The Scrapbook notes a correction in the January 6 New York Times:

An obituary of the innovative comic-page illustrator Will Eisner yesterday included an imprecise comparison in some copies between his character the Spirit and others, including Batman. Unlike Superman and some other heroes of the comics, Batman relied on intelligence and skill, not supernatural powers.

Wrong again! Superman’s powers were not “supernatural.” They were completely “natural”–he’s just an alien from another planet who reacts differently to our sun. Duh!

Galley Hero Charles Johnson has written in with his thoughts on the mysterious uncrumpled version of the CBS memos:

All I can say is that the crumpling was almost certainly done to make the document appear more aged. Apart from that, it’s hard to draw conclusions about when or why it was done. But it does seem that at one time CBS must have had more than one version of this document.

He also adds that the crumpled version has an address blacked out. Who did that, and when?

Again, I’m sure this is innocuous, but still . . .

I take back everything I’ve ever said about Mickey Kaus, he rocks very, very hard.

My longer story on the CBS Report is up now.

I don’t see anyone linking to the source of the Blogging-for-Buck story about Daily Kos (I like to think of him as the leftist Tony Little). So here’s his defense of himself, which is, I think, quite instructive. Try this quote:

So what’s going on? Zephyr is obsessed with imposing journalistic standards on the blogosphere. We can debate the merits of this issue, and good points can be made on both sides (I think it’s a dumb idea). But what Zephyr did, and which I find unconscionable, is that she took the Armstrong Williams issue, and made up shit about our involvement with the Dean campaign to score points.

I’m not sure how he gets to Armstrong Williams–Armstrong was getting funneled tax-payer money he never should have gotten in the first place and never disclosed anything; Kos was getting private money and he did make a fig-leaf disclosure (albeit only for one of his clients). But read Kos’s post and see what sort of strokes he’s working in.

(Bonus Kos note: In this post Kos writes, “it’s not every day that I link to the so-called-liberal New Republic, but I like Ryan Lizza (he should write for TAP!).” I’m sure Lizza loves that endorsement.

Galley Reader John Schulien sends in a long email with a link to this page. The short version: Last September, the CBS memos appeared to have been Xeroxes of crumpled paper. (See Charles Johnson here.) The version of the memos reproduced in the CBS report seem to be “uncrumpled.” What gives?

Here’s the long version from Schulien:

Back in September Charles Johnson documented something interesting–that the memos appeared to have been crumpled out and uncrumpled prior to scanning. . . . This evidence shows up when you drop the PDFs into Photoshop, turn the

contrast way up, and the brightness down.

When the final report came out, I took the time to compare the versions of the documents in the appendix with the documents as they were originally released by CBS. I found something very interesting. If you carefully compare, the evidence of the crumpling and uncrumpling is gone in the version released in the final report. (2B.pdf) Not only are the residual crumple marks gone, but the distortion caused by the crumpling is gone from the letters and words as well.

In the spirit of Charles Johnson’s animated GIF, I prepared a flashing GIF that goes back and forth between one of the original documents as released by CBS (with the address blacked over), and the new version just released (lower resolution but less distorted.)

If you look at the two images as they cycle, it is easy to pick out areas where the crumpling distorted the text in the original document, and how the newly released document is undistorted.

This raises the question–what is CBS doing with both versions of the document?

There’s probably a simple explanation to all of this, but I’d be interested in hearing it nonetheless. After all, these are the guys who changed the cut-copy permissions on their report’s PDF. Charles, anyone, thoughts?

Dr. Joseph Newcomer, the typesetting expert who provided the first definitive debunking of the fake CBS documents, has come out with a devastating response to the Columbia Journalism Review.

Not to be missed.

(He also responds in great detail to David Hailey. Just as devastating; not as much fun.)

Update, 5:09 p.m.: Those links are fixed now, sorry about that. Also, CJR’s Corey Pein has his own blog, will he respond to Newcomer’s dismantling?

National Review has an excellent interview with Andrew Breitbart, whose book, Hollywoood, Interrupted, is flat-out fantastic.

The interview gives you a good idea of what funny, smart guy Breitbart is.