No Comment

Surprisingly, this is one question that Google can’t answer reliably, it seems.

Why do I ask?

Well, first off, McCain himself is notoriously short at a pixie-ish 5′ 7″ tall. But the selection of Palin is so baffling that I’m looking for any plausible reason why McCain would have chosen her for VP, since she’s not only manifestly unqualified, but is also obviously completely uninterested in national issues, and laden with a whole lot of very problematic baggage in her personal and political history.

Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney are reported (neither at particularly reliable websites) to be 6′ 2″, and Joe Lieberman is reported to be 5′ 9″ tall. I can’t seem to find any information about how tall Tom Ridge is.

But Palin is said to be just over 5′ tall.

So, that must be why she was chosen — she was the only candidate who was shorter than McCain himself.

John McCain said yesterday in comments that were widely excerpted in news reports that I saw:

It’s time for us to take off our Republican hats and put on our American hats.

(or something to that effect)

This seems to me to imply that while Republicans are being Republicans, they don’t have the interests of the country as a whole foremost in their minds. This would be an admission on McCain’s part that would confirm what I’ve believed about the Republican party at least since the impeachment debacle.

So, if her daughter is really five months pregnant now, that means it’s virtually impossible for the daughter to have been the mother of Trig Palin (the child with Down Syndrome born just over 5 months ago).

OK, so the rumors about Palin’s fake pregnancy are scotched, but there are still plenty of details about the actual chain of events of the last few hours leading up to the birth of Palin’s last child that would make me question a parent’s judgment:

1. When she began leaking amniotic fluid at 4am, she decided to go ahead and deliver the address she was scheduled to deliver the next day to a Texas audience
2. Rather than going directly to a Dallas medical center for care immediately after the address, she instead went to the airport, to board a plane for an 8-hour flight back to Alaska.
3. Once in Alaska, rather than availing herself of one of the large medical centers in Anchorage, she instead chose to travel back to Wasilla, an hour away, to deliver the child in the small local hospital in her home town.

Now, the weirdness of these decisions in regard to the health and safety of the baby (who was one month premature) is bad enough in the context of a coverup — in that case, at least, it would be plausible that they’d decided to take these risks in order to maintain the coverup. But if the Governor were the actual mother, what in the hell was she thinking by endangering the life of a child that she already knew faced lots of hurdles in terms of health?

Even leaving aside the optics of a pro-choice, anti-sex ed. mother having a child get pregnant out of wedlock, I can’t see how the refutation of the earlier rumor gets her out of hot water on the question of judgment. She looks more and more to me like the kind of caricature career mother that Democrats are so often accused by Republicans of being — it was more important to her to deliver that political speech in Texas than it was to make sure her baby was born in the safest possible and least risky environment.

How can the Palin choice attract mothers and women when she appears to be such a bad one? At the very least, it calls into question her judgment under pressure.

Let’s see.

Republicans are claiming that Sarah Palin’s executive experience trumps Obama’s legislative experience. It should be possible, then, to figure out approximately how many years of legislative experience equal a year of executive experience.

Obama has been a legislator since 1997, so that’s 11 years.

Palin’s been a governor for 2 years.

So, 2 years of executive experience is greater than 11 years of legislative service.

That would be, where X is a year of executive experience and Y a year of leglslative experience:

2X > 11Y

That reduces to:

X > 6.5Y

So, this means that McCain, with 26 years of legislative experience, has the equivalent of 4 years of executive experience, so that means Palin has fully HALF the experience of McCain.

Joe Biden, on the other hand, has 35 years of legislative experience, which would be the equivalent of slightly less than 5.5 years of executive experience.

This would mean that the Republicans have a total of 6 years of executive experience, and the Democrats 7.5.

Hmm. Something can’t be right here.

Mathematically, the equation is not that Palin has the same experience as Obama, but that she has more experience. That means that all of the Senators’ numbers are less than the calculated values.

Say the multiplier is 8 (i.e., Palin’s experience would be equivalent to 16 years in the legislature). In that case, the numbers would be like this:

Er, um, well, that can’t possibly be right.

