DALLAS-CONTROL SPEECH
Dallas Still Wants to Control Speech on JFK Anniversary
Is the Trilateral Commission behind an anti-conspiracy conspiracy?
AAAComments (23) By Jim Schutze Thursday, Mar 7 2013
Nothing could be crazier or sadder. It is the continued determination of a small group of people in Dallas to tightly control public observations of the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination here. They want to banish the public from Dealey Plaza where it happened so that no one can go there and raise questions.
Jared Boggess
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At the behest of this group, the city has agreed to barricade and shut down Dealey Plaza for two weeks bracketing the November 22 anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's murder in 1963. The longer this goes on and the closer we draw to the date, the more I feel myself getting spooked out by the whole thing. This is some weird stuff.
The city's stated goal is to keep Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists away from the immense hordes of international press that city leaders fear will show up for the event. First of all, immense hordes are not coming. C'mon. If you asked people on the street right now to tell you who JFK was, half would guess he was a rapper.
But a pretty decent-sized contingent of press might show up to see Dallas acting like we did it. "Half Century Later, Dallas Still Guilty" — now that's a decent little color piece. The more City Hall keeps doing cheap imitations of a 1950s TV detective show, the better chance we have of actually drawing interest and attention next November, all of it bad.
Last week another shoe dropped onto the overwhelming mountain of evidence already arguing that shutting down Dealey Plaza is a manifestly imbecilic and self-defeating idea. An appeals court came down entirely on the side of Robert Groden, a best-selling author and assassination expert whom the city has been hounding for a decade. The court's finding was a refutation of everything the city has ever said about its right to control Dealey Plaza.
In 2010 a trial court judge quashed the city's case against Groden for selling assassination tracts in Dealey Plaza. Even though the city had come up with three different versions of what they claimed Groden did wrong, the trial judge said it still failed to find a single law he had broken. By the way, this was the 81st time the city had been tossed out of court for trying to banish Groden form Dealey Plaza. Eighty-one. If in the first 80 times you do not succeed, try an 81st!
The city appealed the trial judge's ruling in 2010. It took the appeals court three years to make up its mind, but last week a judge finally handed down the score: Groden 81, city of Dallas goose-egg. A few days later the city informed Bradley Kizzia, Groden's lawyer, that they will not appeal again. The city attorney's office confirmed this to me.
I learned recently that when Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings was in Washington last January for the inauguration, he met with John Judge of the Coalition on Presidential Assassinations, a national umbrella group for assassination scholars and conspiracy theorists, to explore the possibility of compromise on the 50th observations. Judge told me that he offered the mayor three possible compromise positions.
First, Judge suggested the city move its memorial event to the Kennedy Memorial site two blocks from Dealey Plaza and leave the plaza open to the public to whom to it belongs. Second, if the city insisted on using the plaza for its memorial, Judge proposed the city allow COPA to be present during the observation in some nondisruptive fashion. And finally if the city just could not share the moment, Judge suggested that a staggered timing be worked out so that COPA could move into the plaza and hold its own event immediately before or immediately after the city's event.
Mayor Rawlings confirmed to me he had met with Judge in Washington and discussed possible points of compromise. Of the suggestion that the official event remove itself from Dealey Plaza and leave the plaza open, Rawlings told me he told Judge, "I don't think so." He said he did agree to relay a request from COPA that it be allowed to meet with the committee sponsoring the event to present its thoughts, something the committee has declined to allow so far in spite of previous requests from COPA.
Rawlings told me that since returning to Dallas he has met with members of the event committee and has relayed COPA's request to talk to them. He sounded reasonably though not totally optimistic that such a meeting will take place. "If they [the committee] want to, I think we will make that happen," he said.
He also said this about Judge and his group: "John's a nice guy. It was a good conversation. I felt that they cared about this day as much as anybody, so we needed to continue that dialogue.
"I was pleased with a couple of things I heard them say. One is that it's not a massive group. I was afraid it was 500 people or something. I think it's not. I think it's a smaller group. And second, they've been very respectful [in the past]. In fact they were complaining about somebody who had disrespected their moment of silence. So I liked the tenor of what they were talking about."
COPA, by the way, has a long history of solemn and respectful observations at Dealey Plaza on previous anniversaries of JFK's death. Like Groden, Judge and most of the people we are talking about here are mature scholars who choose their words carefully and know how to behave when they go downtown. The suggestion that there is something ominous or dangerous about them — a linchpin of the city's 81 failed cases against Groden — is a lot of what keeps getting the city laughed out of court.
In fact, for the most part the assassination writers and theorists only look scary when you read about them in the pages of The Dallas Morning News, whose writers have described them as necrophiliacs and fiends in the past. The News, of course, was singled out at the time of the assassination for having fanned the flames of extremism in Dallas. Plus ça change.
Dallas would probably have had an easier time of it in the courts if it had launched a jack-booted horseback and lasso round-up of professors of Greek love poetry. No judge has ever been able to find anything wrong with people standing around on the grass on Dealey Plaza speaking to the hordes of tourists who come there seeking answers to the JFK assassination mystery.
And it is a mystery. Most of the world takes it as a mystery. But organizers of the official Dallas City Hall event for the 50th are determined that no one must be allowed to speak those three words — it's a mystery — at any time or in any place near the event.
Groden was a consultant to the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations convened in 1976, which said in a report two years later it had found credible scientific evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in killing Kennedy. The report didn't say who did it. It said it was a mystery.
The murder is still an open case, a point driven home here recently when sponsors of the city's official 50th observation succeeded in luring members of the Kennedy family back to Dallas for an official event — the first time since the assassination. At a gathering in the Arts District, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said exactly the same thing the city has been persecuting Groden for saying in Dealey Plaza: It's a mystery. Kennedy said his father, the assassinated RFK, publicly endorsed the lone-gunman findings of the Warren Commission but privately dismissed those findings and derided the commission's report as "a shoddy piece of work."
Early on in this effort, city officials went to great lengths to explain their sensitivity to the feelings of the Kennedy family, even suggesting at one point that the word "assassination" would be banished from all publicity and proceedings lest it cause the Kennedys to recall something they had perhaps forgotten about. Of course, that story went sailing out the window when RFK came to town and said his father thought the Warren Commission was bunk.
In fact for all its lugubrious, funeral-home hand-wringing, it's the city now that begins to emerge as ludicrous and profane in its treatment of this event. How could Dallas, of all the cities in the world, ever have gotten the idea that it had the right to control this particular conversation?
The mayor's more reasonable tone may offer hope for a more reasonable outcome, but he was careful to tell me that this particular piece of business is not in his hands. He repeated a few time that decisions about the 50th are in the hands of "the committee."
I am slowly coming to my own personal theory about "the committee," the people behind Dallas' effort to basically make this day go away. The committee includes some window-dressing and diversity names, but the core group is made up of way-back Dallas society and money names including Ruth Sharp Altshuler, Deedie Rose, Erle Nye, Margot Perot and Caren Prothro. I suspect their obsession with this event is linked somehow with the Kennedy assassination having been the first time in human history that international live television took a place most people had never heard of before and cast it out naked onto the center stage of world attention, covered in shame and blood as if in a scene from Stephen King's Carrie.
For the people on whose watch all of that happened in 1963, the assassination became the cause for their own personal arrested development. Only by thinking of it that way can I make sense of their approach to the 50th.
It's not the Kennedy family they're worried about. And I don't even think it has anything to do with the city's vaunted image. Images don't really go back 50 years. More like 50 minutes in this world.
It's the nightmare. They're afraid the nightmare is coming back. The strangest thing, the spookiest thing, the saddest thing in all of this is that they are the ones conjuring it out of the ground
DALLAS-CONTROL SPEECH
Dallas Still Wants to Control Speech on JFK Anniversary
Is the Trilateral Commission behind an anti-conspiracy conspiracy?
AAAComments (23) By Jim Schutze Thursday, Mar 7 2013
Nothing could be crazier or sadder. It is the continued determination of a small group of people in Dallas to tightly control public observations of the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination here. They want to banish the public from Dealey Plaza where it happened so that no one can go there and raise questions.
Jared Boggess
Related Content
July 25, 2013
June 20, 2013
July 18, 2013
July 15, 2013
June 21, 2013
More About
At the behest of this group, the city has agreed to barricade and shut down Dealey Plaza for two weeks bracketing the November 22 anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's murder in 1963. The longer this goes on and the closer we draw to the date, the more I feel myself getting spooked out by the whole thing. This is some weird stuff.
The city's stated goal is to keep Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists away from the immense hordes of international press that city leaders fear will show up for the event. First of all, immense hordes are not coming. C'mon. If you asked people on the street right now to tell you who JFK was, half would guess he was a rapper.
But a pretty decent-sized contingent of press might show up to see Dallas acting like we did it. "Half Century Later, Dallas Still Guilty" — now that's a decent little color piece. The more City Hall keeps doing cheap imitations of a 1950s TV detective show, the better chance we have of actually drawing interest and attention next November, all of it bad.
