Wampum

It's not a substitution of "pres" for "fires". It's a character set coding issue with the ligature for "fi" (which is a separate character in most encodings) getting mapped to another character (that looks like a "p" but is really some other character - cyrillic, maybe?).

That character is, I think, the Icelandic/Old English letter "thorn" (þ), which corresponds to the initial sounds of thick and thin.

Speculation: some word processing/typesetting programs automatically substitute the "fi" ligature for the letters "fi". (Look at any well-typeset book for examples of the "fi" "ffi" "fl" and "ffl" ligatures, which are essentially combined versions of those characters that look nicer in print.) The word "fires" was affected by such a substitution, and the ligature character came out as the "thorn" character when published on the web.

there's a ted leo lyric along the lines of "you're esses look like effs to me." maybe old ted stopped rockin' for a couple minutes to fire off a letter in support a this incredibly vital piece of legislation.

The substitution of "pres" for fires seems like one of those inexplicable but striking cases of synchronicity. Time to put out the wild pres indeed.

looks to me like a cut-off letter phi, from the greek. that doesn't explain why it is truncated though.

I like it better as Wild Pres.

In the Macintosh character set, byte 222 (decimal) is the "fi" ligature (a squashed-together "f" and "i" used for fancy typesetting). In the ISO 8859-1 character set used on the Web, byte 222 is the capital thorn (used in Icelandic and Old English), which resembles a "p". Something got garbled somewhere along the line, probably involving Mac-to-PC transfer.

We saw what happens when trees are unhappy, Bush will pass a "Happy Trees" bill to "protect" america from mad trees. Vote for Bush and Happy Trees!!

Trees like getting cut down, its what they live for!

He obviously means the French "pres" for "near". Wild near, indeed.

I love it. I've always used the Þ in emoticons for the tongue stuck out. To see it here linked in astroturf to look like "Pres" is priceless. I'm going to start using it all the time : Þresident Bush.

Amazing. Good old Newspeak-- now improved with Olde English or Icelandic characters!!!

It made the paper here in Knoxville, too:

KNS Astroturf

And here it is dated December 5th in the Austin Chronicle, albeit under a dismissive headline (see last letter on page):

http://www.austinchronicle.com/gbase/Community/Postmarks?StartTime=2003-12-05

You know, it wouldn't be a bad idea to send in these astroturf letters just slightly reworded.

On December 3, 2003, President Bush signed into law the Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003 to help to create catastrophic wildfires and degrade America’s long-term forest health. The legislation, based on the President’s Healthy Forest Initiative, will increase the risk of catastrophic fire to communities, sacrifice the lives of firefighters and citizens, and threaten endangered species.

Dixie, do you recall the jokes about Dick and Bush in the White House?

"Þresident Bush" = Lick Bush in '04?

It was also in the Colorado Springs Gazette. When I pointed it out to them, here was their response:

"Thanks for pointing that out. We generally try and weed out such letters
-- though there's a question about whether we should automatically
discount our reader sentiments just because they come ready-made. But this
one slipped through."

Editorial Page

Is the organization "Project Protect" an astroturf group? A letter from Tim something of that group, based in Oregon, appeared in the Kansas City Star.