Sandy Larsen

Truman was known for his integrity, not his charisma. The modern presidents with the greatest charisma were: FDR JFK Reagan Clinton Obama

Well sorry Bill, but there isn't always a handy JFK around to nominate. You're upset with Democratic primary voters? Since you're so smart and know who the most JFK/Truman-like candidates (whatever that means) have been, why don't you tell us who the best Democratic candidates for president have been. (BTW, Truman had little charisma.) Huh? First the voters pick the best candidate in the primary, and then the voters stay home because they won't vote for this (the best) candidate on election day? That doesn't make sense. Or, maybe your point is that the primary voters don't vote for the best candidate. They vote for someone they each like the most, but there is disagreement and so the candidate(s) they like don't win the primary. All I can say is that that is the way voting works. I personally have extremely little say who gets nominated, and precisely nothing to say on election day. I live in a red state.

It wasn't for not trying, Bill. You seem to think that Democrats can pass any legislation they want to. Well they can't. These days we can count on Republicans to obstruct most anything Dems like, and supermajorities are often needed to pass bills even when we control Congress.

Ron, I like that song and was curious how he got "it out of that," as you put it. So I did a little research. According to Wikipedia, when Paul Simon 's dog died he wondered how he would react if his wife died. Also from Wikipedia, Simon liked the phrase "mother and child reunion" which he got from a Chinese dish made with chicken and egg. (Mother/child, chicken/egg... get it?) "Mother and child reunion" represents the two reuniting once both have died, just as is the case with the Chinese dish. (Both the chicken and the egg are dead.) mother and child reunion (metaphor) ---> afterlife reunion (literal meaning) Replacing the metaphor with literal meaning in the lyrics, we get: No, I would not give you false hope On this strange and mournful day But the mother and child reunion afterlife reunion Is only a motion away Simon doesn't want to give himself false hope that he will reunite with his wife in the afterlife (because that is just something some people believe), but it could happen and it's only "a motion" (an accident, stroke, etc.) away. If you read the full lyrics after that single exchange of words, it all makes sense. Makes me want to write to Simon and let him know what his song means.

CORRECTION: There were no witnesses to Oswald shooting on 11/22/63. Cliff, Your correction appears to be identical to your earlier, uncorrected statement. (Except that it includes the date.) Am I misunderstanding something? <scratching head>

So I guess we can conclude from this list of comparisons that the things that drive a person to become a CIA operative are the same as those that drive a person to become an assassin. Who knew?

What similarity between two gunman? Crooks was a caught-on-tape, witnessed gunman. Oswald was only alleged to be a gunman, and the evidence indicates he wasn't.

I don't recall in which thread it is, but a recent post showed that Ruth Paine said Lee was a loving husband.

Yelling and arguing are one thing. Beating is quite another. And there was only gossip that that happened.

Well sure. And maybe religion too. But all I am saying, is give peace a chance. (Which I can keep saying since I'm no longer a moderator.)

Biden said he's not stepping down and I believe him. If he doesn't, then all these people demanding he do so are doing nothing but putting votes in the 2024 Republican column... not only for Biden, but for the House and Senate as well. Stop the insanity!

Give peace a chance, man!

I don't believe it. I think Marina said that because the alternative story has her looking bad.

Interesting. As a young adult a long time ago, I came to realize that most things you read or hear cannot be trusted. I came to believe that religion cannot be tested, and so was agnostic most my life. I became wiser later in life, and then accidentally came across some proofs for intelligent design (god) and also Christianity. (I subsequently searched for proofs of Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism being divine, but came up empty handed.) I declared myself a believer in Jesus as Messiah about 15 years ago and set about reading the Gospels to see what I should believe in. I intentionally skipped St. Paul's epistles and Acts because I was interested in only what Jesus taught. I wanted to avoid any interpretations by the apostles and other disciples. Here is the impression I was left with: The Good News (Gospel) is that God sent the Messiah, Jesus, to inaugurate the Kingdom of God (or Heaven) on Earth. So the same as what you describe, W. As for what exactly the Kingdom of God is, my current impression is that it is the knowledge and fact that Jesus was sacrificed for the sins of all humanity -- and not just for the Chosen People -- who would therefore live forever. Obviously that would mean that there must be a resurrection... something that was demonstrated by Lazarus and by Jesus himself.

Great point. It's the "expectation of reward" that does the damage.

Thanks for sharing, Ron.

Is it considered bragging to prove something and then present the proof? Regardless, in this case I would hardly call it bragging given that I described the proof using these phrases: ... my proof is merely the law itself ... ... The only thing hard about my proof was locating where the federal regulation was printed... ... [proving it] was just a matter of copy-and-pasting the relevant parts.

Because I found the answer to my question and wanted to document it. There are other forum members who will recall Tommy Graves, and perhaps some of them have wondered the same things about him that I have. As a matter of fact, I just took a glance at the thread and I see that many members participated. Even Lance Payette did. Twelve posts just from Jim DiEugenio. I had to explain the proof, otherwise nobody would understand what I was talking about. Oh, so you read the proof in Post #2? What specifically in my proof do you dispute?

