AND HERE IS WHY THERE WON'T BE A BUSH III IN THE WHITE HOUSE

Wing-Nut presidential candidate Jeb Bush on Thursday flubbed a question from a reporter about Tamir Rice, the black child shot and killed by Cleveland police last year.

When asked by a reporter off-screen, “As you know, the officers that killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice were not indicted. So I’m wondering if you think that people in those communities, those of Tamir Rice and Sandra Bland, do you feel that those people feel we have their back?”

In the video posted by CNN, it appears Bush may have mistaken the case of Tamir Rice with that of Laquan McDonald, who was shot and killed by Chicago police last year. McDonald was shot 16 times. Unlike the case of Rice, McDonald’s killer, Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke, has been charged with first degree murder.

VIDEO COURTESY OF CNN

“I think that Chicago’s got a lot of work to do to rebuild trust,” Bush, who was in Lexington, South Carolina, responded. “The level of violence is abhorrent.”

The reporter then cut him off to point out that Tamir Rice lived in Cleveland, Ohio.

“I’m sorry. My bad,” Bush said.

But Bush then added that “the process worked” in the Tamir Rice case. He said if a grand jury looked at a case and didn’t indict, “maybe there’s reason for that. I don’t believe that every grand jury is racist.”

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SNL's RUTHLESS MOCKING OF THE LATEST GOP DEBATE

NUTTER CLUB 2016

None of the nine escape mockery.

Right after the last Democratic presidential debate of 2015, SNL looked back at the last GOP debate with all nine candidates represented — but with ex-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former-HP CEO Carly Fiorina on the receiving end of the most brutal mockery.

Taron Killiam’s Ted Cruz was suitably smarmy, admitting that everybody –Democrats and Republicans alike — hates him because he has a “punchable face.”


Darrell Hammond’s Donald Trump was very Trump-esque, continually insulting Beck Bennett’s jittery and frantic Jeb Bush.

After a sniveling Bush complains that Trump is a bully trying to “insult his way into the White House,” Trump returns fire.

“Oh realy, jughead?’ Trump replies. “Cuz I’m at 43 and you’re at three — Jeb, you’re a nice guy, but you’re a lightweight, and I know for a fact that you pee sitting down.”

Cast member Cecily Strong turned in a brutal takedown of Fiorina, as she explained that she knows Russian strongman Valimir Putin because she once sold him an HP printer.

“I know Valdimir Putin personally,” she claimed. “I sold him an HP printer and now he hates my guts. It doesn’t work, it never worked. And when Putin calls me to complain, I just smile that classic Carly Fiorina smile,” she continued while grimacing painfully.

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Roger West

JEB BUSH STRUGGLES WITH GOP MENTALITY…THE DOUBLE STANDARD

During the latest stop in his media tour to defend his brother’s actions as president, Jeb Bush asked on CNN Sunday if anyone actually blames his brother for the attacks on 9/11, saying if they do, “they’re totally marginalized in our society.”

CNN’s Jake Tapper pushed back, asking Bush about the Republican Party’s double standard.

“Obviously Al-Qaeda was responsible for the terrorist attack of 9/11,” Tapper said. “But how do you respond to critics who ask if your brother and his administration bear no responsibility at all, how do you then make the jump that President Obama and Secretary Clinton are responsible for what happened at Benghazi?”

The younger Bush bumbled and stumbled with his answer.

“Well I, it’s the question on Benghazi which is hopefully will now finally get the truth to it, is: was that, was the place secure?” he said, clearly flustered. “They had a responsibility, Department of State, to have proper security.”

Bush pointed out that “it’s what you do after that matters” when it comes to leadership, yet he could not explain why the Republican Party continues to attack Clinton for the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya that left a U.S. ambassador dead.





The controversy began on Friday when Donald Trump asserted that the older Bush brother was president at the time of the 9/11 attacks. “When you talk about George Bush, I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time,” Trump said. “He was president, O.K.?”

Jeb Bush then contested the seemingly indisputable comment, calling Trump’s comments “pathetic” and insisting “my brother kept us safe.” The New York Times reported that “[b]laming 9/11 on Mr. Bush is taboo for Republicans and has largely been off-limits for Democrats.” Yet Republicans will force Clinton to testify before a public hearing of the U.S. House Select Committee on Benghazi this week.

