Just found this that someone put together…

2004 Electoral Vote Animation (May 24 – Present)
(via The Daily Dish)

It takes the maps and data from electoral-vote.com and produces an animated history of how the states have been shifting over the last few months.

OK, here goes at posting back the normal way. Here’s my first “news” one since my absence. First, since I have been away, a quick summary of the issue from Slate:

Rather Suspicious
(Josh Levin, Slate)

On Wednesday night, CBS News released four memos it claimed were written in 1972 and 1973 by George W. Bush’s commander in the Texas Air National Guard. In one of the documents, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian writes that a Guard official was “pushing to sugar coat” Bush’s training evaluation; in another, Killian suspects that Bush is “talking to someone upstairs” about getting transferred. Within a few hours of the CBS report, bloggers were questioning the authenticity of the documents. By today, the doubts were on the front page of the Washington Post.

(via InstaPundit)

OK. Now, my take… I was immediately completely convinced by this. Charles from Little Green Footballs was the first person I saw to do this, although others have done this since. Now, as far as I am concerned Charles is a right wing nutcase, and reading his site often makes me cringe because of just how bad it is and not in sync with my way of understanding the world. However… he opened MS Word, used default settings, and reproduced the docuement exactly (minus fax transmission defects). Done. Convinced. Yes, there may have been the tech to do the fonts and everything else back then. Maybe. But that is just too close a match. I have no doubts in my mind. These are fakes, and bad fakes. They didn’t even try.

People like PowerLine have done much more detailed font analysis. But it isn’t even needed. The little demonstration in Word is all it really takes, counter arguments by Daily Kos aside. That just doesn’t convicne me at all. And it actually seems a bit desperate.

The only defense I could think of that made sense was that these were not actually the originals, and for some bizzare reason CBS had used a retyped copy for clarity. But they are standing by it. And all sorts of voices on left of center websites are desperately trying to research old typewriters to prove that these could be real.

Give it up. I am not a Bush fan. I think he is an idiot. I think the charges about him in the National Gaurd and what he did and didn’t do are most likely true. But these docs do NOT support that case. It is completely and totally obvious they were done in Word. Recently. And that isn’t even mentioning the critiques on other grounds. Anyone who defends these documents at this point is just making themselves look like idiots. Just stop, relax, find other issues to attack W on. This is not it.