Sibby Online

More agreement on Rather/Beck

The newest addition to the Dakota Blog Alliance has a post regarding the similarity between Dan Rather and Randell Beck. Wally mentions the Beck School. He also uses a superscripted “th” in Ra^ther.

9/11 on the left

As we remember those who died on 9/11/2001, fellow American and South Dakota blogger (but from the socialist left) is saying that Americans, including our Founding Fathers, are no better than the terrorists who flew innocent people into skyscrapers full of innocent people. No wonder I left the Democrat party in 1999.

Dan Rather pulls a Randell Beck

The mainstream media must have a play book on how to respond when they are busted. WorldNetDaily has a report detailing Dan Rather’s response to allegations that the documents he used may not be authentic:

Amid mounting accusations he presented fabricated documents to bring damning charges against President Bush, CBS anchor Dan Rather used his Evening News broadcast tonight to defend a network story run earlier this week.

Rather opened the report, available on video [note: on the video that the superscripts that Rather claimed to be the same do not look the same to me], stating: "There were attacks today on the CBS News '60 Minutes' report this week raising new questions about President Bush's Vietnam-era time in the Texas Air National Guard."

The news anchor said "partisan political operatives" are behind much of the criticism, but did not mention that the widow and son of the author of the documents both think some or all of the papers are fraudulent.

Here is what Randell Beck, the Executive Editor of the Argus Leader, said when SDP found documents that tied the Argus Leader’s chief political reporter to Democrat James Abourezk:

“You and I have been to a certain extent down this road before. There is somewhere out there in internet-land a small cabal I call them—and they’re small—and they’re a cabal of folks whose hatred of a certain political affiliation is so strong and so violent that they’ll stoop to any level to muddy the waters and confuse the issue. And employing one of the time-worn tactics they shoot the messenger, in this case the largest newspaper in the state and more specifically Dave Kranz, the best political reporter in the region, and to a certain level myself.

On 8/28/2004, Randell Beck made a claim that he has not backed up:

Dave from Brookins writes: "What you don't address is the question of why Argus leader (sic) doesn't in fact cover news stories which would appear to be damaging to (Tom) Daschle?'" Dave's "evidence"? "Surely his trip to the hamptons warranted a story, or the fact that he's refused debates repeatedly?" Well, yes, Dave. And if you'd read, you'd realize Daschle's fundraising visit to the Hamptons has been reported at least twice in this newspaper.

DVT looked for the Hamption reports and could not find them:

I can't find these "reports." Tonight I even went to the library and looked through every Argus since the NY Times story was published. It looks like Beck was completely wrong. If he made a simple made a mistake, fair enough, but this is the editor of 'Hitler would have had a blog fame'--as well as the editor who said blog criticism of the Argus was "crap" driven by a "violent" internet "cabal" of "yahoos" and "jokers," who are full of "hatred" and "vitriol" and lacked "guts" because they hid "behind their computer screens" and wouldn't face him "man to man."

DVT posted updates:

Here
Here
Here
Here
Here
Here
Here
Here

Dan and Randell, we are not attacking you. We only want the truth.

UPDATE: DVT just posted another update...and also relates Randell Beck to Dan Rather.

FreeRepublic was the first

I received this email from a Sibby Online reader:

…lets not forget that the first place picking apart the phony memos was FreeRepublic.

Absolutely correct! Here is what Powerline said in it's first post on this issue:

The Globe story is itself based on last night's 60 Minutes report: "New questions on Bush Guard duty." The online version of the 60 Minutes story has links to the memos. Killian died in 1984; CBS states that it "consulted a handwriting analyst and document expert who believes the material is authentic." Readers Tom Mortensen and Liz MacDougald direct us to the FreeRepublic post and thread (see post no. 47) to this effect:

Every single one of the memos to file regarding Bush's failure to attend a physical and meet other requirements is in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatine or Times New Roman. In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing (especially in the military), and typewriters used mono-spaced fonts.

The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction high-end word processing systems from Xerox and Wang, and later 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 and other systems that were dominant in the mid 80's used mono-spaced fonts. I doubt the TANG had typesetting or high-end 1st generation word processing systems.

