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They should have held up one or two exemplary examples of blogging done right - good content and timley information (and a lack of words like "dat", "ur", "OMG", "LOL", and "ROFLMAO")

You mean, like, instead of holding up our buddy Howard "YEEEEEEEEEAAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHH!" Dean (who, according to Dave Barry, is most famous for "making a sound like a hog being castrated with a fondue fork"), they could have mentioned, oh, I dunno...

The people who broke Rathergate, maybe? A marketing guy in DC who dug up a forensics document expert or Charles Johnson and his famous reproduction of the faked memos?

How about Glenn Reynolds? Or Moulitsas Zúniga? Who really rallied the troops this election season?

Howard Dean??

What about some of the many Iraqi blogs - written by, you know, people on the ground, as it were? How about Spirit of America's Arabic blogging tool, and the bloggers who took the the challenge to raise money for it?

There's a lot more going on out there than ABC is reporting.

They should have held up one or two exemplary examples of blogging done right - good content and timley information (and a lack of words like "dat", "ur", "OMG", "LOL", and "ROFLMAO")

You mean, like, instead of holding up our buddy Howard "YEEEEEEEEEAAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHH!" Dean (who, according to Dave Barry, is most famous for "making a sound like a hog being castrated with a fondue fork"), they could have mentioned, oh, I dunno...

The people who broke Rathergate, maybe? A marketing guy in DC who dug up a forensics document expert or Charles Johnson and his famous reproduction of the faked memos?

How about Glenn Reynolds? Or Moulitsas Zúniga? Who really rallied the troops this election season?

Howard Dean??

What about some of the many Iraqi blogs - written by, you know, people on the ground, as it were? How about Spirit of America's Arabic blogging tool, and the bloggers who took the the challenge to raise money for it?

There's a lot more going on out there than ABC is reporting.

142 comments and no mention of blogger's biggest kill- perhaps when their importance was proven beyond a doubt.

I'm sure you'll all remember that a week or two before the election, Dan Rather went on 60 minutes with a story about how Bush allegedly got special treatment when he was in the air national guard. To prove this, CBS posted PDF's of supporting memos, 'from' the 70's, on their website.

Within hours, someone mentioned on freerepublic that the documents looked like they came from microsoft word.

Over the 12 hours, Littlegreenfootballs.com , with the help of powerlineblog.com blew the lid off the story.

Here's a detailed analysis later put together by a guy who pretty much wrote the book on computer typesetting: Dr. Newcomer

Bloggers showed that CBS had aired a story based on piss-poor forgeries made with MS Word 2003 default settings within hours, and then let so many people know about it so rapidly that there was no turning back for Rather and 60 minutes. His retirement this spring was announced within a month of this fiasco, IIRC.

Now, regardless of what you happen to think of Bush (Dr. Newcomer was a Kerry fan), basing a story on fabricated evidence is inexcusable. Basing it on such obvious forgeries is beyond inexcusable, and reaches into incredibly stupidity.

Bloggers busted 60 minutes on this. Huge story. And I'm suprised I'm the first one posting it.

Because no one ever just makes shit up.

Did you know that:

"/. is full of people who hate the US government because of copyright laws."

It's TRUE!

Yeah, I avoid the "Dear diary" style of blog like the plague. I'm more interested in blogs like lgf that have a real point of view and active regular posters.

The view from the right, http://www.powerlineblog.com/, the further right http://www.littlegreenfootballs.com/, and the stridently right http:www.anncoulter.org/.

Of course, for the view from the further left, one need only turn on the television, which is the whole point about the exit polls.

Enjoy!

I in no way claim to be intelligent, but one reason I have for supporting Bush (ignoring guns & abortion, which are big issues for me) is that he recognizes that the War on Terror is not like the War on Drugs.

Bush has also answered questions many times, while Kerry has refused to answer questions from a reporter that many consider to be left-leaning!

Bush has also had the balls to say that Social Security is in danger, and will need to be revamped. Kerry's response was, "It'll work long enough." I was pleasantly suprised to find that I actually agreed with Bush's domestic policy.

