Oswald acted alone

This I believe.

Like many others, I have played amateur detective in this fifty-year national obsession, more than most but much less than others.  And the more I have learned, the less convinced I am that there was an actual conspiracy.  Here's why...

The vast majority -- 98% -- of all of the documents collected by the Warren Commission have been declassified.  This occurred in 1997 and was prompted by questions raised in Oliver Stone's film 'JFK', which many Americans believe is more accurate than it actually is.  Two things stood out to me from this new data...

-- The "magic  bullet" is flattened on the tail and along one side ("compressed laterally" as the Wiki describes; fourth graf up from the bottom), thus not so magic as its reputation has long suggested.  More on the single bullet theory here if you want it.

-- Oswald was scored a 'sharpshooter' while a Marine in 1956, and a 'marksman' in 1959.  Do you know the distance at which a military sniper must qualify for those ratings with shots within the target?

200 yards.

Do you know how far away Kennedy was from the 6th floor of the Texas school book depository?

Between approximately 189 feet, or 63 yards (neck shot) and roughly 80 yards (head shot).

(Lots of people throw cold water on the postulate that Oswald was a crack shot, for whatever that may be worth to you.)

============

Oswald undoubtedly had conversations -- deranged rants is probably a better descriptor -- with people about killing Kennedy.  Did he have conversations about killing Kennedy with the Russian government, or the CIA in Mexico City, or people loosely associated with the Cuban government or anti-Castro Cubans in this country, or elements of organized crime?  Perhaps.  Was he a patsy, as he claimed?  I doubt it.  Useful idiot?  This fits better to me.

Sidebar: When I lived in St Pete, Florida in 1992, I researched the Tampa gangster of Cuban descent, Santo Trafficante, who seemed as if he might be the link between the nebulous "parties with motive" most often mentioned... along with the CIA and the military/generals/MIC.  I had a personal connection for this interest: my wife's older brother -- born in Cuba like her, and emigrated to the US in 1961 as a teenager with the rest of her family -- had been shot to death by Tampa police in 1976 while running guns for some disjointed segments of the Mafia (essentially petty hoodlums who knew mobsters) and we were caught up with pursuing clues about that.  Nothing significant came of it.

Despite whatever "encouragement" he might have received, did Oswald act alone when he shot the president?  Almost certainly.  And I would not have said that even five years ago, mostly on the basis of an afternoon-long conversation at a Beaumont crawfish boil with Zack Shelton, the retired FBI agent who runs this website.

There's a lot there, much of it probably new to the average conspiracy theorist, so don't go in without a full glass and maybe something to eat.

The subscription channel Reelz has a series running this month called "JFK: The Smoking Gun" and it's fun, particularly if you like the various medical forensics angles like the dispute over the autopsy photos and Kennedy's missing brain and things like that.

And if you have a spare hour-and-a-half, watch Executive Action, the 1973 flick with Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, Will Geer, and several other character actors you'll recognize.  It follows the line that the CIA did it, and that is the only conspiracy theory that hasn't been properly debunked.



But the Warren Commission's conclusion is based on things that can no longer be reasonably disputed, namely...

-- The shots which killed Kennedy -- and wounded Texas Governor John Connally -- were fired from the sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository building.

-- They were fired from a rifle owned by Lee Harvey Oswald; Oswald worked in the school book depository, and carried with him to work on the day of the assassination a wrapped package he described as "curtain rods".

-- Oswald's fingerprints and palmprints were found on boxes in the location of the shooting (the TXSBD sixth-floor window) and his palmprint was found on the barrel of the rifle.

Conspiracy theorists are good at raising doubts about various portions of the Warren Commission account, but are also fairly poor at suggesting plausible alternatives to it.

I'm of the mind that a bonafide conspiracy exists today only in a few feverish minds (lots of people have reasonable enough doubts, but that just wouldn't be enough to acquit Oswald in a trial -- and away we go with the Ruby conspiracy theory).  And the main reason I can't ride in that car any more is that, if anyone actually had inside, verifiable information that there was a conspiracy of any kind... they would have cashed in by spilling the beans in a million-dollar tell-all book years ago.

People crave conspiracy theories and where one does not exist, one will be fabricated. Just look what happened with CBS and Benghazi.

Update: Socratic Gadfly, from the comments, has the best conspiracy theories.

