One really has to wonder if the polls mean anything this year. Ever since the Republican convention, they’ve been going nuts. Just a few days ago Harris had Kerry out in front by one point. But now Gallup comes up and says that Bush leads by fourteen points. No way both are true, or even close to agreeing upon anything. Other polls show similar discrepancies. Kerry is at 41% or at 48%, Bush at 46% or 54%.

Considering that the margin of error is between 3% and 4%, it is highly unlikely that reality is converging at the center and all the polls are off completely to one side. It is more likely that the data is simply greatly unreliable. Perhaps, for some reason or another, the different polling organizations started using very different models, or introduced new variables at about that time. Or maybe it’s just that this election is so unpredictable that surveys simply don’t work at all.

We may have to fly this one in blind.

Meanwhile, the situation in Iraq continues to spin out of control. American casualties have been steadily increasing for four months now. At this rate, September will become at least the third deadliest month of the war with a hundred or more U.S. soldiers killed.

And now more and more analysts are beginning to come out and say it outright: we are losing the war in Iraq. Or, more specifically, Bush is losing the war in Iraq. The soldiers fight on, doing their best, but all a soldier can do is just that–their best. If their commander-in-chief chooses the wrong battle or mishandles his strategy, then there’s little that any soldier can do.

Before the war started, the Arab league predicted that if Bush invaded, it would “open the gates of hell in the Middle East,” and now they’re saying that the gates of hell are indeed open; some analysts see the was as already lost; and this writer notes that the correspondence between Bush’s rosy assessments and the reality on the ground are becoming more and more dissonant.

The question now is, will the realization of Bush’s horrific blunder sink in with the populace in time to do something about it, or will a jingoistic, crowd-pleasing, gung-ho “if you diss me then you diss the soldiers” song-and-dance routine by Dubya sway voters enough to lock us into four more years in Iraq? If Bush gets voted in, then we’re in Iraq for good, because his inability to admit to error will force him to drive us into the ground there.

The war was a mistake from the start, and many of us saw it before the whole thing started:

Contrary to the rosy the-Arabs-will-love-us-for-saving-them pipe dream that Cheney has been hawking, the Arab people do not and never have reacted kindly to U.S. intervention, even when their governments allow it; should we go in with everyone opposing us, tempers will flare further still. Cheney argued that “extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of jihad.” Is he truly so utterly naive? An unsupported attack by America on an Arab nation would generate such fear and hostility in so many people that extremists would be swamped with volunteers willing to die for their cause. It would fire the call for a greater jihad, not frighten the extremists into impotency. Conflict is the friend of the terrorist.

That’s from a pre-Movable-Type blog entry of mine from August 27th, 2002. I was hardly batting 1000 in the entirety of the post, but a lot of what I predicted came to pass, and a lot of other people were closer to the truth than I was. It’s not like it was really that hard to see coming. But Bush and his handlers were either blind to it or didn’t even care.

The sad thing is, it may already be too late. Bush has ceded huge swaths of territory to the insurgents (like he did in Afghanistan when he depleted forces there to fight in Iraq), who now know that a victory is possible. A great deal of that was made possible by things like the prison torture fiasco, turning hearts and minds against us.

The solution would have been for America to go to the United Nations and work out a real coalition, with strong cooperation by Arab nations, to send in a multinational force under U.N. control. Had that been implemented a year ago perhaps, it might have worked. But now Bush has wrecked the Iraq car, totaling it beyond any hope of repair, and we are probably left with the unsavory and yet very real choice of either leaving Iraq to the insurgents and letting it descend into hell, or staying there and still have it descend into hell. The way Bush has taken us in, there is not painless way out. In fact, there is no way out that is not going to be excruciatingly painful.

Bush will inevitably talk about where to go from here, and that is indeed relevant. But even more relevant in deciding the next president is this: what kind of decisions has Bush made, and where have they taken us–because if he gets re-elected, we will be in for more and more decisions just like it.

I just checked back on the box office figures for Fahrenheit 9/11, and noted that it had broken the $200 million landmark. The $118 million domestic take is amazing enough, but $85 million overseas–for what is a very American, very political film–is outstanding. And note that the second-highest overseas gross is in Japan, where grosses don’t usually go very high–and those figures are just after three weeks of release!

The DVD is due for release on October 5th (pre-order your copy!), and since DVDs now often sell more than at the box office, and since this one is coming out unusually early, it should gross even more, breaking more records. But the DVD will also mark a breakthrough in viewership, since a lot more people either on the fence or even on the other side of the fence will be more liable to plop down three bucks for the rental to watch at home rather than pay more than twice that much, per person, not including popcorn, to go to the theater.

In the meantime, Republicans feebly gathered in Dallas for their conservative-laden “American Film Renaissance,” featuring the anti-Moore polemic, “Michael Moore Hates America.” In a rather pathetic wannabe us-too display, the crowd rose and gave the film a ten-minute standing ovation, which did not speak well for the film. After all, a less partisan crowd gave F-9/11 a 15-minute ovation at Cannes; if a staunchly conservative crowd trying their hardest to match that for their best-effort hate movie can only eke out ten minutes on their feet, there must be some enthusiasm missing there. The documentary’s maker aspires to get a theatrical release sometime in October. Well, maybe–but if it does, it won’t be on the film’s merits, but rather because, ironically, Moore’s own film paved the way.

