Hobby Lobby case creates unusual allies

Hobby Lobby case creates unusual allies

By Kathleen Parker

When it comes to tackling complicated legal issues, one would be hard pressed to conjure a less likely partnership than Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and Baylor University President Ken Starr.
Well, okay, there was the David Boies and Ted Olson confederacy fighting for gay marriage rights after they took opposite sides during the 2000 Bush-Gore election dispute. Still, witnessing Dershowitz and Starr discuss and largely agree on religious liberty issues raised by the case popularly known as Hobby Lobby was pleasantly jarring.

The two convened at the Willard Hotel on Monday, the day before oral arguments in the case were presented to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a delightful back-and-forth punctuated by yarns and anecdotes, the two legal luminaries affirmed at least two points of agreement: (1) separation of church and state is good for religion; (2) corporations are people and people are corporations (echo Mitt Romney?) and, therefore, Hobby Lobby should be permitted an exemption from the contraceptive mandate imposed by the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
To back and fill a bit: Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., a family-owned arts and crafts chain of more than 500 stores and 13,000 employees, is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the federal government. Hobby Lobby President Steve Green, who told a dinner crowd Monday night that he has distributed Bibles to a billion people worldwide through his personal ministry, claims that he shouldn’t be forced to participate in what he views as life-terminating contraception, including IUDs and the so-called morning-after pill.
The core of the argument is that Green’s business is protected by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1993. The RFRA basically requires that the government prove “compelling interest” when someone’s religious rights are “substantially burdened” by what the state wishes to do. Although individuals and religious groups are clearly covered by the RFRA, it isn’t clear whether the act’s protections also extend to companies.

Dershowitz and Starr kicked off an afternoon of discussions as part of a symposium co-sponsored by Baylor University and Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs. Starr, a former U.S. solicitor general, described the lawsuit as a “conflict of vision” – big government vs. a family that has devoted itself to Christian mission work. While Starr’s stewardship of a Baptist university might make his favorable view of the plaintiffs’ position unsurprising, Dershowitz’s sympathy for Hobby Lobby may come as a surprise to many.
Proclaiming his love both for religion and the separation of church and state, he called the government’s brief “silly and trivial.” And though he thinks birth control is good for society – and he approves of the ACA – neither of those considerations matter.

It’s the principle.
Contrary to protestations from certain entities that subvert all issues for political gain, the Hobby Lobby case is not about birth control or women’s rights or even universal health care. It is, in Dershowitz’s summation, about “whether or not the statutes in the penumbra of the Constitution require a religious exemption.”
Period.
As a final note of clarification, the Green family did not pick this battle.
The federal government did when it imposed what could be considered a secular belief system on people who happen to be business owners with strong religious convictions about abortion.
In a brief sidebar: Don’t you find it curious that the biological fact of life at conception is characterized as an article of faith (religious), while denial of that life vis-a-vis its involuntary termination is viewed as ultimately sacred? One of life’s little mysteries.

Whatever one’s views on these matters, they are of no consequence.
The fact that I personally favor birth control doesn’t alter the logic of what I’ve just written.
It merely suits me to believe as I do in order to get through life as I find most convenient.
It doesn’t make me right, except under secular law, which a great many people find less compelling than the higher laws of nature – or of God. Your choice.
In any case, the first principle of religious freedom should be treated as paramount, as often and at every stage possible, agreed both Starr and Dershowitz. And both hope that the Supreme Court will find a way to accommodate Hobby Lobby.

The court’s ruling is expected sometime in June.

The impulse of liberals is to run things

The impulse of liberals is to run things

By Walter E. Williams
Some statements and arguments are so asinine that you’d have to be an academic or a leftist to take them seriously. Take the accusation that Republicans and conservatives are conducting a war on women. Does that mean they’re waging war on their daughters, wives, mothers and other female members of their families? If so, do they abide by the Geneva Conventions’ bans on torture, or do they engage in enhanced interrogation and intimidation methods, such as waterboarding, with female family members? You might say that leftists don’t mean actual war. Then why do they say it?

