Jeb Bush Is All In My House With Disease

[stillrobertpaulsen]

'yer father's waitin for yer in the toooolshed........'

I always thought Barbara was scarier than Poppy.



Especially after hearing Bill Hicks' routine on Rush Limbaugh the scat-muncher.

[conniption]

Bad Attitudes

May 10, 2015
My Favorite Stupid Movie Lines

Now that I have your attention …

Just kidding. It’s Sunday and politics have become a great big bore to me. I remain as firm as ever in my conviction that Jeb Bush will be the next president of the United States. I am not happy about this. I don’t want it to happen. I am just acknowledging reality. There will be a third Bush, America. It is written. We are sinners and this is our punishment.

And so what? Is he going to do anything substantively different than what President Hillary Clinton would do? Yeah, he’ll nominate some primitive, hanging judge prick conservative for the Supreme Court, some scowling, dehydrated, ass-puckered “strict constructionist” type who pines for the glory days of the eighteenth century; Clinton will nominate a solid liberal. He’ll oppose gay marriage; Clinton will support it. He’ll tell the rubes they should be able to wear sidearms to Disneyland; she’ll favor background checks, but only after carefully affirming her commitment to our Second Amendment rights. Viva effing democracy.

I won’t bore you with any more Hillary bashing, apart from saying that her phony baloney populism is an insult to anything with a forebrain and opposable thumbs. I think she has genuine liberal sentiments, but ambition trumps sentiments in politics, and she’s running for president of the United States, not president of Sweden or Denmark, and we don’t truck with too much liberalism. Not one minute after she she snookers us libs into voting for her, she’ll be off to brunch with Lawrence Summers and Lloyd Blankfein, and they won’t be eating hot dogs and spare ribs like the folks. They will, however, be having Very Serious Discussions about raising the retirement age and cutting those wicked entitlements. They will be drafting her inevitable speech about “fiscal responsibility” that we’re all going to have to endure. Just watch.

I can hear it in my nightmares. I can hear it in my daymares. I can see it, smell it, feel it and sense it as if it’s a tangible, living presence hovering over my shoulder getting ready to pounce, the Ghost of Establishment Politician’s Past come to smother me with smugness, condescension and hypocrisy.

But that’s moot. She is going to stumble and implode, allowing Jeb to squeak into the White House. Hearken unto my words, brothers and sisters, the third Bush cometh. Plan accordingly. He’s already cutting backstairs deals with Ralph Reed types to garner wingnut support. The media is already doing puff pieces about him; stay tuned for the companion series about his Venezuelan wife, his abiding Catholic faith, and his deep commitment to education reform. The country club that runs our increasingly dingy nation wants him in there and that’s that. The fix is in, suckers.

(They wouldn’t mind Hillary either, mind you, but the Chris Matthews, Howard Fineman, Maureen Dowd Axis of Vapidity can’t abide older ladies with wrinkles. I’m willing to bet that a plurality of voters can’t either. Forget abut the polls for now. They mean nothing — No Thing — at this point in the election cycle. They just give nerdy Beltway types something to natter about on slow news days.)

Enough. No more politics!

As promised, some dumb (and some good) movie lines.

Apollo 13. The lunar module is orbiting around the dark side of the moon. The crew has lost radio contact with earth, and they’ve had to cut the power down to conserve energy. It’s dark and cold. The situation is dire. One of the men then says to the Tom Hanks character, “It hurts when I urinate, Jack.” It cracks me up every time. The idea of chaude-pisse is more terrifying to me than being stranded in space.

Titanic, quite possibly one of the stupidest movies ever made. Worse, perhaps, than Shakespeare in Love, which is saying a lot — I couldn’t stomach ten minutes of that abomination, and this was on an eleven hour flight! I went back to the drink cart while the stewardesses were napping, made myself a few Stoly drivers and watched Greenland pass by instead (alas, Iceland was covered by clouds. Maybe next time). Anyway, Leonardo and Kate are gamboling about on deck, giddy w ith new found love, when they hear the iceberg slash through the hull. Leonardo gravely informs his mistress, “This is bad.”

