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Sen. Hillary Clinton has spoken up in support of her husband Bill’s defense of his anti-terror efforts, saying she’s tired of Democrats being pushed around on national security issues. "I just think that my husband did a great job in demonstrating that Democrats are not going to take this,” she said on Monday in remarks reported by Newsday. In a heated discussion with Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday,” Bill Clinton said that as president, he did more than many of his conservative critics to pursue al-Qaida, and alleged that President Bush didn’t try to stop terrorism in the eight...

The Book of Mormon is often dismissed as gibberish by those who have never taken the trouble to read it. In fact, its very existence poses a serious puzzle if it is not what it claims to be - an ancient record. Below is the Book of Mormon Challenge, an assignment that Professor Hugh Nibley at BYU sometimes gave to students in a required class on the Book of Mormon. The following text is taken from the Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Vol.8, Ch.11, Pg.221 - Pg.222: Since Joseph Smith was younger than most of you and not nearly so...

STOCKBRIDGE, Mass.-One of Norman Rockwell's most famous paintings was found hidden behind a fake wall in its owner's home, proving that the version the owner had long displayed was a forgery, family members and experts said.They believe that the owner, illustrator Donald Trachte Sr., made the copy of "Breaking Home Ties" himself in the early 1970s, deades after he bought it from Rockwell and made it the centerpiece of his art collection.

Fired CBS "60 Minutes" producer Mary Mapes is still blaming the internet for ending her media career prematurely - or more precisely; the "vicious" bloggers who discovered that documents she unearthed in a bid to trash President Bush's National Guard service were forgeries. "The criticism that was launched at us initially really came from the very conservative blogosphere, folks who are on these very conservative web sites," Mapes complained Friday on WVMT Vermont's "Charlie & Ernie" radio show. "This was really a terribly vicious attack they launched on CBS," she insisted, before lamenting: "Politics is not necessarily the way it...

An earlier thread linked to an OpinionJournal article which pointed out that moveon.org had mistaken British troops for American troops. They noted that one of the soldiers was wearing shorts (which are not part of a normal combat uniform). Now, moveon appears to have doctored the above mentioned photo. The current moveon.org link now shows the exact photo as before, but now the soldier is mysteriously wearing pants. If you enlarge the photo, it looks like he is actually wearing one pant leg which covers both his legs. Here is the moveon link with the soldier wearing pants: https://political.moveon.org/donate/thanksgiving.html Here...

Mary Mapes website for her book Truth and Duty has a page labelled DOCUMENTS. On this page she has her famous "meshing" defense for proof that the memos were accurate. On November 16 she added 12 additional documents she got from the Texas National Guard Headquarters. Unwittingly, she posted documents that actually DISproved many of her arguments. Some of the documents were letters to the Guard Headquarters asking preferential treatment for the sons of important people, but the letters were actually refusals by the Guard commanders to these requests. They were only up for a day before someone at Mary's...

...Mary Mapes, the CBS producer fired over the journalistic fiasco involving President Bush's National Guard service, is the latest in a line of lonely crusaders, defending her work more than a year after it was widely discredited. Dan Rather may have apologized for the story, an independent panel may have denounced it and CBS News may have criticized her "disregard for journalistic standards," but Mapes argues in her new book that the critics are either politically motivated, cowardly or just plain wrong. In challenging those who have questioned her work -- including The Washington Post and this reporter, who is...

November 09, 2005 Mary Mapes Names Names ("Anonymous" Ones) Posted by Bill An excerpt from page 201 of her new book: Within minutes of Buckhead's original posting, Freepers began to repeat and embellish Buckhead's thoughts. Not surprisingly, they all agreed with him, they all agreed with one another, and they all agreed this should be pursued aggressively. Freethinkers they are not. The Freepers and their lockstep like-minded fellow travelers moved as a group, like a school of sharks sweeping toward an unaware and unarmed victim. CBS was like some sunburned, overweight Florida tourist with a cut foot, floundering and flapping...