Perhaps the main reason is that Bush's reelection is going to be 4 more years of the same, which (for me and my friends) has not been too bad. But Kerry's election would be (potentially) 8 years of who knows what. I have no real hope that either party will work to fix the DMCA, as both parties supported it whole-heartedly, but perhaps we can at least keep Congress involved with howling about Iraq and not passing any more extensions.

The PATRIOT act is troubling, but Kerry just says he wants to "review" it. If Kerry says that he passed it without reading it, then he is admitting that he didn't do his job as a Senator. That is frightening. At least Bush seems to know (and do) what his job entails.

And furthermore, we need a decisive electoral victory for Bush, to show Iraq and Afghanistan that we really are going to support them, not dump them like a hot potato the moment it becomes convenient. That was the biggest mistakes we've made as a country recently - pulling up short of Baghdad in 1991, which resulted in many Iraqis who thought we were going to help them overthrow Saddam dying, and ignoring Afghanistan after the Soviet Union fell, which resulted in the Taliban taking control.

Also, I do not believe that an administration that supports the Clinton view of the Second Amendment is good for the long-term freedom in America.

Those are some of my reasons.

Things I disagree with Bush on:

1. Outsourcing. It needs control, but I don't care if an Indian has my job if I'm been blown up by a terrorist, so priorities.
2. Education. I think that education should either be controlled by local politics (cities & counties) or not by the government at all.

In fact, I am more in agreement with the Constitutional Party than with the Republicans in many ways, but I feel that especially after the 2000 election, we need to have a decisive victory. Otherwise every election from now on will be decided in courts by lawyers. This is unacceptable.

Here is a link to a blog that explains some of the reasons behind my thinking.

Other, more personal reasons I don't like Kerry:

1. He attacks Bush about this "Draft," yet the draft bills were introduced by Democrats, defeated 402 to 2, and John Kerry himself supported "National Service" as very recently. This is not just politics, but downright shameful. Also, given that many military personell have said they won't reenlist if Kerry wins, the only way he can keep his 40,000 more troops promise would be to instate a draft. Note that the link is to the archive.org's copy of the John Kerry website; this draft stuff has been modified in his current platform. Even Rumsfeld doesn't want a draft.

2. Why the hell does he try to pret

...all those unemployed folks are making up for it by selling beanie babies on eBay! Problem solved. /hey, Cheney said it, not me

BUSH '04 ^_^
draft '05 o_0

Kerry '04 :-/
Draft '05 :-O

It's sad that the AP picks up the fact that a paper with a circulation of 425 supports Kerry. But there is not mention that the Lowell Sun, a ciculation of 100,000+ and a major newspaper in Massachusetts, Endorses Bush.

No Bias here. Noooooosiirrreeee.

Michael: When you rip off posts from Drudgereport.com, The New Scientist and other well-read sites, make sure you follow the thread through to the point where they explain that the story was nothing more than a political hit piece.

For instance, check out an earlier NY Times piece that actually reinforces the administration's position. Or you could review that this hit piece was to be joined by CBS News in another attempted effort to push fraudulant information and sucker all the sheep out there.

Or should we expect a post from you about "critical national guard documents damage Bush" and experience a deja vu Slashdot experience?

Slashdot readers - you too can read it before Michael (or some alleged anonymous reader, just like the CBS anonymous sources) reads it and makes up a libelous headline damaging Slashdot credibility and objectivity:

Drudge Report
The New Scientist

and other excellent critical reads include:

Power Line
Weekly Standard
Little Green Footballs

Oh... I should warn you - if you're determined to vote for Kerry in spite of everything, do NOT go to the any of the above sites. It'll destroy any opportunity for ignorance you might have.

So you can make it mismatch and match at the same time? Crumple it up to make it misaligned and look like a typewritten document, but it still matches Word exactly? Pretty clever!