Senate filibuster nuked

I really didn't think Harry Reid had it in him, but he did.

The Senate approved a historic rules change on Thursday by eliminating the use of the filibuster on all presidential nominees except those to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In doing so, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) invoked the long-threatened ‘nuclear option,’ meaning he called for a vote to change the Senate rules by a simple majority vote. It passed, 52 to 48. Three Democrats voted against changing the rules — Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Mark Pryor of Arkansas.

The unprecedented rules change means that President Barack Obama’s judicial and executive branch nominees no longer need to clear a 60-vote threshold to reach the Senate floor and get an up-or-down vote.

Both parties threatened to change the rules in recent years — but Reid said he felt compelled to finally pull the trigger after what he described as unprecedented use of the filibuster on Obama’s judicial picks, namely three blocked judges to the powerful D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

One picture says it all.

Let's roll.

Houston council passes wage theft ordinance, mayor expands benefits to same-sex spouses

A busy and remarkable day yesterday in H-Town.

The city of Houston will offer health and life insurance benefits to all spouses of legally married employees, including same-sex couples, despite a voter-approved 2001 charter amendment that had banned the practice, Mayor Annise Parker announced Wednesday.

Parker's action relied on a legal opinion from City Attorney David Feldman that cited the U.S. Supreme Court overturning the federal Defense of Marriage Act this year, federal agencies' subsequent decisions to recognize legal same-sex marriages and other relevant case law.

"Based on the right to equal protection under the law, it is unconstitutional for the city to continue to deny benefits to the same-sex spouses of our employees who are legally married," Parker said. "This change is not only the legal thing to do, it is the right, just and fair thing to do."

[...]

Texas' own Defense of Marriage Act remains in force, Feldman and Parker said, but they said actions on the federal level supersede it and that the law is unconstitutional.

Better late than never, certainly. Sometimes little things (like elections) get in the way of big things. And yes, this a BFD. So is this.

Houston City Council voted unanimously Wednesday to adopt an ordinance aimed at deterring companies from stealing workers' wages and ensuring the city does not hire firms that do, though supporters acknowledged the measure's limited reach.

The seemingly easy vote masked months of lobbying and negotiations among Mayor Annise Parker's administration, council members, workers rights groups and business organizations. The item was pulled from last week's agenda for some final tweaks in talks with lobbyists for builders, contractors, restaurateurs, building owners and hotel operators.

In the end, all sides pronounced the passage a positive step, or at least said they could live with it.

Isn't it sweet that the wage thieves said "they could live with it"?

Laura Perez-Boston, director of the nonprofit Faith and Justice Worker Center, flooded the chamber with supporters each time the item came up, citing statistics: 100 daily wage theft complaints in the Houston area; $750 million in local wages lost annually to the practice.

"It's certainly not everything we would want, but I do think it is a substantial step in the right direction," she said. 

It's a start... just like giving spousal benefits to all married city employees.  And it's important to acknowledge our elected officials for doing the right thing.  Progress -- even when it is long overdue and a half-measure to boot -- is good.

Who knows what we might accomplish next?

One in three Houston-area gas pumps is a ripoff

This is what happens after twenty years of Republican rule at the statewide level.

(Houston CBS affiliate KHOU's investigative reporters) analyzed state inspection records and discovered that in the last two years nearly one in three gas station inspections in our region ended in a failing grade.

In all, that represented 1,667 different gas stations ....

State inspectors found problems with (one station's) pumps three different times since the beginning of November, 2011.  According to the Texas Department of Agriculture, in one case a pump charged $1.28 before delivering any gas.

I've blogged about this since 2010, when Hank Gilbert challenged Todd Staples for ag commissioner.  Seven years later, the problem has only gotten worse.  Now Staples wants a promotion to lieutenant governor in 2014.

I'm sure this institutionalized incompetence is only because the agriculture commission is just understaffed due to cutbacks passed in Austin.  After all, since we can't afford any state parks, and the only roads being built are toll roads, everybody's got to tighten their belt.  Right?

If an operator is determined to be intentionally ripping off customers, TDA will turn its findings over the Texas Attorney General’s Office.

How many of these has Greg Abbott's office prosecuted?  Fewer than the number of statistically insignificant voter "fraud" cases, I would guess.  This is the hallmark of Coathanger Ken's legacy: ignore actual fraud, pursue the monster-under-your-bed fears of the right-wing primary voter.

