Archive for the ‘Florida’ Tag
It isn’t a case of the Democrats now going off soul searching, it case of total revamp from top to bottom after Trump’s win last Tuesday. The Amazing Democrats’ advice very early on to the Clinton Campaign (and some of those comments were posted on our social media platforms as far back as the late summer of 2015) went unheard unlike when we worked for the Obama/Biden campaign in 2012. It is time DNC to fire all your overpaid pollsters (who got it so wrong), consultants and the like. The DNC should of known in their hearts of hearts that after Bernie Sanders won twenty-two states with so little money against Hillary Clinton, their candidate of choice would be in serious trouble if the Republicans got a candidate who could storm the mainstream and social media which Trump did and of course got a bit of luck along the way with that first letter released by the FBI Director that certainly damaged Hillary in early voting and gave a huge boast for Trump with his base. Yes, a lot of questions will be asked as to how the FBI were allowed to influence an election so openly. But this was far from the only reason Hillary lost even if the DNC die hards believe it to be so. The DNC and Democrats have lost their way and have been now for a long time. Their obsession only seems to be with fundraising not the core principles of what the party was founded on, Trump was able to tap into that huge hole in the DNC. It was a party that once cared for the low income, the homeless, our veterans, the poor people of America and not the massive billions of dollars in fundraising which was totally wasted trying to take Trump down. Just think today how many homeless people that billion of dollars plus would do to help house the homeless crisis in our major cities which should have been a top issue for Hillary.
Hillary campaign interviewed myself and members of The Amazing Democrats, for the record we call ourselves The Amazing Democrats as we not die hard Democrats, we wouldn’t have followed Hillary in to the fires of hell if she was wrong and we wouldn’t be silent either even if it meant we were fired from the campaign, that’s the way worked in the Obama/Biden 2012 reelection campaign and we were amazed how we survived not to be fired (nearly maybe once or twice when we really overstepped our mark and criticized some of the President’s polices publicly). The interviewing process went back as far as January 2016 to join her campaign. We were subjected to rounds and rounds of interviews, back ground checks, etc. Months would go by and we heard nothing and then it would start all over again. It was by late August this Editor got interviewed for the sixth time, more back ground checks and then was offered four important positions in four different swing states and one of this offers came directly from the DNC. All this was paid employment and not volunteer work. That last weekend in August for me was were I suffered so much turmoil as I had to give them a decision by the following Monday. It meant dropping everything in my life and getting on a plane to Pennsylvania. What was most troubling in my mind was I could sense there was panic setting in for the Democrats and Hillary’s campaign. I didn’t sleep that weekend. I went back to the old formula that the Obama campaign thought me and even though I didn’t have access to data like we did when worked for Obama, never the less, I ran the data all weekend long. It is a long and laborious process that you can see today that both the pollsters and media don’t do, why? Maybe they just are too lazy to do it, who knows? You have to run every state’s county’s data county by county, you have then figure in the data available from both the candidates’ primary wins or loses, a lot of mathematics but in the end you get a somewhat overview, be it very rough. Also you have to take into account that I had been tracking the swing states every week since both primaries ended last year. Not good for Hillary and her team I could see, in fact the Wednesday before the election I was gloomy, I could predict Trump was going to win Ohio by three percent (he won by five percent so I was only out by two percent) and as you know, no Presidential candidate can take their place in The White House if they don’t win Ohio. With all this, it was the hardiest email I ever sent, declining the positions to work on the Hillary Clinton campaign.
As we move into the Trump Presidency, it’s going to be a very dark lonely path for the Democrats. Yes, there is the mid-terms in 2018, but if the DNC works as it has for the last twenty years, they are a very slow climb back up on Capitol Hill as remember this Presidential election in 2016 had the lowest turn out of voters in years, which helped Trump but destroyed Hillary’s chances of winning, nearly 50% of the electorate didn’t bother to vote and historically mid-term voting has a very low voter turn-out. Also if Trump makes any small success of his first term and as everything Trump touches turns to gold, whether you like his manner and process or not and as it very hard to unseat a sitting President, as we all know, Trump going for a second term, then the DNC and Democrats could be looking at the wildness for next eight years at least, that’s 2024, a very depressing thought I know, but maybe a fact unless the DNC make radically chances and that starts today, not six months before the 2018 mid-terms.
In the 2006 mid-terms under George W. Bush, the Republicans got wiped out in the House and the Senate. All the media said at that time that Republican Party need to reinvent itself and stop been the “party of no”. Did they? Of course not, in fact under Obama as President and because of their hatred of him, they became the “party of no, no, no” on every bill he sent to the House and Senate. Now look where they are ten years later. The power of Washington again with the Democrats hanging onto their coattails and the sad thing is, Trump gets to pick the next Supreme Court justice. If he gets two terms, who knows, with three more justices ready for retirement in the next few years, he might even hit the golden jackpot of nominating four Supreme Court justices, a very scary thought. The Democrats however can’t do as the Republicans did in 2006, which was nothing to change their image and beliefs but the Democrats aren’t so lucky. If the DNC go back to business as usual, it will be a very dark long road for the Democrats back to the shining lights of The White House. It is simply the base. The Republican base and the Democrat base is so so much different and as Trump said decades ago when he was a registered Democrat, pro-choice and donated a lot of money to Bill Clinton’s Presidential campaigns: “If I was to run as President, I would run as a Republican as their voters as so dumb and easy to fool, I would lie and lie to them until I got numbers”. That’s all he had to do for this Presidential campaign and he is the winner today not Hillary Clinton.
