December 30, 2015

The kid should have been more law-abiding. Like Cliven Bundy and his supporters. Rec. no text.

December 15, 2015

I've been having trouble with the rec button, and 'leave' or 'hide' on jury.

Just the last couple of days. Is there a fix for it?

August 28, 2015

The sweetheart contracts to 1)Innovative Emergency Management and 2)Service Corp Int'l.

1) Everyone knows that bush outsourced Homeland Security and FEMA to political hacks, where FEMA had been run by actual emergency managers before. A year before Katrina, they gave a private group called Innovative Emergency Management a half million dollar contract to write up a "catastrophic hurricane disaster plan for the city of New Orleans". Of course, after the disaster, FEMA was unable to verify that the document even existed, so bush's pig buddies just stole the money. It was pointed out that it wasn't much of a disaster relief evacuation plan if nobody could even locate the document, after the disaster occurred. IEM's sweetheart contract was actually just another example of corporate-welfare fraud by the ultra-rich nazi lame-o's that are so close to bush, and it endangered the public and led to deaths.

That's not hyperbole, it's a fact.

An interesting sub-plot is this: Greg Palast reported that IEM said in a press release (when they got the private contract a year before the flood), that they had "teamed" with renowned expert James Lee Witt, Clinton's FEMA head, to come up with a plan. But then Witt issued a statement saying that he wasn't involved with IEM at all. They just lied, made something up to make it seem like they had some kind of credentials to get a private contract for emergency management.

Interestingly, Al Frankin discussed 'lying about James Witt' in his book Lies... (on page 2) when he discussed pro-bush media bias. During the first pres. debate in 2000, bush lied and said that by far, the vast majority of his tax cuts were going to the people at the bottom, when in fact the bottom 60% got 14.7% of the money. The media said nothing. But in the same debate Gore said he visited a Texas fire disaster site with James Lee Witt. Actually he visited the site with Witt's deputy, he visited 17 other disaster sites with Witt. There were scores of stories written about how Gore lied during the debate about his involvement with Witt! It was obviously a much more important issue than bush's debate lie, or the subsequent lie of bush cronies that resulted in a 4 figure body count for US citizens.

2) And there is no final body count for the death toll. The '1800 dead' figure is artificially deflated. The private contractor that got the job of recovering bodies was SCI (Kenyon). There's a lot of good archived info on this site:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x443167
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x4808758#4808770
(See post 11, by DU member Snot)

Mark C Miller's book Cruel and Unusual pointed out that the repugs hung their 'impeach Clinton' efforts on the idea that Clinton 'lied under oath'. But when l'il bush was governor, SCI was a big donor of his which engaged in a lot of illegal practices, including desecrating bodies in cutrate shoddy botched embalming procedures and death threats against Ms. Eliza May, the head of the TX Funeral Services Commission. On 7/20/99, in order to prevent a deposition in her wrongful termination suit, l'il bush submitted a sworn affidavit that said he had no conversations with TFSC, SCI, or his staff about this 'FuneralGate' controversy, he had no knowledge of any of the facts in this case, and he never asked anyone on his staff to improperly interfere in this case. The sworn affidavit was entirely false. L'il bush lied under oath. And our country's media outlets failed to report his lying under oath.

So when Katrina's body count was swelling toward 9/11-level bodycount numbers, l'il bush's admin gave a sweetheart no-bids contract to SCI to 'recover' the bodies. Its wholly owned subsidiary Kenyon spent $17 million dollars on a facility that 'handled' 900 bodies, failed to identify 10% of them, failed to inform the families of 12% of the identified dead, etc. Bodies kept turning up, months after the job was 'done'. And there was plenty of wiggle room for SCI to not identify or report dead victims of the hurricane, since so many of them were from the poorest part of our country's population, and the bush admin had made sure to scatter their refugee families all over the country in temporary housing.