What would you think of a white conservative mayor’s trying to defund charter schools where blacks are succeeding? While most of New York’s black students could not pass a citywide math proficiency exam, there was a charter school where 82 percent of its students passed. New York’s left-wing mayor, Bill de Blasio, is trying to shut it down, and so far, I’ve heard not one peep from the Big Apple’s civil rights hustlers, including Al Sharpton and Charles Rangel. According to columnist Thomas Sowell, the attack on successful charter schools is happening in other cities, too.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder recently stated that we must revisit the laws that ban convicted felons from voting. Why? According to a recent study by two professors, Marc Meredith of the University of Pennsylvania and Michael Morse of Stanford, published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, three-fourths of America’s convicted murderers, rapists and thieves are Democrats. Many states restrict felons from voting; however, there’s a movement afoot to eliminate any restriction on their voting. If successful, we might see Democratic candidates campaigning in prisons, seeking the support of some of America’s worst people.

Decades ago, I warned my fellow Americans that the tobacco zealots’ agenda was not about the supposed health hazards of secondhand smoke. It was really about control. The fact that tobacco smoke is unpleasant gained them the support of most Americans. By the way, to reach its secondhand smoke conclusions, the Environmental Protection Agency employed statistical techniques that were grossly dishonest. Some years ago, I had the opportunity to ask a Food and Drug Administration official whether his agency would accept pharmaceutical companies using similar statistical techniques in their drug approval procedures. He just looked at me.

Seeing as Americans are timid and compliant, why not dictate other aspects of our lives – such as the size of soda we may buy, as former Mayor Michael Bloomberg tried in New York? Former U.S. Department of Agriculture spokesman John Webster said: “Right now, this anti-obesity campaign is in its infancy. ... We want to turn people around and give them assistance in eating nutritious foods.” The city of Calabasas, Calif., adopted an ordinance that bans smoking in virtually all outdoor areas. The stated justification is not the desire to fight against secondhand smoke but the desire to protect children from bad influences – seeing adults smoking.

The late H.L. Mencken’s description of health care professionals in his day is just as appropriate today: “A certain section of medical opinion, in late years, has succumbed to the messianic delusion. Its spokesmen are not content to deal with the patients who come to them for advice; they conceive it to be their duty to force their advice upon everyone, including especially those who don’t want it. That duty is purely imaginary. It is born of vanity, not of public spirit. The impulse behind it is not altruism, but a mere yearning to run things.”

Obamacare is a fitting noose around Democrats' necks

By David Limbaugh

The inescapable fact is that Democrats have supported Obamacare the whole way, forming a...

Pollster Celinda Lake's advice to fellow Democrats to take a midway position in the 2014 congressional campaigns is flawed because it can't be sold as honest.
Reacting to results from her bipartisan Battleground Poll that show Obamacare to be a political loser, Lake said: "Don't defend it. Say it was flawed from the beginning and we're going to fix it."

Note that she didn't advise to reject it outright, apparently because she knows that's never going to fly with President Obama and the Democratic establishment and probably because it would be tantamount to an admission that the party has failed in its central policy "achievement."

But her advice to adopt a middle-of-the-road position is not much different. To say the law was flawed from the beginning is a damning admission, especially considering how inflexible the Democrats were when they crammed this albatross through Congress.
I just read a story reminding us that Democrats had a chance to try a more moderate approach in 2009, when then-Sen. Max Baucus warned that Democrats could ram through a health care overhaul on a partisan vote, but wouldn't be able to sustain it. But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid ended up scuttling Baucus' attempt to scale back the bill. So Democrats had a chance to moderate it, but they went full-bore defiance and stuffed it down our throats.
How is it going to play now if they say the following? "We see now the error of our ways; we shouldn't have been so extreme. Give us another chance, because we only want to help you."
The inescapable fact is that Democrats have supported this law the whole way, to the detriment of millions of Americans and to the impending destruction of our health care system. Democratic candidates can opportunistically pretend they'll buck the party to fix this system, but modern history shows they march in lock step with their leftist leadership. Compromise and moderation are not in their vocabulary.
Another major problem with Lake's advice is that the law is fundamentally flawed. It is not fixable. By design, it took over the entire health care system. You can't improve it with incremental changes. It has to be eradicated before it does irreversible damage.
Notice that Lake, like all good Democrats, will never acknowledge that the concept was ill-conceived, for "good intentions" will always be the Democrats' preferred currency, their last line of defense.

Lake insists that it was a good idea in principle because it envisioned that the government would protect people from the evil insurance companies. Those weren't her precise words. What she said was that Democrats should stick to their historical approach of looking out for the little guy when it comes to health care. "We're not going to go back to the days of leaving you on your own with the insurance companies." But didn't the Congressional Budget Office recently estimate that some 31 million little guys will remain uninsured 10 years from now, after Obamacare is fully implemented?

