If this weren’t coming straight off the BBC’s website, I probably wouldn’t print it here. It’s too easily dismissed, as our media usually does with anything that challenges the dominant power structure, as ‘conspiracy theory’.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/6169006.stm

  CIA Role Claim in Kennedy Killing
BBC News

     Tuesday 21 November 2006

     New video and photographic evidence that puts three senior CIA operatives at the scene of Robert Kennedy’s assassination has been brought to light.

     The evidence was shown in a report by Shane O’Sullivan, broadcast on BBC Newsnight.

     It reveals that the operatives and four unidentified associates were at the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles in the moments before and after the shooting on 5 June, 1968.

     The CIA had no domestic jurisdiction and some of the officers were based in South-East Asia at the time, with no reason to be in Los Angeles.

     “Decoy”

     Kennedy had just won the California Democratic primary on an anti-War ticket and was set to challenge Nixon for the White House when he was shot in a kitchen pantry.

     A 24-year-old Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan, was arrested as the lone assassin and notebooks at his house seemed to incriminate him.

     However, even under hypnosis, he has never been able to remember the shooting and defence psychiatrists concluded he was in a trance at the time.

     Witnesses placed Sirhan’s gun several feet in front of Kennedy but the autopsy showed the fatal shot came from one inch behind.

     Dr Herbert Spiegel, a world authority on hypnosis at Columbia University, believes Sirhan may have been hypnotically programmed to act as a decoy for the real assassin.

     Evidence

     The report is the result of a three-year investigation by filmmaker Shane O’Sullivan. He reveals new video and photographs showing three senior CIA operatives at the hotel.

     Three of these men have been positively identified as senior officers who worked together in 1963 at JMWAVE, the CIA’s Miami base for its Secret War on Castro.

     David Morales was Chief of Operations and once told friends:

     “I was in Dallas when we got the son of a bitch and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard.”

     Gordon Campbell was Chief of Maritime Operations and George Joannides was Chief of Psychological Warfare Operations.

     Joannides was called out of retirement in 1978 to act as the CIA liaison to the Congressional investigation into the JFK assassination. Now, we see him at the Ambassador Hotel the night a second Kennedy is assassinated.

     Memory

     Monday, 20 November would have been Bobby Kennedy’s 81st birthday. In Los Angeles, his son Max has just broken ground on a new high-school project in memory of his father on the old Ambassador Hotel site.

     Paul Schrade, a key figure behind the school project, was walking behind Robert Kennedy that night and was shot in the head. He believes this new evidence merits fresh investigation:

     “It seems very strange to me that these guys would be at a Kennedy celebration. What were they doing there? And why were they there? It’s our obligation as friends of Bob Kennedy to investigate this.”

     Ed Lopez, a former Congressional investigator who worked with Joannides in 1978, says:

     “I think the key people at the CIA need to go back to anybody who might have been around back then, bring them in and interview them, and ask - is this Gordon Campbell? Is this George Joannides?”

  ——-

The Orlando Sentinel is posting that so-called undervotes, situations where a ballot was cast, but no vote recorded in some races on that ballot, systematically favored Democrats. In the race for the US House seat in Florida’s 13th district, a number of voters complained on election day that the cast votes in that race, but that the vote wasn’t reflected in the summary. Others claimed that the race didn’t even show up on their ballot. Democrat Christine Jennings lost the seat by 369 votes.

Seriously, WTF is wrong with this country?

I’m just going to repost this editorial in full from www.truthout.org. While I probably wouldn’t be quite as confrontational in my phrasing of the thing, I agree with the sentiment. I’ve been damn pleased with Howard Dean’s 50 State Strategy all year. This is what Dean was talking about when he so poorly stated it as reaching out to guys in trucks with confederate flags on them. Economic change can and does come quickly. Social change is a much slower animal. While I believe that we are winning in the long run on the social change front, we have more power to influence the debate from the majority. I’m also a firm believer that people are more socially open and less vulnerable to demagogues on social issues when they’re doing well economically. Democrats are the party with the will and the desire to push prosperity out to more than just a privileged few.

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    Howard Dean’s 50-State Strategy Pays Off
By Scott Galindez
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

    Monday 13 November 2006

    The chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), Rahm Emanuel, stormed out of Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairman Howard Dean’s office in May after an expletive-filled tirade against the DNC’s spending too much money, too early, in “non-battleground states.” Emanuel was concerned the DNC would be broke and not on the playing field in November. The opposite was true, and the playing field was larger due to the early investment.

    Was Emanuel Talking About States Like Indiana?

    The Democrats picked up 3 seats in a state that was considered as red as the Hoosiers’ basketball uniforms. Dean, in an interview with the Christian Science Monitor, said: “We put folks into Indiana a year and half before we knew the candidates.”

    Was Emanuel Talking About States Like New Hampshire?

