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Jeb-Bush-Miami

Jeb Bush formally enters the 2016 Republican presidential race with a kickoff rally in Miami, Monday, June 15, 2015. (Photo: Reuters/Joe Skipper)

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush officially entered the crowded 2016 Republican presidential field on Monday at an event at Miami Dade College. However, a new poll suggests the once-presumed-to-be frontrunner has a lot of work to do to overcome an inherent challenge no other candidate seems to have — his last name.

A new Rasmussen Reports survey finds that 43 percent of U.S. likely voters say they are less likely to vote for Bush due to the fact that his father and brother both served as president. While not a majority, only 15 percent said they are more likely to vote for Jeb because of his family’s political stature. Thirty-nine percent (39 percent) claimed the Bush name would have no impact on their vote and 3 percent said they weren’t sure.

“Though Rasmussen doesn’t rate particularly high on PPD’s Pollster Scorecard, they are confirming what we clearly have observed in other polls,” said PPD’s senior political analyst, Richard D. Baris. “The Bush name continues to be a net negative, even though his brothers popularity is markedly better than President Obama’s at the moment.”

A recently released CNN/Opinion Research poll found a majority of Americans now view former President George W. Bush favorably by a 52 to 43 percent margin. Obama, on the other hand, was underwater.

While Jeb’s stance on Common Core — the increasingly and broadly unpopular education standards — certainly hurts him, it isn’t the number one reason voters won’t support him.

“We don’t need another Bush in the White House” tops the list with 42 percent in another recent poll, while “his stance on Common Core” (19 percent) is a distant second. Worse still, among the general electorate, Bush has the highest unfavorable ratings proportional to name recognition than any other declared or hopeful candidate in the Republican nomination field.

 

The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on June 14 and 15, 2015 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.

A new Rasmussen survey finds that 43

Politics

P-Donald-Jiron

Top Weather Service official P. Donald Jiron creates consulting job — then takes it himself with $43,200 raise, watchdog says.

Unlike some libertarians, I have patriotic feelings for my country. I want the United States to be the best in everything.

So it’s with some chagrin that I realized that the last two honorees selected for the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame came from overseas.

This included the man from India who earned his spot by not showing up for work – ever – for nearly a quarter of a century.

We also selected the woman from France who had a government-provided car and driver but still managed to bill taxpayers for almost $150 of taxi fares per day.

Given my jingoistic feelings, I’m worried that American bureaucrats are losing ground to their foreign counterparts. It would be a national embarrassment, after all, if our pencil pushers got a reputation for being slackers about slacking off.

So I’m very proud to announce that the newest member of the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame is a red-white-and-blue American.

bureaucrats-sleeping

The Washington Post reports on his truly amazing – and nauseating – scheme to bilk taxpayer to the hilt. Here’s the basic description of what happened.

A senior National Weather Service official helped write the job description and set the salary for his own post-retirement consulting post– then came back to the office doing the same job with a $43,200 raise, the agency’s watchdog found.

Hey, maybe I can do the same thing at Cato. I’ll propose a new position for a Senior Fellow in Recreational Studies. But since I’m modest, I’ll only suggest that this new slot only pay $35,000 more than what I’m now getting. And then I’ll…

Oh, never mind. I momentarily forgot that the Cato Institute isn’t the federal government. Our managers actually care about spending money wisely.

But that’s obviously not the case in Washington, as we can see from these additional excerpts.

The deputy chief financial officer also demanded that he be paid a $50,000 housing allowance near Weather Service headquarters in downtown Silver Spring in violation of government rules for contractors, one of numerous improprieties in a revolving-door deal sealed with full knowledge of senior agency leaders.

Yes, you read correctly. This scheming parasite latched onto the public teat with full knowledge and approval of his superiors.

And in less than two years, he scammed nearly half-a-million dollars from America’s taxpayers.

With his consulting job and housing allowance in place, P. Donald Jiron retired from the Weather Service in early May 2010, then returned to work as a consultant the next day, while collecting his government pension, investigators said. By the time he was fired 21 months later, the government had paid him another $471,875.34.

A taxpayer-provided pension plus a new taxpayer-provided salary. That’s double dipping without even having to get a new desk! Kudos to P. Donald.

