For his documentary on a black Louisiana man who was murdered for whistling at a white woman, Keith Beauchamp is teaming with FBI officials to uncover crimes from the distant past.

Beauchamp believes he’s able to coax more from potential witnesses because he doesn’t carry the stigma often associated with law enforcement officers. Images of billy club-wielding policemen breaking up rallies and protests are still etched in many memories.

“For the first time in history, they are allowing a filmmaker to assist them in setting up a justice-seeking atmosphere that will allow eyewitnesses who may have information to feel comfortable coming forward,” Beauchamp said of the FBI.

The filmmaker also knows what it’s like to fear police. He says in 1989 he was beaten by an undercover police officer for dancing with a white friend in Baton Rouge.

Thinking this was today’s review (it’s actually last Friday’s), I will proceed to link to the NYT’s review of Expelled.

One of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” is a conspiracy-theory rant masquerading as investigative inquiry. . . . Mixing physical apples and metaphysical oranges at every turn “Expelled” is an unprincipled propaganda piece that insults believers and nonbelievers alike.

Typical. In other news, Richard Dawkins explains himself and why Intelligent Design isn’t a scientific theory in the LA Times.

Entities capable of designing anything, whether they be human engineers or interstellar aliens, must be complex — and therefore, statistically improbable. And statistically improbable things don’t just happen spontaneously by chance without an explanation trail. That is what “improbable” means, as creationists never tire of assuring us (they wrongly think Darwinian natural selection is a matter of chance). In fact, natural selection is the very opposite of a chance process, and it is the only ultimate explanation we know for complex, improbable things.

I know I have much to learn about modern evolutionary science, but I don’t buy this non-chance argument. Regis Nicoll comments on the above.

Congress is talking about Internet Neutrality today, and the president of the Writers Guild of America, West, and other interested parties are giving their POV. A new bill, Internet Freedom Preservation Act 2008 (HR 5353), intends to “enshrine Net Neutrality,” according to SavetheInternet.com. It will place Internet Neutrality, “the longstanding principle that Internet service providers cannot discriminate against Web sites or services based on their source, ownership or destination, into the Communications Act.”

It also requires the Federal Communications Commission to convene at least eight “broadband summits” to collect public input on policies to “promote openness, competition, innovation, and affordable, ubiquitous broadband service for all individuals in the United States.

This makes sense to me, as far as I understand it. We don’t want a large corporate conglomerate to own certain web hosts or service providers and be able to deny or delete content critical of their leadership or companies. If that’s what this bill does, perhaps it is good law.