Just listen to the patronizing. I'm not sure which is worse, Lake's statement that people need the caretaking federal government to protect them from presumptively evil insurance companies or Reid's statement that Obama's most recent Obamacare extension is only necessary because people don't know how to use the Internet. The irony is that if Democrats stay in effective control of our government much longer, they'll make sure that people are completely dependent on government — meaning on them.
But Reid is lying, too. This is the 28th Obamacare delay, and most of them had nothing even arguably to do with the Internet. Besides, if people want to get their health insurance information filed, they can mail it in.

Meanwhile, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is also lying. She lied to Congress that the March 31 deadline would not be extended, and now that it has been, she's denying it's an extension. It's analogous to keeping the polls open for voters who are already in line, she says. Oh, really, for weeks? If that's true, why is she trying to get more people to join the line? The sad fact for these charlatans is that some 50 percent of people say they have no intention of signing up even with the extended deadline.

The worst lie of all stems from the fact that all these extensions are a mirage. They are not to help people but to mask just how terrible this law really is and delay the full pain until after the November elections. Obama's disapproval numbers are at an all-time high — 59 percent — and Democrats know he's going to drag down their candidates, so they have to mitigate the damage.

With all due respect, Ms. Lake, the Democrats are not looking out for the little guy or the middle-class guy or the big evil rich guy. They are looking out for themselves, and unless Republicans shoot themselves in the foot, they are going to be in serious trouble in November. Obamacare is a fitting noose around their necks.

Incredible, Shrinking Obamacare

By L. Brent Bozell III & Tim Graham

  

Obamacare is a fiasco. Why don't the media acknowledge that? And it's fair to ask: Why don't they ridicule it? After all, in the Bush years, the press reran President George W. Bush in front of the "Mission Accomplished" banner time and again, did they not? Perhaps Joe Biden at the signing ceremony saying into an open mic that this was a "big (blanking) deal" would suffice.
How do we know Obamacare is failing? Ironically, because those very same "reporters" are doing the opposite of the Bush years. They're burying the story. They aren't in denial. They know the truth. They're just choosing to ignore it. They are pretending there are no broken promises about keeping your insurance plan, or keeping your doctor, or lowering your premium by $2,500 a year. They are pretending, like Ellen DeGeneres told the president, that "everyone" in America loves Obamacare.

Just how much coverage have they given to this, the most important domestic issue since Ronald Reagan's economic recovery plan? A Media Research Center analysis of the three network evening news broadcasts in 2014 found only 12 full stories on three networks in almost three months. "NBC Nightly News" has broadcast one story on Obamacare in this calendar year. That was a piece on Jan. 1 marking the start of what fill-in anchor Lester Holt called "a new era in health care in this country." Including that piece, "Nightly News" has only offered five minutes and five seconds of evening-news coverage of the health care law in 2014.
ABC's "World News" wasn't much better, offering only six minutes and 58 seconds on Obamacare in 2014. And the tone? On Jan. 2, ABC's Jonathan Karl relayed the story of Maggie Fernandez, saying how "for her, the dawn of Obamacare means better health coverage, money saved, and a chance to make her first doctor's appointment in nearly a year."
The "CBS Evening News" was the least embarrassing program, yet it managed only 19 minutes and 17 seconds of coverage over almost three months. Compare that to its coverage of that jet.
CBS was also the only network to locate a victim of Obamacare. On Feb. 8 — a lower-rated Saturday night newscast — CBS correspondent Carter Evans told viewers about a 4-year-old girl sent to Seattle Children's Hospital by her family doctor, only to be told later that the hospital has been deemed "out of network" by the Obamacare policy.
One of the doctors said, "We're seeing denials of care, disruptions in care. We're seeing a great deal of confusion and, at times, anger and frustration on the part of these families who bought insurance thinking that their children were going to be covered, and they've, in fact, found that it's a false promise."
CBS also aired a Jan. 2 report by Sharyl Attkisson who revealed a study that found previously uninsured individuals actually used emergency rooms more once they enrolled in Medicaid and showed "no measurable improvement in physical health, such as blood pressure or cholesterol." But CBS's lack of interest in these stories led her to resign.
Unlike their appetite for Iraq polling, none of the networks dared to report the ongoing opposition of the American people to Obamacare in 2014, even when they were the ones doing the polling. In early March, NBC's pollsters found 49 percent of adults opposed Obamacare versus only 35 percent who supported it. But "NBC Nightly News" would not even touch its own poll.
Last September, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius calmly told Dr. Nancy Snyderman on "NBC Nightly News," "I think success looks like at least 7 million people having signed up by the end of March 2014." Now, Team Obama claims they have 5 million — if you flagrantly ignore whether the sign-ups have actually paid for their policy, which is the only way to "get covered." And when you consider the 5 million who have lost their policy, you stand at zero.
The failure of Obamacare is a big (blanking) deal. As is the media cover-up.