You may be thinking – or hoping – that this is an isolated case of waste, fraud, and abuse.

working-for-the-govt

But the Inspector General report reveals this is just the tip of a very sordid iceberg.

His procurement of his own post-retirement job appears to be commonplace throughout the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Weather Service’s parent agency.

This story also has a nepotism angle. I guess we can modify the old saying: The family that mooches together, stays together.

Jiron also broke other rules, investigators found. He used his position as a contractor and former senior official to pressure Weather Service staff to give his daughter a job, skirting federal hiring rules that require competition.

Amazingly, he apparently wasn’t successful in his nepotism scheme. Which almost led me to deny him membership.

But the housing allowance he scammed was enough to push him over the top.

So here’s the bottom line. We have government positions that shouldn’t exist. We then pay the people in these positions far more than they could earn in the private sector.

And we have government managers who turn a blind eye (or worse) when these bureaucrats figure out ways to double-dip, triple-dip, and otherwise pillage taxpayers.

Hey, nice work if you can get it.

[brid video=”8397″ player=”1929″ title=”Mitchell Want Less Corruption Shrink the Size of Government”]

Top Weather Service official and lifetime bureaucrat

Politics

Obama-Netanyahu

President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2010. PHOTO: JASON REED/REUTERS

In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, former Israeli Ambassador Micheal Oren claimed President Obama “deliberately” damaged U.S.-Israeli relations. Though Oren admits that neither of the parties had a “monopoly” on mistakes that contributed to the well-known tension between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “only one leader made them deliberately.”

The former Israeli Ambassador noted that the issue of Jewish settlements, an oft-cited argument by the Obama administration to justify their hostility toward the prime minister, was one of “many bungles” that “were not committed by Mr. Netanyahu personally.” However, he did apologize for taking Vice President Joe Biden off guard on the issue of settlements, and admits only to premeditating the otherwise well-received speech in front of a joint session of Congress last March.

The same, however, cannot be said of Mr. Obama.

“Mr. Netanyahu’s only premeditated misstep was his speech to Congress, which I recommended against. Even that decision, though, came in reaction to a calculated mistake by President Obama,” Oren wrote. “From the moment he entered office, Mr. Obama promoted an agenda of championing the Palestinian cause and achieving a nuclear accord with Iran. Such policies would have put him at odds with any Israeli leader. But Mr. Obama posed an even more fundamental challenge by abandoning the two core principles of Israel’s alliance with America.”

The two principles Mr. Oren referred to in the op-ed were 1) the understanding between the two countries that “no daylight” exists between them on the key issues and 2) that there are to be “no surprises” on policy shifts toward those issues.

On the former, the cardinal rule broken by the Obama administration was their public scrutiny of Israel on a host of issues. Of course, two countries can and often do disagree; just not publicly. This break from long-standing policy between the two allies was unprovoked, and obvious from the beginning.

“When there is no daylight,” Obama told American Jewish leaders in 2009 at the onset of his administration. “Israel just sits on the sidelines and that erodes our credibility with the Arabs.”

Regarding the latter, “President Obama discarded it in his first meeting with Mr. Netanyahu, in May 2009, by abruptly demanding a settlement freeze and Israeli acceptance of the two-state solution,” Oren argued.

During the very next month following that meeting, Obama traveled to the Middle East but snubbed Israel before addressing the Muslim world from Cairo in his now infamous “apology tour.”

“Israeli leaders typically received advance copies of major American policy statements on the Middle East and could submit their comments,” Oren adds. “But Mr. Obama delivered his Cairo speech, with its unprecedented support for the Palestinians and its recognition of Iran’s right to nuclear power, without consulting Israel.”

Most recently, Israelis rejected attempts by the president and foreign left-wing activists to oust Prime Minister Netanyahu and replace him with a far more left-wing leader Obama felt he could better deal with. A bipartisan Senate committee has been established to investigate the Obama administration’s use of several taxpayer-funded State Department grants to support OneVoice, a U.S.-based leftist activist organization started by five Democrats.

