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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: puborectalis who wrote (637389)11/28/2011 9:40:23 AM
From: Brumar89  Respond to of 1580148
 
Probably. TX was once solidly Democratic you know.



To: puborectalis who wrote (637389)11/28/2011 9:41:46 AM
From: Brumar89  Respond to of 1580148
 
Did Castro Get Kennedy?

Yes.


Humberto Fontova
Nov 23, 2011

“Of all the people I interviewed in New Orleans regarding the Kennedy assassination, Carlos Bringuier was the one I trusted most. I could see in his eyes he was always telling me the complete truth.” (Oriana Fallaci, L, Europeo, 1969.)

"That weasel walked into my store and started looking around," recalls Carlos Bringuier about the afternoon of August 5, 1963. "But I could sense he wasn't a shopper. Sure enough, after a few minutes of browsing he came up and extended his hand. "Good afternoon," he said. "I'm Lee Harvey Oswald."

In 1963 the CIA regarded the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE) “the most militant and deeply motivated of all the Cuban exile organizations seeking to oust Castro." Carlos Bringuier was their representative in New Orleans. It was DRE agents who infiltrated Cuba and brought out the first reports of Soviet missile installations--to the scoffs of everyone from Camelot's CIA to the State Department's wizards, to the White House's Best and Brightest. It took two months for anyone to finally take them seriously. A U-2 flight then confirmed every last detail of what the DRE boys had been risking their lives for months to report.

“Oswald approached me because my name was so often linked to anti-Castro activities in the local (New Orleans) news,” recalls Bringuier. “He even jammed his hand in his pocket and pulled out a roll of bills, offering to contribute to the anti-Castro cause. I was suspicious and declined, but he kept blasting Castro and Communism in very colorful terms the whole time he was in the store. He returned the next day, snarled out a few more anti-Castroisms and dropped off his training manual for the anti-Castro fight, Guidebook for Marines.”

Two days later Bringuier was astounded to spot Oswald a few blocks away from his store distributing Fair Pay for Cuba pamphlets. Carlos approached, accepted a pamphlet, ripped it to pieces and a scuffle ensued. The cops arrived, the scuffle made the news, and a few days later Bringuier and Oswald odebated on New Orleans radio and TV.

Dozens of books, movies, articles and TV specials depict these events. What they DON’T depict is how, between their scuffle and debate, Carlos and a friend Carlos Quiroga turned the tables on Oswald. Posing as a Castro-sympathizer eager to join Oswald’s Fair Play for Cuba Committee, Quiroga (who had not been in the store or involved in the scuffle) visited Oswald at his home and they commiserated for hours. “You read everyplace that Oswald was dumb, a flake, a patsy, a set-up,” says Bringuier. “Nonsense. He was a smooth operator and spoke fluent Russian.”

Quiroga noticed that Oswald’s living room was filled with Fair play For Cuba Committee literature. From one stack Oswald pulled an application to join the Committee and offered it to Quiroga. Yet during the Warren Commission circus The Fair Play for Cuba Committee repeatedly denied that Oswald had any links with them.

Among the things that caught Quiroga's eye during his visit was Oswald speaking Russian with his wife and daughter. "Its good practice," explained Oswald. "I'm studying foreign languages at Tulane University." He was lying. Also keep in mind the date: this was 3 months before the assassination. Oswald’s stint in Russia was virtually unknown at the time.

On the very night of Nov. 22rd 1963 Carlos Bringuier went public on American radio and TV: “We don’t know yet if Lee Harvey Oswald is President Kennedy’s assassin. But if he is, then Fidel Castro’s hand is involved in this assassination. "

Fidel Castro immediately called a press Conference to denounce Carlos Bringuier by name and kick off the media disinformation campaign that finally peaked as high comedy with Oliver Stone’s JFK.

