RUTHFULLY YOURS

Well, we did learn two things from the CBS Democratic debate Saturday night:

1. Bernie Sanders thinks climate change causes terrorism.

How this piece of magic works, he didn’t get to explain, so we can only imagine. Maybe it ‘s a hot desert wind making normal people go to extremes, as in the famous opening of Raymond Chandler’s “Red Wind”:

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Ana’s that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

That global warming — it will get you every time. ISIS-shmicis. Forget Islam having anything to do with it. Bernie doesn’t even want to pronounce the word. But neither, it seems, do any Democrats. I have a suggestion for them. When talking about World War II, don’t, under any circumstances, refer to our enemies as Nazis. It’s terribly un-PC. Call them National Socialists… oh, wait.

2. Hillary Clinton wants to raise the 10,000 Syrian refugees Obama intends to admit to 65,000. BUT…and this is important… none are to be allowed within fifty miles of Chappaqua.

The current intramural battle over immigration policy among GOP 2016 hopefuls, a most welcome and most necessary controversy, is a useful example of why the Senate is such a tough place from which to run for president. Few senators make it — only John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama in the last 60 years — and only after short Capitol Hill stints that yield thin voting records.

The reason is clear: To be a good legislator and to move public opinion on important issues, a senator sometimes must make proposals that, taken out of context, can distort the senator’s overarching position, creating the illusion that he favors what he clearly opposes, and vice versa.

No one should know this better than Senator Marco Rubio. Yet Rubio, a major culprit when it comes to foolish immigration policy, is now straining to defend his walk on the wild side by misrepresenting the record of his rival, Senator Ted Cruz. It’s an ironic turnabout for Rubio, who recently drew plaudits for slamming another rival, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, over his misleading critique of Rubio’s Senate record.

Donald Trump called Ben Carson “pathological” several times yesterday — even comparing the pathology to child molesters — and asked “how stupid are the people of Iowa” to be favoring the neurosurgeon in polls.

In a CNN interview, Trump first said he likes Carson and gets along with him well. “I’m not bringing up anything that’s not in his book,” he said.

“And you know, when he says he went after his mother and wanted to hit her in the head with a hammer, that bothers me. I mean, that’s pretty bad. When he says he’s pathological and he says that in the book, I don’t say that. And again, I’m not saying anything. I’m not saying anything other than pathological is a very serious disease and he said he’s pathological,” Trump continued. “Somebody said he has a pathological disease. Other people said he said in the book and I haven’t seen it. I know it’s in the book — that he has got a pathological temper or temperament. That’s a big problem because you don’t cure that. That’s like, you know, I could say, they’ve say you don’t cure — as an example, a child molester, you don’t cure these people.”

“You don’t cure a child molester. There’s no cure for it. Pathological, there’s no cure for that. Now, I didn’t say it. He said it in his book. So when I hear somebody’s pathological, when somebody says, I went after my mother with — and he’s saying it about himself with a hammer and hit her in the head, I say, whoa. I never did. You never did. I don’t know anybody that ever did personally. But that’s a big statement. When he says he hit a friend of his in the face with a lock — with a padlock right in the face, I say, whoa, that’s pretty bad. And when he said he stabbed somebody with a knife but it hit a belt buckle, I know a lot about knives and belt buckles.”

Hillary Clinton has promised to continue the Obama Administration’s carbon cleanse of the U.S. economy, which is proving to be politically toxic in coal country. So this week she rolled out a plan for government to rescue the coal miners who the government has put out of work.

Coal production nationwide has declined by about 15% since 2008. A Duke University study in April estimated that 50,000 coal jobs were lost between 2008 and 2012, with Appalachia, Utah and Colorado among the biggest victims. Unemployment in eastern Kentucky exceeds 8% and is in the double digits in southern West Virginia.

Shale fracking for natural gas has contributed to the carnage, but the Environmental Protection Agency has assisted by promulgating rules on mercury emissions and ash disposal. The Administration’s new Clean Power Plan will finish off the industry, which still accounts for about a third of U.S. electric generation and two-thirds in Ohio and Iowa.

Several coal companies are slouching toward bankruptcy, which could cause retirees and laid-off workers to lose health coverage. In May Patriot Coal filed for Chapter 11 for the second time in three years. Thousands of workers fear they’ll be forced into Medicaid or the ObamaCare exchanges.

Donald Trump, who leapt to the front of the Republican presidential field with his tough immigration stance, promises to deport every illegal immigrant residing in the country in less than two years, with the help of a “deportation force” — and, naturally, critics are warning of jackbooted thugs and midnight raids. There is no need for either. Much of our problem can be resolved through more modest — and less inflammatory — measures.

Estimates from the Center for Migration Studies and the Pew Research Center show that, of the 11 million illegal immigrants currently residing in the United States, approximately 2.5 million arrived after Barack Obama’s inauguration. Yet the overall number of illegal immigrants in the country has remained fairly static, meaning that illegal immigrants have been coming and going in about equal numbers. Why? Because, contrary to much political rhetoric, many illegal immigrants are not here to stay, and so are very sensitive to incentives: When the prospect of profitable work outweighs the risk of falling afoul of law enforcement, they come; when it doesn’t, they leave.

Being attacked by Donald Trump is one of journalism’s more exhilarating experiences. We got the treatment on Thursday when he took to various TV shows and Twitter with his usual soft sell and demanded corrections, apologies and resignations after our editorial reference to his trade policy. We haven’t had this much fun since Eliot Spitzer left office.