Last week another shoe dropped onto the overwhelming mountain of evidence already arguing that shutting down Dealey Plaza is a manifestly imbecilic and self-defeating idea. An appeals court came down entirely on the side of Robert Groden, a best-selling author and assassination expert whom the city has been hounding for a decade. The court's finding was a refutation of everything the city has ever said about its right to control Dealey Plaza.
In 2010 a trial court judge quashed the city's case against Groden for selling assassination tracts in Dealey Plaza. Even though the city had come up with three different versions of what they claimed Groden did wrong, the trial judge said it still failed to find a single law he had broken. By the way, this was the 81st time the city had been tossed out of court for trying to banish Groden form Dealey Plaza. Eighty-one. If in the first 80 times you do not succeed, try an 81st!
The city appealed the trial judge's ruling in 2010. It took the appeals court three years to make up its mind, but last week a judge finally handed down the score: Groden 81, city of Dallas goose-egg. A few days later the city informed Bradley Kizzia, Groden's lawyer, that they will not appeal again. The city attorney's office confirmed this to me.
I learned recently that when Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings was in Washington last January for the inauguration, he met with John Judge of the Coalition on Presidential Assassinations, a national umbrella group for assassination scholars and conspiracy theorists, to explore the possibility of compromise on the 50th observations. Judge told me that he offered the mayor three possible compromise positions.
First, Judge suggested the city move its memorial event to the Kennedy Memorial site two blocks from Dealey Plaza and leave the plaza open to the public to whom to it belongs. Second, if the city insisted on using the plaza for its memorial, Judge proposed the city allow COPA to be present during the observation in some nondisruptive fashion. And finally if the city just could not share the moment, Judge suggested that a staggered timing be worked out so that COPA could move into the plaza and hold its own event immediately before or immediately after the city's event.
Mayor Rawlings confirmed to me he had met with Judge in Washington and discussed possible points of compromise. Of the suggestion that the official event remove itself from Dealey Plaza and leave the plaza open, Rawlings told me he told Judge, "I don't think so." He said he did agree to relay a request from COPA that it be allowed to meet with the committee sponsoring the event to present its thoughts, something the committee has declined to allow so far in spite of previous requests from COPA.
Rawlings told me that since returning to Dallas he has met with members of the event committee and has relayed COPA's request to talk to them. He sounded reasonably though not totally optimistic that such a meeting will take place. "If they [the committee] want to, I think we will make that happen," he said.
He also said this about Judge and his group: "John's a nice guy. It was a good conversation. I felt that they cared about this day as much as anybody, so we needed to continue that dialogue.
"I was pleased with a couple of things I heard them say. One is that it's not a massive group. I was afraid it was 500 people or something. I think it's not. I think it's a smaller group. And second, they've been very respectful [in the past]. In fact they were complaining about somebody who had disrespected their moment of silence. So I liked the tenor of what they were talking about."
COPA, by the way, has a long history of solemn and respectful observations at Dealey Plaza on previous anniversaries of JFK's death. Like Groden, Judge and most of the people we are talking about here are mature scholars who choose their words carefully and know how to behave when they go downtown. The suggestion that there is something ominous or dangerous about them — a linchpin of the city's 81 failed cases against Groden — is a lot of what keeps getting the city laughed out of court.
In fact, for the most part the assassination writers and theorists only look scary when you read about them in the pages of The Dallas Morning News, whose writers have described them as necrophiliacs and fiends in the past. The News, of course, was singled out at the time of the assassination for having fanned the flames of extremism in Dallas. Plus ça change.
Dallas would probably have had an easier time of it in the courts if it had launched a jack-booted horseback and lasso round-up of professors of Greek love poetry. No judge has ever been able to find anything wrong with people standing around on the grass on Dealey Plaza speaking to the hordes of tourists who come there seeking answers to the JFK assassination mystery.
And it is a mystery. Most of the world takes it as a mystery. But organizers of the official Dallas City Hall event for the 50th are determined that no one must be allowed to speak those three words — it's a mystery — at any time or in any place near the event.
Groden was a consultant to the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations convened in 1976, which said in a report two years later it had found credible scientific evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in killing Kennedy. The report didn't say who did it. It said it was a mystery.
The murder is still an open case, a point driven home here recently when sponsors of the city's official 50th observation succeeded in luring members of the Kennedy family back to Dallas for an official event — the first time since the assassination. At a gathering in the Arts District, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said exactly the same thing the city has been persecuting Groden for saying in Dealey Plaza: It's a mystery. Kennedy said his father, the assassinated RFK, publicly endorsed the lone-gunman findings of the Warren Commission but privately dismissed those findings and derided the commission's report as "a shoddy piece of work."
Early on in this effort, city officials went to great lengths to explain their sensitivity to the feelings of the Kennedy family, even suggesting at one point that the word "assassination" would be banished from all publicity and proceedings lest it cause the Kennedys to recall something they had perhaps forgotten about. Of course, that story went sailing out the window when RFK came to town and said his father thought the Warren Commission was bunk.
In fact for all its lugubrious, funeral-home hand-wringing, it's the city now that begins to emerge as ludicrous and profane in its treatment of this event. How could Dallas, of all the cities in the world, ever have gotten the idea that it had the right to control this particular conversation?
The mayor's more reasonable tone may offer hope for a more reasonable outcome, but he was careful to tell me that this particular piece of business is not in his hands. He repeated a few time that decisions about the 50th are in the hands of "the committee."
I am slowly coming to my own personal theory about "the committee," the people behind Dallas' effort to basically make this day go away. The committee includes some window-dressing and diversity names, but the core group is made up of way-back Dallas society and money names including Ruth Sharp Altshuler, Deedie Rose, Erle Nye, Margot Perot and Caren Prothro. I suspect their obsession with this event is linked somehow with the Kennedy assassination having been the first time in human history that international live television took a place most people had never heard of before and cast it out naked onto the center stage of world attention, covered in shame and blood as if in a scene from Stephen King's Carrie.
For the people on whose watch all of that happened in 1963, the assassination became the cause for their own personal arrested development. Only by thinking of it that way can I make sense of their approach to the 50th.
It's not the Kennedy family they're worried about. And I don't even think it has anything to do with the city's vaunted image. Images don't really go back 50 years. More like 50 minutes in this world.
It's the nightmare. They're afraid the nightmare is coming back. The strangest thing, the spookiest thing, the saddest thing in all of this is that they are the ones conjuring it out of the ground
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The City of Dallas' Anti-Conspiracy Conspiracy
Dallas' handling of JFK anniversary: an enigma wrapped in a big wad of dumb.
AAAComments (22) By Jim Schutze Thursday, Jul 25 2013
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, talking last week about the worries some people harbor concerning the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination in Dealey Plaza, recalled his own recent visit to President Obama's second inaugural in Washington. When a pro-life person climbed a tree and attempted to disrupt the inaugural, Rawlings told me that people in the Dallas group exclaimed, "'That's what's going to happen, that's what's going to happen'" in Dealey Plaza in November.
Daniel Fishel
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When I repeated the mayor's anecdote to John Judge, head of the Coalition on Political Assassinations, one of the groups that will be banned from the plaza by police cordon that day, he laughed. "If you make us do it, yeah," Judge said. "I mean, that's the point. We don't normally climb up in a tree."
It's only four months from the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination, and absolutely nothing has been resolved about access to Dealey Plaza on that day, virtually guaranteeing the kind of messy showdown City Hall fears most.
The plaza will be shut down for two weeks, a week on either side of November 22, with access and control granted to only one group, a private committee calling itself only "The 50th" because they don't even want the word "assassination" spoken. Is that crazy enough for you?
The people in charge of "The 50th" have set up a ticketing procedure by which exclusive access to the plaza that day will be granted. To get in, you must apply online months ahead of time for a ticket, a process requiring you to submit personal identification numbers such as Social Security, driver's license or passport so that you may be subjected to a background check.
And, remember: No matter what anybody tells you, this is not about the life and legacy of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, none of which happened here. It's not about the number 50, which is one more than 49 and one less than 51. It's about an assassination that is of interest mainly to people who believe the killing was a conspiracy unsolved to this day.
In other words, this whole thing is an event that will attract people who believe in, are experts on and think in terms of conspiracy. So what do we think happens when we try to bar conspiracy experts from maybe the biggest conspiracy event of the last half century and then go all dark on them and tough-tootsie and refuse to tell them why they are being barred? They will think the whole thing is a ... (hint: begins with letter after B, before D).
I started asking questions about the ticketing process some weeks ago, because I was getting complaints from people in the assassination-study community who were being barred from the online ticketing process for screwy reasons. Chris Pike, a freelance journalist well known to JFK researchers, is slated to speak at the 50th Anniversary Convention of COPA to be held in Dallas on November 22, the same day as the 50th thing.
Like many of the people who will attend the COPA convention here, Pike went online as soon as he could to apply for tickets to the event in Dealey Plaza. On all of the decade anniversaries since the assassination — the 10th, 20th, 30th and 40th — COPA has conducted somber moments of silence just after noon at Dealey Plaza to mark the moment when it happened. This year for the first time they are barred as a group from carrying out their ceremony, so members are understandably eager to win admission as individuals to a moment and place important to them for most of their lives.