This usually happens when I make a special effort to get a solid eight hours of sleep. I’m usually a night owl, so going to sleep at midnight is early for me. I have to get up at eight, so that’ll be a good chunk of sleep, which I have been lacking of late. So what happens? Some blazing idiot starts trying to fax me at six in the morning. For me, it’s over on the first ring; I’m up now and can’t get back to sleep. But the idiot has left his machine on auto-redial, so every ten minutes, as I’m futilely trying to get back to sleep, the phone keeps going off, like the Snooze Alarm from Hell.

That’s a great way to start the day.

A few years ago, I bought a good leather jacket while on a business trip to Wisconsin. The jacket was cheap, but seemed of good quality–and that has borne out to be true. Good material, rugged, warm, comfortable, and (not that I know anything about fashion) it looked good, at least to me.

At the end of last Spring, I found the one part of the jacket that reflected its price. On the zipper, there is a small, flat metal tab on the fastening mechanism that you pull up and down to open or close the zipper. You know, the little metal flap that you hold between your thumb and forefinger while zipping. That thing broke, snapped in the middle, making it impossible to pull the fastener up or down.

Not a problem, I thought. It’s, what, a simple piece of metal, gotta cost five cents tops to produce. I examined the remaining stump, and with a little twisting, it came right off. Replacing it should be a cinch–get a new metal tab, twist it a bit to snap it on, and Bob’s your uncle. So I went to this large sewing and clothing supply store in Shinjuku I know of, figuring they must have a small rack of these things. Would cost a dollar at most, including a significant markup for the store.

I go in, wait for a salesperson to be free, and asked about it. Go to the sixth floor, she told me. I went to the elevator, which had left the first floor just before I had gotten to it, stopping at every floor on the way up, and on the way down. Sensing one of those frustrating series of piddling annoyances, I speculated that I would be told on the sixth (and top) floor that what I need is actually on the first floor. That happens often enough.

I get to the sixth floor, but don’t see the right materials. So I wait to talk to someone, and am redirected again–twice. When I finally reach someone who deals with these things, she looks at the broken fastener tab with doubt, then goes to the back of the store for a few minutes. When she comes back out, she’s carrying zippers and fasteners. “It’s not YKK, is it?” she observes. YKK is a Japanese company which makes something like 90% of all the zippers in the world. I know because I visited their factory once years and years ago, I forget even why.

The salesperson meticulously compares the zippers that she brought out with mine, attempting to divine their size, mumbling in apparently distress about this non-YKK zipper I’ve got. I try to tell her, I don’t need the fastening mechanism, it’s not broken. I just need a new tab. See? Simple little thing. You must have some. She tried to explain that they don’t sell them. Why not, I wondered–it must be the most breakable part of most zippers, it’s simple, it should be cheap. (Though maybe that’s why they don’t carry them.)

She got that face that shopkeepers get in Japan when you ask for something they don’t have, and they don’t want to disappoint you, yet they know they have little other choice. Here we go, I thought. She’s gonna send me to the first floor for something.

She outdid my expectations. “I can’t tell if the size is right,” she told me. “You’ll have to go to the repair corner. Go down to the first floor, go across the street, and up to the fifth floor.” Great. She found a way to make me go even farther–no doubt to be redirected back again.

So off I went, and sure enough, the elevator down had just left the floor, and was stopping at, well, you know. I walked down the stairs, crossed the street, and got to the elevator just as it had taken off from the first floor. Sometimes you can’t catch a break.

When I got to the fifth floor, naturally I got redirected after waiting yet again, and found the right person. “It’s not a YKK zipper, is it? she mused. “No,” I replied, “but I don’t need the zipper, I just need that little tab. Surely you must have one.”

“No,” she said, “you can’t replace that part.” This is where my BS sensors started going off. It’s a small piece of metal. The operative part is a simple straight bar divided in the middle to allow the piece to be worked into place on assembly. If it’s not available, it must be by choice, not because of a mechanical impossibility. It would be child’s play to replace, you don’t need to be an engineer to figure that out.

Further, she opined that my zipper, being of the non-YKK variety, was probably not going to work with any of their fasteners. “We’ll have to take out the whole zipper and replace it with a new one.” I asked her the cost, and it approached the cost of the original jacket. This is most definitely not right, I knew it.

At that point, I was hit with an inspiration. “Wait, I bet I could use a key ring in there. Just thread it through and use that. It wouldn’t be very stylish–or maybe it would be, I don’t know–but I bet it would work.”

She shook her head sagely, telling me with absolute confidence that it would never work. There’s a locking mechanism in the fastener, she told me; “if the pulling tab isn’t just right, the fastener will lock up. It’ll never work.” Still, I wasn’t about to leave my jacket there for a week or two while they massively overcharged me for unnecessary work–well, not without looking into things first–so I left.

On my way out (the elevator was there for once), I grumbled to myself that the whole thing was ridiculous, I should have been able to snap on an extra part in ten seconds and walked away. Once on the street, I decided to trust my instincts. I fished out my keys, found a key ring which was about the right size and thickness, and rearranged the keys to free up the ring. I then threaded it through the hole in the fastener on the jacket’s zipper.

It works perfectly.

I felt kind of foolish for not thinking of it way earlier, and for not trusting my instincts immediately. After all, sometimes you know it’s just gotta be a scam.

Bush spoke before yet another easy audience the other day: veterans of the National Guard. After all, if you want to address your service in the National Guard and have virtually no one in the audience able to object, where else would you go? Not exactly a tough crowd there.

And Bush couldn’t help but dissemble again. Josh Marshall points out that when bush claimed that he was “proud to be one of” 19 presidents to serve in the Guard, he was being less than fully honest. He was, in essence, counting every president who served in the military before 1903, when the National Guard was formed out of the pre-existing organized militias.