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

Dan Rather responds to bloggers’ research

I watched Dan Rather tonight try to defend his 60 minutes report and the documents that are now in question. Stephen Hayes has a Weekly Standard column giving credit to the blog that brought this issue forward:

DOCUMENTS CITED Wednesday by 60 Minutes in a widely-publicized expose of George W. Bush's National Guard Service are very likely forgeries, according to several experts on document authenticity and typography. The documents--four memos from Killian to himself or his files written in 1972 and 1973--appear to indicate that Bush refused or ignored orders to have a physical exam required to continue flying. CBS News anchor Dan Rather reported the segment and sourced the documents this way: "60 Minutes has obtained a number of documents we are told were taken from Col. Killian's personal file," he said. The 60 Minutes story served as the basis for follow-up news reports for dozens of news organizations across the country. The memos were almost immediately questioned in the blog world, with blog Power Line leading the charge.

Powerline had this response to tonight’s CBS News report by Rather:

Dan Rather has disclosed the identity of one of the CBS/60 Minutes document experts (are there more? I don't think Rather mentioned any): Marcel Matley. Matley's expertise is handwriting analysis. But the issues raised throughout the blogosphere yesterday and the MSM today relate primarily to the apparently word-processed nature of the documents.

Readers Kyle Kveton and Timothy Fergus have kindly forwarded us this this article by Matley: "The expert ambush: How to hold off your opponent until the cavalry arrives." I didn't see Hurricane Dan's apologia tonight, but I think it is fair to say that CBS is in even further over its head than we might have thought.

Powerline’s Hindrocket (John Hinderaker), the Powerline blogger that broke this story, was the keynote speaker at last month’s Dakota Blog Alliance conference. One of the issues was the influence and impact bloggers have and will have in the future. Hinderaker’s bloggng efforts yesterday caused Dan Rather to respond to questions that involve his journalistic integrity today. Glenn Reynolds has a ton of stuff in regards to Dan Rather’s attempt to defend his journalistic integrity. I say that is real impact.

Looks like SDP agrees with my analysis.

More Democrat deceit...this time Daschle

The John Thune campaign issued this press release:

DASCHLE "BLATANTLY LIES" ABOUT INCREASING GAS TAX, FALSELY ACCUSES THUNE OF RUNNING NEGATIVE AD

SIOUX FALLS - Senator Tom Daschle "blatantly lies" in a new television ad regarding Daschle's record of increasing federal gas taxes that also falsely accuses John Thune of running a negative ad, the Thune for Senate campaign charged today.

"Tom Daschle blatantly lies when he denies voting to increase federal gas taxes and when he falsely accuses John Thune of running a negative ad," said Thune for Senate campaign manager Dick Wadhams. "We have not aired an ad that even mentions Daschle much less that attacks him."

"How can Tom Daschle go on the air and lie about his clear record of voting to increase federal gas taxes?"

Daschle began airing an ad today claiming "John Thune is running another negative, misleading ad." The ad goes on to say "Tom Daschle does not support any increase in gas taxes."

The Thune for Senate campaign has not aired any ads that either mention Tom Daschle or criticize Daschle.

An ad by the National Republican Senatorial Committee began airing a television ad earlier this week regarding Daschle joining Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry and Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy in voting to increase the federal gas tax.

"Tom Daschle is lying through his teeth about not supporting increasing gas taxes," Wadhams said. "Tom Daschle clearly voted for Bill Clinton's increase in the federal gas tax in 1993 and nine other times Tom Daschle voted either to increase the gas tax or voted against lowering the federal gas tax."

Dan Rather in the hot seat

From Powerline:

A half hour ago [about 11:15AM Central], Dan Rather went on CNN and said that he knows the Jerry Killian documents to be authentic, and knows that they are not forgeries. Therefore, he said, there will be no retraction, no correction, and -- apparently -- no investigation. The text of the interview is not yet available on CNN's site, but we'll link to it when it becomes available.

What does this mean? Last night, it was reported that senior executives at CBS News were promising an investigation. Today, Dan Rather is personally vouching for the documents' authenticity. This can only mean that Rather himself is the source of the documents. This makes sense; if a staffer on the 60 Minutes payroll had come up with the purported records, the story never would have run without the documents being authenticated. Who has the power to drive this story on to the air without an investigation that would include, for example, contacting Killian's widow, or his son? Dan Rather does.

This would appear to signal the end of Rather's career. If the documents are ultimately accepted as forgeries, which seems inevitable to us, he can't survive. My guess: Rather knows that he will be retiring soon in any event, so as his last public contribution, he is doing whatever he can to elect John Kerry.