Mary Mapes is madder than a rained-out rooster, as her former boss, Dan Rather, might say. Mapes, the CBS producer who lost her job over last year's "60 Minutes II" story about President Bush's National Guard service, resurfaces with a reconstruction of that incident that savages just about everyone associated with it: conservative bloggers, the mainstream media, CBS and its chief executive, Leslie Moonves, the Texas Air National Guard, even a few members of the Dallas Cowboys of the early 1970s. And that's just in the first 40 pages of Mapes's wonkishly named but compellingly told tale of a byzantine...

NEW YORK -- With its official-looking BBC News banner, the Web site looked real enough, but the sick tale it told seemed too preposterous to be true. "Lion Mutilates 42 Midgets in Cambodian Ring-Fight," blared the headline. An article followed about a circus-like spectacle that went awry and resulted in many deaths. The page was a hoax, but it exploded across the Internet. Soon it was being repeated by bloggers, radio show hosts and a few newspapers. The New York Post published the yarn in its "Weird but True" column on May 20. The episode was another in a string...

The media and the Leftists have had a field day with the Downing Street memos that they claim imply that the Bush administration lied about the intelligence on WMD in order to justify the attack on Iraq. Despite the fact that none of the memos actually say that, none of them quote any officials or any documents, and that the text of the memos show that the British government worried about the deployment of WMD by Saddam against Coalition troops, Kuwait and/or Israel, the meme continues to survive. Until tonight, however, no one questioned the authenticity of the documents provided...

Japan’s Sankei Shimbun reported Wednesday high-quality so-called Super X counterfeit US$100 bills were brought into Japan in March by a North Korean freighter. The notes are high-quality forgeries capable of fooling even electronic counterfeit detectors. Sophisticated notes nicknamed Super K circulated in Southeast Asia in the 1990s, but the Super X is much more accurate. Japanese police said 10 of 7,100 US$100 bills brought in by the captain of North Korean freighter Lee Myong Su 7, which docked in Tottori Prefecture on March 23, were Super X counterfeits, according to the paper. The skipper told police he was given the...

Now that the brouhaha over Dan Rather's "Memogate" scandal is no longer front-and-center in the national media, one has to wonder why there's been no closure to the issue of the documents themselves. Bill Burkett, the supplier of the documents to CBS, changed his story on the source of the documents, ultimately claiming that one "Lucy Ramirez" gave them to him. No one even knows who Lucy Ramirez is, if she exists of if she's another figment of Burkett's imagination. Surely, a scoop on where the documents came from would be huge. Reporters, even those at CBS could be working...

As Dan Rather steps down as anchor of the CBS Evening News on Wednesday, the person who deceived him with fake memos on President Bush's National Guard service last fall remains at large, spared from even the threat of a federal or state investigation. Both federal and state felony statutes exist that give law enforcement authorities the ability to pursue the culprit. But neither the U.S. Department of Justice nor prosecutors in Texas have taken up the cause. A spokesman at the Justice Department told HUMAN EVENTS that federal officials

Fired CBS Rathergate producer Mary Mapes is planning a tell-all book that could blow the lid off the scandal that ended Dan Rather's tenure as "CBS Evening News" anchorman and destroyed the credibility of the once-golden "Tiffany" network. Mapes, who obtained documents on President Bush's National Guard record that turned out to be forged, "is preparing to shop a book proposal offering an inside account of what happened at CBS News during the memo scandal," reports the New York Observer. "The book will constitute Ms. Mapes’ defense against charges of journalistic misconduct," the paper says. Mapes' literary agent explained that...

Is there enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Maurice Hinchey has deserted his constituents in upstate New York's 22nd Congressional District and trotted off to Cloud Cuckoo Land? I'm referring to the Maurice Hinchey who, while speaking on Social Security to a meeting in Ithaca last Saturday strolled off topic to assert that Karl Rove, Minister of Dirty Tricks for the Bush Administration, had forged and planted the Rathergate memos. Hinchey: They've had a very very direct, aggressive attack on the, on the media, and the way it's handled. Probably the most flagrant example of that is...