Planet of the Apes. One the best movies ever made, based on a novel by a great French author/satirist named Pierre Boulle, who also wrote The Bridge Over the River Kwai. Mention that bit of trivia to impress your friends, but it probably won’t help you get a girl into bed. What can I say? We live in an imperfect world.

Okay, we’re at the very end, when everyone is on the beach. Charleton Heston mounds his horse with the lovely, lovely Nova. Dr. Zira comments that she didn’t think humans were capable of monogamy, and Charleton Heston replies, “On this planet, it’s easy.”

Anything from Network, but especially Arthur Jenson’s (Ned Beatty’s) “The world is a business” speech. It’s one of the most astute descriptions of how the world really works ever made.

That’s all I can think of off the top of my head.

Just for the hell of it:

[stillrobertpaulsen]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Nice piece. I shared a similar outlook in my latest blog entry:

"Is this the best we can do?!"

[Elvis]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz_V4lRdtjo

[82_28]

Man. I swear to god if we get another bush or clinton it's time to just call this here joint a corporate monarchy and be done with it. It's not a republic or democracy.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Man. I swear to god if we get another bush or clinton it's time to just call this here joint a corporate monarchy and be done with it. It's not a republic or democracy.

"This Constitution is said to have beautiful features; but when I come to examine these features, sir, they appear to me horribly frightful. Among other deformities, it has an awful squinting; it squints toward monarchy; and does not this raise indignation in the breast of every true American?

Your President may easily become king. Your Senate is so imperfectly constructed that your dearest rights may be sacrificed by what may be a small minority; and a very small minority may continue forever unchangeably this government, although horridly defective. Where are your checks in this government? Your strongholds will be in the hands of your enemies. It is on a supposition that your American governors shall be honest, that all the good qualities of this government are founded; but its defective and imperfect construction puts it in their power to perpetrate the worst of mischiefs, should they be bad men; and, sir, would not all the World, from the eastern to the western hemisphere, blame our distracted folly in resting our rights upon the contingency of our rulers being good or bad?

Show me that age and country where the rights and liberties of the people were placed on the sole chance of their rulers being good men, without a consequent loss of liberty! I say that the loss of that dearest privilege has ever followed, with absolute certainty, every such mad attempt."

--Patrick "Slavemeister" Henry

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Jeb Bush Announces White House Bid, Saying ‘America Deserves Better.’

By MICHAEL BARBARO and JONATHAN MARTINJUNE 15, 2015


Jeb Bush formally announced his presidential campaign in Miami on Monday. Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

MIAMI — Jeb Bush declared Monday he is running for president, promising to remove Washington as an obstacle to effective government and economic prosperity and declaring that “America deserves better.”

“I am a candidate for president of the United States,” he told a cheering crowd kicking off his candidacy at Miami Dade College.

Mr. Bush, whose two terms as governor of Florida were marked by the privatization of traditional state services, vowed to “take Washington – the static capital of this dynamic country – out of the business of causing problems” in “the campaign that begins today.”

Mr. Bush called upon his own record of ambitious, conservative-minded change as Florida’s chief executive. “I know we can fix this,” Mr. Bush said. “Because I’ve done it.”

Mr. Bush, 62, is declaring his White House ambitions nearly 27 years after his father was elected president, molding a political dynasty that would propel one son into a governor’s office and another into the White House.

But Mr. Bush will enter a presidential contest — unruly in size, unyielding in pace and voracious in cost — that is unlike any faced by his father, George Bush, who won the office in 1988, or his brother, George W. Bush, who claimed it in 2000.

In his speech, Mr. Bush offered himself up as a counterpoint to a Republican Party that has struggled to connect with minority voters, costing it the last two presidential elections. He also vowed to remain true to his principles, an implicit attack on his Republican rivals who have changed their views to appeal to the party’s conservative base.

