Bush is now a declared candidate finally. The 2nd quarter FEC disclosures will be available to the public in abouth a month from now exactly and that's when people will finally know whether or not he hit his $100 million goal. Interestingly it seems like he has half of his people saying they won't reach it while the other half say they will.

Now it looks like his campaign is going to try to juice the numbers in the other direction for a little while, trying to scrounge up as many $2,700 donations as he can so that in a month from now he can try to claim that he's not purely the big-dollar candidate that everyone knows he is. Walker's camp is floating a $25 million number for his haul over the first of the year but most of the other candidates are staying silent.

nvm... fuck utube

This post was edited by Scaly on Jun 15 2015 11:37pm

http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/06/23/new-hampshire-poll-has-jeb-bush-first-and-donald-trump-second/

Suffolk is a shitty polling firm but their newest survey of New Hampshire is believable: Donald Trump polled second in the state on the strength of name identification. This is the problem with his candidacy and the threat he poses to the rest of the Republicans running. He's practically assured of a podium on the debate stage and that's bad for them for two reasons: he drags the debate to unfavorable ground, and he makes it harder for Kasich to get onto the stage thus depriving the GOP of one of it's only serious candidates.

Annnnnd Republican operatives are now telling anyone who will listen that they seriously fear Trump's ability to pull the discussion, and thus the party, to the fringe.
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/trump-bump-terrifies-gop-119449.html

The Romney campaign had to constantly work to keep The Donald out of the spotlight in 2012 and it took a little luck from the campaign and the RNC to sideline him. That is impossible to do now as a declared candidate, which is exactly why he actually took the plunge. If Trump decides to self-fund then he'll remain a distraction until the end of this year. He's also sucking up all the air in the room and depriving the serious candidates of their announcement-related polling bumps.

First real notable event in a while in the Democratic primary: Clinton is transferring her home email server to the DOJ. I haven't really found any articles that are any better than any others. Though in accordance with the media's "Clinton Rules," it'd be a good idea to give the major networks time to get a couple of the pertinent details wrong and still have time to half-correct them.

From a campaign perspective this is undoubtedly the best move given the contours of the story. Any time a campaign or elected is dealing with a controversy that begins with only scraps of known information it's much more dangerous to leave the media to its own devices, which will necessitate commentators speculating wildly about what has yet to be confirmed, rather than to push the story to its conclusion. There's a guarantee that Clinton will never be exonerated or validated if she's indeed proven innocent of any wrongdoing (see: the last 25 years) but once more information is known then the majors will move onto something else, only occasionally returning to this to shoehorn it into their conventional wisdom about what is defining the race.

This is probably most similar to the IRS nontroversy of 2013.

And then there's this, which is total insanity for so many reasons: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/jeb-bush-isis-hillary-clinton-obama

Jeb Bush is honestly terrible at this. I don't know what these people are doing. He needs to just take that Super PAC money and buy a remote island and declare himself the president of it. Putting aside the fact that he gets nearly every single detail factually incorrect, it's dumb to even be talking about this in the first place.

This also makes him look like a disjointed mess: he "started" his campaign with all these promises that he was "his own man" but practically his entire slate of foreign policy advisers are Bush 43 retreads. He then gave 4 different answers in a 4-day period about the War in Iraq and eventually settled on "it was a terrible idea." Now he's decided to throw both playbooks out and go full-Bushie: it's all the Democrats' fault for sticking to the Status of Forces Agreement that my brother planned on the back of a napkin. Had they just violated the terms of conditions, and ignored the Iraqi Parliament's refusal to allow a standing force to remain in-country, it all would have worked out!

lol

/e nontroversy this: http://www.campaignfreedom.org/2014/06/02/senate-ethics-complaint-filed-by-center-for-competitive-politics/

This post was edited by Santara on Aug 12 2015 05:18pm

True jay jeb is a flip flopper for sure. If the Obama administration would of stayed the course of the Bush plan then destablization wouldn't of happened. We probably shouldn't of went into Iraq in the first place but like a good son he was there to finish his fathers work

I don't know what CampaignFreedom.org is so obviously I'm not clicking it, but I don't see any reason to pretend that the IRS was a "scandal" when literally every single charge made has been disproven. You don't get a disjointed response to abuse of tax law without a jumbled mess of a SCOTUS decision that completely scrapped the existing methods for discovering and punishing those abuses. That's what caused the response that people are taking issue with. Every single claim that related to "ideological targeting" or "White House involvement" or "Republican payback" was proven to be incorrect years ago, as was every charge that involved all of those things being tied together in some huge conspiracy.



This is the most moronic post... stay the course? What the fuck does that even mean?

The Obama administration withdrew from Iraq based on the terms of the SoFA that the Bush administration created on the back of the napkin before they left office. Are we supposed to pretend that didn't happen because you weren't aware of it? That was the course. The Iraqi Parliament voted to not allow the U.S. to keep the residual force like the Obama administration wanted. Are we supposed to pretend that didn't happen either? Unless you're advocating that the Obama administration illegally occupy Iraq (like the moronic Republican presidential candidates in 2012 were suggesting) then there was absolutely nothing that could be done differently. There was absolutely no room to change course because the crux of the agreement, immunity for American forces, was no longer tenable to the Iraqis.

And you're just fundamentally, hilariously incorrect regarding destabilization. It happened because of the invasion, not because of leaving. Literally every single military and foreign policy expert accepts this. There's no ignoring the fact that ISIS was an outgrowth of AQI, which did not exist in Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion. To pretend that this has something to do with the withdrawal requires completely re-writing history.

Lol, disproven.

The link is to the official ethics complaint lodged against 8 sitting US Senators from a former member of the Federal Elections Commission, wherein it details the gross abuses of power made by lawmakers instigating the punitive treatment of conservative groups. It's also not as if Lois Lerner hasn't taken obvious actions to hide her trail.