This is the kind of bad government conservatives should be complaining about.  Instead their response is to run ever more conservative candidates against their previous darlings.  That's not going to fix anything.

Instead of waiting for the TXGOP to figure out that they're part of the problem, let's vote for some solutions instead.  And let's encourage those who aren't voting in off-presidential year elections that it is vital that they start doing so.

The week's best toon

And it's only Tuesday.

Eeeny, meeny, miney, mo

Catch a n----r by the toe
If he hollers, make him pay
$50 dollars every day.

Everybody remember that one?  Lorenzo Garcia does.

Garcia is the Young Conservative of Texas who made the Internet blow up yesterday with his latest demonstration of the urgent need for sensitivity training.  'Latest', because he was the proud organizer of the affirmative action bake sale just a couple of months ago.

Here's a picture of Garcia with his mentor.

Neither of those guys need to crouch down for a picture. They're both already as low as a snake's ass in a wagon rut.

But Abbott, not to be outdone by a mere college undergraduate, thought of something nasty to say about "liberals" in his disavowal of Garcia's immigrant hunt.

“Conservatives should not stoop to the level of liberals, whose shenanigans at the Texas Capitol this summer, including chants of ‘hail Satan’ during Senator Davis’ filibuster to allow abortions after five months, did nothing but sidetrack the Texas Legislature.”

Well you did stoop, General.  You threw yourself out of your wheelchair and crawled on the ground, like some creature out of Leviticus, right under the limbo bar.

This is another "oops" for the Abbott campaign, no matter how much they wail and gnash their teeth.  And it's going to cost him a few extra million dollars in Spanish language media just to try to get the stain out.

I said not so long ago that Wendy Davis would need a boatload of cash, a little good luck, and some unforced errors from Greg Abbott to pull out a win next year. The Attorney General is certainly holding up his end so far.

Update: YCT cancels the event. Everybody is in full retreat.

Update II: As a final self-inflicted coup de grâce, Lorenzo Garcia attributed a quotation from Emiliano Zapata to some unidentified Founding Father.

The irony is so sinfully rich.

The Weekly Wrangle

The thoughts and prayers of the Texas Progressive Alliance are with the people of the Phillippines as we bring you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff looks at the numbers in the Astrodome referendum in Harris County to see what went wrong.

Horwitz at Texpatriate discusses and compares the (all Republican) candidates for Texas' two high courts.

Eye On Williamson is still blogging at our temporary home. There's much that is being lost in the hyperventilating over the mistake-riddled rollout of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or ACA. Part of which is EMTALA and our cruel health care system in Texas.

The Keystone XL pipeline is dead, writes PDiddie at Brains and Eggs. Oh, it probably needs a stake through its heart to stay dead, but it isn't going to be a big deal for a very long time... and maybe forever.

Everyone is focused on the odious Ted Cruz while CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme wants you to know that John Cornyn is every bit as despicable. Cornyn is using the disgraced James O'Keefe to take away people's access to ACA help.

=====================

And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs.

Grits for Breakfast informs us that "One out of Five Known Exonerations is for a Crime that Never Happened".

Texas Vox highlights construction problems with the Keystone XL southern segment.

The Makeshift Academic tracks Medicaid enrollment resulting from the Affordable Care Act.

The TSTA Blog wants to know why Greg Abbott is not making education a priority in his campaign.

Juanita Jean passes along the rumor that Tom DeLay wants to run for Congress again.

And finally, if you don't know who Justin Lookadoo is or why a bunch of Richardson High School students started calling him #Lookadouche on Twitter, then TFN Insider, Hair Balls, Forrest Wilder, TM Daily Post, Word of a Woman, BOR, and Nonsequiteuse explain what you missed.

Sunday Funnies

Socialist elected to Seattle's city council

Bravo, I say.  Bravo.

Seattle City Council candidate Kshama Sawant, a “Socialist Alternative” insurgent, has unseated four-term incumbent Richard Conlin, with the latest batch of mail-in ballots nearly tripling Sawant’s lead to 1,148 votes.

A year ago, Sawant was running against the Legislature’s most powerful Democrat, House Speaker Frank Chopp, charging that the “Democratic Party-majority government” had slashed billions from education programs while bestowing tax exemptions on “rich corporations.”

Hm. Sounds familiar.

