Sorry if this is a dupe or I double posted....

http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/the-buzz-florida-politics/jeb-bush-calls-for-more-hawkish-us-role-abroad-while-distancing-himself/2218076

UPDATE: Jeb Bush's remarks began around 1 p.m. Look after the jump for a live video stream provided via YouTube. (at link above)

Jeb Bush will sharply criticize President Barack Obama for an “inconsistent and indecisive” foreign policy during a speech today in Chicago, while trying to distance himself from his brother and father.

“I admire their service to the nation and the difficult decisions they had to make,” Bush will say of his brother and father, according to excerpts provided by his Right to Rise political committee. “But I am my own man, and my views are shaped by my own thinking and own experience. Each president learns from those who came before — their principles, their adjustments. One thing we know is this: Every president inherits a changing world and changing circumstances.”

Nonetheless, the likely 2016 presidential candidate will still espouse a more hawkish outlook. He may soon enter a tough GOP primary process in which his conservative credentials will be tested over Common Core and immigration, so the bullish talk could also help allay concerns on the right.

“My goal today is to explore how America can regain its leadership in the world,” he will say. "I have doubts whether this administration believes American power is such a force. Under this administration, we are inconsistent and indecisive. We have lost the trust and the confidence of our friends. We definitely no longer inspire fear in our enemies. The great irony of the Obama presidency is this: Someone who came to office promising greater engagement with the world has left America less influential in the world.”

But in the excerpts, at least, Bush sidesteps tougher questions about the wars started under his brother, both of which have caused many U.S. casualties and are unpopular with the public. Asked about foreign policy during an event last week in Florida, Bush said he would not “relitigate” the past, a stance sure to be tested on the campaign trail.

Bush will give his speech before the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. It begins at 12:30 p.m. eastern and can be viewed via live stream.

Meanwhile, Reuters got a first look at some of his advisers:

"The list includes people representing a wide spectrum of ideological views in the Republican Party, from the pragmatic to the hawkish. It includes James Baker, known for his pragmatism in key roles during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush presidencies, and former World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, a hawk as deputy defense secretary who was an architect of George W. Bush's Iraq policy. Among others are two former secretaries of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge and Michael Chertoff, former national security adviser Stephen Hadley and a deputy national security adviser, Meghan O'Sullivan, as well as two former CIA directors, Porter Goss and Michael Hayden.

Others include Paula Dobriansky, a former undersecretary of state, Kristen Silverberg, a former U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Lincoln Diaz-Balart, who was a longtime member of the House of Representatives from Florida, and John Hannah who was Vice President Dick Cheney's national security adviser."

The following are the full excerpts as released by Right to Rise, a committee that is serving as a campaign in waiting for Bush:

Jeb Bush will sharply criticize President Barack Obama for an “inconsistent and indecisive” foreign policy during a speech today in Chicago while trying to distance himself from his brother and father.

“I admire their service to the nation and the difficult decisions they had to make,” Bush will say, according to excerpts provided by his Right to Rise political committee. “But I am my own man, and my views are shaped by my own thinking and own experience.

“Each president learns from those who came before — their principles, their adjustments. One thing we know is this: Every president inherits a changing world and changing circumstances.”

Nonetheless, the likely 2016 presidential candidate will still call for the more hawkish posture shared by presidents George H.W. and George W. Bush. “My goal today is to explore how America can regain its leadership in the world,” he will say.

“I have doubts whether this administration believes American power is such a force. Under this administration, we are inconsistent and indecisive. We have lost the trust and the confidence of our friends. We definitely no longer inspire fear in our enemies. The great irony of the Obama presidency is this: Someone who came to office promising greater engagement with the world has left America less influential in the world.”

In the excerpts, at least, Bush sidestepped tougher questions about the wars started under his brother, both of which have exacted many casualties and are unpopular with the public. Asked about foreign policy during an event last week in Florida, Bush said he would not “relitigate” the past.

Bush will give his speech before the Chicago Council on Global Affairs . It begins at 13:30 p.m. eastern and can be viewed via live stream.

