Developments in the study of JFK’s assassination occur in the media right about at the same time cute animal stories and Loch Ness monster sightings begin to appear as well. It signifies that not much else is left to say about the war, since the sea change in the US political landscape has ended all but the fighting now, and even audience tolerance for the tiring tales of celebrity misbehavior has been exhausted.

    So these developments get tossed in the media mix and many readers never get a chance to actually see them pulled together in one spot. To remedy this, following is list of recent JFK news:

    Scientists at Texas A&M conducted a new forensic analysis of bullets from the batch used by the sixth floor assassin. These new tests established that the JFK assassination bullet fragments could have come from more than three separate bullets. While critics scoff at the “could have” nature of the news, it nevertheless ends the certainty with which the notion that all the major damage was done by bullets from the same gun. The paper reporting these results appears online at imstat.org/aoas/next issue.html

    Howard “St. John” Hunt surfaced a January 2004 taped confession from his father E. Howard Hunt that presented an LBJ-did-it theory, with Cord Meyer as point man for the overall operation. Cord Meyer was at one time married to JFK’s last mistress, Mary Pinchot Meyer, whose exploits (possibly including dropping acid with JFK at the White House) and strange murder once comprised a four-part series in Steamshovel. As Hunt puts in on the tape, which aired on Coast to Coast on April 28, 2007: “I think that LBJ settled on Meyer as an opportunist (like himself) and a man who had very little left to him in life ever since JFK had taken Cord's wife as one of his mistresses. I would suggest that Cord Meyer welcomed the approach from LBJ, who was after all only the Vice President at that time and of course could not number Cord Meyer among JFK's admirers—quite the contrary.”

    Two other JFK connected obituaries happened. Jack Valenti, the film industry lobbyist responsible for the movie ratings system, also happened to be riding in the Dallas motorcade that day. Most recently he, the late president Gerald Ford and PBS commentator Bill Moyers pressured the History channel into censoring one of its “Men Who Killed Kennedy” programs. Interestingly, like Hunt’s deathbed confession, the program involved an LBJ-did-it-theory. The other significant death was that of John K. Lattimer, a urologist and lone nutter who also supposedly owned the remains of Napoleon’s penis.

    Charles Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi has written a 1600 page book that answers all questions about the assassinations and resolves every doubt about the lone nut hypothesis—not. Also, Tink Thomason summarized Bugliosi’s book well in the June 3 edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

    “What is crystal clear, however, is that more than 43 years after the event we don't know what happened. From the very beginning, the event has been left to advocates of one view or another. The Warren Commission put together a case for the prosecution against Oswald. It failed when critics showed its conclusions were not justified by the evidence it considered. The same could be said for the House Select Committee, which reached a conclusion diametrically opposed to that of the Warren Commission. What this case doesn't need is more advocacy on the part of lawyers l ike Posner and Bugliosi. They squeeze the evidence into one mold or another, offering opinions on this or that, buttressed by whatever they choose to tell us, ignoring the rest….What this case does need is some old-fashioned, historical scholarship. It's a shame and a waste of great time and effort that Bugliosi decided to contribute to the problem and not to its solution.”

    Of Bugliosi’s book, Real History blogger Lisa Pease notes: “Seriously, every page I’ve flipped to by searching or randomly browsing so far is fraught with lies, errors, and omissions -- the very things he accuses the research community of doing. Is he just an anti-conspiracy zealot, out to defend a world view he can’t afford to have shaken? Or is something more sinister at work? Maybe a look into his past would give us some answers.” (realhistoryarchives.blogspot.com/)

    Before all of this, actor Bruce Willis apparently got caught up with the work of the conspiracy research community. According to www.infowars.com/articles/us/jfk_bruce_willis_says_jfk_killers_still_in_power.htm Richard Linklater, who had an animated Alex Jones in his 2001 movie A Waking Life, passed around various “9/11 Truth” DVDs, including Jones’ Terror Storm, on the set of his 2006 movie, Fast Food Nation, which had Willis in the cast. Whether that happened or not, Willis wound up telling the New York Post that “They still haven’t caught the guy that killed Kennedy. I’ll get killed for saying this, but I’m pretty sure those guys are still in power, in some form. The entire government of the United States was co-opted.”

    And with that, the JFK business got thrown back into the media mix.