Simply put, one hand washed the other here. L'il bush's team got to avoid the inevitable comparison to his 9/11 failures that a body count over 2700 would bring, got to avoid the inevitable conclusion that his handling of Katrina was another national security failure, and that massive climate-change-caused environmental catastrophes are national security issues. And he got to give big campaign donors a lot of our tax dollars. SCI got our money, performed their job incompetently as usual, and got to help out their crooked buddy with his propaganda efforts. The relationship between bush and SCI is one where they engaged in a ton of felonies together.

3) I can't write about the sweetheart contract Blackwater's mercenaries got to provide security 'military policing' in NO, because it would take years of typing to categorically cover l'il bush and the repugs' hateful crooked thieving evil Katrina 'efforts'. But Naomi Klein and Jeremy Scahill report excellent info on that issue in their books Shock Doctrine and Blackwater.

August 8, 2015

Excellent charts in the Choquette and Johnson paper, that kicked off Clarkson's study.

(link included in the Americablog link).

The shift of votes to benefit repugs at precincts with over 350 voters, reminded me of Michael Collins' study of l'il bush's '04 'win' coming from (allegedly, according to the NEP's strained reconciliation attempt) '4 million new white big city voters', as described in Prof. Mark C. Miller's book Loser Take All, pp 97-115.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0807/S00133.htm

excerpt:

"Miller reveals a more sophisticated election theft in 2004. I wrote the chapter, "Election 2004: The Urban Legend" (by Michael Collins, see disclosure*) based on research by Internet poster " anaxarchos " who discovered some remarkable anomalies in the final exit poll for 2004: Bush won reelection in the nation's "big cities" (500,000 > pop.).

The national exit poll is sponsored by the Media Consortium consisting of the Associated Press ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, and CNN. It provides the acknowledged source of national data on who voted, where, and why. There was great controversy generated by the unintentional release of a late Election Day exit poll showing Kerry winning by 3%. The official version, released the day after the election had Bush winning by 3%.

We examined the official exit poll and discovered data that casts serious doubt on the claimed vote totals. According to the official version of the exit poll:
-- 2004 was not a red versus blue election, as reported. The rural sector in 2000 was 23% of the total vote but in 2004, it was just 16%. Bush total votes were down by two million in 2004 compared to 2000 in that segment. Bush lost significant ground in red states in 2004 and started the election in the hole.
-- Bush made spectacular gains in "big cities" (pop. 500,000 or greater) going from 26% to 39% of the total votes in that segment. According to the official exit poll, he picked up these gains largely with the help of four million white big city voters, ghosts so to speak, who rose from their graves and other hiding places to hand the election to Bush.
-- According to the official exit poll, the Bush big city magic took place amidst a 66% increase in big city voter turnout compared to a more modest 16% national turnout increase using reported vote totals.

There was no 66% increase in big city turnout. Actual big city vote totals, available election eve or shortly thereafter, show big city turnout slightly below the national average. The exit poll's 66% turnout increase and the four million white ghosts were the only way to make the poll agree with the election results, neither of which was accurate.
According to the official exits, Bush became the first president to be re-elected while both losing significant ground in his base and, at the same time, making it up in hostile territory, the nation's big cities. The same people who gave us this mess did the exit polling for the 2008 primaries and will conduct the 2008 national exit poll in November. "


It can't be conclusively stated that the 'over 350 voter precinct' flip is the same as the 'urban legend' red shift, because I don't have the big city precinct'size' numbers. But that central tabulator flip looks like a reasonable mechanism to explain the 4 million new big-city white 'ghost' bush supporters, who 'officially' gave him the victory, when he was hated in all the Dem big cities, and had done absolutely nothing in terms of 'pro-big city' policy, or big-city voter outreach.

March 7, 2015

You're right about the uselessness of 'apologies' when the offense is repeated again, flagrantly.

Or even covertly.

I back Rep. Conyers in his work against repug election theft, and his work on behalf of his non-NOI constituents, and his Congressional Black Caucus work.

