RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Republican candidates for president will gather on a stage in Cleveland, Ohio, tomorrow evening for the first official debates of the 2016 campaign — the main event at 9 p.m. Eastern time for the ten candidates with the highest standing in the polls, and an earlier debate, at 5:30 p.m., for the others. Even with not all the candidates on the stage at one time, each candidate can expect no more than ten to twelve minutes to make his or her case. During that time, we can expect the moderators to cover the usual ground: ISIL and the War on Terror, immigration, taxes, gay marriage, Obamacare. In response, most of the candidates will regurgitate their talking points and stump speeches. The outcome will likely be decided on the basis of who makes the best quip or the biggest gaffe.

But there are some other, more basic questions that I wish someone would ask.

Sara Harberson, former associate dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania and dean of admissions and financial aid at Franklin & Marshall, tells “The Truth About ‘Holistic’ College Admissions” in a Los Angeles Times op-ed last month that I would have missed but for the ever-watchful eyes of Roger Clegg.

But not to worry if you missed it, too. She doesn’t say anything that you don’t already know. For example:

Nowadays nobody on an admissions committee would dare use the term racial “quotas,” but racial stereotyping is alive and well. And although colleges would never admit students based on “quotas,” they fearlessly will “sculpt” the class with race and gender percentages in mind.

With Hillary Clinton’s multiple misdeeds coming to light and causing her political problems, reflected in her declining support in the polls, both she and the Democratic party have reason to be concerned. But both of them may yet be rescued by “The Donald,” who can turn out to be their Trump card.

Donald Trump has virtually no chance of becoming even the Republican party’s candidate in 2016, much less being elected President of the United States.

The reason is not hard to understand: Republican voters simply do not trust him, as the polls show. Nor is there any reason why they should trust him, given his chameleon-like changes in the past.

Why then is he the “front-runner” in the polls?

One reason is arithmetic. When there is a small army of Republican candidates, each with a tiny set of supporters, anyone with enough name recognition to get the support of a fifth or a fourth of the Republicans polled stands out, even if twice that many Republicans say they would never vote for him.

When both kinds of Republicans are counted, Donald Trump is both the “front-runner” and the leading pariah. The danger is not that he will get the nomination, but that his irresponsible talk will become the image of the Republican party, and that his bombast will drown out more sober voices that need to be heard, thereby making it harder to select the best candidate.

This week President Obama is hailing his Clean Power Plan as “the single most important step America has ever taken in the fight against global climate change.” Obama is posing as the environment’s savior, just as he did in 2008, when he promised his presidency would mark “the moment when … the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Seven years later, that messianic legacy is in doubt. Obama’s Clean Power Plan has never had legislative support, even when his own party controlled both houses of Congress. Now he’s trying to impose it without Congress, an audacious ploy his old Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe condemns as “burning the Constitution.”

As his presidency wanes, Obama is desperately burnishing his eco-credentials with environmental zealots like Pope Francis and the leftists at the U.N. and in the European Union. But here at home, his plan would be a disaster economically, which explains its failure in Congress. Hillary Clinton is pledging to support the plan, while Republicans vying for their party’s presidential nomination are vowing to oppose it. The Clean Power Plan will be a fiercely debated issue in coal-consuming swing states like Ohio, Illinois, and Pennsylvania — where the race for the White House is usually decided.

When shouting “Death to America” gets billions of dollars flowing into your coffers.

Iran’s rulers are laughing all the way to the bank as they contemplate the many billions of dollars that will soon begin to flow into their coffers. When not shouting “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” they are also laughing at us for being out-maneuvered by Iran’s negotiators on every one of their key demands.

“The structure of the sanctions that the US had built based on the UN Security Council’s resolutions was destroyed,” Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told a meeting of Iran’s Strategic Council on Foreign Relations in Tehran on August 3rd, according to the “semi-official” Fars news agency. “And like the 1990s, when no other country complied with the US sanctions against Iran, no one will accept the return of the sanctions (in the future).”

Is there a difference? To the perpetrators, no. To the societies from which the murderers came, the difference is a chasm.

When the Israeli government announced it had suspects, one suspect’s mother said, “I will be proud of him until Judgment Day. If… it is true… My boys are all righteous, pious and pure. The goal of my children is the triumph of Islam.”

This weekend in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, thousands of Israelis protested the murder of the baby Ali Saad Dawabshe.

It is almost ghoulish to compare the deaths of children in war. They were not responsible for the situation in which they found themselves, and they did not deserve their fate. In a healthy society, such deaths are mourned without regard for the children’s nationality, or the politics and misdeeds of their parents.

Are we actually being told, then, that the only way to prevent Iran from having nuclear bombs is to let it have them? If not now, in 10-15 years? And with intercontinental ballistic missiles that can reach the U.S.?

Even supporters of the deal say that yes, at the ten year mark, Iran will be able to breakout and build a weapon’s worth of nuclear fuel in a year or less — in other words, have nuclear bombs.

Iran has never come clean with the IAEA — or anyone else — about its nuclear activities. These were discovered not by IAEA inspectors but by the U.S. and allied law enforcement and intelligence services, as well as by dissident groups within Iran. Are we actually assuming that Iran, under this new deal, will now come clean?

Thus under the July deal the U.S. may not (technically) know if Iran, after a breakout, has a nuclear weapon arsenal until Iran either tests a nuclear warhead or explodes it in an American or Israeli city. Then, of course, the discovery will be “too late” to do anything about, especially if the U.S. is helping Iran with technology assistance designed to prevent attacks on Iran’s nuclear sites.

How Obama is using cloak-and-dagger techniques to hide an unpopular, dangerous policy from the public.

President Obama is surreptitiously colluding with radical anti-growth environmentalists to force ideologically driven carbon-emission controls on the energy industry that will devastate the U.S. economy, congressional investigators have discovered.

As the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) drew up rules aimed at limiting carbon emissions from power-generation plants, “key stakeholders — including the American public — had little to no influence over the debate while powerful environmental activist groups were given unprecedented access to and influence over administration officials,” the Washington Times reported yesterday.

A neurosurgeon with an incredible biography but no real experience in governing, 5 Governors all experienced, Walker the most impressive, 3 Senators- Rubio and Cruz and Rand Paul and one buffoon who leads in the polls (so far).

Fox News has announced the ten participants in its primetime Republican debate on Thursday night –Donald Trump; Gov. Jeb Bush; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker; former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee; retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson; Texas Sen. Ted Cruz; Florida Sen. Marco Rubio; Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul; New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie; and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

With all the attention Obama’s disastrous Iran nuclear deal is getting, it is easy to overlook yet another of the president’s many foreign policy success stories: the Taliban.

It is under new leadership, and has strengthened its ties with the decidedly un-“decimated” al-Qaeda terror network.

Recall that just as Obama “ended” the war in Iraq by ceding our hard-won gains to Iran and the Islamic State (the former a longtime al-Qaeda ally, the latter the spawn of al-Qaeda in Iraq), the president is similarly “ending” the war in Afghanistan by consigning the country to the resurgent Taliban.