Not relevant? Take a look at this.

So what’s CBS’s spin now?

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=related:www.fec.gov/info/subj98.htm

Again, I’m not a document forensic person, but measuring the displacements from center, and determining that the displacements are anything other than one-fifth of an ‘m,’ would mean those documents are computer produced.

Centering goes deeper than Buckland’s explanatory post. Buckland is correct that proportional font requires extra steps; but it goes further.

The width of characters on the typewriter is variable, but not infinitely variable. It went in steps with the ‘m’ the widest and the ‘i’ the narrowest. I don’t recall the name that was used then but it was something like an ‘m’ had five whatever they were called, and an ‘i’ one.

Spacing backwards from the middle of a line was by full spaces or half-spaces. Simply backspacing from the center would leave the line “approximately” centered. It would be within a half-space or so, but would not be a fraction of a character such as 1/24th. Back then, that was ‘good enough.’ It was possible to put the carriage in ‘free’ mode and measure, but that was extremely difficult to get right as well.

These documents are ‘exactly’ centered, line after line for the three line headers. Modern computers and word processors don’t use character widths to center the line. Nor do they use fractions of characters. They use measurements such as ‘twips,’ or pixels. These are much finer in resolution, down to 1/1440th of an inch. The lines cannot be centered to that fine a resolution without extreme effort while ‘free-floating’ the carriage.

While I have not seen a study by the experts on this, relative to these documents, but it would not surprise me that these headers literally cannot be reproduced on any typewriter at all.

There is also the question of patience and stamina.

One thing about it, they are old enough to remember Watergate.

Paul Volcker is 76 years old and Thornburg is presumably in that same age grouping himself. And what have we heard from Volcker so far, as compared to what we’ve heard from Claudia Rossett for example? And what are we likely to hear? Will there be the power of subpoena available to either Thornburg or Volcker? (Negative, I believe, in both cases, and it’s difficult to overstate the power that is lacking when subpoenas are not available to investigators.)

Id est, America is being hoodwinked and bitch slapped by CBS. These are the American public’s broadcast airwaves, not the airwaves of the DNC/CBS political committee.

Too, we’re simply asking for an investigation, not for a kangaroo court and a summary judgement by decree. But we’re asking for a real investigation with real investigative powers, including the power of subpoena and attendant legal reviews and supports. That’s the only thing that will get the job done, and both CBS and the U.N. know this.

If Rather/CBS, Mapes, et al are entirely innocent, then a thorough and properly supported investigation will reveal precisely that. In other words they should welcome such an investigation, not stonewall against it.

intricate knowledge of beef cuts is making a big comeback with the younger foodie generation

There is hope!

Centering with a typewriter is a trivial task with fixed width fonts. With a proportional font (Times New Roman in these memos) it is a real pain that can’t be done easily.

With a fixed width it’s just a matter of going to the center of the page and backspacing once for every 2 characters in the header. I tend to think that they just used the tab to get the the center of the page.

With a proportional font you have to know how wide each character is. About the only way to center with proportional fonts was to type the header on a scrap sheet, carefully measure the header, find the center and space back half the size of the header. Not at all a trivial task.

BTW, I thought the exact centering of the headers was the real giveaway on the memos, much more unusual than the ‘th’. In grad school I did my thesis in a proportional font so it would look good, but each and every title was done in a fixed width font because the centering was just such a pain.

For instance, that Karl Rove successfully sued Dick Thornburgh for expenses+damages/costs in money owed him from Thornburgh’s 1991 gubernatorial campaign.

As far as Baccardi — he’s AP. The AP has been found to be faulty in two stories that I am aware of in the last two weeks. One involving a fake Navy SEAL. The Navy SEAL story they made clear they were not going to go back and ask the man because he seemed so “genuine” and they believed him. Story over –NOT. AuthentiSEAL finally got a retraction out of AP, after two weeks!