Is there a climate of fear among Bush supporters? Are Bush's supporters afraid of the anti-Bush crowd? I think so. I put up a Bush yard sign today but it worried me a bit. I'm not afraid of the Kerry supporters, it's the Bush haters who worry me.

And there are a lot of them. Even allowing that my neighborhood is changing from conservative stronghold to mixed, there are lots of really nasty signs.

When I picked up my yard sign they asked if I wanted a bumper sticker, also. I asked about one of the white ovals with "W94" on it. They went first. I think that this is because they are subtle and the least likely to provoke someone.

Some of the anti-Bush crowd is so dedicated to hate that they have become irrational. The local Saturday afternoon peace rally is down to the real hard-core protestors but some of them are really vile. Two signs stand out. One was "Heil to the Beast", the other implied that Carl Rove caused 9/11. Keep in mind that this protest was on the 3rd anniversary of September 11.

Glenn Reynolds thinks that Ralph Nader will do better than expected. After all, Kerry doesn't offer anything to the anti-war wing of the party. He's been all over the spectrum on his support of the war. If it looks like Bush will win anyway, a lot of Democrats will vote for Nader as a protest vote.

Of course, the Democrats fear Nader. They are convinced that Nader cost them the election in 2000. Nader insists that he didn't steal any votes from Gore, that the people who voted for him would have stayed home instead.

We will see. The Democrats are mounting a strong offensive to keep Nader off of the ballot. They want to limit the choices to Bush and their guy.

Maybe they need to consider a name change. "Democrats" doesn't see to fit any longer, does it.

So, are the memos real or are they fakes? Several web sites have shown how simple it is to perfectly reproduce one of the memos. Here's Slates rundown on the whole thing.

CBS still maintains that proportional type existed at the time therefore no further proof is needed. Some web sites have gotten a hold of samples from an IBM Selectric Composer and found that the results are close but not exact. Also, it takes a lot of work to center the heading and no one can explain the kerning.

There is a principal called Occam's Razor. Put simply, given a choice between a simple explanation and a complicated one, the simple one is the most likely.

Complicated version - an army officer who family members say didn't type used a complicated typewriter to produce a memo for personal files that his family says he didn't keep. While producing this memo that no one would read, he went to the trouble of changing "golf balls" in order to superscript the "th". He also chose, by coincidence, the same spacing and layout as the Microsoft Word defaults and he centered the heading at exactly the same place that Word does, even though centering with one of these typewriters is very difficult. And for reasons not given, he refers to an officer who had retired a year and a half earlier as pressuring him.

Simple version - they're fakes.