Paul Brancato

Cliff - of course Comey did something unthinkable and unforgivable. It might have swung the election her way if he hadn't but I've come to doubt that. 

Like Jim I live in California. We did have the luxury here of voting our conscience. I've voted third party many times, not this time. But chewing Jim out because he didn't vote for Clinton ignores his residency. He said he didn't live in a swing state. What more neeeds to be said. If fascism comes here it's not beside of the Jim DiEugenios out there.

Why do so many of you have a problem with criticizing Clinton? I find it very surprising. I voted for Sanders, and Clinton. But I haven't been happy with the Democratic Party for a long time. DiEugenio named a lot of the things that got passed under Bill Clinton that were not good for the country. I know Hilary Clinton has been hounded for decades now. It almost made me feel she would make a good president. But defending her after the election - what's the point? When I criticize her from the left it's entirely different than from the right. I'm really sick of the Democratic Party marginalizing their progressives. I know some of it is the natural tendency, for understandable historical reason, of blacks to be afraid of the left. This goes back at least to the way NAACP dealt with Paul Robeson. He was going to quickly. But blacks also know that progressives are their true friends, not fair weather. 

Another point, and this is to Tommy mainly, is that I think a little empathy is called for when trying to understand Putin's Russia. They are not allowed into NATO, they are surrounded by weaponry and nukes pointing at them, and their opinions in the court of public opinion are dismissed. Didn't we all learn that JFK wanted to end the Cold War? Tommy - do you concur? Well, what are we doing now? What would JFK do?

We never read anything about CIA, yet their hands are all over the Ukraine and Crimea. What would the US do in a similar situation on its border? It's so easy to vilify Putin, especially now. But to say he has no reason to be pissed off would be ignorant. Of course he does. 

Paul - bearing in mind how futile it is to argue with you, your insistence that someone show even one place where Marina lied to the WC is a cop out on your part. It's immaterial whether she was under oath or not. Come on, you imagine that all the testimony taken my the WC under oath was truthful? Do you allow yourself to decide what is truthful and what is not? Do you admit that she  changed her story and that commissioners were concerned about her veracity? It's a moot point Paul what you think is true or not. But you hang your hat on her testimony under oath and ignore the rest.

I have to wonder whether the uncounted votes are part of these statistics. If what I'm reading is correct, there are millions of. Votes not yet counted. In California several million votes, but also in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin. And who knows where else? Of course the uncounted votes are in the cities, as are the voting lines more or less. My mom would have said 'don't put the cart before the horse'. Counting the vote accurately and in a timely manner is the cart. My new motto - Count the Vote.

Everybody - The vote remains incomplete. Yet the nation, the media, the Democratic Party, want to do post mortems. This is a huge scandal getting very little attention, even here where I hope we would be more in tune with conspiracy. I'm not just talking about California. 

5 hours ago, Ron Ecker said:

My sources tell me that Anthony Weiner was a patsy. The FBI was dying to get its hands on his computer, for any Huma emails, so it lured Weiner into sexting a supposed underage girl. It was actually James Comey himself.

Wait till Hillary hears about this!

That's an interesting take. Where did you hear it?

 

 

3 hours ago, Thomas Graves said:

Ever heard of the KGB, the FSB, 1999 Russian Apartment Bombings, the Second Chechen War, Transnistria, Crimea (and the Little Green Men), Donbas (and the Russian BUK that shot down MH17), Syria, Cozy Bear, Fancy Bear, Guccifer 2.0, the so-called Ukrainian Separatist "Motorola," Wikileaks, etc.?

Ever watched the PBS video "Putin's Way"?  (It's free. All ya gotta do is [gasp] Google it.)

--  Tommy

Are you saying Putin is a bad guy? 

Ron - I admit I have no idea what he will do despite the nasty things he has said. If I could wave my magic wand I would bring the demonstrators home. They've made their point and they are rightfully outraged. I would also get Trump to publicly condemn racial and ethnic violence, tell the kkk to put their robes back in their closets and shut the hell up. And then I would have him say to the left that he hears their concerns. 

We have to learn to talk, to disagree respectfully. I blame Republicans for their politics of division, and implore Democrats to take the high road and stop demonizing Trump. It's too soon. We have the moral high ground, but looking down at the deplorables destroys any possibility of constructive engagement. 

Maybe Trump's current demeanor is in part because he sees that there is a nest of viper insiders surrounding him and trying to manipulate him. Too much to hope for probably.

Funny how I found myself agreeing alternately with Cliff and Ron while they face off. The exchange seems like a microcosm of the inability to communicate across a cultural divide that is very complex. Sources of facts are hard to come by in this media driven environment. One thing I notice is that when progressives criticize Clinton it's because she seems wedded to policies we don't agree with. The Republican criticisms are more like a witch hunt, and on the far right the demonization takes extraordinary leaps into complete fabrications. 

Yes, but trying to understand is better than not. The Russians are understandably pissed off about a lot of things. Maybe business is a way to find common ground. 

Michael Ledeen - the names floating around Trump are all the same damn neocons.

Republicans like large deficits, despite their noise, because concern over deficits is used as leverage to defund social programs. And Capitalism runs on debt. What I think will be interesting is whether interest rates on longer term bonds really go up, the way they have since the election. Because the national debt is much harder to finance if we have to pay more interest to the global investors that are buying our debt. It's been my contention that for over 30 years the rates have declined because if they hadn't debt servicing as a percentage of GDP would be too high for even Republicans to get behind because their pet spending programs - corporate welfare - would be adversely impacted. Of course how that long term decline in rates, so convenient to our nation, was enabled I am not expert enough to figure out. But it has happened that way, and without it we would be screwed. For the global elite, buying US debt is a mainstay. As rates came down here, they have collapsed elsewhere. Maybe someone here can help me understand why we have to pay out the rates we do on 2,5,10,30 year debt when alternative investments in other country's bonds yield so much less, or even negative rates. Is the dollar considered more risky long term despite its elevated status relative to other currencies?