In fact, there is no way to say that Palin’s executive experience trumps Obama’s legislative experience without also demonstrating that the Obama/Biden team has more experience between them than the McCain/Palin team.

Unless, of course, you throw in POW years as equivalent to executive experience.

How much you wanna bet some Republican moron will suggest exactly that?

Robert Cringely posts an article today on the subject of Google’s $4.6 billion offer to buy the 700MHz wireless spectrum. In the course of writing about this, he incidentally makes an interesting assertion:

Bill Gates likes to talk about how fragile is Microsoft’s supposed monopoly and how it could disappear in a very short period of time. Well Microsoft is a Pyramid of Giza compared to Google, whose success is dependent on us not changing our favorite search engine.

Now, I’m not sure that’s Google’s only advantage — they have their fingers in a lot of pies, not least of which is ad delivery. But I’m more interested in the question of whether Google is or is not the best search engine. I did some testing recently, motivated by a James Fallows article about a study of search engines financed by Dogpile.com (a search engine aggregator). The conclusion reached by the study was that no individual search engine is providing complete results, so you need a search engine aggregator to get the full picture.

I don’t think the conclusions are correct, because the study’s methodology was based on unique URLs, rather than testing whether or not the results were useful to a human being or not. I sent the following email to Fallows (the spreadsheet referred to in the text is here — sorry about the awful MS-generated HTML, as I didn’t have the time to redo it properly).

There’s a couple of big problems with the story:

1. if you run a search on Google, Yahoo, Ask and Live and then run the same search on Dogpile, the Dogpile results do not actually replicate what shows up in the search engines it’s claiming to include.
2. Dogpile returns a lot of bogus search results.

Attached is a spreadsheet that tallies up what’s going on for “antiquarian music,” a search term of interest to a client of mine (I am their webmaster, programmer and IT support person). What it shows:

1. Eight of the 20 results on Dogpile’s first page are IRRELEVANT to the sought-after results. All 10 of the results on the first page of the four search engines are relevant (though not all equally so).
2. None of the Ask.com results are included, despite the fact that Dogpile’s search page claims that it’s searching Ask.com.

Now, about the individual search results:

Google is by far the most relevant. While it doubles up for two sites, all the other results are relevant, being legitimate antiquarian music dealers. The only exception is the last entry from the Ex Libris mailing list (antiquarian librarians), which is actually an announcement of a catalog the dealer listed #9, so if #9 is relevant, I think that one is, too — it certainly gives you information directing you to an antiquarian music dealer.

Yahoo includes two links to Harvard Library pages that are not useful (they aren’t selling anything), as well as a link to Theodore Front and Schott, both of whom are music publishers/distributors that no longer sell any antiquarian music materials. It also includes the Antiquarian Funks, a Dutch musical group, which obviously doesn’t belong, though it takes more than simple computer knowledge to understand that (though Google seems smart enough to figure it out!).

Ask.com adds Katzbichler, a music antiquarian in Munich who doesn’t appear in the top 10 results of others, but also includes a worthless link to antiquarian music books on toplivemusic.com, which has nothing at all on it that is relevant to the search. It also gives top billing to Schott, who really offers no significant antiquarian music materials. It also includes a link to a republication of the Open Directory’s (DMoz.org) listing for antiquarian music. These listings are republished all over the net and basically just replicate links already found in the main listings.

Live.com also includes the Schott link, as well as two links to the American Antiquarian Society’s page on sheet music. This may or may not be relevant, but that would depend on the individual user. I doubt someone looking for antiquarian sheet music would fail to leave out the term “sheet music” in a search, and someone looking for antiquarian music dealers would not be helped by these links. It also includes the Antiquarian Funks and the unhelpful open directory category listing.

So, in short, for this particular search:

1. Dogpile
   a. misrepresents the results (it doesn’t include what it says it does).
   b. Dogpile does a worse job than any of the individual search engines in providing useful links.
2. Of the individual search engines, Google provides clearly superior results, as it filters out several links that don’t belong (e.g., Schott, Theodore Front, Antiquarian Funks), though how Google knows such complex information is tough to say.

