A NEW CLIMATE OF FEAR IN AMERICA? I hear this stuff, too.

UPDATE: That hasn’t stopped some people from coming out of the closet.

I WAS GOING TO GO BACK over my past few days’ posts on the forgery story and put together a summary of where things stand, but Josh Levin of Slate has already done it. It’s not quite the summary I would have put together, but it’s surprisingly close. However, it omits the Hodges and Staudt issues, which I think are significant. And pajamas are not mentioned.

Read this, too. And, of course, just scroll down a while.

UPDATE: Check out this link roundup from Beldar, too.

ANOTHER UPDATE: And here’s a useful CBS forgery investigation chronology.

HERE’S A FIRSTHAND BLOG-REPORT, WITH PICTURES, from the Vietnam Veterans rally at the Mall in Washington today.

“NO DISPUTING IT — Blogs Are Major Players:” Hugh Hewitt has some favorite paragraphs from this Los Angeles Times piece on blogs and the CBS forgery story.

But my favorite part is what’s not there — there’s no mention of Instapundit (beyond an oblique reference to pajamas). And there shouldn’t be. I took most of Thursday off, with only a passing reference to the forgery story. I stirred myself to blog a bit that evening, but by then the rest of the blogosphere — especially the Power Line guys — had done all the heavy lifting.

For a long time, people kept telling me about the centrality of InstaPundit. I always thought they were exaggerating, but now it’s obvious — I make my contributions, but the blogosphere rolls on regardless. Just as my readers are smarter than I am, so the blogosphere is harder-working than I am. And that’s a very, very good thing. Especially when you look at the credentials of some of the folks blogging on this subject.

UPDATE: A pajama reference here, too! Jonathan Klein is probably already regretting that remark.

CHRIS MUIR’S DAY BY DAY CARTOON is on indefinite hiatus due to family illness. Please wish him well, and hope for his speedy return.

THOMAS CALANDRELLA is photoblogging the Darfur rally. He’s posted a larger gallery of photos here. The photos you see in this post are his, used by permission.

I don’t know how much attention this rally will get in the mainstream press, and I rather doubt that the United Nations crowd reads a lot of weblogs. But I hope that posting this kind of stuff will bring the matter some degree of attention.

DUKAKIS ALERT!

“I smell the same New England genius that I smelled in the Dukakis campaign in 1988,” Mr. Austin added. “Kerry wants to run as a man of the people, and where do they put him for photo opportunities? Snowboarding in Sun Valley, shooting skeet in the Ohio valley, and windsurfing off that great working-class vacation paradise, Nantucket. Democrats – at least Ohio Democrats – play softball and touch football.”

And this is in a piece by R.W. Apple. Is the establishment giving up on Kerry?

UPDATE: Of course, some people think there’s actually a strategy where those photo-ops are involved.

AN EDITORIAL FROM TOMORROW’S INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY:

Could it be that CBS and Rather wanted to take Bush down a peg — especially given the questions about John Kerry’s Vietnam service raised by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth?

And could it be that CBS and Rather let their well-documented political leanings overrule their journalistic sense? Have they become just another hack voice in the political game?

Sadly, the answer seems to be yes. CBS’ bias made it vulnerable to a hoax that fit nicely with the network’s left-leaning culture. . . .

It now appears CBS made a grievous mistake or knowingly relayed false information. If so, what credibility does it have left? Even an on-air correction won’t undo the damage.

CBS would go a lot further in restoring its credibility if it at least checked into the source and authenticity of the memos.

If it’s shown that Democrats or the Kerry campaign are the source — as suggested by comments to the American Spectator by an unnamed Kerry staffer — CBS better say so.

If the documents prove to be forgeries, resignations from Rather and CBS News President Andrew Heyward would be in order — along with a sweeping review of ethical practices at a once-proud news organization.

Ouch.

UPDATE: An observation: “With the New York Times reporting that a key 60 Minutes source has turned on CBS, their earlier decision to ‘stand by their story’ has doubled a bet on a losing hand.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader John Steele emails from Palo Alto:

CBS is full of smart people. It makes no sense to say they’re stalling because they believe these things are genuine. They know what we all know. They are stalling to get their ducks in a row:

They are speaking to lawyers to see if a crime has been committed.

They are speaking to lawyers to see if they can/must/may disclose the source.

