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KOB TV ran this news story on Wed. Jan 5, 2005 about PBS station KNME’s decision to ban “Unlocking the Mystery of Life.” Click here to read more.

William Tucker is a Senior Fellow of Discovery Institute

Today President George Bush will fly to Scott Air Force Base, Illinois, then drive 15 miles northwest to address a crowd at the Gateway Center in Collinsville, which is right next door to Edwardsville, the epicenter of America’s tort crisis.

Madison County, Illinois, has earned all this attention by becoming the nation’s number-one “judicial hellhole,” as the American Tort Reform Association has coined the phrase. “It’s a place where the judicial system has broken down,” says Sherman “Tiger” Joyce, executive director of the American Tort Reform Association.

Actually, Dickie Scruggs, the Pascagoula, Mississippi attorney who started the original $275 billion Medicaid/tobacco lawsuit (and collected several billion in the process) put it better. Speaking before an asbestos conference sponsored by Prudential Securities in 2002, Scruggs — who at least has a streak of honesty — described what he called “magic jurisdictions” in this way:

[W]hat I call the “magic jurisdiction,”…[is] where the judiciary is elected with verdict money. The trial lawyers have established relationships with the judges that are elected; they’re State Court judges; they’re popul[ists]. They’ve got large populations of voters who are in on the deal, they’re getting their [piece] in many cases. And so, it’s a political force in their jurisdiction, and it’s almost impossible to get a fair trial if you’re a defendant in some of these places. The plaintiff lawyer walks in there and writes the number on the blackboard, and the first juror meets the last one coming out the door with that amount of money.… The cases are not won in the courtroom. They’re won on the back roads long before the case goes to trial. Any lawyer fresh out of law school can walk in there and win the case, so it doesn’t matter what the evidence or the law is.

Madison County is one of those little rotten boroughs that — with the help of the trial lawyers — has turned lawsuits into a cottage industry. At last count close to 20 percent of the asbestos lawsuits in the nation were being heard before a single Illinois state judge in Madison. Out-of-state corporations as diverse as Prudential, Ford, AIG, Philip Morris, General Motors, and dozens of others have had to troop down to Madison County before judges and juries obviously intent on stripping them of their worldly goods.

In one particularly ironic case, Judge Nicholas Byron decided in 2003, without benefit of jury, that Philip Morris and its parent company, the Altria Group, had tricked the class of Illinois smokers out of $10.1 billion worth of damages by selling them Marlboro Lights, which plaintiff attorneys said fooled smokers into thinking they were less dangerous than Marlboro regulars. Judge Byron demanded that Altria post a $12 billion bond just to appeal the case to the state supreme court. Altria said it would have to declare bankruptcy.

The decision set off fire alarms in the offices of 49 other state attorney generals, who immediately rushed down to Madison to intervene. What’s the problem? Most states have now built their entire budgets around the Master Tobacco Settlement of 1998, which promises the states $275 billion over the next twenty years. Since Philip Morris pays the lion’s share of this settlement, bankrupting the company in Madison County would set off a financial crisis in 49 other states. Judge Byron finally lowered the bond to $6 billion but the case is still under review by the Illinois Supreme Court.

SEATTLE, JAN. 4 — KNME, a local PBS station in Albuquerque New Mexico, has banned “Unlocking the Mystery of Life,” a science documentary about intelligent design. According to KNME’s website the program was originally scheduled to air Friday, Jan. 7 at 9pm, and it was still listed there on Monday afternoon. According to New Mexico scientist Phil Robinson who worked Read More ›

Do you know how long you will live? Do you know how long the average American will live 50 years from now? Do you know what birthrates will be for the next 50 years? Do you know the rate of immigration for the next 50 years? Do you know the rate of economic growth for the next 50 years?

Of course, neither you nor anyone else the answer to any of the above questions. However, those who tell you we do not need to change Social Security or need only make minor adjustments to the existing system can honestly do so if they know the answers to the above questions — which they do not.

Let’s start with what we do know. The present Social Security system is a “pay-as-you-go” system, in which the taxes paid by workers and their employers are used to fund the monthly benefit checks for the existing retirees. We know that in 1950 there were 16.5 workers paying Social Security taxes for every retired person receiving benefits. We know there are now only about 3.3 workers for each person receiving benefits and there probably will only be 2.2 workers for each benefit recipient 25 years from now in 2030, if we continue with the existing system. We also know the so-called Social Security Trust Fund actually contains no money, because Congress has spent all the money (the surplus from the Social Security tax over actual outlays) on other things since the program’s 1937 inception.

To fully understand the problem, let us go back to what we do not know.

This article, published by California Wild Magazine, contains a review of The Privileged Planet by Discovery Institute Center for Science & Culture Senior Fellows Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards:

The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery, by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards. Regnery Publishing, Washington, DC, 2004. 444 pp., $27.95 hardcover.

Is there scientific evidence that an intelligent designer created our universe? Scientists and theologians have debated this issue for centuries, but now the arguments are heating up. The battle between evolution and creationism has been joined in schools around the country, and each new discovery in astronomy invites people to consider their place in the cosmos. Now authors Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards have stepped into this breach with a provocative new book claiming that our ability to learn about the universe arises from its careful design.

The Privileged Planet links two concepts that at first seem unrelated: “habitability” and “measurability.” Habitability considers whether a place in the universe is suitable for advanced life to develop. Our planet is a cozy place for liquid water, while our large moon prevents Earth from suffering climate-changing swings on its axis. Our sun is a stable star with a life-friendly temperature, and our place in the Milky Way galaxy-like baby bear’s porridge-is “just right” for many astrophysical reasons.

The text of the Cobb County disclaimer is as follows: This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.

With deflation under control and President Bush’s supply-side tax cuts taking hold, the case for a U.S. economic comeback gets stronger every day. But the conventional wisdom is that two of our most important and hardest hit sectors, technology and telecom, have so much capacity and so little confidence that it will be many years before they return to health. Read More ›

Treasury Secretary John Snow “can stay as long as he wants, provided it is not very long,” is destined to go down in history as one of those classic Washington phrases. The phrase appeared in an article in The Washington Post as a quote from “a senior administration official” one week before the president finally announced Mr. Snow would be Read More ›

Sir, Terence Kealey (Comment, December 18) says that proponents of intelligent design are “devilishly intelligent”. Since the British philosopher and former atheist Antony Flew has just washed up on to the shores of intelligent design, he too is now “devilishly intelligent”. What has his Faustian intellect uncovered? Peering into the world of even the simplest functional, self-reproducing cell— — the Read More ›

Are you in favor of a national identity card? Even though many Americans are against the idea of a national identity card, it is coming. In fact, in many ways, it is already here. Every American citizen and every foreign worker in America is required to have a Social Security card. Your Social Security card is only supposed to be Read More ›