An informant, meanwhile, has a theory about how Rather got the forged documents: keep an eye on Ben Barnes.

From Byron York:

Now, Killian's widow has cast still more doubt on the CBS papers. "Number one, he would not have typed because he did not type," Marjorie Connell told ABC News. "Number two, the wording in these documents is very suspect to me. I just don't believe that, it looks like some things may have been picked up out of a document and then other things just made fictitiously to fill in things, to make them flow. I just can't believe that this is his words, my late husband's words."

And finally, Killian's son has also questioned the CBS documents. Referring to the "sugar coat" memo in particular, Gary Killian told the Associated Press, "It just wouldn't happen. The only thing that can happen when you keep secret files like that are bad things.... No officer in his right mind would write a memo like that."

From Hugh Hewitt:

CBS may have to tell all to salvage anything of its reputation. What's old gray Dan saying this morning? Surely he must realize that folks the world over at laughing at him --again. If Dan Rather wants to exit with any dignity, he'd better take the role of wronged newsman and demand and disclose names.

Also check out Hugh Hewitt's inverview with a document expert from yesterday.

CBS News busted by bloggers?

The New York Post has a column By John Podhoretz on yesterday’s scrutiny of the new 60 Minutes documents from the 1970’s:

THE populist revolu tion (SIC) against the so- called mainstream media continues. Yesterday, the citizen journalists who produce blogs on the Internet — and their engaged readers — engaged in the wholesale exposure of what appears to be a presidential-year dirty trick against George W. Bush. What the bloggers and their audiences did was call into profound question the authenticity of four documents proudly trumpeted by CBS News in a much-heralded investigative report on Wednesday night's edition of "60 Minutes" about the president's National Guard service in the early 1970s.

These were "previously unseen documents . . . obtained by '60 Minutes,' " the network bragged Wednesday night on its Web site. Their author, supposedly, was Bush's squadron commander, Jerry Killian, who died 20 years ago.

Here are the details of the investigation:

And by yesterday morning, they were being examined with a fine tooth comb.

The Minneapolis lawyers who run powerlineblog.com were on the case early. Two of the blog's readers directed their attention to a note left on an Internet bulletin board on the freerepublic.com Web site — the 47th posting on the topic there.

Post No. 47 pointed out that there was something off about these documents from the 1970s: The spacing between the letters and the words was proportional, and only a few IBM electric typewriters could achieve that effect back then.

From there it was off to the races. Once anyone who had had experience writing and typing in the 1970s began examining the documents, it was impossible not to see some weird anachronisms that suggested they had been crafted not on a 1970s typewriter, but using Microsoft Word.

Charles Johnson, who runs the wonderful littlegreenfootballs.com, simply typed one of the memos over using Microsoft Word's New Times Roman font and, lo and behold, the document came out exactly identical to the one on the CBS site, down to the letter spacing.

The documents contain such features as superscript lettering, which is done automatically by Microsoft Word, and curly quotation marks. A brief glance at a Web site called selectric.org, run by an amateur typewriter fanatic, reveals dozens of IBM electric typefaces — and none of them has curly quotation marks.

By 3 o'clock, the very careful and honest Jim Geraghty, who produces invaluable material every day on nationalreview.com's Kerry Spot, was saying flatly, "CBS had better have one heck of a defense for this."

Yeah, it had better. I thought on Wednesday that it was scandalous for "60 Minutes" to turn over a good deal of its time on Wednesday night to one Ben Barnes, a one-time Texas political powerhouse who now claims he got George W. Bush into the National Guard.

The problem is not, as some would have it, that Barnes has raised half a million dollars for Kerry. The problem is that Barnes has already lied about this on videotape, and I use the word "lied" without difficulty, where he says he pulled strings for Bush when "I was lieutenant governor of Texas."

The thing is that George W. Bush was sworn into the National Guard in May 1968. Ben Barnes didn't become lieutenant governor until 1969.

From the lies of Ben Barnes to the apparent forgeries of who-knows-who-did-it — why has "60 Minutes" exposed itself in this way?

We all know why. Its producers and others in the media think George Bush deserves to be beaten up now because of the beating administered to John Kerry in August. In some weird way, the editors and producers believe this is fairness at work.

Instead, they have unmasked themselves. Or rather, they have been unmasked by ordinary people who can see what they and their hired experts evidently could not.