So, for this particular search, the conclusions of the cited study do not apply. I would expect that there are a number of such searches for which that is the case.

I cannot tell from the description of methodology what could cause this kind of discrepancy, but I am bothered by this on p. 11 of the PDF about the study:

When the display URL on one engine exactly matched the display URL from one or more engines of the other engines a duplicate match was recorded for that keyword.

The problem with that is that it doesn’t distinguish equivalent links that could differ. A deep-linked page might be just as useful to a searcher as a link to the home page of an entire website — this would depend on the type of website and the type of search. In the case of my spreadsheet, I counted all links to any of the websites as equivalent, no matter which page was linked, because for this particular search, that’s the way a human being would treat them.

So, I would say that this emphasis on unique URLs is going to skew the results for certain classes of websites and for certain types of searches. Yes, a search that takes you to a specific article on the Washington Post’s website is going to be much more helpful than a link to the paper’s home page, but for searches like my example, that’s just not the case.

Secondly, the emphasis on unique URLs would also not reflect different methods of the different search engines in eliminating duplicates. There can be more than one path to the same information, and if all the search engines do not choose the same path, those URLs would be counted by the study mechanism as different, rather than providing the exact same information.

This study was designed in a way that was guaranteed to make a meta search engine like Dogpile appear to be better. But that is simply not true because of the methodology used — it is a statistical ghost produced by over-reliance on computer-based determination of URL identity, instead of evaluating from a human being’s point of view for equivalent value in different URLs.

SCOTUSBlog has examined the voting patterns of the Supreme Court Justices in the last term and has some interesting statistics on the degree in which the Justices agree with each other. I’ve made a graphical representation of the percentages of times justices agree in full, in part or in the judgment. There are a couple of threshold values, 90% and 85% — the former tends to show close associations, while the latter weaker groupings. There are two main groups, right and left.

The right-leaning group has Rehnquist at its center, overlapping with Kennedy, O’Connor and Scalia, and with Thomas almost as strongly connected to Rehnquist (89%). Within that group, Kennedy agreed with O’Connor 87% of the time, and 85% of the time with both Thomas and Scalia. O’Connor and Thomas agreed only 78% of the time, though.

The left-leaning group consists of a very strong core group of Souter, Ginsburg and Stevens, who agree with each other 91% or 92% of the time, while Breyer is only slightly less closely associated, agreeing 91% of the time with Ginsburg, and 87% and 88%, respectively, with Souter and Stevens. The association between this group of four has somewhat less variation than that among the right-word five.

Now, the interesting thing is that the only association of more than 80% between the left-leaning four and the right-leaning five is between Breyer and O’Connor, at 82% (which happens to be closer than O’Connor and Thomas, at 78%).

I have made a pseudo-Venn diagram to illustrate some of the numbers (sorry I created the graphic counter-intuitively with the right-leaning group on the left and vice versa). A PDF from SCOTUSBlog is the source of the numbers.

I have found Kyle Gann’s writings over the years to be interesting and stimulating (I first encountered him when he was a critic for the Village Voice, back when there was a reason to read the Village Voice). For the most part, he writes about music that I don’t know well, so I am not usually in a position to evaluate his positions. Recently on his blog (PostClassic), he wrote about Ives, and asked the question “…why the musicological glee among those who attempt to discredit Ives?” Leaving aside the polemical wording of the question (it has since become obvious that I shouldn’t have ignored it), I thought I had an answer. So I wrote to Gann:

SUBJECT: Why the musicological glee among those who attempt to discredit Ives?

You’re missing the issue. The issue is not about revision, it’s about
the back-dating of the revision to stand in place of the original
work.

Maynard Solomon’s article from way back when about Ives and his
father (which is the first source I know of regarding the manuscript
evidence of Ives’s alterations to his works — given Solomon’s work
on Beethoven and his father, Mozart and his father, and Ives and his,
I always thought someone should write an article on Solomon and *his*
father, but I digress…) made the assertion (insofar as I’m
remembering it) that Ives made the revisions without acknowledging
them as later revisions.