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"STUFF HAPPENS". THE MOST HORRIBLE ANSWER ANY HUMAN CAN GIVE LET ALONE A U.S. PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE

In the wake of another campus shooting that is prompting calls for stricter gun control, Republican presidential candidates have gone to great lengths to avoid offering any policy solutions and risking the National Rifle Association’s wrath. But none have been quite as explicit as Jeb Bush, whose response to the mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon was: “Stuff happens.”

“Look, stuff happens and the impulse is always to do something and it’s not necessarily the right thing to do,” Bush said Friday.

When asked later to clarify his comments, he used a specific example to illustrate how laws are not always the right way to address a tragedy.

“A child drowns in a pool and the impulse is to pass a law that puts fencing around pools,” Bush explained. “Well, it may not change it…the cumulative effect of this is in some cases, you don’t solve the problem by passing the law, and you’re imposing on large numbers of people, burdens that make it harder for our economy to grow, make it harder for people to protect liberty.”

But, as some have pointed out, Bush actually did just that. After a child in Florida fell into a pool and nearly drowned, then-Gov. Bush signed a law in 2000 to require pool owners to choose a way to prevent unsupervised children from going into the water. The law specifically required that pool owners install either fencing directly around the pool, safety covers, door alarms or self-latching doors — or face jail time or a fine.

Bush also drastically expanded gun rights during his tenure as governor, signing the infamous Stand Your Ground law that police used to explain why they didn’t initially charge George Zimmerman for the murder of teenager Trayvon Martin. A study showed that gun violence rates rose in Florida in the wake of the Stand Your Ground law even as violent crime rates dropped. Guns now account for 75 percent of all murders in the state, up from 56 percent in 2000.

Nor is gun control like pool regulation, which may or may not have an impact on pool deaths. States with fewer gun restrictions have higher rates of gun deaths. Johns Hopkins researchers have linked the loosening of certain permit requirements to significant increases in states’ murder rates. In fact, even Jeb Bush himself recently admitted that passing background checks and a 72-hour waiting period in his state reduced gun violence.

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Roger West

JEB SAYS HE’LL CUT CONGRESS’ PAY IF THEY DON'T WHAT HE WANTS

Late last month, Republican presidential candidate and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush cast the Constitution’s model for separation of powers to the winds with a 15 second video centered around one proposal — “If Congress skips votes or hearings Jeb will cut their pay.”

Bush’s proposal to unilaterally cut lawmakers’ pay is unconstitutional. The 27th Amendment provides that “no law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened,” so any law changing congressional pay would not take effect until after the next congressional election. More importantly, the Constitution provides that “Senators and Representatives shall receive a compensation for their services, to be ascertained by law,” so Congress itself would have to acquiesce in Bush’s proposal for it to ever become law. “Jeb” does not have the power to “cut their pay” on his own, even if he is elected president.

There is a very good reason, moreover, why the President of the United States does not have this power. As James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers, “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” Yet Bush’s proposal comes close to accumulating both executive and legislative power into one person’s hands. If the president had the power to impose financial sanctions upon lawmakers — even for seemingly legitimate reasons — that power could easily be abused to coerce those lawmakers into supporting an agenda they would otherwise oppose. In our system of government, elected officials are accountable to the voters for their jobs and the benefits that come with that job, they are not accountable to a single man.

It should be noted that Bush’s proposal is somewhat vague. What does it mean, for example, for “Congress” to skip a vote? During the 113th Congress, which completed its final session in January of 2015, members of the House introduced a total of 5884 bills. That suggests that the House would have needed to vote on nearly 20 different bills every single day that it was in session to avoid skipping a vote on one of those bills. It would have been physically impossible for every member of Congress to research each of these bills and cast an informed vote if Congress tried to complete such a task.

In a conversation on Twitter, Vox’s Matt Yglesias suggests a more likely interpretation of Bush’s proposal — that this is really an “effort to squeeze Sen. Marco Rubio & Sen. Rand Paul.” Yglesias suggests that Bush may be proposing that individual members of Congress — not Congress as a whole — should have their pay docked if they miss a vote or a hearing in order to campaign. Thus, “poor Rubio will have to stand on stage and explain that casting votes isn’t an important part of his job.”

