Other people’s stuff.
I may revisit some of these topics later today, but for the time being here’s a few other interesting stories from People I Don’t Normally Link To:
First of all, at the Mahablog we have “another font comparison”:http://www.pandagon.net/mtarchives/003417.html including more allegations of forged evidence — this time, examples “tweaked” to force apparent similarities. In effect I believe this is what was done with the original MS Word v. typewriter comparison over at LGF; the examples were shrunken enough to obscure differences in the text. But Barbara has even more evidence of falsification of evidence on the falsification of evidence — if you can track that. The CBS documents may yet be proven forgeries, but the claim that they were just papers typed in MS Word and faxed a few times was, is, and remains utter bullshit. If they are forgeries, they are much more sophisticated than that.
Speaking of bullshit, I heard from Pandagon that the “RNC is calling the AEI(American Enterprise Institute) "nonpartisan"”:http://www.pandagon.net/mtarchives/003414.html. If this were an audioblog, you would hear me laughing now. People seem to think this is just an attempt to give the AEI statistic more credibility, but personally I think it’s more propaganda in the campaign to define the mainstream as “radical left.”
Like tbogg, I agree that “bloggers are not the best new source of news”:http://tbogg.blogspot.com/2004/09/blogging-while-patting-oneself-on-back.html. I do think blogging is a great tool for the democratic process — talking about politics is what we’re supposed to do — but we’re never going to replace mainstream media. If we *do* replace it, we will be in a world of hurt. Because then what will we talk about? Who among us has the money to follow Britney Spears around and comment on her makeup malfunctions and general lack of class?
Oh, and here’s something from the professional media. Stephen Holmes has an excellent piece in Salon on “why Republicans aren’t suited to fight the war on terror”:http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/09/16/ideology/index.html, about which more later also. But what it basically boils down to is this: conservatives decimate our national infrastructure at the same time they pursue polices guaranteed to provoke violence.