My memory of the timeline on this may be wrong, but I seem to
remember that the MSS of some works that are dated as having been
composed in the teens were altered in the 30s or later to have more
adventurous juxtapositions of harmonies. But the works are still
treated (either by Ives or by those writing about Ives) as having
been brought into that final state in the teens (not the 30s).

And because of the 20th-century fetish for novelty and innovation,
Ives got credit for being a before-his-time innovator on the basis of
a perception that he was writing the more adventurous harmonies in
the teens, not revising the works to use them in the 30s (at which
point they wouldn’t have been particularly innovative).

Now, I may have mis-stated the exact facts here in regard to dates,
but the main point is this: the works have not been *treated* as
works with two versions (at least, before the publication of
Solomon’s article and the discussion that followed), but as a single
work dating from the original composition date, yet bearing the
musical content of the later revision.

Whether it was Ives himself who perpetrated this misrepresentation or
Ives’s promoters, the fact remains: Ives was not in all cases the
innovator he is painted as being in the conventional narrative about
him.

This matters most to people who think “getting there first” has some
value, but given that Ives was himself one of those people, it seems
to me to be a significant point about Ives and his works, and worth
noting, rather than trying casting it as merely the revisions of any
composer who revisits and alters earlier compositions.

And if I’m not mistaken, Solomon’s conclusions about the MS
alterations have themselves been disputed (Solomon is not the most
reliable researcher in regard to evaluation of musical sources). So,
it could be that, as with Solomon’s Schubert speculations, the
original argument has been wholly disproven.

But I would say this about Ives’s music: the reason the allegation
has always made sense to someone like me is that I’ve always felt
that his music lacks an organic unity, that it seems to have been
composed by layering by chance and not by design — his music often
sounds to me exactly like a piece that has been altered at some later
date. While this is a perfectly valid compositional approach, it is
not entirely in line with that Ives himself advocated, nor with what
he is valorized for having practiced.

In short, his music has always felt more like taped improvisations,
added to in tracks layered on top of the original, than it has like
organically-designed musical wholes that hang together.

Indeed, I have always felt that the main lack in Ives’s work is the
*lack* of sufficient revision, the process by which the composer
takes the original inspiration and reworks it to make it more
consistent and resonant with itself.

Of course, these comments betray my own esthetic stances on musical
value (as musicologist and composer).

But that is hardly a topic to be avoided when discussing a composer
like Ives, who was himself rather hard-headed and voluble on the
subject.

Now, the tone was rather informal, I allowed as how I wasn’t completely in possession of all the facts. I thought I was speaking to a sympathetic individual who was interested in finding the answer to the question. I was sadly mistaken. Next I replied to his response:

SUBJECT: Why the musicological glee among those who attempt to discredit Ives?

On 16 May 2004 at 17:29, Kyle Gann wrote:
> There are many
> composers from the classical repertoire whose
> music I’m not fond of, but I don’t go out of
> my way to try to discredit them, to prove that
> they were fakes in some way.

The reason the charge resonated for me was that the music always felt
fake, false, inauthentic, incompletely realized, half-finished — and
that was in all my exposure to the music before having read the
allegations of tampering with the MSS.

So, I think we all hear different things in the music. Ives has
always sounded to me like someone with interesting ideas who didn’t
work them out sufficiently.

And it does to this day.

Perhaps it’s true that were I to perform the music I’d find things
that are not audible (to me) in repeated hearings (the Concord is
actually one of his pieces I’ve heard a lot) — that is certainly the
case with other music that I’ve performed.

But in other music that I’ve invested time in, I’ve found the surface
of the music and its discourse with itself interesting and satisfying
*before* delving in deeply.

And for me, it’s the failure of Ives’s music to work with itself
internally that has been off-putting. For my ears, there was never
any there there in terms of the reputation of the composer and music.

There was a damned good story, though, and I still think that has had
a lot to do with Ives’s continuing popularity.

Which is fine.

I do not begrudge people their ability to enjoy his music.

I just don’t see what’s so attractive about it.

There was something of Schadenfreude in the possibility of Ives’s
having tampered with his scores to make them retrospectively more
“modern”, to find out that the emperor had no clothes.

