Terry Priest

if it had been so simple as men on the fifth floor heard the shots go off above them, and heard the shell casings hit the floor, they then would have had one of two reactions, peek in the stairwell(s) to see who was coming down, or be too afraid to peak in the stairwell(s). i never saw the followup question, what did you do then after you knew the killer was above you. brennan's testimony to me seems like somebody is trying to be seen. a shooter on the sixth floor would be sweating how is he going to get down either stairway or elevator after shooting from an open window. he would not be lingering in the window.

the old man and posterity an older gentleman who had a long and successful life, had done many great deeds, but had never had a child. he decided he wanted to pass on his superior intellect to a new generation, so he went to a sperm bank to donate. the woman signed him up, gave him a jar, and showed him to the room. much time passes. she knocks and asks if he is alright. he comes out, flustered, and says, i never had this trouble before. i tried everything, i tried my left hand, i tried my right hand, i used warm water. i can't get the lid off this jar

http://www.truth-out.org/goodbye-all-reflections-gop-operative-who-left-cult/1314907779 a republican staffer who just couldnt take it anymore, comprehensive analysis, best i have seen.

john a friend of mine, now deceased, was a guard for trotsky and was there the day he died. thats how i became interested in trotsky. honestly, i am not sure what trotskyism is, or what trotskyists stand for, i think they all stand for something different. i think it was the force of his personality, his work ethic, and the force of his intellect that created the movement, more than any big idea, other than the basic idea of socialism, people should benefit from their labor. he was without question a genius, but geniuses can be wrong. the modern biographies seem to be pretty hard on him, that later in his life, he made some bad decisions, alienated friends and befriended enemies. he was autocratic and impractical at times, but the pressure he was under from stalin, systematically killing not only everyone in his family but everyone he ever knew.there was a firestorm in his own organization the last two years of his life over the hitler-stalin pact. i guess this is off topic since the thread is jbs and koch, but if you take the swp as being the antithesis to the jbs, it kinda fits. i jumped in because it seemed like there was too much of an attempt to connect too many dots. the connection between trotsky and oswald is the swp, trotskys organization founded by cannon. he and joseph hansen were both still in charge of the swp in the early 60s. hansen was trotskys secretary in mexico, was there the day he died, and had some connection, i am not sure what, with the fair play for cuba. hansen is a pretty weird guy, imo. he generated a lot of controversy in the 70s when the english group accused him of being either an fbi agent, a gpu agent, or both, while trotsky was still alive. he seemed to run the organization totally into the ground. i think there is some possibility he was an fbi informant. less likely that he was ever associated with the gpu. my opinion is that the swp was never very significant or had much real influence. even in their heyday, 37-39. stalins pact with hitler, and trotskys insistence that it didnt really change anything, was impossible for many of his american followers to swallow, and they split with him. its the main mistake trotsky made at the end, asking his american followers in a theoretical way to defend russia in a war with america. i cant see any reason he could hold that line, except he could not bear to see his socialist experiment extinguished and perhaps he still hoped for a miracle where he could go back to russia as vindicated. in the 50s after the mccarthy pressure, the swp was, i believe, extremely small. lyman paine was not a founder of the swp. that is repeated occasionally, but i had never heard the name before. there is a couple of web sites that are by followers of trotsky, that catalog all the writings done by him and in trotskys name, and the name lyman paine does not come up in any search. he was there, though references to him are pretty obscure. i will eat my words if somebody shows me a real reference. on the fbi site, they have declassified their trotsky assassination investigation, there are several large pdfs. lyman paine is mentioned in one memo as "the money guy" if i remember right, behind clr james, who was a fairly independent voice, not a masthead character in the swp. so he had some involvement, but not with the cannon, hansen, dobbs, schachtman, burnham, the real leaders in the 30s and beyond. its possible the words "charter member" and "founder" were substituted at one point, but they mean very different things.

mr. phelps your references to trotsky need some background, i am not sure what you are saying, but it seems to contradict what is common information. mexico was about the last place on earth that would accept trotsky. he was allowed in on condition that he have no involvement in local politics. i have never read that he violated that. the first year or two he was consumed by his self-staged trial with dewey, where dewey said stalin's fantastic charges all false. later, he was only there 3 years, his american membership began to question his leadership as stalin and hitler signed their pact. i cannot believe he had any role in mexican catholicism. this is a 400 year institution. trotsky is an alien practically a prisoner in his house. his writing in this period is all about trying to resurrect his organization. he made very little ripples in mexico really, other than being a target. the link you provided does not have any special information. there are several biographies, Deutscher, Volkogonov, Patenaude writes specifically about the mexican exile. i feel he was pretty isolated while there and had his hands full with his declining health, declining influence, the death of nearly all his relations, including his son.

