Roundup
(1) There’s a fight on for control of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court. In a special election in 2023, the left won control 4-3. Now there’s a chance to get it back, because one of the judges on the left is retiring and there’s a special election looming. Needless to say, tons of money are being spent on the race, which pollsters say is tied.
This race is vitally important for the following reason:
Although Republicans have multiple reasons for prioritizing this race, the most immediate is Crawford’s [the Democratic candidate] stated intention to redraw the state’s congressional maps. If elected, she will ensure the maps are redrawn in a way that favors Democratic candidates in next year’s critical midterm elections.
If Democrats regain control of the House, they will seize every opportunity to block President Donald Trump’s agenda—and will almost certainly impeach him at least once.
Who cares about impeachment? It’s meaningless at this point. But the 2026 election is why Trump is in such a hurry to seize the moment.
(2) The JFK files have been released, and AP’s headline is this: “JFK assassination files released, sending history buffs hunting for new clues.” My prediction is that it is JFK assassination conspiracy buffs who will be reading every word in order to further their pet theories or come up with new ones, and that none of it will hold water although people will continue to believe all sorts of things. No doubt quite a few people here disagree with me. I’ve written tons on this blog about the assassination and why I very strongly believe the Warren Commission got it right and the conspiracy theorists get it wrong. I’m not especially keen on going down that rabbit hole again, but you can always take a look at what I’ve written on the subject previously.
(3) The untimely death of University of Pittsburgh student Sudiksha Konanki in the Dominican Republic is extremely sad, and we may never know what really happened although her parents believe she drowned accidentally:
“Both sides of the authorities have shown us how high the ocean waves were at the time of the incident, and both sides of the authorities have clarified the person of interest was not a suspect from the beginning,” Subbarayudu Konanki, the missing co-ed’s father, said from the family home in Virginia.
“It is with deep sadness and a heavy heart that we are coming to terms with the fact our daughter has drowned,” he said. “This is incredibly difficult for us to process.”
RIP.
(4) Gas prices have been dropping, and some say that it’s only because the economy is bad. You be the judge.
(5) Trump and Putin have a chat:
A call between President Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin ended with a limited agreement for Russia and Ukraine to cease attacks on energy infrastructure but stopped short of a U.S. proposal for a temporary truce.
The United States said Russia had agreed to an energy and infrastructure ceasefire. After Moscow and Kyiv agree to stop hitting each other’s power plants and electric grids, negotiators would move on to a potential halt in fighting on the Black Sea ? and then to a full ceasefire and peace agreement in the 3-year-old Ukraine war, a White House statement said.
Will this end up being something good? Time will tell.
1. Dems will cheat
2. Neo, I agree with you. I think we are close to the same age, you being younger (hope I am not insulting you). I remember vividly where I was when I heard about JFK, Senior in HS. We were sent home. I watched on live TV Oswald being shot. We have seen way too much political violence.
3.Not following
4. Gas prices fluctuate from town to town, and within the town, from N side to S side. N cheapest is $2.79 (well yesterday). S was about $2.97. SAMS 10 miles N of me was in the $2.60 range I believe.
5. Has the transcript been release?
Not sure what to think. Hope that Trump doesn’t “give” up Ukrainian territory that Putin doesn’t have. Putin wants more, will Trump say enough is enough about him? Is Trump putting Putin in a box? Don’t know, but I do not believe that Trump is in Putin’s pocket.
1) the gop was only able to prevail once in 2012, when one rural county reported late, ever since then, they have stolen the Court, and before that, they stole the Governorship from Walker, and then the state in 2020
2)its very poorly organized, the document drop, maybe elon’s elves, should take a crack at it,
3) it seems she was dragged out to sea, and the suspect’s statements are all over the place
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/405615
There’s a war back on, a bubbling simmer at this point though all the signs point toward a full on roiling boil very soon. Finish it this time, seems to be the aim.
if we understood the previous pause as a hudna, it makes more sense,
4) I’ve started watching a long running tv series that started 2005. I’m on season 3 or 4 now, and the last couple episodes have mentioned the date, 2008, and some witty banter about possible catastrophes.
The protagonist mentioned $5/gallon gasoline as one of those humorous catastrophes. They drive around in a late ’60’s muscle car. Today, in my town, the range is $4.35 to $5.07 for regular. If the idiots in Sacramento get their way, it’ll be $10/gallon relatively soon.
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Commodities markets, like gasoline, tend to be very forward looking. Just the prospect of substantive future changes in the marketplace can cause significant price changes to occur rapidly.
I recall, around the 2007 – 2008 credit crisis, I was following a lot of financial news. There was a burst of inflation in many commodity items. I was surprised to learn that both regular commodity trading speculators and hedge fund investors were actually buying crude oil and paying storage fees. It was a bet that it’s price would increase greatly. In some cases, the storage fees were rather high.
Imagine if that were going on now (I have no idea the extent of it) and Trump comes into office and begins to take blitzkrieg energy actions. “Sell, Mortimer, SELL!” (To borrow a Hollywood line.) Down come the prices.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obAoPP1bdIM
Oops. Just like the supposed line, “Play it again Sam.” my above line is never actually uttered.
“Gas prices have been dropping, and some say that it’s only because the economy is bad.”
For five years 2017-22 I served as the pastor of a small church east of Baton Rouge. I had two church members who worked at petroleum plants of which we have several. After a devastating hurricane it became difficult to purchase gasoline so I asked them about why gas prices seemed to be dropping or increasing. They explained it was speculators. What people think the price of a barrel of oil will be. I didn’t understand that part. An important point they made which stuck with me is that it takes about three months for the price of petroleum to have an effect on the price of gasoline.