Incredible, Shrinking Obamacare

March 26, 2014 - 4:48 AM

---

By L. Brent Bozell III & Tim Graham

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Obamacare is a fiasco. Why don't the media acknowledge that? And it's fair to ask: Why don't they ridicule it? After all, in the Bush years, the press reran President George W. Bush in front of the "Mission Accomplished" banner time and again, did they not? Perhaps Joe Biden at the signing ceremony saying into an open mic that this was a "big (blanking) deal" would suffice.

How do we know Obamacare is failing? Ironically, because those very same "reporters" are doing the opposite of the Bush years. They're burying the story. They aren't in denial. They know the truth. They're just choosing to ignore it. They are pretending there are no broken promises about keeping your insurance plan, or keeping your doctor, or lowering your premium by $2,500 a year. They are pretending, like Ellen DeGeneres told the president, that "everyone" in America loves Obamacare.

Just how much coverage have they given to this, the most important domestic issue since Ronald Reagan's economic recovery plan? A Media Research Center analysis of the three network evening news broadcasts in 2014 found only 12 full stories on three networks in almost three months. "NBC Nightly News" has broadcast one story on Obamacare in this calendar year. That was a piece on Jan. 1 marking the start of what fill-in anchor Lester Holt called "a new era in health care in this country." Including that piece, "Nightly News" has only offered five minutes and five seconds of evening-news coverage of the health care law in 2014.

ABC's "World News" wasn't much better, offering only six minutes and 58 seconds on Obamacare in 2014. And the tone? On Jan. 2, ABC's Jonathan Karl relayed the story of Maggie Fernandez, saying how "for her, the dawn of Obamacare means better health coverage, money saved, and a chance to make her first doctor's appointment in nearly a year."

The "CBS Evening News" was the least embarrassing program, yet it managed only 19 minutes and 17 seconds of coverage over almost three months. Compare that to its coverage of that jet.

CBS was also the only network to locate a victim of Obamacare. On Feb. 8 — a lower-rated Saturday night newscast — CBS correspondent Carter Evans told viewers about a 4-year-old girl sent to Seattle Children's Hospital by her family doctor, only to be told later that the hospital has been deemed "out of network" by the Obamacare policy.

One of the doctors said, "We're seeing denials of care, disruptions in care. We're seeing a great deal of confusion and, at times, anger and frustration on the part of these families who bought insurance thinking that their children were going to be covered, and they've, in fact, found that it's a false promise."

CBS also aired a Jan. 2 report by Sharyl Attkisson who revealed a study that found previously uninsured individuals actually used emergency rooms more once they enrolled in Medicaid and showed "no measurable improvement in physical health, such as blood pressure or cholesterol." But CBS's lack of interest in these stories led her to resign.

Unlike their appetite for Iraq polling, none of the networks dared to report the ongoing opposition of the American people to Obamacare in 2014, even when they were the ones doing the polling. In early March, NBC's pollsters found 49 percent of adults opposed Obamacare versus only 35 percent who supported it. But "NBC Nightly News" would not even touch its own poll.

Last September, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius calmly told Dr. Nancy Snyderman on "NBC Nightly News," "I think success looks like at least 7 million people having signed up by the end of March 2014." Now, Team Obama claims they have 5 million — if you flagrantly ignore whether the sign-ups have actually paid for their policy, which is the only way to "get covered." And when you consider the 5 million who have lost their policy, you stand at zero.

The failure of Obamacare is a big (blanking) deal. As is the media cover-up.

- See more at: http://cnsnews.com/commentary/l-brent-bozell-iii/incredible-shrinking-obamacare#sthash.9UFflEDL.dpuf

Fossil Facts and Fantasies

Fossil Facts and Fantasies

The stories told about some fossils raise more questions than answers, even with top Darwin spin doctors in the operating room.