In short, Bush was equating himself with former presidents like George Washington, who served in the militia–but was not exactly doing the same sort of thing in the militia that Bush was. Marshall goes on to point out that if one were instead to count all presidents who joined the “National Guard” to get out of combat, the list would have only one member: George W. Bush.

In the past seven days, MT Blacklist (a program that stops blog comment spam for Movable Type blogs) has stopped no fewer than 1,400 blog comment spams from getting on my site–and another 100 got through the protection and had to be removed manually. That’s over 200 spams a day. This represents a rather significant surge in spam volume over previous levels.

I hate to do this, but next chance I get, I’m installing some sort of registration system–provided that they work. Anyone know if they do, or which system is best? I’d really like to stay with MT. I presume MT v. 3.0 would allow me to do that. Any advice would be appreciated.

It is pitiful to go around the web and look at blogs that are not cleaned out by their owners–their comment areas are a cesspool of spam. These people should just shut down comments altogether. They’re just making it worse for the rest of us.

I’m also getting a lot of referral spam, and they’ve evolved–IP Deny no longer blocks them out.

Spammers are the cockroaches of cyberspace. I don’t think anyone with a blog would disagree with that. Unless the blog is run by a spammer, of course. And even then…

Critics point out that Bush failed to take a physical exam required of him by the Texas Air National Guard in 1972, and this got his flight status revoked.

The White House counters that Bush didn’t take the physical because he “was not going to be flying.” Okay, even if we ignore earlier conflicting White House claims about that issue, let’s say that what they now say is true. Bush was not going to be flying.

So here’s the question: why was Bush not going to be flying?

Bush had entered the Guard claiming that he wanted to make flying a part of his life. He has commented on how important flying was to him. Was being a flunky on the campaign staff for a House seat in Alabama more important than that? And why go permanently off of flight status? He would have returned after a few months, why would he not fly again after that?

When you think about it, it doesn’t make too much sense. A physical exam only takes, what, an hour? I don’t think I have ever heard the president say why he made that decision. I’d like to hear it asked, because the only explanation that comes close to making sense is this one.

Some days it’s just hard to write. You see clearly what is going on, but stand in almost despair as others look the other way. You see a man who had everything paid for and handed to him, everything taken care of for him all his life, who drank, almost certainly used drugs; a man who broke the law many times, though arrested only three times that we know of; a man who has spoken outright lies too many to count; who evaded service while admonishing his peers not to do the same–engaging in hypocrisy, cowardice, and then lying about it. A man who displayed cruelty to many people, including a woman about to be put to death on his own watch.

And yet, despite all of these facts, millions of people who see character, dignity, and honor as critical somehow are able to see this man as strong in character. You wonder in disbelief how they can possibly think that.

You see a man who started a war that didn’t need to be fought, sent a thousand young men and women to die and Lord knows how many thousands more to be maimed and cut up, all based on lies about how dangerous the other country was, lies proven wrong beyond any doubt whatsoever; a man who still forwards many of these same bald-faced lies. A man who hides behind the honor of fallen soldiers. A man who did all of this at the cost of fighting an effective war on terror, when from the very start he began to draw resources away from the hunt for those who had actually attacked our people. A man who has allowed and even caused by his words and actions the enemy numbers to swell, while still refusing to adequately fund real defense at home.

And yet, to so many patriotic Americans who see their children’s lives as sacred and the security of our nation as paramount, this same man is somehow seen as a strong, decisive leader who is our only chance for peace and safety.

You see a man who has treated the people with disdain, stealing away their rights in the dead of night, and yet to many who cherish our freedoms and liberties, this man is somehow a protector.

You see a man who has taken a massive surplus and turned it into an unheard-of deficit, a man whose spending has gone far beyond control, and yet among people to whom small government and financial responsibility is essential, somehow this man is seen as a trustworthy manager of the treasury.

You see a man who has presided of massive job losses, over the lowering of uncounted jobs to minimal pay, who has done nothing for education or health care, and yet so many people seem to think he is the best man to accomplish these things and raise our standards of living, tasks which he has proven he cannot accomplish.

And then we turn and see the other man. A man also born to wealth and privilege, and yet he chose to serve, and did serve in combat, with such stature and bravery that a band of his comrades have given up a year of their lives to follow him and declare to anyone who will listen that they owe their lives to him, that he is a man who will lead with honor and dignity. And yet many people who respect military service and honor bravery would sooner listen to political hacks funded by wealthy partisan donors who attack this man with easily punctured lies and thinly veiled hypocrisy–and yet believe them instead. You see the first man attack not just the second, but many others (think of McCain and Cleland) who served and sacrificed with honor, attacking them with bitter lies and calling these patriots traitors, and somehow many people believe the coward who never fought, and disbelieve the men who offered their lives for their country.

You see the other man come forward with workable, sensible and fair plans where the first man has nothing but failures. You see the other man spell out his plans for education in detail, for health care that benefits the people and not the pharmaceutical corporations, a man who would tax fairly, use taxes fairly, and who would reduce the deficit, build better jobs and turn us around from four years of economic failure. But you see that nobody hears of any of this because though the man is speaking of these plans often, the cameras and the journalists do not pass them on as they are supposed to; they instead focus on what the first man is saying without questioning his veracity, and then only how the other man responds to that, and little else. You see the other man trying to tell a country how he can help, how he wishes to serve, but you only read stories and see reports buried low on the page and far into the broadcast, and even then more often than not focusing on how he’s being berated or not being angry enough.