Which brings what fundamentally went south very early on in the Hillary Clinton campaign:
1. NEVER EVER underestimate your opponent.
2. If he/she gets down in the dirt, you go down there with them. Hillary taking the high road was her downfall as political correctness (PC) means nothing anymore in the world of social media as we saw with Trump, the King of Twitter and Obama/Biden in 2008 as the King of Facebook. PC has gone way too far in the US and the rest of the world and Trump, no matter what you think, turned PC on it’s head in this presidential election and as he said on 60 Minutes last night, “it was nasty, very nasty but I am the one sitting here today talking to you and not them”. In fact 2020 and 2024 will be so so much nastier. Rumors were that Trump using his own money, paid pockets of supporters all over America to flood the internet with lies about Hillary and Bill Clinton and the secret? They could never be traced back to him or his campaign. Why didn’t the Hillary Clinton campaign do the same with the rumors about Trump’s ties to the Mafia? Why was this never floated all over the internet? PC I guess but he won and Clinton lost. The new trend now with Presidential campaigns as Trump has lowered the bar, is to win 2020 or 2024 the candidates from both parties to win, will have to get down in the mud and get dirty. Sad? Of course but no cares about the loser, they only care about the winner.
3. Dump the negative ads. One billion dollars was such a waste of money by the Clinton campaign and Trump barely spent a faction of that. We kept telling the Obama/Biden campaign and the DNC in 2012, negative ads don’t work anymore and only turn all the voters off. Pity they didn’t listen.
The Amazing Democrats are not all about criticizing without offering the DNC suggestions for the road forward:
1. Fire all your overpaid pollsters, consultants, lobbyists, etc..
2. Allow the progressive members of the party to take over. (I do not mean the loony left), members who understand the issues of the day to day worries of the lower income Americans (who sadly are too many), the homeless crisis in our cities all over America, our veterans living on our streets.
3. Get back to what a community organizer really is. I used get so annoy with new volunteers who joined our team who tried to tell the person forcefully on the other side of the phone why they should vote for Obama or donate to Obama’s campaign and the DNC. A community organizer’s job is to listen and listen well and then send what they hear up the line and hope they are listening otherwise you get a result like Tuesday’s Presidential elections.
4. As the advice to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, get off the negative ads obsession (turns all voters off).
5. And please with every email you sent, stop looking for donations all the time. It makes us feel you don’t care about anything but money and donations which we know to be true.
6. Find the soul of the Democrat Party again of FDR and John F. Kennedy.
7. And finally, listen. Never stop listening to those on the ground as we are the ones who can make the difference from the Democrats winning or losing an election.
Here is to the 2018 mid-terms, see you then and to 2020 Presidential election. Keep the faith and a sense of humor as The Amazing Democrats do and God Bless America,
Editor, The Amazing Democrats.
Follow us on twitter: @DemocratAmazing
“No matter what side you’re on or not on, your opinion and vote does really matter”. – Be involved and be heard.
Democrats and “Hillary’s People” need to seriously wake up to the most dangerous man for America on the planet and could even have a chance of being our next President of the United States. Donald Trump is not only America’s number one clown around the world, he is also a very dangerous man. The Amazing Democrats have remained silent these past few weeks as we are very disappointed with the direction of the Hillary Clinton campaign. We mentioned time and time it needs a massive shake up campaign staff wise and still (even with the new television commercials for Hillary Clinton’s campaign this week), we see the same old, same old boring save approach messages.
This has never worked against the GOP and we certainly wouldn’t have had a hope in hell re-electing Obama against Romney in 2012 if we had taken that approach. We took our gloves off and played in the dirt with the GOP and we did what we set out to do, we won. The fact the Clintons are friendly with Trump (or Jeb Bush for that matter) makes no odds. Trump threw the first punch when recently (in the South) he brought up Bill’s sex life. So Hillary time to get serious. Shake up your campaign staff from top to bottom and don’t be such a stick in the mud by not hiring some of Obama old campaigners as remember we won for Obama in 2012. There were no rules and there simply aren’t when you are up against the GOP, they don’t play fair and Trump certainly won’t. You and your campaign are giving Trump too much of a head start and you will regret this big time should he be nominated as the GOP candidate. Didn’t you make that same mistake with an unknown Senator called Obama in 2008?