They are speaking to lawyers to see if they must make disclosure in their SEC filings.

They are speaking internally to see who will resign.

They are speaking internally to see how they will word their retraction.

All that takes time. That is why CBS hasn’t updated anything on this for too long. That is why their intitial counter-attacks (e.g., the first version of Times New Roman was invented in 1931), which are obviously inadequate, aren’t being buttressed by anything new.

As a news organization and as a publicly traded company, they can’t issue half-truths once they suspect what really happened. They are getting ready to make all their announcements at once.

Within 48 hours, CBS will come clean with a noise rivaling the disappearance of Krakatoa.

Let’s synchronize our watches and see if he’s right. By the way, several readers have emailed to ask if CBS shareholders could file a derivative suit against CBS management, charging them with damaging the company by publishing forgeries. I forwarded one of those emails to Prof. Bainbridge — who actually works in that area of law — and he’s posted an item on this subject. He thinks there’s basically no chance of such an action succeeding.

MORE: Hmm. I don’t quite know what to make of this.

STILL MORE: Craig Henderson emails:

The real reason is that it takes time to create far better, professionally produced unbreakable forgeries, which implicate Karl Rove.

Within 48 hours they will “unearth” them.

At this point, nobody’s going to buy “newly discovered documents.” Well, nobody but Kos, anyway.

THIS ARGUMENT by Edward Mendelson regarding typography and the IBM Selectric Composer would be more impressive if the images were bigger. As it is, they’re barely legible, making comparison difficult.

Of course, if they were bigger, you’d probably see something like this.

UPDATE: The sad thing is that this forgery by John Dvorak is more plausible than the CBS documents.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Paul Boutin is unimpressed with this effort, and says it’s easy to tell the difference — look at the straight vs. curly quotes.

And Charles Johnson says it’s not even close. “Calling this a match is completely ridiculous. A person writing for PC Magazine really ought to know better than to try to pull off such an obvious flimflam.”

MORE: More here:

The probability that any technology in existence in 1972 would be capable of producing a document that is nearly pixel-compatible with Microsoft’s Times New Roman font and the formatting of Microsoft Word, and that such technology was in casual use at the Texas Air National Guard, is so vanishingly small as to be indistinguishable from zero.

If someone had come forward presenting a “lost” painting by Leonardo da Vinci, which used acrylic paints including Cadmium Yellow and Titanium White, art experts would roll of the floor laughing at the clumsiness of the forgery. . . . Yet somehow a document which could not be created by any of the common office technology of 1972 is touted as “authentic”.

(Via Beldar). And — unlike the Mendelson PC Mag piece — he’s got enlargements. As Jim Treacher says, “I know what I can see with my own freaking eyes.”

Which, interestingly, is pretty much what art historian David Nishimura says:

This is, of course, a classic red flag for art historians on the lookout for fakes: not just the anachronistic detail, but that more fundamental anachronism arising from the forger’s inability to recognize (and suppress) the impress of his own time. And when I read attempts to explain how the memos could be genuine, they sound just like a tenaciously deluded owner of a painting, purportedly the work of some great old master, who points to one feature after another that can be paralleled in the master’s oeuvre, while failing to see how they add up to a whole that is entirely modern in conception.

Indeed.

READER DAVID MAYER sends this picture from the New York City rally opposing the Darfur genocide. I hope to have some more later.

THE WHOLE GAY MARRIAGE THING: Occasionally, people want me to blog more on “the issues” and less about stuff like Dan Rather. My advice to them is usually to blog on the issues they think are important, rather than telling me what I ought to be blogging about on my blog. But even I’m suffering from Kerry fatigue these days, and it’s nice to break up these endless Christmas-in-Cambodia/CBS forgery posts with something else. So here goes.

Friday night, when I watched Kaus on Dennis Miller’s show, part of the discussion involved gay marriage. Chrissy Gephardt (Dick’s daughter) was there representing the Stonewall Democrats, and she launched into this whole diatribe about how Bush hates gays and calls them an “abomination.” Miller called her on this, and got her to admit that, actually, Bush hadn’t ever called gays an “abomination.” He also pressed her hard on the gay community’s different treatment of Bill Clinton, whose support for the Defense of Marriage Act gets a pass.

But he didn’t ask the killer question. The killer question would have been: “What is John Kerry’s position on gay marriage?”

