1. Stop telling me what I can drive. If I want to drive an SUV and it costs twice as much to operate as a mini car, it's my money and I'll spend it the way I want to. Besides, your 1973 peacenik Volkswagen Microbus pollutes the air at least twenty times more than my modern SUV.

2. Stop telling me that I can't own a gun. Americans have owned guns for 200 years, and the few problems we've had with them have been in inner cities where your failed social policies have created abject poverty. People in rural states have all kinds of guns, they just don’t shoot each other with them.

3. Stop telling me what I can do with my own land. If an oddball species of cockroach exists on my land and can’t survive the building of a bridge across a creek, it’s a failed species and is too weak to survive anyway. I don’t buy land to become a steward of miniscule species, I buy it to use it. If you want to buy land and protect the gnats and fleas on it, go right ahead.

4. Stop telling me what words I can use. If I choose to call some women “water buffalo” because they’re making all kinds of noise near my dorm room and keeping me up at night, it isn’t up to you to decide whether it was a racial slur and to silence me. I say what I mean and mean what I say, and if you can’t tell the difference, you’re not smart enough to dictate what I say anyway.

5. Stop silencing people you disagree with. If Dr. Laura gets a TV show and people want to watch it, it is not your place to tell the TV network not to carry her show. I am smart enough to be able to tell what is acceptable, and if I don’t want to watch her, I can turn the TV off. The idea that you are protecting us from “bad speech” is the same tired old excuse used by every tyrant to violate our right to free speech.

6. Stop dictating who teaches my kids and how. If you weren’t obstructing every effort to give me a choice of where to send my kids to school, they wouldn’t have to attend the dirty, dangerous and useless government schools that exist today, and they might actually learn something. If I had a choice, I could send my kids to the best schools, not just the schools that the government decides are good enough for me. You won’t let me have that choice, so our educational system is an embarrassment.

7. Stop trying to decide the presidential race for me. Our country is a democracy, and the use of courts to try to force a presidential election is unethical, immoral and ought to be criminal. Al Gore tried his best to sue his way into the presidency, and if the Florida Supreme Court had been allowed to select the president by judicial fiat, it would have worked. We have an Electoral College. If you don’t like it, you’re free to try to change it, but don’t try to change the rules in the middle of an election. And for God’s sake, stop producing fake documents to try to fool the American public into believing your lies about our President.

8. Stop telling me who I can hire and how. I’m not a racist. I know why I hire the people that I do. I hire the people that can help me the most, regardless of race or sex, and to do any less would be to throw money away. I’m a capitalist, I wouldn’t throw money away just to satisfy some inner dislike of a race of people. If you’ve got proof that I didn’t hire someone because of their race, then show it to me. Don’t second guess how I hire people and why.

I've noticed lately that democrats have begun to raise allegations of "voter intimidation" and "suppression" in the upcoming election. These are based on very nebulous and vague allegations from the 2000 election that voters had been intimidated and bullied by the GOP or Republicans. Now, democrats frequently bring up the issue of "voter intimidation" without ever getting into the specifics of the charge. They believe, and with some justification, that the mere suggestion that Republicans are trying to keep minority voters away will inflame those same voters, bringing them out to vote predominantly for Democrats.

Take for example the case of Georgia Democratic Congressional Candidate David Worley, who just days before the 2000 election brashly proclaimed that the Department of Justice was investigating Republicans in his district for "voter intimidation". The problem was, the press release was a lie, from start to finish. The Department of Justice wasn’t investigating Republicans or anyone else for “voter intimidation”.

This is the first problem – the use of race-baiting in order to inflame minority voters. It’s clear that this is what Worley had in mind, since his entire story about the investigation of Georgia GOP was fictitious. His motivation was surely to cause predominantly Democratic minority voters to the polls.

This National Review article is a good example of race-baiting. It makes references to an apparent epidemic of voter “intimidation”, but doesn’t provide one shred of evidence to support it’s allegation. It merely restates that there have been “allegations” of voter intimidation, as if alleging something proved that it was true.