OneVoice received two taxpayer-funded grants from the U.S. State Department in the past year totaling $200,000 and, as PPD previously reported, joined forces with the group V15 – who had a reputed mission of “anyone but Bibi” – to defeat Netanyahu. V15 is run by Jeremy Bird, known for his role as Obama’s 2012 field director.

But the past is the past, and Oren says his intention in the op-ed was to move forward and “restore the ‘no daylight’ and ‘no surprises’ principles.”

“Israel has no alternative to America as a source of security aid, diplomatic backing and overwhelming popular support,” he added. “The U.S. has no substitute for the state that, though small, remains democratic, militarily and technologically robust, strategically located and unreservedly pro-American.”

According to the latest polls, Americans’ views of Israel are at record-highs, despite Obama’s efforts to undermine Netanyahu’s government. A whopping 70 percent of Americans say they now view the country favorably. Comparatively, just 17 percent currently view the Palestinian Authority favorably, down from 19 in 2014.

“The past six years have seen successive crises in U.S.-Israeli relations, and there is a need to set the record straight,” he wrote. “But the greater need is to ensure a future of minimal mistakes and prevent further erosion of our vital alliance.”

In an op-ed in The Wall Street

Economy

new-home-construction-housing-starts

(Photo: Reuters)

New housing starts in the U.S. fell 11.1 percent in May after big gains in the month of April, the Commerce Department said in a report Tuesday. However, permits for future construction hit a near eight-year high, increasing 11.8 percent to a 1.28 million-unit rate, or the highest since August 2007.

April starts were revised up to a 1.17 million-unit rate, which is the highest since November 2007.

Economists polled by Reuters had forecast housing starts falling to a 1.10 million-unit pace in May after a previously reported 1.14 million-unit rate.

Meanwhile, permits have been above a 1 million-unit pace since July.

Groundbreaking for single-family homes, which accounts for the largest share of the market, dropped 5.4 percent to a 680,000 unit pace. Starts for the volatile multifamily segment plummeted 20.2 percent to a 356,000 unit rate.

The decline was prevalent in all four regions, declining by a whopping 26.5 percent in the Northeast. Starts in the South, where most of the home building takes place, fell 5.0 percent.

Single-family building permits inched up 2.6 percent to their highest level since December. Multi-family building permits increased by a hefty 24.9 percent. Permits for buildings with five units or more increased to their highest level since January 1990.

New housing starts in the U.S. fell

World

AQAP-Nasir-al-Wuhayshi

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) chief Nasser al-Wuhayshi was killed in a U.S. airstrike in Yemen.

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) said early Tuesday that their leader, Nasir al-Wuhayshi, was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen. Wuhayshi, a Yemeni-born jihadist and one of Osama bin Laden’s closest associates, was confirmed dead by the terror group’s media wing.

They said in a video statement that his deputy, Qassim al-Rimi, had been named to take his place as al Qaeda’s second-in-command, , and vowed to continue to wage war on America and Americans in the region.

“Our Muslim nation, a hero of your heroes and a master of your masters left to God, steadfast,” senior jihadist Khaled Batrafi said in the video. “In the name of God, the blood of these pioneers make us more determined to sacrifice.”

“Let the enemies know that the battle is not with an individual,” Batrafi continued, adding “the battle led by crusaders and their agents is colliding with a billion-member nation.”

U.S. officials from both the State and Defense Departments have yet to respond to a request for comment or confirmation. However, a counter-terrorism source who tracks social media accounts tied to al Qaeda and ISIS told Fox News late Monday that a credible account based in Yemen was reporting that al-Wuhayshi had been killed in the CIA strike and al-Rimi was AQAP’s new leader.

“If confirmed, the death of AQAP’s leader is a major blow to Islamist terrorists who are plotting daily to attack America,” Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said Monday.

The death of al-Wuhayshi follows the killing of senior military leader Nasr al-Ansi, the public face of the video in which the group took credit for the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, religious zealot Ibrahim al-Rubish and other top operatives.

Wuhayshi, a former personal secretary to Usama bin Laden, was 1 of 23 al Qaeda terrorists who broke out of a detention facility in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, in February 2006. In 2009, al-Wuhayshi announced the creation of AQAP, and al-Qaeda promoted him to the position of general manager of operations in 2013.