I have pasted below an article that I came across today written by Tommy Graves and posted on Substack. One only needs to read a handful of Tommy's bullet points to discover that he isn't a conspiracy theorist at all... he's a closeted lone nutter. And he's a right-wing pro-government shill. Which explains why he would always write "the evil, evil CIA" in a sarcastic way whenever someone was blaming the CIA. Or.... Or is this some kind of witty fiction that cannot be appreciated by a serious researcher? The Mother of all Conspiracy Theories THOMAS GRAVES JUN 04, 2024 Whether or not the KGB* encouraged and/or trained sharpshooting Lee Harvey Oswald to kill JFK during the two-and-one-half years he lived two blocks from a KGB training school in Minsk, Belarus, USSR, it has taken advantage of the following anomalies to spread anti-CIA disinformation practically from Day One: 1) LHO got a job in the Texas School Book Depository, a seven-story building on a virtual hairpin turn, two months before it was decided that the motorcade would pass right by it. 2) No one saw him carrying his long package up to the sixth floor. 3) The motorcade passed by at 12:30 during everyone’s lunch break. 4) The plywood flooring on the sixth floor was being replaced, so boxes of books were stacked up high around the perimeter, thereby enabling LHO to create a sniper’s next in the south-east corner by simply moving four smaller boxes into it — one to sit on while waiting for the motorcade to appear, and three to stack up at the window to give him something to rest his left elbow one while firing his second and third shots. 5) He missed his first shot half-a-second before Abraham Zapruder resumed filming at Z-133 because he was awkwardly standing and leaning forward for the steeply-downward-angled shot. 6) In Zapruder’s film, JFK is behind the Stemmons Freeway sign when he’s hit by CE-399 7) Texas Governor John B. Connally (who was sitting in front of JFK on a jump seat) visibly reacted to being shot a few frames after JFK’s elbows automatically went up as a result of his spine’s being nicked by the bullet. 8 ) The bullet exited JFK’s throat and hit JBC where it did (in his back and near his right armpit) because the latter was sitting significantly lower and farther to the left than the former and because he was turned far to his right when he was hit. 9) JBC was able to continue grasping his precious Stetson hat because CE-399 didn't damage the nerves that controlled the pertinent muscles in his hand. 10) This same bullet, CE-399, fell out of JBC's thigh at Parkland Hospital and was found about an hour later by a hospital employee while he was moving a gurney in the hallway so he could enter a restroom. 11) Oswald’s final shot, taken when JFK was about eighty yards away, hit near his external occipital protuberance (that bump near the bottom of our head) and destroyed the right side of his brain, thereby causing a relatively slow but catastrophic neuromuscular reaction that made his upper torso and head go back and to his left as though he’d been shot from the Grassy Knoll on his right side. 12) James Tague down by The Triple Underpass was probably 1) nicked by a bullet fragment from this shot and 2) spaced out later as to which shot it was. 13) Vicki Adams probably spaced out (I’m an old wannabe hippy) as to how long she and Sarah Styles had stayed on the fourth floor before going down the stairs to the first floor, thereby creating the plausible scenario that LHO was already below the fourth floor (and out of their view and hearing) when they started down. 14) Adams and Styles probably transited the short arc between the stairwells in the corner of the second floor while LHO, Officer Baker and Truly were out of sight in the lunchroom a few feet away. 15) Dealey Plaza was a veritable echo chamber, confusing many witnesses as to where the three shots had come from and how many seconds elapsed between them. 16) FBI agent Marvin Gheesling canceled the "flash" notice on LHO a few weeks before the assassination, thereby precluding the FBI’s notifying the Secret Service that LHO was working at a job in a tall building on the motorcade route. 17) Oswald's second shot, which started tumbling upon exiting JFK’s throat, only hit one hard bone -- the radial bone in Governor Connally’s wrist -- and did so tangentially, thereby damaging it only on one side near its base. 18) When Oswald was fourteen, he was a member of a Civil Patrol unit that also included anti-Castro firebrand David Ferrie. 19) Jim Garrison’s main witness, Perry Russo, photographically confused clean-shaven 5’ 9” Oswald for David Ferrie’s homosexual roommate, 6’ 3”, thin-faced-and-bearded James “Leon” Lewallen. 20) The doctors at Parkland, in a futile effort to keep JFK alive, performed a tracheostomy which obliterated the small exit wound in JFK’s throat. This wound was, due to its small size, mistaken for a wound of entrance by the doctor who helped perform the surgical procedure, and its small size was probably due to the pressure exerted on JFK’s skin by his collar and tie. 21) The medical personnel at Parkland did not turn JFK’s body over or prop it up to get a good look at the bullet entrance wound in the back of his head. 22) The autopsy doctors at Bethesda Naval Hospital didn’t shave the hair off of JFK’s head to get a better look at the entrance wound and weren’t able to track the wound in the back of JFK’s lower neck for more than a couple of inches because it was several hours after the assassination and rigor mortis had set in. 23) Autopsy doctor James Boswell wrote on an autopsy form that the bullet wound in JFK’s lower neck was “14 centimeters below the bottom tip of his right mastoid process,” but the small circle he drew in the diagram made it look as though the bullet had hit significantly lower than that. . . . . . . . I could go on and on, but the point I’m getting at is that the KGB* caused or encouraged the misinterpretation of the above anomalies to impugn, through people like overly ambitious, scandal-plagued and revengeful Jim Garrison (who had been told in a restaurant by Clay Shaw to stop verbally abusing his wife) and Vietnam War-traumatized Oliver Stone, who was given a copy of Garrison’s 1988 book, On the Trail of the Assassins, by a far-left American woman at a film festival in Cuba and turned it into his self-described mythological (“to counter the myth of the Warren Report”) film, JFK. Those two guys, along with oodles and gobs of other JFK assassination conspiracy theorists (like Joachim Joesten, William G. Buchannan, Mark Lane, “Tink” Thompson, Peter Dale Scott and Jefferson Morley, et al. ad nauseam) — be they Pinko ”National Security State”-hating CTs or Neo-Fascist “Deep State”-hating CTs — have cast aspersions on our government and weakened our body politic to such an extent as to enable former” KGB* counterintelligence officer Vladimir Putin’s taking advantage of our own ignorance, gullibility and tendency towards conspiratorial thinking to get his favorite “useful idiot” installed as our President on January 20, 2017. There, I said it. *Today’s SVR and FSB