When Pike tried to fill out the online form, the web page kept kicking him out, telling him his driver's license number was not current. He says it is current and he's had the same number for 20 years.
I had the same experience. I gave the web page a number and got rejected too. But because I have to re-type things all the time anyway, I kept trying, and eventually the page accepted the number I gave it as authentic. By the way, it was a fake number. I was just messing with it. Anyway, the answer is that the online ticketing system is not robust, to say the least. It does not look, sound or feel like anything law enforcement would do. More on that in a moment.
I asked Paula Blackmon, the mayor's chief of staff, to tell me who is running it. She wrote back, "Just to answer your specific question, DPD [Dallas Police Department] is doing the vetting of folks to the event."
I called the public information office of the police department and got a very puzzled response from an officer who said he would have to get back to me. Later, Frank Librio, the overall spokesman for the city, emailed me an official statement from an assistant chief saying, "Because of the high profile nature of the event and recent attacks in the nation we will be very security conscious. While we don't discuss specific security measures there is a need to identify attendees at the event for security related purposes."
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copa 5pts
5 days ago
Mayor Rawlings, at early "50th" planning meetings we have
transcripts
for, says that COPA and the "conspiracists" are acting like we have
"squatters rights" in Dealey Plaza on November 22.
After holding a Moment of Silence and speaking truth to power every
year, not just the ten year anniversaries, since 1964, we might feel
that way when the Sixth Floor Museum and the Mayor's office and the
Dallas power elite on the 50th committee decided in 2011 that they did
not want to allow "conspiracy theory" to be spoken or be visible this
year, when they know the world press is coming to town.
They have done everything from improper excusive permits to city
proclamations closing all parks for permitted events in town on
November 22 and setting up an exclusive, ticketed, not really random
(since half of the 5,000 have to go to Dallas residents) event which
will not mention the assassination if it can help it, and spending
close to a million privately raised dollars for private security to
protect it.
Public events that draw "tens of thousands" of people, which the Mayor
says he is expecting to come this year for the anniversary, are
routinely handled in Washington, DC without background checks, privacy
invasion, ad agencies, random ticketing or prevention to public access
to historical sites and public parks. They use barricades, entry
points, and bag searches, sniff dogs and other ways to be sure people
coming in don't hurt anyone. The Mayor is not blocking people with
guns that day, just people with signs, bullhorns and banners. Does
that tell you anything?
One good way to have security at his event, which I proposed when we
met, is to have it inside. The American Airlines Center, where the
lucky 5,000 ticket winners are supposed to pick up tickets with ID
during a 3-hour window the morning of November 22, holds 20,000 people
I am told. Easy to do gate security for a large crowd there if the
Mayor wants to move over. He can still use his Jumbotrons around town
for the excluded tourists. Or he could just start at 11:00 am and let
the public and the world into Dealey Plaza where they are travelling
from all over to be at 12:30 pm.
But none of this is really about honoring JFK (for starters, Kennedy
lovers, why not solve his murder and demand justice and restore some
semblance of democracy?) or about counter-terrorism and security. It
is about silencing those who question the official version of the
assassination, preventing us access to the crowds and the press,
creating a perpetuity of silence by hoping Dallas can just forget the
event that brings more tourists town than any other attraction, and
silence the doubts anyone might have about a conspiracy. Never mind
that 85% of Americans discount the official version and believe in
conspiracy in the case.
The Mayor wants to take over history and control the message and put
it all in the hands of a public relations firm. He is an old PR hand
himself. But, the reason we don't want our history and reality
filtered through PR experts and information warfare and perception
management and manufactured consent is just the sort of nightmarish
scenario that has been planned for November 22 in Dallas. Only a PR
firm could come up with such an idea.
It's not squatter's rights we want, and we have never had exclusive
use of the Plaza over the years. We want the rights spelled out for
all Americans in the First Amendment, the right to peaceably assemble
and the right to free speech. We want to be on the ground, not up in
trees. We want the world to be there with us, since they are coming
and will be watching. Apparently there will be more security deployed
to keep us out than was deployed to protect the President in 1963.
The Mayor can honor the life and legacy of John F. Kennedy any time of
the year and any place. We can only hold our Moment of Silence and
speak on November 22 at 12:30pm from the Grassy Knoll in Dealey Plaza
because it is the anniversary of the death of President Kennedy and
the death of democracy in America since, which seems to be what the
Mayor really wants to commemorate after all.
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3LikeReply
TheCredibleHulk topcommenter5pts
5 days ago
They are a nervous bunch.
Somebody should trot down to city hall and shout BOO! to see how many you can get to shit their pants.
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3
LikeReply
timdickey 5pts
5 days ago
Basically, the same 50 families run the city today that ran it in 1963, and those are the families that owned/own the media outlets, fund the politicians and whose ultra-right wing fanaticism in the early 1960's infected the city and led to us being called the "City of Hate" and led JFK to say, "We're heading into nut country now." Now they're embarrassed that, because of the assassination, the nation and world lifted the rock and discovered them crawling around. As the world's attention turns back to Dallas on the Anniversary, they'd like to remain under that rock, which is what "The 50th" will be for them. Dallas' old-old guard is behind this thing--just check out the names on the 50th committee--with a few "newbie" Establishment members thrown in for a little much-needed (for 'optics') racial and political diversity.
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3LikeReply
JimSX topcommenter5pts
5 days ago
Hear, hear.
ShareFlag
LikeReply
themoonknight2 5pts
3 days ago
@timdickey Agreed and liked.
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LikeReply
brookethecrook2011 5pts
6 days ago
DALLAS, THE CITY OF HATE (BTW, not my words & known since at least 1963). In my little town, the commissioners paid for a study to determine why people wouldn't come to the downtown area. One point I remember is the town had a DO NOT ENTER sign for cars NOT to enter into it's Main Street. That is what Mayor Mike Rawlings has said, DO NOT COME HERE unless we choose you. Sounds to be a constitutional issue to me. So those of you that just want to go away, those that dare question my loyalty had better look in the mirror.
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jfetzer2 5pts
6 days ago
For those who want to engage in serious research on the assassination of JFK, Santa Barbara, CA, not Dallas, TX, turns out to be the place to be. Phil Nelson on LBJ, John Hankey on GHWB, Peter Janney on Mary Meyer, Ralph Cinque on Doorman, Larry Rivera on Buell Wesley Frazier, Judyth Vary Baker on Lee in New Orleans, and Jim Fetzer on what happened, who was responsible and why. For more about "JFK: The Assassination of America", see "JFK 50th: The keys to understanding his assassination" on Veterans Today. Dallas is turning itself into a joke. Check out http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/06/13/jfk-50th-the-keys-to-understanding-his-assassination/
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DougHorne 5pts
5 hours ago
@jfetzer2 And who would know a joke better than the grand ole bubbling, blowhard, Jim Fetzer himself. Thank you Fetz for staying away from Dallas and for taking fellow nutball Judy with you. Question is, will you get kicked out of yet another conference, Fetz? Keep a count of how many times Judy gets caught lying about her ... (cough!) love affair (LOL!) with LHO.
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jfetzer2 5pts
4 hours ago
I have written to let Doug know that someone is impersonating him here. I have never been "kicked out" of any conference; on the contrary, I have chaired or co-chaired four on JFK (Minneapolis 1999, Dallas 2000; Dallas 2001; and Duluth 2003) and published three collections of expert studies on different aspects of the case (ASSASSINATION SCIENCE 1998); MURDER IN DEALEY PLAZA (2000), and THE GREAT ZAPRUDER FILM HOAX (2003). Attempts to suppress the truth are reaching a crescendo as we approach the 50th.
For a short take on what we know now about JFK, see
"JFK Part 1: A National Security Event - Oswald didn't do
it"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1lCYzGD7Lk
“JFK Part 2:A National Security Event– How it was done” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9eu7VI-ZGo
JFK Part I: A National Security Event - Oswald
Didn't Do It
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jfetzer2 5pts
4 hours ago
On the contributions of the real Doug Horne, see, for example,
“US Government Official:JFK Cover-Up, Film Fabrication” http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/10/03/us-government-official-jfk-cover-up-film-fabrication/
“Reason and Rationality in Public Debate:The Case of JFK” (with Douglas Horne) http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/11/13/reason-and-rationality-in-public-debate-the-case-of-jfk-2/
“The Two NPIC Zapruder Film Events: Signposts Pointing to the Film’s Alteration” (with Douglas P. Horne) http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/05/24/the-two-npic-zapruder-film-events-signposts-pointing-to-the-films-alteration/
“The Two NPCI Zapruder Film Events:Analysis and Implications” (with Douglas P. Horne) http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/05/29/the-two-npic-zapruder-film-events-analysis-and-implications/
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jfetzer2 5pts
4 hours ago
For a dozen video interviews with Judyth Vary Baker, which cover key elements of her life with Lee Oswald in New Orleans (including their work with David Ferrie and Dr. Mary Sherman to produce a rapid-acting strain of cancer, which appears to have been used to kill Jack Ruby), go to JamesFetzerNews and judge for yourself.
