"Ramadi falls. The Iraqi army flees. The great 60-nation anti-Islamic State coalition so grandly proclaimed by the Obama administration is nowhere to be seen. Instead, it's the defense minister of Iran who flies into Baghdad, an unsubtle demonstration of who's in charge -- while the U.S. air campaign proves futile and America's alleged strategy for combating the Islamic State is in freefall. ...

"We are scraping bottom. Following six years of President Obama's steady and determined withdrawal from the Middle East, America's standing in the region has collapsed. And yet the question incessantly asked of the various presidential candidates is not about that. It's a retrospective hypothetical: Would you have invaded Iraq in 2003 if you had known then what we know now?"

"Estimates vary about how many Republicans are after the party's presidential nomination, but the number 19 keeps coming up. Nothing in nature comes in sets of 19. The only '19' in my memory is the Rolling Stones singing about someone's 19th nervous breakdown. Welcome to the world of GOP party officials, many on the verge of multiple nervous breakdowns over the flood tide of candidates. ...

"A GOP donor told me recently, 'Having 19 candidates is unseemly.' Politics? Unseemly? ...

"Between the GOP 19 and the Democratic One over the next year, give me an unseemly political spectacle."

"Hillary is beginning her trek to November 2016 with a built-in 'ick factor' regarding her essential truthfulness and the sense that she spends her life dancing around and about ethical lines. ...

"The tarnishment is permanent. The Clinton brand is damaged. The question is whether it's going to tarnish the Democratic Party."

"It has been apparent for some time that the United States lacks a strategy to fulfill President Obama's pledge to 'degrade and ultimately destroy' the Islamic State since it has no plan to root out the terrorists' base in Syria. There was hope, though, that Mr. Obama's half-measures might be enough to blunt the Islamic State's advances in Iraq, leaving the Syria problem for the next U.S. president. With the stunning fall of Ramadi on Sunday, even that modest optimism is questionable. ...

"Beginning almost a year ago, the Islamic State carved out, across large swaths of Iraq and Syria, a terrorist state of sorts that Mr. Obama deemed intolerable. He said in September that it is a threat to 'the broader Middle East,' including U.S. citizens and facilities, and 'if left unchecked . . . could pose a growing threat beyond that region, including to the United States.' Yet he refuses to commit the Special Forces and military assistance that could meet that threat, portraying any alternative to his minimalist policy as being 'dragged back into another prolonged ground war.' In fact, Sunni allies in the region will be reluctant to work with the United States until it has a Syria policy, and Sunni tribes in Iraq will not confront the Islamic State unless they believe the United States will stand by them. Every conflict will have ups and downs, as administration spokesmen said Monday. But it is Mr. Obama's unwillingness to match means to strategy that threatens to prolong this war."

"What to think about George Stephanopoulos? ...

"It is impossible to see how Stephanopoulos could do his job with any integrity in an environment in which the Clintons and their foundation will be central to the political news for the foreseeable future. Certainly not after concealing his relationship with the foundation. ABC News owes it to itself to live up to at least the standards of a small-town weekly newspaper. It owes them a lot more than that, in fact, but it cannot deliver the goods with Stephanopoulos at the desk."

"This was absolutely pathetic. If this was meant to reassure the Gulf States, I'm sure that their hair is still standing on end ...

"They should be terrified. In fact, in one of the other answers he was answering the objection that we would be unleashing billions of dollars into the Iranian treasury which they will obviously use for the mischief, the destabilization that they are doing in the region including Yemen, Syria, etc., threatening the Gulf Arabs.

"His answer was, among other things, not to worry, because Iran has a lot of economic needs and they have made a commitment to their people to invest in infrastructure.

"They are not going to spend it, I assume, on Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and all the others.

"That is preposterous and any Gulf Arab would be triply terrified."

"Barack Obama's romance with the Castro brothers is rapidly turning into a sour shack-up. That's what happens sometimes to romances under a tropic moon and the rustle of the coconut palms. Cuba wants to redefine the sanctity of embassies, and how they function. The public still doesn't know what concessions the president is making to keep a flame under the romance, but it doesn't sound good for our side. ...

"The State Department's record of managing real estate is not good. The new Russian embassy in Washington was built on Mount Alto on Wisconsin Avenue with an unobstructed electronic sight line to Foggy Bottom and beyond the Potomac River to the Pentagon. In exchange, the State Department deftly negotiated a site for a new American embassy in a swamp in Moscow.

"'There is a limit to what the United States in self-respect can endure,' President Dwight D. Eisenhower said on the break in diplomatic relations with Cuba in 1961. 'That limit has now been reached.' Yes, Virginia, that'€™s how American presidents used to talk."

"For seven decades, every American President save Jimmy Carter has understood that the best way to conduct foreign policy is to leave no one guessing about whose side we're on. Mr. Obama has pursued a different policy. His Arab guests can be forgiven if they nod at his guarantees and accept his weapons, while also concluding that in the end they are on their own."

"A sobering new report on the cost and scope of federal regulations puts the price of the rules at $1.88 trillion annually, a 'hidden tax' of $14,976 on every single household, or about 23 percent of an average American's income.

"In 'Ten Thousand Commandments,' the Competitive Enterprise Institute also reveals that regulations far more than laws are how the administration rules the land. While Congress, well known recently for doing little, passed 224 new laws last year, federal agencies issued 3,554 new regulations, or 16 per law.

"Author Clyde Wayne Crews Jr., CEI vice president for policy, spread the blame for overregulation around, but said that congressional inactivity is partly at fault and he called for reform that would have Congress oversee and even vote on new burdensome regulations."

"In a new Bloomberg-St. Anselm poll of New Hampshire, Donald Trump is running in fifth place in the 2016 Republican presidential field. The real estate developer and reality TV personality is behind only Rand Paul, Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio - and is ahead of Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, Carly Fiorina, Lindsey Graham, Bobby Jindal, John Kasich, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum. ...

"What to make of it all? Here's the important thing to remember about Trump, or any other political candidate, for that matter: Maybe you think he's a clown. But some voters, perhaps a significant number of voters, take him seriously. They're not dumb. So the question is, what concern of those voters, what need, is being addressed by Donald Trump? ...

"Donald Trump is the third party candidate running for the Republican nomination. It's been clear for quite a while that some conservative voters are so disgusted with the GOP that they would entertain the notion of a third party. If he pursues a race seriously, Trump could win the support of those I've-had-it-up-to-my-eyeballs voters. Their concerns aren't a joke. If Trump doesn't address them, somebody else will."