As for not being required to finish his flight obligation, he signed documents to get into the Guard that he would spend 5 years flying, and only did three.

a standard flight physical which would have incidentally shown up his cocaine usage. He'd taken them before, and he sure as hell supports the war on drugs. I guess he just can't take the heat. He was also told that the Alabama outfit was not acceptable, went ahead on his own and flaked out from both bases anyway.

If he was typing up memos himself to cover his ass for Bush's outside interference

do you think it likely he'd blab to his wife? How old were his children then?

"Lt Bush is a dynamic outstanding young officer. He clearly stands out as a top notch fighter interceptor pilot. Lt Bush is possessed of sound judgement, yet is a tenacious competitor and an aggressive pilot. He is mature beyond his age and experience level as evidenced by his recent participation in the unit firing deployment."

> Daily Kos hatesite

Oh, the irony. As you link to LGF who mocks dead protestors like Rachel Corrie by awarding them their "idiotarian award of the year." And they got the entire country of France on there. Umm, who are the haters exactly? I'll let the reader decide:

DailyKos

LGF

Even 30 seconds browsing both sites is enough to figure out who the "hatesite" is.

Not to mention the telegraph is openly and proudly conservative. Just ask its owner Conrad Black.

The daily mail is the brit liberal paper, btw.

> Daily Kos hatesite

Oh, the irony. As you link to LGF who mocks dead protestors like Rachel Corrie by awarding them their "idiotarian award of the year." And they got the entire country of France on there. Umm, who are the haters exactly? I'll let the reader decide:

DailyKos

LGF

Even 30 seconds browsing both sites is enough to figure out who the "hatesite" is.

Not to mention the telegraph is openly and proudly conservative. Just ask its owner Conrad Black.

The daily mail is the brit liberal paper, btw.

It's a percieved conservative bias, not a liberal one. That's the "problem".

Running across this article today after reading this item yesterday on Google News' inclusion of the Daily Kos hatesite as a "news" source is amusing. The last article on the page (at this time) gives this explanation from Google:

While our news sources vary in perspective and editorial approach, their selection for inclusion is done without regard to political viewpoint or ideology. An article's placement on our main page is determined entirely by a mathematical algorithm, based on many factors including how often and where a story appears on the Web. We do make an effort to group sites that seem biased with contrasting sites, to give a well-rounded perspective on the topic.

We hope that you will find reports within Google News that strike you as unbiased as well as those espousing obvious viewpoints. The beauty of this service is that you get to determine which accounts you wish to read.

When the current page (as I write this) links to four articles from the Guardian and two from al-Jazeera vs. one from the Telegraph, it does lead to some questions of how their algorithm makes its decisions about what to present. The actual selections may have been done by a computer, but the computer is running software that somebody wrote to make those selections.

The children said Majid whipped them mercilessly for not reading their lessons at the top of their voices after afternoon prayers Tuesday.

"But it did not reduce his anger and he cut off our ears with a pair of scissors," one of the students said.

The students attacked by Majid were taken to a local hospital for treatment. [emphasis mine]

So, even though the crime was probably not as serious as the original article implies, it is still beyond comprehension that a teacher would even ponder doing this. Islamic psychosis at work.

girlie, you're being irrational and ridiculous. You just pointed out that someone (me) DID have the same level of scepticism and DID fact check the story. And then in the next sentence you say that no one did any fact-checking.

*Yawn* I can see you're not even worth dealing with.

The philosophy of Radical Islam is at war, not only with America and the West, but with everything that is not Radical Islam. So, do they hate us? Yes they do.

I don't see how any rational person could deny this is so.

In another e-mail, Rachel wrote, "This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop. I don't think it's an extremist thing to do anymore. I really want to dance around to Pat Benatar and have boyfriends and make comics for my co-workers. But I also want this to stop. Disbelief and horror is what I feel. Disappointment. I am disappointed that this is the base reality of our world and that we, in fact, participate in it. This is not at all what I asked for when I came into this world. This is not at all what the people here asked for when they came into this world. This is not what they are asking for now. This is not the world you and Dad wanted me to come into when you decided to have me."