And as the third member of his family to seek the nation’s highest office, he brings to the race a last name that at once burnishes and tarnishes, evoking the nobility of public service and a deep distrust of political entitlement.

Mr. Bush’s campaign will highlight that tension on Monday with the selection of a spare logo, first used in his failed 1994 race for governor, that excludes his surname. It reads simply “Jeb!” And while Mr. Bush’s wife, Columba, and his three adult children plan to attend his speech, aides said his father and brother would not join him for the announcement at the Kendall Campus of Miami Dade College.

Mr. Bush’s advisers and allies once predicted that he would emerge as the dominant Republican in the 2016 campaign, fueled by his record of conservative accomplishment as Florida’s governor, his popularity at the end of his time in office and the fund-raising prowess of the Bush family network. But now they are resigned to a far longer and uglier slog for him in the Republican nominating contest.

“The operative word inside the campaign is patience,” said Al Cardenas, a former Florida Republican Party leader and longtime ally of Mr. Bush. “As people get to know him, things will get better.”

Mr. Bush will make a formal announcement at 3 p.m. here in the multicultural city that allowed him to escape from his family’s patrician roots in the ivy-covered walls of Connecticut and in the oil patches of Texas. It was Miami that eventually nurtured the political ambitions that had long been a birthright of his clan.

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In his speech, he will both embrace elements of his heritage and try to transcend them, portraying himself as an entrepreneurial figure who, in the Bush family way, struck out on his own, built up a real estate business and became a governor who delivered on a promise of sweeping change.

“I said I was going to do these things, and I did them,” Mr. Bush declared in a video released by his political operation on Sunday night. “The result was Florida’s a lot better off.”

Joining a field crowded with governors and senators, he will try on Monday to distinguish himself as an executive animated by big ideas and uniquely capable of carrying them out, pointing to his record in Florida of introducing a taxpayer-financed school voucher program, expanding charter schools, reducing the size of state government by thousands of workers and cutting taxes by billions.

Above all, he will offer himself as a messenger of optimistic conservatism, uninterested in the politics of grievance, obstructionism and partisanship that, in his eyes and those of his allies, have catapulted less accomplished rivals, like Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky, to national prominence.

Leadership, he says in the video, is “not just about yapping about things,” an unmistakable attack on his voluble, less seasoned rivals from the Senate.

He adds: “There’s a lot of people talking. And they’re pretty good at it. But we need to start fixing things.”

The risk for Mr. Bush, a cerebral figure who seems more at ease debating the intricacies of education policy with business leaders than electrifying a crowd of voters, is that the charismatic talkers in his party may outshine him before ballots are cast. He has yet to emerge as a front-runner in polls, lagging rivals in crucial states like Iowa, which will hold its caucuses early next year.

Mr. Cardenas said Monday’s speech was only the beginning of a long sales pitch that Mr. Bush must make in states with early nominating contests like Iowa and New Hampshire.

“I consider the early states an asset for most candidates who are introducing themselves, and a burden for Governor Bush,” Mr. Cardenas said.

“The reason for that is that since 2006, many of our pundits in the party have not been kind to the Bush family,” Mr. Cardenas said.

Many Republican elected officials who admire Mr. Bush have nevertheless held back from endorsing him, saying he still needs to prove himself as a candidate.

Jeb Bradley, the majority leader in the New Hampshire State Senate, said that Mr. Bush met his three criteria for an endorsement — leadership skills, appealing stances on most issues and ability to win — but that he was still open to backing two other Republicans, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin.

“I want to see what Governor Bush says in Monday’s speech, see him at a town-hall meeting up here, see what his fund-raising looks like,” Mr. Bradley said.

The announcement of Mr. Bush’s White House run ends an unusual, legally problematic and occasionally comical phase in which Mr. Bush traveled, raised money and campaigned as a full-fledged candidate but insisted, despite all evidence to the contrary, that he was not officially exploring a presidential run.

