...a newspaper reporter sang a rendition of “Dixie Melody” with these words: “Rock-a-bye the voters with a southern strategy; Don't you fuss; we won't bus children in ol' Dixie! We'll put George Wallace in decline Below the Mason-Dixon line. We'll help save the nation From things like civil rights and inte-gra-tion! Weep no more, John Stennis! We'll pack the court for sure. We will fight for voting rights - To keep them white and pure! A zillion Southern votes we will deliver; Move Washington down on the Swanee River! Rock-a-bye with Ol' Massa Nixon and his Dixie strategy!” Hilarious, right?

It's called 'satire,' Joan, and it's of the over the top, stinging variety. You've just made the same mistake that some people make when they think Steve Colbert is really a conservative. In fact it sounds exactly like something Colbert might have sung for Nixon if he had been old enough at the time.

"...Selectrics existed with proportional font and special character balls could be installed that of course had super- and sub-scripts."

So what? Who disputed that? You aren't addressing the argument, which is that documents created on IBM Selectrics cannot be recreated in MS Word at the default settings. However the disputed documents CAN be easily recreated in MS Word. Don't rely on authority; try it yourself.

As I pointed out, the hardest thing to do is the centered headings. Very difficult to do on a proportional font typewriter, but very easy in MS Word. The disputed documents have centered headings which are not only PEFECTLY CENTERED but IDENTICAL to each other. And yet they were supposed to have been typed months apart. That can't be done on any kind of typewriter, proportional or monospaced.

The documents are shit and so is the thinking that supports them. Blumenthal is making a huge mistake by relying on the word of some authority and not checking the documents himself.

With illustrations:

http://theshapeofdays.com/2004/09/10/the-ibm-selectric-composer.html

The REALLY hard thing to do isn't the superscript, it's the perfectly centered headings. Remember, this is in proportional fonts, so you can't simply count letters as you do with a monospaced typewriter.

And btw the only way to think about any of this is to FORGET THE POLITICS. Reality doesn't have a polticial bias.

Select text, go to "Format/Font/Character Spacing." Adjust letter spacing, position, and kerning as much as you like.

But you don't have to do any of this to recreate the disputed documents. You can just type it and the letters will line up.

They likely were simply typed in MS Word, printed, and then faxed. The faxing process introduced distortions and blurring.

When you retype the documents in MS Word, the letters line up above and below, exactly as they do in the disputed documents. Try it. Some of the documents have a centered headings: the letters above and below still line up. Try that, too.

With a different font, the letters won't line up. They won't line up using differnt fonts in MS Word--you have to use Times New Roman. And they very probably won't line using the famous IMB Selectric Composer, because the fonts are different. MS created its own version of Times New Roman.

But if anyone could show me documents from the 70s that also line up in MS Word using the default settings, I will be convinced that the documents could be real. However no one has done this to my knowledge.

Btw, it is extremely easy to make minute adjustments to letters in MS Word, so the poster below who claims to be an 'expert' is the one who doesn't know what he is talking about.

Then, reproduce it in MS Word using the default settings (Times New Roman, 12 point).

If you can do that, you've proven that the disputed documents COULD have been typed in the 70s, because you CAN reproduce the disputed document in Word using the default settings.

However, AFAIK, no one can do that. The proportional fonts used in the 70s are NOT the same as the default font used in MS Word. The spacing is different so the letters will not line up in the same way.

Hence it's impossible for me to believe that the documents could have been printed in the 70s.

"...that calculus is based on the Panglossian assumption that House Democrats from conservative areas like southern Indiana would ever be willing to buck the White House on a vote that would be portrayed in Republican attack ads as not funding the troops in wartime."

That's the nut that has to be cracked. Somehow an argument has to be made in the conservative areas of the country that pulling out of Iraq is not betraying the troops. This will be true even if a Democratic president is elected next year.

However as far as I can tell, most liberals have no intention of even thinking about these people, let alone talking to them. It seems that they would rather scream about "General Betrayus" then speak in any respectful way to the people who will actually decide if the war in Iraq will continue or not.

The music was horrid and made it unwatchable. And it just didn't match what was on the screen!

I heartily dislike manipulative music in documentaries anyhow. Why do I need music to digest facts? But manipulation that doesn't even bother to get it right is even more annoying.

Also I was always bothered by the fact that the Civil War documentary, which was highly affecting, if not all that illuminating, was shortly followed by a real war, the first Gulf War. I've always wondered if it somehow made us eager to try out a real war for ourselves.