Who does this resonate with? (Repost from a reply on another thread)

[Jackpine Radical]

Time to start taking the WI party back.
Personally, I think the activists (as opposed to the Wineke-style hacks) are at the strongest they have been since WWII. Time we get our shit together and take over the goddamn machinery.

My choice of "Northern Rebellion" as a term for us was maybe ill-considered last year because it left out people like ClassWarrior, but it's time to resurrect some LaFollette mojo around here and take over power in our state party.

Up here in the Toolies we got lotsa goddamn LIBERAL sentiment, and we want something meaningful to happen as a result of our putting time into politics. We're not here just to play Whoop-te-Doo chearleaders to some corporate sellouts, be they from Milwaukee, Madison, New York, or Chicago.

I am giving as little as possible to the DPW while still maintaining an activist role on the left around here.

The upshot is that there's a bunch of us that need to talk, and we sorta know who we are. People from Neillsville, Owen, Chioppy Waffles, Marshfield, Green Bay, Milwaukee, and maybe even Madison come to mind.

[CarbonDate]

1. I'm game.

I grew up in Green Bay. I'm on Guam right now, but I'm out of the Air Force in two years and look to return to Wisconsin. What are your ideas? Are we going to target red districts? I look forward to reading them.

[Jackpine Radical]

2. Hey, I had a cousin who lived on Guam for years

after WWII, working as a civilian heavy equipment operator.

As for the political thing, I think we need a new populist movement in this state. The party hacks are running things and there is a developing odor of corruption around both parties. For example, Joe Wineke pissed off a lot of us by becoming a paid lobbyist for the telecom industry while sitting as party chair.

There are a lot of rural cheeseheads who are angry about having a power line shoved down our throats, who have strong environmental concerns, and who feel strongly that they don't want anyone messing with their guns. They're ripe for conversion to liberalism, but will keep voting their guns, so we keep losing them.

Things like that.

[CarbonDate]

3. Well, I think the first step would be to target county parties....

...in red counties. Start developing a talent pool, a labor pool, and a money pool. Easier said than done, though.

[Jackpine Radical]

4. I think your basic idea is quite right. In WI, most of the red counties

actgually have fairly passionate Dem party orgs. The beginnings are already there, for the most part. We just need to put the tools in their hands to start spreading the message. Northern Cheeseheads are a lot like westerners--pro-gun, not particularly religious, kinda libertarian-spirited. The message has to be tailored for local consumption, and I think the local parties are the place to do it.

A classic example--in N. Wis we refer to deer season as "Holy Week," and a lot of the sportsmen are actually pretty environmentally-minded, but urban latte-liberal PETA freaks and Bambi-lovers think of them as unredeemable bloodthirsty maniacs, so the NRA is the only voice that speaks to them, and you see all these goddamn "Sportsmen for Bush" bumper stickers by default. We could crack that bunch if we just tried a little. These heavily armed, weapon-skilled people aren't shooting each other with their guns and have no desire to do so; let's back wayyyy off on that hot-button and start selling the idea of saving the environment for another generation.

[mojowork_n]

5. Don't have much experience.

I went door to door for Gwen Moore in Bay View, one weekend, for her House race. That's just about the sum total of my involvement with Democratic Party politics.

But I was really, really encouraged to see the Democrats in the House vote NO on giving Bush and the telecom's permanent immunity.

I think you could get many, many people involved if they start seeing the whole facade of lies starting to crack. Keith Olberman's audience keeps growing. Jon Stewart's doing a better job of commenting on the news than anyone on the regular news networks. Since the Chicago Air America/Jones Network station boosted their signal, it's been great having Randi Rhodes, and the rest of those folks, in my car.

In most all of the primaries so far, total Democratic votes have swamped total Republican votes, or they've been way, way up from previous years. It's not just Northern Wisconsin.

...I started to type, "we could be ready to take back America," but who's "We?"

That whole "organizational" thing is a big mystery to me.

