Debatable: The Republican presidential candidates beat up each other last night over terrorism, immigration, and Donald Trump’s call to ban all foreign Muslims from entering the country.

Rand Paul: “I think if we ban certain religions, if we censor the Internet, I think that at that point the terrorists will have won.”

Chris Christie: “I’m a former federal prosecutor, I’ve fought terrorists and won and when we get back in the White House we will fight terrorists and win again and America will be safe.”

Ted Cruz promised he will “carpet bomb” ISIS. “America is at war. Our enemy is not violent extremism. It is not some unnamed malevolent force. It is radical Islamic terrorist. We have a president who is unwilling to utter its name.”

Echoing a line from the movies Jeb! Bush said, “Serious times require strong leadership, that’s what at stake right now.”

But Bush also went after Donald Trump with sharper talons. “Donald, you’re not going to be able to insult your way to the presidency — that’s not going to happen,” Bush said. “Leadership is not about attacking people and disparaging people. Leadership is about creating a serious strategy.”

Trump retorted, “With Jeb’s attitude, we will never be great again, that I can tell you — we will never be great again.” And interestingly, some of the audience booed.

Facts are slippery for several of the candidates. Chris Christie promised that, “When I stand across from King Hussein of Jordan and I say to him, ‘You have a friend again sir, who will stand with you to fight this fight,’ he’ll change his mind.”

Well, not likely, because Hussein has been dead since 1999 and his son Abdullah II is king.

State of Siege: The entire Los Angeles Unified School District was shut down yesterday after an attack threat that was later determined to have been a hoax. All 640,000 students in the country’s second largest school district were either sent home or told to stay home.

Authorities said the emailed threat included all Los Angeles Unified schools and mentioned explosives, assault rifles, and machine pistols.

New York City received a similar threat that was quickly determined to be not credible and New York police commissioner William Bratton described the Los Angeles decision to shut down as an “overreaction.” But Southern California is still nervous and raw after the San Bernardino terrorist attack. Los Angeles School Superintendent Ramon Cortines told reporters, “Based on past circumstance, I could not take the chance.”

Police Beat: The jury in the case of the first Baltimore police officer to be tried in the death of arrestee Freddie Gray last summer has reported to the judge that they are deadlocked. The judge told them to go back at it. Off. William Porter is charged with manslaughter.

AP Science: Physicists working with the Large Hadron Collider in Europe have found whet they believe might be a previously undiscovered tiny particle that is one of the building blocks of matter.

Because physics is not our strong suit we’ll quote the NY Times on the subject: “One possibility, out of a gaggle of wild and not-so-wild ideas springing to life as the day went on, is that the particle — assuming it is real — is a heavier version of the Higgs Boson, a particle that explains why other particles have mass. Another is that it is a graviton, the supposed quantum carrier of gravity, whose discovery could imply the existence of extra dimensions of space-time.”

Sure, we knew that.

-30-