The title of this topic used to be "What Makes Tommy Tick?" Apparently a moderator didn't like it and changed it to what it is now. Which is fine... it just made it hard to find. For a while I thought it had been deleted. It is about a prior forum member named Thomas "Tommy" Graves," for those who weren't around at the time. I was a fairly new forum member when I when I started this topic. I wrote it because I couldn't understand Tommy's irrational behavior. I am bumping it now because I have finally figured Tommy out, which I will explain in my next post. Example of Tommy's Irrational Behavior: At the time I had just proven that bank endorsement stamps are required by U.S. law on postal money orders (PMO). This is important because the PMO allegedly use by Oswald to allegedly buy the Carcano rifle has NO bank stamps on it! There was another new member at the time by the name of Lance Payette. He is a lawyer and he engaged me in a lengthy debate over the PMO bank-stamp issue. (BTW, Lance was another person I couldn't understand... until it became apparent that he was only pretending to be a CTer, when in reality was a Warren Commission apologist. He came in thinking he was going to make us all look like fools, but in fact he left the forum looking like one himself.) The thing I couldn't understand about Tommy Graves is that he kept giving high fives to Lance regardless of how bad Lance's argument was. I wasn't used to this kind of intellectual dishonesty. Now, lest any of you think that maybe my proof isn't as good as I say it is... I will point out that my proof is merely the law itself which is printed in the U.S. government's Code of Federal Regulations. Regulation J to be specific. The only thing hard about my proof was locating where the federal regulation was printed. After that, it was just a matter copy-and-pasting the relevant parts. For anybody who wants to see the proof (i.e. the relevant text of the federal regulation), check out Post #2 of this thread. Read just the parts I've highlighted in red. Tommy's Irrational Behavior in General: After the PMO incident, Tommy and I often worked together trying to solve various JFKA puzzles. We had a number of successes. Every time we worked together, he was really great at discovering important things. Problem is, also every time, whenever we got close to reaching a conclusion that pointed to the conspiracy or the coverup, Tommy would suddenly become stupid. What I mean by that is that he would no longer be good at drawing a conclusion. He made stupid choices.

Why Joe Biden Should Stay in the Race Election predictor says Democrats' prospects would worsen if incumbent stepped aside https://gsas.harvard.edu/news/why-joe-biden-should-stay-race

Oops again! I mean Lichtman. LOL

Lichtman factors in 13 variables to make his prediction. Every situation is unique, one way or another.

Yeah, sorry that. I forgot your "quick answer." But my doing so made no difference in my response, since my response was to your detailed answer. Aha, just as I suspected! You're not using your electoral system/path to show why Biden should get out. You're doing the opposite. You want Biden out, and so you're making up an electoral count/path to justify his getting out. LOL, nice move Kirk! Because Biden and Trump are the least popular 2 Presidential candidates in history! Okay, well at least that makes sense. On the other hand, when polled up against Trump, your candidates do mostly worse than Trump! I know the reason for this seeming incongruity. It is this: When voting time comes, almost all those Democrats who gave Biden an unfavorable vote will come back and vote FOR him. They don't like him, but Trump is much worse. You know this. Sorry, I misspelled his name. It is Allan Lichtman. After the disastrous debate he said it would be a mistake to change the Biden ticket. But that prediction could change post assassination-attempt.

(Wow... talk about misogyny) In defense of Hillary Clinton: Conventional wisdom in the first decade of this century, was that a woman couldn't win the presidency because she'd supposedly be weak on defense. That's the reason Hillary was made Secretary of Defense and was hawkish. As for the bombing of Libya... not a good idea, but Hillary & Obama were not alone. Ten members of the UN voted for the bombing and none voted against it. Fourteen NATO countries -- including the U.S., Canada, Denmark, France, Italy, Spain, and the U.K. -- participated in it.