So when the price of gas suddenly drops or rises the question is not “what happened this week to cause that” but “what happened about three months ago?” Some situations can cause prices to fluctuate sooner such as when refineries shut down after a hurricane.
During the first Trump presidency and then the Biden presidency I started following gas prices more closely. And could see that three month delay at work. About three months after Biden was elected prices started climbing. Last month people celebrated the drop in prices under Trump.
Well yes and no. If prices started dropping in February what happened three months before that? What was happening three months ago?
On Gas prices, they might be doing their reformulations for Summer.
Might be some price drops on different imported goods if the US can stop the Houthis from firing rockets and drones.
I just read that Mia Love has not long to live. She was diagnosed awhile back with glioblastoma and recently was told there is nothing left to do.
I remember when she first hit the scene– she was a real breathe of fresh air. It was sad that she lost in 2018 — because of the unfortunately influx of lefties to Salt Lake City.
“how conveeenient”, which is a line from, I believe, SNL, seems to apply to one or another suicide.
A Boeing exec, speaking about their shortfalls, told his brother that if anything happened, it wasn’t suicide. Shortly thereafter, he was shot to death. Ruled a suicide.
One such is referred to in some of the released materials.
It would be easier to refute the conspiracy theory(ies) about one thing or another if certain unlikely incidents of “timing” had not occurred.
Oswald as the lone shooter is perfectly acceptable until Jack Ruby showed up. How conveeeenient. Bad luck for the lone shooter thing. Yeah, we know Oswald was a nutcase, fascinated with Mother Russia, so forth and so on. Makes him the ideal lone shooter.
Or the ideal point man for a Russian operation.
Or any other organization which could appeal to his weird sympathies.
We’re at the point of having to prove a negative.
Yes, there’s information he was a “bad shot” [so somebody else must have done it], but it appears that applies to a shot gun and trap shooting. I was a better than average shot with a variety of military and civilian weapons, but I’ve never been to a trap shooting range. Might get lucky and eyeball the first one but…I’d be a “bad shot”. Still could have made Oswald’s shots easily. Oswald had Marine training and so the question is whether the “bad shot” comment had to do with the irrelevant shot gun issue.
This could go on and on, but the files contain so much information, some valid and some possibly dodgy that anything may be made out of it. Including the lone shooter.
Still, the variety of things Ruby had to do as part of his routine in various places in Dallas just happened to make shooting Oswald convenient.
He might have done them at different times, maybe different days, who knows? But just happened to be handy to the transfer of Oswald from one secure location to another. A moment or two of being vulnerable. Do the math, come to your own conclusions, but the “conveenient” issue still itches.
It proves nothing but is part of a structure which makes the structure more difficult to prove untrue.
And the same is true of certain other issues, maybe. Which we may or may not find from the release.
Rick67, what happened three months before the February gas price drop began was Trump’s election. People anticipated his doing something to remove Biden-Obama restrictions on energy.
With due respect to the late Vincent Bugliosi,
Anna Paulina Luna: “…I believe there were 2 shooters…”
If you paid $0.30 for a gallon of gas in 1965 with three silver dimes…
Melt price today $2.44 per dime or $7.30 or so.
Why should it interest anyone what Ana Paulina Luna has floating around in her head? That thesis has been advanced for nearly sixty years and it continues to fail.
When some of the first announcements about the JFK files being released came out, I started to think that one of the things we’d find had been buried is that Oswald was much more of a ‘known wolf’ than had been let on previously. It always seemed strange that he could have defected to Russia, returned, and then been involved in various other Communist orgs but nobody seemed to have him under surveillance. I’ve seen a couple of reports now that the previous sealed docs do indicate that he was being watched fairly closely but, obviously, the preparations he was making to assassinate JFK weren’t noticed or connected to an assassination attempt.
Anyone can believe anything what is the evidence behind it many of the conspiracies that bill kurtis to cite one example peddled in the 80s were deeply deficient, some were ridiculous in the extreme
Re: JFK files
I am not expecting proof of a second gunman.
I am expecting material embarrassing to the CIA. They definitely knew more about Oswald than they let on. And so:
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Attorneys for the Mary Ferrell Foundation argued that the agencies have illegally stalled the release of more than 16,000 additional documents related to the case over concerns they could potentially compromise the names of individuals and the methods used in intelligence-gathering activities more than a half-century ago.
Newsweek reached out to the CIA for comment.
“Why would they want to hide that? Because it’s embarrassing,” Larry Schnapf, a professor of law at New York University who has served as the foundation’s attorney, told Newsweek. “But embarrassment is specifically a term the JFK Records Act provides for. It says that embarrassment is not grounds for postponement.”
That the CIA knew of Oswald is not a smoking gun. It has already been revealed the federal government knew more about the circumstances surrounding the Kennedy assassination than it acknowledged publicly, beginning with the National Archives’ release of a trove of previously classified documents relating to the assassination in 2017 as well as the release of a number of documents detailing Oswald’s history in 2021.
https://www.newsweek.com/new-documents-shed-light-cias-connection-lee-harvey-oswald-1765105
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Mary Ferrell was an historian and researcher who compiled a large database on the JFK assassination.
Yes huxley. Most of the classification was likely due to embarrassment, not conspiracy. In the vein of “never ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity”.
FOAF:
Intentionally concealing information for one’s benefit doesn’t sound like stupidity.
More like malice and conspiracy.
CIA’s MKUltra was an experimental mind control program to develop, among other things, programmed assassins. The CIA intentionally destroyed nearly all its MKUltra files.
We only know about the program because some files were overlooked or stored in secondary locations.
Malice and conspiracy.
General Mike Flynn: The JFK file release CONFIRMS the CIA was behind JFK’s assassination