February 15, 2005 League Blasts N.Y. Times re Pius XII A New York Times story smearing Pope Pius XII had about as much truth in it as the notorious "60 Minutes" Rathergate story that was based on forged documents, new facts show. The story in question is a piece in the Jan. 9 Times about an article in an Italian newspaper claiming to have uncovered a 1946 document implicating Pope Pius XII in a scheme not to return baptized Jewish children (who were hidden by the Vatican from the Nazis during the Holocaust) to their parents after the war. That...

At CBS, they still don't get it. The same holds true for the investigators of Dan Rather's "60 Minutes" report, which charged that George W. Bush, while in the Texas Air National Guard, used political pull to escape punishment for his insolent insubordination to a superior officer. For this story, at root, is about far more than just the blunders, deceptions and stonewalling of Rather, Mary Mapes and CBS. The real story is who was behind this criminal conspiracy to bring down a president of the United States, using fake and forged U.S. government documents, which is a felony. And...

Dan Rather was on the run, chasing big stories from New York to Florida to Texas and back to CBS headquarters in Manhattan. In less than a week: The Republican National Convention. A deadly hurricane. An interview for a blockbuster CBS investigation. Former President Clinton's open-heart surgery. [snip] Rather, 73, recalled somewhat vaguely that he had heard from his star producer that Burkett was a "straight-talking West Texan" with a reputation as a "truth teller." Had he turned to Google, though, the CBS anchorman would have found stories painting Burkett as something quite different: a highly controversial and disgruntled retired...

What's the newest word getting into the dictionary for the new year? Miriam Webster's editors announce it is "blog" — defined as "a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer." So hoist a glass to toast perhaps the most famous "blogger" of 2004 — a brilliant Atlanta lawyer nicknamed "Buckhead." He's the pajama-clad fellow, along with a follow-up host of other Internet truth seekers, who struck a telling blow at anchor Dan Rather and his CBS TV "60 Minutes II" by quickly analyzing and questioning the proportionally spaced fonts...

CBS News is undoubtedly hoping that release of the Thornburgh/Boccardi Report, with its embarrassing admissions, will satisfy critics enough that the Rathergate scandal will be allowed to disappear into dim memory. They are wrong. Many observers, our own Clarice Feldman included, have been impressed by the extent of the incompetence (and worse) CBS has admitted with this internal report. Some, like Jim Geraghty, of National review Online, are concerned that critics of CBS should appear reasonable, and praise what is praiseworthy, while asking for more information, as a matter of political strategy. Already, Washington Post writers Howard Kurtz and Dana...

I, who never watch CBS News, spent yesterday afternoon, reading the lengthy Thornburgh/Boccardi Report. Within its considerable limitations, it is a fine, well-detailed view of the CBS TANG memo scandal. While it could have asked other questions, and utilized other investigative approaches (for example, analyzing the telephone records of various key individuals), given its methodology, it tells us quite a bit that is embarrassing to those who are paying for it. The Report reveals what most of us who don't watch network news already knew: CBS News is a shoddy operation all around, one more concerned with production values and...

John Podhoretz does a great job unpacking and re-assembling the information in the CBS Report, to show that: Mapes was not "focused on any particular event or topic." In other words, she had nothing to go on. And yet on she went, searching for a "viable story line." Mapes was on a gigantic fishing expedition. She was trying to bag a president. She did so with the consent and support of her superiors. With that aim in mind, she partnered up with one Michael Smith, a Texas journalist. Smith told her he had a "tasty brisket of information" to share...

RATHER STAYS HOME; EXECUTIVES SPLIT; MOONVES LOOKS TOWARDS FUTURE *Exclusive** CBSNEWS veteran Don Hewitt called Dan Rather's disappearance from Monday's Evening News "really stupid" during a damage control meeting on Monday, sources tell the DRUDGE REPORT. One top source inside the CBS Broadcast Center claimed Rather was told to stay off the air on Monday, as a form of punishment! Chief Washington Correspondent Bob Schieffer was called in to anchor the damaged ship. CBS staffers were shocked Monday when CBS president Les Moonves suddenly tied Rather's upcoming resignation to the phony document flap, a departure from CBS's official storyline. Moonves...