johnson the morning of nov 25: "We can't be checking up on every shooting scrape in the country"

the picture that sticks most in my mind of the Reagan years was the photo in "The Progressive" with the night's kill laying on the road in El Salvador. Allan Nairn was the journalist, the issue was the May 1984 issue of "The Progressive" - "Behind the Death Squads." I cannot find it online. To me its the worst of the anti-communism extra-judicial righteous killings. it must stick in Nairn's mind too, because he still talks about it here. http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Authors/Nairn_Reagan_DNinterview.html as i recall the man called the father of the death squads was trained in vietnam. the latin america paramilitary was set up similar. the cia put out a famous death squad training manual, i cannot find that either, with a picture of people with holes in their head on the cover. i dont have any nolstalgia for reagan. if he did one good thing, it was the disarmament treaties. other than that...

the U.S. government just does not seem to realize these extra-judicial killings are fundamentally immoral.

the probable martyr assange will show if the threat of challenging authority is overstated. power doesn't retreat. he maybe has done as much to unite governments, against him, as he has to spread trouble. chomsky said governments need to keep secrets to protect themselves from their own people. i am hoping for a non-tragic outcome. it seems like governments, at least the american government has not really come to terms with the idea of electronic files yet. they leave open the possibility that thousands of people can steal these files, then blame the thieves. sarah palin practically gave millions of people all the information they needed to "hack" her email, if you could guess she met her husband in her hometown, and then she compared this spontaneous act by a 20 year old in his basement to watergate. i hope assange lives thru this. so if anything is overstated, its the reaction of the state to any threat, such as anti-communism, and any penetration of its control.

wrt to china, not britain, and state capitalism versus its effect on free trade capitalism. i was involved in a new factory built in minnesota. the steel was cheaper to fabricate and ship from china. steel is the same price the world over. the steel has to be cut, end plates welded on, holes, braces, etc. To prove it was all correct, it was erected in china, errors corrected, pictures sent, dismantled and shipped. This is obviously "not fair", there is no wages low enough to justify this. so add the effect of the state capitalizing core industry, low wages, lack of regulation, environmental neglect, and central planning starts to look like it has transformed from inefficient communism into a triumph over idealistic capitalism. jobs will follow low wages. in america, from the industrial northeast, to the midwest, to the south, and now to mexico and china. this seems to me the challenge of capitalism, no industrial country has ever had an expanding economy that also did not have low wages.

john everybody knows here that most of our goods are coming from overseas, even american flags are made in china. so we have dollars leaving the country to pay for goods, then the dollars come back when they loan money for bonds. wikipedia says the current 2009 spending is 3.5 trillion, and revenues are 2.1 trillion. our current longterm debt i think is around 13 trillion. how that all washes out, i dont know. if an individual was spending 1.5 times more than he made, and his total debt was 6 times his annual income, he would be in some trouble. but printing money wouldnt be an option for him.

john, the tea party doesn't have an economic policy. they ran on the phrase, "out of control spending." but they never make a simple declarative statement of how much spending has increased. local letters to the editor always talked about the deficit, sometimes getting the debt and deficit mixed up, never quantifying the drop in tax revenues because of the recession, or the component in the stimulus that was a tax cut, which conservatives say they always approve. these are dark times! there is populist anger, jobs seem to be on a long downward trend. the conditions for a popular protest are there. the democrats do not seem to be a different party than the republicans when it comes to financial regulation, war-making, or the mechanics of government. these are the real problems, and the democrats seem to want to pick off relatively minor issues. so in my view, you have a party in power which deserves to be thrown out. however the anger is out of proportion to their actual misdeeds. and i think that should be placed squarely on the right wing gasbags, limbaugh, beck, drudge, and a whole army of others. the propaganda that is going on unchecked is vicious and immoral. its a political assassination of a different kind.

obviously taken from the video you describe, david

i think its propaganda on the right and incompetence on the left. the left government seems to be more concerned with social issues, the economics of the heartland are really bad. the fierce and immoral propaganda seems to have been ignored by the left. maybe we will stop hearing the bogus socialism charge. i am beginning to think socialism means anybody who cares in the least for anybody but themself.

i am betting on an earache.

he appeared pretty rational on the john stewart interview. he is just a man, it would be hard to keep your head in that job. he is not a political genius, if you listen to right wing radio, you know how nuts it is getting and for him to say a large group of people are irrational because they are scared, seems technically correct to me. the last president to leave the job with their head held high? eisenhower or truman?