Just today, two of the top half dozen major media sites don’t even mention Kerry’s name on their main pages, though they all name Bush; two more of that number do not mention him until near the bottom of the page. And yet we are less than two months away from an election.

You may or may not share my views or judgments, and I am far from being without bias. There are other things to be said that oppose what I have written above, to be certain. But even taking all that into account, I still cannot fathom how so many can dismiss so much which is vital in a leader and accept a man such as Bush; I cannot believe how a man like Kerry, who, for all his faults, fought for his nation and fights for it still, a man of ambition and yet still of conscience, can be so beaten in the media and disbelieved and unheard by so many who value the things that he has accomplished and promises to do.

You look at the papers and read the news and listen to the broadcasts, and sometimes it hurts to see how the truth is being played with by veterans of spin, how you know what is right and yet also see how millions will see it as wrong, or wrong as right.

This does not mean that I am giving up, however. It does not mean I have abandoned hope, far from it. My hope is that those who fear what will come from another four years, and those who hope for what a new administration could bring, will be galvanized by the blind eye of much of the country and the jaded eye of the media. My hope still remains in my mantra now quite long in speaking: turnout, turnout, turnout.

I fear for my country, but above all I hope for it.

Here is an article from U.S. News and World Report that is saying the same thing I’ve been saying for more than a year now. About time somebody in the media finally realized it. In short: Bush did not fulfill his duties; even if you take all of the records released by the White House at face value, Bush still fell short on points in the Guard. Interesting, though, that they don’t mention the “gratuitous” points Bush was awarded to put him over the top. Performing your duty would earn you points for the year; if you achieved 50 points, you got awarded 15 “gratuitous” points. Bush, in 1972 for example, only earned 41 points, but was awarded the extra 15 points to bring him over minimum requirements–and yet that was not supposed to happen. You only got the extra points if you first fulfilled your duty. The White House has been trying to tell everyone that since Bush got over 50 points, he finished his stint. He did not.

As I mentioned before, the manual for the $1,000 machine I just bought comes nowhere near being informative enough to tell me how to operate the thing. After hours and hours of translating, reading, and fiddling around I worked out maybe half of the bare minimum to get the machine to function. So I have to resort to the support line. Except there’s a problem. I’ve been hitting “redial” every fifteen seconds for 45 minutes now, and every number Toshiba has for support–three different numbers–have been solidly busy since opening time. And when I called the main support line over the weekend, the same person answered each time, suggesting that they only had one person on staff to answer the phones. You plop down that much money for a machine, you’d think that they’d either put more effort into writing the manual, or hire a few extra people to answer the phone…

I don’t suppose there’s anyone out there with an RD-XS53 who could give me some tips?

Just thought you might enjoy this AP Photo. Even the little girl knows generally where her heart is located. One can easily imagine what Bush might be thinking. “I can’t belive I ate that whole pizza all by myself.” Or maybe, “Damn those pretzels! If they don’t choke me, they give me indigestion!”

Anyone care to suggest other captions?

You might or might not be aware the George W. Bush once ran for Congress. It was 1978, and after winning the primary race, he lost to Democrat Kent Hance. What is interesting is that in his campaign materials, Bush claimed to have served in the Air Force as well as in the Texas Air National Guard.

Of course, this is nothing new. In his 1999 biography, he stated that after June 1970, “I continued flying with my unit for the next several years,” which is now known to be false. In 1999 and 2000, Bush lied–twice–about his drunk driving arrest. And then there was the time that Bush, as Governor of Texas in 1999, lied under oath (isn’t that an impeachable offense now?) in a criminal investigation.

Ah, but those were five years ago, and so were just youthful indiscretions. After all, he wouldn’t ever lie as president, would he?

A huge explosion in the northern part of North Korea sent a plume of smoke more than two miles wide into the air on an important anniversary of the secretive communist regime, a South Korean news agency reported Sunday. …

”We understand that a mushroom-shaped cloud about 3.5 to 4 kilometers (2.1 to 2.5 miles) in diameter was monitored during the explosion,” the news agency quoted an unidentified diplomatic source in Seoul, the South Korean capital, as saying. (source)

Whatever it was, it’s not good. Something damned big blew up there on Thursday, for the mushroom cloud to be more than 2 miles across. If it’s not nuclear, then I have no idea what it could be. Powell is saying that it’s not nuclear, and one would assume that if it were a nuke, Powell wouldn’t be quite so definitive. We’ll probably find out what it was in a few days.

Initial reports have a U.S. official claiming it was a forest fire. That’s gotta be some forest fire… but in all seriousness, it can’t be that. So what is it? If it is nuclear, then Bush is in huge trouble. Remember his statement, “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” Considering the advancements made with North korea under a Democratic president, and how Bush immediately blew all of that off and called North Korea “evil,” a nuclear test by that country would be greatly embarrassing. It should also be noted that the explosion happened on a keynote date (the anniversary of North Korea’s foundation), which would be a logical day for something like a first successful nuclear test.

It should also be noted that this also comes at about the same time as a revelation that South Korea started enriching uranium four years ago with America not objecting, throwing yet another wrench into the whole situation.