The second problem is that he was trying to prevent any investigation of voter fraud in Georgia. The Georgia GOP had indeed been photographing what they believed were incidents of voter fraud. Photographing people at polling booths is illegal. Worley could have simply complained about the practice, but he chose to release a fraudulent press release to inflame minority voters. But in either case, it’s clear that Democrats have no interest whatsoever in minimizing or preventing voter fraud when it benefits them.

Democrats have been behind several major efforts to enable voter fraud to take place and ensure that no effective means to stop it is adopted. One attempt to find a solution, requiring voters to show ID at the polls, compelled DNC spokesperson Maria Cardona to claim that “ballot security and preventing voter fraud are just code words for voter intimidation and suppression.” No meaningful effort to reduce voter fraud has been enacted, in large part due to opposition from Democrats like this.

The first piece of legislation signed by Bill Clinton was the so-called “Motor Voter Law”. This enabled people to vote without any ID by sending their ballots by mail, and also included language to prevent anyone from challenging any new registrant’s legality to vote. It also made it more difficult to purge voter lists of people who were dead or no longer residents. As a result of this and other Democrat Party efforts, voter rolls swelled – sometimes exceeding the total voter population of the district. It also resulted in some famous instances in California of people registering their pets or non-existent people, and getting ballots for them. In fact, an illegal alien who had assassinated Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio managed to register to vote twice in California.

Can this be stopped? It could be, if Democrats were willing to support any realistic effort to minimize voter fraud. So far, they haven’t.

So look forward to another election season of baseless charges of "voter intimidation" and concurrent voter fraud that cannot be stopped.

Check out my fake document. I think you'll all agree, it's much better than CBS'. Oh, I mean it's... not fake... yeah. This is real...

These are my observations of the purported memo, released by CBS News, allegedly detailing the history of George W. Bush and his service in the Air National Guard in the early 1970’s. The memos are purportedly from the files of Jerry B. Killian, who died in 1984.

The original document, as supplied by CBS News. Click for larger version.

Modification to Text of Document

The following are the total edits made to make the document, typed in Microsoft Word XP, fit the exact layout of the original document, alleged to have been typed on a typewriter in 1972.

1)    & nbsp; Adjusted left tab so that numbered list items would not indent, as they appear in the letter. Also adjusted so that items were not “tabbed-in”, but rather used spaces between numbers and text.

2)    & nbsp; Cropped image, using apparent page ends on the left and bottom, is about 8.3” x 10.5”.

3)    & nbsp; Left indent remains at Word default (1.25”) and left tab is set at .25” in from left indent. This results in all numbered items aligning to the left as in the original. Right indent is set at 5/8”.

4)    & nbsp; Had to manually retype instances of “1^st” as Word tries to superscript them automatically when they are typed.

5)    & nbsp; 2 spaces between “SUBJECT:” and “Bush”

6)    & nbsp; Two spaces before last sentence.

7)    & nbsp; Two spaces before last sentence in 3^rd item.

8)    & nbsp; One space between “P.” and “O.” in “P. O. Box”

9)    & nbsp; The date line and the signature and rank line are all tabbed in 8 tabs, using Microsoft standard tab settings.

10)  Stretched the image in Photoshop, overlaid on original, to correct for distortion from Faxing/Photocopying.

Observations

Original seems to have a 1.5” margin on the left. This is hard to measure, since the actual size of the document is unknown.

Noted that “letterhead” portion is centered, but is still in same font as body. This is very hard to do manually, and not worth the trouble to any but the most retentive typists. Centering is easy in a word processor, but very difficult to do manually. The vast majority of people don’t bother to do this with a manual typewriter unless they are creating a document for print. To see this for yourself, try to center some text on a page manually, without correcting it (not even using “backspace” or selecting the text). Only use spaces and the letters. If you make an error, you have to start over again (remember, this is before word processors).

