W. Niederhut

Hougan points out that Bob Woodward's "Deep Throat" source was, apparently, unfamiliar with certain critical details of the FBI investigations of the Watergate burglaries-- indicating that Deep Throat was probably not involved with the FBI.

Jeff, Don't you mean, "normalizing rational fear over communist practices?" 😬This kind of polarizing, Putin-esque disinformazia is causing a serious crisis right now in liberal Western democracies-- which is precisely what your fascist hero, Vlad, is trying to do. Putin doesn't have to worry about the destructive effects of this kind of dirty, divisive propaganda in his police state, where disobedient journalists can be readily blown up in their cars. But it is, obviously, a problem in the free world-- especially now that the GOP has abolished the Fairness Act, and Rupert Murdoch has been authorized to establish his disinformazia empire in the U.S.

Cheggidout, folks... 😬 The Gerasimov political polarization/propaganda strategy that helped propel Putin's candidate, Donald Trump, to the White House is, apparently, booming. Americans Steal Kremlin’s Playbook, for Clicks and Profit An investigation found that a former Fox News executive hired Macedonians to write culturally and politically divisive content for his websites. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/21/technology/LaCorte-edition-news.html?action=click&auth=login-email&login=email&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

I finished reading Jim Hougan's truly fascinating 1984 book, Secret Agenda, last night. Three questions for the forum. (Apologies in advance if this has already been reviewed.) 1) I still don't understand why E. Howard Hunt and James McCord were trying to sabotage Nixon. Was it mainly an attempt to protect Richard Helms and the Company? 2) Was Alexander Haig Deep Throat? 3) Have any movies or screenplays been based on Secret Agenda?

Looks like the coal miner's daughter pointedly disagrees with Jeff Carter's arguments on this lengthy thread... Fiona Hill’s opening statement at impeachment hearing https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/read-fiona-hills-opening-statement-at-impeachment-hearing/ar-BBX6MGi

Dr. George Lundberg's promotion of Dennis Breo's disinformation about the JFK autopsy is also a disgrace, especially since Lundberg, as a pathologist, surely knows better. Lundberg looks like one of the many U.S. academicians (and journalists) who signed "mockingbird" contracts with the Company.

I have believed, for many years, that the U.S. should have a single payer, non-profit healthcare administrative system. The Canadians cover everyone, and they spend a lot loss per capita to achieve better public health outcomes, generally -- partly by eliminating insurance industry profits, and partly by having the leverage to reduce costs for goods and services. Medicare is a shining example of how such a system could work for everyone in the U.S. (other than the 2003 Bush-Cheney Medicare Part D proviso that prohibited Medicare from negotiating with Big Pharma to reduce drug prices!) Among other success stories, Medicare dramatically reduced senior poverty in the U.S. after 1965. Not to make excuses for physicians, but the main driving force behind our current dysfunctional for-profit healthcare system, IMO, has been the private insurance industry. They control the money supply, and they put a lot of energy into managing (reducing) their costs, while advertising how much they "care." Physicians nowadays are mostly pawns in the industry game-- unless they simply cater "out-of-network" to the rich, as many do. Not sure what it will take to break the insurance industry's stranglehold on political efforts to establish a general single payer system. I was surprised and bitterly disappointed when Hillary Clinton's healthcare task force in the 1990s invited only private insurance industry moguls to the table, rather than sitting down with public health experts to devise the best healthcare system for the American people. Similarly, (after waiting another 15 years for a reform effort!) the 2009 Senate Finance Committee sabotaged the crucial ACA plans to include a "public" provider option for the ACA. It was a bipartisan sabotage effort, spearheaded by Charles Grassley, Max Baucus, and Joseph Lieberman, on behalf of the private insurance industry. What we know, for certain, is that America's private insurance industry moguls will fight tooth-and-claw to sabotage any future legislative efforts to expand a single payer system. The industry sabotage will include heavily funded advertising/disinformation, lobbying, and the usual YUGE financial donations to elected public officials in both parties.