Aquatic sloths:  Live Science has some comments about the “aquatic sloths” that were found with those Chile whale fossils (2/26/14).  The interpretation that they lived in water relies on measurements of high density of their bones.  But since land-dwelling sloths and some other mammals also had dense bones, the idea seems a stretch.  The article weaves a tale about how they swam to the bottom of the water to eat vegetation, since the coast was becoming arid, then went extinct when the Isthmus of Panama closed “4 million years ago.”  Whatever happened, there used to be more species of sloth, and bigger ones, than the two kinds that live in trees today – and they didn’t evolve blowholes, flippers or sonar.

Tar pit tales: Paleontologists are rushing to document bones in asphalt tar in west Los Angeles before a subway tunnel is completed, PhysOrg reported.  70 feet below the surface, workers have found ice-age mammals, birds, and insects in the same formation as the nearby La Brea Tar Pits.  “In one spectacular instance,” the article says, “a worker scraped his bulldozer across what turned out to be a nearly intact skeleton of a Columbian mammoth with 10-foot-long tusks, which researchers named Zed.”  The terrestrial fossils are supposed to be two million years old, but this paragraph jumps out of the article:

Paleontologists have recovered mollusks, asphalt-saturated sand dollars, pieces of driftwood and Monterey cypress cones. For [Kim] Scott, the most exciting finds have been a rock embedded with what appears to be part of a sea lion’s mouth (perhaps 2 million years old) and a non-fossilized 10-foot limb from a digger pine tree that would look right at home today in Central California woodlands.

The dating seems convoluted.  The article says that the deposit is supposed to be from 50,000 to 330,000 years old, so how did a 2-million year old seal get mixed in?  And an unfossilized digger pine?  Those don’t usually grow near sand dollars.  Why are marine and land creatures in the same mix?  The explanation given is that this was a coastline community.  “Even though we’re finding fossils older than what’s found at La Brea, none of the identified fossils found to date are extinct,” Scott said. “We can still find all the plants and animals in California.”  That doesn’t help much; the “younger” La Brea fossils include mammoths, mastodons, American lions, saber-tooth cats, dire wolves, huge bison and camels that are extinct.

Fossilized fern cell division:  A fossil fern said to be 180 million years old shows  “preserved cell walls and the nucleus containing genetic material” so clearly that chromosomes undergoing cell division are discernible, says New Scientist.  For such exquisite preservation, it must have been “almost instantly fossilised,” perhaps by becoming engulfed in a lava flow.  Why, though, did it not burn up in the hot lava?  The fossil was donated in the 1960s by a Swedish farmer, but was forgotten in a museum drawer till analyzed recently.  Despite being so “old” in the evolutionary timeline, no evolution is visible:  “The fern is very similar to a living species: the cinnamon fern, Osmundastrum cinnamomeum,” the article says.  “The similarity of the cinnamon fern to the fossil supports the idea that is a ‘living fossil’ – an example of evolutionary stasis, when organisms appear not to evolve for millions of years.”  The fossil was also reported by Live Science, where Tia Ghose presented a different theory: “The fossilized plant was likely preserved when minerals in the superheated, salty water oozing from a crack in the earth, called a hydrothermal brine seep, rapidly crystallized, freezing the plant in time while it was still alive.”

The original paper in Science calls this “180 million years of genomic stasis in royal ferns,” indeed a “paramount example of evolutionary stasis.”  Why, then, do they claim it “can provide exceptional insights into the evolution of life over geological time”?  The paper shows stunning photographs of cells with chromosomes in various stages of cell division.  Prior to this fossil find from Sweden, “evidence for evolutionary conservatism in fern genomes has been exclusively based on studies of extant plants.”  Now, fossils confirm that no evolution is evident in 180 million Darwin years.

Conventional wisdom fails turtle race:  Two halves of a giant sea turtle fossil came together at last after being separated for 162 years, PhysOrg reported. One half of the fossil had been brought to the attention of famed paleontologist Louis Agassiz in 1849.  When an amateur found the other half on a grassy knoll in a New Jersey stream bed in 2012, scientists were startled, not believing it could have survived so long at the surface – but the fit was good.  “Now, the scientists are revising their conventional wisdom to say that, sometimes, exposed fossils can survive longer than previously thought.”  Paleontologists estimate the turtle was 10 feet long, the largest known sea turtle.  How did the turtle swim to New Jersey?  “The scientists believe that the entire unbroken bone was originally embedded in sediment during the Cretaceous Period, 70 to 75 million years ago, when the turtle lived and died,” the article explains, but then “those sediments eroded and the bone fractured millions of years later during the Pleistocene or Holocene, before the bone pieces became embedded in sediments and protected from further deterioration for perhaps a few thousand more years until their discovery.”

