God, Guns and...Well, really, just God & Guns

Via A Spork in the Drawer:

Coded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the United States military by a Michigan company, an ABC News investigation has found.
[...]

Trijicon confirmed to ABCNews.com that it adds the biblical codes to the sights sold to the U.S. military. Tom Munson, director of sales and marketing for Trijicon, which is based in Wixom, Michigan, said the inscriptions "have always been there" and said there was nothing wrong or illegal with adding them. Munson said the issue was being raised by a group that is "not Christian."

[...]

A photo on a Department of Defense Web site shows Iraqi soldiers being trained by U.S. troops with a rifle equipped with the bible-coded sights.

"It's wrong, it violates the Constitution, it violates a number of federal laws," said Michael "Mikey" Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an advocacy group that seeks to preserve the separation of church and state in the military.

And, Spork reminds us why this should not be surprising.
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The Dan Rather Story - It Ain't What You Might Think

If you have a free moment, pop on over to this story at Media Matters. It's on "Rathergate" and it's sure to cause one or more of our local conservative friends (and you know who you are) to blow a few gaskets.

Some choice excerpts. Eric Boehlert starts by asking rhetorically who's more upset by Dan Rather's recent statements about the suit he filed:

Was it executives at CBS News who now face the prospect of reliving one of the network's darkest chapters via endless depositions from a plaintiff who says he won't accept a cash settlement?

Or was it right-wing bloggers, some of whom likely punched their TV sets in frustration watching Rather go on national television and claim, correctly, that nobody has ever proven that the memos he used in his report were fake, and pointing out that the basic facts of the Texas Air National Guard story -- that Bush walked away from his military commitment during the Vietnam War for months at a time--are still not in dispute.

Two things that lotsa folks believe to be true, in fact aren't.

1. The Killian Memos were proven to be forgeries - they weren't.
2. The "Bush skipped out of his Air National Guard duty" story is bogus - it isn't.

Boehlert links to this mediamatters story that itself links to the report from the commission set up to investigate "Rathergate" and quotes the executive summary as saying that the panel:

"identified a number of issues that raise serious questions about the authenticity of the documents and their content," it "has not been able to conclude with absolute certainty whether the ... documents are authentic or forgeries."

So while there are serious questions about the authenticity of the documents, the commission (which included former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, by the way) wasn't able to prove they were forged.

Point 1.

Point 2 - Boehlert, after some needed criticising of the media's coverage of the story sets up his ending:

And, oh yeah, how do I know the story about Bush evading his military service is true even though bloggers and the mainstream media declared, in the wake of Memogate, that it was not? It's easy. Using Bush's own military records, I'll list 10 glaring discrepancies regarding his fraudulent military service, none of which is based on the disputed memos that were aired by CBS News in 2004. And yes, I'm pretty sure all 10 discrepancies will come as news flashes to the same journalists who mocked Rather last week for having the temerity to suggest his National Guard report was true. [emphasis in original]

Go read them - they're very enlightening.

While you're at it, check out this site and this site and definitely this site.

The story is true - Dan Rather botched it.