The secret with Trump’s weakness is his business deals in the past. Dig and dig hard. In the 1980’s in New York, who did he do business with then? Follow the money. Follow his treatment of people who got in his way. For example take the poor people of Scotland and what he did to the locals there who were just trying to make a living. Trump is not just a man about greed and stupidity, he is a very dangerous man for America and the world. Wake up Ms. Clinton please and start the fight today and shake up your campaign staff and campaign. Don’t repeat the mistakes of your 2008 campaign – Editor, The Amazing Democrats.
by Jim Tanersley
BOCA RATON, Fla. — On the campaign trail, Jeb Bush has repeatedly emphasized his record overseeing Florida’s boom economy as the state’s governor. He says it’s an example of an economy that created a huge number of jobs and benefited the middle class — an example of what he could do as president. “I know how to do this,” he said in Maitland, Fla., on Monday.
But according to interviews with economists and a review of data, Florida owed a substantial portion of its growth under Bush not to any state policies but to a massive and unsustainable housing bubble — one that ultimately benefited rich investors at the expense of middle-class families.
The bubble, one of the biggest in the nation, drove up home prices and had many short-term benefits for the state, spurring construction, spending and jobs. But the collapse of the housing bubble as Bush left office in 2007, after eight years of service, sent Florida into a recession deeper than that in the rest of the country, and hundreds of thousands lost their homes.
“Who got hammered? Lower- and middle-class America,” said Marshall Sklar, a real estate investor who, like other well-off financiers operating in the state, has benefited from the wreckage.
Sklar recently won an online auction for a small stucco condominium in Boca Raton that a married couple had bought in 2004 for no money down. They borrowed against it as the state’s housing bubble inflated and then, like so many others, had to walk away heavily in debt when it burst.
After buying their busted dream, Sklar flipped it to a wealthy investor, banking a commission. His investor will probably earn a 12 percent return by renting out the condo. The value of the condo was redistributed upward, like so much of Florida’s housing wealth in recent years. “You took it out of the sheep and gave it to the wolves,” Sklar said after touring several houses he recently bought at bargain prices.
The story of this house and its owners is in many ways emblematic of much of the experience of Florida’s economy in the 2000s — a story that contrasts sharply with the record Bush recounts.
“We made Florida number one in job creation and number one in small-business creation,” Bush said in Miami as he announced his bid for the Republican nomination. “One point three million new jobs, 4.4 percent growth, higher family income. . . . That is the record that turned this state around.”
As governor, Bush pursued a classic conservative economic strategy: He cut taxes and sought to limit regulations on businesses. In his 1999 inaugural address, Bush lamented “the crushing weight of taxes, regulations and mandates on Florida’s families and entrepreneurs.”
Bush signed billions of dollars’ worth of state tax cuts into law, including temporary sales tax holidays and reductions in corporate taxes.
His largest cuts were for taxes on investments. Critics said those cuts largely benefited the wealthy; supporters said they helped unleash more economic activity, which boosted poor and middle-class workers.
Bush also contracted out some state services to private companies, reduced the size of the state workforce, pushed limits on legal liability and curbed regulations on private industry. He attempted to diversify the state’s economy by spending $500 million to lure a biotechnology research facility.
Bush campaign officials say it is fair for the former governor to take credit for Florida’s growth under his watch but not blame for the downturn that followed. Under Bush, the Florida economy grew more than a percentage point faster, per year, than the nation’s.
“His overall economic record is impressive,” Kristy Campbell, a Bush spokeswoman, said in a statement. “The governor’s policies, including tax cuts, education reform and junk lawsuit reform, created a strong environment for job growth, which encouraged nearly three million people to move to Florida during his two terms.”
But economic analysis suggests that much of that superior performance — at least half of the difference between Florida’s growth and the nation’s — was driven not by any policy initiatives but by a rapid increase in housing prices. When those prices fell sharply, the state’s economy crashed.
It is a “huge stretch” for Bush to hold up Florida’s growth as a model for the country, said Stan Veuger, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who is not affiliated with any presidential campaign. “I don’t think you can replicate that growth, from a state with one of the hottest housing markets in the nation, in any sustainable fashion,” he said.
Consumer advocates in Florida say Bush’s administration did little to slow that run-up. Other states, such as Texas, had stricter lending standards for home buyers that minimized their housing bubbles and the damage from the ensuing recession.
In the four years after Bush left office, median income in Florida declined by $5,700 — more than a 10 percent drop and double the percentage drop for the nation as a whole. The typical Florida family’s net worth fell 60 percent in that time, according to the Census Bureau. In a state where so much of the economy revolves around real estate, and where many foreclosures that began years ago are only now winding through the court system, there are 200,000 fewer families who own their homes than there were in 2005.
Many of those families now pay rent to Wall Street firms. Institutional investors have bought up huge inventories of Florida condos and single-family homes, often at foreclosure auctions where they pay less than the assessed value of the properties. They’ve watched the value of those properties rise as the housing market heats up again — and they’ve charged escalating rents to people who no longer own their own homes. Florida metro areas have the largest concentration of investor-owned homes in the country, according to RealtyTrac data.
