Kerry Shot in the Foot

[Guest bluex_v1]

blind hatred

Dude, it is not blind. There is information all over the place with which to make a rational conscious assessment that you do not like Hillary and/or gov't healthcare (especially as proposed by her).

 

I just don't get the relavance of the bridge comment at all... Independent contractors with the gov't as their customer is not the same as the govt dictating which contractors individuals will be allowed to hire.

 

You assumption that the gov't would mess that up but is capable of supplying you with clean water or educating your children or even converting a Muslim anarchy into a shining symbol of democracy is a glaring contradiction.

WTF? Show me where I said the gov't is capable of supplying me with clean water or education or installing democracy. You can't because I did not make those assertions.

I have a water filter, I use it. I intend to, at the very least, suppliment my children's likely poor education with some home schooling. The Iraqis have to make a democracy for themselves, we just cleared the path.

(BTW, anarchy != dictatorship)

 

Why do you assume that gov't health care is worse than employers shelling out thousands per employee in insurance and gov't mandated workman's comp?

 

Why are you comparing this to employer provided group coverage? I don't know how seriously you support gov't healthcare back in the real world, but if it is something that is important to you, do some research. Look at Canada, the UK, and other European nations. Look at how these systems operate. My brother's father-in-law died in the UK because he had to wait months for a test to confirm his cancer before being allowed treatment. Qualified Dr's are becoming harder and harder to find there because there is less incentive to enter the medical field there. Fewer are entering medical school.

Workman's comp is equivalent to disability insurance, not health insurance.

 

And as in my case, if I'm the only one paying a living wage with benefits and W.C while the rest of the industry is hiring Mexicans off the street corners, the disparity is too large to be overcome.

This sentence doesn't really make sense. Regardless, the hiring of Mexicans off the street is an entirely different issue, one that laws exist for already and need to be enforced. (or with the introduction of something like the Fair Tax plan, it would reduce on its own. http://www.fairtax.org)

 

Looking at it on a global scale, we accuse the other nations of dumping because their industries are gov't subsidized. But no one asks the hard questions of how? Do they save ins. premiums with managed health care? Pensions with gov't ones? We keep hearing "by doing nothing we are giving you the most wide open option possible." Maybe that's what the merchant and the priest told the man left on the road to Samaria.

I don't even know what this means.

 

 

Amen, Pop N Wood!

 

Just a point of info for you Phil. The B2 bomber was not designed to be used against Arab nations for conventional bombing. It was a nuclear deterent. Also, defense spending has been under 20% of the federal budget for about the last decade.

A lot of the federal budget goes into the 'cost of business' running the bloated administrations that are inherent in all gov't endeavors. It does not all come back to us.

Check out the "Outlays by function and subfunction":

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2005/pdf/hist.pdf

[Guest Phil1934]

I just don't get the relavance of the bridge comment at all... Independent contractors with the gov't as their customer is not the same as the govt dictating which contractors individuals will be allowed to hire.

The point is you trust the government to oversee your safety in a myriad of situations every day.

 

 

WTF? Show me where I said the gov't is capable of supplying me with clean water or education or installing democracy. You can't because I did not make those assertions.

I have a water filter, I use it. I intend to, at the very least, suppliment my children's likely poor education with some home schooling.

I assumed you worked a regular job, where you might use the water fountain or have a cup of coffee, go to lunch and get a hamburger without worrying as the restaurant had been inspected by the gov't health official.

 

The Iraqis have to make a democracy for themselves, we just cleared the path.

(BTW, anarchy != dictatorship)

If we just cleared the path and promised to pull out in June, why are we still there? (I could ask this question ten years from now.)

 

Qualified Dr's are becoming harder and harder to find there because there is less incentive to enter the medical field there. Fewer are entering medical school.

 

Qualified doctors are harder to find here because they can't afford the insurance premiums. Delivery doctors are the fastest dying breed.

