Investor's Business Daily has some advise for CBS:

It now appears CBS made a grievous mistake or knowingly relayed false information. If so, what credibility does it have left? Even an on-air correction won't undo the damage. CBS would go a lot further in restoring its credibility if it at least checked into the source and authenticity of the memos.

If it's shown that Democrats or the Kerry campaign are the source -- as suggested by comments to the American Spectator by an unnamed Kerry staffer -- CBS better say so.

If the documents prove to be forgeries, resignations from Rather and CBS News President Andrew Heyward would be in order — along with a sweeping review of ethical practices at a once-proud news organization.

"In its propaganda war Israel has spread many lies particularly using Palestinian children, and it is amazing how gullible some Western media are when it comes to Israel over and over again. … their latest invention is that Palestinians are using their children to carry explosives and commit suicide bombings." (Ali Kazak, "Palestinian children and Jewish state," April 27, 2004)

 

Cinemagoers in the Iranian capital were given their first glimpse of 'Fahrenheit 9/11' this week, but appeared to enjoy more the rare chance to watch an American movie than its assault on their regime's arch foe George W. Bush..."The authorities obviously gave the film the green light for political reasons, in that anything against the United States must be good," quipped one of the hundreds of mainly young people who flocked to Tuesday night's opening screening..."I love to see foreign films on the big screen, and I never miss Farhang cinema shows no matter what is on," said Sima Gharavi, a 24-year-old dressed in a short bright blue coat rather than the more conservative all-black attire.  But she hastened to complain that "out of all the films people would love to see, the authorities had to go for this one -- just because this film is in line with the view of the Islamic regime." And despite sporadic laughs here and there, most of Moore's sardonic humour appeared to fall flat. The end of the film was also greeted with some half-hearted clapping...."It was just too political. I was bored from the middle, and I wished we had gone to see "Kill Bill" instead," said one young man, referring to the trendy Quentin Tarantino flick also being shown. ["Fahrenheit 9/11' gets 'axis of evil' premiere", AFP]

"The FBI field surveillance reports document a speech that Kerry gave in 1971 in which he praised Ho Chi Minh, the founder of Vietnamese Communism. The occasion was a speech Kerry gave to a group at the YMCA in Philadelphia on June 14, 1971. As reported by the FBI:

'On June 29, 1971, [BLACKED OUT SECURITY EDIT] advised the JOHN KERRY of the National Office of the VVAW, spoke at the YMCA, Philadelphia, on June 14, 1971. In this talk he stated that HO CHI MINH is the GEORGE WASHINGTON of Vietnam. Ho studied the United States Constitution and wants to install the same provisions into the Government of Vietnam. KERRY criticized United States activities in Vietnam, saying we are destroying villages, cities, crops, and the people there and these activities must be stopped.'

Kerry gave many antiwar speeches in 1971. His tendency to idealize the Vietnamese Communists and to demonize the United States was possibly most apparent when he chose to praise by association with America's founding father the man responsible for introducing Communism to Indochina." Page 137

The Tawhid and Jihad group, headed by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, posted a Web statement claiming responsibility for Tuesday's car bombing. The al-Qaida-linked group launched a surprise assault in Baghdad on Sunday, killing dozens, and boasted it had the upper hand in the fight against the Americans.

The mushroom-shaped cloud -- initially detected by South Korean intelligence authorities and widely reported from an explosion -- is believed to have been a natural cloud, said Deputy Unification Minister Lee Bong-jo during a weekly news briefing.

The president does have his share of celebrity supporters, though they are not as vocal or active as their Democratic counterparts. Bush supporters include the actors Kelsey Grammer, star of Frasier, Lara Flynn Boyle, Bruce Willis, Charlton Heston and Mel Gibson. Younger supporters include the Friends star Matt Le Blanc and the singers Jessica Simpson, Ricky Martin and Britney Spears. But there is also concern in Hollywood that coming out as a conservative can cost a performer his livelihood. "I think there are more conservatives in Hollywood than you would think, but I don't think they're going to come out because you never know why you don't get your next job," the pro-Bush comedian Dennis Miller said last year.

Other actors who've been in Bush's corner include Freddie Prinze Jr., Jason Priestley, Bo Derek, Shannen Doherty, Kelsey Grammer and bohemian right-winger Vincent Gallo, who once called left-wing author and radio talker Al Franken a "commie crawfish."

...But Lynyrd Skynyrd, Kid Rock, Britney Spears, Ted Nugent, and Steve Tyler of Aerosmith are fans of the President. So is punk-rock guitarist Johnny Ramone of the Ramones, who urges musician pals to donate to Bush's campaign. "I try to make a dent in people when I can," he said in a March interview with the Washington Times. "I figure people drift toward liberalism at a young age, and I always hope that they change when they see how the world really is."

