I’ll be on the road for the next week, and though I have the laptop, I don’t know that I’ll be blogging a lot.
Be sure to visit the folks on the blogroll, though – it’s almost as good as reading SDA, since I steal most of my stuff from them, anyway.

(Dali-ing on the Beltway Traffic Jam)

This is interesting.

When all of this crap began back in 1999, I was a political consultant for several Democratic candidates, as well as later being a senior consultant for Janet Reno in her run for Governor. I bought the document package from Marty Heldt and we subjected them to the most thorough investigation one could imagine. Why? Because if there was anything there, we damn sure wanted to use it. But guess what? Only two of those documents proved to be authentic and they were not even related to the charge being levelled. Many of them are so blatant in their alterations it is almost funny. Several purport to be signed by real live military personnel, yet they don’t even know the proper format for a military date.

This is a newsgroup posting from a writer who identifies himself as Brooks Gregory.
I won’t go as far as others in openly speculating the connection between this comment, posted Wed, 28 Jan 2004 16:27:57 GMT, and what it may suggest as to the possible source of the forged CBS memos, or even if they might have been the same ones. Time will tell.
Hat tip – Dean Esmay who rightly cautions about open speculation and naming names. But, the internet is a big place – and a tool available to anyone with a few google search skills. It’s not a drawer in someone’s bedroom, so I don’t know how you keep speculation from occuring – or even argue that it’s unethical, when so much of it occurs in the editorial pages of America’s most respected newspapers.
Wizbang notices that Marty Heldt has been popping up a lot elsewhere.

Who do Salon and David Brock’s Media Matters trot out as their rebuttal witness against the forgery charges? None other than “independent researcher” Marty Heldt.

Plot, thickened.

Good news.

Bruised and battered, Canadian military writer Scott Taylor survived four terror-filled days as a captive in Iraq.

More.
Maybe I was out of the loop, but I heard nothing about him being captured. Taylor is editor of Esprit De Corp, and a fairly frequent guest on talk radio interviews. While his political leanings sometimes colour his analysis, I always had respect for the fact that he wasn’t an puffed suit pontificating from the Green Zone in Toronto.
And a huge roundup of more general good news, though unrelated.

As more established media voices add to the criticism of CBS, some are also acknowledging that the world of big journalism has been forever changed – by the blogosphere.
Some of those voices this morning – Peter Worthington at the Toronto Sun is expecting a rather rapid retirement, and has the following observation about the twisted political logic.

The Democrats accuse the Republicans of sponsoring the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (who now say they’ve raised $6.7 million from 53,000 donors) when the Swiftie TV ads make it clear the Republican party and president aren’t involved.
Yet when an anti-Bush forgery boomerangs on Democrats, they blame the Bushies. Kind of convoluted.

The New York Times William Safire:

Alert bloggers who knew the difference between the product of old typewriters and new word processors immediately suspected a hoax: the “documents” presented by CBS News suggesting preferential treatment in Lt. George W. Bush’s National Guard service have all the earmarks of forgeries.

John Fund, Wall Street Journal “gets it”.

If it turns out that the Killian memos are indeed forgeries, the Internet will have played an invaluable role in exposing the fraud much faster than the 18 months Mr. Camacho had to twist in the wind. Free Republic, a Web bulletin board, raised early warning signals about the memos within hours of last Wednesday’s “60 Minutes” broadcast. Powerlineblog.com, a site run by three lawyers, reposted those comments, which were amplified by indcjournal.com. Then design expert Charles Johnson, who blogs at littlegreenfootballs.com, retyped one of the memos using Microsoft Word and showed them to be a perfect typographic match.
A defensive Dan Rather went on the air Friday to complain of what he called a “counterattack” from “partisan political operatives.” In reality, traditional journalism now has a new set of watchdogs in the “blogosphere.” In the words of blogger Mickey Kaus, they can trade information and publicize it “fast enough to have real-world consequences.” Sure, blogs can be transmission belts for errors, vicious gossip and last- minute disinformation efforts. But they can also correct themselves almost instantaneously–in sharp contrast with CBS’s stonewalling.

Of course, there are plenty of the usual suspects who don’t. – the meme of the day from those still wanting to cling desperately to the notion that they “have something” on Bush – “What’s the fuss about the memos, anyway? Even if they are fake, we know they were true.”
update – INDC Journal has a reprint of a well-done NY Sun article by Roderick Boyd. Read the comments – Roddy shows up to expand on the choice of word “non-journalist”, and adds this;

and we are on the cusp of something viz. big change, but what it is, i have no idea.