My goal today is to explore how America can regain its leadership in the world. And why that leadership is more necessary than ever. American leadership projected consistently and grounded in principle has been a benefit to the world.
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I have doubts whether this administration believes American power is such a force. Under this administration, we are inconsistent and indecisive. We have lost the trust and the confidence of our friends. We definitely no longer inspire fear in our enemies.
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The great irony of the Obama presidency is this: Someone who came to office promising greater engagement with the world has left America less influential in the world.
...
The United States has an undiminished ability to shape events and build alliances of free people. We can project power and enforce peaceful stability in far-off areas of the globe. To do so, I believe we need to root our foreign policy in a set of priorities and principles.
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I also have been lucky to have a father and a brother who both have shaped America’s foreign policy from the Oval Office. I recognize that as a result, my views will often be held up in comparison to theirs — sometimes in contrast to theirs. I love my father and my brother. I admire their service to the nation and the difficult decisions they had to make. But I am my own man — and my views are shaped by my own thinking and own experiences. Each president learns from those who came before — their principles … their adjustments. One thing we know is this: Every president inherits a changing world … and changing circumstances.
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The transformation of our economy will also send a powerful message about the American system: free people, free markets, free ideas … implemented faithfully… will set a powerful example of what’s possible to the rest of the world.
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Our words and our actions must match — so that the entire world knows we say what we mean and mean what we say. The administration talks, but the words fade. They draw red lines … then erase them. With grandiosity, they announce resets and disengage. Hashtag campaigns replace actual diplomacy and engagement. Personal diplomacy and maturity is replaced by leaks and personal disparagement.
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The president’s word needs to be backed by the greatest military power in the world. … The president should call on leaders of both parties to fix the budget and address the shortfalls in our defense spending. He should show leadership — and commitment to solving the problem.
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Having a military that is equal to any threat is not only essential for the commander in chief … it also makes it less likely that we will need to put our men and women in uniform in harm’s way. Because I believe, fundamentally, that weakness invites war … and strength encourages peace.
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The threats of the 21st century will not be the same as the threats of the 20th… and it is critical that we adapt to meet this challenge.
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America does not have the luxury of withdrawing from the world — our security, our prosperity and our values demand that we remain engaged and involved in often distant places. We have no reason to apologize for our leadership and our interest in serving the cause of global security, global peace and human freedom.

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all this new talk, JEB did say before he thought brother GW was right and did good on Iraq!

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/newsmax-pledged-1-million-clinton-foundation_858504.html

Conservative website Newsmax has pledged a very large donation to the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, a new report in the Wall Street Journal states.

"Newsmax, a conservative news organization, last year pledged $1 million to the Clinton Foundation over a five-year period, according to a spokesman for Chris Ruddy, the organization’s CEO. Mr. Ruddy has been friends with the Clintons since 2007," reports the Journal.

"Through a spokesman, he said the donation wasn't tantamount to an endorsement of Mrs. Clinton’s potential campaign, though he thinks she would 'make a great presidential candidate.'"
Ruddy himself has even written a blog post for the Clinton Foundation website. The topic? "Public-Private Partnerships Advance Health Care in Mozambique."

"Christopher Ruddy is a noted journalist and entrepreneur. He currently serves as CEO and President of Newsmax Media, one of the nation's leading online news media companies. In 1998, Chris founded Newsmax Media, a multimedia publishing company that publishes online and offline content in the fields of news, politics, health and finance. Newsmax.com is consistently ranked as one of the country's most trafficked news websites," reads his bio on the foundation's website.

Daniel Halper is author of Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine.
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Please, follow the money.....

by
Robert Hackett
February 13, 2015, 12:31 PM EST

With transparency in mind, the former Florida governor released his email correspondence from his term in office. With it: personally identifiable information of his constituents.
Earlier this week, former Florida governor Jeb Bush released online a cache of emails sent and received by his personal email address during his time in office. His attempt at transparency turned sour after it was realized that some emails contained personally identifiable information of Floridians, including social security numbers, names, and dates of birth.

Todd Feinman, CEO of data protection firm Identity Finder, ran an analysis of the data and determined that nearly 13,000 unique social security numbers were released. His software, which uses natural language processing to identify sensitive information through contextual clues, found that about 12,500 of those were contained in a spreadsheet embedded in a PowerPoint slide attached to an email dated October 2003.
Kristy Campbell, a spokesperson for Bush, could not confirm that number.

When Feinman and his team first inspected the heavily flagged email, they were unable to locate the data. Initially suspecting it might have been a bug in the code—they had just released a new version of their software—they eventually determined that the information was contained in so-called hidden Excel columns, obscured from view.
Bush’s email address, along with about 50 others (including aol.com and hotmail.com addresses), had been copied on that email. The spreadsheet in question, as the AP reports, concerned “tracking the number of people on a state family service waiting list.” The relevant slide is titled, “Developmental Disabilities Home and Community-Based Waiver Waitlist Data.”

“We’ve redacted the emails that were brought to our attention that contained personally identifying information,” Campbell said. Bush’s team has also removed the downloadable archive, raw data “.pst” files. (Another site, americanbridgepac.org, which hosted the data since December, took the files down Thursday.)

There are, however, social security numbers represented in a non-standard format (e.g. not XXX-XX-XXXX) still visible on copies posted to the web on jebbushemails.com. Feinman estimates that there are 100 still publicly accessible.