 

 

Regardless, the hiring of Mexicans off the street is an entirely different issue, one that laws exist for already and need to be enforced. (or with the introduction of something like the Fair Tax plan, it would reduce on its own. http://www.fairtax.org)

The point is government imposed standards for business have crippled the small business. Eveerything is geared for large business, but all we hear is Bush wants to encourage small business. Get a 1/5 of billings insurance premium off the back of small business if you want to encourage them. Again, if health care were guaranteed, there would be no need for insurance other than gen'l liability.

 

Looking at it on a global scale, we accuse the other nations of dumping because their industries are gov't subsidized. But no one asks the hard questions of how? Do they save ins. premiums with managed health care? Pensions with gov't ones? We keep hearing "by doing nothing we are giving you the most wide open option possible." Maybe that's what the merchant and the priest told the man left on the road to Samaria

I don't even know what this means.

The point is our gov't has saddled us with the cost of these programs when it comes to competing, yet have given us nothing. The Republicans throw this up as offering the widest of options. That last part comes from the Bible.

 

 

Just a point of info for you Phil. The B2 bomber was not designed to be used against Arab nations for conventional bombing. It was a nuclear deterent. I could have picked any. How about the Patriot missile that Bush Sr. touted as 90% effective. A recent story placed its accuracy at less than 10% with staged tests with targets with homing beacons. As I said, no overesight on a bloated defense dep't.

 

I don't really care to point by point so I'll go back to my short posts now.

[johnc]

So far, in all of these posts, no one has asserted a fact. All have asserted "truths" which have nothing to do with facts. This thread is a classic example of how people focus on their own "truths" without regard to facts.

 

Again, do your own basic research. Read and understand facts. Then (and only then) develop your own "truths."

[johnc]

Back to the original point of this thread...

 

Its getting worse:

 

McAuliffe denies involvement in memos flap

 

By Stephen Dinan

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

 

Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe today said neither his organization nor John Kerry´s campaign leaked to CBS documents questioning President Bush´s service record, which may have been forged.

He suggested White House adviser Karl Rove could be behind the documents.

"I can unequivocally say that no one involved here at the Democratic National Committee had anything at all to do with any of those documents. If I were an aspiring young journalist, I think I would ask Karl Rove that question," Mr. McAuliffe said.

Asked later if he believed Mr. Rove or Republican operatives were involved, he said: "I am telling you that nobody — Democratic National Committee or groups associate with us — were involved in any way with these documents. I am just saying I would ask Karl Rove the same question."

He did not explain how the White House would benefit by providing forged documents trying to undermine Mr. Bush´s service record, but emphasized that he "can unequivocally speak for the Kerry campaign" in saying they had nothing to do with the documents either.

The documents, whose authenticity are being questioned by experts who say the type face used may not have existed when they were supposed to have been written, became the center of the political world Wednesday when CBS reported about them on "60 Minutes."

They show Mr. Bush ignored a direct order to get a physical from Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, who died in 1984, and was then grounded as a pilot in the Texas Air National Guard. CBS said it stands by its reporting and that the documents were "thoroughly examined."

The Prowler, an Internet political column, is reporting that the documents attributed to Col. Killian were given to a DNC staffer "more than six weeks ago." It says the documents were handed over to the campaign of Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry.

News outlets have reported that both the son and wife of Col. Killian, said while one of the documents sounded authentic, they doubted Col. Killian would have written another that said he was encouraged to "sugar coat" Mr. Bush´s performance.

The White House and Bush campaign did not immediately return calls for comment, nor did Mr. Kerry´s campaign

.

 

Now the DNC is blaming the Republicans for forging and then leaking these documents?

[JMortensen]

Doh... that's gotta be hard to say, even for McAuliffe...

[johnc]

And in fairness, a link to a blog that attempts to debunk some of the pro-forgery assertions:

 

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/9/10/34914/1603

 

Along with links to some of the original document formatting questions:

 

http://www.donaldsensing.com/2004/09/ibm-introduced-proportional-spacing.html

 

http://www.donaldsensing.com/2004/09/more-format-and-content-analysis-of.html

 

For some reason I got really interested in this issue...

