RUTHFULLY YOURS

Substance only appeared after Christie, to his credit, chided the moderator for spending so much time on spats among Rand Paul, Kasich, Bush, Fiorina and the Trump….CNN questions became virtually irrelevant as Rubio, Christie and Fiorina stepped up the debate and the substance….rsk
Candidates fielded questions ranging from immigration and national security to the economy.

Attitude met substance on a California debate stage Wednesday night. And if substance didn’t win, it at least made a comeback.

For two months, the Republican presidential race has been dominated by Donald Trump, whose approach has been to boast about his leadership style—“I’m a winner, I’ll negotiate great deals”—while skirting past detailed policy discussions.

The remainder of the field was left fuming, talking about Mr. Trump and seeing media coverage flow his way. What they weren’t doing was talking about their agendas.

That changed in the debate at the Reagan presidential library in California. While many of the questions posed by the CNN moderators began with a recitation of comments Mr. Trump has made, which left him still at the center of the conversation, his competitors managed to launch a conversation that, for the first time in weeks, got beyond the Trump orbit.

Frustration, anger, despair. Allow life’s negatively charged emotions to run free long enough and they all arrive at the same place—madness. We are there.Or many of us are, in the U.S. and all over a troubled world.

Some 30% of Republican voters want as their president the former host of “Celebrity Apprentice.” About the same percentage of Democrats prefer a 74-year-old Socialist who seems to believe federal revenue is created by pixies.

The British Labour Party just cast its lot with a leader whose choice for finance minister includes among his interests “fomenting the overthrow of capitalism.” A torrent of Syrian refugees has unhinged European liberalism. Islamic State is drowning history itself in blood, while the pope is giving speeches on climate change.

Not least, the future of the slow-growth, anxiety-producing American economy is in the hands of one nice lady named Janet Yellen, who presides over what is literally a central-bank black box. Crazy.

A friend last weekend said he thought the story about the University of New Hampshire’s website publishing a bias-free language guide, which declared that use of the word “American” is “problematic,” was a hoax. Of course, it was real.

Is it trivial of me to conflate campus microaggression theory with Islamic State’s barbarism? I don’t think so. Because it is when people start to conclude that all of this stuff has rolled into a huge, spinning, out-of-control ball of incomprehension that it becomes madness.

American politics among both parties is in a grim temper, and the new estimates of income and poverty for 2014 that the Census Bureau published on Wednesday help explain why. The report is a portrait of economic stagnation.

Real median household income—the exact halfway point of the earnings distribution—was statistically identical to the 2013 median. The $53,657 for 2014 follows two consecutive years of decline in 2011 and 2012 and remains 6.5% lower than the median in 2007. About the only indicator of well being that hasn’t declined in the Obama recovery are measures of income inequality.

These trends would be less worrisome were there more mobility over time, but the Census data suggest that fewer people are moving up the pay ladder compared to earlier periods. Some 57.1% of households were cemented in the same income quintile between 2009 and 2012.

The 2016 presidential race has been notable for its surprises, and Wednesday night’s debate at the Reagan library in California may reshuffle the candidate polling order again. Our guess is that Carly Fiorina, Chris Christie and Marco Rubio helped themselves the most in a race that will see many more turns before a nominee is chosen.

Ms. Fiorina made it to the big debate stage for the first time and didn’t waste the opportunity. The former Hewlett-Packard CEO showed off her policy chops and skill in delivering a message. She does her homework.

She notably outshone the other two “outsiders” who haven’t held elected office— Donald Trump and Ben Carson. The retired pediatric neurosurgeon can be endearing but he suffered from vagueness and looked smaller than he did in the first debate. Mr. Trump was full of his usual bluster and bragging but seemed out of his depth when the debate turned toward specifics.

The TV replays will showcase Ms. Fiorina’s slyly cutting response to Mr. Trump’s insult about her looks that he later said was really aimed at her “persona.” Ms. Fiorina said, “You know, it’s interesting to me, Mr. Trump said that he heard Mr. Bush very clearly and what Mr. Bush said. I think women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said.”

Mr. Trump looked like a fighter stunned by a sharp right hand, which he was.

But the more telling exchange for presidential qualifications concerned Russia’s recent military moves in Syria. Mr. Trump offered his usual fierce generalities, saying, “Syria’s a mess. You look at what’s going on with ISIS in there, now think of this: We’re fighting ISIS. ISIS wants to fight Syria. Why are we fighting ISIS in Syria? Let them fight each other and pick up the remnants.”

He meant that as a criticism of President Obama’s strategy, but letting them fight each other is Mr. Obama’s strategy. Mr. Trump also said “I would talk to him. I would get along with him [ Vladimir Putin], I believe, and I may be wrong, in which case I’d probably have to take a different path.” So he’d get along with the Russian unless he didn’t.

Mr. Rubio then gave a far more specific analysis of Vladimir Putin’s strategy: “Well, first of all, I have an understanding of exactly what it is Russia and Putin are doing, and it’s pretty straightforward. He wants to reposition Russia, once again, as a geopolitical force. . . . He’s trying to destroy NATO . . . He is trying to replace us as the most important power broker in the Middle East.” Exactly right.