A May letter obtained by Fortune shows that Bush’s attorney had asked the Florida Department of State to scrub sensitive information from the archive of jeb@jeb.org, so that the emails could be released:

We hope these emails will be available permanently to the public, provided the records are first reviewed by state officials in accordance with with Florida Statute to ensure information exempt from public disclosure is redacted before release, including social security numbers of Florida citizens who contacted Governor Bush for assistance; personal identifying information related to victims of crime or abuse; confidential law enforcement intelligence; and other information made confidential or exempt by applicable law.

“Our site contains the public records made available by the State of Florida,” Campbell said. (Florida’s “sunshine law” opens up the records of public officials by request.)

“The Department of State is currently reviewing our process for redacting confidential information from documents given to the State Archives,” said Florida Department of State spokesperson Mark Ard.

http://fortune.com/2015/02/13/jeb-bush-social-security-numbers/
now let it be known, he's too stupid to be the president!

Read more: http://www.thepoliticalinsider.com/find-out-which-two-liberal-congresswomen-partied-it-up-at-the-grammys-on-sunday/#ixzz3RYNN4aOV

Grammys
Look who was spotted at the Grammys over the weekend – two of the liberal congresswomen in the country:

They were walking the red carpet with the likes of Beyoncé, Jay Z, Rihanna and Kanye West.

But congresswomen Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Sheila Jackson Lee caused more of a storm than the majority of the celebrities with their own attendance at the star-studded bash.
Both Democrats, who are outspoken over wanting to close the wealth gap between rich and poor, sparked calls of ‘hypocrisy’ from disgruntled voters with their appearance alongside the Hollywood elite.

Within minutes of being spotted, people took to social media to question why they were there.

Facebook group 100 Percent FED Up wrote: ‘Inequality queens living it up at the Grammy Awards’ sparking angry backlash.


Read more: http://www.thepoliticalinsider.com/find-out-which-two-liberal-congresswomen-partied-it-up-at-the-grammys-on-sunday/#ixzz3RYNYt0kp
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Gads...you gotta see the pic!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/02/10/feds-poised-to-withdraw-longstanding-warnings-about-dietary-cholesterol/

Time to put eggs back on the menu?

The nation’s top nutrition advisory panel has decided to drop its caution about eating cholesterol-laden food, a move that could undo almost 40 years of government warnings about its consumption.

The group’s finding that cholesterol in the diet need no longer be considered a “nutrient of concern” stands in contrast to the committee’s findings five years ago, the last time it convened. During those proceedings, as in previous years, the panel deemed the issue of excess cholesterol in the American diet a public health concern.
The finding follows an evolution of thinking among many nutritionists who now believe that, for healthy adults, eating foods high in cholesterol may not significantly affect the level of cholesterol in the blood or increase the risk of heart disease.

The greater danger in this regard, these experts believe, lies not in products such as eggs, shrimp or lobster, which are high in cholesterol, but in too many servings of foods heavy with saturated fats, such as fatty meats, whole milk, and butter.

The new view on cholesterol in food does not reverse warnings about high levels of “bad” cholesterol in the blood, which have been linked to heart disease. Moreover, some experts warned that people with particular health problems, such as diabetes, should continue to avoid cholesterol-rich diets.

While Americans may be accustomed to conflicting dietary advice, the change on cholesterol comes from the influential Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, the group that provides the scientific basis for the “Dietary Guidelines.” That federal publication has broad effects on the American diet, helping to determine the content of school lunches, affecting how food manufacturers advertise their wares, and serving as the foundation for reams of diet advice.

The panel laid out the cholesterol decision in December, at its last meeting before it writes a report that will serve as the basis for the next version of the guidelines. A video of the meeting was later posted online and a person with direct knowledge of the proceedings said the cholesterol finding would make it to the group’s final report, which is due within weeks.

After Marian Neuhouser, chair of the relevant subcommittee, announced the decision to the panel at the December meeting, one panelist appeared to bridle.
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Get off the statins! they weaken your muscles, which your heart is one!

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-10/it-s-surprisingly-simple-to-get-your-house-off-google-street-view?cmpid=BBD021015&alcmpid=

Like your privacy? So does Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, as we see here.

Just one question: Why does his house vanish into thin air when you drive past it?

At least, that's what happens in Google Street View, the Google Maps feature that lets you switch to a panoramic view of a building or block.




Google will let anyone blur the image of his or her home through a simple process. You find the image you want blurred, click a button to report a problem, and drag a rectangle over the offending photo. Google asks you what type of image you want obscured and offers four options: a face, a license plate, a home, and "Other." The company promises to review requests promptly.

But here's the thing: Chez Zuckerberg, there is no blurring. Instead, Google catapults you past the home like it got sucked into a black hole.

Did the 30-year-old billionaire get special treatment?

Google offered no comment on the space-time anomaly. Facebook didn't respond to requests for comment.

To compile its Street View images, Google dispatches camera-mounted vehicles across entire urban grids, so there's probably a photo of your front door posted online. That bothers some people more than others. Germans, notably, have been wary of Street View, prompting Google to stop collecting images of German streets years ago.