“This whole thing,” said Thomas Ice, a former corporate lawyer and real estate speculator who now represents hundreds of South Florida homeowners fighting foreclosure, “has been one of the great land grabs — transfers of property to the oligarchs — in the history of the United States.”
Housing prices soar:
Florida’s economy has always revolved heavily around selling the state — to tourists, to retirees, to fellow Floridians — and Bush wasn’t the first governor to have climbed a real estate Matterhorn to economic success.
Housing prices rose 10 percent a year in Florida throughout Bush’s first term. By 2005, near the end of his second, they were increasing by 30 percent, more than twice the national average. Only a few other states were seeing such rapid increases. As Florida’s prices ballooned, so did the typical family’s net worth.
Sklar was a freshman at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton when he bought his first condo, for almost nothing down. The next year he borrowed against its value to buy another condo. By the time he graduated in 2005, he’d bought five or six more. In 2006, he cashed out his portfolio, clearing nearly $1 million in profit.
“You know the saying, when your cabbie gives you stock tips, sell?” he said. “That was happening” — but for house-flipping. “Teachers, police officers, they were buying and selling.”
State construction employment rose by 50 percent during Bush’s tenure, and real estate employment grew by 40 percent — twice as fast as in the nation at large. The boom helped attract the largest wave of new residents in state history, and rising home prices drove Florida consumers to spend a lot more money because they felt wealthier.
Economists at the real estate Web site Zillow analyzed the increase in housing value in the state from 1998 to 2006 and calculated, based on a conservative reading of economic research, that inflating prices explained about half of Florida’s faster-than-the-nation growth through the peak of the housing market.
It is “empirically inescapable” that “housing was a big part of the robust Florida economy at the time,” said Stan Humphries, Zillow’s chief economist.
Housing quit boosting Florida’s economy when price growth slowed to a stop in 2006, Bush’s last full year as governor. The state economy shrunk by an average of 2.4 percent a year from 2007 to 2010, while the nation averaged 0.3 percent growth.
“It just crushed retail,” said Brad O’Connor, director of economic research for the Florida Realtors group. “The uncertainty, and everyone being suddenly worried about being able to pay their mortgage, really affected the economy.”
Profits after the fall
While home prices fell, Sklar earned a real estate agent’s license and opened a brokerage firm. By 2012, he saw that prices were ready to rebound. He started buying properties again, both with his own boom-time windfall and with investment partners and associates in his brokerage. His biggest partner was a friend who had worked at a hedge fund before quitting to invest in Florida housing.
On a sunny weekday, Sklar was lounging in a cramped conference room, in jeans and a lavender polo shirt, talking into a cellphone to an investor and watching text messages scroll on a laptop screen. Time was ticking down on the county foreclosure auction, and Sklar beamed it onto a big screen over the table.
The condo’s former owners owed nearly $164,000 on it. Sklar’s winning bid with his investor was $87,000. The couple, wherever they are, will still be on the hook for the difference. The investor will immediately start drawing rental income.
“It was a good one,” Sklar texted the investor. “Best price in a while.”
Soon after, Sklar slipped into his white Toyota Prius to visit several properties his team is working to flip. It was a tour of housing carnage.
There was a low-slung pink stucco house in an immigrant neighborhood in Boynton Beach, next door to Boca Raton. Its owner was halfway through a $40,000 mortgage when she refinanced and borrowed money to add four bedrooms, a bathroom and a new roof. The money ran dry, the work was never finished, and the bank foreclosed. The woman now rents a one-bedroom apartment from Sklar. He’s finishing the extra rooms and is about to sell the house, for more than $50,000 profit.
There was a tan ranch-style on a street where several police officers live, a blue-collar neighborhood with canals running through it. A comedian had owned this house, laid Brazilian cherry floors throughout and filled it with leather furniture, a pool table and a six-figure kitchen remodel. Sklar bought it, post-foreclosure, for less than $200,000, and he expects to clear up to $100,000 profit on the resale.
Sklar’s own house is 3,600 square feet, near a lake but not on it, bought at foreclosure for $400,000 and now worth about $700,000. He also owns a boat, which he takes out spearfishing every Friday. It’s his only real escape from his dream-salvaging business.
Jeb W. Bush 2016! made more than $29 million dollars since leaving the governor’s office in 2007 (in just eight years).
Jeb W. Bush 2016! owned funds run by Abbey Capital LP, so some of the tax forms include addresses in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.
by Steve Eder (New York Times)
After he left office as governor of Florida, Jeb Bush’s net worth grew to at least $19 million from $1.3 million, a significant leap in wealth that reflects the power of his connections and the breadth of his entrepreneurial pursuits.
Mr. Bush and his wife, Columba, reported $28.5 million in adjusted gross income from 2007, the year he left office, through 2013, according to tax returns he released on Tuesday. Nearly $10 million came from his speaking engagements.
The Bushes’ income topped out at $7.3 million in 2013, the last of 33 years of returns he made public. The return showed that they paid $2.9 million in federal taxes on that income, for an effective tax rate of 40 percent.
