Here's a strange one. Ben Stein has one foot in LA taking part in some brilliantly dry comedy. The other foot is planted in vintage DC republican circles. He was speechwriter for Nixon and his dad was in Nixon's cabinet.

His odd duality has surfaced again. He has called, no, begged Rove to take over the McSame campain (sic) while at the same time endorsing Al Franken.

Stein says, " He is a really, really capable smart guy, I don't agree with all of his positions, but he is a very impressive guy, and I think he should be in the Senate."

Being half right is better than being totally wrong.

I'm not sure if Ben is exhibiting generosity to the Franken campaign, but we should.
Al's new ads are looking pretty good too.

On last night's Countdown on CSNBC,Keith Olbermann reported that Ben Stein and other right-wing pundits expressed outrage that Barack Obama addressed the people of Berlin outdoors, and 200,000 people took it upon themselves to show up for this event.  Horror of horrors!  Mr. Stein suggested that this was somehow reminiscent of Nazi rallies, implying some connection between Sen. Obama's candidacy and the danger of fascism.  Typical wingnut use of innuendo.  I am not writing this diary to bemoan the wingnuts' tendency to stoop to this kind of smear when they're running behind in the polls; we've learned to expect that.  

I think someone may have spiked my Diet Coke with something extra special tonight because tonight's diary prep went to 2 pages - again. Goody for us all - I hope!

So, let's Countdown for the night before payday for me!

Family Research Council is drumming up headliners for its September 2008 Values Voter Summit. The list of confirmed speakers reads as one would expect it to: Chuck Colson, Phyllis Scaffley, Newt Gingrich, Bill Bennett, Mitt Romney, Gary Bauer, etc.

Both presidential candidates are listed as "invited speakers."

Will McCain accept the invitation in order to shore up his transformation into the Security and Values candidate?

Will Obama accept the invitation in order to quell any remaining tremors resulting from the Dobson debacle?

Earlier tonight, I had the misfortune of stumbling upon a segment of Glenn Beck's Headline News hour of pain.  It was a testament to how far people will go to be willfully ignorant when it comes to politics.  Here's a transcript.  The relevant bits to this diary can be found toward the top of the page, in the first segment of the show.  This is the first time I've watched Glenn Beck, but as someone who regularly checks Media Matters, I know that of which he's capable.  He didn't disappoint tonight, and lived up to his reputation as one of the media's greatest misinformers.

Beck thinks the media has treated Hillary Clinton unfairly in the wake of her RFK assassination comments.  So to combat this horrible, horrible injustice, Beck and his guest Ben Stein decided to have a chat about Barack Obama.

I sent this to Countdown, by the way.  It's definitely "worst persons" worthy.  In fact, I think Glenn deserves the dubious honor of being "worse, worser, and worst" on tomorrow evening's program.  Below the fold are some of the notable quotes.

It was going to be the Religious Right's answer to Michael Moore. It was going to be a blockbuster that blew open a whole new front in the culture wars, and not so incidentally made the producers a hefty stack of cash in the process. Take that, liberals!

And then it just went pop like a soap bubble.

No riots, no fighting in the streets, no angry mobs with torches, and -- worst of all -- no profit.

At the close of its fourth weekend, down to about a third of the screens it was released on, the total box office for "Expelled" has just inched over the $7M mark. Given a production budget of $3.5M and a publicity budget described by the producers as "multiples" of that, we're probably talking about at least $11.5M at bare minimum to make and market the thing, including the literally million-dollar expense of making over a thousand prints for such a wide release.

In other words, our friends the creationists have, despite all their attempts to rally their own troops, taken a multi-million dollar bath.

Isn't that nice?

So that naturally brings up the question, "Who killed 'Expelled'?" Was it the nefarious nabobs of Big Science and the Librul Media? Or was it you? Read on.

Want your head to explode? Here's how, in two easy steps.

1. Go to your local theater complex and buy a ticket to any movie except "Expelled: No Intelligent Audience."

2. Go into the theater playing "Expelled" instead of which ever one you paid for -- (I chose "Baby Mama" because the world needs more Tina Fey movies) -- and watch as much of it as you can stand.