This afternoon, HBO showed Oliver Stone's film, "JFK", and I caught the second half. (I still haven't seen the movie, all the way through. Just bits and pieces, here and there.)

I was curious enough to google up the complete text of the screenplay, to re-read something the Donald Sutherland character says. He's a composite of several Black Ops types, and tells the Kevin Costner character:


In 1961...
...right after the Bay of Pigs, very few people know this...
...I participated in drawing up National Security Action Memos 55, 56, 57.
These are documents classified top secret.
In them, Kennedy told Gen. Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs...
...that from here on, the Joint Chiefs would be wholly responsible...
...for all covert paramilitary action in peacetime.
This ended the reign of the CIA.
Splintered it into 1,000 pieces, as JFK promised he would.
And now he was ordering the military...
...to help him do it. Unprecedented!
I can't tell you the shock waves this sent along the corridors of power.

...Kennedy's directives weren't implemented because of...
...bureaucratic resistance.
But one of the results was...
...the Cuban operation was turned over to my department...
...as Operation Mongoose.
Mongoose was pure Black Ops.

Don't underestimate the budget cuts that Kennedy called for in March of 1963.
Nearly 52 military installations in 25 states.
Twenty-one overseas bases.
Big money.
You know how many helicopters have been lost in Vietnam?
Nearly 3,000 so far.
Who makes them? Bell Helicopter. Who owns Bell?
Bell was nearly bankrupt when First National Bank of Boston asked the CIA...
...to use the helicopter in Indochina. How about the F-111 fighter?
General Dynamics of Fort Worth, Texas. Who owns that?
Find out the defense budget since the war began. $75 going on $100 billion.
Nearly $200 billion will be spent before it's over.
In 1949, it was $10 billion.
No war...no money.
The organizing principle of any society, Mr. Garrison...
...is for war.
The authority of the state over its people resides in its war powers.
Kennedy wanted to end the Cold War in his second term.
He wanted to call off the moon race and cooperate with the Soviets.
He signed a treaty to ban nuclear testing.
He refused to invade Cuba in 1962.
He set out to withdraw from Vietnam.
But all that ended on the 22nd of November, 1963...

...No one said, "He must die." No vote. Nothing's on paper.
There's no one to blame.
It's as old as the crucifixion.
Or the military firing squad.
Five bullets, one blank. No one's guilty.
Everybody in the power structure...
...has a plausible deniability.
No compromising connections except at the most secret point.

...the perpetrators must be on the winning side...
...and never subject to prosecution for anything by anyone.
That is a coup d'état.
Kennedy announces the Texas trip in September.
At that moment, second Oswald's pop up all over Dallas...
...where they have the mayor and the cops in their pocket...

Does it matter who shot...
...from what rooftop?
Part of the scenery.
I keep thinking about that Tuesday...
...the 26th of November.
The day after they buried Kennedy.

'Gentlemen, I am not going to let Vietnam go like China did.
I'm committed...
...not to take our soldiers out of there till they know we mean business in Asia.'
Lyndon Johnson signs National Security Memo 273...
...which reverses Kennedy's withdrawal policy...
...and approves covert action against North Vietnam...
...provoking the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
Just get me elected, I'll give you the damn war.
In that document...
...lay the Vietnam War.
I can't believe they killed him because he wanted to change things.
-ln our time, in our country! -They've done it throughout history.
Kings are killed. Politics is power, nothing more!
Don't take my word for it. Do your own thinking.
The size of this is...
...beyond me.
Testify.
-Me? -Testify.
No chance in hell.
No, I'd be arrested and gagged...

I can give you the background. You find the foreground, the little things.
Dig, you're the only one to bring a trial in Kennedy's murder.
That's important. It's historic.
I haven't yet.
I don't have much of a case.
You don't have a choice anymore.

..Be honest.
Your only chance is to come up with a case. Something. Anything.
Make arrests. Stir the shitstorm.
Hope to start...
...a chain reaction of people coming forward.
Then the government will crack.
Fundamentally, people are suckers for the truth.
And the truth is on your side, bubba.