But, nonetheless, it didn’t seem to me to be a matter of revisions
(of which Ives did plenty, no?) as of covert back-dating to establish
chronological primacy of innovation.

All of that could be a matter of Ives needing to be defended against
his defenders, but I’ve never liked him personally either (the
individual that comes through in his writings is a homophobic,
arrogant bastard, so far as I can tell), so he didn’t get the benefit
of the doubt from me when someone stuck a pin in the bubble of his
reputation.

Of course, I also think Schubert is vastly overrated…

In response to this informal reply, I got back the “challenge” replicated in Gann’s most recent posting (If Ives Was a Poseur, Prove It):

SUBJECT: Why the musicological glee among those who attempt to discredit Ives?

On 16 May 2004 at 22:11, Kyle Gann wrote:
> You show me where in Ives’s writings,
> letters, or recorded conversations he
> makes a claim to have been the first in
> history to have done anything, and I’ll
> recant everything. Failing that, leave me
> alone to enjoy his music as I have for decades.

Ah, we come to the crux of the problem: you think that I don’t want
you to enjoy Ives’s music.

I never said that or implied it.

Nor did any of Ives’s other critics so far as I can tell.

Gann then agrees that I never objected to his enjoyment of Ives’s music, and levels a different accusation:

SUBJECT: Why the musicological glee among those who attempt to discredit Ives?

On 17 May 2004 at 12:23, Kyle Gann wrote:
> No, you said you didn’t begrudge me enjoying
> Ives’ music. But you sure find it important
> to let me know that you don’t, and why, and at
> length. It seems an odd thing to tell a total
> stranger who you already know disagrees with you.

Read the subject of this email exchange. It’s a question you asked on
your blog. I was only responding to a question you asked.

In other words, my simple reply to his question constitutes for Gann an attack on his esthetics, which he seems to think was initiated by me, personally. This, despite the fact that I admitted that my esthetics were my own and put no requirements on other people.

In reponse to this, Gann descends into more of the same intellectual dishonesty exhibited in his blog’s summary of my position:

SUBJECT: Why the musicological glee among those who attempt to discredit Ives?

On 17 May 2004 at 14:32, Kyle Gann wrote:
> Ah! It didn’t even occur to me that that could
> be an answer to the question, but now I get it:
>
> Q. Why the musicological glee among those who
> attempt to discredit Ives?
>
> A. Because we don’t like his music.

That’s an intellectually dishonest summary of my reply and you know
it.

> Subjectivity as a basis for music history. There
> are a lot of composers whose music I don’t like,
> but I don’t jump to the conclusion that they’re
> bad people. But I appreciate the frank admission,
> which sort of confirms my worst suspicions.

I made no such “admission,” which you know quite well.

Are you a Republican?

In any event, no reply necessary — clearly no honest discussion is
possible with you.

It was only after that reply that I discovered that Gann had used my emails to him as a jumping off point for his blog entry (and, as you can see from the text of my emails above, mischaracterized my position badly), and I fired off one last email to him:

SUBJECT: Your most recent post on your blog

I did not say I *believed* Solomon’s article — I said the accusation
was plausible to me based on how I hear Ives’s music, and on what I
know of the valorization of Ives in the literature, and based on the
attitudes espoused in Ives’s own writings. [Here, I also should have pointed out that I was mostly talking about how it felt in 1988 reading Solomon's 1987 article, before other scholars got a chance to dispute Solomon's hypothesis]

When you write:

     What puzzles me is why people who find Ives not to their taste
     always seem in such a hurry to discredit him

you are inventing motives.

I don’t give a rat’s ass if Ives is discredited.

I simply answered your question in your last post, and you’ve twisted
everything I’ve written to you, summarizing it in your public posts
in a way that gives you a handy hobby horse to ride into the battle
against the musicologists.

You are the most intellectually dishonest blogger I’ve ever [sic]
encountered in a long time.

Enjoy your echo chamber, since it’s pretty clear you can’t abide
discussions with anyone who disagrees with your esthetics.

No reply, please, and don’t even think about summarizing this message
in your blog.