While the Occupy Seattle organizer is about to occupy an office in the council chambers, ballots are still being counted in several close races.  One big ballot measure is still hanging, while other contests appear narrowly decided.

The $15-an-hour minimum wage proposal in SeaTac, already under legal challenge, leads by exactly 53 votes.  The margin was cushioned by 12 votes in Thursday’s count.

The proposal for taxpayer-financed elections in Seattle, Proposition 1, has climbed in the late vote count.  Unlike Sawant — who overcame a 6,193-vote election night deficit — Prop. 1 hasn’t quite climbed enough.  The “No” side still has a lead of 2,656 votes.

"Taxpayer-financed elections" is code for getting the money out of politics.  Repealing Citizens United and Moving to Amend as a city ordinance.  But pause for a moment and let that sink in: taxpayer-financed elections aren't quite as popular in Seattle as the Socialist about to be sworn in.

You may recall that Houston had both a Socialist and a Green running for mayor earlier this month, but they didn't fare quite so well as Council Member-elect Sawant (about 1% apiece).  My feeling -- well, my hope anyway -- is that continuing to offer alternatives to left-leaning Houstonians, Texans, and Americans is, at best and as this is written today, a tool to pull the Democratic Party back to the port side of the political equation, and if Democrats keep doing things like this then the trend will be inexorable.  You won't hear about it in the mainstream media, though.

Well, you'll hear some about it.



What a breath of fresh, pine-scented air.

This qualifies as bonafide progress. Honestly I thought cities like Berkeley and Portland would have been at the lead, but some will say that the Left Coast is all the same anyway.   Republicans in California, Oregon, and Washington must feel even more hopeless than Texas Democrats did in 2002.

My opinion is that this is the most effective answer to both the Tea Party and the creeping conservatism among establishment Dems; an actual progressive movement outside the center-left that threatens it just enough to make them see the error of their corporate ways... and change them.   It could be so much more with a groundswell of actual populism, here in Texas and across the country, but there are just barely audible rumblings about that.  I thought that was much closer to a real thing in 2006, but the election results that year proved me wrong.  And that was three years -- a political eon -- before the Tea Party birthed itself out of the raging spittle against "RINO" John McCain ... and the nation's first black president, Barack Obama.  (It continues today, of course, in the unrelenting assault on public health insurance known as the ACA.)

Read a little of this...

According a recent Gallup poll, Democrats and Republicans have reached an all-time low in public opinion--only 26 percent of Americans believe the two mainstream parties do "an adequate job of representing the American people." Some 60 percent said there was a need for a third major party.

In Seattle, where the Democrats predominate, this discontent translated into heavy press interest in Sawant. She won an endorsement from The Stranger before her strong showing in the August primary election--the alt-weekly wrote in an article headlined 'The Case for Kshama Sawant': "Sawant offers voters a detailed policy agenda, backed up by a coherent economic critique and a sound strategy for moving the political debate in a leftward direction."

After coming in a close second in August, Sawant continued to pick up broad support, including a small group of 'Democrats for Sawant' -- -a stark symbol of the bitterness with the incumbent Conlin, who has a long record of pandering to business interests....

As a socialist challenger in a liberal city against a Democratic opponent, Sawant was able to avoid one of the key difficulties that third party candidates typically face: the so-called spoiler effect. Without a Republican in the election, the Democrat Conlin wasn't able to browbeat his party's much more liberal base into supporting him as a 'lesser evil'.

More Greens and more Socialists on the ballot, please, in 2014.  Voters want -- and democracy needs -- more than two corporate-controlled options.

Update: Kshama Sawant talks to Salon.

President Obama told the Business Roundtable – speaking of “the capitalist class” – in his first term that he’s an “ardent believer in the free market,” and that he sees three roles for government: to create rules for a level playing field; to provide things that individuals can’t do for themselves; and to provide a social safety net. What do you make of that kind of politics?

