If the DI was so dead set against it, then why did Behe and Minnich testify (and why was Dembski going to testify before he withdrew)?
The DI certainly advised them against testifying. I think that by that time, the situation was out of their control any ways. It was obviously heading to a train-wreck, but they were powerless to stop it.
It’s not clear to me when it was that the DI recognized that this case represented a poor litigation strategy. But they certainly went in, whole hog, on it, attempting to force those kids to hear about ID Creationism. Without the DI’s help, the case might have ended rapidly, when it became clear that nobody would testify that there were objectively legitimate secular purposes to the Board’s policy. That, coupled with the clear religious motivations of board members, would probably have led even the Thomas More Law Center to recommend abandoning the policy. By getting in with such enthusiasm and pushing to force kids to learn IDC, the DI arguably brought the whole disaster about. Of course, we’ll never know what would have happened if the DI had stayed out of it.
I’ve talked to John West about this, and in this case I do think he is being honest and his recollection of events makes a ton of sense.
The scientific community was appalled by both Dover and the Kansas Hearings, and they are linked together in our minds as the same event. But DI totes Kansas a success while running from Dover. Seems like a more head way would be made by separating these events and discussing the problems with Kansas. One problem is that Kansas emboldened the Dover board to go to court before even the DI was ready to do so.
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It means that they wrote it in their private capacity, representing themselves, not the DI. It means that the book represents only the opinions of those particular fellows, not necessarily of other fellows, or even of the majority of fellows; and it certainly does not represent the institutional policy of the DI – which is what we were talking about. You denied that the institutional policy of the DI in 2005 was what it is in fact was, and you did it by appealing to a book which some DI fellows wrote, in their private capacity, for another publisher, in 1999. That’s a materially misleading representation of the situation. My description of the DI position on mandating ID in 2005 was accurate. Yours was an invention.
First, the book never mentions anything called “ID creationism”, so you’re filtering its words through your interpretive lens. Second, the book clearly distinguishes “intelligent design theory” from “creationism”, in section 6. The point of section 6 is that this distinction means that the Edwards ruling does not apply to ID theory – which means that, in principle, ID theory could be taught in science class without constitutional violation.
Does it follow that because ID theory can be taught constitutionally, that it must be mandated? I don’t see that. I think the point is that if it produces better science education (as the authors thought it would), that’s a legitimate secular goal. I think the book is encouraging school boards who are thinking of including some discussion of ID not to be afraid of doing so on legal grounds. In retrospect, that advice was not so great, since an actual court did not accept the distinction made in section 6. But it was a plausible distinction in 1999 and the authors had the right to point out the legal possibilities.
You’re distorting the situation. Behe etc. were not there advocating that school boards should mandate ID. They were there to defend the idea of the theory of intelligent design, as a non-Bible-based enterprise appropriate to be talked about in science class. Behe talked about flagella etc. Scott Minnich did the same. They were trying to make clear the distinction between ID and creationism. They were using the opportunity to generate some positive public awareness. It largely backfired. But their presence didn’t alter the DI’s steady rejection of the Dover Board’s policy.
Nothing in the Dover 4-paragraph statement referred to “ID Creationism” or endorsed it. The theory of intelligent design was mentioned. And as the rest of your post trails off in more ravings about “ID Creationism”, which neither Cooper nor Discovery urged Dover to teach, I’ll stop here.
I agree.
The book was published by an imprint of Discovery Institute Press.
Publishing imprint
An imprint of a publisher is a trade name under which it publishes a work. A single publishing company may have multiple imprints , often using the different names as brands to market works to various demographic consumer segments.
Watching Eddie squirm after being caught in yet another blunder is one of my favorite things on PS. 
Nope, dead wrong. We had this same discussion about another book. At the time FTE was not part of Discovery Press. Puck’s claim is about 1999, when the two were entirely separate publishers. DI as an institution had nothing to do with putting the book out. Puck was just wrong.
Then how did they get roped into testifying in the first place, if the DI didn’t offer them as witnesses? The Dover board had not even heard of ID until the DI contacted them. As I said above, there’s more than a little that is murky about the DI’s interactions with the board.
But, of course, the DI will never be ready to go to court, at least not on the scientific merits. The biggest hope for the creationists on this one is that we get a Supreme Court that abandons existing precedent on the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, or which simply decides to defer to the discretion of local agencies to a greater degree. The latter can be done by simply declining to inquire into subjective motive – this is fairly common in review of statutes, but less so in the review of local agency decisions – and by deferring to the judgment of the agency on the basis that it has specialized expertise in education where the courts do not.
So ID is a litigation disaster waiting to happen, today, just as it was then, and there’s no sign of that changing. But changes in applicable legal standards could make the rights of children in this matter depend solely upon whether they have a creationist school board.
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DI Press didn’t exist until around 2011, so any publishing the DI did before that date, that they could not get a major publisher interested in, would have to be through a friendly press – like the FTE. I also have heard (but have not confirmed) that Dembski worked as an editor there.
“Cdesign proponentsists” 
I don’t think you understood my remark. My point is that it was stated repeatedly on the DI website long before, and during, the trial, that the DI opposed mandating ID in the schools. It should surprise you that someone who claims to be an expert on DI activity and events related to the Dover trial did not see those statements as they appeared on the DI website. It suggests he was not following events as closely as he claims to have done. As for me, I was daily reading the accounts from both of the local Dover papers, analysis and interpretation from the DI, from the New York Times, from the NCSE, and from other sources, and of course reading the transcripts as soon as each was available. So I knew from the get-go that Discovery had not wanted ID to be introduced in the way that Dover had done it. Puck should have known this, too, if he was following as closely as I was.
Yet now he says:
Yikes! And this guy is an expert on the DI’s policies?
It would help to produce the text of that statement.
That’d be people like the Dover school board. Alan Bonsell, for one, didn’t want his children to be taught about evolution.
The Board just had to name them as witnesses, and there is no reason they needed DI’s permission to do this.
It should probably be noted that, had the DI’s actual position been that ID Creationism shouldn’t be mandated because “it is a relatively new concept,” the DI might have defended that position by offering its aid to the plaintiffs rather than the defendants. One DI fellow would do the trick, no need for four: testify that while ID Creationism aspires to be scientific, it is not yet a scientific theory. This might have spared IDC to fight another day on the issue of scientific merit. Instead, what did the world see? Behe, testifying that if you broaden the definition of “science” sufficiently to encompass astrology, ID gets in.
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Be careful with the dates - FTE is an imprint of the DI now, and has been since at least 2016, but I don’t think FTE was an imprint of the DI then.
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I can’t help with the text, but my recollection matches Eddie’s re “mandating” ID.
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Not relevant to my point to Tim H. Tim H. was arguing (or rather, implying, since he never argues rigorously) that because FTE now is an imprint of Discovery, it was a Discovery arm then. But it wasn’t. He thought he had caught me in a factual error – but he hadn’t.
As for other outlets, ID books were being published by numerous publishers at the time, so FTE would not have been necessary, but I agree that some ID proponents would have found it handy. But again, does not prove the the book in question was a DI initiative, as opposed to a project of some (a small minority of) DI Fellows.
In the golden age of Hollywood, sometimes one studio would borrow the services of a leading star, maybe even a leading star, director, and cameraman, from another studio, for a particular film. It was hardly the case that a Warner film using Goldwyn personnel was a Goldwyn production. The book in question was an FTE production, the product of Jon Buell’s oversight, not of Discovery’s oversight. It’s simply wrong to say that the DI produced it. But Puck has withdrawn the claim – while of course trying to belittle the significance of the error – so that’s where the matter stands.