Now, of course, any question beginning “what is John Kerry’s position. . .” is a tough one. But — correct me if I’m wrong here — the only real difference between Kerry and Bush is that Bush has offered vague support to the certain-to-fail Federal Marriage Amendment. But it’s, er, certain to fail. Now that’s a difference, I guess. But it’s not a huge one, and to me it doesn’t seem to be a big enough difference to justify the vitriol. (Kerry’s been, maybe, more supportive on civil unions, but I wouldn’t take that to the bank.)

I support gay marriage, of course, though I’d be lying if I said it was as important to me as it is to, say, Andrew Sullivan. But if you look at the polls, it’s opposed about 2-1 by voters. What that means is that you’re not likely to see much difference between the parties until somebody thinks they can pick up enough votes to make a difference.

I think that gay marriage is good for everyone. Marriage is a good thing, and I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be just as good a thing for gay people as for straight people. Judging from the gay couples I know, it would be a good thing — and I’m entirely at a loss to understand why people think gay marriage somehow undermines straight marriage. But to get there, you need to make that case, not just accuse opponents of being closedminded-biblethumping-bigotsoftheredneckreligiousright. (Andrew Sullivan made some of these positive arguments quite well in Virtually Normal, but I don’t think the tone on his blog has been as constructive of late.)

Personally, I agree with the guy who told Julian Sanchez that it’s a generational thing. As I’ve mentioned before, attitudes are changing fast, even in Dayton, Tennessee, best known for the Scopes Trial. And my law students seem to expect a change. I’m not sure that name-calling will accelerate this process, though.

I’m no expert political strategist, but it strikes me as a mistake for gay-marriage advocates to take the Bush-bashing Gephardt position. First, with the polls as they are, attacking Bush on gay marriage may solidify the Democratic base, but it probably costs swing voters, at least in the short term. Second, that sort of thing can only serve to alienate Republicans, even those who are supportive, or at least not opposed to, gay marriage. Given that right now it seems likely that we’ll see a Republican Congress, and probably a Republican White House, in the coming years, that’s probably poor planning, at least if you want actual change and not just an interest-group rallying cry.

Finally, in all of this I’m reminded of something one of the New Haven black panthers said on a radio show I produced back when I was producing radio shows. Looking back at their failures in 1970, he remarked: “Revolution is a process, not an event. It’s not enough to agitate, you’ve got to inform and educate. And they didn’t do that.” It’s possible to package gay marriage as a move toward traditional values and away from 1970s style hedonism (not that there’s anything wrong with that). But again, you have to make the case, not call names, if you want to win people over.

So there you are. You want blogging on Bush’s vs. Kerry’s healthcare plans , you’ll have to go somewhere else.

UPDATE: William Kelly objects that Bush’s support for the Federal Marriage Amendment isn’t “vague.” He’s right. A better term would be “lukewarm.” He’s said he’s for it, but he hasn’t exactly pushed it. Kind of like, to pick one of my issues, his support for a renewal of the Assault Weapons Ban, which was equally pro forma. In both cases, I think he’s wrong, and he’s pandering — to different constituencies, of course — but it’s awfully weak pandering, and thus not worth getting too excited about.

Meanwhile, reader Madhu Dahiya offers a different perspective:

I like your blog ‘as is’, but it is nice when you blog on other topics such as gay marriage. I don’t buy the argument that gay marriage undermines heterosexual marriage at all. I think the problem with heterosexual marriage is, uh, heterosexuals. If the opponents of gay marriage were serious about the challenges to straight marriage, then there would be tax credits for Match.com and Eight Minute Dating (and marriage counseling). There would be no mention of sports and steroids in any state of the union speech. Instead, the president would give a stern talking to those men, and women (and you know who you are), WHO NEVER CALL YOU BACK. I mean, you want to move the numbers towards the Republicans in the single, over thirty over educated female-type bracket? Well, there you go. There’s an issue that should poll just nicely, thank you very much.

This certainly makes me glad I’m not single anymore. . . .

[LATER: When they don’t call, it’s because they’re just not that into you.]

MORE: John Kerry’s position:

Once one of 14 Democratic senators to oppose the Defence of Marriage Act, Mr Kerry now favours outlawing all marriages except those between a man and a woman. “I’m against gay marriage,” he said. “Everybody knows that.”

Apparently not.