First of all, I think Obama is being quite honest … he believes in capitalism. And so for people to have the faith that he is going to really fight against those ideas … there is no basis in reality for that …

I would say that the “free market” is basically free for the super-wealthy, and extremely un-free for the rest of us. Because they dictate the terms. And so this idea that the free market can generate conditions where social programs can thrive and a level playing field can be created — it is an oxymoron. Because what the capitalist market does – and that’s what they call the “free market” – is that if you are a big player, like one of the oil companies, then you are in the best position to consolidate your wealth even further … One of the systematic, statistical realities under capitalism is intergenerational transmission of wealth and intergenerational transmissions of poverty …

I often ask my students, “What do you think is the best way of making money under capitalism?” They often give me interesting answers, like maybe [creating] an app for an iPhone … I tell them, “Look, the best way of making money under capitalism is to have money in the first place” …

You also hear people saying, well, it’s “crony capitalism” or it’s “disaster capitalism” or some other capitalism. Well, the fact is, you know, they’re all dancing around [that] this is capitalism …

It’s not built into the system that the goal is to ensure that socially responsible life is possible. The goal is to maximize profits for those who already have wealth …

The reality is that capitalism rewards the biggest corporations and it tends toward monopoly. That is what capitalism is.

Every time you hear some pathetic conservative say "BrockObamaizaSoshulist", remember that -- as of this post -- the stock market has reached several consecutive days of record highs, and gasoline is $2.79 a gallon in Houston. So Obama is obviously a very crappy socialist.

The Keystone XL pipeline is dead.

Most likely, anyway.  This piece from Paul Ausick at 24/7 Wall St. is worth reading.

The Keystone XL pipeline will not be built. And while the environmentalist arguments against the pipeline had a significant impact in delaying construction of Keystone XL, the primary reason it will not be built is because it really isn’t needed any longer.

The market, as the Libertarians always say, decides.  And the market has moved away from KXL.  I'm going to emphasis some in the following paragraphs.

In its Drilling Productivity Report issued Friday, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) projects that crude production from the Bakken shale play in North Dakota and Montana will top 1 million barrels a day in December. The Keystone XL has been designed to transport 830,000 barrels a day from Alberta to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries, with some capacity devoted to crude from the Bakken region. However, the delay in getting construction started has obviated the need for the pipeline as rail transport has filled the need for getting Bakken production to refineries on all three U.S. coasts.

You are not hearing from Gulf Coast refineries that they need more crude because they already have all they can profitably refine. If Keystone XL were to be built, that crude would very likely be re-exported. Politically, using the entire breadth of the U.S. to transport Canadian crude to foreign markets will be a very hard sell.

Close followers of the battle around KXL knew that this nasty tar sands oil was never going to contribute to national security, but to the bottom lines of a handful of major and minor oil and pipeline companies, such as TransCanada, Total (they have a refinery in Port Arthur, TX) and ConocoPhillips, Shell, and Valero.

The argument over the number of jobs created by the Keystone XL’s construction no longer carries much weight either. During the two-year construction period, a total of about 8,000 to 10,000 full-time jobs would have been created and then disappeared. The economic boost to towns along the route would have been significant, but that was a more important issue two or three years ago than it is now.

Shipments of petroleum and petroleum products by rail in the United States are up 33.6% year-over-year through last week. A total of nearly 607,000 carloads of crude and refined products have been shipped by rail in the U.S. this year, and more rail terminals are being constructed every day to accommodate booming production from the Bakken.

Environmentalists must turn their focus to safety issues with rail shipments of oil, as well as keeping the pressure on frackers to clean up their act.  The nation's pre-eminent fracking watchdog is none other than the Texas Progressive Alliance's own TXsharon at BlueDaze. As for the Big Gas Mafia, they are already advancing the premise of "national security".  Read this now; the title is "There Would Be No Iranian Nuclear Talks If Not for Fracking".

A political fight over the Keystone XL simply will not happen. The president does not need another battle, and his political opponents are running out of allies. Furthermore, Obama can score some big points with environmental voters for the next Democratic presidential nominee by rejecting the pipeline. There is no upside for any national politician or political party to go down with the Keystone XL ship.

[...]

Once the Keystone XL is officially pronounced dead, the environmentalists will proclaim victory and will use the victory to redouble their efforts to cut dependence on fossil fuels. That is a long-run issue, and as Americans become better acquainted with the effects of climate change, demand for fossil fuel will continue to fall.

[...] The refiners no longer need or want the oil, environmentalists never wanted the pipeline in the first place and President Obama can focus on getting his health care program working.

Bloomberg says "redundant", but I think 'comatose' is more accurate.  The Keystone XL pipeline is on life support and somebody will eventually pull the plug on it.  And it won't be Obama or even the Tar Sands Blockaders, but TransCanada itself.  There's some ironic justice in there somewhere.

On to the next.