SwiftVets.com

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_________________
Please Mr. Kerry Sign Form #180 Now!
Let the truth set you free? NOT!

[jimlarsen]

MEMO

TO: Dan Rather, CBS News
SUBJECT: Fake Documents

You continue to claim that the documents you presented on 60 Minutes II are authentic and were made in the early 1970's. However, many people have shown conclusively that it's possible, to create exact duplicates of the documents with Microsoft Word on a personal computer. You, on the other hand, have cited testimony from people, some of whom never saw the documents, and shown a document that had a raised "th" that's nothing like the superscripted "th" found on some of the documents, as evidence that the documents are authentic. But, you have presented nothing that's anywhere near as conclusive about the origin of the documents as the duplication of the documents with Word. If you want your weak assertion that the documents were really made in the early 1970's, then show us a typewriter from that period that could actually produce these documents as closely as Word does.

SHOW US THE TYPEWRITER.

[jimlarsen]

My previous message was a memo to Dan Rather. I'd like to see this memo or similar ones become the news item in the next few days. I'm going to send it to any news org. I can find. Others might like to do this too. The end sentence is my proposal for a mantra (hope that's the word) for Dan Rather.

SHOW US THE TYPEWRITER.

[jimlarsen]

Shrry, a few words were left out of my original. Here's the fixed version:

MEMO

TO: Dan Rather, CBS News
SUBJECT: Fake Documents

You continue to claim that the documents you presented on 60 Minutes II are authentic and were made in the early 1970's. However, many people have shown conclusively that it's possible, to create exact duplicates of the documents with Microsoft Word on a personal computer. You, on the other hand, have cited testimony from people, some of whom never saw the documents, and shown a document that had a raised "th" that's nothing like the superscripted "th" found on some of the documents, as evidence that the documents are authentic. But, you have presented nothing that's anywhere near as conclusive about the origin of the documents as the duplication of the documents with Word. If you want your weak assertion that the documents were really made in the early 1970's to be taken seriously, then show us a typewriter from that period that could actually produce these documents as closely as Word does.

SHOW US THE TYPEWRITER.

[8dayweek]

Hi People,

I saw the other memo and wanted to present my letter if anybody wants to use it. My approach is to contact my affiliate station (Identified by XXXX where the call sign goes) and inform them that I and others would be contacting thier local advertisers and telling them that we would be orgainizing boycotts agasint their products until CBS allows an independent investigation of their documents. Then, you must follow up and call local businesses and tell them your intention to boycott and ask them if they would like a copy of the letter you sent to your affiliate faxed to them. You can imply that you and others are going to pursue boycotts without lying while not exactly being truthful. (I learned that trick from Bill Clinton) I feel you have to start at the local level to accomplish a ground swell, a bottom up approach. I then forwarded my letter to CBS New York. There are numerous expert opinons on the web right now that say these docs are absolute forgeries. This makes it a federal crime. Of course, since laws don't seem to apply to democratic operatives, I guess it doesn' matter. Feel free to edit and remove portions that may be over the top for your own use. Thanks, and keep up the great work!

Dear Sirs,

I am writing to advise you that until Dan Rather and CBS News produce the documents, source, and the names of all experts consulted concerning President Bush’s military service, I will be spending my time contacting businesses that advertise on XXXX and telling them that there is a boycott movement under way concerning their products as long as this situation exists. I and many others are also contacting the FTC, the FEC, and the FBI concerning this matter. It is a federal crime to forge military documents and somebody is going to have to answer to this.

These documents are clearly forgeries. A 10 year old child could pick up on it in minutes. For Dan Rather to say he defends the documents after people whom he said verified them said that they were mislead by CBS (Retired Maj. General Hodges), ignored the response of Killian’s son who said they appeared forged, his widow’s statement of same, and refused the opportunity to consult other people who worked with Lt. Bush in the TANG because they appeared too Republican stinks of bias and corruption. It’s time for Dan Rather and CBS News to prove these documents are real. The burden is clearly on them.

Do you think this is the way your parent company should be operating? Do you find it the least bit interesting that the DNC and liberal newspapers and democratic fundraisers like Dan Rather continue to go after President Bush with the same charges for over 10 years now and that now it has degenerated to falsifying documents? Do you find it the least bit interesting that at the same time John Kerry has refused to sign a form 180 and release his military records like President Bush did? Do you find it the least bit interesting that John Kerry was not able to obtain an honorable discharge DD Form 214 from the United States Navy until 2001 after he had been in the Senate for over 15 years? Do you find it the least bit interesting that John Kerry is under formal investigation by the Department of the Navy at this very moment concerning probable impropriety in the records leading to the award of his Silver Star and two of his Bronze Stars? A quick perusal of Judicial Watch will make you aware of this investigation. Do you or anybody in CBS think that the situation concerning John Kerry deserves attention considering the unending manic obsession with your peers to take down the Commander in Chief?