ARIS, May 29 — Italian and German investigators have disclosed fresh information suggesting that hints of an attack involving aircraft and the United States were more widespread among European law enforcement agencies before Sept. 11 than previously suspected.The disclosures come after weeks in which the Bush administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which announced a shake-up today, have come under sharp criticism that they did not pay sufficient heed to signs of Al Qaeda plots in the United States that may have alerted them to the Sept. 11 attacks.A Central Intelligence Agency spokesman said today that before Sept....

If you believe CBS’ report it was all producer Mary Mapes fault – Dan Rather was not much more than an innocent bystander in the scandal that now bears his name: "Rathergate." CBS would also have you believe there was no evidence that politics played a role in CBS airing of a story based on forged documents. CBS, for that matter, still won’t say the documents were forged. This last conclusion is convenient for CBS and the “independent” panel they appointed to investigate Rathergate. If the documents are forgeries -- which almost everyone agrees is the case -- there are...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - An independent report on Monday found a CBS News story about U.S. President Bush's National Guard service record was deeply flawed and came from the network's "myopic zeal" to be first with the news. CBS said it would fire four employees for their roles in the erroneous story, broadcast on Sept. 8, 2004, and would take steps to bolster its credibility. Following are some celebrated media scandals over inaccurate or fabricated stories. April 1981 -- The Washington Post relinquishes a Pulitzer Prize for a story written by Janet Cooke about "Jimmy," an 8-year-old heroin addict who...

In response to the release today of a report on CBS News' bogus story about President Bush's National Guard service, an organization that has pushed Americans to boycott the network urges executives there to shun New York and broadcast the evening news "from the heartland" of America. The panel probing the story found CBS News failed to follow basic journalistic principles in the preparation and reporting of the piece. Asked to resign were Senior Vice President Betsy West, who supervised CBS News primetime programs; "60 Minutes Wednesday" Executive Producer Josh Howard; and Howard's deputy, Senior Broadcast Producer Mary Murphy. The...

Let the fence-mending begin. According to a Broadcasting & Cable source in Washington, D.C., CBS News president Andrew Heyward, along with Washington bureau chief Janet Leissner, recently met with White House communications director Dan Bartlett, in part to repair chilly relations with the Bush administration.CBS News’ popularity at the White House—never high to begin with—plunged further in the wake of Dan Rather’s discredited 60 Minutes story on George Bush’s National Guard service.An incentive for making nice is the impending report from the two-member panel investigating CBS's use of now-infamous documents for the 60 Minutes piece.Heyward was “working overtime to convince Bartlett that neither...

Experts advised world museums to re-examine their Bible-era relics after Israel indicted four collectors and dealers on charges of forging items thought to be some of the most important artifacts discovered in recent decades. The indictments issued Wednesday labeled many such "finds" as fakes, including two that had been presented as the biggest biblical discoveries in the Holy Land - the purported burial box of Jesus' brother James and a stone tablet with written instructions by King Yoash on maintenance work at the ancient Jewish Temple. Shuka Dorfman, the head of the Israel Antiquities Authority, said that the scope of...

A little biride familiar with discussions at CBS News tells me that the network suits will announced Dan Rather's replacement the day they release the report about the faked memos. I guess the aim is to distract from the bad news by creating two headlines instead og just one.

....Rather’s abrupt departure is the latest in a long line of actions taken by media conglomerates in recent years bowing to objections from the government or from corporate, military or intelligence interests to any serious investigation of the practices of the American ruling elite....

Wired News comes out clearly in favor of Utah state professor David Hailey in an article portraying him as a victim of a “mob:” Wired News: Prof Pursued by Mob of Bloggers. Hailey is the professor of creative writing who created an “analysis” of the fraudulent CBS Killian memos, arguing against all evidence that a typewriter could have produced them even though Hailey’s own examples are not typewritten. Now Dr. Joseph M. Newcomer, a typography expert who holds several patents on desktop publishing technology, has drafted an absolutely crushing review of David Hailey’s work: The Hailey Connection. Dr. Newcomer emailed...