Jerry Mazza on "The Great Mosque Contretemps"
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jfetzer2 5pts
4 hours ago
Here is the first in a series with Judyth Vary Baker: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjYxk3tRaKg&list=TLashJ4-1nBXM
Judyth Vary Baker: Living in Exile, Part 1
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joe010 5pts
6 days ago
The real issue what can all of us do to make a difference as opposed to complaining about the power structure and taking cheap pot shots at them. Remember? Ask not what your country can do for you, but what can you do for your country. That includes all of us
I'm one of those who was around when it happened. Was in Junior High and recall the hatred, anger toward the president, the infamous ad in the DMN and comments by some about how happy they were he was killed.
What would be a more fitting tribute to his memory in addition to the Big Event would be a concerted effort by the movers and shakers as well as the rest of us put our time and money into making a difference. This should go toward programs for those who are struggling and especially to educate the young who are more amenable to change (not just the poor kids but the wealthy ones) in the importance of equality of all citizens and the dignity of every citizen. Our culture and Dallas is no different, rates people based on their bank account.
Way too many people who succeed think they did it totally on their own and forget how much they owe to their community and this country for providing them the opportunity for success. This would be a great time for the city to no only put on a show but actually focus on this kind of change. It has become very apparent that the the political philosophy controlling state government can't be counted on for much. It is up the cities.
I think Mayor Rawlings does in fact have a very strong sense of this and some of the pot shots in these comments are really way off the mark.
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copa 5pts
5 days ago
@joe010 The "cheap pot shots" are coming from the Mayor and the Sixth Floor Museum who refer to respected medical, ballistics and forensic experts, academicians and researchers who have spent decades revealing the truth about who killed President Kennedy and why as "crazy conspiracy theorists" and the Dallas Morning News that referred to our Moment of Silence as a "morbid, necrophilic circus", and the Sixth Floor Museum that wants to silence us.
We are doing what we can for our country. Public service is fine, but the death of President Kennedy marked a change in the historic direction of this country that has yet to reverse. The rise of the Military Industrial Complex and the CIA, warned about by President Eisenhower, was completed with that assassination. Kennedy was working for peace, civil rights, and against the big corporations, the Mafia, the oil industry and ending the Vietnam war.
We have been in permanent war since and the resources that could have solved the problems Kennedy and his brother, Dr. King and others wanted to address (poverty, racism, militarism) have been squandered on wars and privatized profits for the few.
It is fine to work for good, but sometimes you have to work for change to get there. Exposing those who killed the Kennedy brothers and King, and why they did would be a first step to honoring their life and legacy, which the Mayor says he wants to do.
His message can be right alongside ours, we also honor JFK, but his event is designed to silence ours instead, for the purpose of improving and promoting the image of Dallas. Not the reality - the image, which is what public relations is about anyway.
Whatever noble motives you want to ascribe to this celebration of denial and silencing are outweighed by both the absurdity of their planning and the venality of their fears.
John Judge, COPA
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yoka 5pts
6 days ago
I guess it was inevitable that the powers-that-be in this town would just muck this up. There may be genuine concern that somebody might do something embarrasing, causing Dallas another of it's endless black eyes...but the greater point seems to be to withhold the 'riff-raff' from Dealey Plaza so they can sip chardonnay and mix among their fellow swells. The garish, and incompetent process of selecting - and vetting - ticket holders adds insult to injury, and renders pointless one of the few events that gives Dallas any distinction, and one of the fewer reasons to come see it.
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PaulTrevizo 5pts
6 days ago
Yet another example of Dallas suffering from "Big City Syndrome"--we try to do things other big cities do but just can't get it right.
Victory Park--empty except for when for when something is going on at the AAC.
Klyde Warren Park--free, until they decided it wasn't free
Trinity River Project--lets build a highway inside the levee
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Sotiredofitall topcommenter5pts
6 days ago
When will all this nonsense be over.
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WhiteWhale 5pts
7 days ago
Why would this be any different than the Trinity white water project for kayakers? The outcome is virtually guaranteed to be the same for most Dallas efforts. SNAFU
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bvckvs 5pts
7 days ago
This is a favor by the mayor to the gangsters. They're still here; still running the high-end gambling, heroin and prostitution trades; and still corrupting the police force.
And Mike wouldn't be mayor without them.
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mcdallas topcommenter5pts
6 days ago
@bvckvs Evidence, please.
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brookethecrook2011 5pts
7 days ago
The Mayor of Dallas couldn't make a fart in a whirlwind nor could he command to make a good case of hemmoroids. I'll be damn if Dallas gets any of my tourist money. They don't want me to come to Dealey Plaza so I wouldn't, ever. The Mayor is making his city what is was called in 1963, THE CITY OF HATE. Oh yes, remember to turn off the 24/7 cam from the 6th floor, you certainly don't want a subversive to be watching the cam while the city celebrates with a "Glee Club".
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Obummer 5pts
7 days ago
Yo remembers men, wez’all n dis Tagather.
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DALLAS-CONTROL SPEECH
Dallas Still Wants to Control Speech on JFK Anniversary
Is the Trilateral Commission behind an anti-conspiracy conspiracy?
AAAComments (23) By Jim Schutze Thursday, Mar 7 2013
Nothing could be crazier or sadder. It is the continued determination of a small group of people in Dallas to tightly control public observations of the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination here. They want to banish the public from Dealey Plaza where it happened so that no one can go there and raise questions.
Jared Boggess
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At the behest of this group, the city has agreed to barricade and shut down Dealey Plaza for two weeks bracketing the November 22 anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's murder in 1963. The longer this goes on and the closer we draw to the date, the more I feel myself getting spooked out by the whole thing. This is some weird stuff.
The city's stated goal is to keep Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists away from the immense hordes of international press that city leaders fear will show up for the event. First of all, immense hordes are not coming. C'mon. If you asked people on the street right now to tell you who JFK was, half would guess he was a rapper.
But a pretty decent-sized contingent of press might show up to see Dallas acting like we did it. "Half Century Later, Dallas Still Guilty" — now that's a decent little color piece. The more City Hall keeps doing cheap imitations of a 1950s TV detective show, the better chance we have of actually drawing interest and attention next November, all of it bad.
Last week another shoe dropped onto the overwhelming mountain of evidence already arguing that shutting down Dealey Plaza is a manifestly imbecilic and self-defeating idea. An appeals court came down entirely on the side of Robert Groden, a best-selling author and assassination expert whom the city has been hounding for a decade. The court's finding was a refutation of everything the city has ever said about its right to control Dealey Plaza.
In 2010 a trial court judge quashed the city's case against Groden for selling assassination tracts in Dealey Plaza. Even though the city had come up with three different versions of what they claimed Groden did wrong, the trial judge said it still failed to find a single law he had broken. By the way, this was the 81st time the city had been tossed out of court for trying to banish Groden form Dealey Plaza. Eighty-one. If in the first 80 times you do not succeed, try an 81st!
The city appealed the trial judge's ruling in 2010. It took the appeals court three years to make up its mind, but last week a judge finally handed down the score: Groden 81, city of Dallas goose-egg. A few days later the city informed Bradley Kizzia, Groden's lawyer, that they will not appeal again. The city attorney's office confirmed this to me.
I learned recently that when Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings was in Washington last January for the inauguration, he met with John Judge of the Coalition on Presidential Assassinations, a national umbrella group for assassination scholars and conspiracy theorists, to explore the possibility of compromise on the 50th observations. Judge told me that he offered the mayor three possible compromise positions.
First, Judge suggested the city move its memorial event to the Kennedy Memorial site two blocks from Dealey Plaza and leave the plaza open to the public to whom to it belongs. Second, if the city insisted on using the plaza for its memorial, Judge proposed the city allow COPA to be present during the observation in some nondisruptive fashion. And finally if the city just could not share the moment, Judge suggested that a staggered timing be worked out so that COPA could move into the plaza and hold its own event immediately before or immediately after the city's event.
Mayor Rawlings confirmed to me he had met with Judge in Washington and discussed possible points of compromise. Of the suggestion that the official event remove itself from Dealey Plaza and leave the plaza open, Rawlings told me he told Judge, "I don't think so." He said he did agree to relay a request from COPA that it be allowed to meet with the committee sponsoring the event to present its thoughts, something the committee has declined to allow so far in spite of previous requests from COPA.
Rawlings told me that since returning to Dallas he has met with members of the event committee and has relayed COPA's request to talk to them. He sounded reasonably though not totally optimistic that such a meeting will take place. "If they [the committee] want to, I think we will make that happen," he said.
He also said this about Judge and his group: "John's a nice guy. It was a good conversation. I felt that they cared about this day as much as anybody, so we needed to continue that dialogue.
"I was pleased with a couple of things I heard them say. One is that it's not a massive group. I was afraid it was 500 people or something. I think it's not. I think it's a smaller group. And second, they've been very respectful [in the past]. In fact they were complaining about somebody who had disrespected their moment of silence. So I liked the tenor of what they were talking about."
