Please do not depend upon italics for responses.

[Sandy Larsen]

Over the past I've seen  number of times where a forum member's post consists entirely of quoting another member's post.... and nothing else!  No response to that member. I always chalked it up to being a bump.

Well, just now I noticed such a "bump," except I spotted my name in it. I studied it carefully... and then even more carefully... and then I discovered something totally unexpected. And that is, the quoted text had built into it a response from the person posting it!

And I thought, why didn't  the person inserting his responses do anything, like using a different text color, for his response so it could be distinguished from the quoted text. I then realized that the person had italicized his text!

Here's an example:

 

14 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

It does not mean that at all Sandy.  Because at least in that version she did not see him.  (That version did change over time.)

Here is Seamus Coogan on the subject of this mythical gathering:

Johnson himself was seen by a few thousand people and filmed that night in the company of President Kennedy at the Houston Coliseum. Johnson didn’t arrive in Fort Worth until 11.05 pm on the night of the 21st of November, and it is roundly reported that he wound up his day in the same hotel at a very late hour with his advisors. (William Manchester, Death of a President, pgs 135, 138).

With much due respect Jim D., I'm not sure how much "roundly reported" means in the way of proving whether LBJ did not possibly slip out of the hotel for a brief meet up only a 40 + minute drive away even after 11:PM the evening of 11,21,1963.  Could Johnson have had the ability to leave like that without reporters noticing? I would think so considering his many years of doing the same for his many proof established rendezvous. And the super high energy LBJ was only 55 at the time. Not 68 like Hoover and McCloy.

The same goes for Dick Nixon, who was on the town late that night with Joan Crawford. (Nixon was a partner in a law firm that represented the Pepsi-Cola Company. Crawford was the wife of the CEO of Pepsi.) This was widely reported in the Dallas press and was still being reported until fairly late that evening. (The Dallas Morning News, Friday, November 22, 1963, Section 1-19) Kai Bird’s biography describes John McCloy hearing the news of the assassination while having breakfast with former President Eisenhower. (The Chairman, p. 544) As for Hoover, according to Anthony Summers, it is highly likely (to the point of absolute certainty) that J. Edgar Hoover, like McCloy, was nowhere near Texas at the time. For instance, the next day he was calling Bobby Kennedy from his Washington office at around 1:34 P.M EST with news of the shooting. (Summers, Official and Confidential, p. 394). In fact, none of the standard biographies of Hoover—Powers, Theoharis, Gentry, or Summers—notes him being in Texas that evening.

A Dallas-to-Washington round trip is around 3.5 hours each way. Why would two very powerful and highly visible 68-year-olds, like Hoover and McCloy, fly to Dallas to meet with Johnson at some ungodly hour, well after 11:00 P.M CST, compromising themselves in the process, and then fly back from Dallas, arriving home anywhere between 3:00-5:00 AM the following morning?

Hoover could have slept on such a flight.

 

On my monitor, in my browser, there is only a slight difference in the way the italicized text looks compared to regular text. As a lifelong computer geek I can say that how well italicized text stands out depends upon the font style used by the operating system and the browser. The font used on by different computer varies widely, as users can change the font by merely clanging their desktop theme.

I recommend that people use another method to make their responses stand out. I don't know the ideal way. I use a color and larger text size myself. Beware though... once I as accused of "shouting" all the time in my responses. Apparently on that guy's monitor my larger text size appeared very large. LOL. So maybe no matter what, somebody is going to complain... just as I am doing now. 

Thanks.