“For 15 years of my life at the top of the Soviet bloc intelligence community, I was involved in a world-wide disinformation effort aimed at diverting attention away from the KGB’s involvement with Lee Harvey Oswald. The Kennedy assassination conspiracy was born—and it never died.”(Ion Pacepa, the highest ranking intelligence official ever to defect from the Soviet bloc.)

But Carlos Bringuier was on to the disinformation campaign from its very birthday.

“Oliver Stone interviewed me for hours while researching for his movie JFK” recalls Bringuier. “This was almost 30 years ago. Stone’s loony–left credentials weren’t yet blatant. I figured he was after the truth. So I went along, telling him everything. Well, his movie comes out --and turns out I’M involved in the conspiracy to kill JFK!” Bringuier laughs. “For fifty years the media has either ignored or turned everything I’ve told them upside down,” says Bringuier. “Finally I got sick of it so when 60 Minutes asked me for an interview a couple years back, I told them: “Sure. I’ll do an interview—but this time it has to be LIVE, no editing.” That ended whatever relationship I had with CBS producers.”

"U.S leaders who plan an eliminating Cuban leaders should not think that they are themselves safe!" warned Castro on Sept 7,1963. "We are prepared to answer in kind!"

Many of those closest to the early evidence were convinced that Castro made good on his boast. "I'll tell you something that will rock you," Lyndon Johnson told Howard K. Smith in 1966. "Kennedy tried to get Castro -- but Castro got Kennedy first."

General and former Secretary of Defense Alexander Haig agreed with LBJ. Haig served as a military aide under both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. "As I read the secret report I felt a sense of physical shock, a rising of the hair on the back of my neck," he writes about an incident one month after the Kennedy assassination when a classified report crossed his desk. "I walked the report over to my superiors and watched their faces go ashen." "From this moment, Al." said his superiors, "You will forget you ever read this piece of paper, or that it ever existed."

The classified intelligence report that so rattled Haig and caused so many faces to go ashen described how a few days before the Dallas assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, accompanied by Castro intelligence agents, had been spotted in Havana, where he'd traveled from Mexico City.

For 34 years Markus Wolf was the chief of East Germany's foreign intelligence service, a branch of the STASI with many contacts and operations in Castro's Cuba. It was the STASI rather than the KGB that undertook the training of Castro's police and intelligence services. Wolf's autobiography is titled, "Man Without a Face" and subtitled, "The Autobiography of Communism's Greatest Spymaster." Most intelligence experts agree that the subtitle fits. Wolf was once asked about the Kennedy assassination and quickly replied. "Don't ask me -- ask Fidel Castro."

townhall.com

h/t Tom Clarke



To: puborectalis who wrote (637389)11/28/2011 9:47:07 AM
From: Brumar891 Recommendation  Respond to of 1580148
 
Op-Ed Columnist The Enduring Cult of Kennedy


By ROSS DOUTHAT Published: November 26, 2011
THE cult of John F. Kennedy has the resilience of a horror-movie villain. No matter how many times the myths of Camelot are seemingly interred by history, they always come shambling back to life — in another television special, another Vanity Fair cover story, another hardcover hagiography.

It’s fitting, then, that the latest exhumation comes courtesy of Stephen King himself. King serves a dual role in our popular culture: He’s at once the master of horror and the bard of the baby boom, writing his way through the twilit borderlands where the experiences of the post-World War II generation are stalked by nightmares and shadowed by metaphysical dread.

In this landscape, the death of J.F.K. looms up like the Overlook Hotel. The gauzy fantasy of the Kennedy White House endures precisely because the reality of the assassination still feels like a primal catastrophe — an irruption of inexplicable evil as horrifying as any supernatural bogeyman.

At its best, King’s new Kennedy assassination novel, “11/22/63” — which sends its protagonist back in time to change that November day’s events — offers an implicit critique of this generational obsession. (I am not giving much away when I reveal that the time-traveling hero does not succeed in freeing ’60s America from the cruel snares of history.) But its narrative power still depends on accepting the false premises of the Kennedy cult — premises that will no doubt endure so long as the 1960s generation does, but still deserve to be challenged at every opportunity.