COPA, by the way, has a long history of solemn and respectful observations at Dealey Plaza on previous anniversaries of JFK's death. Like Groden, Judge and most of the people we are talking about here are mature scholars who choose their words carefully and know how to behave when they go downtown. The suggestion that there is something ominous or dangerous about them — a linchpin of the city's 81 failed cases against Groden — is a lot of what keeps getting the city laughed out of court.
In fact, for the most part the assassination writers and theorists only look scary when you read about them in the pages of The Dallas Morning News, whose writers have described them as necrophiliacs and fiends in the past. The News, of course, was singled out at the time of the assassination for having fanned the flames of extremism in Dallas. Plus ça change.
Dallas would probably have had an easier time of it in the courts if it had launched a jack-booted horseback and lasso round-up of professors of Greek love poetry. No judge has ever been able to find anything wrong with people standing around on the grass on Dealey Plaza speaking to the hordes of tourists who come there seeking answers to the JFK assassination mystery.
And it is a mystery. Most of the world takes it as a mystery. But organizers of the official Dallas City Hall event for the 50th are determined that no one must be allowed to speak those three words — it's a mystery — at any time or in any place near the event.
Groden was a consultant to the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations convened in 1976, which said in a report two years later it had found credible scientific evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in killing Kennedy. The report didn't say who did it. It said it was a mystery.
The murder is still an open case, a point driven home here recently when sponsors of the city's official 50th observation succeeded in luring members of the Kennedy family back to Dallas for an official event — the first time since the assassination. At a gathering in the Arts District, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said exactly the same thing the city has been persecuting Groden for saying in Dealey Plaza: It's a mystery. Kennedy said his father, the assassinated RFK, publicly endorsed the lone-gunman findings of the Warren Commission but privately dismissed those findings and derided the commission's report as "a shoddy piece of work."
Early on in this effort, city officials went to great lengths to explain their sensitivity to the feelings of the Kennedy family, even suggesting at one point that the word "assassination" would be banished from all publicity and proceedings lest it cause the Kennedys to recall something they had perhaps forgotten about. Of course, that story went sailing out the window when RFK came to town and said his father thought the Warren Commission was bunk.
In fact for all its lugubrious, funeral-home hand-wringing, it's the city now that begins to emerge as ludicrous and profane in its treatment of this event. How could Dallas, of all the cities in the world, ever have gotten the idea that it had the right to control this particular conversation?
The mayor's more reasonable tone may offer hope for a more reasonable outcome, but he was careful to tell me that this particular piece of business is not in his hands. He repeated a few time that decisions about the 50th are in the hands of "the committee."
I am slowly coming to my own personal theory about "the committee," the people behind Dallas' effort to basically make this day go away. The committee includes some window-dressing and diversity names, but the core group is made up of way-back Dallas society and money names including Ruth Sharp Altshuler, Deedie Rose, Erle Nye, Margot Perot and Caren Prothro. I suspect their obsession with this event is linked somehow with the Kennedy assassination having been the first time in human history that international live television took a place most people had never heard of before and cast it out naked onto the center stage of world attention, covered in shame and blood as if in a scene from Stephen King's Carrie.
For the people on whose watch all of that happened in 1963, the assassination became the cause for their own personal arrested development. Only by thinking of it that way can I make sense of their approach to the 50th.
It's not the Kennedy family they're worried about. And I don't even think it has anything to do with the city's vaunted image. Images don't really go back 50 years. More like 50 minutes in this world.
It's the nightmare. They're afraid the nightmare is coming back. The strangest thing, the spookiest thing, the saddest thing in all of this is that they are the ones conjuring it out of the ground
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Dallas' handling of JFK anniversary: an enigma wrapped in a big wad of dumb.
AAAComments (22) By Jim Schutze Thursday, Jul 25 2013
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, talking last week about the worries some people harbor concerning the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination in Dealey Plaza, recalled his own recent visit to President Obama's second inaugural in Washington. When a pro-life person climbed a tree and attempted to disrupt the inaugural, Rawlings told me that people in the Dallas group exclaimed, "'That's what's going to happen, that's what's going to happen'" in Dealey Plaza in November.
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When I repeated the mayor's anecdote to John Judge, head of the Coalition on Political Assassinations, one of the groups that will be banned from the plaza by police cordon that day, he laughed. "If you make us do it, yeah," Judge said. "I mean, that's the point. We don't normally climb up in a tree."
It's only four months from the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination, and absolutely nothing has been resolved about access to Dealey Plaza on that day, virtually guaranteeing the kind of messy showdown City Hall fears most.
The plaza will be shut down for two weeks, a week on either side of November 22, with access and control granted to only one group, a private committee calling itself only "The 50th" because they don't even want the word "assassination" spoken. Is that crazy enough for you?
The people in charge of "The 50th" have set up a ticketing procedure by which exclusive access to the plaza that day will be granted. To get in, you must apply online months ahead of time for a ticket, a process requiring you to submit personal identification numbers such as Social Security, driver's license or passport so that you may be subjected to a background check.
And, remember: No matter what anybody tells you, this is not about the life and legacy of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, none of which happened here. It's not about the number 50, which is one more than 49 and one less than 51. It's about an assassination that is of interest mainly to people who believe the killing was a conspiracy unsolved to this day.
In other words, this whole thing is an event that will attract people who believe in, are experts on and think in terms of conspiracy. So what do we think happens when we try to bar conspiracy experts from maybe the biggest conspiracy event of the last half century and then go all dark on them and tough-tootsie and refuse to tell them why they are being barred? They will think the whole thing is a ... (hint: begins with letter after B, before D).
I started asking questions about the ticketing process some weeks ago, because I was getting complaints from people in the assassination-study community who were being barred from the online ticketing process for screwy reasons. Chris Pike, a freelance journalist well known to JFK researchers, is slated to speak at the 50th Anniversary Convention of COPA to be held in Dallas on November 22, the same day as the 50th thing.
Like many of the people who will attend the COPA convention here, Pike went online as soon as he could to apply for tickets to the event in Dealey Plaza. On all of the decade anniversaries since the assassination — the 10th, 20th, 30th and 40th — COPA has conducted somber moments of silence just after noon at Dealey Plaza to mark the moment when it happened. This year for the first time they are barred as a group from carrying out their ceremony, so members are understandably eager to win admission as individuals to a moment and place important to them for most of their lives.
When Pike tried to fill out the online form, the web page kept kicking him out, telling him his driver's license number was not current. He says it is current and he's had the same number for 20 years.
I had the same experience. I gave the web page a number and got rejected too. But because I have to re-type things all the time anyway, I kept trying, and eventually the page accepted the number I gave it as authentic. By the way, it was a fake number. I was just messing with it. Anyway, the answer is that the online ticketing system is not robust, to say the least. It does not look, sound or feel like anything law enforcement would do. More on that in a moment.
I asked Paula Blackmon, the mayor's chief of staff, to tell me who is running it. She wrote back, "Just to answer your specific question, DPD [Dallas Police Department] is doing the vetting of folks to the event."
I called the public information office of the police department and got a very puzzled response from an officer who said he would have to get back to me. Later, Frank Librio, the overall spokesman for the city, emailed me an official statement from an assistant chief saying, "Because of the high profile nature of the event and recent attacks in the nation we will be very security conscious. While we don't discuss specific security measures there is a need to identify attendees at the event for security related purposes."
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copa 5pts
5 days ago
Mayor Rawlings, at early "50th" planning meetings we have
transcripts
for, says that COPA and the "conspiracists" are acting like we have
"squatters rights" in Dealey Plaza on November 22.
After holding a Moment of Silence and speaking truth to power every
year, not just the ten year anniversaries, since 1964, we might feel
that way when the Sixth Floor Museum and the Mayor's office and the
Dallas power elite on the 50th committee decided in 2011 that they did
not want to allow "conspiracy theory" to be spoken or be visible this
year, when they know the world press is coming to town.
They have done everything from improper excusive permits to city
proclamations closing all parks for permitted events in town on
November 22 and setting up an exclusive, ticketed, not really random
(since half of the 5,000 have to go to Dallas residents) event which
will not mention the assassination if it can help it, and spending
close to a million privately raised dollars for private security to
protect it.
Public events that draw "tens of thousands" of people, which the Mayor
says he is expecting to come this year for the anniversary, are
routinely handled in Washington, DC without background checks, privacy
invasion, ad agencies, random ticketing or prevention to public access
to historical sites and public parks. They use barricades, entry
points, and bag searches, sniff dogs and other ways to be sure people
coming in don't hurt anyone. The Mayor is not blocking people with
guns that day, just people with signs, bullhorns and banners. Does
that tell you anything?
One good way to have security at his event, which I proposed when we
met, is to have it inside. The American Airlines Center, where the
lucky 5,000 ticket winners are supposed to pick up tickets with ID
during a 3-hour window the morning of November 22, holds 20,000 people
I am told. Easy to do gate security for a large crowd there if the
Mayor wants to move over. He can still use his Jumbotrons around town
for the excluded tourists. Or he could just start at 11:00 am and let
the public and the world into Dealey Plaza where they are travelling
from all over to be at 12:30 pm.