As Neal says, you shall know the truth, and it will make you mad! :)

Another blog in a similar mindset:
http://instapundit.com/

Right-leaning blogs

http://rightwingnews.com/
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/
http://nicedoggie.net/

Humor - to balance out the bitterness of the last two

http://www.coxandforkum.com/ - Editorial cartoons
http://www.scrappleface.com/ - News satire

Right Wing News Allah Is In The House Little Green Footballs Cavalier's Guardian WatchBlog Iraq The Model Instapundit Power Line Michelle Malkin Ace Of Spades HQ A Small Victory The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler Israpundit Jihad Watch IMAO Moxie Niel Boortz Lonewacko Wizbang Dumb Celebs Fear And Loathing In Iraq Kim du Toit PABAAH Ann Coulter La Shawn Barber Mark Steyn David Limbaugh

funny how they are such a stickler for CBS memos, but when it comes to innacurate stories about Muslims, it's go-time baby!

Evidence. Read down to comment #15, if you can stomach that much bigotry. It puts Charles Johnson's 'journalistic integrity' directly on display.

BTW, the memos have shown two thing about the 'sphere. It's good for establishing technical facts, and piss-poor for putting them in context.

Pretty much like other AI's.

Daily "screw them" Kos.

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/weblog.php

http://realclearpolitics.com/

http://althouse.blogspot.com/

http://www.powerlineblog.com/

http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/

http://www.intel-dump.com/

http://denbeste.nu/indexlofi.shtml

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevoluti on/

http://www.parapundit.com/

http://www.allahpundit.com/

http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/

http://www.jihadwatch.org/

http://www.radicalmiddle.com/

Chomsky suffers from being Chomsky. And no one suffers from it more than him ;)

That is about the best dead-on explaination of Chomsky I think I have ever read on Slashdot.

Thank you for that.

A agree about Kos as well, for the record. He's a crackpot, from this whole CBS document scandal, to the whole screw them episode he is so well known for. If a conservative did half of the crap Kos gets away with, I think most of the Slashdot audience would be showing up with torches and pitchforks.

Oh well...at least they mean well.

I feel Little Green Footballs is one of the better conservative weblogs out there.

It's great for those who want an alternative to the many liberal blogs already posted here.

Hugh Hewitt's site has links to many of the conservative web blogs out there

• Blogs of War
• AllahPundit
• IsraPundit
• Little Green Footballs

If you really want to read a high-quality conservative blog, here are two from National Review Online:

• The Corner, a braided-blog with constributions by many of NR's writers, run by Kathryn Jean Lopez, and
• The Kerry Spot, penned by Jim Geraghty, whichs follows Kerry and his campaign closely, as well as related subjects. (The Kerry Spot was one of the best sites to follow for updates on Rathergate.

• http://www.powerlineblog.com/
• Instapundit
• Little Green Footballs
• http://www.allahpundit.com/
• Rather Biased, which perked back to life after the scandal broke.
• http://www.rathergate.com/, which sprang into being shortly after the scandal broke
• http://www.indcjournal.com/
• Finally, although I'm less of a regular reader, it was a poster on Free Republic who first broke the story.

Well, that should get you started. in truth, except for the NR blogs, I was only an occasional readers of the others before the Rathergate story broke, but now I'm much more of a regular reader, much to the detriment of my productivity...

Little Green Footballs
IMAO
RWN
and musn't forget
Drudge Report.

" I believe Tom Rosenthiel got it right in that Boston Globe article when he said that the proper question is not whether you call yourself a journalist but whether your own work constitutes journalism. And what is that? I like his answer: A journalist tries to get the facts right, tries to get as close as possible to the verifiable truth not to help one side win or lose but to inspire public discussion."

And to quote a Boston Globe reporter on journalistic honesty is almost as funny. Next on to Rather and CBS, the Boston Globe was the most aggressive at defending those forged memos with bogus claims they could have been churned out on an early 70s typewriter.