3. Kablam!

...and two steps back.  That's the way Florida's education system is heading, with a recent decision by the state's House and Senate to allow public schools to teach "alternatives" to the theory of evolution.

So Expelled has been causing a little bit furor over its unremitting and unending stupidity.  And, I want to be quick to point out, that stupidity does NOT have to do with the content of its underlying "science," creationism (which, for the record, is pretty stupid).  The stupidity comes from its false dichotomy and its insistence that there's some sort of Great Atheist Conspiracy to suppress creationism.

But I have a slightly different question, since I'm not by any means a science blogger - I'm at best a law blogger who sometimes forays into religion or politics.  Anyway, my question is this:

How are we supposed to ensure that only science is science?

Republicans and Conservatives (especially the talking Bobblehead kind on Fox News) talk a lovely game when it comes to protection of private property, particularly copyrights for intellectual properties. The Republican Congress back in 2001 passed the odious DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and has generally allowed the RIAA and the MPAA to become the intrusive, suing beasts that they are today.

Apparently, like laws against torture and ease-dropping, Conservatives also can choose to just ignore copyright law whenever the want.

Exhibit A: "Expelled" and the film's use of John Lennon's "Imagine". Typically responsible filmmakers try to get permission to use an Artist's music in their film or documentary regardless of how much or how the music is used. If a filmmaker doesn't they get sued into oblivion, or (more likely) their film never sees the light of day because no Film Distributor wants to get sued themselves.

All we need now is some mayo, mustard and some bread. We've already got the baloney and the cheese.

Former Nixon speechwriter, terminally droll pretend smart-guy and eyedrop spokesperson Ben Stein, attacks those elitist scientists while invoking Godwin's law in the new crapumentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Scientific American viewed the film which apparently does a good job of living up to it's name by not displaying any intelligence.

Crossposted at CollegeFreedom.

Okay, I can't resist: Can anyone save Ben Stein from looking like an idiot in his new pro-creationist documentary, Expelled? Anyone? Anyone?

Yes, the actor who became famous by portraying a rather stupid teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off is back on the big screen, but this time his stupidity isn't an act. "No Intelligence Allowed" is the ironic subtitle of the movie, which begins with stock footage of the Berlin Wall. Is the reluctance of scientists to embrace a crackpot theory the equivalent of an evil totalitarian regime? According to Stein, yes. That’s only the beginning of the absurdly inappropriate analogies to be found in Expelled.

It is astonishing in our day and age that somebody would try to do an "Inconvenient Truth" or "Supersize Me" type of documentary in favour of Intelligent Design. If the public were even a little more literate about science, who would want to face the ridicule? And yet, thanks to the opening created by our substantial scientific illiteracy, Ben Stein has done exactly that. I'm sure you've seen the commercial of an Einstein-like professor ridiculed from the back of a class by Ben Stein, uttering some gibberish about "why is there still monkies" (or some other allegedly paradoxical inanity drawn from the illiterati of Yahoo Answers.) This commercial is promoting a new film he has made called Expelled.

Scientific American lays the smackdown on Stein.

I attended an opening night screening of Ben Stein's insipid Intelligent Design film so you don't have to.

The proof is in the tweets -- all 50 of 'em -- over the last 90 minutes at Colorado Confidential.com. Read more for random thoughts, observations and crowd reaction to "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed."

Ben Stein is about to release a documentary that seems to claim that not teaching Creationism in schools leads to Nazis, amongst many other evils.

There's news on the intelligent design front. Ben Stein has written and narrates Expelled, a "documentary" coming out mid-April (maybe--it's been postponed before) about academics who propound ID and are expelled (get it?) from universities because academia is biased in favor of evolution and natural selection (like that’s a bad thing).

Oh, good gawd.  I just went and watched the way-too-long "trailer" of Ben Stein's "Expelled:  No Intelligence Allowed."

I read a few months ago that he was working on some pro-intelligent-design (creationism), anti-Darwin propaganda film, but had forgotten about it.  I think it was dreamed up right after the Dover, Pennsylvania, court case on ID where these same cast of characters got their asses handed to them by the judge.

More below the fold --

In an article in the New York Times yesterday, Ben Stein, writing an open letter to John McCain, managed instead to make an excellent case for Democrats in 2008.