RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the U.S. it takes six working days to start a business. In Israel: 34.

Israel is a remarkable country with big problems. The existential threats it faces from abroad are well known; only slightly less so, the troubled relations between the Jewish majority and the (mostly) Arab minority within its own population.

By contrast, most Americans know little about Israel’s economy, and most of what they think they know is shaped by the country’s vibrant high-tech sector. But Israel’s economy is more varied—and its overall performance more troubled—than glowing reports about the latest IT breakthroughs convey.

Put simply, the Israeli economy is an island of innovation in a sea of bureaucracy. “Start Up Nation” faces off against “Can’t Get Started Nation.” The result: The economy is functioning well below developed-world standards, and average families are paying the price.

It isn’t just “Obama’s power grabs.” It’s a revision of the Founders’ original vision.

To the list of questions Hillary Clinton will never answer, add one more: Would a second Clinton presidency continue and expand Barack Obama’s revision of the American system of government that existed from 1789 until 2009?

The central feature of Mr. Obama’s rewrite of what one might call the Founding Fathers’ original vision has been to abolish Congress. Yes, the 535 men and women elected to Congress still show up at the old Capitol building, as they have since November 1800. But once past passage of ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank, the 44th president effectively retired Congress from its historic function. If you put the president behind the wheel of a car in front of the White House to visit Congress, he’d probably get lost.

This is not a joke if you are one of the many million Americans the Re-Founding Father has commanded, via vast executive power, to do what he wants you to do. He did it again last week.

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, whose neo-constitutional function is to serve as a primary executor of Mr. Obama’s re-dos, waved into existence a massive expansion of the Clean Water Act. Landowners across America woke up to discover that the EPA has designated ponds, creeks, rivulets, ditches, catch basins and water-filled potholes as subject to what the Clean Water Act originally called “navigable waters.”

Tuscany — Northern and central Italy are not on the southern Mediterranean. But somehow thousands of refugees from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East are everywhere here — as is true of much of the European Union. Some sleep on park benches. Many peddle knock-off electronic goods and counterfeit watches. Angry Italians shoo away refugee beggars from tour groups.

The Greek islands near the coast of Turkey are likewise flooded this summer with dispossessed refugees from countries such as Afghanistan and Syria. Apparently a bankrupt Greek government lacks the resources to patrol its vast coastline. Some beleaguered Greeks assume that thousands of boat people and homeless refugees will eventually leave their makeshift camps and head northward to the wealthier homelands of Greece’s Northern European creditors.

Has the contemptible Laura Kipnis Affair incensed the worm into turning? Our own David French certainly hopes so. “Feminists from Jezebel to The Nation have expressed concern about Kipnis’s treatment,” French wrote on Monday, “and Jonathan Chait has discussed her ordeal as part of his recent campaign against PC.” Indeed,” he continues, “there is a growing wave of leftist dissent against campus intolerance.”

The latest froth in the wave comes today, from “Edward Schlosser, a teacher “at a midsize state school.” “I’m a liberal professor,” Schlosser writes over at the “explainer” website Vox, “and my liberal students terrify me.” Why? Because a considerable number of them have bought hook, line, and sinker into a worldview in which “the feelings of individuals are the primary or even exclusive means through which social issues are understood and discussed,” and, in consequence, any accusations of misconduct that are leveled at academics have become too subjective to be dispassionately analyzed. Chagrined and alarmed by the burgeoning number of inquisitions, Schlosser has been left fretting that were he to be hauled in front of a disciplinary committee, he would likely stand no chance:

Since World War II, America has clearly won only one of five major conflicts: Operation Desert Storm. Korea was a bloody stalemate, Vietnam an “outright military defeat,” and both Afghanistan and Iraq — America’s two longest wars — hardly look like victories. At least that’s the contention of Dominic Tierney, contributing editor at The Atlantic and Swarthmore political science professor. Yesterday, he launched a new book, The Right Way to Lose a War: America in an Age of Unwinnable Conflicts and promoted it with a lengthy Atlantic essay outlining the reasons for American failure abroad.

