Top Jeb Bush Adviser Vin Weber Signs On to Lobby for Anti-Gay Uganda Government

Uganda hired Mercury Public Affairs, Weber’s firm, for a $50,000 per month retainer with Weber as the only registered lobbyist on the account. The contract calls for Mercury to provide general “lobbying services” as well as communication services to promote trade and investment opportunities in Uganda.

Weber joined the Bush campaign effort in February as an outside adviser. According to the Washington Post, Weber has worked behind the scenes to develop ties between Bush and major donors and conservative leaders. He told the Post in June that he intends to “coordinate policy” for the campaign.
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The anti-LGBT laws proposed in Uganda have found support from some religious right figures in the American conservative movement. According to journalist Jeff Sharlet, Ugandan politician David Bahati, the sponsor of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act, is a member of a conservative Christian organization known as The Family, whose members include Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Ok., Jim DeMint, and Tom Coburn.

Religious right figures Bryan Fischer and Lou Engle have also provided praised the effort. (Notably, Hillary Clinton is one of a very small group of Democrats to attend private Capitol Hill prayer services organized by The Family.)

Top Jeb Bush Adviser Vin Weber Signs On to Lobby for Anti-Gay Uganda Government

Stupid is, as stupid does,,,

So in Texas, it’s not enough to deny funding for abortions. If your facility performs abortions, Texas won’t give you money for anything. In fact, that is already state law. This budget provision goes further, in that now, it’s not enough that you don’t perform abortions in your facility. If you are associated with an organization that provides abortion services, you can’t get the cancer screening money.

Planned Parenthood Out of Cancer Screening Program

As part of the GOP's ongoing fight against Planned Parenthood, poor, uninsured women in Texas will soon be unable to obtain government-subsidized breast and cervical cancer screenings at the organization's clinics.

In an effort to boot Planned Parenthood from the joint state-federal Breast and Cervical Cancer Services program, Texas lawmakers wrote a provision into the state budget to prohibit clinics affiliated with abortion providers from receiving taxpayer funding for breast and cervical cancer screenings. That state budget takes effect Sept. 1.
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The 17 Planned Parenthood clinics participating in the Breast and Cervical Cancer Services program, or BCCS, were already prohibited by state law from performing abortions if they accepted taxpayer dollars. Planned Parenthood officials had said the budget rider was part of Republicans' efforts to put the organization out of business in the state.

Jeb Bush wants to move Planned Parenthood funding to abstinence-only health organizations

Former Florida Governor and Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush wants to defund Planned Parenthood, just like almost every other Republican. But Bush has ideas for where the current funding should go.

Bush Tweeted, “we absolutely have to defund PP and redirect those funds to other women’s health orgs.”

But what organizations would Bush be willing to redirect these funds to? Well, for starters, they would have to be abstinence-only women’s health centers and ones that do not perform abortions.

Daily Kos reported that as governor of Florida, Bush was keen to redirect these funds to religiously-motivated organizations which did not offer any type of family planning services such as birth control.

Here’s what Jeb Bush really did to public education in Florida - The Washington Post

If you care about your child's education or your grandchild's, this is not the way to go.

Now that Jeb Bush is officially in the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, expect his campaign to talk a lot about school reforms he spearheaded in Florida when he was governor from 1999-2007, and about his role as a leader in the national corporate school reform movement. You will hear about his reforms — standardized test-based “accountability,” for example, and “school choice” — along with claims of success in helping to transform schools. But there are big questions about his claims: Did his Florida reforms really accomplish what he says they did? When he talks about helping schools, which ones is he talking about?

Here’s what you won’t hear — and what is vital to know to fully assess Bush’s education reform record and to understand why his critics call him a privatizer — and not a reformer — of public education.