I think that pols like John C. and Jesse Jackson are within the range of the money and force arms of the NOI. For a very long time, the schism between Chicago and NY crime had Detroit on NY's side, the same as in Pgh., where I live. But Detroit is perilously close to Chi., and Farrakhan's money and connections are big. If you look at where the NOI comes from, how it was formed, where it gets its money and influence, you're looking at far-right bircher money and far-right intel.

If presented with any organized effort to lobby Rep. Conyers to never associate with the anti-Gay, anti-Semitic, anti-Woman, pro-Black Nationalist Farrakhan, I will be on board 100%. You're right about Conyer's attendance of the 2 '14 speech, but I won't throw the baby out with the bathwater regarding Rep. Conyers on this. In fact, I believe that the far-right who hates LGBTs also hates Conyers, and purposely forced him into this position to further schisms between groups of people they hate.

I see a bit of a parallel between Conyer's association with Farrakhan, and Moscone and Milk's association with Jim Jones. I believe the far right would have attempted to kill Harvey Milk, anyway, but the proximate cause of the Milk and Moscone assassinations was the murder of Rep. Ryan when he was investigating Jonestown. It is very much alluded to in Fierstein's documentary, Shilt's book, and Bay Area LGBT activists efforts at the time.

Jones already had a crazy and murderous record from his "People's Temple's" time in Ukiah, CA. He moved to S.F., with his big money and large personnel resources, and was a political force to be reckoned with when the Moscone Milk group took SF mayor and Supervisors. Aides to Milk were troubled by the behavior of the Jones personnel, and Milk cautioned them that the group was crazy and dangerous. Moscone put Jones in charge of the Housing Authority, but I believe he was forced to do so, not because the Jones people passed out flyers for the coalition, but because Jones had big money right wing backers who had to be contended with, by the Mayor and City Supervisors.

There is no doubt that Milk and Moscone were opposed to the insane moves by Jones, in Jonestown and S.F. The far-righties behind Jones felt that Moscone and Milk were going to blow the whistle, when Jonestown came crashing down, which explains their being murdered much better than twinkies can. There have been ridiculous efforts to tar Moscone and Milk with 'association with Jones', but the fact that they were assassinated puts the lie to this far-right effort to engender a schism between groups that the far-right hates.

Antecdotally, in my city, there was an isolated, high-crime housing project called Westgate Village. Back in '90 -'91, the 'Security' for this project was provided by the NOI. They decided that they didn't like an illegal card game being run in one of the units, and some of the Fruit of Islam attacked the place in force. They got their asses handed to them in unarmed combat, by the residents, and other members came back to fire-bomb the unit. Unfortunately, they didn't know the area, were out-of-towners like the rest of the Fruit of Islam security force, so they hit the wrong unit, and burned a single-mother and her family out of their home (no deaths). I just mention it because it was a high profile display of Housing Authority corruption, municipal fraud, increased influence of Chicago organized crime in Pittsburgh, and sweetheart contracts given to the Nation of Islam. The firebombing wasn't part of the policy of the Dems who run our area, it was purely a Farrakhan initiative, though the NOI got the contract for security through Dems. And Pittsburgh's own Black Moslem leaders were already on the record years before, in calling Farrakhan 'the biggest fool on the face of the Earth'. The Black residents of Westgate Village, and the non-aligned Black Moslems in Pittsburgh, didn't like Farrakhan, and don't back him on anything, including his anti-LGBT 'theories'. He speaks for the far-right, not Blacks, Moslems, or Democrats.

Farrakhan is from the right, of the right. People within his org's armreach have to deal with him. Conyers is wrong, but not bad.

July 10, 2014

There was an interesting tie-in between the anti-healthcare ads and the tv ultrasound bills

that Rachel Maddow caught, and Galraedia posted 9-20-13.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1017146835

Bryan Slater was an "Americans United for Life" v.p.. He was in charge of the successful ram-rodding of model legislation that pushes mandatory t.v. ultrasounds, that the patient had to pay for, in a dozen repug controlled states. Slater moved over to the Koch brothers funded "Generation Opportunity", to run the creepy 'Uncle Sam doing gyn exams' ad campaign!