Despite the temporary victory and, because of the nature of Islamic terrorism, U.S. officials still believe AQAP to be the group most capable of attacking the homeland. First, intelligence officials believe that Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, the group’s top bomb-maker, is still be alive and has designed bombs that slipped past security on three separate American-bound airplanes. Second, the new leader of AQAP, al-Rimi, is thought to be the brains behind a series of attacks that prove his capabilities.

Officials believe al-Rimi orchestrated a foiled yet deadly plot to mail bombs to the United States, as well as multiple attacks against Yemen’s U.S.-backed government. In writings and videos, he vowed to topple the pro-West Sanaa government that was toppled by Shiite rebels backed by Iran, and strike America in the homeland.

 

 

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP)

World

Kurds-Turkey-Syria-Islamic-State

June 15, 2015: In this photo taken from the Turkish side of the border between Turkey and Syria, in Akcakale, southeastern Turkey, Kurdish people wave a Free Syria Army group flag in the outskirts of Tal Abyad, Syria. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)

Kurdish fighters took control of a strategic town on the Syria-Turkey border Monday evening and cut off a key supply line to the caliphate’s capital. The defeat at Tal Abyad, which is located roughly 50 miles north of ISIS’ self-declared capital of Raqqa, is the Islamic terror army’s biggest loss since the Kurds retook control of the border town of Kobani near Turkey.

The Washington Post reported that the Kurds, known as the YPG, backed by allied Syrian rebels, captured the town of Tal Abyad, and claimed control of the town center by nightfall Monday. A contingent of the Free Syrian Army is fighting with the Kurds in an alliance against ISIS, which is called “Burkan al-Furat,” or Volcano of the Euphrates.

The Post also reported that the advancing forces had cut off ISIS’ escape route from the town, surrounding it from the east, south, and west. Further, officials from the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirmed to PPD that Kurdish fighters have nearly taken “full control” of Tal Abyad and command of the border crossing with Turkey.

The Kurdish victory deprives ISIS of a direct route for bringing in foreign militants and supplies, and links the Kurds’ two fronts, putting even more pressure on Raqqa. Now, according to sources, the Islamic State are hunkering down in the city in preparation for defense, setting up checkpoints along key locations around the city’s limits.

While the U.S. backs the YPG, a group of moderate, mostly secular Kurdish militiamen long-driven by a desire for autonomy, the administration has stalled deliveries of arms and other badly needed supplies. Still, since the beginning of the year, they have retaken some 500 Kurdish and Christian towns in northeastern Syria, as well as the strategic border town of Kobani and mountains seized earlier by the Islamic State.

Yet, the Kurdish efforts has increased tensions with Turkmen and Arabs, who blame them for the displacement of more than 16,000 people who fled to Turkey in the past two weeks. On Monday, more than a dozen Syrian rebel groups accused the Kurdish fighters of deliberately displacing thousands of Arabs and Turkmen from Tal Abyad, accusing the YPG of committing acts of “ethnic cleansing.”

“YPG forces … have implemented a new sectarian and ethnic cleansing campaign against Sunni Arabs and Turkmen under the cover of coalition airstrikes which have contributed bombardment, terrorizing civilians and forcing them to flee their villages,” the statement issued by rebel and militant groups said.

Of course, the Kurds and their FSA allies have vehemently denied these charges, and PPD has not been able to confirm them with human rights groups or public officials.

“We say to residents of Tal Abyad, there is no reason for you to cross to another country (Turkey). Our towns are open to you, you are our people and you will return to your towns, villages and properties,” Khalil, the YPG spokesman said.

He also vowed to leave the business of governance in Tal Abyad to the locals once it is completely secure. Khalil said the Kurdish fighters will pack up and leave the town when they are no longer needed.

The Kurds have taken control of a

Opinion

jean-paul-sartre

The political left has come up with a new buzzword: “micro-aggression.”

Professors at the University of California at Berkeley have been officially warned against saying such things as “America is the land of opportunity.” Why? Because this is considered to be an act of “micro-aggression” against minorities and women. Supposedly it shows that you don’t take their grievances seriously and are therefore guilty of being aggressive toward them, even if only on a micro scale.