The day after this now discredited CBS expose, Google news listed over 1000 stories in papers around the world. In none that I read did the reporter make even a cursory examination of those memos. They simply repeated CBS's doctored tale like parrots.

Into the breach stepped a handful of blogs, notably Powerline and Little Green Footballs. In less than a day and using the expertise of their readers much like open source and Groklaw, they demonstrated that the memos were clumsy forgeries done with a recent version of Microsoft Word. Five years ago, perhaps even two years ago, that would have been impossible.

It was easily the biggest Internet story of the year. A handful of blogs take on a powerful TV network, charge it with using forged documents, and win. It demonstrates perfectly the democratic, leveling influence of the Internet.

But those depending on Slashdot for their window on the world would have heard almost nothing about this amazing development. A story that should have been shouted from Slashdot's main page and updated several times a day, was buried on the politics page.

The select few that determine what stories Slashdot displays are free to vote for whoever they want in the November election. But they're not free to caption their pages with "Politics for Nerds. Your vote matters" and expect us to trust them. If they want to champion Kerry by burying contrary stories, they should change that slogan to "Partisan Politics for Nerds. Vote for Kerry."

--Mike Perry, Inkling blog , Seattle

Here are a few websites that reference this situation:

UPI: breaking news

littlegreenfootballs.com

AllahPundit here and here and here.

indcjournal.com

cnsnews.com

command-post.org

hftp.blogspot.com

Regarding the small "th" after the date, Dr. Bouffard told me that it was possible to order specialty keys that would duplicate the automatic miniaturization completed by word processors after a numerical date, but it was certainly not standard, and wouldn't make a lot of sense in a military setting. "That by itself, while suspicious, is not impossible, but in conjunction with the (font irregularity of the) number four, it is really significant," he said.

Next, Dr. Bouffard began entering individual characters in an attempt to match them to the remaining fonts that were available on proportional spacing typewriters of that era, focusing on numbers. Thus far, one character stood out, the number "4." In the document provided by CBS News, the number 4 does not "have a foot" and has a "closed top," which is indicative of Times New Roman, a font exclusive to more modern computer word processing programs. other characters matched the old proportional spacing fonts (available on only a small few typewriters of the era), but this number did not (please note that this is only an initial analysis with numerical characters).

Dr. Bouffard ran this number and could not find a match in his entire database of over 4,000 typewriter fonts that have been maintained and collected into his computer database since 1988. Otherwise, the font is very indicative of Times New Roman, the font that is only available on computer word processing programs.

There are now two side-by-side comparisons available on the web:

Spacetown.

LGF

Look at them yourselves.

I'm not a typographical expert, but I typed a helluva lot of memos and documents on US Gov't issue typewriters in 1969-73. I don't remember any of them having a superscript key.

You might also want to look at some of the other documents from Bush's records. Look, eg, at the 30 Apr 72 FITREP in the "Performance grades" PDF.

Little Green Footballs here

"I opened Microsoft Word, set the font to Microsoft's Times New Roman, tabbed over to the default tab stop to enter the date "18 August 1973," then typed the rest of the document purportedly from the personal records of the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian...The spacing is not just similar--it is identical in every respect. Notice that the date lines up perfectly, all the line breaks are in the same places, all letters line up with the same letters above and below, and the kerning is exactly the same...There is absolutely no way that this document was typed on any machine that was available in 1973.

PowerLine here.

Pacetown here.

Somebody questioned the credibility of a supposedly 1973 memo typed with a proportional font, and made a little experiment.

If you're too lazy to click on the link: the document typed with all default settings in Microsoft Word looks 1:1 identical, minus the "aging" probably induced by running through the photocopier 4-5 times.

More info

From and post from Freerepublic:

Howlin, every single one of these memos to file is in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman.

In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing, and typewriters used monospaced fonts.

The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers. They were not widespread until the mid to late 90's. Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn't used for personal memos to file. Even the Wang systems that were dominant in the mid 80's used monospaced fonts.