A typical picture of the way nazi repugs work. The repugs ARE the creepy uncle sam 'government' wielding a large probe as a weapon, then they project that crime falsely onto their political enemies, to avoid fallout from their insanely fascist legislation, and to attempt to make political gains on another health legislation front.

July 1, 2014

Here's a few notes, professor

I caught your 'simile - synonym' correction, thanks for tossing it. I'll leave 186 unedited, this line shows acknowledgement of my mistake, well enough.

Drop the lawyer act, just come right out and accuse mad of lying about having taught. Otherwise, your long-winded response in #187 -- with 4 sets of q and a s which don't really say what you want, but just imply it -- appears to be a tactic that is taught in 'De-Railing Conversations 101'.

Your use of 'motivation' in your third q shows you could use some time brushing up on definitions or reading comprehension, because it was a question about mad's actions, not the reasons she has for performing them. So bringing motivation into your answer doesn't respond to the question in a clear way, it just further obscures things. To a lesser extent, minor academic mistakes like mis-spelling weird and compliment can be avoided by clicking the helpful 'check spelling' box to the lower left of the reply box. These things tend to discredit your intellectual and academic capabilities, but there's no harm in being mistaken, as long as you learn from your mistakes.

If you feel that hostile responses populate the thread, at some point a reasonable person might take a moment to reflect on their own style and ask 'could it be something I'm doing that engenders this common response from diverse sources?' My take on your style is that you have a very thin veneer of 'humor', where you write accusations of lying and whining in a veiled manner. The accusations show real hostility, (YOU are angry), and you chortle up your sleeve that you got one over the jury system again. But it's not a happy laugh. If you're pretending to be polite, you aren't really convincing anyone else that is the case.

Your virginity simile, and exhaustive list of synonyms, aren't disturbing or shocking, they're just odd stylistic flashes that add nothing to the discussion. It's odd and ironic that you permit yourself these useless flashes, since you indict blogs as 'not primary sources', yet here you are on-line essentially functioning as a blog yourself, indicting blogs. And there are plenty of primary sources in the posts from mad or Diane Ravitch, which brings the derailed conversation back to the fore. This was written in the WaPo blog (of Post Education reporter Valerie Strauss), and it's something that you dismiss because, you know, it's a blog (so the arbiter can arbitrarily declare that primary sources and expert opinions aren't meeting their high expectations, and can therefore be mislabeled and ignored):

"Apparently, the department believes that more testing will help special education students achieve more in school. But since No Child Left Behind started, the standardized test-based “accountability” era more than a dozen years ago, there has been no evidence to show that standardized tests have improved student achievement, or that linking test scores to teacher evaluations has created better teachers."

It's a fact. It's a widely acknowledged fact, that bears discussion, and mad and other public ed advocates are trying to discuss it. You keep ignoring the testing end of things (example posts #70, 101, 139, and 186 are places where the issue was brought up, and you gloss over it, like you just don't see it.) The advocates and opponents of high-stakes nclb testing are continuing to say that public education is losing ground, it's observable reality. Opponents have been saying for over a decade that l'il bush's policy was just an attack on public education, an attempt to destroy it and steal the money for his wealthy cronies. But they were just bloggers with an opinion. (As usual, advocates are saying we should just stay the course, we just haven't enacted the policy fully enough and it needs more power and time to succeed.)

