If Hillarious told the truth her tongue would die from shock.
It has become more and more obvious she traded the nation's security for her own. (See 1 below.)
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You would hope Obama's handling of the nation's race relations would cause a backlash among thinking members of the black community who would realize how they have been played for fools not only by Obama but by the Demwit Party for decades. Their dependency, deprivation of a sound education has not served their community well and, in fact, has simply enslaved them to a government that has has done more harm than good (ask Native Americans what government assistance has done for them) and to a Party that has demeaned their spirit, helped to break up their family and church related connections and been an affront to their conservative values.
Senator Patrick Moynihan waned about this over 50 years ago and The Republican Party gave up on them as voters assuming they would never break with the Demwits. This was not only dumb, but it also was wrong. The Republican Party has a good race relations record and a compelling message but they did not know how to get their message across so they walked away.
Republicans and members of the black community should heed Ben Carson!!! (See 2 below.)
This from my Australian cousin! They too have a similar problem. In fact all nations that flirt with misguided Socialism have a costly dependency problem. (See 2a below.)
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Fareed Zakaria is the darling of the wine and cheese crowd but, in my humble opinion, is just another empty suit whom the media trots out from time to time because he wears nice clothes and is handsome. (See 3 below.)
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If Obama knew how to negotiate and truly cared about Iranian victims... (See 4 below.)
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Krauthammer and the odds. (See 5 below.)
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Off to committee meeting of GMOA in Athens and will return late Tuesday. Will mail this upon my return.
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Dick
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1) NY Post: Would a Clinton lie to you?
Would a Clinton lie to you?
‘I remember landing under sniper fire.”
“I actually started criticizing the war in Iraq before [Obama] did.”
“We came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt.”
Hillary Clinton’s relationship with the truth has always been one of disdain, as shown by her accounts of landing in Bosnia (she was actually greeted by a child on the tarmac), her policies (she voted for the war in Iraq and only criticized it later, after the winds shifted, and after Obama) and her finances (if owning two multi-million-dollar homes is “dead broke,” then sure).
But the Democratic front-runner has outdone herself with her varying explanations for her home e-mail server. Here are her five fabrications in the shifting story of why she hid her correspondence from public records and compromised national security.
1. “I thought it would be easier to carry one device for my work.”
Truth: This was Clinton’s excuse on March 10 for why she used a personal e-mail address for official business as secretary of state — so that all her e-mails came to one device. “Looking back, it would have been probably, you know, smarter to have used two devices,” she said.
A couple weeks later, a freedom of information request by the AP discovered that Clinton used multiple electronic devices, including an iPad and a BlackBerry, to send e-mail.
2. “The server contains personal communications from my husband and me.”
Truth: If that’s true, it will come as a surprise to Bill Clinton. “The former president, who does regularly use Twitter, has sent a grand total of two e-mails during his life, both as president,” said his spokesman, Matt McKenna, in an interview published around the same time.
3. “I’ve never had a subpoena... Let’s take a deep breath here.”
Truth: Confronted by CNN’s Brianna Keilar on July 8 about why she had deleted 33,000 e-mails while under investigation, Clinton said it was common practice. Keilar pressed: Even if you’re under subpoena?
Clinton was under subpoena when the question was asked. After requesting Clinton’s e-mails in December 2014, Trey Gowdy (R-SC) got nowhere, so he sent her a subpoena in March. A Clinton lawyer, David Kendall, responded to the subpoena later that month, saying that Hillary Clinton was waiting for approval from the State Department before releasing the e-mails.
Clinton’s people argued she deleted the e-mails before she was under subpoena, so her answer was correct. Except they were deleted in December, when she already knew Congress was interested in them. Before the hard drive was erased, e-mails were handed over to the State Department — but only the ones Clinton’s staff deemed relevant. Since all the rest were deleted, no one else could check their work.
Like so many Clinton statements, while the line may be technically correct, it ignores the spirit of the complaint.
4. “I did not e-mail any classified material to anyone on my e-mail. I’m certainly well aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material.”
Truth: Another claim made during that March 10 press conference that has fallen apart. After taking a random sample of 40 of Clinton’s e-mails, the inspector general for 17 spy agencies told Congress that two contained information deemed “Top Secret.”
