Last night there was no more Trump L’oeil , and Dr. Carson’s civility was the antidote to the pseudo conservative buffoon. Among their supporters are many “independents”- who may identify with Republicans, but they do not vote in primaries. My bet is that registered Republicans who now cheer Trump and Dr. Carson will veer to either Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio.
By most estimates they, and possibly Chris Christie were the stars in last night’s debate…..Stay tuned…..rsk
There’s no consensus on who won the latest Republican debate, but there was no question that CNBC was the big loser.
The Republican debate on CNBC was supposed to be about the economy; instead it became a debate about media bias as candidates fought moderators over dishonest questions and cynical attacks.
Instead of discussing the economic worries of a nation impoverished by two terms of the Obama Economy, Republican candidates struggled to talk about the concerns of working Americans while CNBC moderators dug up old discredited attacks from the CNN debate and fired gotcha questions at them.
Most observers would have said that there wasn’t much that could bring the Republican field together, but media bias did it. Candidate after candidate struck back at the moderators to thunderous applause from the audience. Instead of a debate between the candidates, the CNBC debate quickly became a pitched battle between the Republican contenders and the outnumbered Democratic moderators.
And by the end of the debate, CNBC moderators Becky Quick, John Harwood, and Carl Quintanilla had been outmaneuvered, beaten and humiliated by the Republican candidates in every round.
Boulder, Colo. — It was a new world order at Wednesday’s Republican presidential debate here in Boulder.
With just three months to go until the first GOP nominating contest, voters are beginning to get serious about making decisions, and candidates could not get by just introducing themselves. At this debate, they had to prove that they deserved to be on everybody’s short list.
For the first time, the outsider candidates — Donald Trump, Carly Fiorina, and Ben Carson — were largely sidelined in favor of people who conventional wisdom would say are the safer bets to win the nomination — specifically, Marco Rubio.
In previous debates, almost all the combat revolved around Donald Trump. His brash style and willingness to level uppercuts at his opponents — both on the stage and off —determined the questions, defined the narrative, and made him the most prominent voice in the debates. But the candidates descended on Boulder as the shape of the race is starting to change. Trump can no longer say he is leading in every single poll in every single state. Ben Carson has slid ahead in Iowa, and is taking up ground in national polls.
Amid growing indications that Iran does not plan to comply with the July nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA), there is a new report that the huge U.S. concessions offered to Tehran to get this agreement are already undermining global efforts against nuclear proliferation.
One of the most significant of these concessions allows Iran to continue to enrich uranium even while the JCPOA is in effect. This contradicts years of U.N. Security Council resolutions calling on Iran to halt all uranium enrichment, and previous U.S. policies that have strongly discouraged nations from beginning peaceful uranium-enrichment programs due to the ease with which they can be used to produce weapons-grade nuclear fuel.
Although Obama-administration officials deny it, this concession has been interpreted by Iran and other nations as conceding to Iran the “right” to enrich uranium. Andrew McCarthy wrote in National Review in August that this denial is hard to take seriously, since John Kerry conceded Iran’s right to enrich in 2009, when he was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The chickens have already come home to roost on the uranium-enrichment concession: The United Arab Emirates (UAE), which in 2009 signed an agreement with the U.S. barring it from pursuing uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing, is now considering renouncing these commitments.
Swing and a miss.
It was the story of the night, the story of the debate, and it might soon be the story of Jeb Bush’s campaign.
After months of flicking passively at Marco Rubio — all the while dismissing talk of their collision course, and rolling his eyes at the narrative of “master vs. apprentice” — Bush finally launched a public broadside against his friend and former protégé during the third GOP presidential debate Wednesday night.
His timing was logical and yet inopportune; CNBC’s Carl Quintanilla had been quizzing Rubio about his mounting number of missed Senate votes, which prompted a Florida newspaper to call for his resignation. Rubio responded forcefully by decrying the newspaper’s “double standard” of endorsing Democratic candidates who had similarly missed votes. The audience rallied behind Rubio, roaring with approval — and just then, Bush decided to jump in.
“Marco, when you signed up for this, this was a six-year term, and you should be showing up to work,” Bush lectured. “You can campaign [for president] or just resign and let someone else take the job. There are a lot of people living paycheck to paycheck in Florida as well. They are looking for a senator that will fight for them each and every day.”