1 hour ago, Robert Prudhomme said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_Fire_Decree

So damn true, and no one ever believes me when I mention agent provocateurs. Amazing, considering that the practice goes back at least as far as the Roman Empire. It's especially the peaceful protesters that need to understand this, because it only takes a few agents to cause others who are not thinking clearly and are angry to follow them. But we have seen all this before. Recall the 1968 Chicago Convention.

2 hours ago, Pamela Brown said:

IMO the rest of the truth of what happened to JFK lies in areas that have not been fully researched and that some do not wish to discuss -- one is our involvement and inclusion of those who had been Nazis in our intelligence agency and in the space race, and the other is the response of the relatively new, at that time, nation of Israel.  I hope to fill that gap. 

I'm quoting you Pamela for a second reason. You recall Bonnie Franklin and her KPFA show Guns and Butter. Two weeks ago she had a guest on - Michele Chussodovsky, a man with controversial ideas that are sometimes interesting - and he said that the most dangerous candidate was Hilary Clinton, because she was the most likely to use nuclear weapons. And of course the statement went unchallenged. I flipped and called the station. They have now lost my support.

i agree completely about the Nazis. Not sure about the Israelis.

Michael Walton - you are correct. Where did you read the three reasons the Dems lost? 

The great David Lifton? Who's exaggerating their case? HSCA was a joke? Marina's WC testimony is the truth? How do you know? WC lawyers said otherwise. 

Trejo will say that her WC testimony was under oath. But I agree with you

4 hours ago, Larry Hancock said:

I just have to respond to Ron - unless I misread the popular vote totals, if you actually tallied the "droves" on pure head count Clinton would be President elect.

But more seriously I think Peter has brought up a relevant point, we know that the WC did not trust the FBI and bemoaned relying on them for investigative research, we know that they felt Hoover would willingly withhold information from them - yet they forged ahead and rendered an opinion with virtually no investigative resources of their own and a staff that was not composed of criminal investigators or even legal professionals. They were pushing the FBI on evidentiary issues right up to the issuance of their report and even up to that point we know that FBI HQ was spinning the information being provided to them, the Odio inquiry being an example where the field offices were saying one thing and HQ another.

In the JFK case the FBI was literally assigned to the WC, rather than acting under the Justice Dept as it would in a Federal crime investigation and prosecution; if you look at the MLK case you find the same thing with lots of documents showing that the FBI blindsided Justice and forced them out of what should have legally been a Federal crime investigation. And in 2016 we have the FBI Director bypassing Justice, even worse rejecting Justice legal opinions, violating all existing protocols about investigations in process and going directly to Congress. There seems to be a real pattern of the FBI being used as a tool by its own Directors - is that really the case, how do the Directors get away with it and do they have some motive other than purely individual career/political interests?

 

I think that Comey might have decided to go public because the NY office was leaking to Giuliani, and Comey may have decided to close ranks in order to preserve what he saw as the integrity of the FBI. Eventually the leaks became news too, but it had less impact than it would have. I don't mean to be whitewashing Comey's actions. He may have had a political agenda. But I'm presenting another possibility.

I think this election result was more about a backlash against economic globalism that moved good jobs overseas without compunction or compensation, than it was about the politics of hate. We've always had the haters. I agree with Cliff that allowing the travesty of 1963 to go unsolved and unpunished, for which the media is to blame, is where this really begins. 

Quite a conincidence. I always wonder about the ex FBI ex Hoover agents whether they had ongoing communications with Hoover, especially Guy Banister.

George DeM thought he was very intelligent.

No doubt it's the same person. I must have missed something Thomas. Were there others that said they weren't?

Vince I watched the movie. You were very articulate and convincing. Thanks for the suggestion.

James - did you see a post of mine on a Ruby thread about the man seen with Oswald at Ruby's club with the scar over his left eye? When I was reading the notes made by Richard Billings when he was working with Garrison I noticed the peculiar fact that when Billings mentioned this sighting at Ruby's the very next paragraph he said that Garrison was speculating that the man with the scar might have been with Oswald in MC, and that perhaps the photos of Oswald were all of him with this man with the scar. I'm fairly certain that David Sánchez Morales had such a scar, but that he was completely unknown to Garrison. 

I'm putting this here because at the beginning of your Probe article you mention David Atlee Phillips following Oswald to MC. If I'm not mistaken Phillips was in close contact with JM Wave where Morales worked. We know for sure that Phillips met with Oswald in Dallas. I think that in this context Garrison's surmise about Oswald being accompanied by the man with the scar is very interesting. Thomas Graves thinks Morales was with Oswald in NO as well. 

I did not know that mcGeorge Bundy and Dulles were close. For me that is like the nail in the coffin. Bundy running the White House communications with AF 1, calling the shots early on. 

Paul T - you sound desperate. Drama queen? Completely inappropriate metaphor. Too bad your hero Caulfield wrote such an unreadable book. With all apologies to Jim Hargrove, calling Armstrong's book the 'last gasp of the CIA did it theory' is grasping at straws. You know beyond a doubt that what you are trying to do is discredit people who find the CIA in any way culpable. This is a false equivalence, a dishonest tactic, a page from the CIA propaganda playbook. Phillips would love it. Repeating your personal theory every time you post, mischaracterizing anyone else's theory, plugging Caulfields book - shameless. Hargrove beat you fair and square, point by point, without plugging any books.