Clinton’s camp put out a long technical defense saying that the information wasn’t classified when she received it and that different agencies disagreed over what should be classified. But it begged the question: Why take the risk at all?
After months of resisting, Clinton agreed to hand over her home server to the FBI, though it’s been wiped clean. Experts will try to recover what they can — and if even more surprises await.
5. “Everything I did was permitted. There was no law. There was no regulation. There was nothing that did not give me the full authority to decide how I was going to communicate.”
Truth: As The Washington Post points out, “In 2009, just eight months after Clinton became secretary of state, the US code of federal regulations on handling electronic records was updated: ‘Agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic-mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency record-keeping system.’ The responsibility for making and preserving the records is assigned to ‘the head of each federal agency. ’”
“On top of that, when Clinton was secretary, a cable went out under her signature warning employees to ‘avoid conducting official department business from your personal e-mail accounts.’ ”
The State Department requires employees to preserve records, even saying explicitly that on the rare occasion a personal e-mail address is used, those e-mails should be forwarded to the work address for archiving. Clinton never did this.
The Washington Post concludes: “She appears to be arguing her case on narrow, technical grounds, but that’s not the same as actually complying with existing rules as virtually everyone else understood them.”
Can we expect any less of the spouse of the man who argued what “is” is? Columnist Charles Krauthammer said it best when he noted last week, “Nothing she says ever is true three weeks later.”
What will be revealed as a lie next?
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2)The Tragic and Complete Collapse of Racial Relations
2)The Tragic and Complete Collapse of Racial Relations
Posted By Victor Davis Hanson
NBC’s Al Sharpton shakes hands with Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake as she prepares to speak at a summit to address issues surrounding the death of Freddie Gray and its aftermath at New Shiloh Baptist Church, Thursday, April 30, 2015, in Baltimore. Note the “No Justice, No Peace” slogan behind them. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Why do polls show that racial relations have gotten much worse under Barack Obama, who won the White House with over 95% of the black — and 45% of the white — vote?
A recent New York Times/CBS News poll [1] just revealed that about 60% of Americans feel race relations are not good. Some 40% think that they will become even worse. Yet when Obama was elected, 66% of those polled felt race relations were generally OK. All racial groups, according to recent polling, believe that Obama’s handling of racial relations has made things worse since 2009. Another recent Pew poll confirms these tensions, and suggests whites are now about as pessimistic as blacks.
What has happened to racial relations?
Crime. A small cohort of urban African-American males under fifty — no more than 3-4% of the general population — is responsible for about 50% of many of the violent crimes committed. Blacks are 5-8 times more likely to commit rather suffer an interracial crime, which makes up less than 10% of most violent crime. Both the analysis and solution have become taboo subjects. Writing the above is a near thought crime.
The non-African-American community of all races largely feels that if blacks were committing crimes commensurate to their percentages in the general population, the police would come into contact with young black males with much less frequency, diminishing the opportunities for jaded police-community flare-ups. In turn, would crime decline in the inner city if there was more emphasis on curbing illegitimacy, drug use, and single-mother families, while privileging study and academic excellence over sports and the cult of machismo?
Black leaders counter that racism is still the engine that drives a sense of despair, which insidiously is at the root of all pathology. Equality-of-result federal programs are ultimately seen as the answer that will catapult the disadvantaged into the middle class. The legacy of slavery and Jim Crow is said to trump the horrors that other immigrant and minority groups experienced — the Irish who were declared to be inhuman by mid-nineteenth-century essayists, the Asian exclusionary laws and the Japanese internment, the Holocaust and the deliberate polices of the State Department and War Department to refuse entry of Jews fleeing the gas chambers, the Native Americans who lost their tribal landscapes, and on and on.
One can see why this back-and-forth argument about cause and effect has no solution by reading a typical story about black crime in any online mainstream newspaper or wire-service report. The journalistic narrative is embedded within politically correct tip-toeing around the race of the perpetrator, with interviews of family members attesting to complete astonishment that a son, brother, or friend, with a previous arrest or criminal record, would ever do such a heinous thing. Police overreaction is thematic. Crimes such as assault are downplayed. Little concern is accorded to a victim who was robbed, murdered, or raped. The news accounts of black crime are the written versions of the edited George Zimmerman 911 tape, his photoshopped picture, and his new identity as a “white Hispanic.”