Mr. Bush’s disclosure of voluminous financial records comes early in a presidential campaign that has elevated the issue of candidates’ wealth, and the way it may distance them from ordinary Americans in an era of economic uncertainty.
After he left state politics eight years ago, Mr. Bush made clear that he wanted to make money. The mystery was just how much he had made.
The Bush campaign reported that the couple’s total net worth is now between $19 million and $22 million.
The wealth of America’s political dynasties is emerging as a major theme of the 2016 campaign. And while the fortune amassed by Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton dwarfs what Mr. Bush collected, the records show that he similarly had little difficulty leveraging his prominent name to gain millions of dollars in the private sector.
Mr. Bush said his wealth has also allowed for significant charitable contributions. The couple reported $110,616 in donations on their 2013 return. In a statement on his website, Mr. Bush said they donated $739,000 to charity from 2007 to 2014.
“I’m proud of what Columba and I have contributed,” he said.
The effective tax rate of 40 percent that Mr. Bush paid compares with the 13.9 percent rate that Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential candidate, reported paying in 2010, a figure that drew widespread criticism.
The release of the returns, 16 months before the general election, is intended to position Mr. Bush as particularly open to scrutiny compared with other candidates. It included filings for several years that had previously been disclosed during his campaigns for governor. The Bush campaign said he has requested extensions for filing his 2014 taxes and his financial disclosure report, which will include details of his assets and liabilities.
Deep in the 2013 filing, he reported $5.8 million in “consulting and speaking” income. Separately, Mr. Bush’s campaign provided details of his engagements showing that he delivered about 260 paid speeches from 2007 to the present, for which he earned a total of $9.95 million. He listed 10 speeches at the Poongsan Corporation, a South Korea-based copper manufacturer that has long ties to the Bush family. His most recent audiences included the National Automobile Dealers Association and the American Council of Life Insurers.
The campaign did not release details of the income from his consulting engagements.
In the early going of the 2016 campaign, the candidates’ financial and business affairs have drawn particular scrutiny. Their wealth can be seen as a double-edged sword, signifying both financial acumen but also socioeconomic distance from most voters at a time when income inequality is a pressing issue.
Among the field of candidates, Mrs. Clinton disclosed in May that she and her husband had made at least $30 million since the start of 2014, largely from giving paid speeches. Senator Marco Rubio reported that he cashed out a retirement account last year. And in June, as he announced his candidacy, Donald Trump held up a document showing his net worth to be around $8.7 billion.
Mr. Bush and his wife have paid a higher tax rate than many fellow millionaires because most of his earnings come in the form of wages and salaries, instead of investment income, which is often taxed at a lower rate.
“One thing is obvious,” said Alan Viard, a resident scholar at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute and a former staff economist in Congress, who took a cursory look at the returns. “Compared to many people in his income range, Jeb Bush clearly has less capital gains income, and therefore has a higher effective individual income tax rate.”
For several years, Mr. Bush, 62, has used an office at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, Fla., working closely with his son, Jeb Jr., while consulting, giving speeches and managing a private investment business.
One of his endeavors included serving as a paid director to the hospital company Tenet Healthcare, which backed President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. The position invited questions for Mr. Bush, who as a candidate opposes the health care law.
Mr. Bush profited handsomely from his Tenet shares. According to the newly released tax returns, Mr. Bush acquired $441,203 worth of stock in Tenet Healthcare in May 2011. The stock doubled in value by the time he sold it in October 2013, earning him a profit of $462,013 in just 29 months.
Like other hospital stocks, Tenet rose sharply from October 2012 through March 2013, when President Obama’s re-election made it likely that the health care law would be carried out. The law was considered a boon for hospitals because it was expected to increase business and reduce the expense of caring for uninsured patients who could not pay their bills.
Mr. Bush resigned from the Tenet board in 2014 when he was preparing for his presidential campaign, and this year sold off his stakes in his two remaining businesses as he contemplated a run for the presidency. He sold his consultancy, Jeb Bush & Associates, to his son and business partner, Jeb Jr., while also shedding his interest in the Britton Hill entities, a group of private investment and advisory firms.
His other high-profile and controversial engagements have included working as a paid adviser to Lehman Brothers, an appointment that included seeking an investment in 2008 in the failing bank from Carlos Slim Helú, a Mexican billionaire. Mr. Bush also consulted for the building materials manufacturer InnoVida, which went bankrupt and whose founder pleaded guilty to fraud charges.
The tax forms also trace the period in the 1980s and 1990s when Mr. Bush, then a young entrepreneur, was building his own political base in South Florida. He told a reporter at the time, “I want to be very wealthy.”
The returns showed that his average adjusted gross income was about $400,000 over the 18 years before he became governor.
Josh Barro and Patricia Cohen contributed reporting, and Kitty Bennett contributed research.