It is time for XXXX as an affiliate of CBS to inform your parent company that their actions and disregard for proper investigation are leading viewers of your station to question if Dan Rather and CBS are part and parcel to this forgery. It is time for XXXX as an affiliate of CBS to inform your parent company that their actions are beginning to affect the sponsors you rely on for income. It is time to step up to the plate and demand that your parent company come clean on this situation. It is not going away until they do.

Sincerely,

[FireFox]

Viacom hasn't had the best of years so far but has a setup for a bounce.
It should be really interesting to see what happens to their stock tomorrow.

Media stocks should get some kind of bounce given the increased ad
revenue from the political campaigns. I'm sure that even the President's
campaign will be buying time on CBS and its affiliates.

[producehawk]

I will be suprized if barnes is not hired by CNN to be a analist

[Nathanyl]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5974037/site/newsweek/

[CrazyIvan]

Has anyone checked the validity of either the PO box number or any of the zip codes used in the memo? Does anyone know how this would be done? I know that areas grow in size, the Postal Service will often carve them into new zip codes.

[Paul R.]

[DenisC]

After reading BeldorBlog tonight, I am 100% sure Rather and Kerry will be the last to die because of Vietnam. (Not as in DEATH, but you know what I'm saying)

http://beldar.blogs.com/beldarblog/2004/09/some_credential.html


Sunday, September 12, 2004
Some credentials for the lawyer-bloggers who are prosecuting Dan Rather in the blogosphere

Maybe it's our own fault because so many of us use nicknames. But some of us pajama-wearing bloggers are getting a bit miffed at being dis'd by CBS News and others in the mainstream media. Some of us are getting a bit testy about it, in a mostly good-humored way. (My own most recent post about lawyer-bloggers was tongue-in-cheek; I'm perfectly aware that sometimes I'm "full of it," and try not to let my ego float me away for too very long at a time.)

Hugh Hewitt, for example, posted today about an article in today's Los Angeles Times article today in which Jeffrey Seglin, a professor at Emerson College in Boston, is quoted as saying,
"The fear I have is: How do you know who's doing the Web logs?

"And what happens when this stuff gets into the mainstream, and it eventually turns out that the '60 Minutes' documents were perfectly legitimate, but because there's been so much reporting about what's being reported, it has already taken on a life of its own?"

Hugh suggests that Prof. Seglin, who has

good credentials of his own, might bother clicking on some blogger links to answer that question. Hugh lists several high-quality and influential nonlawyer bloggers whose identities and credentials are easy to find, but being a lawyer-blogger myself who's been down on CBS News' case for the past few days, I thought I'd "expose" the credentials of a few other lawyer-bloggers (sometimes a/k/a "blawgers") who are baying along with me as part of the pack.

Let's start with Hugh, then. Hugh Hewitt's understated bio on his blog reveals that he is "the host of a nationally syndicated radio show heard in more than 60 cities nationwide, and a Professor of Law at Chapman University Law School, where he teaches Constitutional Law," and that he "is a weekly columnist for The Daily Standard, the online edition of The Weekly Standard, and a weekly columnist for WorldNetDaily.com." In addition to summarizing his various books, Hugh's somewhat more detailed bio on the website of the Chapman University School of Law confirms that he's a three-time Emmy Award winner (1995, 1997, and 1998) as "co-host of the week-night television news and public affairs show Life & Times on PBS Los Angeles affiliate KCET-TV," and that he
served for nearly six years in the Reagan Administration in a [variety of] posts including Assistant Counsel in the White House and Special Assistant to the Attorney General of the United States. He was Governor Wilson's appointee to the South Coast Air Quality Management District, and is presently a member of the California Arts Council. Professor Hewitt appears frequently as a political and social commentator on shows including Nightline, The Today Show and Larry King Live. Professor Hewitt is an honors graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School.

Pre-White House, Hugh also had an extremely unusual but wonderful clerkship on the prestigious United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (the appellate level metaphorically just below, and literally just around the corner from, the U.S. Supreme Court), but he's too modest to have listed the details in any of his online CVs. (If you were to imagine a combination of Scalia, Bork, Ginsberg, and J. Skelly Wright, you'd still not quite get the full flavor of his clerkship year.)