But this should be a reminder of one other important fact: Kim Jong Il is still there, and still a greater threat to his own people and to us than Saddam Hussein ever was. North Korea is still developing nuclear weapons when Hussein was doing nothing even close to that. People in North Korea are unimaginably more oppressed than Iraqis ever were. And yet we went into Iraq, first under the pretense that Hussein was building nukes, which later (when WMD were never found) morphed into a humanitarian mission because the Iraqis were so terrorized by their leader. Both of those excuses are shown up as feeble in light of the threat of North Korea. I’m not saying that we should have invaded North Korea instead, I’m pointing out that the reasons given for invading Iraq were, to put it kindly, false.

The current situation also begs the question, what has Bush been doing about North Korea? Because as far as I can tell, he’s been doing pretty much nothing at all.

So I broke down and went out and bought the Toshiba RD-XS53 HDD/DVD Recorder. That’s the (supposedly) TiVo-like machine which works with SkyPerfecTV (which I just got), recording whatever you like and doing all the programming work for you. Or not.

In order to get enough time to set up the gadgets that I buy, I usually get them Friday evening on the way home from work, or on Saturday afternoon (like this time); that’ll leave me the weekend, before I have to go back to work, to fiddle with the thing and get it just right.

And every time I seem to forget what happens every time before–the manual is frustratingly confusing, and the 24/7 telephone number is for pre-sales only–tech support won’t open till Monday at 10 am, by which time I have to go to work. Yargh.

One of the main features–and they advertise the spit out of the machine as having this very feature–is that it can control the SkyP tuner box through a control cable, turning it on and off, changing the channel, switching the bilingual mode. But just try getting it to do that. The “easy setup” manual is unforgivably lacking in detail–it only explains a portion of what you have to do before you can even do the most basic of tasks–and in order to get things to work right, you have to reference the thicker manual, without prompting from the “easy setup,” and, well, you get the picture. I could rant on, but I doubt you’d want to read about it.

Short story: I have figured out enough after a few hours of reading, fixing the settings, arranging the channels manually and so on, to get the thing to simply record whatever I manually set it to. Which will hold me, I suppose, until the tech support people come in from the weekend.

Spiffy features I hadn’t known about: you can divide any recorded show into DVD chapters, and delete any chapter you want–which can be used to separate out and then delete commercial breaks, if you want to take the time to do that. That I could figure out, though I wouldn’t even have known about it except that the Yodobashi Camera sales guy showed it to me. Another nifty feature is the ability to manually set the compression. Instead of just having “regular” (4.6) or “long” (3.2), you can set the quality from 1 to almost 10, so a DVD could hold anywhere from 1 to 8 hours of programming, depending on the quality you select. My current task is to figure out how much DVD play time is added by going up or down each step in compression so I can set the quality just right for X amount of video to fill up a disk.

One drawback: the DVD recorder will produce only Region-2 DVDs, so if you want to send homemade DVDs–even self-made things, like home movies–to anyone outside Japan, they’ll need a region-free DVD player to view them. And there is copy-protection, so you can’t just pop in a rental DVD, save it to disk, then record back onto a DVD-R (unless you have a pirate box that defeats the DVD protection).

I’m sure there are quite a few other ups and downs to come… And if anyone in the U.S. is interested in this kind of a machine, it’ll be released there next month, at about $700. I presume it’ll be geared to hook up to American satellite systems, and will probably have equivalent features.

Well, here is an excellent example of damage control on the part of Republicans. As stated in yesterday’s post, CBS uncovered some highly damaging documents from Bush’s superior officer in the TANG concerning his using family ties & influence to get out of fulfilling his duties. The documents are from the early 70’s.

It did not take long for stories to be released claiming the documents are forgeries. The proof? Col. Jerry Killian’s wife says he never kept papers! His son say he wouldn’t write like that!

Beg pardon? Did his wife and son hang out at his base and observe his writing and paper-pushing proclivities? Besides, men who served with Killian, including Lt. Col. Bobby Hodges (who is mentioned in the memos) report that Killian both wrote memos of that nature and openly spoke about the same kind of things written in the memos.

But there’s a superscript “th” in the document! That was impossible on typewriters in the 60’s! An expert in forensics said so!

It didn’t take long for observers to point out that typewriters with superscript abilities had been available for almost a decade by the time the memos were written.

But the memo was written with proportional spacing, not monospace where “i” and “m” are the same width! 70’s typewriters couldn’t do that!

Except that they could, it turns out.

But wait! The memos were types in Times New Roman, and font used on PCs that were not available in the early 70’s! And if you overlay an MS Word printout over the memo, they match!

Except that Times New Roman was invented in 1931, and the current computer fonts are based on it, so of course they’re very close. But they are not identical. A screen overlay shows substantial differences in detail–ironically, the greatest difference is with the famed superscript “th.”

Every few hours, it seems like some right-wing organization comes out with new claims as to how the documents are faked, and almost immediately research shows that the claims of forgery are unfounded and false. But I’m sure that won’t stop any and all Freepers and Dittoheads from believing the forgery theory, and unfortunately, due to strong media coverage, enough doubt will be introduced so that most in the public will simply disregard what is now an iron-clad presentation of evidence that Bush used favoritism, got out of serving, went AWOL, and then lied repeatedly about it.

While the original report of the documents was carried by some but not all major news organizations (some buried it, some didn’t carry it on their main page), the story of the forgery claims are being carried by every news organization I can find, at the top of the news.

For an exhaustive analysis of the whole typewriter issue, read this post from DailyKos, it is comprehensive and blows just about every right-wing conspiracy theory out of the water.