David, These private industries want PROFITS. It's about for-profit systems vs. the public sector. Both systems have obvious virtues and flaws. When I was a medical intern, (36 years ago) I worked part of the year at a fairly posh private hospital, and part of the year at a local VA and inner city hospital. I used to joke that my experiences that year made me a believer in capitalism. The private hospital services were very efficient, and of high quality. At the VA, it was difficult to do my job. For example, I had to do my own phlebotomies on the patients and retrieve lab results from a hand written ledger in the basement of the hospital, because there were no phlebotomists or staff to retrieve results for the wards. I even had to wheel my patients down to X-ray and assist the X-ray tech to get chest X-rays at night, because there were no orderlies around to help us out on the wards. The advantage of a public sector, Medicare type single-payer system is that; 1) it eliminate the siphoning of healthcare funds (about 15-20% in some estimates) by private insurance corps, and 2) it reduces costs by enabling the single-payer to negotiate lower prices for drugs and other services. The trade off is that there is a reduced incentive for efficient, high-quality services. When I retired last year, I was one of the few private psychiatrists in town who was still participating in Medicare. It was very difficult to find providers for my Medicare patients. This article in yesterday's WaPo describes some of these issues fairly well, IMO. Americans have questions about Medicare-for-all. Canadians have answers. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/americans-have-questions-about-medicare-for-all-canadians-have-answers/2019/11/18/7971c78e-d4d6-11e9-9610-fb56c5522e1c_story.html Yasmeen Abutaleb November 19, 2019 at 5:30 a.m. MST HINTON, Alberta — When Bryan Keith was diagnosed with prostate cancer three years ago, he underwent a blizzard of tests, specialist consultations, a month of radiation treatment and a surgical procedure. His out-of-pocket costs? Zero. “I’ve never had to reach into my wallet for anything other than my health-care card,” said Keith, 71, who is now in remission. In this picturesque mountain town of about 10,000 people, Keith’s experience is the norm — and the model often cited by Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren as they promote Medicare-for-all as an antidote to some of the problems afflicting U.S. health-care consumers. No one in this mostly working-class community agonizes over whether they can afford to see a doctor, or take their child to the emergency room. No one faces bankruptcy, or loses their home, because of medical debt. Most residents of Hinton have had babies delivered, broken bones set and cancer treatments provided without ever seeing a bill. But there are also drawbacks: Some wait months for knee or hip replacements or to see certain specialists. Most also pay premiums for private insurance to cover prescription drugs and other services not included in their government plan. As middle-class Americans express growing anger about skyrocketing drug prices and mounting co-pays, premiums and deductibles, the Canadian health-care system has emerged as a shadow player in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary contest — offering a window onto a parallel reality where 37 million people’s health-care needs are largely covered from birth to death. The stories of real people here in rural Alberta show how the health-care system functions in their daily lives — and underscore Canadians’ deep and widely shared belief that health care is a human right, which helps explain their overwhelmingly positive reviews of the system despite its shortcomings. By all accounts, Canada’s system, called Medicare, is simpler, more equitable and more consumer-friendly than America’s patchwork of public and private plans that leaves millions without sufficient coverage. Every resident of Canada has guaranteed access to covered benefits through provincial- and territorial-administered public insurance plans — and pays taxes to support that system. There are no premiums, co-pays or deductibles for a broad menu of care that includes doctor visits, emergency care, hospital stays, surgical care, and maternal and newborn services.

It's puzzling to see Elizabeth Warren siding here with our CIA saboteurs in Latin America. (One more reason that I'm still a Bernie Sanders supporter.) From what I have read, the coup against Evo Morales is looking more and more like what Kissinger and the Company did in Chile to oust Salvador Allende, (and what the CIA did in El Salvador.) Morales had made significant progress in improving the quality of life for Bolivia's impoverished working class.

This thread could use some serious comic relief... 😬 https://thenib.com/a-real-head-scratcher?id=tom-tomorrow&t=author

Kirk, In my humble psychiatric opinion, Trump doesn't rely on "experts" mainly because of his narcissistic grandiosity-- his inflated, delusional concept of his own tremendous wisdom. It's a common problem for people with narcissistic personality disorders. Trump is the guy who punched his music teacher in the eye in grade school, while exclaiming that the teacher "(didn't) know anything about music." Similarly, as POTUS, he fires any "experts" who disagree with his poorly informed, idiotic judgments. The contrast with JFK is YUGE, even by Trump's gargantuan standards. JFK disagreed with the Cold War hawks in his administration because he was perceptive, informed, and ethical.