But none of this is really about honoring JFK (for starters, Kennedy
lovers, why not solve his murder and demand justice and restore some
semblance of democracy?) or about counter-terrorism and security. It
is about silencing those who question the official version of the
assassination, preventing us access to the crowds and the press,
creating a perpetuity of silence by hoping Dallas can just forget the
event that brings more tourists town than any other attraction, and
silence the doubts anyone might have about a conspiracy. Never mind
that 85% of Americans discount the official version and believe in
conspiracy in the case.
The Mayor wants to take over history and control the message and put
it all in the hands of a public relations firm. He is an old PR hand
himself. But, the reason we don't want our history and reality
filtered through PR experts and information warfare and perception
management and manufactured consent is just the sort of nightmarish
scenario that has been planned for November 22 in Dallas. Only a PR
firm could come up with such an idea.
It's not squatter's rights we want, and we have never had exclusive
use of the Plaza over the years. We want the rights spelled out for
all Americans in the First Amendment, the right to peaceably assemble
and the right to free speech. We want to be on the ground, not up in
trees. We want the world to be there with us, since they are coming
and will be watching. Apparently there will be more security deployed
to keep us out than was deployed to protect the President in 1963.
The Mayor can honor the life and legacy of John F. Kennedy any time of
the year and any place. We can only hold our Moment of Silence and
speak on November 22 at 12:30pm from the Grassy Knoll in Dealey Plaza
because it is the anniversary of the death of President Kennedy and
the death of democracy in America since, which seems to be what the
Mayor really wants to commemorate after all.
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3LikeReply
TheCredibleHulk topcommenter5pts
5 days ago
They are a nervous bunch.
Somebody should trot down to city hall and shout BOO! to see how many you can get to shit their pants.
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3LikeReply
timdickey 5pts
5 days ago
Basically, the same 50 families run the city today that ran it in 1963, and those are the families that owned/own the media outlets, fund the politicians and whose ultra-right wing fanaticism in the early 1960's infected the city and led to us being called the "City of Hate" and led JFK to say, "We're heading into nut country now." Now they're embarrassed that, because of the assassination, the nation and world lifted the rock and discovered them crawling around. As the world's attention turns back to Dallas on the Anniversary, they'd like to remain under that rock, which is what "The 50th" will be for them. Dallas' old-old guard is behind this thing--just check out the names on the 50th committee--with a few "newbie" Establishment members thrown in for a little much-needed (for 'optics') racial and political diversity.
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JimSX topcommenter5pts
5 days ago
Hear, hear.
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themoonknight2 5pts
3 days ago
@timdickey Agreed and liked.
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brookethecrook2011 5pts
6 days ago
DALLAS, THE CITY OF HATE (BTW, not my words & known since at least 1963). In my little town, the commissioners paid for a study to determine why people wouldn't come to the downtown area. One point I remember is the town had a DO NOT ENTER sign for cars NOT to enter into it's Main Street. That is what Mayor Mike Rawlings has said, DO NOT COME HERE unless we choose you. Sounds to be a constitutional issue to me. So those of you that just want to go away, those that dare question my loyalty had better look in the mirror.
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jfetzer2 5pts
6 days ago
For those who want to engage in serious research on the assassination of JFK, Santa Barbara, CA, not Dallas, TX, turns out to be the place to be. Phil Nelson on LBJ, John Hankey on GHWB, Peter Janney on Mary Meyer, Ralph Cinque on Doorman, Larry Rivera on Buell Wesley Frazier, Judyth Vary Baker on Lee in New Orleans, and Jim Fetzer on what happened, who was responsible and why. For more about "JFK: The Assassination of America", see "JFK 50th: The keys to understanding his assassination" on Veterans Today. Dallas is turning itself into a joke. Check out http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/06/13/jfk-50th-the-keys-to-understanding-his-assassination/
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DougHorne 5pts
5 hours ago
@jfetzer2 And who would know a joke better than the grand ole bubbling, blowhard, Jim Fetzer himself. Thank you Fetz for staying away from Dallas and for taking fellow nutball Judy with you. Question is, will you get kicked out of yet another conference, Fetz? Keep a count of how many times Judy gets caught lying about her ... (cough!) love affair (LOL!) with LHO.
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jfetzer2 5pts
4 hours ago
I have written to let Doug know that someone is impersonating him here. I have never been "kicked out" of any conference; on the contrary, I have chaired or co-chaired four on JFK (Minneapolis 1999, Dallas 2000; Dallas 2001; and Duluth 2003) and published three collections of expert studies on different aspects of the case (ASSASSINATION SCIENCE 1998); MURDER IN DEALEY PLAZA (2000), and THE GREAT ZAPRUDER FILM HOAX (2003). Attempts to suppress the truth are reaching a crescendo as we approach the 50th.
For a short take on what we know now about JFK, see
"JFK Part 1: A National Security Event - Oswald didn't do
it"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1lCYzGD7Lk
“JFK Part 2:A National Security Event– How it was done” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9eu7VI-ZGo
JFK Part I: A National Security Event - Oswald
Didn't Do It
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jfetzer2 5pts
4 hours ago
On the contributions of the real Doug Horne, see, for example,
“US Government Official:JFK Cover-Up, Film Fabrication” http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/10/03/us-government-official-jfk-cover-up-film-fabrication/
“Reason and Rationality in Public Debate:The Case of JFK” (with Douglas Horne) http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/11/13/reason-and-rationality-in-public-debate-the-case-of-jfk-2/
“The Two NPIC Zapruder Film Events: Signposts Pointing to the Film’s Alteration” (with Douglas P. Horne) http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/05/24/the-two-npic-zapruder-film-events-signposts-pointing-to-the-films-alteration/
“The Two NPCI Zapruder Film Events:Analysis and Implications” (with Douglas P. Horne) http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/05/29/the-two-npic-zapruder-film-events-analysis-and-implications/
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jfetzer2 5pts
4 hours ago
For a dozen video interviews with Judyth Vary Baker, which cover key elements of her life with Lee Oswald in New Orleans (including their work with David Ferrie and Dr. Mary Sherman to produce a rapid-acting strain of cancer, which appears to have been used to kill Jack Ruby), go to JamesFetzerNews and judge for yourself.
Jerry Mazza on "The Great Mosque Contretemps"
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jfetzer2 5pts
4 hours ago
Here is the first in a series with Judyth Vary Baker: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjYxk3tRaKg&list=TLashJ4-1nBXM
Judyth Vary Baker: Living in Exile, Part 1
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joe010 5pts
6 days ago
The real issue what can all of us do to make a difference as opposed to complaining about the power structure and taking cheap pot shots at them. Remember? Ask not what your country can do for you, but what can you do for your country. That includes all of us
I'm one of those who was around when it happened. Was in Junior High and recall the hatred, anger toward the president, the infamous ad in the DMN and comments by some about how happy they were he was killed.
What would be a more fitting tribute to his memory in addition to the Big Event would be a concerted effort by the movers and shakers as well as the rest of us put our time and money into making a difference. This should go toward programs for those who are struggling and especially to educate the young who are more amenable to change (not just the poor kids but the wealthy ones) in the importance of equality of all citizens and the dignity of every citizen. Our culture and Dallas is no different, rates people based on their bank account.
Way too many people who succeed think they did it totally on their own and forget how much they owe to their community and this country for providing them the opportunity for success. This would be a great time for the city to no only put on a show but actually focus on this kind of change. It has become very apparent that the the political philosophy controlling state government can't be counted on for much. It is up the cities.
I think Mayor Rawlings does in fact have a very strong sense of this and some of the pot shots in these comments are really way off the mark.
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copa 5pts
5 days ago
@joe010 The "cheap pot shots" are coming from the Mayor and the Sixth Floor Museum who refer to respected medical, ballistics and forensic experts, academicians and researchers who have spent decades revealing the truth about who killed President Kennedy and why as "crazy conspiracy theorists" and the Dallas Morning News that referred to our Moment of Silence as a "morbid, necrophilic circus", and the Sixth Floor Museum that wants to silence us.
We are doing what we can for our country. Public service is fine, but the death of President Kennedy marked a change in the historic direction of this country that has yet to reverse. The rise of the Military Industrial Complex and the CIA, warned about by President Eisenhower, was completed with that assassination. Kennedy was working for peace, civil rights, and against the big corporations, the Mafia, the oil industry and ending the Vietnam war.
We have been in permanent war since and the resources that could have solved the problems Kennedy and his brother, Dr. King and others wanted to address (poverty, racism, militarism) have been squandered on wars and privatized profits for the few.
It is fine to work for good, but sometimes you have to work for change to get there. Exposing those who killed the Kennedy brothers and King, and why they did would be a first step to honoring their life and legacy, which the Mayor says he wants to do.
His message can be right alongside ours, we also honor JFK, but his event is designed to silence ours instead, for the purpose of improving and promoting the image of Dallas. Not the reality - the image, which is what public relations is about anyway.
Whatever noble motives you want to ascribe to this celebration of denial and silencing are outweighed by both the absurdity of their planning and the venality of their fears.