But the right-wingers won’t stop there. A new offensive has started, in which the claim is being made that Kerry also tried to avoid going to Vietnam. The story carries little documentation, none of it damning, and cites only one source: the Swift Boat Vets tome of lies about Kerry. Already the majors are beginning to pick it up–though at least the Boston Globe story focuses on how wrong the accusations are. Don’t expect most of the media to go that way.

A side note: both my father and I have observed as of late that reporters don’t seem to question people much any more. For many years I’ve noted that if a politician being interviewed completely avoids answering a question (instead saying, ‘let me first mention that…’ and never coming back), the reporter will simply let it go, and not come back with, “excuse me, but you didn’t answer the question.” A few reporters will do that, but only a precious few.

But now, it seems like reporters simply whore themselves to the politicians going on air, allowing them to say anything, get away with anything. The politician can lie like a rug, and the ‘journalist’ will never contradict them with little things, like blatantly obvious evidence to the contrary. It happens only so rarely, and when it does, it’s great–but all too often it simply just slides by.

I miss professional journalism. I hope it comes back some day.

Updates: Sandra Ramsey Lines, the forensic “expert” who was reported as first stating that the Killian memos were fake, just by sheer coincidence happens to be a contributor to a Republican organization for Republican women in congress. Who’da thunk?

And now one of Bush’s old college professors has come out saying that Bush told him he was for the war but had arranged to get out of serving.

Tsurumi, who crossed paths with Bush in the early 1970s when the future President was studying for his MBA, previously has criticized Bush’s economic policies and described him as a mediocre student who “believed people were poor because they were lazy.” … “He was very casual about [getting into the TANG],” the professor said. “I said, ‘Lucky you, how did you manage it?’ He said, ‘My dad had a good friend who put me at the head of the waiting list.'”

Believe Tsurumi or not, but his statements are backed up by others; a college classmate of Bush also came out some time ago saying that Bush was for the war in Vietnam, and the evidence that Bush used family influence is rather overwhelming.

Not that diehard Bush supporters will care, but the evidence has now mounted to prove that Bush (a) got into the guard through family influence, not merit, and did so in order to avoid serving in Vietnam; (b) he did not fulfill his service; and (c) he received special treatment in the guard and escaped punishment because of who he was.

The story is often confusing because it is often told in a disjointed way, often just focusing on a few specifics and rarely told in full. A fully-detailed telling of the story could probably fill a book, but here are the highlights:

When Bush applied for the Texas Air National Guard (TANG), there was a long waiting list–usually one and a half years long–and absolutely no guarantee of a spot. Bush checked “do not volunteer” for overseas assignment on the application forms. Bush admits to having called Colonel Walter Staudt, commander of the TANG, to ask about getting into the Guard.

Sid Adger, oilman and Bush family friend, asked then-Lt. Governor Ben Barnes to get young Bush into the TANG. Barnes contacted General James Rose, head of the TANG, and asked him to take Bush in. Barnes just recently recounted that story on 60 Minutes.

Bush joined the TANG just 12 days before his college deferment ran out. Col. Staudt immediately became Bush’s mentor and guardian. Staudt held a special ceremony to swear Bush in, complete with photographers–even though Bush had already been sworn in. Staudt held another ceremony for the cameras when Bush was made an officer, with the Elder Bush in attendance.

Bush was made a Lieutenant despite not having accomplished any of the requirements for the rank; Bush was made a jet pilot despite getting only a 25% score–the lowest possible without failing–in his aptitude test. Bush was elevated into the 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron over the heads of far more qualified pilots. Col. Staudt insisted that there was no favoritism. Bush was assigned to an F-102, which was being phased out and would never be called to Vietnam. (additional source)

The above rather clearly proves that Bush used connections and family influence to get into the Guard, and once he was in, he was rather blatantly guided into a position of status, safety, and comfort.

The next stage of the whole affair comes in 1972, when Bush is still a few years away from completing his comfy service in Texas:

In the spring of 1972, George H. W. Bush, then the U.S. Ambassador the to U.N., directly called Jimmy Allison, Bush family political guru and manager of the Blount campaign in Alabama. The elder Bush asked Allison to take young George under his wing, and get him to work on the Blount campaign. Said Allison’s widow in a recent interview, “The impression I had was that Georgie was raising a lot of hell in Houston, getting in trouble and embarrassing the family, and they just really wanted to get him out of Houston and under Jimmy’s wing.”

In April 1972, all overseas and stateside military services started instituting drug testing.

A new document, just released, shows that on May 4, 1972, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, then Bush’s commanding officer, gave Bush a direct order to have his annual physical exam no later than May 14. It was previously assumed that Bush was due for his exam in August. The question is, why was he ordered to have his exam two to three months earlier than normal? This memo also shows that the Bush camp lied when they claimed Bush did not take the exam because Bush was in Alabama and his family physician was in Texas–Bush was in Texas when ordered to take the exam.

Another new document shows that on May 19, Bush called Killian to see if he could get out of performing his duties and go to Alabama. Killian noted that Bush had not taken his physical, and reminded Bush of the $1 million investment the TANG had made in training him. Killian wrote that he suspected Bush was “talking to someone upstairs.”

On May 24, Bush put in a request to be transfered to an inactive postal Reserve unit in the Alabama Guard; Killian recommends the transfer for Bush. One week later, his request was turned down by the National Guard Bureau headquarters. Bush remained in Alabama, however, and did not return to Texas as was required. Doing so could be considered going AWOL (it is desertion if it is more than 30 days).