If it were letterhead it would be centered, but it clearly isn’t letterhead since it is the same font and size as the body, and contains no logos or other art.

Noted that all incidents of “1st” after the first one (in the first sentence) have a space between the “1” and the “st” or the “147” and the “th”. Doing so prevents Word from automatically Superscripting the “st” or the “th”, but seems to have no other purpose. Is this common practice in documents of the period?

The text does not line up correctly at the top of the page. I attribute this to stretching during the faxing of the document, as the document is otherwise perfectly aligned vertically.

Horizontal spacing of text is not exactly as it appears in the original document. This can be due to differences in printers, or distortion from photocopying/faxing. The document has noticeable distortion, and is skewed significantly to the right at the top, in this copy.

Conclusion

It is not possible to conclusively identify this font as “Times New Roman” as distributed by Microsoft. The original document would have to be produced to definitively prove what font this is. The quality of the reproduction is too poor to identify the font with authority. This is, however, definitely a serif font, very similar to Times New Roman. It is not Garamond, another popular serif font. Also, the font is variable-width, not fixed-width.

A comparison of the variable-width font used in the original document (bottom) to the Times New Roman font (top). Click for larger version.

The centering of the header text is so highly suspicious that it borders on proof of fraud. As stated before, centering text without the aid of a word processor is nearly impossible, and even if it were to be accomplished with a manual typewriter, it would take many, many attempts. Remember, even one extra space (or missing space) on any line would mean the author would have to start over again. Even so, the likelihood that the type would actually be centered, as it is here, and not just appear to be centered is low.

Also note that there are no hyphenated words in the document at all. In the pre-word processor era, hyphenated words were everywhere, because if you ran out of space on a line, that was the only way to get down to the next line. The typist of this document was unnaturally concerned with avoiding hyphens if this came from a typewriter in 1972.

The variable-width font is another big problem. Variable-width typefaces (where the distance between letters is variable and depends on the size of the previous character) were not in use in any commonly available typewriter of the day. In fact, even early word processors and computers (including the original IBM PC) still used fixed-width fonts. The advent of variable-width fonts did not become commonplace until at least the Macintosh in 1984. They are ubiquitous today, though, with modern word processors.

Also highly suspicious is that when the copy of the message is typed in Microsoft Word, one has only do minor adjustments to the left tab and indent settings to make the copy appear exactly like the copy in the original. All of the line breaks are in the right place. The tab-indented characters (like the date at the top and the name/rank at the bottom) line up perfectly by using eight tab characters. No adjustment to the size of tabs is necessary, nor is any fancy spacing. You don’t even have to enter extra spaces.

The Microsoft Word version, in red, superimposed on the original. Click for larger image.

As someone who regularly has to struggle to get text to fit where you want it, to have this happen by accident is just not reasonable.

Given how exactly the copy lines up when typed in Word, we have to come to one of the following conclusions:

1)    & nbsp; Microsoft copied this typewriter’s font, letter spacing, tabs and font width from this exact typewriter model, 25-odd years after it was obsolete, and ignoring all of the advances in typography that have occurred in the meantime. This also assumes that the typewriter in question was capable of the advanced typesetting features that are apparent in this document.

2)    & nbsp; Through some miracle of coincidence, the letters just all happen to fall in exactly the right places. This is similar to the “1000 monkeys typing on 1000 typewriters for 1000 years” model. It’s just not feasible.

3)    & nbsp; The last possibility, and by far the most likely, is that the “memo” dated from 1972 was actually created on a computer within the last five years.

My conclusion, from my knowledge of typeface and typesetting technology, is that this document is a fraud. The possibility that it even came from a word processing program other than Microsoft Word is small.  The possibility that it is real or that it even came from a typewriter, rather than a computer, is very, very miniscule. I am not aware of any typewriter available in 1972 that was capable of centering text, variable-width fonts or creating documents without using hypens for line breaks within words.