“Down Under” Australia just suffered an election defeat. Here is an up front comment by Quadrant (Australia’s eminent conservative magazine) contributor Merv Bendle which is totally applicable to our own nation:

“The path forward for conservatives is clear, now that the coup executed by Malcolm Turnbull has eradicated any illusions that the Liberal Party led by Tony Abbott could be an effective bulwark against the evermore intrusive power of the state as it seeks completely to colonize civil society and dominate every aspect of life.”

All of these areas of public policy share one crucial characteristic – they involve the mobilization of state power to impose vast new structures of tightly regulated behaviour upon society that would not otherwise have evolved of their own accord. They also necessitate massive bureaucracies based on the Promethean assumption that the almost infinite intricacies of social, economic, and ecological life can be grasped, modelled, manipulated, and directed by the apparatus of the state …..”

Which of the candidates debating tonight gets this and what corrective suggestions could be offered?

Just weeks ago, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel posed for pictures with anguished Syrian refugees and pledged to take in as many as 500,000 per year. But as Fox News reported, “uneasy critics inside the European power fear the huge influx could not only skew the nation’s demographics in a hurry, but could also include terrorists hiding among the war weary masses…ISIS has already said it planted jihadist fighters among the refugees, and some in Germany wonder why the terrorist army’s claims are not being taken more seriously.”

Now in a complete reversal, Germany has announced it is immediately introducing border controls in the south of the country, as announced Sunday by Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière.

Vox.com reports the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel claimed “urgent security reasons.”

And when you view this clip courtesy of LiveLeak, it all makes perfect sense. Do you want to invite hooligans with sticks, stones and hurling fists into your quiet cul-de-sac?

A Shiite militia has released an ISIS-style video featuring Turkish workers it took hostage. Its message is aimed at Turkey’s Islamist leader Erdogan, who is allegedly an ISIS backer and certainly a backer of assorted Sunni Islamic terror groups.

While Western media sources aren’t listing the identity of the Shiite terror group responsible, Turkish media outlets claim that Iraq raided Kata’ib Hezbollah, an Iraqi version of Hezbollah backed by Iran. The raid resulted in a firefight between what’s left of the Iraqi army and Shiite militias.

Insurgent radical Bernie Sanders’ passionate anti-American campaign is eating away at the once-commanding lead of frontrunner Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary race, according to new polling.

Although Hillary is still edging out Bernie at the national level, according to a new Monmouth University poll for the first time Bernie is now leading Hillary by 7 points in New Hampshire, the first state to vote in 2016. New Hampshire allows unaffiliated voters to participate in the primary of their choice.

Clinton still clings to a small lead among Democrats in the state. She has 43 percent support among Democrats, compared to Sanders’ 39 percent support. Sanders enjoys 49 percent support from registered Independents and new voters, way ahead of Clinton’s 26 percent.

Vice President Joe Biden, who is pondering joining the race, has 13 percent. A mere 2 percent back Martin O’Malley and Lincoln Chafee, Larry Lessig, and Jim Webb each receive 1 percent.

— America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, outstripping even Russia, Cuba, Rwanda, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Though America is home to only about one-twentieth of the world’s population, we house almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners. Since the mid 1970s, American prison populations have boomed, multiplying sevenfold while the population has increased by only 50 percent. Why?

Liberals blame racism and the “War on Drugs,” in particular long sentences for nonviolent drug crimes. This past July, in a speech to the NAACP, President Obama insisted that “the real reason our prison population is so high” is that “over the last few decades, we’ve also locked up more and more nonviolent drug offenders than ever before, for longer than ever before.” The War on Drugs, he suggested, is just a continuation of America’s “long history of inequity in the criminal-justice system,” which has disproportionately harmed minorities.

Two days later, Obama became the first sitting president to visit a prison. Speaking immediately after his visit, the president blamed mandatory drug sentencing as a “primary driver of this mass-incarceration phenomenon.” To underscore that point, he met with half a dozen inmates at the prison, all of whom had been convicted of nonviolent drug offenses. Three days earlier, he had commuted the federal prison terms of 46 nonviolent drug offenders, most of whom had been sentenced to at least 20 years’ imprisonment.

The president is echoing what liberal criminologists and lawyers have long charged. They blame our prison boom on punitive, ever-longer sentences tainted by racism, particularly for drug crimes. Criminologists coined the term “mass incarceration” or “mass imprisonment” a few decades ago, as if police were arresting and herding suspects en masse into cattle cars bound for prison. Many blame this phenomenon on structural racism, as manifested in the War on Drugs.

“I’m offering something different.”

Which Republican presidential candidate said these words? Was it Donald Trump, Ben Carson or Carly Fiorina, one of the outsiders highlighting the fact that they have never held elective office? Or maybe John Kasich, Scott Walker or Chris Christie, one of the sitting GOP governors running against Washington?
Marc Thiessen writes a weekly column for The Post on foreign and domestic policy and contributes to the PostPartisan blog. He is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. View Archive

No, it is Jeb Bush in his first campaign TV ad in the 2016 race.

Something different? Like what, a third Bush presidency?

The slogan, and the ad, epitomize everything that is wrong with his presidential campaign. In an election where outsiders are dominating, Bush’s ad screams “politician” — factory workers toiling in the background, while the candidate in his shirtsleeves talks about his experience and accomplishments in office. You could have seamlessly replaced Bush with almost any political candidate in America.