An afficionado of The Smirking Chimp, who use a 'lost virginity' simile to prove a point, might appreciate this: l'il bush's education policy is 'the Iraq invasion' of education policies. Bloggers opposed the Iraq debacle, saying that it was a horrible idea. Proponents said that there was no primary source to back up the assertions that his team was only interested in oil, profits, power; he was 'really' doing it for peace, democracy, national security, humanitarian interests. Opponent bloggers were all over the place with their conjectures (it was for the oil, it was revenge against Hussein, it was the chimp one-upping his dad for Freudian reasons, it was so he could consolidate power as a war president, it was so he could take Iraq's oil off the market to benefit the Saudi Exxon bottom line, it was so contractors like Halliburton and Blackwater could bleed us for obscene profits, etc.) They may have disagreed about the motives, but all agreed that the chimp was lying, and the results would be disastrous. Proponents said that those bloggers were all over the board, and had no proof that their suspicions were justifiable. These proponents' objections served to enable the bush Admin.

Here we are, 11 years later, and the results are disastrous. The opponents' predictions were proved true, the proponents' justifications proved disastrously false. Similar to his foreign policy, the chimps' Iraq War style education policy is a disaster, that he lied about to get implemented. We still get to see the architects of these failed plans opining on primary sources, all the time. Because the big money people are happy about the results, though they vary wildly from the stated aims used to justify the policy implementation. I'm not blaming you for Iraq with this simile or analogy, you just remind me of the Iraq policy proponents when you pursue your justification of l'il bush's 'Iraq Invasion' Education policies. Same tactics, same de-railment, same 'you can't prove it', for the same results.

Does your business happen to involve work with Rhee, Pearson, Broad, Gates, or any of the other witches brew of profiteers who want to destroy education and make big bucks out of denying non-rich Americans of the ability to learn? I only ask because it would go a long way towards explaining why duty called the educator-businessman to dust off the old account and suddenly re-enter the fray to forcefully back the Iraq invasion of education policies, while making thinly veiled insulting false accusations against a demonstrably good educator and Democrat like mad. Especially when any competent researcher knows that all over the country bad news is pouring in about educational opportunities for non-wealthy public school students, whether you accept the sources as primary \ substantive or not.

December 19, 2013

Your post # 460, last Jan 22 (in your o.p. of Jan 15), had info on an alternate route.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=2242472

I mistakenly thought the road was 'Commerce' or 'Commercial', it was 'Industrial'. Deputy Chief Lumpkin (who was Army Intel Reserve, and in the motorcade's pilot car), said in your link that Industrial was not a good route, because it was run down and winos hung around there.

Lumpkin's name came up twice in Russ Baker's Family of Secrets , once in connection with the motorcade and its route (On the re-routing, Baker said on p. 110 that "Officially, the decision to reroute the motorcade from Main Street to Elm, in front of the Book Depository Building, was made only a week before the event--by two Secret Service agents", but Baker didn't name the official source or the agents who changed the route). Lumpkin is first mentioned on p. 115: "on the day of the assassination, Deputy Police Chief George L. Lumpkin was driving the pilot car of Kennedy's motorcade...Lumpkin was a friend of Jack Crichton, Poppy bush's GOP colleague" (Crichton was running for statewide office alongside Poppy bush, Crichton for Gov, Poppy for Senate)..."Like Crichton, moreover, {Lumpkin} was a member of an Army Intelligence Reserve unit. (Lumpkin would later tell the HSCA that he had been consulted by the Secret Service on motorcade security, and his input had eliminated an alternate route.)" Baker didn't mention that the route was via Industrial, unlike your HSCA link. "In the car with Lumpkin was another Army officer, Lt. Col. George Whitmeyer, commander of all Army Reserve units in East Texas, who happened to be Jack Crichton's boss in the Reserve. Although Whitmeyer was not on the police list of those approved to ride in the pilot car, he had insisted that he be in the vehicle and remained there until the shooting. The only recorded stop made by the pilot car was directly in front of the Depository building. Lumpkin stopped briefly there and spoke to a policeman handling traffic at the corner of Houston and Elm."