When JFK Wasn't Trump... 😬 In Shift, U.S. Says Israeli Settlements in West Bank Do Not Violate International Law Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the reversal of decades of American policy that may doom any peace efforts. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/18/world/middleeast/trump-israel-west-bank-settlements.html November 18, 2019

I was only joking about NOKO state media, apparently, sharing your low opinion of Biden. But, speaking of "state media," a conservative radio talk show host here in Denver, former Assistant DA Craig Silverman, was fired yesterday in the middle of his show for criticizing Trump's conduct during the impeachment inquiry. (I went to high school with Craig Silverman, and he used to coachmy nephew's baseball team. Good guy.) The story is out today that Silverman's KNUS employer, Salem Media, had forbidden any negative commentary on their shows about Trump and the impeachment hearings. Creepy stuff.

I have a question for the forum. There was an article in Friday's Washington Post by a writer named Mike Lofgren, who claimed credit for popularizing the concept of the "Deep State" in his 2016 book of that title.* From this article, Lofgren-- in addition to borrowing a term he didn't invent-- doesn't even seem to conceptualize the "Deep State" concept as it has been defined and used in the JFKA research community. Didn't UC Berkeley Professor Peter Dale Scott originally coin and define the term, "Deep State," several years ago? * The real ‘deep state’ is about corporate power, not entrenched bureaucrats This right-wing catchphrase supposedly describes rebellious government workers. But moneyed influencers are the real “deep state.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-real-deep-state-is-about-corporate-power-not-bureaucrats/2019/11/15/9bd203d6-0701-11ea-ac12-3325d49eacaa_story.html by Mike Lofgren November 15, 2019 "As the author who popularized this term, I’m invoking the privilege of correcting them. There is no deep state as the right imagines it — that is, a secret cabal of government insiders hellbent on undermining the White House. Rather, it is Trump himself, under the camouflage of populist rhetoric, who has overseen the open expansion of the deep state: entrenched interests gaining outsize influence and setting their own policy agenda, unchecked by the will of the people, their elected representatives or the civil servants meant to regulate them. I wrote my book “The Deep State” to capture a phenomenon I had noticed over my 30 years as a Republican staffer in Congress."

There's no question that Stephen F. Cohen is a great Russian history scholar, but he has been widely criticized of late, even in academic circles, for his curiously unabashed Putin apologetics. Is he getting paid by Putin's propaganda establishment? Is The Nation? Where is Cohen's criticism of Putin's usurpation of the Russian Constitution, his demolition of a free press, murder of journalists, suppression of opposition political parties, and his obvious subversion of liberal democracies in Europe and the United States? Let's be honest, please. Putin is a totalitarian leader of a nationalist, quasi-fascist police state. (He even has his own Russian version of the Hitler Jugend.) He runs the RF with a cadre of former KGB and military generals, (including Gerasimov) Russian mafia bosses, and billionaire oligarchs. I agree with the point by Cohen, James DiEugenio, et.al., about the overly aggressive actions of NATO and the U.S. in polarizing Ukraine and Russia, but let's also recall that the entire USSR was hopelessly corrupt after 1991-- including the Russian Federation. The former Soviet republics all degenerated into mafia style oligarchies. In that political vacuum, the West erred by too aggressively intervening to prevent a Russian-controlled reconstruction of the Warsaw Pact and USSR. As for Cohen's idealization of the Rus in Ukraine, he sounds almost like an old Trotsky-ite of sorts. 7-10 million ethnic Ukrainians were murdered by Stalin's police state in the Holodomor of 1932-33. And many Ukrainians have never approved of Russian hegemony in Ukraine, and attempts to control their institutions (even in some Orthodox Christian circles.) As bizarre as it sounds, some Ukrainians, initially, even viewed the Nazi Wehrmacht as an army that might liberate them from the horrors of the Stalinist yoke. I was told that even our late (Carpatho-Russian) ROCOR Archbishop of San Francisco had initially supported the Nazi invasion of the USSR. (That illusion about the Wehrmacht vanished quickly during the blitz krieg of Operation Barbarossa, when the Nazis committed indiscriminate bombing and mass murder of Soviet citizens.) Cohen also seems to ignore the widespread opposition of many ethnic Ukrainians to the ultra-corrupt, Russian-aligned Yanukovych regime. Yanukovych was always a crook and a thug, whose unfortunate election was orchestrated by the machinations of Paul Manafort and Kremlin-aligned oligarchs in Ukraine. In fact, Yanukovych was, ultimately, accused of high treason by the Ukrainian government for inviting Putin to invade the country.