This interpretation of Bush’s proposal has some intuitive appeal, although some of that appeal may diminish if voters understand just how often hearings are convened for parochial or even partisan purposes. Should a member of Congress really face personal sanctions, for example, if they fail to attend yet another hearing attempting to transform the tragic deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya into a political liability for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton?

In any event, the Constitution contemplates a very explicit sanction for lawmakers deemed inexcusably absent: those lawmakers will have to stand for election and could be tossed out of office if their constituents are dissatisfied with their performance. Unlike Bush’s proposal, allowing voters to judge their own representatives also does not raise the specter of a president taking financial retribution against lawmakers that displease him.

[h/t thinkprogress]

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JEB BUSH'S BROTHERLY LOVE

VIDEO COURTESY OF MARK FIORE

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Roger West

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED JEB BUSH STYLE

The Daily Show's Jon Stewart slammed Jeb Bush for his flip-flopping answers on the Iraq war, and for the way he's run his "unofficial" presidential campaign, so he can coordinate with his PAC.


VIDEO COURTESY OF COMEDY CENTRAL

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There is no quantity of soap and water which can cleanse the stain of his brother's grotesque foreign policy fuck-ups. Bush 43's legacy of bloody preemptive war and supply side debt-based economic chicanery shall resonate for decades, even centuries, assuming there's a USA in which it can resonate. And it shall never be forgotten that it was Jeb himself who aided the installation of his moronic brother into the White House. Hanging Chad reference.

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Roger West

BABY BUSH PROVES HIMSELF UNFIT FOR PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

In an interview with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly to air Monday night, Jeb Bush says that he would have authorized the 2003 Iraq War.

Kelly asks Bush, “Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?”

Bush effectively dodges that question but says that “confronted with the intelligence that [the George W. Bush administration] got” in 2003, he would have authorized the invasion. He argues that the intelligence provided to his brother’s administration left them with no choice but to invade.



The Iraq War, however, was not dictated by intelligence. Rather the administration cherry-picked, manipulated and ignored intelligence to support their predetermined outcome.

This is the view of the CIA official who oversaw Middle East intelligence during that time, Paul Pillar. In 2006, Pillar published an article in Foreign Affairs, writing:

In the wake of the Iraq war, it has become clear that official intelligence analysis was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made… and that the intelligence community’s own work was politicized. As the national intelligence officer responsible for the Middle East from 2000 to 2005, I witnessed all of these disturbing developments.

Pillar concluded that “Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war.”

A bipartisan, if contentious, report of the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that the George W. Bush administration “repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.” The report documented numerous statements made by the Bush administration to justify the war that were not supported by intelligence.

Mike McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence under George W. Bush from 2007 to 2009, found the administration “set up a whole new interpretation because they didn’t like the answers” the intelligence community was giving them. Inside the Pentagon, an effort was led by Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith to “reinterpret information” provided to them by intelligence. It was Feith’s group that produced and promoted “false links between Iraq and al Qaeda.”

Bush, however, is unmoved. “if they’re trying to find places where there’s big space between me and my brother, Iraq might not be one of those,” he said.

We theses statements this Bush has declared himself to be unfit for the office of President.

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Roger West

JEB BUSH’S ANSWER TO POVERTY, MARRY EM UP.

Jeb Bush, the former Republican governor of Florida who is expected to run for president, has weighed in on the upheaval in Baltimore and the economic condition of American cities generally. “We have spent trillions of dollars in the War on Poverty, and poverty not only persists, it is as intractable as ever,” he writes. “This represents a broken promise. And it feeds the anger of Baltimore.”

Bush is right that poverty hasn't been eradicated and that it is particularly pronounced in Baltimore, a city where the rate is 24 percent. But the money spent on the programs that were part of the War on Poverty has significantly lowered the poverty rate, and it would be much worse without them. The poverty rate has dropped from 19 percent in 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson first declared his effort to fight poverty, to 14.5 percent today.

But that doesn’t capture the impact of War on Poverty programs such as food stamps, housing and heating assistance, and nutrition programs, as well as things like tax credits. Using that measure, poverty has fallen from an estimated 26 percent in 1964 to 16 percent today. Meanwhile, food stamps kept 4.6 million people out of poverty last year and the poverty rate would be 17.1 percent without them, while it would be 16.5 percent without housing subsidies, which kept 3.1 million people above the poverty line. These programs — which Republicans keep trying to cut — do in fact alleviate poverty.