A deep dive on Jeb’s business record — “Bush dogged by decades of questions about business deals,” by Robert O’Harrow Jr. and Tom Hamburger: “Records, lawsuits, interviews and newspaper accounts stretching back more than three decades present a picture of a man who, before he was elected Florida governor in 1998, often benefited from his family connections and repeatedly put himself in situations that raised questions about his judgment and exposed him to reputational risk. Five of his business associates have been convicted of crimes; one remains an international fugitive on fraud charges. In each case, Bush said he had no knowledge of any wrongdoing and said some of the people he met as a businessman in Florida took advantage of his naiveté … He has brokered real estate deals in Florida, arranged bank loans in Venezuela, marketed industrial pumps in Thailand, wholesaled shoes in Panama, promoted a building-materials company to Mexican interests and advised transnational financial services firms.”
Robert Costa (The Washington Post)
When asked this week at an exclusive Manhattan gathering about who advises him on U.S.-Israel policy, Jeb Bush surprised many of the 50-plus attendees by naming his brother, former president George W. Bush, as his most influential counselor.
“If you want to know who I listen to for advice, it’s him,” Bush said Tuesday, speaking to a crowd of high-powered financiers at the Metropolitan Club, according to four people present.
The remark came as part of an answer to a question about Bush’s political advisers and their policy views. Bush was pressed for details about who he surrounds himself with and consults as he thinks through his positions, guests said.
The Republicans in the room spoke on the condition of anonymity to divulge information about the proceedings, where confidentiality was insisted upon by the event’s host, GOP mega-donor Paul Singer.
Embracing his brother as a foreign policy confidant is a risky and unexpected move for the former Florida governor as he readies for a likely presidential run. While George W. Bush’s approval ratings have improved since he left office in 2009, his foreign policy legacy — particularly the long war in Iraq — remains deeply unpopular. He has also become anathema to some conservative activists for presiding over an increase in the federal debt, among other policies.
As he has explored a 2016 campaign for the White House, Jeb Bush has sought to create distance from the family political brand. While Bush has not criticized his brother, he rarely cites him as his guide on policies. And George W. Bush said last month that he planned to stay away from the campaign trail because voters do not like political dynasties.
Jeb Bush’s revelation that he regularly speaks with his brother about Israel also indicates that the siblings may be closer than often portrayed. The relationship is often described as cordial and warm but distant on policy matters.
Tim Miller, a spokesman, played down the significance of Bush’s comment.
“Governor Bush has said before that his brother is the greatest ally to Israel in presidential history, he admires his stalwart support for our ally, and that is in line with his commitment to standing with Israel in the face of great threats to their security and our own,” Miller said in a statement Thursday.
Singer, a hedge-fund billionaire, and his advisers organized the session for their associates to hear from Bush. Similar meetings have been held with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina, three of Bush’s potential rivals in the 2016 race.
The question that led to Bush’s response was about how much he relied on former secretary of state James Baker, a respected party figure and longtime Bush family friend, but one angered conservative Republican hawks in March when he addressed the left-leaning pro-Israel advocacy group J Street. During his keynote speech, Baker criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for not backing a two-state solution.
Bush said that he respected Baker, but maintained that he is not part of his foreign policy team and then noted that one person he routinely looks to for guidance on Israel and related matters is his brother.
Bush also expressed regret for the way he has unveiled his staff hires and list of advisers and said the lengthy list he made public in February, which included Baker, was not an accurate representation of who he reaches out to when he’s considering Israel-related issues.
Participants said the reception at the club was mostly encouraging, but one attendee said he was “stunned” to hear Jeb Bush specifically mention George W. Bush as his go-to adviser. “I started looking around and wondering if people were recording it. It was jarring,” the attendee said. “If video of it got out, it’d be devastating.”
Others saw it differently.
“It was a very positive response, just based on faces around the room,” a second attendee said. “There didn’t seem to be any sort of negative reaction.”
A majority of registered voters still have unfavorable views of how George W. Bush handled his job as president, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll in March. Nevertheless, there remains deep affection in the GOP for George W. Bush, with 87 percent approving of his presidential tenure.
Last month, the former president drew enthusiastic reviews for his appearance before the Republican Jewish Coalition, where he answered questions about his time in the White House and his post-presidency.
Peyton Craighill contributed to this report.
By Anne Gearan (The Washington Post)
NEW YORK — Hillary Rodham Clinton made no mention of her forthcoming presidential campaign, or her recent e-mail controversy, as she accepted an award here Monday for her work helping to ease the decades-long sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland.
Wearing green in honor of St. Patrick’s Day on Tuesday, Clinton said she accepted the Irish America magazine lifetime achievement award “on behalf of all the remarkable women that I met and admired in Northern Ireland” as first lady.
Magazine editor Patricia Harty said Clinton was honored “for her role in helping to broker the Good Friday agreement” during the administration of her husband, Bill Clinton.
The event underscored Hillary Clinton’s long history with Northern Ireland, which figured prominently in her time as first lady in the 1990s and was part of her last overseas visit as secretary of state. She faced attacks during the 2008 campaign after saying she “helped bring peace to Northern Ireland,” a claim she avoided making Monday.