It reminds me of that line from an old Dylan song... "Do you take me for such a fool, to think I'd make contact with one who tries to hide what he don't know to begin with?"

Jim, It sounds like North Korean state media shares your low opinion of Joe Biden. NOKO declared today that Joe Biden is "in the end stages of dementia" -- "a rabid dog" who needs to be "beaten with a stick" in order to "depart this life." When I first read this NOKO press release, I mistook it for an unusually literary Trump tweet or a Fox News headline... 🤪

At this point, I don't see how anything Sondland says or doesn't say can alter the established fact that Trump persistently withheld military aid and a White House meeting with Zelensky as part of his extortion campaign to pressure President Z to publicly smear Biden. As Trump said, he wanted President Z, "in a box," before "signing the check." It was all about scamming Americans by manipulating public perceptions-- the one thing Trump does well.

But, of course! It wasn't done by the "Russian government," eh? As Putin, himself, said, "Perhaps private Russian citizens did something." (wink wink)

Who is Bernie Olaf? And what is the Stasson Group-- a wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries ? My initial skepticism about the film, based on the lead article on this thread, is that it seems to mirror the Trumpaganda blaming the "Deep State" for Trump's Russia-gate and Ukraine-gate scandals. In that sense, it sounds like another pre-election propaganda film based on fake GOP "history" -- like the Thirteen Hours propaganda film about Benghazi from 2016.

How about the archive of the 35,000 Russian Facebook ads from 2016 that I posted for you? Evidence?

Jim, IMO, we can, and should, be justifiably critical of NATO aggression against the former Soviet Union without endorsing Kremlin aggression against Ukraine (and against liberal democracies in the EU and North America.) Part of the basic disagreement here about Russia and Ukraine (and Trump) is based on differing perceptions of Putin and his motives. As I said above, I don't view Putin as a benevolent world leader who wants to help the Ukrainian people, or strengthen liberal democracy in the West. I view Putin as a militant Russian nationalist, (and imperialist) who is trying to implement Alexander Dugin's 1997 strategy to increase Russian hegemony in Eurasia. I understand why Putin intervened in Syria in 2015 against our wrong-headed, Neocon/PNAC war against the Assad regime. But Putin's regime, in general, is not focused on improving the plight of humanity. It is focused on advancing the interests of Russia. The current Russian Federation is, IMO, a quasi-fascist police state-- a post-Christian, post-Leninist, transmogrified Russian Empire. What do they want? The same thing our military-industrial complex wants. The Scythians want to steal other people's stuff.

Speaking of Brando, I just bought a Blu-Ray of Viva Zapata! and had a number of questions for the (truly impressive) film historians and critics here. (Apologies in advance for going off on a tangent about the semi-Irishman, Anthony Quinn.) I should preface this by mentioning that I had recently watched Fellini's film La Strada, and started reading up on the long, strange history of Chihuahua native Anthony Quinn. Curiously, when I did a search for "Anthony Quinn" (in DVDs & Blu-Ray) at Amazon.com, Viva Zapata! didn't show up on the list, even though Quinn won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Eufemio Zapata in the film. 1) Was Viva Zapata! blacklisted to any extent in the U.S., for its sympathetic portrayal of the "socialist" revolutionary Emiliano Zapata? (You'd think that a screenplay by John Steinbeck, and performances by Brando and Quinn would merit greater popularity and distribution.) 2) Did William Goldman and George Roy Hill possibly base the final scene of Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid on the final scene of Viva Zapata! ? 3) I read somewhere that Viva Zapata! was Republican stalwart John McCain's favorite movie. Is it also possible, in a truly bizarre twist of plutocratic fate, that George H.W. Bush named his CIA front company, Zapata Oil after the film?

Interestingly, on the same day that Frank Bruni published the above op-ed, Russ Baker's WhoWhatWhy website has published an interview with psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton about the same subject -- the alternate "reality" fantasy world of the Trump Cult. Has America Lost Its Grip on Reality? https://whowhatwhy.org/2019/11/15/has-america-lost-its-grip-on-reality/