Here’s what Jeb Bush really did to public education in Florida - The Washington Post

See also:

The Big Jeb Bush Charter School Lie: Why His Florida Education ‘Miracle’ Is Hogwash

In 1996, Liberty City was the place Jeb Bush chose to introduce his big change — charter schools, the privately managed, publicly funded schools that operate outside the oversight of democratically governed school systems. Bush created Florida’s first charter school in Liberty City in an attempt to salvage a faltering political image by building credibility on both the education and civil rights fronts. But Liberty City Charter School proved to be much more than a campaign prop, sparking as it did a bushfire of charter school startups across Florida that continues to this day. Now there are over 600 charter schools in the state, and Florida's policies for charter school governance – ranked in the nation's top 10 by charter industry advocates — are touted as models for the rest of the nation.
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 As charter schools began to pop up here and there around the country, there’s no doubt Bush was aware of the trend. In fact, according to a recent article by Alec MacGillis in the New Yorker, the same year Bush founded his own advocacy group, he also "joined the board of the Heritage Foundation, which was generating papers and proposals to break up what it viewed as the government-run monopoly of the public-school system through free-market competition, with charters and private-school vouchers."

ADDENDUM::Zombies Against Medicare - The New York Times

Paul Krugman takes a look at Bush's "zombie idea" that Medicare is not working and that raising the age of eligibility is a good idea.

[W]hile raising the Medicare age has long been a favorite idea of Washington’s Very Serious People, a couple of years ago the Congressional Budget Office did a careful study and discovered that it would hardly save any money. That is, at this point raising the Medicare age is a zombie idea, which should have been killed by analysis and evidence, but is still out there eating some people’s brains.
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The real reason conservatives want to do away with Medicare has always been political: It’s the very idea of the government providing a universal safety net that they hate, and they hate it even more when such programs are successful. But when they make their case to the public they usually shy away from making their real case, and have even, incredibly, sometimes posed as the program’s defenders against liberals and their death panels.

What Medicare’s would-be killers usually argue, instead, is that the program as we know it is unaffordable — that we must destroy the system in order to save it, that, as Mr. Bush put it, we must “move to a new system that allows [seniors] to have something — because they’re not going to have anything.” And the new system they usually advocate is, as I said, vouchers that can be applied to the purchase of private insurance.

The underlying premise here is that Medicare as we know it is incapable of controlling costs, that only the only way to keep health care affordable going forward is to rely on the magic of privatization.

Now, this was always a dubious claim. It’s true that for most of Medicare’s history its spending has grown faster than the economy as a whole — but this is true of health spending in general. In fact, Medicare costs per beneficiary have consistently grown more slowly than private insurance premiums, suggesting that Medicare is, if anything, better than private insurers at cost control. Furthermore, other wealthy countries with government-provided health insurance spend much less than we do, again suggesting that Medicare-type programs can indeed control costs.

Zombies Against Medicare - The New York Times

Elderly woman rips Jeb in townhall: "I paid into that for years - now you want to take it away?”

A bit of and addendum to my last post:

“We’re not going to have adequate coverage for our children or our grandchildren without Medicare. I paid into that for years and years just like all these other seniors here and now you want to take it away?” said the woman, who did not identify herself and left before the town hall concluded. “Why are you always attacking the seniors?”
 
“Well, I’m not,” Bush responded. “Here’s what I said: I said we’re going to have to reform our entitlement system. We have to.”

“It’s not an entitlement,” the woman shot back. “I earned that.”

“It’s an actuarially unsound healthcare system,” said Bush, who said something must be done before the system burdens future generations with $50 billion of debt. “Social Security is an underfunded retirement system; people have put money into it, for sure.

“The people that are receiving these benefits, I don’t think that we should touch that; but your children and grandchildren are not going to get the benefit of this that they believe they’re going to get or that you think they’re going to get, because the amount of money put in compared to the amount of money the system costs is wrong.”

Elderly woman rips Jeb in townhall: "I paid into that for years - now you want to take it away?”

Jeb Bush ‘should be embarrassed’ by his overtime pay claims, economists say

Just how far out of touch is Bush version 3.0 with the everyday life of the average American,  First he and his ilk have been attacking Social Security from a variety of angles - privatization of some form [1], outright elimination based on the sound biblical principle that Noah never retired [2] because it is a Pagan concept [3] or raising the retirement age.  In their minds destroying a long standing social safety net is just one way to humiliate the poor.

