The Daily Show - Best News Show on TV?

I'm beginning to think so. I just saw a repeat of the episode with John Kerry. Wow! Kerry was fabulous. He was funny, raised good points, and has a great smile. Why don't we see it more? Kerry should hire Jon Stewart as his campaign manager. We'd lose a great show, but the campaign would be over in a week or so. This episode should be burned to DVD and distributed far and wide.

The comedy format lets Stewart says things that the "real" news organizations wouldn't dare to. They're afraid to lose their access if they say something that offends our current administration. Stewart is like the king's jester of times past who was the only one in the court who could speak the truth about what was obvious to everyone.

Watch this show while it's still legal. It will cheer you up to know that others see through the veils of bullshit and obfuscation currently obscuring our public discourse.

Links

I've accumulated an excess of them, perhaps even a surfeit. You don't need to check out all of these.

Bush isn't the only Republican who is taking liberties with the truth. Arnold was "mistaken" about a few things in his speech. He said the Humphrey/Nixon debate made him a Republican. But there was no such debate! He also said he recalled Soviet tanks in the Austria of his youth. However, he grew up in the British zone of Austria and would have had to travel to see the Soviets. The impression he leaves you with is that he lived in the Soviet occupied zone.

Some details here:

http://www.arnoldwatch.org/
http://slate.msn.com/id/2106283/

Andrew Card, Bush's chief of staff, is quoted as saying of Bush that, “It struck me as I was speaking to people in Bangor, Maine, that this president sees America as we think about a 10-year-old child. I know as a parent I would sacrifice all for my children.” Charlie Pierce takes his rapier wit to this notion. There's some serious thought amongst the savage barbs here.

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=8480

Forgeries? - not likely

The Daily Kos has a lot of details on this here:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/9/10/34914/1603

I'll summarize. Claims that you can re-create this document "exactly" in Microsoft Word are false. The people doing the comparison shrank both documents to compare them. Shrinking documents loses detail. How do they compare when magnified? Naturally, the "experts" haven't done that. Claims that the proportional font typewriters weren't available in the 70's are false. They were available starting in the late 40's. The proportional typewriters weren't as expense as some are saying either. The "experts" also haven't mentioned that some letters in the CBS original float above or below the baseline. This is a characteristic of typewritten documents, not computer-printed ones.

What boggles my mind is that the mainstream press doesn't seem to know what's in this article yet. Will they ever? The Internet is a great place to start your research. You don't have to trust Kos (or anyone else), by the way, just use that information as a starting point and confirm it. Be sure to ask your news station why they haven't been competent enough to do so.

Here's even more typewriter lore for those who just have to know all the details:

http://amygdalagf.blogspot.com/2004/09/ibm-executive-typewriters.html

Read this far? Now you know more than most (maybe even all) of the newsies on the air today. But wait, there's more ...

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/9/10/205917/730