Rubio had the most consistently impressive night. He showed his political skill with the first couple of questions, which were hostile and had him playing defense, but he parried effectively and by the end he had made each one a positive for him. At every opportunity, he brings his answers back to his message of helping Americans struggling in this economy and to Hillary Clinton (he went out of his way to hit her on Benghazi). He knows his brief extremely well and almost always sounds authoritative and well-informed. You have to think after tonight more Republicans are going to realize his potential.
Cruz had the best moment of the night in his Newt Gingrich-style slam of the moderators that he carried off very effectively–perfectly timed and delivered. It will be repeated over and over online and on the radio in the next 48 hours. He faded a bit after that, but he was as fluid as always on everything else and I imagine pleased former Ron Paul voters in Iowa with his answer on the Fed. Tonight will provide more support for the rapidly congealing conventional wisdom that it will end up as a Rubio-Cruz race (caution: the conventional wisdom used to be that only Rubio, Bush or Walker could win the nomination).
Germany’s political stability and economic sway have until recently earned Chancellor Angela Merkel unprecedented global influence and power.
Postwar Germany has become the financial powerhouse of Europe and a model nation. Give credit to German hard work and competency for the country’s continuing economic miracle.
Less appreciated is how Germany also brilliantly exploited the lucrative in-house trade framework of the European Union market — along with nearly seven decades of subsidized defense from an American-led NATO.
The result is that Germany alone now determines the fiscal future of the nearly insolvent southern European Union nations on the Mediterranean.
Germany was also the self-appointed broker between Vladimir Putin and the apprehensive EU. Merkel supposedly has watered down Putin’s military ambitions by seducing Russia with lucrative German trade.
In addition, Germany positioned itself as the moral voice of Europe. In penance for an aggressive past that had nearly wrecked Europe on three occasions, it became the loudest critic of supposed U.S. imperialism.
Those with snouts buried deepest in the climate trough are the engines whose faux science, gingered stats and withdrawn papers drive the alarmist publicity machine, but their mischief would be impotent without the support of the ill-read and ardently gullible
Many years ago, when I was a young shaver, Connie Francis had a very catchy hit – Stupid Cupid. I heard it again recently and it made me think of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW). It occurred to me that the cupidity of the climate science establishment, and its rent-seeking claque, coupled with the gullibility of the masses, has created a perfect ideological storm that no amount of common sense seems able to calm.
This is brought home to me most forcefully by a local denizen who infests the columns of our local Letters to the Editor page, regurgitating any and all alarmist claptrap he can glean from what must be an obsessive, 24/7 trawling of all the usual alarmists sources.
Still inspired by Connie Francis, my reverie ranged further afield until it conjured the mental image of a predominately normal Aussie bloke — someone like my local rag’s tireless correspondent, in fact — who one day notices a slight, dull ache in his left leg. He ignores it in the fond hope that it will go away. But it doesn’t. Eventually, our hapless hero, let’s call him Jerry, consults his GP who, after some tests, refers him to an oncologist, Dr Piltdown Mann.
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson told USA Today yesterday that the wave of Syrian refugees that will be admitted into the U.S. in the coming year will be subjected to “extensive, thorough background checks.”
But just last week, testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, FBI Director James Comey said exactly the opposite.
When asked about criticisms made by Donald Trump about the administration’s immigration policies and about concerns that ISIS may embed themselves among Syrian refugees as a “Trojan horse,” Johnson replied:
Well, in terms of the level of effort of security review that we will apply and we have applied it will be and it is extensive. Both law enforcement and homeland security have improved the process from the days when we admitted a lot of Iraqi refugees.
We now do a better job of connecting the dots, consulting all the right databases and systems that we have available to us, and the refugee review process is probably one of the most if not the most extensive thorough background checks that someone seeking to enter this country goes through.
In one moment, Senator Ted Cruz managed to do what no other candidate for the Republican nomination for president has done to this point: unite Republicans. He did so by pushing back against the ridiculously biased questions presented by CNBC moderators. The Hollywood Reporter transcribes:
“The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media,” said the U.S. senator from Texas, instantly earning applause.
“This is not a cage match,” he continued. “Look at the questions. ‘Donald Trump, are you a comic book villain;’ ‘Ben Carson, can you do math;’ ‘John Kasich, will you insult two people over here;’ ‘Marco Rubio, why don’t you resign?;’ ‘Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen?’ How about talking about the substantive issues people care about?”
Cruz contrasted moderators’ treatment of Republicans with their treatment of Democrats:
…every fawning question from the media was, “Which of you is more handsome and wise? …”
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