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It was a claim that allowed Mr. Bush to collect vast sums of cash for the political entities that could supercharge his campaign, but it produced several moments of semantic gymnastics. (A few days ago, to the barely suppressed laughter of the reporters nearby, Mr. Bush referred to “election night” and the “campaign that is likely to take place.”)

Despite Mr. Bush’s stumbles so far, his friends and allies said his biggest asset was his unwillingness to transform himself into something he is not.

“I think he needs to put aside the last few months and continue to calmly show a grown-up attitude,” said Barry Wynn, a prominent South Carolina Republican and donor. “The two things that will distinguish him are his stature, that he is a grown-up ready for the presidency, and his consistency, that he’s not changing to make everyone happy.”

“The worst thing for Jeb to do,” Mr. Wynn said, “is give his opponents any opportunity to close the stature gap he enjoys.”

But it remains unclear whether conservative-leaning voters will be as animated by Mr. Bush’s “grown-up” qualities as the party’s donor class, which has formed his core of early support.

“I am going to be who I am,” he said in Europe last weekend, on a trip during which he barely interacted with ordinary people. He seemed content mostly to bat around policy ideas, as he did on Saturday in Estonia with a group of technology executives who briefed him on the digitalization of the country’s government.

“I’m not going to change who I am,” Mr. Bush said as he left the meeting, his last in Europe, and headed home.

Last name not necessary.

[seemslikeadream]

Last name embarrassing

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Last name embarrassing

Last name should be retired to the dustbin of history. But unfortunately won't.

[seemslikeadream]

jebbushforpresident



Who are those two young dudes?!

CJ and Charlie -- since 1996

ENGINEERS, DOGGY DADS, MADLY IN LOVE

We met in 1996 through a mutual friend while we were living in Portland Or. In our time together we've made a great many friends, seen a lot of the US in our RV, and had many grand adventures.

Now we find ourselves at a crossroad... how can we help our friends, family, and neighbors have the discussions we all need to have so we can learn from each other and break down some of the tension, drama, and sometimes outright ignorance of our fellow man?

That's why we're doing this blog. Let's have a chat, share viewpoints, maybe realize that the person you felt you could never have anything in common with is actually dealing with exactly the same issues.

[zangtang]

gotch er campaign slogan right here -

'this time its different'

[Elvis]

"You can believe me this time!"

[zangtang]

'I don't feel entitled, you know, not like Hilary'

on edit (staring me in the face) :

'Third time lucky !'

[Luther Blissett]

REPORT: JEB BUSH’S CIA BRIEFING IN 1977 LED TO COVERT ACTION, WEALTH, POLITICS

As Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign prepared to launch June 15, an investigative reporter has revealed that the CIA provided the future candidate with a high-level briefing in 1977 that helped launch his career.

Reporter, author and former Navy intelligence officer Wayne Madsen published a CIA document disclosing Bush’s briefing by the agency as Bush prepared in 1977 to become the Venezuela branch manager and a vice president for the influential Texas Commerce Bank.

Madsen headlined his June 12 column, Jeb Bush received comprehensive CIA briefing when he worked for bank in Caracas.

Published on the subscription site the Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), Madsen wrote:

A June 7, 1977 letter on Texas Commerce Bank stationery from "Jeb Bush" of the bank's International Banking Division, using post office box 2558 in Houston, to Robert W. Gambino, director of security for the CIA, thanks Gambino, who was in charge of issuing clearances for CIA official cover and NOC agents alike, for "arranging such a comprehensive and informative briefing" for Bush during his recent trip to Washington.

The Justice Integrity Project has independently confirmed that the document is authentic.

Madsen used the briefing and his sources to portray the banking job as a gateway to power for the younger Bush in the family.

Madsen noted also that Gambino resigned from the agency to support the George Bush for President campaign in 1980, and subsequently received political patronage jobs from the Reagan and Bush administrations that extended into the Clinton administration. Gambino's career progress helps underscore the wild card advantage the Bush family holds over virtually all competitors, Republican and Democratic: Their embedded loyalists, often with a national security background, who constitute a core of the nation's hidden government.