John Judge, COPA
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yoka 5pts
6 days ago
I guess it was inevitable that the powers-that-be in this town would just muck this up. There may be genuine concern that somebody might do something embarrasing, causing Dallas another of it's endless black eyes...but the greater point seems to be to withhold the 'riff-raff' from Dealey Plaza so they can sip chardonnay and mix among their fellow swells. The garish, and incompetent process of selecting - and vetting - ticket holders adds insult to injury, and renders pointless one of the few events that gives Dallas any distinction, and one of the fewer reasons to come see it.
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PaulTrevizo 5pts
6 days ago
Yet another example of Dallas suffering from "Big City Syndrome"--we try to do things other big cities do but just can't get it right.
Victory Park--empty except for when for when something is going on at the AAC.
Klyde Warren Park--free, until they decided it wasn't free
Trinity River Project--lets build a highway inside the levee
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Sotiredofitall topcommenter5pts
6 days ago
When will all this nonsense be over.
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WhiteWhale 5pts
7 days ago
Why would this be any different than the Trinity white water project for kayakers? The outcome is virtually guaranteed to be the same for most Dallas efforts. SNAFU
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bvckvs 5pts
7 days ago
This is a favor by the mayor to the gangsters. They're still here; still running the high-end gambling, heroin and prostitution trades; and still corrupting the police force.
And Mike wouldn't be mayor without them.
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mcdallas topcommenter5pts
6 days ago
@bvckvs Evidence, please.
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brookethecrook2011 5pts
7 days ago
The Mayor of Dallas couldn't make a fart in a whirlwind nor could he command to make a good case of hemmoroids. I'll be damn if Dallas gets any of my tourist money. They don't want me to come to Dealey Plaza so I wouldn't, ever. The Mayor is making his city what is was called in 1963, THE CITY OF HATE. Oh yes, remember to turn off the 24/7 cam from the 6th floor, you certainly don't want a subversive to be watching the cam while the city celebrates with a "Glee Club".
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Obummer 5pts
7 days ago
Yo remembers men, wez’all n dis Tagather.
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The City of Dallas' Anti-Conspiracy Conspiracy
Dallas' handling of JFK anniversary: an enigma wrapped in a big wad of dumb.
AAAComments (22) By Jim Schutze Thursday, Jul 25 2013
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, talking last week about the worries some people harbor concerning the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination in Dealey Plaza, recalled his own recent visit to President Obama's second inaugural in Washington. When a pro-life person climbed a tree and attempted to disrupt the inaugural, Rawlings told me that people in the Dallas group exclaimed, "'That's what's going to happen, that's what's going to happen'" in Dealey Plaza in November.
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When I repeated the mayor's anecdote to John Judge, head of the Coalition on Political Assassinations, one of the groups that will be banned from the plaza by police cordon that day, he laughed. "If you make us do it, yeah," Judge said. "I mean, that's the point. We don't normally climb up in a tree."
It's only four months from the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination, and absolutely nothing has been resolved about access to Dealey Plaza on that day, virtually guaranteeing the kind of messy showdown City Hall fears most.
The plaza will be shut down for two weeks, a week on either side of November 22, with access and control granted to only one group, a private committee calling itself only "The 50th" because they don't even want the word "assassination" spoken. Is that crazy enough for you?
The people in charge of "The 50th" have set up a ticketing procedure by which exclusive access to the plaza that day will be granted. To get in, you must apply online months ahead of time for a ticket, a process requiring you to submit personal identification numbers such as Social Security, driver's license or passport so that you may be subjected to a background check.
And, remember: No matter what anybody tells you, this is not about the life and legacy of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, none of which happened here. It's not about the number 50, which is one more than 49 and one less than 51. It's about an assassination that is of interest mainly to people who believe the killing was a conspiracy unsolved to this day.
In other words, this whole thing is an event that will attract people who believe in, are experts on and think in terms of conspiracy. So what do we think happens when we try to bar conspiracy experts from maybe the biggest conspiracy event of the last half century and then go all dark on them and tough-tootsie and refuse to tell them why they are being barred? They will think the whole thing is a ... (hint: begins with letter after B, before D).
I started asking questions about the ticketing process some weeks ago, because I was getting complaints from people in the assassination-study community who were being barred from the online ticketing process for screwy reasons. Chris Pike, a freelance journalist well known to JFK researchers, is slated to speak at the 50th Anniversary Convention of COPA to be held in Dallas on November 22, the same day as the 50th thing.
Like many of the people who will attend the COPA convention here, Pike went online as soon as he could to apply for tickets to the event in Dealey Plaza. On all of the decade anniversaries since the assassination — the 10th, 20th, 30th and 40th — COPA has conducted somber moments of silence just after noon at Dealey Plaza to mark the moment when it happened. This year for the first time they are barred as a group from carrying out their ceremony, so members are understandably eager to win admission as individuals to a moment and place important to them for most of their lives.
When Pike tried to fill out the online form, the web page kept kicking him out, telling him his driver's license number was not current. He says it is current and he's had the same number for 20 years.
I had the same experience. I gave the web page a number and got rejected too. But because I have to re-type things all the time anyway, I kept trying, and eventually the page accepted the number I gave it as authentic. By the way, it was a fake number. I was just messing with it. Anyway, the answer is that the online ticketing system is not robust, to say the least. It does not look, sound or feel like anything law enforcement would do. More on that in a moment.
I asked Paula Blackmon, the mayor's chief of staff, to tell me who is running it. She wrote back, "Just to answer your specific question, DPD [Dallas Police Department] is doing the vetting of folks to the event."
I called the public information office of the police department and got a very puzzled response from an officer who said he would have to get back to me. Later, Frank Librio, the overall spokesman for the city, emailed me an official statement from an assistant chief saying, "Because of the high profile nature of the event and recent attacks in the nation we will be very security conscious. While we don't discuss specific security measures there is a need to identify attendees at the event for security related purposes."
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5 days ago
Mayor Rawlings, at
early "50th" planning meetings we have transcripts
for, says that COPA and the "conspiracists" are acting like we have
"squatters rights" in Dealey Plaza on November 22.
After holding a Moment of Silence and speaking truth to power every
year, not just the ten year anniversaries, since 1964, we might feel
that way when the Sixth Floor Museum and the Mayor's office and the
Dallas power elite on the 50th committee decided in 2011 that they did
not want to allow "conspiracy theory" to be spoken or be visible this
year, when they know the world press is coming to town.
They have done everything from improper excusive permits to city
proclamations closing all parks for permitted events in town on
November 22 and setting up an exclusive, ticketed, not really random
(since half of the 5,000 have to go to Dallas residents) event which
will not mention the assassination if it can help it, and spending
close to a million privately raised dollars for private security to
protect it.
Public events that draw "tens of thousands" of people, which the Mayor
says he is expecting to come this year for the anniversary, are
routinely handled in Washington, DC without background checks, privacy
invasion, ad agencies, random ticketing or prevention to public access
to historical sites and public parks. They use barricades, entry
points, and bag searches, sniff dogs and other ways to be sure people
coming in don't hurt anyone. The Mayor is not blocking people with
guns that day, just people with signs, bullhorns and banners. Does
that tell you anything?
One good way to have security at his event, which I proposed when we
met, is to have it inside. The American Airlines Center, where the
lucky 5,000 ticket winners are supposed to pick up tickets with ID
during a 3-hour window the morning of November 22, holds 20,000 people
I am told. Easy to do gate security for a large crowd there if the
Mayor wants to move over. He can still use his Jumbotrons around town
for the excluded tourists. Or he could just start at 11:00 am and let
the public and the world into Dealey Plaza where they are travelling
from all over to be at 12:30 pm.
But none of this is really about honoring JFK (for starters, Kennedy
lovers, why not solve his murder and demand justice and restore some
semblance of democracy?) or about counter-terrorism and security. It
is about silencing those who question the official version of the
assassination, preventing us access to the crowds and the press,
creating a perpetuity of silence by hoping Dallas can just forget the
event that brings more tourists town than any other attraction, and
silence the doubts anyone might have about a conspiracy. Never mind
that 85% of Americans discount the official version and believe in
conspiracy in the case.
The Mayor wants to take over history and control the message and put
it all in the hands of a public relations firm. He is an old PR hand
himself. But, the reason we don't want our history and reality
filtered through PR experts and information warfare and perception
management and manufactured consent is just the sort of nightmarish
scenario that has been planned for November 22 in Dallas. Only a PR
firm could come up with such an idea.
It's not squatter's rights we want, and we have never had exclusive
use of the Plaza over the years. We want the rights spelled out for
all Americans in the First Amendment, the right to peaceably assemble
and the right to free speech. We want to be on the ground, not up in
trees. We want the world to be there with us, since they are coming
and will be watching. Apparently there will be more security deployed
to keep us out than was deployed to protect the President in 1963.
The Mayor can honor the life and legacy of John F. Kennedy any time of
the year and any place. We can only hold our Moment of Silence and
speak on November 22 at 12:30pm from the Grassy Knoll in Dealey Plaza
because it is the anniversary of the death of President Kennedy and
the death of democracy in America since, which seems to be what the
Mayor really wants to commemorate after all.