Sept.13, 2004 – Thus begins the week that the MSM has accepted – some with anger, some with relief – that their all-powerful hold on the “last word” in news and information has officially come to an end.
Welcome to the blogosphere, Roddy.

Colby Cosh

The Dumb Luck Hypothesis, as it applies to Alberta, is terribly popular with people in Saskatchewan. They love to tell me, personally, how lucky Alberta has been to find itself sitting on top of all that oil. (They are generally unfazed when I explain that my parents and an army of kinfolk took the trouble to move here from Saskatchewan, many years ago, precisely because hardworking people were needed to help locate and extract all that oil.) Now I can simply point out that those who stayed behind have suddenly been revealed to be, almost literally, sitting on an assload of gems that has been left unprobed for decades. Luck ain’t something you get: it’s something you make.

Required reading for those in this province who think the difference between Aberta’s prosperity and Saskatchewan’s stagnation is oil.
Sometimes I do wonder how much better off this province would be today, had someone had the good sense to shoot Tommy Douglas.

The Orlando Sentinel;

It’s called the Boyfriend Arm Pillow, and that’s pretty much what it is. A big pillow complete with a shoulder crook, a comforting arm and a nice blue shirt with a pocket. It’s not as long as a full-body pillow, but the manlike features of this lovable cotton ball must be appealing to single women because the “boyfriends” have become quite popular in Japan.
Mr. Pillow not only comes with his own shirts for those ladies who feel compelled to dress their guys, but he also has a soothing, vibrating arm function that will comfort a woman into a blissful slumber.

I’m thinking that vibrating thing could get damned annoying.

For all the arguable advantages with outsourcing, some tasks should probably remain in house.

Eight London hospitals are using or negotiating to use the services of Omnimedical which employs a pool of secretaries in India to transcribe letters from tapes dictated by consultants.
[…]
Information about a patient’s “phlebitis [vein inflammation] left leg” was typed out as “flea bite his left leg”. A “below knee amputation” was transcribed as “baloney amputation” and “eustachian tube [in the ear] malfunction” was given as “Euston station tube malfunction”.

Of corset maybe defaultive the dock tarsand righting.

Spike Lee;

“Michael Moore would not need armed guards around him 24 hours a day if that film had no impact,” says Lee, who spoke to Moore a few days ago. “He’s not happy about it, with his life being threatened. I wouldn’t be happy either.” [emphasis mine – ed ]

Someone alert the NRA.
This has the makings of one fine promotional ad.
via Right Wing News

Out of town. Check out the blogroll !

Matt Drudge has a leaked transcript up. It’s not pretty. One would think that with all that time to think about his accusations, Moore would have a more skilled response ready. OTOH, I think O’Reilly missed the boat by not dismissing Moore’s “send your children” faux question.
Nobody is sending “children” to Iraq. They are adults, professional soldiers and all are volunteers.

It’s the Palestinians who send their children to war.

Toronto star writer, Antonio Zerbisias, pops in to comment on Bob Tarantino’s blog. With her favorite pet troll at her side. A snippet;

(And Bob, don’t cum all over your keyboard because I am posting here. Marc Weisblott suggested I pop over here into your little playpen for a laugh.)

I can see why they pay her the big bucks.

Oh. Did I miss a letter? Oh well….
Michael Moore, in A July 4th op-ed for the LA Times;

But, in high school, things changed. Nine boys from my school came back home from Vietnam in boxes. Draped over each coffin was the American flag. I knew that they also had made a sacrifice. But their sacrifice wasn’t for their country: They were sent to die by men who lied to them.

James Lileks;

For some reason that intrigued me: “nine boys from my school”. So I googled around, and found the Casualty list for the Vietnam War. There were six casualties from Davison, Michigan. (He didn�t go to high school in Flint. He didn�t live in Flint. You knew that, right? He lived in a suburb.) They weren’t boys. They were men. The earliest was killed in 1967, and there were two casualties in that year. Two in 1969, one in 1968, and one in 1970. Moore was born in 1954, so he would have entered high school in 1969, after which there were four casualties. (One of which died of a heart attack.) Two were drafted, incidentally. The rest – if I’m reading the site correctly – appeared to have enlisted.
Just so we’re not throwing them around as props, we should give their names. They were Gary Thompson, Martin Scott, David Bonesteel, Howard Doyle, David Ex, and Lowell Holden.

This, of course, is why Mr.Ambush Schlockumentary will only grant interviews when he can screen the questions in advance.
Lileks concludes – “There you have it. He wants the flag to stand for clean water. This from a man who waddles up to the deep well of American freedom, fumbles with his zipper, and pisses in it.”
Go read the whole gory dissection.