Amid the Guinness toasts at lunchtime and jokes about the number of potential U.S. ambassadors to Ireland in the crowd, Clinton took a serious tone as she recalled a trip to Belfast in 1995, when she stood with her husband to light Christmas lights. The episode was part of a process that would eventually lead to a peace accord in 1998.
“They simply would not take no for answer,” Clinton said of women who pushed male leaders to make and keep the Good Friday accord that Bill Clinton counts as a signature achievement of his presidency.
Hillary Clinton returned often to Northern Ireland, including her final overseas trip as secretary of state, in December 2012. She had planned further trips but canceled them after falling and hitting her head after returning from Dublin and Belfast.
Clinton played no direct role in fostering the 1998 peace deal but is credited with helping solidify support for the reconciliation effort. Her work bringing together women from both sides of the conflict served as a foundation for Clinton’s later work as secretary of state to include women in political and peace discussions.
Clinton did not go into the particulars of her involvement Monday, while praising the roles played by others.
Bill Clinton bucked domestic political opposition to extend an invitation, and a U.S. visa, to Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, Hillary Clinton said. Adams sat across from Clinton at the head table Monday in a glittering ballroom along Central Park West.
Bill Clinton received the same award in 2011. The publisher of Irish America, Niall O’Dowd, is a longtime Democratic donor and served on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 finance committee.
Clinton is expected to launch her second run for the White House next month. Her appearance Monday marked her first public remarks since a tense news conference last week in which she sought to put to rest questions about her use of a private e-mail system while serving as secretary of state.
Later Monday, Clinton took to Twitter to criticize the GOP-controlled Congress, including for not yet confirming Loretta Lynch to head the Justice Department.
“Congressional trifecta against women today: 1) Blocking great nominee, 1st African American woman AG, for longer than any AG in 30 years,” Clinton wrote. “. . . 2) Playing politics with trafficking victims . . . 3) Threatening women’s health & rights.”
by Ed O’Keefe (The Washington Post)
Jeb Bush used his private e-mail account as Florida governor to discuss security and military issues such as troop deployments to the Middle East and the protection of nuclear plants, according to a review of publicly released records.
The e-mails include two series of exchanges involving details of Florida National Guard troop deployments in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the review by The Washington Post found.
Aides to Bush said Saturday that none of the e-mails contained sensitive or classified information, and that many of the events mentioned in them were documented in press accounts, either contemporaneously or later. But security experts say private e-mail systems such as the one used by Bush are more vulnerable to hackers, and that details such as troop movements could be exploited by enemies.
An unknown number of the e-mails housed on Bush’s server were redacted or withheld from public release because they contained sensitive security issues, Bush representatives have said. Communications director Tim Miller said general policy was for Bush to discuss sensitive National Guard issues in person with only occasional briefings by e-mail that “wouldn’t contain information that should not be in the public domain. “This Democrat opposition research dump of a few innocuous e-mails that Gov. Bush voluntarily posted on a Web site only highlights how large the gap is between him and [former secretary of state] Clinton in the area of transparency,” Miller said in a statement.
Bush is actively considering a run for president and has sharply criticized likely Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton for her use of a private e-mail account when she served as secretary of state. He called it “baffling” that Clinton didn’t consider the potential security risks of discussing diplomatic and national security issues by using an e-mail account not tied to a government server.
As governor, Bush used his account, jeb@jeb.org, to conduct official, political and personal business, ranging from plans to woo new businesses to the state, judicial appointments and military matters, the e-mail records show. His e-mail server was housed at the governor’s office in Tallahassee during his two terms; he took it with him when he left office in 2007.
He later turned over about 280,000 e-mails for state archives under the requirements of Florida records laws, or about half of the total e-mails on the server.
In one e-mail sent four days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the top general for the Florida Air National Guard told Bush that “we are actively planning sequences in preparation for mobilization orders should they come.”
“They have not come at this time,” wrote Ronald O. Harrison, who was adjutant general of Florida. “We are pretty good at anticipating the type of forces potentially needed and are prepared to respond to the Presidents [sic] call.”
“Keep me informed of the mobilization,” Bush wrote in reply.
Bush officials noted that many of the deployment orders issued after 9/11 were included in news reports at the time, including some of those mentioned in the Bush e-mails.
In November 2001, Bush and an aide to then-Lt. Gov. Frank Brogan exchanged messages about the deployment of National Guard troops to a nuclear power plant in Crystal River, Fla. The aide wrote Bush that a state lawmaker had called to say she thought “it is imperative that the Crystal River nuclear facility have National Guard security.”
Bush wrote back: “Florida power does not want it. We are reducing or getting rid of guard protection in the other plants.”
Aides to Bush argue that the nuclear plant discussions were innocuous and mostly public anyway. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the International Atomic Energy Agency had warned that terrorists might try to attack nuclear power plants.
Bush dispatched Guard troops to protect two South Florida nuclear power plants but not the Crystal River facility. The plant’s operator, Florida Power Corp., declined the governor’s offer of security, according to local news reports at the time.
Aides also say Bush’s server was secure because it was kept at the governor’s office.