But read what follows these daily crime stories in the online comments section. (Do the usually censorious PC editors encourage uncensored commentary in their news websites, in the sense of bread-and-circuses entertainment or efforts to gin up sagging readership?) The readers’ editorialization could come right out of the Old Confederacy. If elites doctor our news to massage racial themes, the mass displays a furor at the political-correctness and lying. And in their wrath, online commentators ironically end up confirming stereotypes that many whites are getting angry to the point of becoming racists.
Obama never seriously raised the topic of inordinate black crime other than a few ephemeral pre-election throat-clearings about personal responsibility. We were left instead with his administration’s cheap editorializing on Trayvon, Ferguson, “nation of cowards,” and “punish our enemies.” Few see resolution of the half-century-old argument, except that much of non-white America (Asians, East Asians, Arabs, Latinos, etc.) does not yet see racism as the cause of a lack of parity; e.g., so far there is not a Korean Al Sharpton, a Latino Jesse Jackson, or a Punjabi Louis Farrakhan.
As the country moves beyond the old 90/10% white/black binary, race becomes more complex, and the charge of racism less effective as an exegesis for pathology. We fear the familiar script of 2014-5 will play out for the rest of our lives: a young Michael Brown-like inner-city African-American, with a past record of felonies and often unarmed, will be manhandled or perhaps even shot during a police encounter, usually as a result of either resisting arrest or attacking the officer. He will be immediately lionized as “gentle” or “on his way to college,” and become emblematic of reckless government violence in a way hundreds of murders each month of blacks by blacks are not indicative of inner-city pathologies. Mention of rap sheets will remain taboo. The media insists that more numerous examples of police shooting whites (who comprise a larger population, but are far less likely on a percentage basis to be arrested for suspicion of committing a felony) are irrelevant; so are black-on-white instances of crime, or black officers killing those of other races. Police will react by pulling back from the inner city in fear their careers will be ruined should they use greater force to counter initial force. Black community leaders will fire back that derelict racist officers are not protecting the community. Police will reenter the inner city in proactive fashion. Another Freddie Gray or Michael Brown case will follow, with demands that police leave the community alone.
The cases quickly become iconic and mythographic: Obama evokes “Ferguson” as an example of racism, without any context that Michael Brown resisted arrest, was under the influence and walking down the middle of the street — after recently committing a felony. If the president’s own attorney general can exonerate Officer Darren Wilson and the president can still persist in referencing Ferguson, racial relations, as the polls suggest, are going to get even worse.
So far we have read only in the elite media about black furor over white privilege. Yet the white elite that most certainly has Ivy League pedigrees, Washington/New York insider leverage, and corporate/Wall Street Clintonian-like help seems to encourage black anger as a sort of personal penance. Yet the elite has no clue of the growing anger of the white middle class and underclass that has no white privilege, and is tired of hearing that it does and being smeared as Neanderthal racists. When those who have no privilege hear “white privilege” from those who most certainly enjoy it, their reaction is similar to Denzel Washington’s in Man on Fire [2], who tires of hearing ad nauseam only “I’m just a professional.”
Jobs. A second problem is the static pyramidal Obama economy that has made labor participation historically low. Overregulating and overtaxing are fine for elites, who have enough money to either pay or find ways to avoid higher taxes. They don’t care much if their power, gas, or health costs go up — at least if they are led to believe that is the proper green atonement to pay for cooling the planet, putting a bait fish back into a delta, or shutting down a coal plant. Obama in recompense for favoring the aristocratic elite feels that by expanding food stamps, disability insurance, housing, legal, and education subsidies, etc., the lower classes will be satisfied in lieu of a high-paying job on a fracking rig, in construction, or welding on the Keystone pipeline.
Yet in such a fossilized European system, the subsidized lower classes still see little chance of getting all the stuff they see advertised on television and computers, or the opportunities of the middle classes, and don’t wish to accept that their smart phones, Kias and air conditioning make them princes compared to the wealthy of 1970. Throughout history, the absence of parity, not the lack of means, has been the criterion for revolution. I’d go further: the more affluent the consumer underclass becomes due to Chinese-made goods, inexpensive high-tech appurtenances, and federal and state largess, the angrier it become that others have even more. Looters focus on sneakers and electronic goods, not flour and vegetables. Should Obama cut taxes, lift regulations, become pro-energy and pro-growth, and reform entitlements and the tax code to expand the economy at 5-6% growth per annum, would not all sorts of new opportunities open up for African-Americans?