STILL MORE: Harvard law professor Bill Stuntz emails:

Your post on gay marriage is thoughtful and wise. I write to add a thought about the behavior of all those alleged bigots on the other side.

It seems to me that the gay marriage debate today is the price we pay for Roe v. Wade a generation ago. Roe sent a message to a sizeable fraction of Americans, and the message was: your views don’t count. Not “you lose,” but “you don’t even get to make an argument.” I think the rush to constitutionalize marriage is very, very bad in a host of ways and on a host of levels, but it’s hard to criticize the religious right for reaching for the weapons the other side used to crush them. Like you, I assume the marriage amendment is going nowhere. Maybe, once that happens, we can actually have a political debate (not a legal argument) that produces compromise and progress instead of polarization and regress. It’d be a nice change.

Keep up the good work. You’re terrific.

Oh, and re Bush and Kerry: Has anyone noticed that each of these guys comes from a state his party can’t possibly lose? Presidential candidates are career politicians, and they learn their trade running for office in their home states. Bush and Kerry both learned to appeal to very one-sided electorates. Is it any wonder that neither is very good at appealing to the other side? The mystery is why both parties behaved this way. The biggest political talents are generally to be found in swing states, or states that lean the other way: Think Rudy Giuliani in New York, or Arnold Schwarzenegger in California. Those guys are politically dead if they can’t talk persuasively to Democrats. Just like John Edwards could never have won in North Carolina if he couldn’t speak to Republicans. (If the ticket were reversed, I bet the Democrats would be ahead now.) Let’s hope we swing voters get a different and better set of choices in ’08.

I think that Texas was competitive until pretty recently, but the point holds. Swing states do seem to punch above their weight — but I think the apparatus of national parties makes people from safe states stronger internal contenders for a variety of fairly obvious reasons. On the rest — well: I’m one of the relatively few constitutional law professors who believes that Roe was properly decided, though the rationale needs to be understood in terms of limits to legitimate government power rather than affirmative individual rights. (I have a proof for this, but it will not fit in the margin.) Nonetheless, I think the basic point holds. Without Roe we would have had widespread legal abortion via legislation, something that was already well underway. It might have taken a bit longer, but as a practical matter, it might have been as available as it is now, given the many logistical hurdles in the path of legal abortion in many localities.

Gay marriage is different, but I do think that it would be much better obtained through political than judicial means. I might feel differently if I were gay, and anxious to get married, but of course that cuts both ways.

This is one of those hot-button issues that I don’t get. Perhaps it’s because I lack fire, but the strong feelings aroused by gay marriage escape me. Still, there’s no doubt that many people dislike the idea, do so intensely, and resent efforts to achieve gay marriage without taking their views into account. In a democratic system like ours, their views do matter, one way or another, and I think it’s better to try to persuade them. Others, of course, may disagree.

MORE: Andrew Sullivan has posted a nice response. Basically, he sees Bush as a cynical manipulator of homophobia. I see Bush as a beleaguered guy trying to keep his coalition together to fight a war, doing the bare minimum on this front to get by. Which of us is right? Your call.

C-SPAN will be showing Vietnam Vets for the Truth (NOT to be confused with the Swift Boat guys) at 2. Live video here.

HEH: Sadly, this may be close to the truth. And there’s this: “You know, I think I figured out why this thing is so fascinating to me, and to so many other people. (Beyond how hilarious it is, of course.) It’s because, even if I don’t know exactly how I feel about Iraq or Bush vs. Kerry or any of that, I know what I can see with my own freaking eyes.”

And this image, illustrating that point, is an animated file created by Charles Johnson, which alternates between the CBS version and what he typed straight into Microsoft Word using the defaults. The only differences appear to be the result of faxing and copying.

And Hugh Hewitt has a Ra^therGate roundup that is very useful, pulling together the many different threads and contradictions in one place.

UPDATE: Dan Rather may want to ponder this observation.

ALARMING NEWS is reporting from the American Film Renaissance festival. Evan Coyne Maloney’s film, Brainwashing 101, gets a good review (you can see it online here.)

I make a (very brief) appearance, with comments actually shot for Evan’s forthcoming longer film. The gist: In movies like Animal House, it’s uptight conservatives like Dean Wormer who are coming down on students; nowadays the Dean Wormers are on the left, but not much else has changed.

VIRGINIA POSTREL’S The Substance of Style is now out in paperback.