 

But, these new documents, even if authentic, don't assert anything new. All of this, was hashed over in the 2000 campaign with Gore's staff doing a much better job with the issue.

[Michael]

Returning to the health care issue for a moment…

 

I spent the first “formative†years of my life in the former USSR – socialized medicine in the extreme. For the past 24 years I’ve been an “adopted†American. I vaguely remember getting my shots in a government clinic in Leningrad, back in the 1970’s. And I remember all too well breaking my leg this August, the ensuing operation and my sojourn through the private medical system in the U.S.

 

Observations….

 

If you are seriously, catastrophically ill, there is no better medical system than in the U.S.! When money is no object, when you need the best doctors and the most high-tech medicine, it’s right here.

 

BUT, if you are basically healthy and require only minor, occasional care – such as vaccinations, tooth fillings and blood pressure medicine, you’re better off under socialized medicine. Why? Because when cost and convenience matter more than quality and sophistication, the socialist system of distribution has an advantage. The additional advantage is that in socialized medicine, doctors are employees – civil servants – and not private businessmen. Taking the profit motive out of medicine will hurt innovation and will lower the quality of high-end treatment, but by decimating the prestige of doctors and the medical profession, it makes medical service a commodity.

 

If you have good health insurance, it’s the best of both worlds – at least, for your immediate purposes (high quality care for low out-of-pocket price). But in the long term, this situation is unstable. If you get a heart attack that requires a $70,000 operation, and your out-of-pocket cost is $400, some one still has to pay.

 

In my one case – getting metal plates to reconnect broken bones in my leg – the quality of care probably would have been the same in either system. It’s a relatively low-tech procedure – it probably hasn’t changed in 50 years. But I actually would have preferred to deal with doctors who were salaried employees, not private businessmen. They would have been less arrogant and more accommodating.

[SportZ2]

Keep in mind that Times Roman type has been around for a long time. They are not saying that the typeface didn't exist at that time, but that it was vary rare and probably not available to manual typewriters of that era.

 

Superscripts were also around but that would have only been available in high end typwriters. I doubt that the air guard would have had those kind of typewriters. Keep in mind that it's also about the subject matter in the letters that don't add up as well.

 

I find it hard to believe that the republican campaign would go as far as to plant the documents so that it would look like the Kerry camp did it. Man, that's really going out on a limb.

 

Can you smell that? Smells like desperation in the air.

[tannji]

Take note that I dont actually think that this happened, but if I were a political weasel, and knew that the opposition was hunting high and low for dirt, I wouldnt be opposed to (and this would occur to me immediately) making something for them to find, plausible, and yet right up the alley they preferred. I would play very hard to get.... and then donate the considerable proceeds to the Democratic National Committee.

 

Like I said, not likely.... but still very plausible.

[Guest Phil1934]

It just keeps getting better. The letter said he was under pressure from the base commander, Staudt, to sugar coat Bush's record, but Staudt had retired 18 months before the letter was written. There's just too many inconsistencies. If you had a letter to get the letterhead and signature, why would you change the addressing? This looks like a crime scene where clues are everywhere, including someone's wallet. You have to wonder if this many inconsistencies were put in to ensure at least one was found.

[tannji]

If I were to ever believe that someone did this with the intent of suckering the Democrats, all the errors and the relative lack of comment by the Republicans would be my first clue. Some of the people seem a little smug about it.......

[johnc]

It just keeps getting worse for CBS and Dan Rather:

 

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/politics/NotedNow/Noted_Now.html

 

http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/news/special_packages/election2004/9633814.htm

 

http://www.wbap.com/listingsentryheadline.asp?ID=239369&PT=wbaptopstories

 

 

From: http://hughhewitt.com/#postid877

 

One example of the process underway: Yetserday and today I received a series of e-mails from a Professor of Computer Science at Rice University. E-mail #1:

 

Hi Hugh,

 

I am a Professor of Computer Science at Rice University who has

followed the evolution of word processing technology over the past 30

years. A cursory glance at the "Killian documents" shows that they are

forgeries, the product of a modern word processing system. Even the

most powerful word processing systems available in the early 70's were

not designed to produce propotionally spaced documents. Moreover,

no mechanical typewriter, even with variable letter widths like the

IBM Executive typewriter, could produce precise propotional spacing

comparable to a modern word processor. Precise proportional

type-setting is a very demanding computational problem. Since modern PC's

are more powerful than supercomputers from the 70's, we take this form

of computation for granted.

