RUTHFULLY YOURS

While Republicans are busy deciding who will represent the party in next year’s presidential election, Gary Franks is contemplating how the eventual nominee could do a better job of attracting black support.

If his name sounds familiar, Mr. Franks is a former congressman from Connecticut and a bona fide racial pioneer. Upon winning his House seat in 1990, the Waterbury native became the first black Republican in Congress in nearly six decades and the only one ever elected from Connecticut. Over the next six years, Mr. Franks fought for welfare reform, backed lower tax rates, opposed the racial gerrymandering of voting districts and tested the tolerance of Congressional Black Caucus progressives.

The caucus failed the test, of course, voting to limit their GOP colleague’s access to meetings. Former Missouri Rep. Bill Clay Sr., a veteran of the caucus and father of the current congressman, took matters even further and in 1996 issued a six-page letter that referred to “Franks’ foot-shuffling, head-scratching ‘Amos and Andy’ brand of ‘Uncle Tom-ism.’ ” Mr. Franks, ever the jolly warrior, did not respond in kind. “Obviously Bill Clay is not a supporter of mine,” he deadpanned, “but I wish him Godspeed.”

“The goal of American Transparency’s project, Open the Books, is to put every dime of government spending—on all levels—online, in real time. It’s an ambitious and audacious mission to map government’s role in our lives.”

Dr. Coburn, a former U.S. senator from Oklahoma, is the honorary chairman of American Transparency.

Citizen activists can now monitor online how elected federal and state officials are spending their money.

With the rise of supposed outsider candidates, pundits are calling the coming presidential election a referendum on the establishment. They’re missing a more profound story, which is the rise of new elites. These are the citizen activists using technology to reshape the status quo in ways neither the traditional establishment nor today’s antiestablishment pretenders understand.

The rise of citizen activism became apparent to me during the GOP’s struggle over earmarks. As a member of the House of Representatives, where I served from 1995 to 2001, I had fought against earmarks unsuccessfully. By the time I was elected to the Senate in 2004, I was confident that a David vs. Goliath strategy would succeed.

While the establishment thought we were outgunned, the balance of power had shifted. We had the support of the “blogosphere”—an army of citizen journalists. Anyone with a laptop could be an investigative reporter and publish his or her findings. In the end we were nimbler and more effective than the lethargic, pork-addicted congressional appropriators.

No fight better illustrated the power of these elites more than the debate about the “Bridge to Nowhere” earmark. On Oct. 21, 2005, I offered an amendment to eliminate the bridge planned for Ketchikan, Alaska. We lost the vote 15-82 in the Senate but won the argument among the electorate. Thanks to the public outcry expressed through the blogosphere the vote put earmarks on the road to extinction. Congress banned them in 2010.

The power of these new elites in action made me want to pave the way for more. Not long after the bridge vote I teamed up with a freshman senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, who was eager to burnish his bipartisan credentials around “good government” initiatives.

The central bank needs to try something different—and has serious options to get median income rising.

Last week’s dismal jobs report for September will throw an indecisive Federal Reserve deeper into paralysis. For months the central bank hinted that it would end its near-zero interest rate policy, before backing down amid fears of soft growth and opposition from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. That leaves Fed officials with no plan, as worrying economic news mounts.

After seven years of emergency policies, it is vital that the Fed try something new. If not a rate increase, it should consider other growth-oriented options: tapering its huge bond reinvestment program to free up collateral for credit markets; shifting some of its borrowing away from banks to encourage bank lending; or shortening the maturity of its bond portfolio to relieve some of the illiquidity in bond markets.

Carly Fiorina took the stage at the 2005 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to introduce a new camera from Hewlett-Packard Co., joined by singer Gwen Stefani, who shot a selfie with the beaming chief executive.

“I can’t believe I’m on stage with this woman,” said Ms. Stefani, who was introduced by Ms. Fiorina as H-P ’s “hippest product engineer” for the singer’s help designing the camera’s case and accessories.
The moment celebrated a marriage of technology and popular culture that Ms. Fiorina had cultivated through 5½ years at the helm of H-P. “What is our ambition for 2005? To be at the intersection of simplicity, innovation, personalization at affordable mass-market prices,” she told the crowd.

Ms. Fiorina wasn’t around long enough to see the camera ship to stores. She was fired a month later by the H-P board of directors.

As Ms. Fiorina campaigns for the Republican Party nomination, she presents her tenure at H-P from July 1999 to February 2005 as evidence of a business-based competence she would bring to the White House.

Interviews with former employees and board members, as well as an examination of H-P’s financial performance during that period—which included a $25 billion deal to acquire Compaq Computer Corp.—suggest Ms. Fiorina’s vision and marketing talent overshadowed her ability to deliver results.

“Carly is a brilliant sales person, and she did an exquisitely good job of selling the Compaq merger to a cynical market,” said George Keyworth, a former H-P board member. “But what she could not do was execute.”

