were hoping to avoid by keeping mainstream critics out.

Mr. Stein said in a telephone interview that he had not read Mr. Moore’s review, but that “being compared with a Holocaust denier is nonsense,” adding, “This guy is extremely confused.” He said he decided to participate in the project because “there’s just a lot of people who don’t believe that big science and Darwinism should have a stranglehold on academic life, and they have been waiting for a voice.”

Every time Stein opens his mouth, he’s helping us. This is a movie that uses Nazi imagery to accuse science since 1859 of being the primary cause of anti-semitism — it’s not denying the Holocaust, but instead is trivializing it by using it as a tool to dishonestly browbeat a group that was not responsible. In the 1930s, a political group in Germany used centuries of deeply rooted anti-Semitism to create a popular movement that culminated in the murder of six million people for their ethnicity and a war that consumed practically the entire planet; it wasn’t caused by academics arguing over a theory.

And he projects his bizarre misinterpretations again. “Darwinism” doesn’t have a stranglehold on academics; we’ve moved well beyond Darwin to new ideas, and are constantly wrestling with novel suggestions to expand on the old Darwinian core. To name one example, proponents of evo-devo think they’ve got a set of theories that should change the way we think about evolution. There are smart people loudly arguing on both sides, with the pro side bringing up observations and evidence that emphasize the importance of the discipline, and cons poking holes and pointing out major failings, and pushing for more and better evidence. There is no stranglehold, there are only high standards of evidence that are not met by making propaganda films and getting church leaders with no knowledge of biology to denounce one side or the other. There is hard work required to break through into academic credibility, work which is not being done by the IDists.

We also have expectations of honesty that are not being met. The makers of this film had to hide their motivations every step of the way, because they know that they can’t stand the harsh light of criticism. And they just can’t stop lying.

Logan Craft, executive producer of “Expelled” and chief of Premise Media, said he thought Mr. Moore had been wrong to attend the screening after being disinvited, but both he and Mr. Lauer denied any involvement in an online “media alert” that purported to be from a backer of the film. The alert accused Mr. Moore of posing as a minister to gain admission, calling his actions a “security breach.” Mr. Moore said he never represented himself as other than a reporter.

Oh, come on. I’ve got a copy of the “media alert,” and it’s from promotional material put out by Motive Marketing. Look at the official movie site, and right there on the bottom right is the logo for Motive Marketing. They’ve been bragging about using Motive for marketing, since this is also the firm that promoted Gibson’s snuff movie, The Passion of the Christ. This Lauer fellow is the founder of Motive. A reader has sent me more promotional mail from these guys, and they are peddling the movie hard. And now they’re lying to the New York Times and claiming they’ve got nothing to do with it? It seems to be a kind of pathological reflex to deny, deny, deny even when they’re caught red-handed in something relatively inocuous.

Oh, well. It’s a sign of desperation that they are straining so hard to find a narrow audience that will appreciate their movie; they know that they’ve got a klunker that will rely on appeal to a narrow bias to succeed. Randy Olson has ’em pegged: they want to use humor to broaden the appeal to more than just the theocratic sheep, but their movie isn’t funny. A movie that tries to build on clips of goose-stepping Nazis and Hitler salutes is pretty much destined to be depressing, unless you’re Mel Brooks. And Ben Stein is no Mel Brooks.