 

Let me take a moment to recount the state-of-the-art in

word-processing in the 1970's. I used a state-of-the-art word

processing system to write my undergraduate thesis at Harvard in the

spring of 1971. I was one of a handful of Harvard students who were

given access to a PDP-10 time-sharing system to conduct my thesis

research. I used the same machine to prepare my thesis using a word

processing program called "runoff". The output device for "runoff" on

the Harvard PDP-10 was a flexowriter, a typewriter-like device driven

by punched paper tape. I had to write in the superscripts and

subscripts by hand because the flexowriter could not perform

fractional line spacing much less proportional font spacing. The

runoff program did not support any output devices with proportional

spacing. Neither did any other word processing of that era to my

knowledge. In the late 1970's, researchers at Bell Laboratories

developed a new version of runoff, called troff, to support

proportional typesetting on a photo-typesetter; troff is still

available today on standard Unix distributions.

 

So in 1971, even the most powerful available computer systems were not

equipped to produce documents like the Killian documents. In Fall

1971, I entered graduate school in Computer Science at Stanford. I

soon gravitated to the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which had

the most powerful time-sharing system (a PDP-10) on campus. In either

1972 or 1973, Xerox gave the Stanford Artificial Intelligence

Laboratory a prototype xerographic printer called a "Xerox Graphics

Printer (XGP)". Two similar prototypes were given to the MIT Computer

Science Department and the Carnegie-Mellon Computer Science

Department. The programming staff at the Stanford AI Laboratory was

thrilled with the gift because it was the first opportunity that

computer science research community had to develop software to support

printer quality type-setting. The three Computer Science Departments

cooperated in developing the word processing programs to support the

XGP. I wrote my first published research paper and my doctoral

disseration using the XGP in Spring 1976. It would take another

decade before comparable word processing systems were available to

most computer science researchers on minicomputers running Unix. It

would take nearly another decade before they were widely used on

personal computers.

 

Sincerely,

 

Robert "Corky" Cartwright

Professor of Computer Science

Rice University"

 

I predict that a few people will be fired at CBS and Dan Rather might retire early after the election as a result of this screw up.

[johnc]

CBS trying to escape the "Kill Zone":

 

http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/2004/09/escaping-kill-zone-dan-rathers-defense.html

[Guest Phil1934]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned checking the water mark to establish the paper date. Maybe they were saving that one if the other clues went unnoticed.

[johnc]

CBS has not produced the original document and hasn't even admitted to possessing it. All they've shown to date is a copy of a fax. What's funny is that their supposed "expert" (really only a handwriting analyst named Marcel Matley) verified the signature after looking at a copy of a fax. He did not (and cannot because he's not a document expert) verify the authenticity of the document despite what Dan Rather has claimed.

 

Some of Matley's bibliographical information:

 

Matley, Marcel B. "Studies in Questioned Documents, Number Seven: Reliability Testing of Expert Handwriting Opinions." San Francisco, CA. Handwriting Services of California, 1992.

 

Matley, Marcel B. "The Physiology and Forensic Identification of Handwriting, 1993 NADE Pre-Conference Class." San Francisco, CA. 1993

[SportZ2]

How about the news now that the guy they interviewd (Lt. Gov of Texas) said he got Bush in when he was Lt. Gov. The only problem is he wasn't the Lt. Gov until a year later. I'll be interested to see what happens with this.

[tannji]

Man.... see what happens when you dont inhale??? The Dems are apprently suffering from collective stupidity at the moment.... I have never seen it this bad before. WTF is going on?