Recently, Bush3.0 "began" attacking the work ethic of those of us who have to grind it out at lower paying jobs in order to survive.  Stating,

"(That) means we have to be a lot more productive. Workforce participation has to rise from its all-time modern lows. It means that people need to work longer hours and through their productivity gain more income for their families. That's the only way we are going to get out of this rut that we're in," Bush had said.

But yet this week he is against support for expanding overtime protections for mid-management working those same long hours. In other words, working longer hours shouldn't necessarily gain you more income for your family. 

“It’s this prescribed top-down approach that is the wrong approach,” Bush said. “The net effects of the overtime rule will be, if history is any guide, there will be less overtime paid, less wages earned.”

The reality, 

“If employers want to avoid overtime pay, they hire more workers on straight time and that creates new jobs,” Bernstein said. “Even staunch opponents agree with that and disagree with Mr Bush.”

So what really is your agenda Mr. Bush?
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[1] In good economic times this would make sense, over the long term stocks typically fare better. But recent history tells us how fool hardy that plan may be.  No one has been able to answer this one question:  What if the stock market goes bad just before retirement, will the government guarantee against this loss?

[2]  In regards to Greg Gianforte's comments

Montana Republican: Noah was 600 years old when he built the Ark, so why do Americans need retirement?

Noah Was 600 Years Old When He Built the Ark So Americans Don't Need Retirement 

[3] From Right Wing Watch,  "One of the great indications that something is not part of what God wants is the fruit that accompanies it," he continued. "And one of the things that I’ve always believed is Deuteronomy 6:24, He says, 'Everything I tell you is for your benefit, that you can enjoy a long life, that you can prosper,' and so if we see something in the way of statistics or science that shows that we don’t have a long life, that will diminish our life, then we know that’s not part of what God wanted us to do."

For a bit more snark on the matter:  ‘God Hates Retirement’ Is Wingnuts’ Hot New Reason For Killing Social Security

Jeb Bush ‘should be embarrassed’ by his overtime pay claims, economists say

Can't Unring That Bell: Jeb Bush Says He's A Fan Of Charles Murray's Books

So let me get this straight.  It is OK for a GOP presidential candidate to endorse a White Supremacist but yet the President got reamed for going to a church of a "Black Supremacist"?

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center:

,,,disadvantaged groups are disadvantaged because, on average, they cannot compete with white men, who are intellectually, psychologically and morally superior. Murray advocates the total elimination of the welfare state, affirmative action and the Department of Education, arguing that public policy cannot overcome the innate deficiencies that cause unequal social and educational outcomes.

While both sides of the political spectrum have racists, it seems only the Reich puts theirs on pedestals.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) declared himself to be a fan of controversial social scientist Charles Murray's books at a forum Thursday in Washington.

Bush lauded Murray's books on two separate occasions during an interview with National Review editor Rich Lowry, at a forum sponsored by the conservative magazine.

Lowry asked Bush, "... is there any policy or anything public officials can do to help turn back what has been a rising tide of family breakdown crossing decades now?"

"Absolutely, there is," Bush, a likely 2016 Republican presidential candidate, said. "It's not exactly the core. My views on this were shaped a lot on this by Charles Murray's book, except I was reading the book and I was waiting for the last chapter with the really cool solutions — didn't quite get there."
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Murray is the author of the highly influential 1984 book Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 which argued that social welfare programs of the 1960s and 1970s actually hurt the poor rather than helped. It was and remains a seminal work in the conservative policy canon.

Ten years later Murray authored the highly controversial The Bell Curve, which he co-authored with Richard Herrnstein. Critics denounced it as racist, saying it essentially argued that African-Americans aren't as intelligent as white Americans because of genetic differences. In 1994 Bob Herbert, then a columnist at The New York Times, described the book as a "scabrous piece of racial pornography masquerading as serious scholarship."

Can't Unring That Bell: Jeb Bush Says He's A Fan Of Charles Murray's Books

A Catholic City? | Americans United

On the site of an abandoned tomato plant in rural Collier County, Fla., Dom­ino’s Pizza founder Tom Monaghan is attempting to create a Catholic paradise. Ave Maria, an unincorporated planned town, boasts streets named after saints and is the site of Ave Maria University, a conservative Catholic institution.