Bush ‘campaigns’ for Blount in Alabama; according to the widow of Jimmy Allison, Bush constantly showed up late, shirked regular work, bragged about his heavy drinking, and that the only work he did during that time was “contacting people who were impressed by his name and asking for contributions and support.” Allison also had no idea Bush was in the Guard and never saw or heard of Bush attending drills.

On August 1st, Killian suspends Bush for not taking his physical exam. A mandatory report by a Flight Inquiry Board detailing Bush’s situation is still missing from the documents released from the Bush administration.

On August 18, Killian wrote a memo titled “CYA,” almost certainly standing for “Cover Your Ass.” This is one of the most damning memos; in it, Killian notes that Bush’s superior officers (Lt. Cols. William D. Harris Jr. and Bobby Hodges) are being pressured by Staudt to go easy on Bush and “sugar-coat” his reviews. Killian writes that he’ll falsify the date of a report on Bush but will not rate him better than he deserves. Staudt was clearly going to a great deal of trouble to get Bush off the hook for his failure to follow orders or even show up for duty.

On September 5, 1972, Bush was ordered to start service in an active but non-flying Alabama Guard unit, but it is doubtful that he ever served there at all. Of all the people on the base, only one man, James “Bill” Calhoun, ever claimed to have seen Bush there–but Calhoun’s story was shown to be a lie when records showed that Calhoun claimed to have seen Bush on dates when Bush was not even assigned to the unit. Other witnesses (the base commander Lt. Col. William Turnipseed and then-Lt. Bob Mintz) state definitely that Bush would have stood out like a sore thumb, and yet they never saw him, despite having looked. The only evidence Bush even went to the base is a dental exam–which only proves that he got free medical treatment, not that he served.

Bush’s absence at this time violates a ”statement of understanding” which he signed in which he swore to achieve ”satisfactory participation” which “included attendance at 24 days of annual weekend duty — usually involving two weekend days each month — and 15 days of annual active duty.” (source)

In November 1972, Bush finally returned to Houston Texas, but did not report for duty with his home squadron.

In December 1972, Bush inexplicably began working as a counselor with black youngsters in Houston, in a community service stint–often a punishment for offenders who are let off easy. His public criminal record for that period was wiped clean when Bush became governor of Texas and had his driver’s license number changed. (Rumors suggest that Bush was either caught with cocaine or for a second drunk driving offense.)

In May 1973, Bush was ordered to serve “nine certain duty days” in person at Ellington Air Force Base in Montgomery between May 22 and June 7; he never showed up. In fact, Bush never returned to duty in Texas; Lt. Col. Hodges said that “If he had come back to Houston, I would have kept him flying the 102 until he got out, but I don’t remember him coming back at all.”

On July 30, 1973, when he was cleared to go to Harvard, Bush signed a document reading, “It is my responsibility to locate and be assigned to another Reserve forces unit or mobilization augmentation position [in Massachusetts]. If I fail to do so, I am subject to involuntary order to active duty for up to 24 months…” Bush never did so, and therefore disobeyed a direct command and failed to serve duties he swore to uphold.

Upon leaving the Guard in the summer of 1973, Bush was awarded 35 “gratuitous” inactive Air Force Reserve points, which means that he did not attend his duties but was credited with serving anyway. This was not normal, and went directly against the rules at that time. In essence, Bush did not complete his duties, so higher-ups simply gave him credit for the service so he could receive an honorable discharge.

October 1, 1973: Bush is honorably discharged eight months before his duty is scheduled to end.

(extra sources: 60 Minutes, Bush’s TANG Timeline, and this BlogD post)

The White House has been trying to explain this away, mostly by simply lying–claiming Bush served when not only do they have no proof, but when there is substantial evidence showing Bush did not complete his duties. White House spokesman Bartlett summed it up thusly: “The bottom line is, is that President Bush would not have received the honorable discharge that he was granted when he returned from Alabama if he had not met his requirements.”

However, the new evidence, in addition to a great deal of prior evidence, clearly shows that Bush was being given special treatment, that his superiors were being pressured to falsify records, and that he was given far more breaks, promotions, positions and credits than he deserved. All of this proves without question that he very well could have received the honorable discharge without fulfilling his duties, and–as detailed above–he did in fact NOT fulfill his duties on many separate occasions.

Bush has lied about this. His people have lied constantly about this. Which begs the question, what else are they holding back? There are still a great many documents that should exist but which the Bush administration has not yet revealed.

What does all this mean? What relevance does it have? It means that Bush is and was dishonest; that his character is and was unacceptable; and that he cannot be trusted to carry out his responsibilities. If honesty, character, and reliability are important in a president, then all of this is of great importance for voters considering whom to elect to the nation’s highest office.

The milestone was reached and passed while I slept. Here is the editorial from the Seattle PI.

Count to 1,000, slowly

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD

We probably won’t know which American was the thousandth to die in the war on Iraq or precisely when or where he or she fell, nor do we need to know. The grisly milestone was reached yesterday, according to records compiled by The Associated Press.

In a news conference earlier in the day, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld appeared to downplay the looming tick in the death tally. He contended that terrorism’s death toll was already well over 1,000 by counting the roughly 3,000 who were lost in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

It was a cynical attempt to renew the discredited connection between terrorism and Iraq. Indeed, Rumsfeld said, our 1,000 dead in Iraq fell to “a combination of terrorists, former regime elements and criminals.”

It’s no time to engage in the ghoulish calculus of how many American deaths are too many. Even one life lost in an errant cause is one too many. The validity of their sacrifice can never be questioned, but the wisdom of those who called them to make that sacrifice must be.