A bonus mention of Army Reserve unit involvement comes from Russ on page 188. He pointed out that the Bottlers' convention, which was scheduled at the same time as Kennedy's visit to Dallas, held a rodeo to entertain 200 orphans, and the Army Reserves volunteered to provide trucks and drivers to transport the kids to and from the arena at Fair Park (close to the site of the Crichton-led Dallas Civil Defense group's underground emergency bunker and communications facility. Crichton, like Ferrie and Oswald, was big on Civil Defense.) Baker pointed out that the bottlers' convention brought Nixon to Dallas, brought 8,000 strangers to Dallas, sent army vehicles into action on city streets the night before the assassination, and by taking the biggest Dallas venue, helped determine Kennedy's venue and the motorcade route.

The other mention of Lumpkin in Baker's book is on page 119. Within hours of Kennedy's death and Oswald's arrest, a right wing repug party activist and precinct chairman, white Russian emigre Ilya Mamantov, stepped in and functioned as an interpreter between Marina Oswald and investigators, embellishing her comments to establish in no uncertain terms that 'leftist' Lee Oswald was the gunman-the lone gunman-who killed the President. "It is interesting of course that the Dallas police would let an outsider--in particular, a right-wing Russian emigre--handle the delicate interpreting task. Asked by the Warren Commission how this happened, Mamantov said that he had received a phone call from Deputy Police Chief George Lumpkin. After a moment's thought, Mamantov then remembered that just preceding Lumpkin's call he had heard from Jack Crichton. It was Crichton who had put the Dallas Police Dept. together with Mamantov and ensured his place at Marina Oswald's side at this crucial moment. Despite this revelation, Crichton almost completely escaped scrutiny. The Warren Commission never interviewed him."


Harrison Livingstone's The Radical Right and the Murder of John F. Kennedy discussed motorcade planning while talking about a problem with the postmark for the money order Oswald allegedly sent to obtain the murder weapon. It was for 10:30 a.m. on 3/12/63, but during this time Oswald was working for Jaggers-Chiles at some distance from the post office, he was punched in before the post office opened, and his time sheet accounted for each of the jobs he did that morning. "... the job he was working on the longest that morning was for his employer's client, Sam Bloom, the man who later worked closely with the Secret Service to set up the motorcade and Kennedy's visit to Dallas eight month's later. Sam Bloom was an 'associate' of Jack Ruby who was reputed to be Oswald's friend." (p. 209, Livingstone, source cited Warren Commission vol. 22, p. 516.) Mr. Livingstone's book is poorly indexed, and jumps around topically quite a bit, and he says 'Sam Bloom' instead of Mae Brussell's 'Sol Bloom'. Maybe 'Sam' is an Americanized version of 'Sol'; I've never seen them both written together in any source discussing the P.R. agency who was handling the publicity and political side of the motorcade planning, as opposed to the security side.

James Hepburn's Farewell America said on p. 352 that Secret Service advance man Winston Lawson and Dallas S.S. head Sorrels drove the motorcade route with Chief Curry on Monday, Nov. 18. "After they had driven through the center of the city and reached Dealey Plaza, Curry pointed down Main Street past the railroad overpass and said, 'and afterwards there's only the freeway.' But instead of turning right into Houston Street in the direction of Elm Street, as the motorcade did on November 22, Curry turned left in front of the Old Court-house, and neither Lawson nor Sorrels followed the parade route past that point...This type of double turn is contrary to Secret Service regulations, which specifiy that when a Presidential motorcade has to slow down to make a turn, 'the entire intersection must be examined in advance, searched and inspected from top to bottom'. Curry, however, brought the reconnaissance to an end at the very point where it became unacceptable (as well as unusual) from the point of view of security."

When Curry pointed down Main and said, "and afterwards there's only the freeway", that might have been the route Senator Yarborough remembered taking in previous motorcades, Curry's implied route seems to match the 'Main St. to Stemmons Freeway' route description. Why Sorrels, who was the head of Dallas S.S., would need a guide or be unfamiliar with Dealey Plaza and the Freeway ramps, is beyond my ability to explain reasonably. But given his frenetic activity post-assassination to deal exclusively with Zapruder's footage, maybe some 'Occam's Razor' advocate could offer the simplest explanation of Sorrels' activities, abilities, and motivations. To me, it seems like Hepburn's source for the 'dry run' events and conversation was either Lawson or a written report from Lawson.