According to some critics, it’s also the site of a miniature theocratic fiefdom. Religious communities aren’t exactly a new phenomenon in the United States. Since the earliest days of European colonization, members of various faith groups have regarded the United States as a potential haven from persecution and a place to carve out their own sectarian utopias.

As a consequence, many started settlements with explicitly sectarian motivations and laws that reflected those beliefs. The Puritans built their “city upon a hill” in Massachusetts; the towns of Rehoboth, Del., and Zion, Ill., also have theocratic roots. That’s true of some states, too: Pennsylvania used to be a refuge for Quakers, and Catholics had similar ambitions for Maryland.

But those mini-theocracies collapsed as outsiders moved in and religious pluralism took hold. Building theocracies is against the law – or so most Americans believe.

Despite this, there are still American towns whose governmental structures and legal systems resemble religious texts more than they do the founding document of our democracy.

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About 2,500 people now live in Ave Maria, without public schools, a police force – and even a representative form of government. That’s because Monaghan didn’t just found the town. He owns it, alongside the Barron Collier development corporation.

The Naples Daily News reports that in 2004, mere months before Ave Maria came into being, Monaghan and Barron Collier directly lobbied former Florida governor Jeb Bush for a change to the state’s laws on planned developments. Developments originally belonged to the founding corporation for 10 years; after that period, they held elections to fill town council and mayoral roles. Town government in planned developments would eventually be identical to governments in other municipalities, thus ensuring that residents enjoyed full constitutional rights and democratic government.

But that’s no longer the case. Bush acquiesced and backed a law eliminating the requirement that development owners must surrender control of their investments. Now, they can retain that control indefinitely, and that means Monaghan and Barron-Collier could own Ave Maria in perpetuity. The town is officially known as the Ave Maria Community Stewardship District and is governed by a board of residents.

A Catholic City? | Americans United

Jeb Bush: Gay couples’ rights should depend on where they live - Salon.com

Notice Bush's reference to "mob rule." As I have stated before, the rights of a minority cannot be impinged upon by the rights of a majority. Just because the "community" believes its views are correct and proper, does not make it the "law of the land."
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Listen to the Beltway chattering class, and you could be forgiven for forming the impression that Jeb Bush will be the courageous centrist in the Republican Party’s 2016 presidential field. He’s the guy who will absolutely refuse to pander to the party’s rabid right-wing base, rising or falling without backing down from his heretical positions on issues like education and immigration reform. Of course, the meme of Bush the Moderate conveniently glides over his thoroughly conservative views on issues like abortion, taxes, climate change, and government regulation; that he is considered a centrist says far more about the ever-rightward march of the Obama-era GOP than it does about Bush’s worldview.

On Sunday, Bush offered further evidence that he’s hardly a moderate, criticizing a recent federal court decision to allow marriage equality in Florida, where Bush was governor from 1999 to 2007. Echoing previous comments, Bush essentially argued that same-sex couples’ rights should be contingent on where they live.

“It ought be a local decision. I mean, a state decision,” Bush said in an interview with the Miami Herald. “The state decided. The people of the state decided. But it’s been overturned by the courts, I guess.”

Jeb Bush: Gay couples’ rights should depend on where they live - Salon.com

Jeb Bush on 2016 run: ‘I don’t think there is any Bush baggage at all’ | The Raw Story

 All politics aside for the moment, I would hope that family baggage would not be and issue.  Jeb is his "own" person.  BUT it's not family baggage so much that worries me, it's the adherence to the party line,,,

“Do you think there is any Bush baggage?” Wallace wondered. “Do you think that would be a problem?”

“No,” the former Florida governor replied. “I don’t think there’s any Bush baggage at all. I love my brother, I’m proud of his accomplishments, I love my dad, I am proud to be a Bush.”

“And if I run for president, it’s not because of something in my DNA that compels me to do it. It would be that it’s the right thing to do for my family, that the conditions are right and that I have something to offer.”

Jeb Bush on 2016 run: ‘I don’t think there is any Bush baggage at all’ | The Raw Story