One of the pages on Kerry's site is called "John Kerry's Official Naval Records" (www.johnkerry.com/about/john_kerry/military_records.html). As of 10/5/04, three sections of this page, "Military Service Awards," "Bronze Star," and "Silver Star" contained fake, forged documents.Why are these documents on this site, who put them there, what does Kerry know about them and why has no one vigorously pursued this obvious dishonesty and misrepresentation? Kerry is lying on his "Offical" site and, since it reflects on everything he says, must be explained.There are actually, THREE forged documents on this "Official" mendacious site. All purport to be signed by Secretary of the...

Media Pushes Fictions over Facts By Robin Boyd Posted On September 27, 2004 @ 09:58 PM EST [Post Comment] The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were the focus for crucial weeks of the 2004 Presidential Campaign. Day after day, Democrats decried the use of “partisan money” to fund the Swifties’ ads, calling on President Bush to denounce the partisan attack against John Kerry. John Edwards called on the President to stop hiding behind what he called a “front group.” The media’s search for Bush/Cheney connections to the Swift Boat vets was also relentless, and it is a study in media...

Forgeries More Interesting Than Facts By Robin Mullins Boyd September 29, 2004 The appearance of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in the 2004 Presidential Campaign has caused quite an uproar. The Democrats decried the use of partisan money to fund the Swift Boat ads. They have called on President Bush to denounce the partisan attack against John Kerry. John Edwards called on the President to "stop hiding behind a front group". The media's search for Bush/Cheney connections to the Swift Boat vets has been relentless. The media has been so focused on uncovering anything that could possibly damage the...

Longtime CBS newsman and "Face the Nation" host Bob Schieffer said Monday that the Rathergate forged document scandal has been "a terrible blow" to the network's credibility. "I love CBS. I love the people who work here. This is a terrible blow to all of us," Schieffer told the ABC Radio network's Sean Hannity. "It's hurt us in two ways," Schieffer said. "Clearly, it's hurt our credibility. But it's also like somebody just came up and kicked us in the stomach. It's hurt us emotionally." The top CBS newsman made his comments as the latest ratings for the CBS "Evening...

Where's the outrage -- at CBS? Pat Buchanan September 26, 2004 Something remains puzzling about the Rathergate scandal. Where is the outrage? Where is the righteous rage of Dan Rather at the forgers of faked military records of George W. Bush, who played him for a fool? Something is fishy here. And, indeed, the inexplicable absence of outrage suggests that there is more, much more, to this story To understand, imagine this situation. Detectives come to the home of John Q. Citizen to inform him he has been the victim of a fraud. The hundred-dollar bills he used as a...

Unit 127 of the Pajamahadeen reporting for duty. On August 13, Bill Burkett posted approving comments on democrats.com ( http://democrats.com/view.cfm?id=23055 ) about a rabid website that claims President Bush went AWOL while in the National Guard. These remarks were highlighted in an article by Steve Gilbert on the American Thinker website that I want to acknowledge first. ( www.americanthinker.com/comments.php?comments_id=719 ) The AT piece points out a stark contradiction between Burkett's August comments and his claim to have received the Killian forgeries in March (the cattle show story). Near the end of his August comments, Burkett says "I have found no...

Buckhead vs. Dan Rather Internet David Slays Media Goliath September 26, 2004 by Nicholas Stix Say good night, Dan. Dan Rathers journalism career is surely over. When he got snookered by the forged memos peddled by longtime Bush enemy Bill Burkett, a retired Texas Army National Guard lieutenant colonel, and the fraud was exposed by a lousy Internet site, instead of Rather re-investigating the story, he stonewalled, took the offensive, engaged in a “modified, limited hangout (the September 21 New York Post) and attacked his critics. Once he admitted that something wasnt quite right about the documents, he even tried...

If George Orwell could have teamed up with Lewis Carroll, maybe, just maybe, they could have concocted something as down-the-rabbit-hole outlandish as the current CBS wisdom on those four almost universally discredited memos trashing George W. Bush's Air National Guard service. After a week in the media pillory, beginning in the blogosphere and spreading even to the mainstream media bastions of The Washington Post and ABC News, Dan Rather and CBS have suggested, barely, that their documents may be fake. They insist, though, that the content is accurate. "Those who have criticized aspects of our story have never criticized the...

