“Clouded Political Judgment”: What Happened To Jeb Bush? Too Much Money
Jeb Bush has dropped into single digits in the polls — and that’s just among Republicans in his home state of Florida. What happened to the man with all the money, top name recognition and, according to last year’s political sages, a clear shot at his party’s presidential nomination?
The problem is all the money and how it may have clouded Bush’s political judgment. He seems to have assumed that the cash pile freed him from the chore of dealing with the party’s difficult grass-roots voters.
As part of this faulty thinking, he’s been awfully blatant about advertising his availability as the go-to man for business interests seeking favors from government. Such interactions often take on the air of corporate welfare, despised by many in the Republican base and lots of others.
His moderate position on immigration, no doubt heartfelt but also aimed at the general election voters, only further aggravated the hard right. It was another message to the generally older and white grass roots that he considered the nomination already in the bag.
But the biggest irony of how Bush swings the money bat is that he may have turned off some big-money donors, as well. Case in point is the apparent defection of Texas energy magnate T. Boone Pickens as a loyal benefactor, having penned him a check for $100,000 early on.
The back story: Pickens’ wind power company, Mesa Power, bid on huge energy contracts being granted by the province of Ontario. Pickens lost to NextEra, an energy giant domiciled in Florida. Pickens is now in international court charging Ontario with having fixed the process in NextEra’s favor. The court is expected to rule on the case shortly.
What does this have to do with Jeb Bush? NextEra, owner of Florida Light & Power, has been another bankroller of Bush campaigns. As Florida governor in 2009, Bush infamously called for an increase in the company’s electricity rates. To win support for the unpopular position, he held up the scary prospect of rolling blackouts and economic collapse if the state didn’t go along. A longtime NextEra executive subsequently became a limited partner in one of Bush’s private equity firms.
Pickens has begun to publicly throw support toward Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson. Perhaps he resents the Bush family’s divided affections. He recently chided brother George W. for calling Ted Cruz selfish.
“Hell, they’re all in it for themselves,” Pickens said. That’s the voice of one irritated man and also one who no longer sees a downside in alienating a Bush.
Here we have it, the political risk facing a politician with vast dynastic connections and so much campaign cash that he’s declared the prohibitive front-runner. It opens the temptation to give corporate donors the impression that they need him more than he needs them. (Cough up, or I won’t answer your call once I’m president.)
What about Donald Trump, who against logic continues to lead the Republican polls? Trump has a lot more money than Bush has. But Trump does the little people the honor of aiming his populist messages — both wise and ridiculous — directly to them. The big corporate donors are not on his team, his team comprising mainly himself. He doesn’t owe them. That’s the message.
Trump is probably as surprised as anyone that he’s gotten as far as he has — and the thought of actually being elected president may horrify him. His candidacy seemed intended mainly to build his brand.
In any case, the showman knows to go for the people’s love, whereas Bush seeks their allegiance. Love is something a candidate works for. Allegiance is extracted. Which would most of us prefer?
By: Froma Harrop, The National Memo, October 22, 2015
“Black Guns No Different From Other Sporting Guns”: Court Decision Uses Gun Industry’s Own Fiction To Uphold Assault Rifle Regulations
Right after the Sandy Hook massacre, both New York and Connecticut passed laws that tightened up restrictions on owning ‘black’ guns, a.k.a., the military-style AR rifles like the type Adam Lanza used to kill 26 adults and young kids. The laws basically toughened the earlier assault weapons bans, provoking immediate outcries from the pro-gun gang who challenged the laws based on their inalienable 2nd-Amendment rights. After all, the 2008 Heller decision protected private ownership of all guns that are “in common use,” and what could be more common than AR rifles of which probably more than four million have been manufactured over the last twenty years?
The gun industry began promoting black guns in the 1990s when they realized that hunting and traditional sporting use of guns was dying out. This promotion took two forms: on the one hand creating the fiction that black guns, like all guns protected us from crime; on the other hand creating the equally beguiling fiction that military-style weapons were no different from other, traditional rifles since they could only be fired in semi-automatic mode.
The industry went so far as to create an entirely new shooting tradition, replacing the phrase ‘assault rifle’ with the nomenclature ‘modern sporting rifle’ so as to pretend that an AR-15 is nothing other than the same, old hunting gun that sportsmen have for generations been taking out to the woods. And for those who like to imagine themselves mowing down ISIS or Al Queda in the streets and alleys of Philadelphia or New York, the guns being sold by Bushmaster, Colt, Stag and other black-gun manufacturers are referred to as ‘tactical’ weapons, which everyone knows is simply an assault rifle with a different name.
Both the CT and NY laws were challenged and upheld in District Court; now the Court of Appeals, 2nd Circuit, has upheld both laws again. What is interesting about this decision, indeed remarkable, is the fact that it is based not just on the government’s authority to regulate guns that are in “common use,” but to regulate these particular types of weapons based on their definition as created and promoted by the gun industry itself! The Circuit Court accepted the notion that black guns are just another type of sporting rifle, and it was the acknowledgement that black guns are no different from other types of sporting guns that ultimately legitimized the assault-rifle bans in Connecticut and New York.