It's longer and more rambly than Ned Beatty's rant in Network, but those are the words that have been resonating, ringing in my head.

It's admittedly a little bogus from the jump. One side of Oliver Stone's head (a fictional "composite" character) talking to the other, (a fictionalized Jim "Everyman" Garrison), but the dynamic doesn't seem that unreal.

Nobody I know has been "arrested and gagged", but I'm kind of familiar with a few people who've lost jobs. For being Lib'ruls, trying to do their 9 to 5 reporting to Waukesha County Wingnut boss's.

We're all of us staring at the "foreground, the little things", every time we gas up the car.

Katherine Harris, Jeb Bush and Scalia steal an election from President Gore, and instead of Tonkin Gulf and Vietnam, we get the more up close and personal "WMD" threat.

Anyone paying attention knows it's a bogus crock, but the New York Times and Judith Miller (and most of the Senate and House) make sure that doesn't even matter. The WMD inspectors who'd been in Iraq, doing their jobs, for years, weren't pulled because of any threats from Saddam. They were withdrawn because the weapons verification process, itself, precluded military action.

Politics is power, nothing more!

Bell Helicopter was making a fortune in 1966?

Let's hear it for Blackwater's outsourced mercenaries, earning monthly salaries several multiples higher than their enlisted counterparts, in the regular military.

I have no idea how anyone "stirs the shitstorm", here, in an effective way, but the whole country is already aware that this coming election is already historic.

If there's "...a chain reaction of people coming forward.
Then the government will crack."

If the new leaders who are going to be elected know that people are on to the game, they're less likely to compromise their better natures.

(It would be the opposite of that line from "Lords of War", "Those who know, don't care. Those who care, don't know.") Not neglecting our fellow Americans, on the other side, who may also care, but are only too happy to believe the forumula half-truths and lies.

...I hacked and edited the pasted-in dialog quite a bit. Here's the link to the full text:

http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/j/jfk-script-transcript-oliver-stone.html

[Jackpine Radical]

6. Been years since I saw that flick.

Interesting how the Establishment tried to paint it all as a paranoid delusion. But it was wearing tinfoil already back then.

[MessiahRp]

11. Actually Sutherland's "Mr. X" character is L. Fletcher Prouty

Who was really involved with black ops and kept all of his paperwork re: missions and military orders to prove what he was saying. He was heavily involved in a lot of scandalous things and the only reason he never got this message to a broader audience is that the Pentagon and Government played him as a paranoid lunatic who made stuff up.

He didn't meet with Garrison until after the trial but Stone thought a lot of what Prouty had to say was important enough to add into the movie so he pushed their meeting up to the timeframe of the trial.

BTW JFK is a pretty great movie and a lot of people pissed all over it but after reading On the Trail of Assassins by Garrison himself not much was fabricated. Willie O'Keefe (Kevin Bacon) was a mix of three different character witnesses compressed mostly for time constraint reasons (although they made him shady to water down his credibility just as those three witnesses were watered down in real life for their shady backgrounds).

They did have someone working in their group to screw with their case and who poorly vetted at least one witness (seen on the Director's Cut as the character who took fingerprints from his daughter before and after she came back from college to make sure she came back the same person) but there was certainly validity in his cause.

Look up Prouty and get some of his books. He has a lot to say about the Military and Intelligence missions we ran from WWII until after JFK.

Rp

[mojowork_n]

12. The film came out in late December, 1991.

but I *still* haven't seen the whole thing, start to finish.

When it came out, I suppose I swallowed all the negative publicity and avoided it. A lot of the reviews made Oliver Stone seem like some sort of fervently delusional -- or grossly opportunistic -- whacko.

I had a few doubts about the Warren Commission Report, but didn't really want to devote too much thought to the topic, one way or the other.

Probably because I was trying to avoid even the prospect of having to include myself among the tinfoil-topper posse.