The first premise is that Kennedy was a very good president, and might have been a great one if he’d lived. Few serious historians take this view: It belongs to Camelot’s surviving court stenographers, and to popularizers like Chris Matthews, whose new best seller “Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero” works hard to gloss over the thinness of the 35th president’s actual accomplishments. Yet there is no escaping the myth’s hold on the popular imagination. In Gallup’s “greatest president” polling, J.F.K. still regularly jostles with Lincoln and Reagan for the top spot.

In reality, the kindest interpretation of Kennedy’s presidency is that he was a mediocrity whose death left his final grade as “incomplete.” The harsher view would deem him a near disaster — ineffective in domestic policy, evasive on civil rights and a serial blunderer in foreign policy, who barely avoided a nuclear war that his own brinksmanship had pushed us toward. (And the latter judgment doesn’t even take account of the medical problems that arguably made him unfit for the presidency, or the adulteries that eclipsed Bill Clinton’s for sheer recklessness.)

The second false premise is that Kennedy would have kept us out of Vietnam. Or as a character puts it in “11/22/63,” making the case for killing Lee Harvey Oswald: “Get rid of one wretched waif, buddy, and you could save millions of lives.”

Actually, it would be more accurate to describe the Vietnam War as Kennedy’s darkest legacy. His Churchillian rhetoric (“pay any price, bear any burden ...”) provided the war’s rhetorical frame as surely as George W. Bush’s post-9/11 speeches did for our intervention in Iraq. His slow-motion military escalation established the strategic template that Lyndon Johnson followed so disastrously. And the war’s architects were all Kennedy people: It was the Whiz Kids’ mix of messianism and technocratic confidence, not Oswald’s fatal bullet, that sent so many Americans to die in Indochina.

The third myth is that Kennedy was a martyr to right-wing unreason. Writing on J.F.K. in the latest issue of New York magazine, Frank Rich half-acknowledges the mediocrity of Kennedy’s presidency. But he cannot resist joining a generation of liberals in drawing a connection between the right-wing “atmosphere of hate” in early-1960s Dallas and the assassination itself — and then linking both to today’s anti-Obama zeal. Neither can King, whose “11/22/63” explicitly compares right-wing Dallas to his own fictional territory of Derry, Me. — home of the murderous Pennywise the Clown from “It,” among other demons.

This connection is the purest fantasy, made particularly ridiculous by the fact that both Rich and King acknowledge that Oswald was a leftist — a pro-Castro agitator whose other assassination target was the far-right segregationist Edwin Walker. The idea that an atmosphere of right-wing hate somehow inspired a Marxist radical to murder a famously hawkish cold war president is even more implausible than the widespread suggestion that the schizophrenic Jared Lee Loughner shot his congresswoman because Sarah Palin put some targets on an online political map.

This last example suggests why the J.F.K. cult matters — because its myths still shape how we interpret politics today. We confuse charisma with competence, rhetoric with results, celebrity with genuine achievement. We find convenient scapegoats for national tragedies, and let our personal icons escape the blame. And we imagine that the worst evils can be blamed exclusively on subterranean demons, rather than on the follies that often flow from fine words and high ideals.

h/t lindybill



To: puborectalis who wrote (637389)11/28/2011 9:54:36 AM
From: HPilot  Respond to of 1580148
 
I guess all the tax breaks for the oil industry was a Democratic idea.