Still, more can clearly be done to help the country’s poor, both in cities like Baltimore and elsewhere. Bush’s prescription for reducing the rate further, however, begins with a call for poor people to get married. “If our government leaders want to attack poverty, they should first acknowledge that an effective anti-poverty program is a strong family, led by two parents,” he writes. “The evidence on this is incontrovertible.”

Certainly the children of married couples on the whole experience a lower poverty rate than those of cohabiting or single parents. But more than 9.3 million married people still live in poverty. Meanwhile, researchers have found that it’s not marriage per se that helps the children of married couples or even parenting necessarily, but rather differences in income, given that married couples tend to be better off. Lower incomes for unmarried parents explains about a third of the differences for their outcomes as compared to those of married parents. And single parents’ lower incomes are the result of deliberate policy choices.

Meanwhile, pushing low-income people to wed isn't likely to do much.More than two-thirds of single mothers who marry end up divorced later on, which actually leaves them worse off financially than just staying single. Even if it did help, the government has a terrible track record of successfully prodding them into it. It has spent millions on marriage promotion programs that have had no impact on whether the couples get married or even stay together and no impact on the divorce rate, while one even made couples less likely to remain together.

Bush’s next solution is to “take aim at our deeply failed education system.” He notes that “Baltimore spends more than $15,000 per student each school year,” yet has some of the worst outcomes, and claims, “The schools in our cities are not underfunded.” Baltimore schools do struggle, as less than a third of eighth graders test advanced or proficient in math and just over half test at that level in reading, while less than two-thirds of high school seniors met graduation requirements, compared to nearly 90 percent statewide.

But while the spending figure Bush cites may sound like a large amount, the city actually ranks 20th among the country’s 500 largest school districts in terms of spending and 160th among school districts with at least 5,000 students. Meanwhile, Baltimore’s school funding gets shared with charters; traditional public schools will get just $5,336 per student next year. Average amounts also obscure the fact that school districts usually spend more on wealthy students and white students than on poor and black ones. On the other hand, there is evidence that spending more money on education does improve outcomes.

His final recommendation is “Reducing regulations, removing expensive licensing requirements for startups and cutting occupational fees.” But it’s hard to see how getting rid of some red tape will fix the economic woes of a city like Baltimore, which has been hemorrhaging jobs along with its population — and therefore, its tax base — for decades. Its black residents in particular still struggle with the legacy of racist housing policies dating back to the early 20th century that still haven’t been eradicated and took another toll in the subprime lending crisis.

cross posted from thinkprogress

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WHO KNEW JEB BUSH WAS HISPANIC?

THE TWO BUFFOONS

Jeb Bush identified himself as Hispanic on a 2009 voter-registration form in Florida, according to a copy of the document obtained by The New York Times.

Needless to say, neither Bush nor his parents are Hispanic, though his wife, Columba, was born in Mexico. "It is unclear where the paperwork error was made," a spokesperson for Bush said Monday. Jeb later took to Twitter: "My mistake! Don’t think I’ve fooled anyone!"

Mr. Bush, a former Florida governor and likely presidential candidate, was born in Texas and hails from one of America’s most prominent political dynasties. But on at least one occasion, it appears he got carried away with his appeal to Spanish-speaking voters and claimed he actually was Hispanic. 

In a 2009 voter-registration application, obtained from the Miami-Dade County Elections Department, Mr. Bush marked Hispanic in the field labeled “race/ethnicity.”A Bush spokeswoman could offer no explanation for the characterization. 

Carolina Lopez, deputy supervisor of elections for Miami-Dade, said voters must submit hard copies of applications with a signature before receiving a voter information card confirming their address and polling location. According to the Florida Division of Elections, the application requires an original signature because the voter is swearing or affirming an oath. Florida law requires that the signature, driver’s license number and social security number be redacted before being publicly released.

While Mr. Bush’s claiming to be Hispanic may have been a careless mistake, confusion over heritage is no laughing matter during a campaign season.

Obviously it’s most apparent that both Bush brothers suffer from learning disabilities. Is this a calculated move or a simple mistake of checking the wrong box? With the Bush brothers, who knows?

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Roger West

CYNICAL TURD

Bill Maher took Jeb Bush to task for his hypocrisy on enforcing marijuana laws and called for an end to the drug wars during his New Rules segment this Friday.


VIDEO COURTESY OF HBO

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Roger West