If 1 million illegal aliens a year were not pouring across the border, would not employers vie for labor rather than seek to import it cheaply? Instead, the Democratic Party is mostly about an elite on top that, as penance for its privilege, supports subsidies for the mass below that remains distant and out of sight and mind. By that cheap fillip, I mean the Obama daughters don’t walk into the inner city any more than Chelsea Clinton lives in Jamaica Queens or Barbara Boxer has a granddaughter in the Madera city schools.
The Implicit Bargain. African-American elites envision the urban underclass the same way that some La Raza third-generation Latinos view impoverished illegal immigrants from Oaxaca. Social disparities among the poor become arguments for affirmative-action leverage for elites, as if Barack Obama getting into Harvard Law or Lisa Jackson serving as EPA administrator will lower the crime rate in Baltimore or help change attitudes about illegitimacy in Oakland. Until we confess class is a greater barometer of privilege than race, I see no solution to the escalating tensions. How odd that upscale, one-percent African-Americans at NPR, the New York Times, and MSNBC monotonously blast white privilege, as if their own lives are always far more hurtful than those in Appalachia or rural Oklahoma.
Progress is Impossible? Ta-Nehisi Coates writes that he has no affinity with the firemen and police who were incinerated on 911 [3], given his grievances over endemic racism and the inability of blacks to gain parity with the majority due to systematic exclusion, formerly overt, today insidious. Currently, blacks make up about 12% of the population. The president of the United States, the present (and former) attorney general of the United States, the secretary of Transportation, the secretary of Homeland Security, the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the head of NASA are African American. Twenty-one percent of the Postal Service employees are African-American; seventeen percent of the entire federal work force is black. Seventy-eight percent of the NBA are African-American. Sixty-seven percent of NFL players are black. Sixteen percent of the teams have African-American head coaches; twenty-four percent of the teams have black general managers. Has the definition of diversity become that overrepresentation in some areas (the Left’s word, not mine) of African-Americans, based on percentages in the general population, is still diversity, while underrepresentation of blacks in the physics department at Caltech is proof of endemic racism? Or does a physics professor enjoy more perks and money than a NFL general manager?
We are asked to believe that Mr. Coates encounters crippling racism more so than my quite dark, quite accented, and quite turbaned Punjabi neighbor, who lives in a sea of non-Punjabis. We are asked to believe that an entire generation of lower middle-class white and mixed-race Americans who came of age not during Jim Crow and the civil rights movement, but during the half-century of affirmative action and diversity set-asides are guaranteed winning slots in American because of their “white privilege.” When I see the local, broke, and white tire-changer, somehow I don’t think his coming of age in the 1980s was easier than that of Jeh Johnson or Eric Holder. When I see a video in which a privileged young white elite at $65,000-per-year Wellesley or Amherst confesses to “white privilege,” I wonder how many hours he has welded in Tulare or she has done data entry in a carrel in San Jose. Many of our problems derive from black elites feeding off the guilt of compatriot white elites of a like class in a similar landscape, who claim to speak for all whites, as if they shared something when in fact they share nothing much at all. I suspect that more white males feel an affinity, a stronger one based on shared ideas, with Ben Carson than any affinity on the basis of race with Hillary Clinton or John Kerry.
Because of our dishonesty on matters of race and the elite’s use of it for their own privilege, we will see not only little progress, but also much retrogression. Look at the world abroad: anytime a man or woman identifies by race, violence mounts and chaos follows. The times they are a changing — for the worse.
2a)
I just received an audit on my tax return for 2014 back from the Australian Tax Office and it puzzles me!!!
They are questioning how many dependents I claimed.
I guess it was because of my response to the question, "List all your dependents?"
I replied, "100,000 muslim immigrants we provide everything for; 10,000 crack heads in rehab; 1 million unemployed people on the dole and not looking for work, 25,000 people in prison, 3,000 boat people who just arrived for a holiday and 535 persons in the Parliament and Senate!!!!
They told me that this was NOT the correct answer.
SO I KEEP ASKING MYSELF, "WHO THE HELL DID I MISS"?