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5 days ago
They are a nervous bunch.
Somebody should trot down to city hall and shout BOO! to see how many you can get to shit their pants.
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5 days ago
Basically, the same 50 families run the city today that ran it in 1963, and those are the families that owned/own the media outlets, fund the politicians and whose ultra-right wing fanaticism in the early 1960's infected the city and led to us being called the "City of Hate" and led JFK to say, "We're heading into nut country now." Now they're embarrassed that, because of the assassination, the nation and world lifted the rock and discovered them crawling around. As the world's attention turns back to Dallas on the Anniversary, they'd like to remain under that rock, which is what "The 50th" will be for them. Dallas' old-old guard is behind this thing--just check out the names on the 50th committee--with a few "newbie" Establishment members thrown in for a little much-needed (for 'optics') racial and political diversity.
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5 days ago
Hear, hear.
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3 days ago
@timdickey Agreed and liked.
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6 days ago
DALLAS, THE CITY OF HATE (BTW, not my words & known since at least 1963). In my little town, the commissioners paid for a study to determine why people wouldn't come to the downtown area. One point I remember is the town had a DO NOT ENTER sign for cars NOT to enter into it's Main Street. That is what Mayor Mike Rawlings has said, DO NOT COME HERE unless we choose you. Sounds to be a constitutional issue to me. So those of you that just want to go away, those that dare question my loyalty had better look in the mirror.
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6 days ago
For those who want to engage in serious research on the assassination of JFK, Santa Barbara, CA, not Dallas, TX, turns out to be the place to be. Phil Nelson on LBJ, John Hankey on GHWB, Peter Janney on Mary Meyer, Ralph Cinque on Doorman, Larry Rivera on Buell Wesley Frazier, Judyth Vary Baker on Lee in New Orleans, and Jim Fetzer on what happened, who was responsible and why. For more about "JFK: The Assassination of America", see "JFK 50th: The keys to understanding his assassination" on Veterans Today. Dallas is turning itself into a joke. Check out http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/06/13/jfk-50th-the-keys-to-understanding-his-assassination/
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DougHorne
5 hours ago
@jfetzer2 And who would know a joke better than the grand ole bubbling, blowhard, Jim Fetzer himself. Thank you Fetz for staying away from Dallas and for taking fellow nutball Judy with you. Question is, will you get kicked out of yet another conference, Fetz? Keep a count of how many times Judy gets caught lying about her ... (cough!) love affair (LOL!) with LHO.
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4 hours ago
I have written to let Doug know that someone is impersonating him here. I have never been "kicked out" of any conference; on the contrary, I have chaired or co-chaired four on JFK (Minneapolis 1999, Dallas 2000; Dallas 2001; and Duluth 2003) and published three collections of expert studies on different aspects of the case (ASSASSINATION SCIENCE 1998); MURDER IN DEALEY PLAZA (2000), and THE GREAT ZAPRUDER FILM HOAX (2003). Attempts to suppress the truth are reaching a crescendo as we approach the 50th.
For a short take on what we know now about JFK, see
"JFK Part 1: A
National Security Event - Oswald didn't do it"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1lCYzGD7Lk
“JFK Part 2:A National Security Event– How it was done” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9eu7VI-ZGo
JFK Part I: A National Security Event -
Oswald Didn't Do It
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4 hours ago
On the contributions of the real Doug Horne, see, for example,
“US Government Official:JFK Cover-Up, Film Fabrication” http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/10/03/us-government-official-jfk-cover-up-film-fabrication/
“Reason and Rationality in Public Debate:The Case of JFK” (with Douglas Horne) http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/11/13/reason-and-rationality-in-public-debate-the-case-of-jfk-2/
“The Two NPIC Zapruder Film Events: Signposts Pointing to the Film’s Alteration” (with Douglas P. Horne) http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/05/24/the-two-npic-zapruder-film-events-signposts-pointing-to-the-films-alteration/
“The Two NPCI Zapruder Film Events:Analysis and Implications” (with Douglas P. Horne) http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/05/29/the-two-npic-zapruder-film-events-analysis-and-implications/
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4 hours ago
For a dozen video interviews with Judyth Vary Baker, which cover key elements of her life with Lee Oswald in New Orleans (including their work with David Ferrie and Dr. Mary Sherman to produce a rapid-acting strain of cancer, which appears to have been used to kill Jack Ruby), go to JamesFetzerNews and judge for yourself.
Jerry
Mazza on "The Great Mosque Contretemps"
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4 hours ago
Here is the first in a series with Judyth Vary Baker: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjYxk3tRaKg&list=TLashJ4-1nBXM
Judyth Vary Baker: Living in Exile, Part
1
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6 days ago
The real issue what can all of us do to make a difference as opposed to complaining about the power structure and taking cheap pot shots at them. Remember? Ask not what your country can do for you, but what can you do for your country. That includes all of us
I'm one of those who was around when it happened. Was in Junior High and recall the hatred, anger toward the president, the infamous ad in the DMN and comments by some about how happy they were he was killed.
What would be a more fitting tribute to his memory in addition to the Big Event would be a concerted effort by the movers and shakers as well as the rest of us put our time and money into making a difference. This should go toward programs for those who are struggling and especially to educate the young who are more amenable to change (not just the poor kids but the wealthy ones) in the importance of equality of all citizens and the dignity of every citizen. Our culture and Dallas is no different, rates people based on their bank account.
Way too many people who succeed think they did it totally on their own and forget how much they owe to their community and this country for providing them the opportunity for success. This would be a great time for the city to no only put on a show but actually focus on this kind of change. It has become very apparent that the the political philosophy controlling state government can't be counted on for much. It is up the cities.
I think Mayor Rawlings does in fact have a very strong sense of this and some of the pot shots in these comments are really way off the mark.
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5 days ago
@joe010 The "cheap pot shots" are coming from the Mayor and the Sixth Floor Museum who refer to respected medical, ballistics and forensic experts, academicians and researchers who have spent decades revealing the truth about who killed President Kennedy and why as "crazy conspiracy theorists" and the Dallas Morning News that referred to our Moment of Silence as a "morbid, necrophilic circus", and the Sixth Floor Museum that wants to silence us.
We are doing what we can for our country. Public service is fine, but the death of President Kennedy marked a change in the historic direction of this country that has yet to reverse. The rise of the Military Industrial Complex and the CIA, warned about by President Eisenhower, was completed with that assassination. Kennedy was working for peace, civil rights, and against the big corporations, the Mafia, the oil industry and ending the Vietnam war.
We have been in permanent war since and the resources that could have solved the problems Kennedy and his brother, Dr. King and others wanted to address (poverty, racism, militarism) have been squandered on wars and privatized profits for the few.
It is fine to work for good, but sometimes you have to work for change to get there. Exposing those who killed the Kennedy brothers and King, and why they did would be a first step to honoring their life and legacy, which the Mayor says he wants to do.
His message can be right alongside ours, we also honor JFK, but his event is designed to silence ours instead, for the purpose of improving and promoting the image of Dallas. Not the reality - the image, which is what public relations is about anyway.
Whatever noble motives you want to ascribe to this celebration of denial and silencing are outweighed by both the absurdity of their planning and the venality of their fears.
John Judge, COPA
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6 days ago
I guess it was inevitable that the powers-that-be in this town would just muck this up. There may be genuine concern that somebody might do something embarrasing, causing Dallas another of it's endless black eyes...but the greater point seems to be to withhold the 'riff-raff' from Dealey Plaza so they can sip chardonnay and mix among their fellow swells. The garish, and incompetent process of selecting - and vetting - ticket holders adds insult to injury, and renders pointless one of the few events that gives Dallas any distinction, and one of the fewer reasons to come see it.
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6 days ago
Yet another example of Dallas suffering from "Big City Syndrome"--we try to do things other big cities do but just can't get it right.
Victory Park--empty except for when for when something is going on at the AAC.
Klyde Warren Park--free, until they decided it wasn't free
Trinity River Project--lets build a highway inside the levee
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6 days ago
When will all this nonsense be over.
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7 days ago
Why would this be any different than the Trinity white water project for kayakers? The outcome is virtually guaranteed to be the same for most Dallas efforts. SNAFU
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7 days ago
This is a favor by the mayor to the gangsters. They're still here; still running the high-end gambling, heroin and prostitution trades; and still corrupting the police force.
And Mike wouldn't be mayor without them.
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6 days ago
@bvckvs Evidence, please.
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7 days ago
The Mayor of Dallas couldn't make a fart in a whirlwind nor could he command to make a good case of hemmoroids. I'll be damn if Dallas gets any of my tourist money. They don't want me to come to Dealey Plaza so I wouldn't, ever. The Mayor is making his city what is was called in 1963, THE CITY OF HATE. Oh yes, remember to turn off the 24/7 cam from the 6th floor, you certainly don't want a subversive to be watching the cam while the city celebrates with a "Glee Club".
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7 days ago
Yo remembers men, wez’all n dis Tagather.
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