The bank, co-founded by an ancestor of Bush family ally James Baker, has a long history of sensitive operations, including help in funding the 1950s business operations of Jeb Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush.

The elder Bush became a covert CIA operative in the early 1950s while also a businessman co-founding Zapata Petroleum in 1953. Its affiliate Zapata Offshore was formed in 1954 with the help of funding from Texas National Bank, a major predecessor of the Texas Commerce Bank, according to the bank history But Also Good Business, co-authored in 1986 by professors Walter L. Buegner and Joseph A. Pratt.

The Bush family, Baker, their allies virtually never talk about such matters even though research indicates that all recent U.S. presidents have established secret relationships with the CIA or FBI before they entered politics. This enables politicians on the way up to establish strong bonds with the agencies and the powerful backers of the agencies on Wall Street and in such key sectors as energy, agri-business, mining and media. Details are provided in Madsen's book The Manufacturing of a President (2010) and our own Presidential Puppetry (2013), among other places.

Regarding the media, Operation Mockingbird was the CIA's secret program to coordinate agency-friendly messaging among the nation's top broadcast networks, magazines and newspapers. Author Deborah Davis first revealed the program in her 1979 book Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and Her Washington Post Empire, which publisher Harcourt Brace Jovanovich pulverized under pressure from the Post and CIA. Davis was able find another publisher for the book in 1987 after winning a lawsuit settlement.

To understand Operation Mockingbird and its successors, it's vital to appreciate that the program was a cooperative effort sustained by media owners, many of whom had advanced in precisely the same CIA, CIA-predecessor OSS, Harvard-Yale-Princeton, and Wall Street circles of inherited wealth as the CIA leaders.

One of the most prominent press lords was, for example, Washington Post Publisher Philip Graham, the Harvard Law-educated husband of Katharine Meyer Graham and an enthusiastic supporter of Operation Mockingbird. He and his wife dined weekly with the operation's onetime leader Frank Wisner, who succeeded future CIA Director and fellow Wall Street lawyer Allen Dulles in running the propaganda program.

As further perspective on the tight ties between intelligence, banking, media and politics rarely described in news coverage:

Eugene Meyer, Philip Graham's father-in-law and the founder of the modern Post, had been a chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank and separately the World Bank. Meyer had been a friend of the Bush family since their overlapping work together during World War I in managing U.S. armaments purchases (Bush's core area) and financing (Meyer's). Upon the graduation of George H.W. Bush from Yale College, Meyer offered him a job. George Bush chose instead to seek his fortune in Ohio and then Texas, and soon landed the CIA and banking connections that enabled Zapata's founding. Zapata became the CIA code word for the Bay of Pigs invasion, a not so subtle coincidence given Zapata's expertise in ocean mapping.

For obvious reasons, reporters and authors with access to the Bushes and other major politicians of their status tend to focus through the years on traditional political themes that avoid sensitive matters, especially regarding the kinds of hidden relationships with intelligence and banking companies that are important to media owners.

Acceptable fare for publication thus includes candidate statements, the competitive “horse race” between candidates, donors, candidate personalities, and such non-controversial topics as the Bush announcement June 14 of a campaign logo, exemplified by the Washington Post story June 14 On the eve of a presidential run, Jeb Bush becomes just ‘Jeb!’

Madsen, however, cited sources and his long experience in similar investigations to assert that Jeb Bush’s banking work involved him in covert and at times sinister CIA operations in Venezuela to advance CIA priorities and his own career.

WMR normally publishes its work behind a paywall requiring subscriptions, which cost $7 per month or $30 per year. Madsen made Jeb Bush column and its documentation available for free because of its timeliness and importance.

[Nordic]

The name JEB is a lie. His real name is John Ellis Bush, a name that tells more of the truth as yo his WASPY east coast old-money crime family heritage than the folksy "JEB"