You might think that this is just another crazy idea from Berkeley. But the same concept appears in a report from the flagship campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana. If you just sit in a room where all the people are white, you are considered to be guilty of “micro-aggression” against people who are not white, who will supposedly feel uncomfortable when they enter such a room.

At UCLA, a professor who changed the capitalization of the word “indigenous” to lower case in a student’s dissertation was accused of “micro-aggression,” apparently because he preferred to follow the University of Chicago Manual of Style, rather than the student’s attempt to enhance the importance of being indigenous.

When a group of UCLA law students came to class wearing T-shirts with a picture of one of their professors who had organized an intramural softball game, those T-shirts were protested as a manifestation of “white privilege.”

Why? Because that professor had written a book critical of affirmative action.

“Micro-aggression” protests have spread to campuses from coast to coast — that is, from California’s Berkeley and UCLA to Harvard and Fordham on the east coast, and including Oberlin and Illinois in the midwest.

Academic administrators have all too often taken the well-worn path of least resistance, by regarding the most trivial, or even silly, claims of victimhood with great seriousness, even when that involved undermining faculty members held in high esteem by most of their students and by their professional colleagues on campus and beyond.

The concept of “micro-aggression” is just one of many tactics used to stifle differences of opinion by declaring some opinions to be “hate speech,” instead of debating those differences in a marketplace of ideas. To accuse people of aggression for not marching in lockstep with political correctness is to set the stage for justifying real aggression against them.

This tactic reaches far beyond academia and far beyond the United States. France’s Jean-Paul Sartre has been credited — if that is the word — with calling social conditions he didn’t like “violence,” as a prelude to justifying real violence as a response to those conditions. Sartre’s American imitators have used the same verbal tactic to justify ghetto riots.

Word games are just one of the ways of silencing politically incorrect ideas, instead of debating them. Demands that various conservative organizations be forced to reveal the names of their donors are another way of silencing ideas by intimidating people who facilitate the spread of those ideas. Whatever the rationale for wanting those names, the implicit threat is retaliation.

This same tactic was used, decades ago, by Southern segregationists who tried to force black civil rights organizations to reveal the names of their donors, in a situation where retaliation might have included violence as well as economic losses.

In a sense, the political left’s attempts to silence ideas they cannot, or will not, debate are a confession of intellectual bankruptcy. But this is just one of the left’s ever-increasing restrictions on other people’s freedom to live their lives as they see fit, rather than as their betters tell them.

Current attempts by the Obama administration to force low-income housing to be built in middle class and upscale communities are on a par with forcing people to buy the kind of health insurance the government wants them to buy — ObamaCare — rather than leaving them free to buy whatever suits their own situation and preferences.

The left is not necessarily aiming at totalitarianism. But their know-it-all mindset leads repeatedly and pervasively in that direction, even if by small steps, each of which might be called “micro-totalitarianism.”

PC in the form of "micro-aggression," or

Opinion

Justice Antonin Scalia

If you doubt that Christians are fair game for ridicule by the cultural left, take a look at the hit piece on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia by Jeffrey Tayler for Salon.

I can’t decide which is worse, the title or the subtitle. The title: “Antonin Scalia is unfit to serve: A justice who rejects science and the law for religion is of unsound mind.” The subtitle: “The justice claims to be an originalist, but his real loyalty is to religion and a phony man in the sky.”

The writer is trying to be cute, but don’t conclude that any part of his thesis is intended to be tongue-in-cheek. He opens by telling us that “faith-derangement syndrome” has now infected the Supreme Court as it has the executive branch.

He writes: “Sufferers of faith-derangement syndrome (FDS) exhibit the following symptoms: unshakable belief in the veracity of manifest absurdities detailed in ancient texts regarding the origins of the cosmos and life on earth; a determination to disseminate said absurdities in educational institutions and via the media; a propensity to enjoin and even enforce (at times using violence) obedience to regulations stipulated in ancient texts, regardless of their suitability for contemporary circumstances; the conviction that an invisible, omnipresent, omniscient authority (commonly referred to as ‘God’) directs the course of human and natural events, is vulnerable to propitiation and blandishments, and monitors individual human behavior, including thought processes, with an especially prurient interest in sexual activity.”