the dvd fog of war, robert mcnamara, has some audio of lbj telling mac to write a position paper on vietnam. thats fine, says mac, but what to say. i will tell you what i would say, says lbj, whenever i heard you and kennedy talking about pulling out of vietnam, i thought it was wrong, we're losing... very loose remembrance on my part, but essentially telling mcnamara there is a new policy. in lbj's own voice. I think that was the moment mcnamara should have thought long and hard.

in the senate since 1952 and realized Nixon was a dishonest man in 1976. thats looking at things through partisan eyes. books about truman read similar to this, plain speaking, "I didn't fire MacArthur because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he is, but because..."

there is a roscoe white thread also with some of the other more fantastic or fantastic hoax claims, either a magnet for fiction or, http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=3899&st=0&p=113176&hl=roscoe&fromsearch=1entry113176

mike robinson http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=2862&st=285

it might be in anthony summers bio of j edgar hoover. an admiring employee of the fbi had a baby boy, he named him edgar, in honor of the director. the joke went around fbi headquarters, if it had been a girl, he would have named her clyde. the pope flies in to new york, is picked by a limo, tells the chauffeur, i have always wanted to drive one of these things, get in back. in no time he is doing 90 on the freeway and gets pulled over. the cop walks up to the window, looks at the driver, looks in the back, walks back to his radio. i need some backup, i pulled over somebody big. how big. big. the mayor? bigger. the governor? bigger. the president? bigger. how could anybody be bigger than the president? i dont know but the pope is the chauffeur. rodney dangerfield : i bought a used car and found my wife's dress in the back seat.

my beginners reading is that the lone nut advocates say the evidence is conclusive, and the conspiracy theory advocates say, the evidence has been tampered with. so there is that disagreement. but what does not seem disputable to me is the evidence of a coverup. i dont even think i need to repeat that evidence, but a coverup by definition is hiding something. Then there is that small problem of dozens of people running towards the knoll and people on the knoll saying bullets whizzed over their head. When Oswald gets shot in police custody, that looks like a conspiracy. When Ruby begs the WC to get him out of Dallas, and he will talk, but if he talks in Dallas, he will die, he is not afraid of Oswald supporters. The memos have now been released before the WC was even begun that said our concern is that we set up a commission that finds what we already know we want to put across. thats a coverup. Its a great way to learn history, my concern is that when the generation that remember it pass on, so will the passion, and its time to cut to the chase, there is too much chaff to leave to historians, mark the most important evidence, and make it evidential, as in affidavits and videos of witnesses, the secondhand and passed along unsourced facts will be thrown out in the court of history.

Bill thanks for acknowledging the question. how do you get away? i have read a little on the trotsky assassination and in hindsight, everyone who knew the assassin said he was a nervous wreck, because he had to go into the walled compound, he could imagine being able to kill, but he could not figure a way out. this was a trained assassin. and thats what happened. he tried to kill him silently, but trotsky screamed. it seems to me a lone gunman shooting from the sixth floor in a building where nearly every window is occupied, he can have no expectation of getting down those stairs without at least meeting somebody who has heard the shots from above. Brennan says, http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/history/The_deed/Brennan/Brennan_book.html "Directly across the street from where I sat was the Texas School Book Depository Building. By now it seemed that every window in the place was open with one or more people peering out." then he says but mostly on the lower floors, just those few people on the fifth floor, and just the one on the sixth. my question, all those people heard the shots, the windows are open, are the acoustics that strange they could not tell they came from an upper floor? did nobody think somebody was coming down the stairs? Supposedly the guys on the fifth floor could hear the casings hit the floor. all they got to do is peek in the stairway(s). did they even mention to anybody there is somebody on the sixth floor with a gun?

somebody who has actually seen the building might be able to give some insight. is there just one staircase? the guys that were on the 5th floor, that heard in a deafening way 3 shots, and heard the shellcasings hit the floor, because the sub-floor was all there was, and there were cracks in it, i think all that is from posner, did they hot foot it down the stairs, or did they hide because they knew the assassin was coming down the stairs? did anybody ask them how tempted were you to see who was coming down the stairs? if you are going to shoot the president from the sixth floor, with no accomplices, you got to assume you are not getting down those stairs. i think oswald would have been a nervous wreck all morning and somebody should have noticed it. it was no plan at all. the witness across the street said the shooter stopped, seemed calm, didnt seem in a hurry. 100 employees? the best vantage point would be the building, a lot of folks watching from windows, according to the witness. it would seem everybody in the building would hear the shots, everybody would know somebody was coming down the stairs.