Throughout this week, I have urged readers of TIA Daily to be "anti-Bushites for Bush." On Tuesday, I wrote:

"Both parts of the slogan 'anti-Bushites for Bush' imply the need for vigorous action. By being 'for Bush,' I meant that we should actively advocate and promote Bush's re-election, but do so on specific, narrow grounds: that it is necessary to fight an offensive war against terrorism and to fundamentally reform the political system of the Middle East. But we should also be prepared, after the election, to immediately and vigorously oppose everything that is wrong with the Bush agenda--to demand that he live up to his fierce rhetoric in prosecuting the war, and to oppose his attempts to expand the welfare state and inject religion into politics."

I would like to offer more specific advice on how we should achieve these goals.

First, a bit of advice on how to be for Bush: don't oversell him. Don't promote him as a strong and unyielding opponent of terrorist states. Explain to people that we need to be even stronger, that we need to stop making compromises and concessions, and that going on the offensive against terrorism means turning our attention to Iran, the main threat to the civilized world today. Then say that you support Bush because he is the only candidate who has even a prayer (so to speak) of going halfway in this direction.

And that leads me to the question of how to be an anti-Bushite.

It now seems likely that Bush will win the election, given the stunning incompetence of the Kerry campaign and the effectiveness of the Republican convention, which emphasized Bush's strongest issues and buried his weakest ones. So even those who do not plan to vote for Bush need to prepared with specific measures to oppose his worse policies during his second term.

How should we do it?

Soon Charles Johnson, a Los Angeles musician-turned-conservative-blogger who hosts the site LittleGreenFootballs.com, posted the results of his own investigation [of the CBS Bush memos]. He wrote that he had opened Microsoft Word, set the font to Times New Roman and used the program's default settings to retype a purported Killian memo from August 1973. "My Microsoft Word version, typed in 2004, is an exact match for the documents trumpeted by CBS News as 'authentic,' " Johnson wrote, posting images of his creation and the CBS document. (The Times New Roman font itself predates computers; it was designed in 1932.)

Within 90 minutes of that post, the Power Line site was linked to perhaps the best-known conservative site of all -- the Drudge Report, made famous when Matt Drudge took a lead role in the first reports on the relationship between then-President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.

"That was a quantum jump in awareness," said [Power Line's] Scott Johnson. "It was wildly circulating in the blogosphere until Drudge linked us. Then it was instantly known to a million people, and it was all of a sudden a legitimate story."

The only problem was the memo. Amazingly, this guy at the Air National Guard base, Lt. Col. Killian, had the only typewriter in Texas in 1973 using a prototype version of the default letter writing program of Microsoft Word, complete with the tiny little superscript thingy that automatically changes July 4th to July 4th. To do that on most 1973 typewriters, you had to unscrew the keys, grab a hammer and give them a couple of thwacks to make the ''t'' and ''h'' squish up all tiny, and even think it looked a bit wonky. You'd think having such a unique typewriter Killian would have used a less easily traceable model for his devastating ''CYA'' memo. Also, he might have chosen a font other than Times New Roman, designed for the Times of London in the 1930s and not licensed to Microsoft by Rupert Murdoch (the Times' owner) until the 1980s. Killian is no longer around to confirm his extraordinary Magic Typewriter, but his son denied the stuff was written by his dad, and his widow said her late husband never typed. So, on the one hand, we have hundreds of living veterans with chapter and verse on Kerry's fantasy Christmas in Cambodia, and, on the other hand, we have a guy who's been dead 20 years but is still capable of operating Windows XP. It took the savvy chappies at the Powerline Web site and Charles Johnson of ''Little Green Footballs'' about 20 minutes to spot the eerily 2004 look of the 1972 memo, and various Internet wallahs spent the rest of the day tracking down the country's leading typewriter identification experts.

The great lost Democratic opportunity here is that Mr. Bush's Iraq policy is open to criticism: his under-estimation of the postwar insurgency, preventing the Army and Marines from dealing decisive blows to Moqtada al-Sadr in Najaf and the Baathists in Fallujah, failing to train enough Iraqi allies quickly enough, and prolonging the U.S. occupation. But all of these criticisms come from the prowar right, for not fighting in Iraq with the force and tenacity to win. Other Democrats -- Joe Lieberman, Dick Gephardt -- could have made that critique with some credibility, but Mr. Kerry seems incapable of it. Now even if Iraq blows up in October, as it well might, Mr. Kerry will find it just about impossible to convince voters that he would prosecute the war with any more vigor than Mr. Bush.