Plaintiffs in this case argued that there were more than four million AR-15 rifles owned by civilians and that these guns, like other civilian weapons, could only be fired in semi-automatic mode. As the Court said, “This much is clear: Americans own millions of the firearms that the challenged legislation prohibits.” Further, the Court also accepted the notion that many Americans keep an AR-15 in their home for self-defense. Given those circumstances, how could the Circuit Court decide that prohibiting civilian ownership of such weapons was not a violation of 2nd-Amendment rights? Because what the Court did was take the gun industry’s own fiction about these guns and stand it on its head.
The industry’s marketing of black guns as ‘sporting’ rifles is based on one thing and one thing only; namely, these weapons can only be shot in semi-auto mode. Never mind that you can deliver up to 60 rounds of ammunition in thirty seconds or less; never mind that the .223 round has a lethality specifically designed to kill or injure human targets; never mind that many military and law enforcement units also deploy the semi-auto gun. That residents in New York and Connecticut can own all kinds of semi-automatic rifles which do not contain certain military-style features means that the ban on AR-style rifles is not a prohibition of semi-automatic weapons at all.
As a noted Supreme Court justice once said, “History also has its claims.” And one of those claims is that the 2nd Amendment doesn’t give the gun industry the right to invent a tall tale to justify how it tries to sell guns.
By: Mike Weisser, The Blog, The Huffington Post, October 21, 2015
“Another Way Of Saying Palestinians Are Nazis”: The Dangerous Motivation Behind Netanyahu’s Holocaust Revisionism
In a speech to the 37th Zionist conference on October 20, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shocked the world by exculpating Adolf Hilter for responsibility for the Holocaust. The destruction of the European Jews, Netanyahu suggested, came from a suggestion by the Arab nationalist Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was the Mufti of Jerusalem.
In Netanyahu’s own words:
And this attack and other attacks on the Jewish community in 1920, 1921, 1929, were instigated by a call of the Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was later sought for war crimes in the Nuremberg trials because he had a central role in fomenting the final solution. He flew to Berlin. Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, “If you expel them, they’ll all come here.” “So what should I do with them?” he asked. He said, “Burn them.”
The first thing to say about Netanyahu’s historical narrative is that it is absurd. Husseini was a real person. It’s accurate to say he was an evil man: He led anti-Jewish riots that were motivated not just by opposition to Zionism but also anti-Semitism. He was an eager, although largely ineffectual, collaborator with the Nazis. Husseini hoped to work with the Nazis to thwart the creation of a Jewish state in Israel. To that end, he raised an army of 6,000 Arabs. This stands in contrast to the tens of thousands of Arabs who fought against the Nazis, including the 9,000 Palestinians who fought with the British. As Hussein Ibish, senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine, noted in an article for The National, “The record is a complex, mixed and nuanced one, but the overarching fact is that Arab and Muslim involvement in the war was overwhelmingly on the Allied side, and was a significant factor in fighting on the ground. The overwhelming majority joined the cause voluntarily, despite British and French colonialism.”
Among the millions who fought in World War II, Husseini’s brigade was a sideshow. To elevate him to the level of having “a central role in fomenting the final solution” is a lie.
Responding to Netanyahu’s comments, Steffen Seibert, a spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, re-iterated the historical fact that Germany bears responsibility for the Holocaust. “All Germans know the history of the murderous race mania of the Nazis that led to the break with civilization that was the Holocaust,” Seibert said. “This is taught in German schools for good reason, it must never be forgotten. And I see no reason to change our view of history in any way. We know that responsibility for this crime against humanity is German and very much our own.”
Reviewing a biography of Husseini in The New York Times, historian Tom Segev acutely described the problem of over-emphasizing Husseini’s importance in the history of the Holocaust.
[O]ne can question whether Husseini “played an important role” in the Holocaust. For as Bernard Lewis wrote in “Semites and Anti-Semites”: “It seems unlikely that the Nazis needed any such additional encouragement from outside.”…
The mufti’s support for Nazi Germany definitely demonstrated the evils of extremist nationalism. However, the Arabs were not the only chauvinists in Palestine looking to make a deal with the Nazis. At the end of 1940 and again at the end of 1941, a small Zionist terrorist organization known as the Stern Gang made contact with Nazi representatives in Beirut, seeking support for its struggle against the British. One of the Sternists, in a British jail at the time, was Yitzhak Shamir, a future Israeli prime minister.
The second thing to say about Netanyahu’s statement is that he’s trying to smear Palestinian nationalism as being intrinsically anti-Semitic, indeed genocidal. Netanyahu’s fanciful excursion into Holocaust historiography comes in the context of the larger argument of his speech: that the current outbreak of violence in Israel has nothing to do with Israeli management of the Temple Mount or the on-going occupation. In effect, Netanyahu is arguing that Palestinians have no grievances and are simply motiveless, violent, Jew-hating psychopaths. Which is another way of saying: Palestinians are Nazis.