Tayler is particularly exercised by his assumption that Scalia rejects Tayler’s sainted opinions on both “anthropogenic global warming” and “the fact of evolution — the foundation of modern biology — in favor of the opening chapter of a compendium of cockamamie fables concocted by obscure humans in a particularly dark age, evidence that his faculty of reason has suffered the debilitating impairment associated with acute FDS.” Tayler continues, “He therefore cannot be relied upon to adjudicate without prejudice and should be removed from the bench henceforth.”

Sorry for the extensive quotes, but I have to assume you’d think I were exaggerating if I paraphrased this harangue.

What apparently got Tayler’s attention was an interview of Scalia a few years ago by Jennifer Senior, a contributing editor for New York magazine. Tayler was disgusted that Scalia accepts the Catholic teaching about homosexuality and incredulous at his admission that he believes in heaven and hell and that the devil is “a real person.”

Senior asked Scalia, “Have you seen evidence of the devil lately?” I wish Scalia had cited the left’s glorification of abortion as Exhibit A, but he chose instead to point to the devil’s wiliness in getting people not to believe in him or God.

Scalia’s confessions of faith, by Tayler’s lights, constitute an “outrage against reason,” calling the devil “a comic-book bugaboo the pedophile pulpiteers of (Christianity) have developed to warp the minds of their credulous ‘flocks’ for two millennia.” He condemns Scalia as a self-confessed “biblical literalist,” which means Scalia is “an enemy of historical fact.”

I wrote a book last year presenting evidence and arguments supporting Christianity’s truth claims, so I won’t re-litigate that case here except to say that in my humble view, many who espouse Darwinian evolution as if it were gospel despite the gaping holes in the theory or man-made global warming as an unchallengeable fact that represents an existential threat to humankind often are arrogant, curiously incurious and close-minded and don’t know a fraction of what they think they know.

Further, the aggressive anti-theists who mock Christians for believing in the God of the Bible and his Word believe at least one thing that requires far more faith: that something arose from nothing without a Creator. Oh, sure, some of them tell you they don’t believe that, saying that they believe in multiverses, that we are the spawn of aliens or that the universe has always existed, even though science, which they tend to deify when it is convenient, points to a definite beginning to the universe. Even if it didn’t and even if there were no such thing as entropy, it would still take a formidable suspension of disbelief to believe in an eternal universe.

I am not nearly so troubled by Tayler’s beliefs or non-beliefs as I am by his derisive, contemptuous and tyrannical attitude toward believers. You should know that he acknowledges that 6 in 10 Americans believe in the devil yet still implies the belief is insane. Christians, in his view, are “devotees of an invisible celestial tyrant.”

What I suspect animates Tayler’s angst regarding Scalia (and other Christians) is Scalia’s faith-based view against same-sex marriage. Why else would Tayler single out a justice of the Supreme Court poised to rule on a case involving this issue? Why else would he sneer at God’s “especially prurient interest in sexual activity,” which, by the way, is a perverse mischaracterization of the God of the Bible? Why else would he allude to “the many Religious Freedom Restoration Acts disgracing legal codes of far too many states”?

In the end, however, Tayler’s motives are beside the point, which is that he feels not only free to unleash this kind of slander against the belief system of the majority of Americans but also that there is no risk that he will be considered, much less called, a bigot or intolerant for doing so. That’s because in the leftist-dominated media culture, you can, with limitless vile, insult individuals and groups outside those protected by political correctness with impunity and often with confidence that you’ll be praised.

If you doubt Christians are fair game

Politics

Jeb-Bush-announcement-Miami

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush waves to the crowd as he takes the stage at a rally in Miami Monday June 15, 2015, to announce he is running for president in 2016. (Photo: Getty)

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush formally announced his 2016 bid at a rally in Miami Monday, leaning heavily on his executive experience to make his case to voters. Bush, who became number 11 in the crowded field of Republicans vying for the nomination, vowed to use his executive experience to take Washington “out of the business of causing problems.”

“I know we can fix this. Because I’ve done it,” he said.

Despite the Fox News instant transformation from news outfit to Bush cheerleader, the son and brother of the 41st and 43rd president, respectively, is not the frontrunner by any relevant measure this early in a presidential cycle.

