Just another nerd.
Per the Bureau of Alochol, Tobacco and Firearms,
By statute, the prohibitions relating to semiautomatic assault weapons and large capacity ammunition feeding devices expired on September 13, 2004. As a result, certain sections of the Gun Control Act, 18 U.S.C. Chapter 44, and its implementing regulations, 27 CFR Part 478, are no longer in effect.
Of course YMMV depending on whether you live in a girlie-man state such as California that has its own “assault” weapons ban.
Edward Mendelson thought he was going to show conservative bloggers a thing or two by demonstrating it is easy to make a document in Word look like a type document from the early 1970s. The idea here is that the fact that the fake Bush documents are an almost identical match for similar documents typed on Word proves nothing. But, instead, Mendelson ended up showing just how strange it is that MS Word versions of the fake documents look just like the documents supposedly from the 1960s.
Mendelson took a screen grab of output from an IBM Selectric Composer — one of the few typewriters everyone agrees could have been used to produce documents in the 1960s and 1970s with most of the typographical features in the Killian memos. Mendelson then typed in the same text in MS Word, altered some margins and added some hyphenation to more closely resemble the Selectric Composer sample, and then crowed that he had shown that such matches were likely to be common.
But, in fact, as Charles Johnson demonstrates, a very cursory glance would tell anyone who knew nothing about the samples that they were likely not produced by the same typewriter. Johnson has an overlay of the screen shots posted by Mendelson that, even though Mendelson’s shots are ridiculously small, make it clear that both were almost certainly not produced on the same machine. Apparently, making an MS Word document look like a document from a 1960s/1970s era typewriter takes a bit more work.
This also might answer a perplexing question. It is very odd that if you type in the text of the memos on MS Word and print them out, the result is essentially identical to the Killian memos. Assuming they are fakes and that they were produced in MS Word, why would someone be so stupid as to create fake memos from the early 1970s in a modern word processor?
Mendelson’s experiment suggests that the answer is because it is a lot more difficult than it initially appears to create forgeries this way. True, someone with a lot of knowledge about Word or a page layout program could certainly do a pretty good job, but it appears to be a task which would take someone like me a great deal of time, and even then it’s likely that reproducing the exact font and spacing might be impossible without buying specialty fonts.
So if you’re not a typography and computer expert but you want to create fake documents, what’s the next best step? Create them in Word and then use photocopiers and fax machines to create multiple generations of the documents until the typeface and spacing is a bit distorted to the point where it may appear to be authentic at first glance to non-experts.
Glenn Reynolds has some interesting thoughts about gay marriage as a campaign issue. Bottom line — there seems to be little substantive difference between Kerry and Bush on the topic. The main difference is that Bush supports a defense of marriage amendment to the Constitution which he can do because he knows it has no chance of coming to pass (much as he has endorsed re-upping the assault weapons ban largely because he knows it’s just not going to happen).
I’ve posted before about the inconsistency of gay marriage supporters, but whether you support or oppose it, it is clear that legalization of gay marraige is all but inevitable.
Reynolds quotes Julian Sanchez as writing,
I spot the one Ben Sherman in a solidly Brooks Brothers room (actually Benetton, I discover, but Benetton trying to look like Ben Sherman) and try to suss out how gay Republicans are feeling in light of the Federal Marriage Amendment push. And his answer’s a pretty good one: That the gay rights issue is largely a generational one, and that it’ll be won inside of 10 or 15 years as a result of demographic changes regardless of which party’s in power.
In the late 1980s I was sitting in a philosophy class in which the topic had turned to forms of government and balancing civil liberties with other interests. The topic of homosexuality came up, and the professor asked how many people in the class of about 50 thought there should be laws against homosexuality. Not a single person, even the conservative Christians in the class, thought these were a good idea. To me the question was almost incomprehensible, similar to asking whether or not there should be laws against blasphemy.
It seem to me all but inevitable that laws that define marriage as only between a man and a woman are destined to fall, though I’d pushed the timeline out further to 25 years.
BTW, this is unrelated, but I got my first glimpse at just how odd this sort of tolerance is in another philosophy class. The first day of the class there were a number of Muslim women in full conservative dress. They all got up and left about 15 minutes into the course and never came back. Why? According to the instructor, this philosophy of science course would consider the implications of Big Bang cosmology on theistic arguments for the creation of the universe, and these women did not want to sit in any class in which they might have to read or consider arguments that they believed went against the Koran.
Earl W. Lively was director of operations of the Texas Air National Guard in the 1970s when CBS’ apparently fake memos were supposedly produced. His take on the memo’s authenticity?
They’re forged as hell. . . . And there’s no way that Jerry Killian would have written what they’ve come up with.
Newsweek, meanwhile, has an article fueling speculation that the source of the documents might be Bill Burkett. Burkett is a former TANG officer who became ill during a mission to Panama in 1998 and blamed then Gov. Bush for his failure to receive proper compensation for his illness.
Four years ago, Burkett claimed that he witnessed an incident at TANG headquarters where records related to Bush’s service were destroyed. Burkett claims he saw records related to Bush thrown into a 15 gallon trash bin.
Furthermore, the Ace of Spades blog notes that Burkett has previously claimed that some of the documents he saw destroyed were signed by Killian. Burkett posted on a web site discussion board,
Of the files that I saw within the 15 gallon waste can were numerous documents which detailed why 1LT George Bush was grounded from flying including a two-page counseling statement signed by LTC Jerry Killian.
The odd thing is this post was made on August 14, 2004.
If Burkett is the source, why not disclose that? Because Burkett is easily discredited. His hatred of Bush goes into the irrational, such as this essay peddling a conspiracy theory about how Mossad gave the Bush administration precise details, including a timeline, about the 9/11 plot the week prior to the terrorist attack. Burkett also claims that Bush personally doctored Burkett’s TANG records.
Source:
Bush Guard papers ‘forged’. Hugh Aynesworth, Washington Times, September 12, 2004.