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3)
Ambassador Dermer on Israeli Support for Netanyahu on Iran Deal: Moses Didn’t Have Those Numbers
An an interview with Fareed Zakaria, Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer said Prime Minister Netanyahu has more support from Israelis in opposition to the Iran deal than Moses had from Israelites during the Exodus. PHOTO: CNN/Screenshot.
Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, said on Sunday that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has more support in the Jewish state for his opposition to the Iran nuclear deal than Moses had when he led the Israelites out of Egypt.
Dermer’s comment was made in an interview with CNN‘s Fareed Zakaria in response to a question on whether it was prudent policy for Israel to oppose the Obama Administration on the Iran deal, given the importance of Washington’s support for Israel’s security.
Acknowledging the centrality of Israel’s relationship with the United States, Dermer said that ensuring the State of Israel’s survival was more important, and that, “the Prime Minister of Israel and the head of the [opposition] agree that this is a very bad deal that endangers Israel’s security.” He continued, “in Israel this view is shared by the Prime Minister, by the head of the opposition [Isaac Herzog], by 30 out of 33 members of our Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. Moses didn’t have those kind of numbers.”
Dermer also said he believed that President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry were sincere when they claimed that the Iran deal would make both the United States and Israel safer, but, “We just disagree with their judgment. We think this deal will endanger Israel’s security.”
He also said that while Israel is not directly lobbying U.S. lawmakers to vote down the deal, “We are telling them that this is a bad deal that endangers Israel’s security.”
Zakaria shot back saying that the former head of Israel’s Mossad, Meir Dagan, supported the deal, to which Dermer responded that in a Jewish and democratic state it is impossible not to have differences of opinion.
Zakaria also questioned Dermer on Netanyahu’s continued warnings over the past twenty years that Iran was two to three years away from a bomb, yet decades later Tehran had still not produced an atomic weapon. “Why has he been wrong about Iran for twenty years,” asked Zakaria, “is it possible that you don’t completely understand Iran?”
Dermer responded, “I think the Prime Minister of Israel understands Iran better than almost any leader in the world because he’s been focusing on this issue for twenty years,” and said the reason why the Prime Minister’s predictions did not materialize was American and Israeli action.
“Had the United States and Israel done nothing over the last fifteen years, they would have had a bomb maybe ten years ago but the United States and Israel have worked together to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power and we should continue to work together to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapons capability,” said Dermer.
He added that the Iran deal, “closes the nuclear file, not by blocking Iran’s path to the bomb, but by ceding to them a nuclear weapons capability and a nuclear arsenal, at best delaying it for a few years.”
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Debts of the Ayatollah
Iran gets money that should be used to pay its terror victims.
The giveaways in President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal keep piling up. By handing $100 billion or more in frozen funds to Tehran, the deal would not only fill the coffers of Iranian terror proxies. It would also abandon American victims of terrorism waiting to collect tens of billions of dollars in compensation owed to them by Iran.
Over two decades U.S. federal courts have found the Iranian government liable for orchestrating or supporting the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers U.S. Air Force facility in Saudi Arabia, and multiple shootings and suicide bombings in Israel, among other attacks. Judges have awarded some $45 billion in damages to hundreds of plaintiffs such as Embassy bombing survivor Anne Dammarell and the widow and orphaned children of Hamas bombing victim Ira Weinstein.
Iran has refused to pay a cent, while continuing to back Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other terror groups. Yet U.S. law provides for the victims to get compensation. Under the 2002 Terrorism Risk Insurance Act, U.S. court judgments against state sponsors of terror can be satisfied by tapping the seized or frozen assets of those states.
An estimated $100 billion to $150 billion in Iranian oil money has been held in escrow accounts under U.S. sanctions laws since 2012. That’s enough to satisfy the many court rulings in favor of Iranian terror victims, but Mr. Obama’s deal would transfer it to Tehran as “sanctions relief” merely for signing on the dotted line. As even Mr. Obama admits, some of that money would inevitably end up funding more Iranian-backed terror directed by figures such as Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, who also gets sanctions relief under the agreement.
A U.S. official told the Journal this month that the U.S. never raised the issue of terrorism victims with Iran. In negotiating Libya’s nuclear disarmament a decade ago, by contrast, the U.S. secured an agreement for the Gadhafi regime to compensate victims of attacks such as the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The 1981 Algiers Accord resolving the Iranian hostage crisis included a claims tribunal that ordered $2.5 billion in payments from Tehran.