Bush currently enjoys a slight 0.2-point lead in the nationwide Republican presidential nomination polls, according to the PPD average. But it’s a tenuous lead at best, a lead actual data indicate is due to name recognition rather than devoted, energized support among primary voters.

The former Florida governor, who trails Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in Iowa and is roughly tied with the him in New Hampshire, has the highest unfavorable ratings measured proportional to name recognition. Holding no clear frontrunner status in either of the first two early contests, he also has the largest number of voters who say they will never support him in both primary and general elections.

That said, it isn’t the intention here to beat up on Jeb. It is simply necessary to underscore these “fundamental” and “structural” challenges to emphasize that his record — or, at least how he sells it to voters — will matter in 2016.

The two oft-cited gripes conservative voters have with Jeb — not counting the utter letdowns his father (taxes) and brother (spending) turned out to be for the base — are his stances on Common Core and immigration. Because we have only comments to go on regarding the latter, let’s dive into his record on the economy, his advancement of or hinderance to limited government and the record on education.

Economic Record

The Club for Growth just recently shared their Presidential White Paper analysis of the economic freedom record of Gov. Bush with PPD. Their findings and their take on what they found in their research further underscore part of Jeb’s problem. Conservatives, despite positive accomplishments in his record, simply don’t know which Bush they will get if he becomes the 45th president.

“As the two-term governor of Florida, Jeb Bush has an extensive record on the issues of taxes, spending, entitlement reform, and government regulation,” said Club for Growth President David McIntosh. “He fought for major tax cuts, proposed sweeping reforms to Medicaid in Florida, and has been a leading advocate for school choice.”

While we will dive into Bush’s record on school choice and his education record in Florida shortly, there were findings that clearly contradict some of the statements (or, rather promises) made in the speech today. Bush vowed to take the nation from energy dependent to energy independent, within five years, which will help the economy to grow at a 4-percent GDP rate annually.

However, the Club’s research gives reason to doubt — or least hesitate — to believe that pledge.

“Our White Paper also identifies concerns with the Bush record, including the fact that state spending exceeded inflation and population growth in Florida, and Bush supported restrictions on oil and gas extraction,” he added. “Overall, though, on many key issues of economic freedom, we believe the record in Florida shows that Bush often governed as a pro-growth conservative.”

But, as Mr. McIntosh pointed out, as Bush has turned his attention toward transitioning from sight-seer to presidential candidate, “his economic agenda for the future has been light on details. Thus, he leaves open the question of whether, as president, he would be more like the Governor Bush of old, or the more recent, cautious establishment candidate Bush.”

Education Record

While Bush was governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007, the state “made dramatic improvements in the academic outcomes of all its students,” according to a report from the conservative Heritage Foundation in 2010. Efforts to narrow the nationwide achievement gap in grades K-12 between white students and minorities, particularly among blacks and Hispanics, were profoundly successful.

Matthew Ladner and Lindsey M. Burke, the authors of the report, cited parental choice, higher standards, and both accountability and flexibility for pushing the state’s black students to either match or outperform the statewide reading average, helping to surpass 8 states, and for Hispanics to do the same juxtaposed to 31 states.

And the teachers’ unions hate him, which should be a boon among conservative voters.

“Florida enacted a series of far-reaching K-12 reforms despite opposition by the teacher unions,” Ladner and Burke said. “The result was unique: The unions effectively lost control of K-12 policy in Florida.”

However, it’s also true that unions and conservatives — notably Michelle Malkin — ironically find common ground in their opposition to the reforms put in place by Gov. Bush, which are now called the A+ Plan for Education.

“After 15 years of this approach, students are a little better at taking tests,” Florida Education Association (FEA) spokesman Mark Pudlow argues. “But many of the subjects that get children excited about learning have been curtailed or eliminated so that they can spend more time on the tests, public schools are still chronically underfunded and teachers are left feeling under-appreciated.”

If it sounds like an anti-Common Core sentiment — save for the claim public schools are underfunded — that would be because it is.

It’s fair to conclude that the former Florida governor would have been a far more conservative president than either his brother or father were if, say, “Bush 2000 to 2007” made a bid. However, it is also a fair position to remain skeptical of Jeb, precisely because pedigree and recent comments suggest we don’t know if that’s the man running for president in 2016.