That "lunatic fringe" tag is a pretty powerful disincentive, sometimes, to doing your own critical thinking. "Auto-cenzura", or self-censorship (as they used to call it in the Eastern Bloc), is one of the most effective propaganda tactics.

I've been making up for lost time since November 22, 2002. At least I think it was the 40th anniversary. The History Channel showed about 5 or 6 straight hours of programming. It was a mixed bag of both 'single-bullet' and 'grassy knoll' stuff.

In their quest for big ratings numbers, maybe, the History Channel producers included some documentaries that were extremely critical of the Warren Report version of events.

That whole block of programming was repeated in a loop, the next night, and I saw some of those documentaries two or maybe three times. That was the "tipping point", for me.

That and the fact that two or three of the most skeptical programs have *never been seen*, on television, since. (I've been looking for them to be repeated. Those documentary channels make their living off cyclical repeats of the same stuff, but in the 5 + years, since, I haven't seen any of them once.) That, and the fact that the "newer" material on the subject tends to rely heavily on CGR (computer graphics) re-creations of the 'magic bullet' theory, just reinforces my doubts.

[MessiahRp]

13. ABC did a grossly misrepresentative documentary trying like hell to defend the Osward/Magic Bullet

claims and it gets way too much re-air on The History Channel IMO. It uses technology and laser sighting to prove their point at least on the initial shots but there's a major component missing in all of these shows (and even the ridiculous "Penn & Teller's Bullshit!" show's attempt to back the Government lie up) and that is none are done out of the Texas Book Depository because they have altered the building on the inside which makes it a hard recreation to pull off.

If they WERE able to do this they'd recognize the one thing totally missing from these fake recreation shows. A huge Texas Live Oak that was right in front of Oswald's supposed shot. The Texas Live Oak, from what I have heard, sprouts it's leaves in the Fall and a full tree would have blocked Oswald's aim. None of these recreation shows even mention the tree.

Rp

[HelenWheels]

7. Every democrat I talked to yesterday was an Edwards supporter

There was a room full there to say good-bye to Maryls and of course the conversation got political. Every person that I talked to, with the exception of Lawton, were Edwards supporters and most were still on the fence now that he dropped out. So how did it come down to Clinton/Obama?

[dragonlady]

8. The media, the purists, and the chance to make history

Here are three major reasons why Edwards didn't make it to the finish line.

1. Most people don't obsess about politics and seek out everything they can find, so when they didn't see as much about Edwards (and the other five) as Clinton/Obama, they figured he wasn't important. (This shows how powerful our corporate-owned media is.)

2. Those who want their candidate to agree with them on everything from the beginning saw that Edwards had voted for the war and bankruptcy bill and some other things they disliked, and they crossed him off. That he had grown and changed his positions and apologized didn't matter.

3. Lots of people wanted to be able to say they helped bring about the historic moment when the first African American or woman was elected president. Taking back America from the corporations, lifting people from poverty, and giving everyone affordable health care somehow didn't have the same appeal. I guess I can understand that. We are in such a dismal situation right now after two terms under Bush that everyone is yearning for something really thrilling. I hope we get that and then start working on achieving the goals John Edwards set for us.

[Jackpine Radical]

9. Same thing for me. Everybody I know was an Edwardian.

Maybe I just hang out with the wrong people--socialists, progressives, peaceniks and the like...

[ewagner]

10. Hey Jackpine

I finally saw your post....

I'm in....(shhhhhh....don't tell Joe :rofl: )

Send me a PM with a phone number so we can talk

I also know that most of my cohorts around here were "Edwardians" and people for the most part are none too happy about our choices....

btw: to our friend on Guam...I was there man...it was the most isolated feeling I ever had in my life....they wanted to send me to R & R on (are you ready for this?) Saipan!
See ya'll soon!

[CarbonDate]

14. Saturday night and I'm on DU....

I mean, I'm a single guy in my late twenties... just goes to show the rut I'm in out here.