November 29, 2015

Why Don’t We Know Much About Right-Wing Terrorists? Conservatives Fired The Guy Studying Them

Stuff to remember when wondering why the tee vee doesn't match what you know.

So, yes, we have no rightwing terrorists by definition because the rightwing gets to define the defined. No, right? Right!

November 28, 2015

Oliver Stone: JFK conspiracy deniers are in denial

Mainstream media have never given up telling us how superstitious or illogical the common people are.

by Oliver Stone
Nov. 21, 2015

Living through the news media assault of the past few weeks leading up to this 50th year's commemoration marking the violent end of JFK's presidency, I'm amazed there is any single adult left in the USA who would not think that Lee Harvey Oswald was the one and only assassin.

Although polls from 1964 on clearly signal the public's distrust of the official story, the mainstream media have never given up telling us how superstitious or illogical the common people are in this belief. As one of that multitude, the motivating factor for my disbelief has not been my idealistic view of Kennedy or what he might have done had he lived, but the very evidence of the shooting itself, which remains, then and now, dubious. Some basic examples:

* The single bullet theory allows for one bullet, fired from the sixth floor, on a downward trajectory, to enter Kennedy's back and then move upward, out his throat and into Texas Gov. John Connally to his front, where it zigs and zags breaking two bones and creating seven wounds. Now, I've been in the infantry and I've seen enough combat to tell you that in all the craziness of war, this "Alice in Wonderland" scenario defies physics and common sense. The American people are not stupid.

* The theory asks us to believe that the president, moving away from the alleged sharpshooter, up six floors, can be shot in the back of his head and snap suddenly back and to the left — although common sense and the naked eye tell us that he should be going forward when he receives that shot.

* And that, coincidentally, there was a supposedly empty fence to the right front of the president, which when you stand there in Dealey Plaza presents a nearly perfect line of sight at the president — and would naturally justify the motion of the president back and to the left if he were shot from the front right. Now the fact that the fence was supposedly unoccupied during this whole time when the entire plaza was filled with eager observers of the popular president further defies common sense.

We're supposed to accept all that even though:

* More than 50 witnesses testified at the time to the Warren Commission that they heard or saw a shot coming from that fence area to the front of the president.

* The Assassination Records Review Board (1994-1998) found that over 40 witnesses in two locations saw a large avulsive (i.e. penetrating outward) wound in the rear of JFK's skull. This includes highly qualified medical personnel at hospitals in Dallas and Bethesda, as well as FBI agents James Sibert and Frank O'Neill, who were at the autopsy in 1963 and restated it to the board. This wound again indicates an exit wound from a shot to the front. Conclusion: The president was shot from at least two sides, front and back — not one location.

* An accidental film made that day, the Zapruder film, shows a sequence of motions that indicate five, probably six shots fired. It also shows that when the president is shot in the back by the "single bullet," that he's moving forward while Connally is still holding his Stetson hat, which is impossible if Connally was hit by the same bullet in his right wrist. The governor himself said he was not hit by the same bullet as Kennedy and added, "I do not for one second believe the conclusions of the Warren Commission."

Yet the mainstream media in recent weeks tell us more strongly than ever that Oswald, with his twisted motives, did it alone with his Mannlicher-Carcano Word War II rifle. What kind of history are they talking about? Not the one that is perhaps too dark for them to deal with and unsettling to their smug belief in some form of American exceptionalism, by which our politics are unflawed by such corruption. Is this why the media, with very few exceptions, have not allowed any serious presentation of the evidence against their official story from qualified pathologists, scientists, photographic and ballistics experts, and doctors who disagree?

I've rarely seen the many fine works by these qualified individuals reviewed: Robert Groden's JFK: Absolute Proof (2013), James W. Douglass' JFK and the Unspeakable (2008), and James DiEugenio's Reclaiming Parkland(2013). Particularly note in DiEugenio's book Chapters 4-7. They deconstruct the massive 2000-paged tome by prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, overly praised by the media probably because very few people have actually read it. To read DiEugenio's deconstruction is to fully understand the shaping of the lie.