This is all pretty shocking to me. Gann seems to have brought a huge load of baggage along with him when he read my email. I should have seen the sneer behind his every reference to “musicologists.”

The other thing that bothers me is that, in the end, he seems to think that subjectivity should play no role in motivating musicological research. Of course, what he’s actually alleging is that I am judging musicological research not on the facts but on my own subjective feelings about the music, when, in fact, I pointed out that I didn’t know whether the Solomon accusations were true or not (this was in my original email to him). I was simply explaining to him one reason why a musicologist could reject the “revisions” special pleading.

I’m not in a position to do the library research to answer Gann’s juvenile challenge, but I’m really not interested in it even if I had the tools handy, because doing so would tend to reinforce the impression that Gann has correctly characterized my position in the first place.

My mistake was in considering Gann to be a sympathetic correspondent. Instead, he was clearly suspicious of everything I wrote, and took the inconsistencies of informal communication as an opportunity to beat musicologists around the shoulders once again for supposedly being stupid.

Maybe he’s auditioning for a job at the New York Times.

And here’s a final note to Gann:

YOU WIN!

With the evidence available to me, I can’t prove the assertion you erroneously attribute to me.

I’m not going to play your game, so you win. You can feel very satisfied that you’ve discredited the discreditors.

But to me, it just looks like you were spoiling for a fight, and not really interested in most of the issues I raised in my original email messages to you.

So, you can feel as superior to this lowly musicologist as you like.

And I shall take you off my blogroll.

• Mendelssohn: Octet & String Quintets: Hausmusik, London, Monica Huggett, dir.
• Cannabich: Symphonies, Lukas Consort, Viktor Lukas, dir.
• Schmelzer & Muffat: Sonatas, London Baroque, Charles Medlam, dir.
• Moussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition, Cleveland Orchestra, Lorin Maazel
• Schenck: L’Echo du Danube, Sonatas 1-3, 5, Berliner Conzert
• Mozart: Harmoniemusikien, vol. III, Don Giovanni, Consortium Classicum, Dieter Klöcker, dir.
• John Blow: Ode on the Death of Purcell and Songs from Amphion anglicus, Leonhardt, et. al.
• Satie: Works for Piano, Aldo Ciccolini
• G.B. & G. Sammartini: Concerti & Sinfonie, Ensemble 415, Chiara Banchini, dir.
• Jane Siberry: No Borders Here
• Mendelssohn Cello Sonatas, Variations & Songs Without Words: Mischa Maisky, cello, Sergio Tiempo, piano
• Alberta Hunter: The Legendary Alberta Hunter (London Sessions, 1934)
• John Field: Piano Concertos #1 & #2: Miceal O’Rourke, London Mozart Players, Matthias Bamert, dir.

I almost have to put down two piano quartets of Hoffmeister, since I definitely “listened” to them many, many times over the last week as I scored them up from the original 1788 parts. MIDI files of those will soon be available on my page of works I’m studying for my dissertation.

Dean is done.

It seemed obvious to me that Kerry has grown substantially over the course of the debates — he really does do a much more persuasive job of explaining himself. Edwards was absolutely amazing, in my opinion — he hit several of them right out of the ballpark. He’s the candidate that I can get excited about.

But Dean, well, he just didn’t rise to the occasion. He seemed limp, unexcited about what he was saying. He gave the same answers he’s been giving in debates since December. The only answer of interest was his very first one where he very artfully turned an invitation to beat up on Kerry over special interests into a very strong attack on Bush.

I don’t know if Edwards picks up any support with these kinds of performances. For me, it really does make me optimistic that there is someone running who is inspiring and can grow as a candidate. It does appear to me that he’s stolen a lot from Dean, especially the “I’ll tell you the hard truth” trope, which he used in regard to the question of whether jobs never returning once they’ve gone overseas, and on the question of his portion of personal responsibility for the war due to his vote for it.

Kerry dodged this last rather poorly, in my opinion, in a fashion that made Edwards’ upfront admission refreshing and winning.

Kerry’s got the nomination, I’m sure, and that’s really too bad, given that he’s just not a very good campaigner. But I’m not sure he’s any weaker than Al Gore was (and I was an enthusiastic supporter of Gore). If Edwards becomes his running mate, I truly think it’s a very strong ticket.