This is a war whose cost has been borne by so few, waged by a nation that has cut taxes for the wealthy and in which a spike in gas prices is as close as most of us have come to sacrifice. So, for today, it’s essential to stop and stand quietly beside this milepost on the road of war — and count to one thousand, slowly.

I find it incomprehensible, what Rumsfeld was trying to say. Comparing the soldiers lost to those lost in 9/11? Furthering the lie that Iraq was somehow connected to that terrorist attack? And comparing our people lost–how is that supposed to tie in? What, is he trying to match the number? Or to say that 1,000 is not so many, so we shouldn’t grieve so much?

Incomprehensible.

More news out:

Remember the Congressional Report on 9/11 which the Bush White House ripped 27 pages out of? We always knew that the redacted pages were about Saudi Arabia, but we probably assumed that it just talked out secondary relationships between the terrorists and that country.

Not quite. According to Florida Senator Bob Graham, part of the 27 pages censored by Bush spoke of two 9/11 hijackers who got support from Saudi agents–and the Bush administration blocked an investigation into the matter. Omar al-Bayoumi and Osama Bassan worked for the Saudi government when they gave substantial financial support to Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhdar (hijackers on AA Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon), and found them apartments in San Diego when they began flight training there.

When the staff tried to conduct interviews in that investigation, and with an FBI informant, Abdussattar Shaikh, who also helped the eventual hijackers, they were blocked by the FBI and the administration, Graham wrote.

The administration and CIA also insisted that the details about the Saudi support network that benefited two hijackers be left out of the final congressional report, Graham complained.

Bush had concluded that “a nation-state that had aided the terrorists should not be held publicly to account,” Graham wrote. “It was as if the president’s loyalty lay more with Saudi Arabia than with America’s safety.”

Bush’s statement about nations that aide terrorists is completely opposite to Bush’s post-9/11 policy which he used to justify invading Afghanistan.

Graham also reveals that, according to General Tommy Franks, the Bush administration started shifting resources out of Afghanistan and into a position to be used against Iraq as early as February 2002, just four months after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and more than a year before the invasion of Iraq–not to mention long before Bush had congressional authority to do anything of that nature. Franks told Graham at one point, “Senator, we are not engaged in a war in Afghanistan.”

All of this gives even more credence to the case made in Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11, in which the extensive ties between the Bushes and the Saudis is outlined; far more detail is given in the Craig Unger book, House of Bush, House of Saud. The short story is, Bush is covering up the Saudi connection, perhaps even illegally so, committing obstruction of justice.

What odds you want that the mainstream press ignores the story?

Fighting in Iraq has surged, bringing the 1000th death of an American soldier close to reality frighteningly faster than expected. 12 fatalities in the past 36 hours have brought the toll to 998. It is sad that only this milestone may bring even a little attention to how badly things are going for our people in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nearly 7,000 more have been wounded, many losing limbs or otherwise becoming handicapped. And still, they’re being short-changed and left in the cold (make that heat) in regards to everything from bottled water to body armor, while looking at Bush administration VA funding cuts of almost a billion dollars. These among a host of issues plaguing the troops. We say we support them, but few seem willing to focus on these vital issues. To know more about what’s happening straight from the source, visit Operation Truth, a web site by soldiers in Iraq.

Was Saddam Hussein worth the lives of 1,000 Americans?

Concern has been growing over the quick-and-dirty post-convention polls from TIME and Newsweek which show Bush enjoyed a double-digit bounce. Not so fast, though; Rasmussen polls, tracking the numbers day by day, see only a 4 to 5 point lead over Kerry, which is backed up by reports of internal poll numbers from both campaigns. Rasmussen attributes the discrepancy between TIME & Newsweek and the new numbers to the news magazines’ giving more weight to Republicans’ responses in the polling data; the L.A. Times, apparently, made the same mistake by counting too many Democrats when the paper reported a huge Kerry lead earlier in the year.

A new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll shows an even smaller bounce: according to this poll, Bush got no more than a 2% increase in the poll numbers relative to before the convention. If true, this would equal the bounce Kerry got after the Democratic convention.

More dirt on Bush?

Well, it looks like it. More and more people have been noticing the long-known fact that the Bush National Guard document dump may have had lots of pages, but it left out key documents, such as the mandatory report detailing why Bush missed his physical exam. The White House response? Texas Air National Guardsmen were sloppy record-keepers. Really, that’s what they’re saying. This as Ben Barnes’ 60 Minutes interview is getting ready to air.

And now Kitty Kelley, author of the Nancy Reagan Bio, is publishing a book on the Bushes, in which she reports witnesses who say that Bush used cocaine at Camp David when his father was president, and that he and Laura Bush both smoked marijuana. The 700-page book titled “The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty” is reported to contain “five bombshells,” including the drug information and apparently new information on Bush and the National Guard.

Bush has still not answered the cocaine issue save to say that he didn’t use illegal narcotics after 1974; frankly, it is rather obvious he did use cocaine, else the clumsy obfuscation he attempted in 2000 about how he would clear background checks in former white house administrations makes absolutely no sense at all.

New allegations of cocaine use won’t really affect those already voting against Bush much, but it could hurt his support among his base, fundamentalist voters who might be less inclined to go to the polls in November if this gets enough coverage in the press.

A rather sizable aftershock, 6.4 on the Richter scale, has hit in the same place that the 7.3 hit just the other day. That one could be felt way over here in Tokyo as well, though it was more of a sharp jolt, and didn’t last very long.

Japan quake info can be found at Tenki.jp or at Hi-net.