Judge Jones is hypocritical about "judicial independence"

It may seem hard to believe, but five years after the Kitzmiller v. Dover ruling, Judge John E. "Adolf" Jones III is still on the lecture circuit. Here is a recent lecture by Jones hypocritically titled, "From Scopes to Kitzmiller and beyond: lessons in judicial independence." I know that this lecture is recent because Jones said that the Kitzmiller trial testimony had concluded five years previously (my, how time flies). I say that the lecture was hypocritical because his blatant chumminess with the Kitzmiller plaintiffs' representatives -- e.g., plaintiffs' expert witness Barbara Forrest and plaintiffs' attorney Richard Katzke -- is not consistent with the idea of "judicial independence."

Judge Jones has falsely characterized criticism of his decision as just an issue of "judicial independence" -- as I have previously pointed out, some of his biggest critics have been Darwinist, atheist, or neutral.

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Darwinists still missing the point regarding the "plagiarism" charges against Judge Jones

On Panda's Thumb, Timothy Sandefur writes,

Y’all remember how, years ago, Casey Luskin and the boys were calling Judge Jones a plagiarist because the final decision in Kitzmiller drew a lot of language from the briefs? I pointed out at the time that, well, that’s what briefs are for. Now here’s an article in Political Research Quarterly that uses software to find that even the U.S. Supreme Court draws a lot of language from the briefs filed by the parties in any particular case,

But the "plagiarism" charges against Judge Jones were not based on just the copying, but were based on the extreme one-sidedness of the copying. Larry Moran, a hardline Darwinist himself, summed it up nicely:

Any junior clerk could have copied the material in a single afternoon, making some minor changes of wording. This is not a case of picking and choosing from both sides and writing a summary that incorporates a few phrases here and there. It's wholesale copying, the order is the same and entire paragraphs are copied for 34 pages.

Ironically, Sandefur also says, "For most of us, it’s nice to know that court opinions show the judges actually read the briefs." On the contrary, the Kitzmiller opinion shows no evidence that Judge Jones actually read the ID-as-science sections of the defense briefs, because the opinion did not quote or cite those sections, directly or indirectly.

I think that a major reason for the one-sidedness in the Kitzmiller opinion was that Judge Jones felt fairly safe in ignoring the defense briefs' arguments because an appeal was not expected because of the changeover in the school board membership.

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Nick Matzke is a dodo

Nick Matzke is a former Public Information Project Director of the National Center for Science Education and was an advisor to the plaintiffs in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case. In a recent post on Panda's Thumb, he wrote,

To a first approximation, if evangelicals become OK with evolution, then the evolution fight will be over and the evolutionists will have won, in the Western world, at least.

Sheeeesh

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What? Birds are "living dinosaurs"?

In his new book Written in Stone: Evolution, the Fossil Record, and Our Place in Nature", Brian Switek wrote, "If you want to see living dinosaurs, you don't have to trek to a steaming jungle or isolated plateau. All you have to do is put up a bird feeder and look out the window." Now I have heard everything. Sick, sick, sick.

Not surprisingly, this stupid book has been endorsed by the National Center for Science Education.

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