But, oh how I regret that Dean flamed out. In retrospect, I think it’s clear he wasn’t all that strong a candidate, though he was saying all the right things. I was never too happy with where he comes down on certain positions (gun control, death penalty), but those differences with my positions seemed to me to enhance his electability, as most voters are well to the right of me on these issues. I hope Dean has a role in the party from here on out.

I hope the Democratic Party has learned its lesson from Dean and his campaign, that timidity and calculation lose you more votes than they win.

So far as I understand it, the White House is giving reporters access to the documents from Bush’s military records but not letting them have copies. According to the LA Times today, the White House is showing reporters copies of medical records while distributing copies of other (presumably less sensitive) documents. Unfortunately, I cannot trust the LA Times, based on the way they reported Thursday this week about how Bush listed his arrest record in his Guard application.

The part that concerns me reported is in an LA Times article from Feb. 13th. It says (call this item 1):

On the form, Bush was asked: “Have you ever been arrested, indicted or convicted for any violation of civil or military law including minor traffic violations? (If YES, explain stating nature of offense, date, name and place of the court and disposition of the case.)”

And then the article goes on to list various infractions:

According to McClellan’s unaltered copy, Bush responded: “Misdemeanor, New Haven, Connecticut, December 1966, charge dismissed.

“Two speeding tickets, July ‘64 and August ‘64, $10 fine, Houston traffic court.

“Two collisions, July ‘62 and August ‘62, $25 fine, Houston traffic court.”

Now, that all seems just fine and dandy.

Except Kevin Drum points to the full graphic of the redacted document (cited in a blog entry of his from Feb. 13th), and that document says at the bottom quite clearly in the non-redacted section (call this item 2):

Have you ever been detained, held, arrested, indicted or summoned into court as a defendant in a criminal proceeding, or convicted, fined or imprisoned or placed on probation, or have you ever been ordered to deposit bail or collateral for the violation of any law, police regulation or ordinance (excluding minor traffic violations for which a fine or forfeiture of $25 or less was imposed [Italics in original])? Include all court martials while in military service [blacked out] If “YES” list the date, the nature of the offense of violation, the name and location of the court or place of hearing, and the penalty imposted or other disposition of each case.

Item 1, in the LA Times, says “including minor traffic violations” while Item 2, in the actual document the newspaper is presumably reporting about, says “exluding minor traffic violations for which a fine or forfeiture of $25 or less was imposed.”

That’s a direct contradiction between the LA Times report and the actual wording on the document.

Of more concern, though, is that if the instructions say to exclude minor traffic violations, why would Bush have included two such violations that did not exceed the $25 fine listed in the instructions?

How can we trust that the LA Times is correctly reporting what is on the original document when they reverse the meaning of the one part of the document that we are able to confirm?

And given that two of the three items reported to be on the document should never have been included, according to the instructions on the document, how can we trust that what the LA Times reports about the document is correct, and not just as innacurate as its characterization of what was included/excluded?

OK, that’s step 1. Step 2 is:

Given that it’s demonstrably the case that the press is able to look at these documents and then write articles that report precisely the opposite of what those documents say (“include” vs. “exclude”), how can we trust that reporters who see this new batch of documents in the White House are going to correctly report what’s in those documents?

ABC News has already concluded that there’s nothing there, as Terry Moran on ABC Nightly News on Thursday and Friday cast the dental exam and the payroll records as proof of Bush’s service in Alabama (treating “Bush was proven to be in Alabama during the period” and “Bush was on base in Alabama during the period” as though it means “Bush served his duty in Alabama during the period”).

I don’t trust the media to report accurately on these documents.

Therefore, all the documents need to be released to the public, not just to the White House press corp, or we haven’t gained anything at all in terms of completeness.

Last of all, how can we know that the documents released through the White House are all the documents in the files? Doesn’t the full disclosure Bush promised in the Russert interview require that Bush authorize free access to the documents directly, rather than as provided by the White House? How else could the public ever know that all the records have been made available?