He's baaaaack! George W. Bush raises money for JEB!

(USA Today Politics) - Former president George W. Bush jumped into the 2016 presidential race Thursday with a fundraising letter on behalf of brother Jeb. “This is a consequential time in our nation’s history, and we need a strong leader,” the 43rd president said in the missive. “Jeb took on tough challenges as Florida’s Governor and delivered results. I know he will do the same as President.” The Bush campaign is also planning a “donor summit” for late October in Houston featuring Jeb’s brother and his father, former president George H.W. Bush. The George W. Bush fundraising e-mail comes as Jeb Bush has fallen behind in Republican polls to GOP front-runner Donald Trump.

“My brother will be a tremendous President,” George W. writes. “He is a proven leader with an optimistic outlook and a clear, conservative agenda for America’s future.” Read more.

JEB! Bush refuses to rule out use of torture if he becomes US president

I know watching me run for president, and hit slice after slice
into the sand and water is torture, but GET OVER IT!

(The Guardian) - Jeb Bush has declined to rule out the US resuming the use of torture – with the Republican presidential hopeful saying brutal questioning methods might be justifiable and necessary in some circumstances.

The former Florida governor said in general he believed torture was inappropriate and his brother, former President George W Bush, largely ended the CIA’s use of the techniques before he left office. The CIA had been using waterboarding, slapping, nudity, sleep deprivation, humiliation and other methods to coerce al-Qaida detainees – methods the military would be prohibited from using on prisoners of war. Read more.

JEB! Bush Got $1.3M Job At Lehman After Florida Shifted Pension Cash To Bank

Hey, you people are supposed to be focused entirely
on Hillary's emails. MOVE ON!

(International Business Times) - For Florida taxpayers, the move by the administration of then-Gov. Jeb Bush to forge a relationship with Lehman Brothers would ultimately prove disastrous. Transactions in 2005 and 2006 put the Wall Street investment bank in charge of some $250 million worth of pension funds for Florida cops, teachers and firefighters. Lehman would capture more than $5 million in fees on these deals, while gaining additional contracts to manage another $1.2 billion of Florida's money. Then, in the fall of 2008, Lehman collapsed into bankruptcy, leaving Florida facing up to $1 billion in losses.

But for Jeb Bush personally, his enduring relationship with Lehman would prove lucrative. In 2007, just as he left office, Bush secured a job as a Lehman consultant for $1.3 million a year, Bloomberg reported.

Weeks after Bush took the Lehman job, the Florida State Board of Administration (SBA) -- a three-member body that makes investment decisions about state pension funds and whose ranks had recently included one Jeb Bush -- gave Lehman additional business: SBA purchased $842 million worth of separate investments in Lehman’s mortgage-backed securities. Over the course of the year, the SBA would shift an additional $420 million of pension money into the same fund in which the state had begun investing under Bush.

In short, during Bush’s first year working for Lehman, his former colleagues in Tallahassee, the state capital, moved vast sums of Florida pension money into the doomed Wall Street investment bank, even as warnings about its financial troubles began to emerge. Read more.

Legacy Bush donors account for half of JEB!'s donations

Look, I'm my OWN MAN here! How many times to I have to say this?

(ABC News) - Jeb Bush's fundraising network is two generations in the making, and it shows.

About half of the roughly $120 million raised to help him win the Republican presidential nomination comes from donors who previously gave to his brother or father, both former presidents, according to a new analysis of Federal Election Commission records by Crowdpac.com, a nonpartisan political research company.

The finding puts a numerical exclamation point on the advantage Bush's presidential family gives him when it comes to fundraising.

In Crowdpac's review of named contributors to three political committees helping Bush, $59.2 million came from first-time Bush donors, while $60.3 million came from returning donors to the earlier campaigns of President George W. Bush, President George H.W. Bush or both.

There are more than 1,800 men and women who have given to all three Bushes over the years, Crowdpac found. These loyalists are spread across the country, with a heavy concentration in Texas, where the two presidents began their political careers, and in Florida, where Jeb Bush served as governor. Read more.

JEB! Bush: the government should have broad surveillance powers of Americans

(Yahoo News) - Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush said Tuesday that the government should have broad surveillance powers of Americans and private technology firms should cooperate better with intelligence agencies to help combat "evildoers."

At a national security forum in the early voting state of South Carolina, Bush put himself at odds with Republican congressional leaders who earlier this year voted to end the National Security Agency's bulk collection of phone records.

The former Florida governor said Congress should revisit its changes to the Patriot Act, and he dismissed concerns from civil libertarians who say the program violated citizens' constitutionally protected privacy rights. Read more. 

JEB! Bush says Paul Wolfowitz is a foreign-policy adviser

(CBS Marketwatch) - Jeb Bush on Friday identified Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the Iraq war, as one of his foreign-policy advisers.

The comment came as the former Florida governor was answering questions at the Iowa State Fair. The question wasn’t audible, but Bush’s reply was.

“Paul Wolfowitz is providing some advice,” he said. “I get most of my advice from a team we have in Miami, Fla.” Wolfowitz had been reported to have been an adviser to Bush, but this is believed to be the first time the Republican presidential candidate spelled that out.

Bush did explain the challenges he has in crafting his own reputation for foreign policy with the team of advisers he has.

“If they have any executive experience, they have had to deal with two Republican administrations,” he said. With a smile, he asked: “Who were the people that were presidents the last two Republican administrations?”

The last two Republican presidents were, of course, his brother George W. Bush and his father George H.W. Bush. Read more.

JEB! Bush Abandons Mainstream, Finds Inner Neocon

(Cato Institute) -  Jeb Bush has amassed a sizable war chest and positioned himself to be the safe establishment pick after Donald Trump’s expected implosion. Alas, on foreign policy Bush has turned hard right.

“Our security,” he recently claimed, is “in the balance.” Yet the U.S. continues to dominate the globe as no other nation before it.

Moreover, Bush contended, “if we withdraw from the defense of liberty elsewhere, the battle of eventually comes to us anyway.” Actually, the world long has been filled with horror which Washington has successfully avoided.

Bush followed the Republican stereotype in demanding more military spending. “We are in the seventh year of a significant dismantling of our own military,” he falsely claimed. Real spending continued to increase until 2012.

In Bush’s view two and a half percent of GDP for the Pentagon is too low. But as Ronald Reagan observed, military spending should reflect the threat environment, which is vastly improved. Bush seemed to recognize this reality when he suggested a strategic review since “the world’s changed. I mean, we’re, the Soviets aren’t going to launch a tank attack across Eastern Germany into Germany.”

Very true. He should launch a strategic review first, which would suggest fewer defense responsibilities and thus lower military outlays.

Bush first called his brother’s policy in Iraq “a mistake.” More recently, however, he declared that ousting Saddam Hussein was a “pretty good deal.”

Maybe so, I pointed out in Forbes, “if you don’t count dead Americans, dead allied personnel, dead Iraqis, widespread sectarian violence, mass refugee flows, increased Iranian influence, regional instability, and the rise of the Islamic State.”

Bush misleadingly argued that ISIS “didn’t exist when my brother was president” and that a continued U.S. military presence “would not have allowed” the group to flourish. This is false.

ISIS is an outgrowth of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which developed in response to George W.’s invasion. The group grew in opposition to the U.S. occupation and Shia-majority regime installed by Washington. Read more.