Thanks for the link to the N. R. article, and the Agents Go On Record link, Octa. There had to have been a lot of good Secret Service agents on the job, or Kennedy wouldn't have lived as long as he did. But none of those agents were in command on 11/22, instead Pat Kirkwood's drinking buddies were in charge. The New Republic article from Dec. of '63 is excellent, it does a good job of compiling the constantly altering details of the emerging 'official story'. I like those early sources, watching the authorities trying to explain things that are known and undeniable, then their explanation trips them up, then they have to re-explain. I really like lines about the '30 Cal Enfield/7.65 mm Mauser/.25 cal Army or Japanese rifle they found on the 2nd, 5th, and 6th floor and in the stairwells, which changed into the 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano that Italian rifle-makers 'customarily' leave their name off of, to prevent their products from being immediately identifiable. Even better that Oswald was across town at work when he purchased the money order at the post office in another part of town to pay for this remarkable weapon. I'm pretty sure he would have faced some kind of wire fraud charges for a transaction like that, had he lived.

December 6, 2013

There's a good analysis of the Parrott memo in Russ Baker's book 'Family of Secrets'

It runs on pp 45 through 66 (paperback version). I'm not saying you must read my source, though. To sum it up: Poppy bush was in Dallas campaigning against Kennedy and the Democrats on 11-21 and 11-22 morning. He was in Tyler, Texas (he alleges) prepared to give a repug campaign speech, and heard that wires from Dallas confirmed that the President had been assassinated (1:38 pm Central). He didn’t give the political speech. Instead, a few minutes later, he called the FBI to 'finger' Parrott (1:45 pm Central) -- 'There's this guy who volunteers for the organization I'm leading, and he's been talking about killing Kennedy. Gee whiz, I hope he didn’t do anything rash against the guy I’ve been railing against in my Senate run. By the way, I’m not in Dallas, I used my oil buddy’s private jet to go to Tyler, and I’ll use it to go back to Dallas, now'. Fortunately for James Parrott, at the exact same time of the call, Poppy's right hand man in the Harris County repug Party, Kearney Reynolds, was visiting Parrott on behalf of bush to coordinate repug campaign activities with him, and so could provide an alibi to the FBI for Parrott. So what was the point?

There are several points, actually. First, as author Russ Baker points out, bush phoned a FBI agent named Graham Kitchel with the tip. Graham's brother George, an offshore oil engineer, was good friends with Poppy, long-time friends according to an interview George K. himself gave. This ensured his useless tip, among hundreds of calls fielded on what may have been the most hectic day in the FBI’s history, would get action and documentation, unlike a lot of other ‘tips’ that weren’t worthy of documentation. It wasted the Feds’ time and resources, but that waste wasn’t caused in furtherance of a plot against JFK. What the documentation of bush’s ‘tip’ ‘from Tyler’ did, was ‘establish’ the ‘fact’ that bush wasn’t in Dallas, though he was in Dallas on the morning of the 22nd and (according to bush) ‘flew back and was in Dallas on the afternoon of the 22nd’. The FBI memo functioned as a paper trail that explained bush’s presence in Dallas before and after the assassination (because many people saw him there), and ‘established’ that he wasn’t there during it. The result of the useless tip was that “Parrott became Poppy’s alibi, and Poppy’s assistant became Parrott’s.”(--Baker, p. 61). It’s the Texas two step.