Examining the record: Former Florida Gov. Jeb

Policy

hillary-clinton-oecd-2011

Then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton delivers remarks at the OECD Ministerial in June, 2011.

What’s the worst international bureaucracy?

But I think the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has them all beat, particularly if we grade on a per-dollar-spent basis.

Just consider the OECD’s work on inequality. The bureaucrats recently published a study that claimed inequality somehow undermined growth.

In a column for the Wall Street Journal, Matthew Schoenfeld of Dreihaus Capital Management explains why the study is deeply flawed. He starts with a summary of what the OECD would like folks to believe.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recently published a report, “In It Together: Why Less Inequality Benefits All,” that claimed rising income inequality from 1990-2010 depressed cumulative growth across its member countries by 4.7%. The OECD’s suggested solution: government-led redistribution, funded via tax increases on “wealthier individuals” and “multinational corporations.”

But Schoenfeld explains the OECD’s research is riddled with misleading use of statistics.

From 2011-13, according to the World Bank, the five most unequal countries grew nearly five times faster (3.9% cumulative annual average) than the others (0.84%). By using a 2010 cutoff, the OECD has skewed its findings. Consider Greece. From 1999-2012, its Gini coefficient “improved” by 6% to .34 from .36—more than any other OECD country. …Greece’s redistributive social transfer spending also grew most quickly among OECD peers from 2000-12. But Greece’s economy has shrunk by more than 20% since 2010.

Here’s another example.

…the income-tax rate is a subpar proxy for redistribution policy. …A more representative proxy for redistribution is government expenditure as a percentage of GDP, which encompasses all government spending on the provision of goods, services, subsidies, and social benefits. From 1995-2012, OECD member countries that increased government expenditures as a percentage of GDP grew 30% slower than member countries that trimmed government expenditure as a percentage of the economy over that span—average annual growth of 1.9% compared with 2.5%.

Gee, who would have guessed that bigger government leads to less growth? I’m shocked, shocked.

And who would have guessed that the OECD produces research with dodgy numbers? Knock me over with a feather!

Though I must say that the sloppiness in this inequality study is trivial compared to the junk-riddled methodology of the OECD’s poverty study, which actually purported to show that there’s more deprivation in America than there is in poor nations such as Greece, Turkey, and Portugal.

Which gives me an opening to highlight what I wrote about this OECD study. I suggested that “the bureaucracy’s ‘research’ now is more akin to talking points from the Obama White House” and highlighted some utterly preposterous conclusions of the study.

We’re supposed to believe that Spain, France, and Ireland have enjoyed better growth. I guess France’s stagnation is just a figment of our collective imaginations. And those bailouts for Spain and Ireland must have been a bad dream or something like that.

Some folks may question whether the OECD is really a leftist bureaucracy. Or at least they may wonder whether I go overboard in my criticisms.

For what it’s worth, I do give the crowd in Paris some praise when good research is produced.

But imagine that the OECD is a student who gets a B on one test and fails every other exam. At some point, isn’t it safe to assume we have a remedial pupil?

And here’s some very strong proof. It turns out that the OECD is even further to the left than the Obama Administration.

I’m not joking. Check out these excerpts from an item in Politico’s Morning Tax.

…the U.S. is definitely not on the same page as its allies. The split was apparent at last week’s OECD conference in Washington to discuss the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) plan… Robert Stack, deputy assistant secretary for international affairs at Treasury, suggested that the OECD’s Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) project was being driven less by a desire for sound policy than by foreign countries’ domestic politics and a desire for more revenue.

I wrote just last week that the BEPS plan is a naked revenue grab by high-tax nations and I find it remarkable that a senior official at the Obama Treasury Department agrees with me.

P.S. This isn’t the first time the Obama Administration has been to the right of the OECD.

P.P.S. Speaking of remedial students, I wrote back in 2011 that ending the flow of American tax dollars to the OECD (the biggest share of the bureaucracy’s budgetcomes from the United States) should be a test of whether Republicans are serious about cutting back on wasteful government spending.

At what point do I change the GOP grade from “incomplete” to “F”?

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The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

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