The Argus Leader reported the 60 minutes report on page 3A of yesterday’s issue, today they are reported the problems, also on page 3A. Initially, according to a WorldNetDaily report, CBS was not admitting problems with the documents. Now Drudge is reporting this:

CBS NEWS executives have launched an internal investigation into whether its premiere news program 60 MINUTES aired fabricated documents relating to Bush's National Guard service, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

"The reputation and integrity of the entire news division is at stake, if we are in error, it will be corrected," a top CBS source explained late Thursday.

The source, who asked not to be named, described CBSNEWS anchor and 60 MINUTES correspondent Dan Rather as being privately "shell-shocked" by the increasingly likelihood that the documents in question were fraudulent.

Rather, who anchored the segment presenting new information on the president's military service, will personally correct the record on-air, if need be, the source explained from New York.

Yes, but will they admit who gave them the documents?

Powerline has more. Powerline also wonders about a report regarding a lady who called into Monica Crowley's talk radio program and claimed she is Amy Barnes:

A woman alleging herself to be none other than Amy Barnes, daughter of fromer Lt Gov Ben Barnes called into a Texas radio program being hosted by well-known host Monica Crowley. The woman, stating that her politics differed greatly from her Fathers, stated that he informed her months ago that he was going to "go public" with this story, known to be false. She claims that he has acknowledged the untruthfulness of this story to her over the years. She claims that there are two motivations for his doing this. One, to gain publicity for a book he is writing and, 2 the desperation of the Kerry campaign at this moment in time. Apparently Barnes offered to carry this tainted water if it appeared necessary in the general election to help secure a Kerry victory.

I cannot personally verify the woman's identity, although Barnes does indeed have a daughter Amy. Also, WABC radio has replayed the phone-in interview twice tonight in drive time radio host Mark Levin's program.

The do nothing UN in Sudan

WorldNetDaily reports on Colin Powell’s testimony at a Senate hearing:

The United States is calling the slaughter of blacks in western Sudan by the Islamist Khartoum regime and its Arab militia allies genocide.

"We concluded that genocide has been committed in Darfur and that the government of Sudan and the Janjaweed bear responsibility and genocide may still be occurring," said Secretary of State Colin Powell in testimony prepared for the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Here are the details:

Separately, Sudan's cleric-backed National Islamic Front regime in the Arab and Muslim north declared a jihad on the mostly Christian and animist south in 1989. Since 1983, an estimated 2 million people have died from war and related famine. About 5 million have become refugees.

So what is going to be done? :

In his testimony this morning, Powell announced the U.S. will initiate a new U.N. Security Council resolution under the Genocide Convention.

Since when had militant Islamists cared about UN resolutions? Since when has the UN enforced their resolutions? What is the UN doing about the attack of innocent children in Russia?

It is sad to see the looney left blame America for the acts of terrorists. When will the world wake up and go after the terrorists? The answer is when the world quits looking to the UN to solve it's problems. President Bush has done that...John Kerry and the rest of the socialists on the left will not. Instead they blame America first.

Save 2nd Amendment to fight terrorists

Larry Pratt is fighting to restore the 2nd Amendment rights to American teachers. Excerpt:

A gun-rights group is calling on Congress to deny funds for prosecution of violators of a federal ban on guns in school zones, saying teachers carrying weapons could prevent a terrorist attack like the one at a Russian school from occurring in the U.S.

Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, told members of Congress in a letter that "teachers in this country are just as disarmed as the defenseless teachers in Russia," where Islamic terrorists killed hundred of innocent civilians whom they held in a school gymnasium in the town of Beslan.

For those who think Pratt is a radical, look at what happened in Israel:

Israel's government officials have once again demonstrated a better grip on reality than have those in the United States when it comes to self-defense.

In the mid-seventies, a terrorist attacked an Israeli school bus, murdering over 30 children.

There ensued a national debate, with some Israelis unable to shake their socialist baggage brought from Europe. Namely, they assumed that the government would protect them.

A majority of Israelis, however, found a compelling reason for putting guns in schools -- terrorists would get guns whether Jews were armed or not. As a result, schools in border areas, and school buses, were manned with gun-toting teachers or others assigned to be at the ready.

As the terror attacks have escalated in Israel, a number of attempts have been thwarted when armed Israeli citizens shot and killed the terrorists. Seeking to have more of a good thing, the Israeli government announced plans to issue 40,000 more gun licenses to civilians according to the London Times.