    Voters in New Hampshire, home of the nation’s kickoff presidential primary, re-elected Democratic governor John Lynch in a landslide over state representative Jim Coburn (R). Democrats gained more than 80 seats to grab a majority in the 400-member House, where they had been in the minority since at least 1922. Democrats also picked up five seats - giving them 13 of 24 seats - to flip control of the New Hampshire Senate, where they have been in the minority since 1988.

    Was Emanuel Considering Governors’ Races?

    Going into the midterm elections, Republicans had a 28-to-22 advantage in governors. That number has now flipped. States with Democratic governors now command 295 electoral votes, up from 126 before the election, a factor that could have a “huge impact for the presidential race in ‘08.”

    How About State Legislatures, Rahm?

    Democrats nearly doubled the number of states where they control both the legislature and the governor’s office. Fifteen state governments are now solidly blue politically, seven more than before the voting. Ten state capitals are fully in Republicans’ hands, down from 12. The other 25 states have divided government.

    Emanuel and Schumer Deserve Credit, Too

    Much has been made about the battle between Dean and the Netroots v. Emanuel and Schumer. In the end, they all did their jobs, and the Democrats prevailed. The DCCC and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) pumped enough money into the key races in the last month of the campaign to guarantee victory. Now if they could just see that by pumping money and staff early into all 50 states, Howard Dean gave them more key races to work with.

    Lesson Learned

    The lesson learned should be that the DNC should continue to build the party from the ground up in all 50 states, expanding the playing field, while the DCCC and DSCC should continue to target the key races, giving the final push to victory.

A few years ago, I read Democracy Derailed: Initiative Campaigns and the Power of Money by David Broder. This book was largely focused on California because it has the largest and most active ballot initiative system in the country, but it did address several other states. The conclusion that I drew from his book is that it’s usually special interests behind these initiatives, they usually stand to make money off of them, and they usually win. When there’s some genuine public good behind an initiative, it will probably be opposed by some powerful special interest and it will lose. In many ways, the ballot initiatives are a kind of fake populism that look like direct democracy, but often bring us things that even the corporations might be shy about trying to get passed through the legislature. I knew I would not have time to do a thorough study of these phenomenon in this election or anything close to it. Instead, I decided to pick a couple of important, high profile initiatives and see if they further proved that thesis.

I chose follow to California Propositions 86 and 87. Prop 86 would put a steep new tax on cigarettes. It would put some of that money into smoking prevention programs, the rest into other healthcare programs. The steep new tax itself would be quite an incentive to quit smoking. Prop 87 would put a tax on oil that is drilled in California. That money would be used to fund research and initiatives with clean and renewable energy resources.

Both were, in my estimation, attempts at doing a genuine public good. Prop 86 was backed by the California branches of The American Cancer Society, The American Lung Association, the American Heart Association, and dozens of other health, medical, environmental, and community groups. Its opposition was financed by Big Tobacco. Prop 87 was backed by major environmental and health groups such as The American Lung Association and the Sierra Club and others It also received major public endorsements and television ads from Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Its opposition was sponsored by Big Oil, particularly by Chevron. Big Oil spent $100 million to defeat it.

Both lost.

I spent the entire yesterday tied to my toilet. I know that’s not the kind of thing I usually post here, but it’s my explanation for not having written a damn thing about the election. I don’t know for sure if it was food poisoning or just a terrible stomach virus, but it completely KO’d me.  I was semi-conscious for most of the day. I managed to drag myself into a somewhat awake stance around 4:00pm pacific when the election coverage started. I had planned to spend the morning making phone calls at a MoveOn.org phone party. That got cancelled. I was finally able to eat a little soup today, but I haven’t been mentally “with it” enough to feel like I can add much to what everyone else is saying. I have some vague, rumbling thoughts in my brain, but it may take some time to get them into herded into a usuable form.

I am thrilled that Santorum lost. I’m thrilled that it looks like we’ve got the House and the Senate. When I went to bed last night, it didn’t look like it was going to pan out. McCaskill was down by 70,000 votes and the stem cell ballot initiative in Missouri was losing. Allen still had a lead in Virginia, though the pundits were saying that it was his strongholds that hadn’t yet come in with the votes. Montana was a toss up. It was damn nice to wake up and see things had gone our way and then get that  confirmed when the AP called it for Webb in Virginia.

Then getting to watch Rumsfeld cut ‘n run just made my day.

It looks like I’m going to spend yet another four years living under the yoke of a Republican governor. In the last decade I’ve lived in a toss up state, and two of the bluest of the blue states. I haven’t lived under a Democratic governor since Lawton Chiles’ second term* ended with JEB!’s election. You know it’s bad for the Democrats when their candidate is even losing in the bay area. Recent polls of the bay area put Schwarzenegger up anywhere from four to eight points.

I have other thoughts and theories on this state’s elections, but since I’ve lived here less than a month, I’m not going to put any of that speculation on the record. Hopefully, by the next election, I’ll know enough about this state’s politics to make public pronouncements about them. I will share my thoughts after the results are in, though.  One nice thing about being on pacific time is that I’ll start seeing results shortly after 4:00pm and have a good picture of how things are going by 5:00 or 6:00.