But Johannes Ullrich, a cybersecurity expert who is dean of research at the SANS Technology Institute, said private accounts in general are more susceptible to attacks than government e-mail addresses, particularly attacks in which a hacker establishes a look-alike account that allows them to impersonate as the account holder.
Encryption technology was also far less sophisticated in 2001, he said, which could have made Bush’s e-mails particularly insecure while traveling. If hackers gained access to Bush’s account, he said, there’s a chance they could break into the account of the National Guard commander or other officials who Bush exchanged e-mails with.
“The bigger issue here is, what else can an attacker do?” Ullrich said. “Now I may be able to penetrate a National Guard commander’s laptop by infecting it or by impersonating Jeb Bush’s account. . . . Now you may even be able to give the order to remove troops or change deployments.”
In recent days, Democrats — reeling from the criticism of Clinton’s e-mail practices — have stepped up their critique of Bush on the same topic, arguing that he used his personal e-mail to avoid public scrutiny of his actions as governor.
“The GOP presidential hopefuls’ attacks on this issue are completely disingenuous, and there are still a litany of questions Republicans need to answer, like what e-mails has Jeb Bush not turned over?” said Holly Shulman, a spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee.
Bush rebuffed such criticism during an event in New Hampshire on Friday. “I’m not surprised that the Clinton operatives would suggest this. It’s kind of standard operating procedure,” Bush told reporters, referring to Democratic charges that his e-mail situation was no different than Clinton’s.
He added later that he was “totally transparent. I have a BlackBerry as part of my official portrait, for crying out loud. There was nothing to hide.”
Under Florida law, Bush was required to hand over e-mails related to his time in office. Bush aides say there were about 550,000 e-mails on Bush’s server when he left office in 2007, although a portion of those came from before he began his tenure. About half that number were eventually turned over to state archives.
As noted Saturday by the New York Times, the archive process continued until last May, when attorneys for Bush delivered 25,000 additional messages. Aides have defended the pace of Bush’s compliance, saying that it took seven years because of his volume of correspondence.
In February, Bush launched a Web site, JebBushEmails.com, telling visitors that “they’re all here so you can read them and make up your own mind.”
Bush’s aides have strongly defended the process used to release his messages, noting that other potential GOP presidential candidates haven’t released any e-mails or are having e-mails released only as part of ongoing government investigations. The list includes former Texas govenor Rick Perry; Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker; and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie .
Perry and Jindal have used private e-mail for government business, according to the Associated Press. Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley (D) — who is also weighing a presidential bid — said last week that he used a private Gmail account as governor to communicate with aides and Cabinet officials.
When Bush published his e-mails in February, aides said many messages would be withheld or redacted to comply with state law barring the release of messages including Social Security numbers, confidential business issues or law enforcement and other security matters. Some of the published e-mails initially included Social Security numbers, forcing Bush’s team to quickly redact them — an early stumble for the governor’s fledgling presidential efforts.
A spokeswoman for the Florida secretary of state’s office did not return a request for comment Saturday to explain why some e-mails were released and others withheld, saying any answer would require a fuller legal interpretation that wouldn’t be available until next week.
Bush’s archives include a handful of other messages from leaders of Florida’s National Guard. There are copies of the “Florida National Guard Activity Report” from August 2000 and December 2000, with information about troop deployments to the Caribbean, South Korea and Kuwait; the activation of units; and details on training exercises and drug seizures.
In October 2000, Harrison e-mailed Bush to remind him that 170 Florida Air National Guardsmen from Jacksonville would be deploying to Saudi Arabia to enforce the southern Iraq No-Fly Zone. The message said they would “coincidentally travel over with a group of 90 from the Texas Air National Guard” — a unit that was under the command of Bush’s brother, George W. Bush, who was then Texas governor.
The next month, a lieutenant commander with one of the deployed units e-mailed Jeb Bush to thank him for sending a message of support, noting that “our unit has played a key role in missions directly related” to ongoing tensions between Iraq and Israel. The officer added that “you can assure your brother the F-15s from your state could take the F-16s from his state!”
Immediately after news broke March 2 about Clinton’s use of a private server, Bush faulted her for not releasing her e-mails from her time as secretary of state, writing on Twitter that “Transparency matters.” He later raised concerns about Clinton’s decision during an interview with Radio Iowa.
“For security purposes, you need to be behind a firewall that recognizes the world for what it is, and it’s a dangerous world, and security would mean that you couldn’t have a private server,” he said. “It’s a little baffling, to be honest with you, that didn’t come up in Secretary Clinton’s thought process.”
On Friday night, after a meeting with potential supporters, Bush was asked to respond to criticism that he, like Clinton, was allowed to self-select which e-mails should be turned over for archiving.
“I was way too busy to decide,” Bush said, before clarifying that his general counsel was among those involved in selecting which e-mails to turn over.
“It was a process that was based on the law itself, and we complied with the law and all during this time we’ve complied with the law, even in my post-governorship,” he said.
Rosalind S. Helderman contributed to this report.
The Amazing Democrats 