Obama voted for them. Clinton wouldn't lie would she?

reuters.com



To: puborectalis who wrote (637389)11/28/2011 10:30:44 AM
From: Brumar89  Respond to of 1580148
 
Shale Oil Drilling To Help Create Mfg Jobs in OH

The asterisk to this story or the qualification to it, is that it depend on whether or not the Obama Administration decides to kill these jobs through regulation. As long as plants are being built on the assumption that supplies will be needed to drill into the shale reserves, we have a glimmer of hope at some sane energy policy coming from the White House. But that might be just a momentary lapse of reason. From the AP:



A rare sight in hard-luck Youngstown, a new industrial plant, has generated hope that a surge in oil and natural gas drilling across a multistate region might jump-start a revival in Rust Belt manufacturing.

The $650 million V&M Star mill, located along a desolate stretch that once was a showcase for American industry, is to open by year’s end and produce seamless steel pipes for tapping shale formations.

It will mean 350 new jobs in Youngstown, a northeast Ohio city that is struggling with 11 percent unemployment.

V&M Star’s parent company Vallourec, based in Boulogne-Billancourt, France, hopes increased interest in shale formations will produce a ready-made market.

Vast stores of natural gas in the Marcellus and Utica shale formations have set off a rush to grab leases and secure permits to drill. Industry estimates show the Marcellus boom could offer robust job numbers for 50 years.

Similar hopes are alive in Lorain, Ohio, where U.S. Steel will add 100 jobs with a $100 million upgrade of a plant that makes seamless pipe for the construction, oil-gas exploration and production industries. Erin DiPietro, a company spokeswoman in Pittsburgh, said the expansion will make the Lorain operation more competitive and help it tap into expanding shale developments.

The mayors of both Ohio cities see a chance to revive manufacturing through shale drilling.

For every manufacturing job there are between five and seven ancillary jobs created within the community that support those manufacturing jobs,” said Lorain Mayor Tony Krasienko. His city has a 10.6 percent unemployment rate.

Companies are trying to spin off more work from shale development, and every bit will be a plus, according to Youngstown Mayor Charles Sammarone. “I just know this: the money they will spend will help the economy,” he said.

Those benefiting from shale development include American Railcar Industries of St. Charles, Mo., with an order backlog that is the largest since 2008. The company, with operations across the U.S, was helped by demand for freight cars used in the shale industry.

One of the biggest manufacturing projects on the shale developing horizon is the plan for a multibillion-dollar Shell Oil Co. petrochemical refinery. Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia are competing for the plant, which would convert natural gas liquids to other chemicals that go into everything from plastics to tires to antifreeze.

“What they’re talking about at this stage is, you’re looking at the next gold rush,” said Martin Abraham, science-engineering dean at Youngstown State University.

One study backed by the oil and gas industry predicted developing oil and gas reserves could create or support more than 200,000 jobs in the next four years just in Ohio, where Hess Corp. recently made a series of mineral-rights purchases worth $750 million.

But the project is not without controversy.

Susan Helper, a Case Western Reserve University professor who studies manufacturing issues, said such job projections are suspect, in part because the estimate of natural gas reserves may be inflated…

Inflated or not, good paying jobs will be created as a result of this. And that helps the middle class. Or do the Democrats really care about us?

http://bluecollarphilosophy.com/2011/11/shale-oil-drilling-to-help-create-manufacturing-jobs-in-ohio/



To: puborectalis who wrote (637389)11/28/2011 11:54:25 AM
From: Brumar891 Recommendation  Respond to of 1580148
 
Good news for people dumb enough to buy a Volt, Govt Motors will give you a loaner car if you're worried about your dangerous turkey catching fire:

DETROIT — General Motors says it will offer free loaner cars to Chevrolet Volt owners if they’re concerned about the cars catching fire.

The move comes after last week’s announcement that the government is investigating fires involving the Volt’s lithium-ion batteries.

The company says it will contact the owners to reassure them that the cars are safe. But it’s making the offer to make sure Volt owners don’t lose confidence in the cars.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says a Volt battery pack that was being monitored after a crash test caught fire on Thursday. The agency says another battery that recently was crash-tested gave off smoke and sparks.

The latest fires are in addition to a battery fire in a crash-tested Volt six months ago.

fuelfix.com