As Friday approaches, please take a moment to remember that no professional marksman has replicated the Warren Commission scenario with Oswald's flawed rifle. To my knowledge, there have been at least four attempts with professionals to simulate the shooting without that rifle. No person ever achieved what the commission said Oswald did on the first try, i.e., attain two of three direct hits in the head and shoulder area to Kennedy in six seconds. This alleged shooting has been achieved only with computer simulations.

CONTINUED w/links...

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/11/20/oliver-stone-jfk-conspiracy-assassination-oswald-column/3657321/

November 27, 2015

Drumpfdenk

!

PS: Danke schoen for the great imagery, napkinz. Historically accurate, as they say.

November 27, 2015

JFK's death changed government policy in matters of war and peace.

The Nation magazine wanted to know "Why don't Americans know what really happened in Vietnam?" Interesting read, it brings up how much USA uses the volunteer military and observes the corporate owned news media don't want to bring that up so that people continue to thank the troops for their service without wondering why they're tasked with missions in 133 countries around the world. What the article missed and people need to know:

JFK ordered withdrawal from Vietnam. LBJ reversed it four days after Dallas.



The 1,000 advisors were the beginning. All US military personnel were to be out of the country by the end of 1965, reported James K. Galbraith.

Then in NSAM 273, four days after the assassination in Dallas, LBJ changes the policy to stay and support South Vietnam in its "contest against the externally directed and supported Communist conspiracy."



Very much appreciate that you know what's at stake is democracy. The farthest-travelling person at yesterday's Thanksgiving Dinner was my cousin's widow. He was a US Army doctor in Vietnam. Spent half the time in the field. He made it home, miraculously.

I recall days when the US Government was "We the People." Call me crazy, but I really am out for the "Fawning Acolytes". They may not remember or been around then, but they believe in DEMOCRACY. Thank you for being one, Mc Mike.

November 27, 2015

That's how it is with me. I'm not campaigning for Chief of Catch-22.

Trump’s Self-Hatred Will Destroy His Campaign

by JOHN ESKOW
CounterPunch, AUGUST 14, 2015

To paraphrase Bob Dylan, even Donald Trump must stand naked, and like everyone else sometimes he winces at what he sees. Consider Trump stepping out of the shower–forced to confront all that sun-lamped, over-fed, over-cologned flesh, and those hate-lines around his pout-shaped mouth, and, of course, that wildly asymmetric mass of orange-Kool-Aid-colored hair, still wet from the shower–on one side of his head, it hangs down past his shoulder in a huge ragged curtain; on the other side of his head, there is nothing but bald scalp and sadness. He begins every day by engineering that combover, the equivalent of The Great Wall of China. Then he Spanxes up, re-colognes himself, puts on a red Trump necktie, and goes out into the world to proclaim his own greatness.

You don’t have to be a psychotherapist to see that Donald Trump’s loathing for others is just an offshoot of his loathing for himself. Do you know any confident people in their 60s who need to compulsively remind you that they attended a good college–and got As? Do you know any truly-loved people who keep insisting, twenty times a day, that everyone loves them? Trump’s dirty secret is that he’s just smart enough to know that he’s a fraud, and not smart enough to forget it. He knows in his bones that if he wasn’t rich, not only would Hillary Clinton skip his wedding, but there would be no wedding to skip–at least not to another attractive young blonde. And this awareness is what fueled the single most important moment in the history of televised political debates.

As CounterPunch’s Mike Whitney wisely pointed out, Trump did America an enormous favor in that ten-second stretch of epic truth-telling at the Fox debate–when he breezily admitted that Hillary Clinton “had” to attend his wedding, not because she cares about him, but because he buys, sells, and trades the Hillary Clintons of the world like a twelve-year-old playing Fantasy Football. In a sane America, Trump’s forbidden truth would have upended the whole political dialogue–but CNN and MSNBC studiously ignored it and spent five whole days chasing updates on the Megan Kelly “bleeding” remark instead.

If Trump had real guts and vision–and if he was serious about winning–he would make that Forbidden Truth the core of his campaign, and keep expanding it: “Everyone’s angry that America is run by the 1%–well, I’m not just the 1%, I’m the 1% of the 1%, and I’m the only one who not only knows the tricks of the trade, but who’ll let you in on all our dirty little secrets, and change all the rules…The Tea Party and the leftists are both right: the whole game is rigged, and we’re going to blow it up and start fresh.”