By: Jeet Heer, Senior Editor at The New Republic, October 21, 2015
“Freedom Of The Press Is No Longer Free”: GOP Wants Press To Pay Up For Good Convention Seats
The Republican Party wants reporters to pay up for the pleasure of their company at their 2016 presidential convention. And reporters, obviously, are not pleased.
On Monday, news broke that reporters would have to pay $150 each for a seat in the press risers overlooking the convention floor. For that, they get a chair, space at a table, and access to power outlets. Fancy!
Outlets that don’t want to shell out for space can send their reporters to the nosebleed section of the Quicken Loans arena, where they won’t have electricity and won’t be able to see what’s going on on the floor—in other words, where they won’t be able to do their jobs properly.
“I’ve been to every national convention since ‘84, and this is the first time we’re being asked to pay for a space in the arena,” said Jonathan Salant, who chairs the press gallery’s Standing Committee of Correspondents.
He and Heather Rothman, who chairs the Executive Committee of Periodical Correspondents, aired their complaints in a terse statement.
“The convention committee said reporters who don’t pay still will be allowed into the arena,” they wrote. “But the vantage points they will be given will not allow them to follow convention proceedings, gain access to the convention floor to interview public officials, nor file stories on the event. We are concerned that the proposed fee smacks of forcing the press to pay for news gathering.”
Sean Spicer, the communications director for the RNC, didn’t respond to an email seeking further comment on fee. Allison Moore, a spokeswoman for the RNC, told Roll Call that it isn’t actually an access fee.
“There is no access fee,” she said. “For custom built work stations, there will be a minimal charge at a fraction of the actual cost.”
It’s still a very big first.
Representatives from the Democratic Party didn’t promise their party wouldn’t follow suit.
“Obviously, this is a different year in terms of funding but it’s too early in our planning to make any definitive determinations,” emailed April Mellody, who is helping put together the Democrats’ convention.
That said, one person with knowledge of the Democrats’ plans said it’s extremely unlikely they will charge reporters to use press writing stands.
“It’s the precedent of charging for access and that’s what bothers us,” Salant said.
By: Betsy Woodruff, The Daily Beast, October 20, 2015
“Benghazi Committee Chair Finds Himself In The Hot Seat (Again)”: The Stop Hillary PAC And Gowdy Appear To Be Close Allies
The Republicans’ Benghazi Committee has unraveled to an extraordinary degree in recent weeks, as the entire effort is reduced to a taxpayer-financed election scheme. Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), the beleaguered chairman of the controversial panel, told Politico the other day, “I would say in some ways these have been among the worst weeks of my life.”
At least the controversies surrounding the committee couldn’t get much worse, right? Wrong.
The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank today flagged an overlooked angle that deserves to be added to the broader indictment against the Benghazi witch hunt.
As that mess was being cleaned up, Gowdy was dealing with another, courtesy of my Washington Post colleague Mike DeBonis. Gowdy has spoken piously about keeping his investigation above politics and about refusing to raise money from it. But DeBonis reported that Gowdy’s campaign had returned three donations after the Post inquired about the money’s ties to a political action committee that ran an incendiary ad during last week’s Democratic presidential debate. Three $2,000 contributions had been made to Gowdy by groups affiliated with the treasurer of Stop Hillary PAC. Stop Hillary PAC had spent $10,000 on robocalls last month to boost Gowdy in his district, and its treasurer had been involved with Gowdy’s former leadership PAC. […]
Could such a skilled prosecutor and his experienced staff really be so hapless? Or are the mistakes more purposeful?
The Stop Hillary PAC, which exists to “ensure Hillary Clinton never becomes president of the United States,” made headlines last week for running a rather disgusting attack ad during last week’s debate, prominently featuring Ambassador Chris Stevens’ grave, against his family’s wishes.
The Post reported, however, on the alliance between Gowdy’s political operation and the political action committee: the congressman’s leadership PAC and the Stop Hillary PAC shared a top official, an anti-Clinton operative named Dan Backer; the Stop Hillary PAC spent $10,000 on robocalls a month ago in support of Gowdy; and Gowdy received campaign contributions groups the Stop Hillary PAC’s treasurer helped run.
Gowdy, realizing that this doesn’t look good, quickly returned the contributions, but the damage – or more accurately, the additional damage – was already done.
TPM ran a related item yesterday, showing an image of its email inbox “when you search the StopHillaryPac email and Gowdy’s name.” The takeaway isn’t subtle: the Stop Hillary PAC and Gowdy appear to be close allies.
It’s against this backdrop that the Senate Democratic leadership sent a letter to the Republican National Committee yesterday, asking the RNC pick up the tab for the party’s Benghazi Committee, since it’s unfair to ask taxpayers to pay for “a political inquisition.”
The top four Senate Dems added, “Due to the political nature of the committee, we believe it is inappropriate that a reported 4.7 million taxpayer dollars were used to finance its operations and that the RNC subsequently orchestrated numerous fundraising opportunities in its wake.”
The RNC responded fairly quickly, declining the Democratic request.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 21, 2015
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