MORE TROUBLE FOR DAN RATHER AND CBS:

DALLAS — New information casts additional doubts about the authenticity of the memos purportedly written concerning President Bush by a former superior officer in the Texas Air National Guard in the 1970s, as Dan Rather and CBS News doggedly stuck to their guns defending the documents.

“They’re forged as hell,” said Earl W. Lively, 76, who during the era in question was director of Texas Air National Guard operations in Austin.

Ouch.

TOM MAGUIRE continues to be on a roll. So does Ed Morrissey. Just keep scrolling. And the Power Line guys remain Ra^therGate Central, of course, so keep checking them out, too.

LOOKS LIKE IVAN is set to bullseye Grand Cayman. When I was last there, our dive operator Peter Milburn — a longtime Caymanian who taught Peter Benchley how to scuba dive — pointed to all the development on the beach and said “Next big hurricane, it’ll all be gone.” He said they were building too close to the beach and cutting corners on protection. The only good news is that the water around Grand Cayman is so deep (3000-5000 feet until a few hundred yards from shore, most places) that the storm surge won’t build up as much as it will elsewhere. That’s just as well, given that the highest place on the island is probably only 20 feet above sea level. Still the last hurricane (Michelle) really tore up the reef — which is probably the best in the Western Hemisphere — and this is likely to do even more damage.

DON’T TRUST CONTENT FROM SIXTY MINUTES: Reader Gail Keasling sends this link to the abstract of a Washington Post report from April 13, 1999, about CBS presenting a story involving fake documents and phony witnesses. I looked up the whole thing, and here’s a bit more:

For the second time in four months, CBS’s “60 Minutes” has made an on-air apology regarding a report about drug smuggling. This time it’s over a memo that turned out to be bogus.

Correspondent Lesley Stahl delivered the apology on Sunday’s broadcast, as part of a settlement with a customs official who had sued the newsmagazine.

In December, “60 Minutes” founder Don Hewitt apologized on-air for a June 1, 1997, story based on a British documentary about smugglers who swallowed heroin in latex gloves to get past authorities. An investigative panel later determined that the documentary producers had faked locations and paid actors to portray drug couriers.

In Sunday’s apology, Stahl emphasized that the April 20, 1997, segment accurately reported on the flow of illegal drugs across the U.S.-Mexico border at San Diego.

But that report, which was presented by Mike Wallace, cited a memo said to be written by Rudy Camacho, the San Diego district director of the Customs Service, calling for customs agents to quickly process trucks owned by a company linked to Mexican drug cartels.

The Customs Service in Washington investigated and found the memo to be fake, and that no preferential treatment was offered, Stahl said. “60 Minutes” had already reported in February 1998 that the memo was declared bogus. But Camacho sued; the on-air apology was part of an “amicable settlement” between him and CBS News, a “60 Minutes” spokesman said.

“We have concluded that we were deceived, and ultimately so were you, our viewers,” Stahl said. “Under the circumstances, we regret that any reference to that memo or to Mr. Camacho’s connection with it was included in our original report and apologize for any harm to Mr. Camacho’s professional reputation and any distress caused to him and his family.”

So how come the apology wasn’t given by Wallace? The “60 Minutes” rep says Wallace was in California last Thursday and Friday on a story.

I guess Dan Rather’s behavior is in character, then.

HERE ARE SOME 9/11 PHOTOS taken by my cousin-in-law Brad Rubenstein. More about them, along with other, more cheerful, photos, on his blog.

DON’T FORGET TOMORROW’S RALLY IN NEW YORK CITY AGAINST THE DARFUR GENOCIDE: I’m hoping to have a few pictures to post tomorrow night.

BILL AT INDCJOURNAL earlier reported that the Boston Globe misquoted the statement of forensic expert Philip Bouffard. [LATER: Maybe “deceptively presented” is better?] He has posted the results of a telephone interview with Bouffard, where Bouffard says they misrepresent his conclusions, suggesting that the documents may be genuine when he didn’t say that, and reports that he’s “pissed.”

Now Bill reports that CBS is repeating the Globe misquote as part of its efforts to defend its own position. Bill has posted the Globe ombudsman’s address and suggests that you contact her.