[johnc]

All I can say is, Wow:

 

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=12551_One_More_CBS_Document_Example

 

Here is an animated GIF, alternating between the PDF version of the Microsoft Word document I created, and the CBS News “original.”

 

 

And even more evidence that CBS is lying:

 

http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040912-125608-4609r.htm

 

http://www.nationalreview.com/kerry/kerry200409111432.asp

 

And someone else pointing out the 60 minutes has a history of using faked documents (who can forget the Audi Unintended Acceleration debacle):

 

...a Washington Post report from April 13, 1999, about CBS presenting a story involving fake documents and phony witnesses. I looked up the whole thing, and here's a bit more:

 

 

For the second time in four months, CBS's "60 Minutes" has made an on-air apology regarding a report about drug smuggling. This time it's over a memo that turned out to be bogus.

 

Correspondent Lesley Stahl delivered the apology on Sunday's broadcast, as part of a settlement with a customs official who had sued the newsmagazine.

 

In December, "60 Minutes" founder Don Hewitt apologized on-air for a June 1, 1997, story based on a British documentary about smugglers who swallowed heroin in latex gloves to get past authorities. An investigative panel later determined that the documentary producers had faked locations and paid actors to portray drug couriers.

 

In Sunday's apology, Stahl emphasized that the April 20, 1997, segment accurately reported on the flow of illegal drugs across the U.S.-Mexico border at San Diego.

 

But that report, which was presented by Mike Wallace, cited a memo said to be written by Rudy Camacho, the San Diego district director of the Customs Service, calling for customs agents to quickly process trucks owned by a company linked to Mexican drug cartels.

 

The Customs Service in Washington investigated and found the memo to be fake, and that no preferential treatment was offered, Stahl said. "60 Minutes" had already reported in February 1998 that the memo was declared bogus. But Camacho sued; the on-air apology was part of an "amicable settlement" between him and CBS News, a "60 Minutes" spokesman said.

 

"We have concluded that we were deceived, and ultimately so were you, our viewers," Stahl said. "Under the circumstances, we regret that any reference to that memo or to Mr. Camacho's connection with it was included in our original report and apologize for any harm to Mr. Camacho's professional reputation and any distress caused to him and his family."

 

So how come the apology wasn't given by Wallace? The "60 Minutes" rep says Wallace was in California last Thursday and Friday on a story.

[Mikelly]

Biggest mistake ever made was when John Kerry Marched up to the podium, soluted and said "Reporting for duty". Almost as bad as Bush donning a flight suit and claiming a half assed victory on an Aircraft carrier...

 

THESE are your TWO viable choices...

 

Goodluck!

 

BTW, I hope CBS is tanked for this... They have skirted these types of tactics for way to long. This gets back to what JohnC and I have BOTH been saying... Do NOT believe ANY of the media... The media was once a relayer of news... Not weighted with their agendas, opinions or views... Just the facts... We've lost it... No more unbiased and fair reporting... FOX is "Republican" and most everyone else is Liberal and democratic... This is beyond wrong.

 

On the health care issue, I must say that although I agree, something has to be done, I've had to be treated in Europe (Eastern and Western) and I like our system just fine thank you! Is it the best? Nope. Do we need to improve it? Damned straight! But "socialist" and the "United States" had damned well better never be a part of the same "Democracy". When that happens, I'll be searching for residency elsewhere...

 

This has been one of the BEST politically motivated threads we've had on this board... I want ot thank you guys for an EXCELLENT read! It is good to see obviously democrat and republican members agreeing the we've got problems on both sides of the political fence!

 

Mike AKA The fence sitter

[johnc]

You know its bad when USA Today piles on:

 

http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/nation/president/2004-09-12-bush-documents_x.htm

 

And this whole thing now has a name:

 

http://rathergate.com/

 

Here's the final nail in the coffin, the Boston Globe even says the docs are probably fake:

 

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/09/12/new_doubt_cast_on_guard_documents/