Hoover didn’t like the Kennedys, but had no lost love for bush’s bircher crowd, either. He also knew that if they could kill JFK, they could kill Hoover. His reaction to the bush ‘tip’ was a memo of his own a few days later, saying ‘Mr. George Bush of the CIA , we’ve been watching that crowd of armed extremist Batista Cubans you’ve been training, and we think they’re trying to use the assassination as a pretext to launch a war from our soil against Cuba. We know that’s illegal, and we ARE in the business of law enforcement, after all.’ (Those Cubans are the people who Oswald had documented involvement with, working both in favor of their cause and, as the only documented member of the FPCC in New Orleans, ‘against’ their cause. Carlos Bringuier, Antonio Veciana, Col. Orlando Piedra, Sergio Arcacha Smith – those Cubans.)

Hoover’s memo was also important because Poppy denied being in the CIA until he was appointed to lead it, and denies having been in the CIA from the 50’s – 70’s, to this day. Hoover blew bush’s cover, quite purposefully, and told bush’s crowd that they had reached the end of their chain, in action terms.

The reaction to Hoover’s move was an immediate set of leaks in December to Dallas D.A. Wade and ‘friendly’ (to right wing repugs) Dallas reporters saying that Oswald was an FBI informant. And in January, Texas A. G. Waggoner Carr sent Warren Commission General Counsel Rankin a memo about the allegations. Carr said the allegations came from Dallas D.A. Wade, and Wade was unable or unwilling to specify the source of them. That’s the Texas repugs and CIA man bush’s crowd saying ‘How about we pin the assassination on you, Hoover?’

Interestingly, when D.A. Wade was giving a late night press conference as Nov. 22 ended, he identified Oswald as a member of the ‘Free Cuba Committee’. He was corrected by a strip-club owner named Jack Ruby, who had mixed in with the crowd of reporters, and who said ‘That’s the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.’ (The Crusade to Free Cuba Committee was an anti-Castro pro Batista Cuban expatriate crowd who had offices in the New Orleans building at 544 Camp Street. Oswald distributed flyers stamped with that address for the pro-Castro FPCC, he distributed those flyers on the street outside that building, and used that building as a base for his ‘work on behalf of’ Castro.)

I remember discussing Wade’s actions with Zap, the DU WC advocate last year. Why would a DA in a high profile international press conference take public correction from a mob flunky, instead of having the cops remove the guy from the room? How did a mob flunky strip club owner come to have such in depth knowledge about obscure pro and anti Castro groups, to make sure that the anti-Castro group didn’t get blamed, but the pro-Castro group did get blamed? Those two lines from the press conference showed that Wade knew Ruby, and Ruby knew Oswald, but the response to my question from Zap was a glib ‘Why don’t you ask Wade?’, (who is dead).

And finally, regarding Parrott: Baker’s book talked about an interview conducted with Parrott in ’93. The high interest in the Kennedy assassination in the early ‘90’s had led to Congress unanimously passing the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of ’92, which caused the Parrott memo to be released. This generated interest in Parrott, and he gave an interview in ’93. He noted that he had worked for bush’s re-election campaign in ’92, and “in an article covering the frenzied GOP-convention podium attacks on the Clinton-Gore team over family values, Parrott is described as passing out flyers saying ‘no queers or baby killing’, while wearing a plastic shield over his face, explaining that it was protection against the AIDS virus.” (-- Baker, p. 63, sourced to Minneapolis Star-Tribune reporter Steve Berg, 8-19-92.) Parrott was a teabagger 17 years before the movement existed. He suffered no harm from bush’s ‘tip’. If he did, bush wouldn’t have cared, because Parrott is deranged teabag cannon fodder. But he didn’t.

Parrott’s party activism illustrates a point: for those of us who find the ‘official story’ yarn spun by the Warren Commission to be composed of a thousand loose threads, we’re not just re-hashing academic historical facts about the murder of JFK. We believe that the people who committed the crime benefitted from it, and they and their heirs are still around hurting the country. Exposing them will help prevent them from hurting the country more.

November 5, 2013

Your thread last year on the assassination helped me

I lost a good friend on Thanksgiving 11 22 12, and reading and writing in your thread then helped me feel better. He was a big Kennedy Democrat, and he would have enjoyed the information, though he was never involved in online exchanges.