UPDATE: I don’t know what they said on the air, but CBS is amazingly sloppy on their website, where they get Bouffard’s name wrong, calling him “Phillip Broussard” — even though they’re referencing the Globe story which, despite misquoting Bouffard, at least gets his name right. CBS reports: “Saturday’s issue of the Boston Globe reports that one document expert, Phillip Broussard, who had expressed suspicions about the documents, said ‘he now believes the documents could have been prepared on an IBM Selectric Composer typewriter available at the time.'”

Bear in mind that to be quoting from the Globe article they must have had it in front of them, and they still got the name wrong. (Even adding an extra “l” to the first name.) Sheesh. Get these guys some pajamas, fast!

ANOTHER UPDATE: David Hogberg saw the broadcast and reports. They seem to have gotten the name wrong on the air, too. [LATER: Hogberg updates and says he’s not sure what they said on the air — he checked the CBS website for the name. Bad move, David!]

Meanwhile, Brian Carnell notes that although Dan Rather last night said that CBS’s expert authenticated all the documents, the Los Angeles Times says that he only looked at one.

MORE: I notice that some commenters over at INDCJournal think that the Big Media is trying to bury this story. I actually don’t think so. I was interviewed today by a journalist for a major paper who’s doing a story, and it’s getting big play in the latest Weekly Standard. Plus, as a scroll down will demonstrate, it’s getting a lot of major-media coverage already.

And the thing is, even if CBS never admits that the documents are forged and just lets the story die, it’s suffered a crippling blow. Sure the diehard Bush-haters will still listen. But if CBS becomes known as the broadcast equivalent of the Democratic Underground (which seems about right, lately), its ability to affect events goes way down.

With all this noise and fury, and lost credibility, their ability to initiate some sort of last-minute anti-Bush scandal and make it work is gone. (Even people who might have been persuaded have by now, as several readers email, gone numb from the constant onslaughts of “Bush lied” over the past years). And the ability of the Big Media to maintain preference falsification by presenting a unified message is already long gone. Those costs exist regardless of whether Rather fesses up to either forgery or carelessness.

STILL MORE: A reader offers this take on the Bouffard/Broussard bellyflop:

In addition to the unnamed experts who originally verified the documents, CBS has now added confirmation from a source whose name they don’t know.

Heh.

MORE STILL: A journalist reader offers this speculation:

I’m wondering if anyone is going to do to Dan Rather what they did to Stephen Glass of “Shattered Glass” fame- suggest that it’s unlikely that this is the first time he “cooked” a story. Maybe rob him of his legacy, somewhat? If anyone wanted to do the fact-checking on old Rather stories that seemed to be “too good”. . . .

I think it’s kind of like lifeboat ethics at this point, for the MSM (print and network news). The little market-share pie that they’re dividing is ever-shrinking as their readership ages and dies off, the young news junkies go for cable news and the internet, and now the last few haggard old survivors-desperate and hungry, now ganging up on the weakest guy (CBS) as the picture grows more bleak.

That seems a bit dramatic, but not entirely implausible. In fact, I’ll have a related post tomorrow.

THIS DAN RATHER INTERVIEW is as genuine as the Bush National Guard documents! As reliable as a Boston Globe photo essay on prison abuse in Iraq! As honest as an AP report of booing crowds!

OK, it’s probably more truthful than those. But it’s still a satire. And it’s funny.

UPDATE: Link went bad at the other end. Jeff Goldstein has fixed it, and the new link above works now.

JOURNALISTIC MALPRACTICE: Elliot Minor of the Associated Press has a story on veterans’ reactions to the CBS National Guard documents — and it makes no mention of the likelihood, or even the claim, that they’re fraudulent.

Forget editors — do these guys have lawyers?

UPDATE: A reader points to a sentence saying that “questions have been raised” about the documents’ authenticity. Did I miss that, or was it added later? Not sure, but it’s hardly adequate to describe the importance of the debate.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader sends a link to this earlier version, which doesn’t mention the problems (except in the headline, which I don’t think came from AP) but which is, overall, much more sympathetic to Bush than the one linked above.

NEW TIME POLL: “Last week’s seismic voter shift to George W. Bush showed no signs of dwindling in this week’s Time Poll. Bush continues to lead Democratic challenger John Kerry among likely voters by double digits, 52% – 41%, in the three way race, with Nader at 3%, the same as last week.”

UPDATE: Has Dan Rather re-elected Bush? Look at how the TradeSports market moved for Bush on Friday after Ra^therGate broke.