The Salt Lake Tribune has a prominent article questioning Bush campaign Honcho Karl Rove's student deferment that allowed him to to avoid being drafted for three years of the Vietnam War. [link via Buzzflash.]

Except for a lapse of several months, Selective Service records show presidential adviser Karl Rove escaped the draft for nearly three years at the height of the Vietnam War using student deferments....[Rover's]draft record and accounts from friends reveal a young man who didn't necessarily agree with the war and managed to avoid being drafted.

Rove's friend and classmate back then, Mark Gustavson, now a Salt Lake City attorney, says:

Far from being a conscientious objector, Gustavson recalls, Rove's opposition to the war was political. He considered the conflict a "political skirmish that was not being properly administered."

Here's the nuts and bolts of Rove's draft status and deferment:

Too bad for Judicial Watch...

The Navy's chief investigator concluded Friday that procedures were followed properly in the approval of Sen. John Kerry's Silver Star, Bronze Star and Purple Heart medals, according to an internal Navy memo.

Vice Adm. R.A. Route, the Navy inspector general, conducted the review of Kerry's Vietnam-ear military service awards at the request of Judicial Watch, a public interest group. The group has also asked for the release of additional records documenting the Democratic presidential candidate's military service.

Here's background on Judicial Watch's ridiculous request.

This came via email from an experienced DUI attorney who has a big problem with Bush's explanation of his 1976 DUI. This lawyer suspects that it was not his first drunk driving offense. Is anyone else discussing this?

Bush’s DUI record as posted at Smoking Gun . It reports that Bush’s driver’s license was suspended for two years after his conviction on 10/26/76 under Maine’s 1976 “operating under the influence” statute (29 MRSA sect. 1312 (10). It states his license was reinstated on 10/25/78.

Bush told reporters that he never went to court on this charge, just paid $150 and had his license suspended for “30” days or “briefly”. He may not have gone to court, some states allow attorneys to appear without their clients, but the two year suspension?

In 1976, that would be unthinkable for a first offense. If this was a first offense, the suspension would have been for four months, for a second offense, one year (subject to reduction to six months), and three years for a third offense (subject to reduction to two years). (The Maine legislative reference librarian faxed me the 1976 statute today, saying that it is not accessible on the web.).

If the posted MVA record is correct, Bush must have had two priors within ten years. Have you seen any explanation for this record anywhere? The record first exposed in Maine in 2000 was from the court record, the record on Smoking Gun is from the Secretary of State, MVA.

Jeff at Protein Wisdom has a very funny photo up that he says comes from the Abilene Kinko's--could it really be him?

Bush's bounce bounces away.:

By the second poll, done Sept. 11-14, the Bush lead had evaporated. In that poll, Bush and Kerry were knotted at 46 percent among registered voters. Among likely voters, Bush was at 47 percent and Kerry at 46 percent.

Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, says "This poll finds a lot of the positive impact Bush had in the convention remains. But Bush's vulnerabilities on Iraq and the economy continue, and these have anchored the race."

Bush: Vulnerable on Iraq and the economy. Let's move off the Guard records and help John Kerry bring this one home.

The major television networks have not yet decided whether to carry the Presidential and Vice Presidential debates live. They should. Media for Democracy urges you to sign their petition.

The Village Voice has the details of an ad for John Kerry to use against Bush about Osama that just could make him win the election.

The Washington Post reports that one of the experts who was asked by CBS to review the Killiam memos says at least one of the documents was faxed from a Kinkos in Ablilene, Texas. Who's from Abilene?

There is only one Kinko's in Abilene, and it is 21 miles from the Baird, Tex., home of retired Texas National Guard officer Bill Burkett, who has been named by several news outlets as a possible source for the documents....Burkett, who has accused Bush aides of ordering the destruction of some portions of the president's National Guard record because they might have been politically embarrassing, did not return telephone calls to his home.

In news interviews earlier this year, Burkett said he overheard a telephone conversation in the spring of 1997 in which top Bush aides asked the head of the Texas National Guard to sanitize Bush's files as he was running for a second term as governor of Texas. Several days later, he said, he saw dozens of pages from Bush's military file dumped in a trash can at Camp Mabry, the Guard's headquarters.

What top Bush aides asked for a file purge?

The Bush aides Burkett named as participants in the telephone conversation were Chief of Staff Joe M. Allbaugh and spokespersons Karen Hughes and Dan Bartlett. All three Bush aides and former Texas National Guard Maj. Gen. Daniel James have strongly denied the allegations.

Dan Rather has acknowledged the possibility that the Killian memos regarding Bush's National Guard service may not be authentic. To his credit, he's willing to shoulder the blame.

"If the documents are not what we were led to believe, I'd like to break that story," Rather said in an interview last night. "Any time I'm wrong, I want to be right out front and say, 'Folks, this is what went wrong and how it went wrong.' "

Rather's doubts stem from speaking with Marian Knox, Killian's former secretary. Knox said she didn't type the memos but they accurately reflect Killian's beliefs. CBS has the details of the tonight's interview here.

Will Rather survive the storm if he was wrong?

Drip. Drip. There are more records of Bush's National Guard service about to be released:

White House press secretary Scott McClellan hinted that more documents regarding Bush's National Guard service may soon be released. Asked whether officials in the White House have seen unreleased documents, McClellan called that "a very real possibility." Other officials with knowledge of the situation said more documents had indeed been uncovered and would be released in the coming days.

The mainstream media has made up its mind: The CBS Killian memos on Bush's National Guard Service were forgeries. The LA Times lead editorial in Wednesday's edition carries the headline " A Black Eye for CBS News." But the paper also bashes Bush on his Guard service.

Whatever the truth, CBS' real error was trying to prove a point that didn't really need to be proved. It doesn't take documents for anyone to realize that . Bush pulled strings to get into the National Guard. And, during the Vietnam draft, nobody went into the National Guard out of passion to defend his country. It also doesn't take new documents to establish that Bush shirked even his National Guard duties when he moved to Alabama and then to Harvard Business School.

In an interesting twist, Marian Knox, Killian's former secretary has spoken out. She says the memos are not the ones she typed, and some of the words are different, but they accurately reflect Killian's views and may have come from real memos that she did type for Killian.

She said that although she did not recall typing the memos reported by CBS News, they accurately reflect the viewpoints of Killian and documents that would have been in the personal file. Also, she said she didn't know whether the CBS documents corresponded memo for memo with that file. "The information in here was correct, but it was picked up from the real ones," she said. "I probably typed the information and somebody picked up the information some way or another."

Knox also said that Killian kept a "cover his back" file that he kept in a locked file. She said she used a mechanical Olivetti that had a "th" superscript key. as well as an IBM selectric.

Former D.C. Mayor Marion Berry has won the Democratic primary for a Ward 8 City Council Seat with 61% of the vote. The district is so Democratic that he is virtually assured of winning in November.

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