[T]he coalition must continue crushing the insurgency. That should not include offering rebels and terrorists a pass, as Maj. Gen. John Batiste did this week. The head of the 1st Infantry Division told insurgents they were free to leave Samarra or could remain inside the city if they stopped fighting — a poor idea, since that would let them live to fight another day. The coalition, under the leadership of the U.S., will win the peace in Iraq only with the persistent application of deadly force.

We wish there were another way. Sadly, there isn't. The insurgents — who seek chaos, not peace — leave no other option.

Politically-correct news organizations undermine their credibility with such subterfuges [as using euphemisms for terrorist]. How can one trust what one reads, hears, or sees when the self-evident fact of terrorism is being semi-denied? Worse, the multiple euphemisms for terrorist obstruct a clear understanding of the violent threats confronting the civilized world. It is bad enough that only one of five articles discussing the Beslan atrocity mentions its Islamist origins; worse is the miasma of words that insulates the public from the evil of terrorism.

In the face of such horror, who can offer up any shred of justification? Yet that is precisely what has happened in the wake of every terrorist event the world has seen in recent years. By such lights, terrorism is viewed as a political act, intended to draw sympathetic attention to a cause -- in this case the brutal Russian occupation of Chechnya. Post-9/11, there were those who "explained" the attacks by blaming U.S. policy in the Mideast as behind the "desperation" of the hijackers. After the Madrid bombings, half the Spanish electorate effectively blamed their nation's participation in the war in Iraq by voting out the government that supported the U.S. In the wake of every suicide bombing in Israel, that country's policy on Palestinians is deemed responsible in many quarters, especially in Europe. Post-Beslan, who is prepared to blame the children?

They are still burying the victims of the latest atrocity committed by evildoers professing Islam -- the slaughter of hundreds of children, teachers, and parents in an elementary school in Beslan, Russia. And from Muslims the world over, as usual, has come mostly silence.    There have been no public demonstrations by Muslims anxious to make it clear how outraged and sickened they are that anyone could commit such unspeakable deeds as an act of Islamic faith. There has been no anguished outcry by Islam's leading imams and sheiks. Prominent Muslim organizations in the West have not called press conferences to express their disgust and anger. Once again the world has witnessed a savage episode of Islamist terror, and once again it strains to hear a convincing rejection of the terrorists from those who should care most about Islam's reputation.

For the first time since the presidential contest became a two-man race this spring, it seems to have a clear leader: President Bush. The latest TIME poll shows Bush leading his rival, John Kerry, 52% to 41%.

[B]bouncing Bushies are properly concerned with peaking too soon. Because the media revel in a horse race right down to the wire, any reduction of the present Bush surge will be hailed with a jubilant "Here comes Kerry!" But the Republicans coming out of their New York success -- with a personally popular candidate, a much deeper surrogate bench, the momentum of an upbeat message and a clearly centrist appeal -- have good reasons to have faith in the November decision of today's legion of swing voters.

The Washington Post covered the protest march that took place in New York City on Sunday.

more than 200,000 protesters peacefully swarmed Manhattan's streets on the eve of the Republican National Convention to demand that President Bush be turned out of office.

Strange, but my experience of the protestors was that they were anything but peaceful.

[...]

Prior to starting our march, we had assigned each Warrior to a tactical group and over time, each group split off to infiltrate the march. The rules were that upon infiltration. we would do nothing more provacative but carry our signs. My group was Group Six lead by Tom Paladino. At first we were accepted as one of their own (but with much better signs).

Then they noticed us.

The massive crowd started chanting "Fascists, leave our march!". Then our way was blocked by a number of individuals who linked arms and stood in our way. We were then physically assaulted. Two of our group of 15 were punched, their signs were taken from them and destroyed. Tom's megaphone (which he only use after we were attacked to try to calm people) was taken from him and destroyed.

I truly thought I was going to die. The NYPD ran in to protect us. We identified the individuals who assaulted us who ran like cowards. I'm not sure if the police got them or not. The crowd was now chanting "Fascist Police".

Things were getting very dangerous. The NYPD asked us to leave the march and we complied not only for our safety but for theirs. Had we stayed, these guys would have tried to protect us and likely would have otten hurt as well. Not to mention the whole out-of-control riot thing.

We left and regrouped in Herald Square with the other tactical teams who had met with pretty much the same response; in some cases without such a quick police response as we got.

... Once this was cleared up, we lined up our signs along the barracades and did our own chanting. One of our members was physically attacked with a broom stick by a man who managed to get it into the march. He was quickly arrested by the NYPD. So while the march may been "peaceful" this was only because of the terriffic efforts by the NYPD. Had they not have been as prepared and well trained as they were, it would have been a disaster.

But don't let anyone tell you these people are for peace or Free Speech. It's just not true.