But he blew the moment, because he didn’t realize what a profound insight he’d given the American people. Instead, in one hilarious tweet that went beyond speaking-of-one’s-self-in-the-third-person, he said that “Roger Ailes promises that ‘Trump’ will be treated fairly.” I mean–putting your own name in quotation marks? As the young people say–what’s that about?

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/14/trumps-self-hatred-will-destroy-his-campaign/

November 26, 2015

Not so. CIA obstructed justice, failing to reveal their ties to Oswald, when asked by Earl Warren.

Ex-CIA director Allen Dulles, fired by JFK over the Bay of Pigs fiasco, somehow ended up on the Warren Commission. In his work, he explained to his fellow commissioners that a CIA agent could be expected to lie under oath to protect his status. Harold Weisberg documented the episode by using FOIA to access the WC secret session minutes.

So in the 1970s, when the House Select Committee on Assassinations were going through CIA assassination-related files, the agency stopped cooperating -- appointing one George Joannides to serve as liaison in place of an officer who had cooperated with the HSCA. They also failed to mention to the committee that Joannides, back in 1963, had served as their case officer monitoring the DRE, a violently anti-Castro Cuban terrorist organization that had a "confrontation" with "pro-Castro" Oswald in New Orleans.

It's worth knowing, in part, because the DRE's leaders were among those who reported to the press that Oswald, the assassin, was a defector to the USSR, linked to Castro and the communist cause.

Jefferson Morley, author and former Washington Post reporter, has followed the still-evolving story.

http://jfkfacts.org/assassination/cia-our-jfk-story-is-no-longer-operative/

November 26, 2015

That calls for a toast.

To Faustian Motivation!



http://www.jstor.org/stable/2378523?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

November 25, 2015

The Best Slave Doesn't Know He Is One.

-- Goethe

November 25, 2015

Here's an example of what I have posted that bears on your smears:

Both of these guys had ancestors and cronies in the slave trade.



Baron de Rothschild and Prescott Bush, share a moment and some information, back in the day.

The people who tried to overthrow FDR in 1933 had kids.

And their offspring* and connected cronies in crime are the ones* screwing America now.

What's different today, is we don't have Smedley Butler or FDR to stop them.

* Of course, it's not just a few rich families's offspring who screw the majority today. They've hired help and built up the giant noise machine to continue their work overthrowing the progress FDR and the New Deal brought America for 80 years.

Why would the nation and world's richest people do that? Progress costs money. And they don't want to pay for it, even when they've gained more wealth than all of history put together. Instead, whey continue to work -- legally, through government and lobbyists -- to amass even more, transferring the wealth of the many to themselves.

And instead of an armed mob led by a war hero on a white horse, as planned in 1933, their weapon since Pruneface made his first payment to the Ayatollah has been "Supply Side Economics." To most Americans, that means Trickle-Down.

Generation upon generation, knowing only service to power and property.



Kevin Phillips called them a ''multigenerational family of fibbers.''



While some wonder how Saddam got WMDs, Wall Street gets ahead.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So show, Orrex, where any of that is wrong. Or racist. Or anti-Semitic. Or homophobic. Or anything you want to. That encapsulates why I bother to post on DU. It bears on Democracy.

November 24, 2015

The New York Daily News of Nov. 23, 1963

Here's a pretty remarkable story, from the day after the assassination. It includes information from Oswald's background in the Marines, life in the Soviet Union, Russian wife, an appeal to Sen. John Tower and his time in New Orleans.

Pretty thorough job of reporting. Even picked up on the guy's days in New Orleans as a communist sympathizer. Of course, since then, there's been little mention, apart from Jim Garrison and Oliver Stone, of the other guy in New Orleans Guy Bannister. Of course, there's been no mention of who was paying the New Orleans group who fought with Oswald, CIA man George Joannides. He would later derail the House Select Committee on Assassinations. I know you know that, deutsey. How many people do you know, beside those on DU, that know?