H-P’s stock price fell 55% on Ms. Fiorina’s watch, more than peers in the technology industry, even those hammered by the 2001 downturn. Dell Inc.’s stock dropped 5% over the same period; Cisco Systems Inc. ’s fell 45%; IBM dropped 31%. The Nasdaq Composite Index fell by 27%.

Sometimes, distance is good for perspective. For Angela Merkel, that perspective came in New York.

The week before last, the German chancellor flew to the Big Apple to address the United Nations summit on sustainability, women’s rights and climate change. But what she took home with her was the surprising realization that Horst Seehofer actually has a lot in common with Ahmet Davutoglu and Nawaz Sharif.

Seehofer is the governor of Bavaria and the head of the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU), the sister party to Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU); Davutoglu is the prime minister of Turkey; Sharif the prime minister of Pakistan. All three have recently conveyed the same message: Merkel must get tougher in the refugee crisis.

Davutoglu asked Merkel in New York for her support for a buffer zone along the Syrian-Turkish border, where anywhere between 100,000 and 300,000 refugees from the civil-war torn country are to be accommodated. Sharif, for his part, engaged the chancellor about the escalating situation in his country and in neighboring Afghanistan. He demanded that the chancellor send Pakistani refugees back home.

Anyone who doubts the power of prayer should consider the power of Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount, the Jerusalem hill where the First and Second Temples of ancient Israel once stood. It’s still a Jewish world, at least from the Indus to the Atlantic; everyone else just lives in it. That in what an extraterrestrial observer would conclude from the hysteria over a modest Jewish presence on the site.

A Palestinian law student last week murdered a young Israeli father and a local rabbi in Jerusalem’s Old City last week, the killer’s father declared: “He defended the honor of 1.5 billion Muslims all over the world,” according to the Washington Post. The murderer, Mohannad Halabi, also wounded the man’s wife and infant daughter, and killed a local rabbi who came to the family’s aid.

Halabi had written on his Facebook page, “What’s happening to our holy places, what’s happening to our mothers and sisters in al-Aqsa mosque? We are not the people who accept humiliation. Our people will revolt.” The killer’s father, Shafeek Halabi, declared “I am so proud of him” for having defended Muslim honor. Self-styled “guardians” of the Temple Mount have stockpiled stones and firecrackers in the al-Aqsa Mosque itself to throw at Jewish visitors as well as Israeli police, who have arrested violent protesters on several occasions in recent months.

No-one wants to talk about anything except the US elections, and there is nothing sensible to say about them. The Republican Party of better days, of entrepreneurship and energetic defense, seems to have been kidnapped by space aliens and replaced by Pod People. The aliens have kidnapped not just the party apparatus, but the party base as well. What do the Republicans want? The operative answer is “none of the above,” namely a candidate without a verifiable track record–a Donald Trump, a Ben Carson, a Carly Fiorina.

According to the Pew Institute, 65% of Republicans in September preferred “new ideas and a different approach” to “experience and a proven record.”

President Obama’s “Uncle Omar” lived in the US illegally for years and was arrested for DUI, but avoided punishment and received a legal driver’s license.

What has been traditionally used to identify American motorists has now become about as useful to police as an empty holster. For example, California’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) surge in giving driver’s licenses to more than 1.5 million illegal immigrants — a/k/a undocumented immigrants in current Golden State “newspeak” — is disturbing to many law enforcement officers. Police officials are very concerned with this policy, so much so that a homeland security newsletter began covering what many believe is just one more magnet for drawing illegal immigrants to the United States from terrorist havens throughout the world.

In January 2015, California began allowing undocumented immigrants to obtain the same driver’s licenses as legal immigrants and citizens. Police officers claim that there are tens of thousands of immigrants who stand on long lines at DMV centers throughout the state and their licenses not only allow them to drive vehicles but also double as identification for conducting many personal and business transactions.

Memo to the State Department: It’s time to think twice about knee-jerk criticism of Israel. You never know when it might turn around and bite you.

Just that happened when Associated Press reporter Matt Lee caught deputy State spokesman Mark Toner by surprise at a briefing this week. Lee asked about Saturday’s US bombing of a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, that left 22 patients and staff dead.

The administration has called the attack a tragic mistake. But Lee recalled Israel’s August 2014 shelling of a UN school in Gaza — which State immediately labeled “disgraceful,” adding: “The suspicion that militants are operating nearby does not justify strikes that put at risk the lives of so many innocent civilians.”

Jerusalem’s Jewish connection dates back more than 3,000 years. Even after Jews lost control of the city in 70 CE, a Jewish spiritual and physical bond with Jerusalem remained unbroken, despite 2,000 years of dispersion.

Although Islamic dynasties controlled Jerusalem for some 1,300 years, they never once made it the capital of an Arab state. Even Jordan, which controlled part of the city for 19 years, until 1967, refrained from making it its capital. Furthermore, Jerusalem is never mentioned in the Quran, Islam’s most holy book.