Snakes alive, venomous snake evolution in Africa?  Fossils of a clade of venomous snakes have been found in Tanzania, Science Daily reports, providing the “Oldest fossil evidence of modern African venomous snakes” in that part of the continent.  “Colubroid fossils are documented as early as 50 million years ago,” the article explains. “But they weren’t expected to constitute such a large part of the African snake fauna 25 million years ago, as they became dominant in Europe and North America much later.”  Instead of the high ratio of venomous snakes “In the Oligocene epoch, from about 34 to 23 million years ago, we would have expected to see a fauna dominated by booid snakes, such as boas and pythons,” experts said.  Clearly they didn’t see what they expected.

Cambrian care:  Ostracods babysat their young 450 million years ago, an article on Live Science reveals.  Ostracods are small crustaceans that lay eggs; it is very rare to find fossilized animals of any kind with their eggs intact. This is the earliest known example of brooding in an animal.

“This is a very rare and exciting find from the fossil record,” David Siveter, lead study author and a geologist at the University of Leicester, said in a statement. “Only a handful of examples are known where eggs are fossilized and associated with the parent. This discovery tells us that these ancient, tiny marine crustaceans took particular care of their brood in exactly the same way as their living relatives.

The ostracod specimens are among the rare fossils that preserve body tissues, such as limbs, embryos and other soft parts. These tissues have been replaced by the mineral pyrite, or fool’s gold, but the mineralization means the researchers could closely examine the tiny fossils by X-ray and CT scanning.

The report on Science Daily says that “like their modern relatives, the ostracods were probably capable of swimming near the sea bed and obtained their food by scavenging and hunting.”  The “exceptionally well preserved” fossil ostracods were found in Ordovician strata in New York along with trilobites.

Coal beast from Vietnam:  A fossilized “coal beast” and a rhinoceros, said to be 37 million years old, were found in a Vietnam coal mine, according to Science Daily.  “The newly described mammals show a surprisingly close relationship to prehistoric species known from fossil sites in Europe.”  The coal beast is a “pig-like ungulate, closely related to hippos,” the article says.  Their predators were found, too: “The mammals’ remains bear signs of crocodile attacks. Indeed, the excavation site at Na Duong contains the fossilized remains of crocodiles up to 6 meters in length.”

Fishapod on the air:  Neil Shubin, discoverer of Tiktaalik (the fossil that crawled onto land behind Neil Tyson in the first Cosmos episode, 3/10/14) is taking his fish to TV.  In an interview for National Geographic, he said his fossil garnered so much attention partially because the Dover case on intelligent design was going on at the time (12/23/05, 12/30/05) and Steven Colbert also featured it, “it ended up part of popular culture, which is really wonderful.”  Having achieved his “huge find in paleontology” (1/14/14) he plans to go back to Ellesmere Island, the site of his discovery, to push the envelope. “I’m going back there this summer to look for something even older, something from the ‘Cambrian Explosion,’ when you see all these different sorts of creatures appear in the fossil record,” he says.  “A fish with a real skull, that’s what we hope to find. That would be terrific.”

There are facts (the fossils as observed), and there are narratives into which they are forced.  Learn to keep them apart.  There is nothing about any of these “brute fact” fossils that serves the Darwin narrative; indeed, they militate against it.  Early complexity (e.g., the ostracod), extraordinary stasis (the fern), and the strange mixtures of fossils (tar pits), are not what Darwin would have predicted.  The millions-of-years dates become increasingly absurd when you think of organisms that Darwin claimed would be in a continuously fluid state of evolution turn out to be identical to their living counterparts for hundreds of millions of years.  Add to that the exceptional preservation of many of these fossils after tens or hundreds of millions of years.  How can you believe such things?  If we had not been indoctrinated into the moyboy lingo for so long, such notions would appear incredible.  Philosophically, time becomes the evolutionists’ closet, as big as a warehouse, in which to hide their skeletons.

Shubin still doesn’t mention the tetrapod trackways that precede his fishapod.  Let him find a Cambrian-explosion fish with a skull.  Bring it on.  That will hurt the Darwin narrative even more.  There’s an inverse relationship going on, you see: as the Cambrian explodes, Darwinism implodes.

http://crev.info/2014/03/fossil-facts-and-fantasies/