I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old.

This should be pursued aggressively.

linky

lgf is a right leaning weblog, but I wanted to make sure that the right's talking points were also represented. I believe that the other point the right made (as seen on 60 minutes) was that this is a purely political move and merely the rehash of an attack that the right claims to have defused during Bush's first run for office.

My understanding is that if this information is new, then the right's argument doesn't hold water, and if these documents are truley forged, then the left has some splainin' to do.

Josh Marshall (of talkingpointsmemo fame) has the Brokaw interview here and the relevent memo text here.

Damn! sorry.
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=1252 4_Bush_Guard_Documents-_Forgeries

• Daily Kos
• Democratic Underground
• Talking Points Memo

• Instapundit
• Eject! Eject! Eject!
• Little Green Footballs

Ted Turner has got no right to get on a pedestal about integrity when CNN's is doubtful at best.

You do not need to be aware of any information sources not sanctioned by Big Media

You've got to be kidding me, this is a joke right? The web is seething with Conservative forums. Try Little Green Footballs for a start. Check out the hundreds of links they have. Try to keep your lunch down. -- If affirmative action means what I'm for, I'm for it.

An incident in Kakabeka Falls last month has apparently caught the attention of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I.

ABC News reports that the arrest of two people driving a van loaded 12 drums of red phosphorous has caused concern because of fears of a new terror attack in the U.S. The chemical is highly incendiary, and ABC says American authorities have reports a spectacular attack may be planned for sometime before the Presidential election this fall.

Thunder Bay Police charged a man and a woman only for violations of the Dangerous Goods Act. Police spokesperson Chris Adams says it's an ongoing drug investigation, since red phosphorous can be used to make Speed. He says U.S. officials have not contacted Thunder Bay, but may have picked up on the case through Interpol.

ABC reports the two people arrested here were Muslims, and that they claimed they were paid $4500 to drive the phosphorous to the U.S. Adams says that in fact, they said they were paid to drive the van to Toronto. They were released with a court appearance set for July.

Now, I'm not saying that we should turn our Western world into a police state. At the same time, though, there are those among us who are determined to destroy our civilazation - and discussions like this we're having here on /. help us weigh the pros and cons to make informed opinions, and keep our rights, yet not at the cost of safety.

University of Toronto != Canadian Government

The University itself may have its own problems with censorship, but at least get the organization right.

I, on the other hand, do care. And when the day comes and Canada is suffering massive social unrest my children will be called upon to bail you out. Your no care attitude is probably why my grandfather's family left your country. Your kind probably made him sick too.

Keep whistling in the wind and hating America. It's the world's hobby these days. But we will never forget how you have turned your back on us: "we, quite frankly, just DO NOT CARE."

However, "firm commitments" by donor countries meeting in London this week was only in the range of US$700 million, said Nigel Roberts, World Bank's representative to the West Bank and Gaza.

He said US$1.1 billion would "maintain the very basic level of equilibrium in the economy."

Donors disbursed US$930 million in 2001, and just over a billion dollars in 2002, Roberts said. "Given the trends, this very high level of foreign assistance is roughly US$300 per capita, which on a sustained basis is the highest in any country in the world, in a developing country situation," he told a news conference.

• Nuclear proliferation through coal burning (PDF)
• Voyager radioactivity problem
• Natural radioactivity

Notice that cinder blocks may include...cinders. Ash from coal. Concentrated minerals.

You think you can actually ban anything? Banning behavior drives profit. Banning non political speech drives profit in the name of self rightcheousness. Whether it's alcohol, pot, or child porn - the second you ban personal use of something, you increase the profit motive substantially, and you expose a substantial number of otherwise innocent people to both prosecution and persecution.

You hang the lynchers. You hang the rapists. You do not hang the people who view these things, no matter what their motive. Prosecuting people purely for motive amounts to thought crimes, and thought crimes are not the domain of a free society.

He has a system for dealing with address harvesters which you can learn about here.

He has a system for dealing with address harvesters which you can learn about here.