In federal court in New York City two dozen victims of Iranian terror have sued to block Mr. Obama’s deal for disregarding U.S. laws meant to enforce just compensation. “It would be outrageous to release the $100 billion in frozen Iranian funds when these American families have unpaid court judgments against the terror-sponsoring regime in Tehran,” said lawyer Nitsana Darshan-Leitner. As Iran can’t be expected to pay, she said, “it is really in the hands of the U.S. administration, which encouraged the U.S. victims to file these cases.
”By ignoring the $45 billion owed to Iran’s terror victims, the U.S. government mocks its own judiciary and erodes a deterrent to state-sponsored terrorism. This is one more reason for Congress to reject a deal that blesses Iran as a nuclear-threshold state.
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5)Charles Krauthammer: The racing form, edition three
By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
WASHINGTON — Both presidential nomination contests having been scrambled by recent events — the FBI taking control of Hillary Clinton’s private email server and a raucous, roiling GOP debate — the third edition of the Racing Form is herewith rushed into print.
Legal disclaimer: This column is for betting purposes only. What follows is analysis — scrubbed, as thoroughly as a Clinton server, of advocacy. (Unless I simply can’t resist.)
Hillary Clinton: Ever since her disastrous book-launch performance, I’ve thought her both (1) a weak candidate and (2) the inevitable Democratic nominee.
No longer. She has fallen from her 95-percent barring-an-act-of-God perch. The email imbroglio has already badly damaged her credibility. But now that she’s lost control of the server, there is potential for further, conceivably fatal, damage.
Whatever happens, she will stay in the race. Clintons never quit. But if more top-secret information is found, if she did destroy work-related emails and if her numbers continue their steady decline, the party might decide it simply can’t afford to continue carrying her baggage.
Odds: 1-3.
Bernie Sanders: A less flighty, more serious Gene McCarthy. Fiery and genial, Sanders is the perfect protest candidate. But can a 73-year-old dairy-state Brooklynite socialist win? Of course not. If Hillary falls, Joe Biden fills the vacuum. Possibly even John Kerry.
Meanwhile, over at the GOP ...
Donald Trump: Clear front-runner. Are you waiting for him to bring himself down? He won’t. He’s impervious to the gaffe.
Since the debate, his numbers have plateaued, and in some places declined. In New Hampshire, for example, he’s gone from the mid-20s to the high teens. And he had a rough debate, as reflected in the Suffolk University poll in Iowa taken right afterward, in which, by 55-23, respondents felt less comfortable with him as president.
Nonetheless, his core support, somewhere around 20 percent (plus or minus a couple), remains as solid as that once commanded by Ron Paul and Ross Perot. Which means Trump will likely continue to lead until the field whittles down to a handful, at which point 20 percent is no longer a plurality.
Teflon Don. Solid constituency, fixed ceiling. Chances of winning his party’s nomination? About the same as Sanders winning his.
Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio: Still the top tier. Walker just held his own in the debate. Bush slipped slightly, appearing somewhat passive and, amazingly, still lacking a good answer to the “brother’s war” question. But he continues steady with a serious follow-up foreign policy speech and stick-to-his-guns positions on Common Core and immigration -- not easy given the current mood of the party.
Rubio had the best debate performance of the prime-time 10 — fluid, passionate, in command. And he was already No. 1 in the “who could you support” question (at 62 percent), crucial in a 17-member field.
Odds for each? Rubio 3-1. Bush and Walker 4-1.
Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Carly Fiorina: The new second tier. And rising. Cruz had a strong debate, establishing himself as the most convincing carrier of the populist, anti-Washington meme.
Kasich was engaging and compelling as the bleeding-heart conservative and successful tough-guy governor. Not an easy trick.
Fiorina displayed raw talent that surprised everyone who didn’t know her — and 6 million watched. Articulate, knowledgeable and relentlessly combative, she took on Clinton, Trump and Barack Obama.
Odds for the second-tier? 9-1 but with high ceilings for each.
Bonus Racing Form feature: the general election.
Conventional wisdom is that the GOP is tearing itself apart and headed south. What’s becoming clear, however, is that the Democrats are equally split ideologically and increasingly nervous about Clinton’s chronic, shall we say, character problem.
Both parties limp into November 2016. Current odds? GOP: 55 percent.
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