Mr. Trump isn’t upset that we called him potentially the Republican Party’s “most protectionist nominee since Hoover.” Perhaps he took that as a compliment. He’s mad because he says we said that he didn’t know that China isn’t part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

But we didn’t say that. We wrote that judging from his debate remarks Tuesday “it wasn’t obvious that he has any idea what’s in” TPP. It still isn’t. Here’s the debate transcript after Mr. Trump was asked by moderator Gerard Baker about the candidate’s opposition to TPP and why he would “reverse more than 50 years of U.S. trade policy”?

Mr. Trump: “The TPP is a horrible deal. It is a deal that is going to lead to nothing but trouble. It’s a deal that was designed for China to come in, as they always do, through the back door and totally take advantage of everyone. It’s 5,600 pages long, so complex that nobody’s read it. It’s like ObamaCare; nobody ever read it. They passed it; nobody read it. And look at the mess we have right now. And it will be repealed.

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama’s biggest campaign donors are mostly sitting on the sidelines of the 2016 Democratic presidential primary so far, not opening their wallets in support of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders.

Almost four-fifths of the people who gave the 2012 maximum $5,000 to the president’s re-election committee hadn’t donated to a presidential candidate by Oct. 1, a Wall Street Journal analysis of federal campaign finance records found.

In interviews ahead of this Saturday’s Democratic debate in Iowa, donors said Mrs. Clinton, the party’s front-runner, hadn’t motivated them to give the way Mr. Obama and previous Democratic candidates had. Still others said they are put off by the larger role of super PACs and that their donations to candidates, which are limited in this election cycle to $5,400 for the eventual nominee, just don’t matter much anymore.
“I’m just not ready for Hillary yet,” said Robert Finnell, a Rome, Ga., lawyer who gave the maximum allowed contribution to Mr. Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns and gave significant sums to 2008 hopeful John Edwards and 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry. “It’s not that I don’t think she’s competent—she is competent, she’s just hard to like.”

The donors’ reluctance could be a troubling trend for Mrs. Clinton. They are some of the easiest prospective contributors to identify, given that their names are on Mr. Obama’s campaign disclosure reports, and that they’ve already made a habit of cutting checks to politicians.

In the fourth televised GOP primary debate last night, eight Republican candidates for president laid out their positions as they sparred over taxes, immigration, government spending, and to a lesser extent, foreign policy.

They clashed heatedly over what it means to be a conservative and the immigration issue, particularly amnesty.

The debate venue was the same storied Milwaukee auditorium where Theodore Roosevelt gave a 90-minute speech Oct. 14, 1912 after being shot in the chest by a deranged saloonkeeper. Roosevelt, who served as president from September 1901 to March 1909 as a Republican, was campaigning at the time for president on the Progressive Party ticket.

Last night’s debate was — fortunately — less eventful.

It was also the best, most business-like of the four GOP primary debates so far.

It stood in stark contrast to the televised firing squad 10 Republican contenders faced on CNBC on Oct. 28. That was the debacle of a debate in which moderators acted like prosecutors cross-examining hostile witnesses and obnoxiously playing candidates off against each other.

Unlike left-wing CNBC charlatan John Harwood, the moderators of Fox Business Network last night recognized it was their job to elicit answers and facilitate constructive conversations, not oversee gladiatorial combat. FBN anchors Maria Bartiromo and Neil Cavuto, along with Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Gerard Baker, were well-behaved, reasonable, and professional. (The main debate transcript is available here.)

One of the evening’s more interesting multi-debater exchanges came when Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) trolled Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) over foreign policy and child tax credits.

After Baker told Rubio his tax plan includes a significant expansion of child tax credits that would raise the incomes of struggling parents, the moderator asked if there was “a risk you’re just adding another expensive entitlement program to an already over-burdened federal budget?”

Rubio stressed the paramountcy of the family in American society and said he was “proud” of his child tax credit increase, which he said was part of a “pro-family tax plan” that would strengthen the family unit.

Paul interjected, perhaps thinking of himself an an ideological gatekeeper like William F. Buckley Jr., saying,

We have to decide what is conservative and what isn’t conservative. Is it fiscally conservative to have a trillion-dollar expenditure? We’re not talking about giving people back their tax money. He’s talking about giving people money they didn’t pay. It’s a welfare transfer payment … Add that to Marco’s plan for $1 trillion in new military spending, and you get something that looks, to me, not very conservative.

Rubio shot back, saying “this is their money” that Americans have paid. Using an argument often employed by left-wingers, the senator said his program would allow parents to “invest” in their children, “in the future of America and strengthening your family … [the] most important institution in society.”

Paul replied, “Nevertheless, it’s not very conservative, Marco.”

Rubio said he wanted to rebuild the military and slammed Paul as “a committed isolationist.” Rubio added, “I’m not. I believe the world is a stronger and a better place, when the United States is the strongest military power in the world.”

Milwaukee — It was, at last, a debate about policy. If the emergence of Donald Trump and the efforts of previous debate moderators to pit candidates against each other have forestalled the policy arguments that typically characterize Republican primary contests, Fox Business Network’s debate on Tuesday brought them to the fore.

Less than three months before voters go to the polls in January, the candidates clashed on some of the major issues that have divided the Republican party over the past six years: The night’s big moments did not come from one candidate trashing another, but from policy exchanges, first on immigration and then on defense spending. After months of headlines dominated by a real-estate mogul-cum-reality-television star, it was a welcome change of pace.

The event was steady and studious, and the upshot was predictable — an evening that did little to alter the trajectories of individual candidates or the broader narrative of the race. In the course of two hours there were no knockout punches, no major gaffes, no made-for-opposition-research moments. Each of the candidates went silent for a stretch, but none completely disappeared as in previous debates — perhaps because the stage had shrunk to only eight, the smallest primetime grouping to date.