When he's not in his pajamas, John H. Hinderaker, "Hindrocket" of Power Line, is affiliated with the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Policy and is a partner in the Minneapolis law firm Faegre & Benson. His practice history includes "twenty-six years [in] a broad-based and varied commercial litigation practice. A veteran of more than 80 jury trials, he has appeared in courts in fifteen states." J.D. cum laude from Harvard; A.B. magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth — yeah, I think I've heard of those schools. Scott Johnson, Power Line's "Big Trunk," is also affiliated with Claremont, and probably doesn't wear pajamas to his day job as "an attorney and senior vice president of TCF National Bank in Minneapolis." Power Line's "Deacon" is Paul E. Mirengoff, a partner in the Washington office of mega-firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld (where his partners include uber-Dems Bob Strauss and Vernon Jordan). In addition to government service in the Office of the General Counsel of the EEOC, his credential include an undergraduate degree, summa cum laude, in 1971 from Dartmouth College, and a J.D. in 1974 from Stanford Law School, where he served on the Stanford Law Review.

The Godfather of law bloggers, of course, is the InstaPundit himself, Glenn Reynolds. Again, his blog bio is pretty modest, but if you dig a bit deeper, you'll find that Glenn Harlan Reynolds is the Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee College of Law. (Endowed chairs are a very big deal, even for a full professor at any law school.) His legal and popular-press publications list is a mile long — the top-tier law reviews in which he's published scholarly articles include Columbia, Virginia, Penn, and Wisconsin — and he has a BA from Tennessee in 1982 and a JD from Yale Law School in 1985.

As for the crusty old trial lawyer who writes this blog, the About Beldar link in the upper right corner of my sidebar will take you to a short bio that includes my name and bar card number, as well as a link that goes to my full bio on the website of the law firm where I'm currently "of counsel" as the (literal) office graybeard. I've never pretended to false modesty about my credentials and experience, and in fact have ended up referencing them repeatedly in explaining my context for commenting on various legal matters. I won't run through them in full here — that's what hyperlinks are for, Prof. Seglin. But let's just say that CBS News seemed fairly well satisfied with my credentials, ability, and performance when I won a Fifth Circuit appeal of a defamation case as their lawyer in 1983. (Note: Neither I nor my current firm represents CBS at present, nor have I personally since 1983; and somehow I doubt that I'm likely to anytime soon.)

And there are many, many lawyer bloggers writing about this scandal that I could mention — including at least one other alumnus of my alma mater, Texas Law School. [Update: I left out left out the Bruin Brigade — the superbly credentialed and experienced Profs. Stephen Bainbridge and Eugene Volokh from UCLA, for instance! See also former Southern District of New York federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy of NRO's The Corner, who led the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others and has taught as an adjunct professor at NYU and Fordham. Plus a deity! And if he wasn't so busy with the SwiftVets, we could maybe get former Supreme Court law clerk and number-one-in-his-class Texas Law School graduate John O'Neill on board as well.]

I wouldn't mind matching up the academic and legal practice credentials of any of these lawyer-bloggers against — oh, just hypothetically, a certain lawyer who's running for President at the moment. Yale is a great undergrad institution, of course, and Boston College is a fine law school. (I emphatically disagree with the snarky folks who've made fun of him for not going to Harvard Law, having turned down Stanford and Columbia, both higher-regarded law schools, for Texas Law School myself because of financial and geographic considerations that I've never regretted.) But if you start looking for the magna cums and summa cums, or the law review memberships and judicial clerkships, or the law review publications or major firm partnership-type credentials — well, let's just say that said lawyer's extended credentials thin out pretty quickly in comparison.

I'll finish with this remark: I'm highly confident that if we assembled together in a courtroom, the lawyer-bloggers currently "prosecuting" Dan Rather in the blogosphere could, collectively, match up just fine against any legal team CBS News chose to hire from any firm or firms anywhere in the country. And Dan — without being too self-righteous about it — we're kickin' your butt in the blogosphere, buddy. You guys can't even field a decent team in this arena.
_________________
DenisC
173rd Airborne, RVN '65-67'

[Navy_Navy_Navy]

LOL! Oh, we love ya, Beldar!
_________________
~ Echo Juliet ~
Altering course to starboard - On Fire, Keep Clear
Navy woman, Navy wife, Navy mother

[Nomorelies]

[cipher]

[Nomorelies]