TIME TO JUST SAY IT, by JB WILLIAMS September 22, 2004 - Politicians have successfully divided 290 million individuals into a handful of nice neat little voting blocks easy to pander to. The liberal media (who is rarely fair or balanced about anything), has brain soaked the country into thinking “fair & balanced” reporting is of more value than just plain “truthful” reporting. In the real world, truth is often unbalanced and rarely fair, especially to those who find themselves standing on the wrong side of truth. Occasionally, circumstances demand that we set aside congeniality and get right down to...

Something to Yak About - Gillespie on Phony Docs: 'Was a Crime Committed? I Think So' Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie laid it on the line Wednesday, telling reporters he thinks criminal activity is behind the bogus documents used as the peg for a Sept. 8 CBS News report smearing the president. "Was a crime committed? I believe so," said Gillespie. "Obviously, forgery is involved. But the Texas Legal Code also says it is a third degree felony if one 'makes, presents, or uses any record, document, or thing with knowledge of its falsity and with intent that...

When "60 Minutes" producer Mary Mapes set up contacts between the source who gave her forged documents on President Bush's military record and top Kerry campaign strategist Joe Lockhart, it wasn't the first time she had violated the most basic journalistic rules. Just four years ago, Mapes was accused of concocting a scheme to help secretly pass information between convicted white supremacist Peter Langan and another federal prisoner at a Colorado penitentiary, a violation of federal regulations. In a Nov. 20, 2001, letter to Mapes and her boss, Jeff Fager, J.E. Gunja, warden at the federal penitentiary at Florence, Colorado,...

The jig is up. The game is over. CBS tried to energize the country into voting against President Bush by highlighting forged documents it said would prove Bush's failure to serve honorably in the Texas Air National Guard. The smoking gun went up in smoke. Once caught, CBS and Dan Rather could have responded with a simple apology. Instead, they went ballistic -- and now must pay the price for their defiance. For more than a week, Dan Rather responded like a cornered politician, blaming a vast right-wing conspiracy of "partisan political activists" for unfairly trying to change the subject...

Sticking it to CBS and Kerry The Drudge Report claims that Bush officials want CBS News correspondent Bob Schieffer removed as the moderator for the final (Oct. 13th) Presidential debate. If true, this would appear to be a clever move to keep the story about the CBS forged document scandal in the public eye, while simultaneously punishing CBS for it's biased and shoddy journalism. But characterizing it as merely a “clever move” misses the underlying genius. It would be a BRILLIANT political move, simultaneously skewering CBS and the Kerry campaign. Let's look ahead and see why. There are only three...

Caption & Credit Line (Photo Taken October 30, 2003): The Philly’s More Fun When You Sleep Over™ marketing campaign makes a splash in New York City with a Times Square electronic billboard, located on 43rd Avenue between Broadway and 7th Avenue. The Philadelphia message will be seen on the NBC Astrovision By Panasonic Times Square Screen seven days a week, six times an hour (every 10 minutes) and 96 times a day, through January 31, 2004. Photo courtesy of GPTMC

Daily Ramblings:The Circus Is In Town ... 09/21/2004No choice but to reprise this for Dan Rather. Sing it loud and try not to choke up:Every moment of existence seems like some dirty trick Happiness can come suddenly and leave just as quick Any minute of the day the bubble could burst Try to make things better for someone, sometimes, You just end up making it a thousand times worseThis whole story and its ever-increasing list of names is beginning to resemble a surrealistic Dylan story song. We've got Bill Burkett, Lucy Ramirez, George Conn (con?! - and he is said...

Was channel surfing and Bill Hemmer and Jeff Greenfield were talking about the CBS fiasco. Greenfield couldn't even mention that Lockhart was the Kerry official who was in contact with Burkett. Hemmer then said it was Lockhart and that he would be on CNN during the 9:00 AM hour.

Considering the people involved in RatherGate - Rather, Mapes, Heyward, Burkett, Barnes, Knox, Lockhart, Cleland - don't they comprise a Vast Left Wing Conspiracy?