Paul McCartney and Jimmy Page are said to be among the celebrities who have had their houses obscured. Zuckerberg himself became real estate blog fodder last fall, when Street View photographers documented construction work on his San Francisco pied-à-terre.

If you're thinking of filing for a blur, though, note this warning from Google: "Once we apply blurring to an image, it is permanent."
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Just took care of mine! I'm on a corner, so I had to do it twice for two home shots!

He should be F I R E D ! I will not watch NBC nooze until he is fired. So there.

And there is probably more...

http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/carl-hiaasen/article8836085.html

As a monster storm roared up the northeastern seaboard last week, the White House announced plans to open a wide swath of offshore waters to gas and oil exploration. Nice timing.

Although drilling is years away, future rigs in the Atlantic would lie in the path not only of fierce winter clippers but also hurricanes, presenting the year-round potential for devastating winds and pounding seas.

The risk doesn’t trouble the oil companies or the governors of Virginia, Georgia and the Carolinas, all eager for a piece of the action.

Already the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe of 2010 is a fading memory, except for the families of the 11 workers who died and the hundreds of thousands of Gulf Coast residents whose lives were upended. We’re told that the BP disaster was a jarring wake-up for the energy industry. Today the drilling technology is much better, the companies boast, and so are the safety measures.

Trust us, they say. Something that terrible can’t happen again.

Which is what they said after the tanker Exxon Valdez dumped its load in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, polluting a thousand miles of shoreline. Twenty-six years later, there’s still crusted oil on the beaches.

After the BP rig blew up off the Louisiana coast, crude oil gushed for almost three months before the company could cap the pipe. Day after day, underwater video cameras let the whole nauseated country watch the poisoning of the Gulf of Mexico.

Nobody knows how much oil really leaked out, but BP’s early estimates proved absurdly (and predictably) low. The U.S. government says the amount was at least 210 million gallons, much of which is still suspended as a spectral goo somewhere in the depths, according to many experts.

Tar-balled beaches from the Mississippi to the Florida Panhandle have been cleaned, groomed and re-cleaned to make them presentable to tourists, but the Gulf still shows signs of sickness.

In the time since the spill, marine biologists have documented more than 900 dead bottle-nosed dolphins and 500 dead sea turtles — and those are just the corpses that were found. Infant dolphins continue dying at a suspiciously elevated rate.

While some prized species of Gulf fish seem to be rebounding, life-threatening deformities are occurring in the organs of tuna and amberjack. A University of Miami study found that larval and juvenile mahi exposed to Deepwater crude were much weaker, losing up to 37 percent of their swimming strength.

The possibility of a similar calamity along the eastern seaboard hasn’t deterred the Obama administration or politicians in the lower coastal states, but it’s scaring many oceanfront municipalities with economies that rely on clean beaches and healthy, abundant seafood.

And scared they should be. One blowout is all it takes.

Fortunately, Florida was spared from Obama’s offshore-lease plan, thanks to Sen. Bill Nelson and others who don’t suffer from Deepwater Horizon amnesia.

Energy-industry lobbyists insist that oil spills are extremely rare, but that’s not true. According to the Associated Press, at least 73 domestic pipeline-related spills happened in 2014, an 87-percent jump since 2009.

Two weeks ago, a pipeline broke near Glendive, Montana, spewing more than 50,000 gallons of crude into the Yellowstone River and contaminating the public water supply. A similar accident happened less than four years earlier, when an ExxonMobil pipeline ruptured and dumped 63,000 gallons into the Yellowstone near the town of Laurel.

Those spills weren’t on the nightmare scale of Exxon Valdez or the Deepwater Horizon, yet they jolted the rural communities that treasure the Yellowstone and depend on it for irrigation, drinking water and family recreation.

(Boosters of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry foreign-bound Canadian oil through Montana and elsewhere, say recent mishaps demonstrate a need for larger, more modern pipes.)

Major ocean spills don’t happen often, but the damage is long-term and far-reaching. If a major well ruptured off the Atlantic seaboard, the resulting spill could impact millions of residents by killing tourism and destroying vital fisheries.

Obama said the rig platforms must be at least 50 miles from land, not much of a comfort zone. The Deepwater Horizon was about the same distance offshore, and that wasn’t enough to spare the beaches or the marine life.

At the same time the president declared his intention to allow oil leases in the Atlantic and expand exploration of the Gulf, he said he will prohibit drilling in parts of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas in the Arctic Ocean.

These areas, explained Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, “are simply too special to develop.”

That’s another way of admitting that drilling is still very risky.

The shorelines of Virginia, Georgia and the Carolinas evidently aren’t “special” enough to deserve protection.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/carl-hiaasen/article8836085.html#storylink=cpy