While I have long taken issue with the notion that the military has truly “lost” its wars, there is no question that most of our postwar conflicts have been much longer than anticipated, less decisive than hoped, and far more costly than promised. In analyzing why, Tierney explains the gap between America and its recent enemies with startling (and refreshing) clarity: “It’s limited war for Americans, and total war for those fighting Americans. The United States has more power; its foes have more willpower.”

Harold Edward Stassen was the 25th Governor of Minnesota from 1939 to 1943. After service in World War II, he was president of the University of Pennsylvania from 1948 to 1953. He sought the Republican Party’s presidential nomination nine times in 1948, 1952, 1956, 1960, 1964, 1968, 1972, 1976 and 1988. He never really thought he would win and he never really had a chance in spite of a good political resume he became known as the ”perennial, never-say-die candidate.”

Which reminds me of Jeb Bush, Bobby Jindal, Lindsey Graham, George Pataki, Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, Rick Perry, and, regretfully, Ted Cruz whose turn may and should come. I don’t mention Carly Fiorina or Ben Carson or Donald Trump because they have never held office. And, forget about Rick Santorum who was defeated after only one term as mediocre senator in Pennsylvania.

Why are they running with the full knowledge of their inability to win? Among the Dems it may be to advance political platforms. Why can’t they just move away?

Oh never mind….I am just a disgruntled senior citizen venting…..rsk

I keep thinking we’re done with George Pataki — but like an order of bad clams, he keeps coming back up on me.

The three-term Republican governor of a famously blue state seems like a serious 2016 presidential contender on paper — until you read the fine print.

Pataki had a promising start. He beat Democratic icon Mario Cuomo in 1994. He cut income taxes 25 percent and trimmed other taxes as well. In his first two years in office, spending went down 2.5 percent.

If you had stopped the Pataki show there, he’d be the next Reagan. Similarly, if Napoleon had quit before invading Russia, he’d be remembered very differently, too.

It’s a journalistic cliché to say that when a Republican lurches left he’s “growing in office.” Woodrow Wilson once said that every politician either grows or swells when he enters office. Pataki did both and for so long, conservatives felt he should have come with a Viagra-like warning label: If this apostasy lasts for more than one campaign, consult a physician.

President Barack Obama is less than stalwart in the fight against ISIS and doesn’t seem overly concerned about Vladimir Putin’s predation in Ukraine or China’s aggression in the South China Sea. It is the fight against climate change, an allegedly dire threat to the nation’s security, that brings out his inner Churchill.

In remarks at the Coast Guard Academy commencement, Obama pledged his undying hostility to climate change and his determination to fight it on the beaches and in the fields. He called it “one of the most severe threats” we face and “an immediate risk to our national security.” President Obama is to climate change what Cato the Elder was to Carthage.

Defenders of the College Board’s controversial new AP U.S. History (APUSH) framework like to paint their opponents as ignorant chauvinists who want to censor the bad bits out of American history. That’s going to be awfully hard to do now that 55 distinguished historians, Americanists, and education specialists have issued a powerful condemnation of the College Board’s revisionist history.

The statement’s signatories make it clear that they favor a “warts and all” account of American history that nonetheless emphasizes the ways in which “we remain one nation with common ideals and a shared story.” I cannot improve upon this statement, which will almost certainly stand as a landmark in our public debates about what sort of country we are and want to be. I recommend that you read it forthwith, along with the excellent commentary on it by Peter Berkowitz. (Note that the bottom of the statement contains instructions for those with professional competence in the study or teaching of American history who wish to add their names to the list of signatories.)

The New York Times reported in an article today that a new IAEA report indicates that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium has increased by about 20 percent since the nuclear talks began in early 2014, “partially undercutting the Obama administration’s contention that the Iranian program had been ‘frozen’ during that period.”

The article says Western officials and experts can’t figure out why this is but cited two possibilities: Iran has run into technical problems that have kept it from converting some of its enriched uranium into uranium powder, or it is increasing its stockpile to give it an edge if the negotiations fail.