RUTHFULLY YOURS

Mr. Malpass is president of Encima Global LLC. He served as deputy assistant Treasury secretary in the Reagan administration and deputy assistant secretary of state in the George H.W. Bush administration.

So the economy isn’t ready to withstand a quarter-point rate hike even after seven years of stimulus?
Like Lucy in the classic “Peanuts” comic strip, the Federal Reserve Thursday invited a running kick of the football—the first interest-rate hike in nine years—only to pull back at the last minute. The Fed cited recent “global economic and financial developments,” i.e., China’s stock-market woes, which “may restrain economic activity somewhat and are likely to put further downward pressure on inflation in the near term.”

Financial circles in New York and Washington are celebrating, but the latest delay in tapering off the Fed’s near-zero interest rate policy risks plopping the economy, like the hapless Charlie Brown, flat on its derrière. While Wall Street applauds, uncertainty about future rate increases will likely keep business investment weak.

The economy is stuck in a zero-rate trap in which businesses don’t want to invest when they don’t know the impact of a rate hike, while the Fed thinks a rate hike would shake financial markets and hurt investment. Underinvestment leaves high cash balances at big corporations, but it is idle liquidity and doesn’t add to productivity.

The 2016 presidential race has been notable for its surprises, and Wednesday night’s debate at the Reagan library in California may reshuffle the candidate polling order again. Our guess is that Carly Fiorina, Chris Christie and Marco Rubio helped themselves the most in a race that will see many more turns before a nominee is chosen.

Ms. Fiorina made it to the big debate stage for the first time and didn’t waste the opportunity. The former Hewlett-Packard CEO showed off her policy chops and skill in delivering a message. She does her homework.

She notably outshone the other two “outsiders” who haven’t held elected office— Donald Trump and Ben Carson. The retired pediatric neurosurgeon can be endearing but he suffered from vagueness and looked smaller than he did in the first debate. Mr. Trump was full of his usual bluster and bragging but seemed out of his depth when the debate turned toward specifics.

Conservative columnist Ann Coulter is no stranger to controversy but her comments posted to social media during Wednesday night’s Republican presidential debate have some accusing her of anti-Semitism.

During the debate, Coulter responded to candidates’ comments about Israel with the following: “How many fucking Jews do these people think there are in the United States?”

Throughout the debate, Coulter continued to comment on the focus on U.S./Israel relations.

Coulter continued her barrage throughout the debate, and then began defending her comments when she was questioned. She later added that her comments were “not about the Jewish people.”

“I like the Jews, I like fetuses, I like Reagan. Didn’t need to hear applause lines about them all night,” she tweeted. “Cruz, Huckabee Rubio all mentioned ISRAEL in their response to: ‘What will AMERICA look like after you are president.'”

When conservative pundit Ann Coulter live-tweeted her displeasure with the CNN-sponsored GOP debate on Wednesday night, she couldn’t have anticipated the firestorm that would ensue. Or could she?

Coulter, like the Republican candidate she supports, is no stranger to controversy. On the contrary, what she and presidential hopeful Donald Trump have in common is their constant hunger for it.

Indeed, it is the utter lack of “political correctness,” bordering on bad manners, that has gained each of them as many fans as it has enemies. In a culture addicted to a genre of TV that caters to the basest part of human nature (the very highway voyeurism that causes drivers to slow down at the scene of an accident to get a glimpse of a mangled body), figures like Coulter and Trump are necessarily popular as people one loves or loves to hate.

If nothing else, each can be counted on to say something inappropriate or outrageous on cue.

While global economic slowdown and insecurity have reduced consumption, export and growth throughout the world:

1. Microsoft acquired Israel’s cyber security startup, Adallom, for $320mn. Adallom exposed the break into the security server of Microsoft Office365. In recent months, Microsoft also acquired Israel’s cyber security company, Aorato, for $200mn, Equivio for $200mn and N-trig for a few scores of millions of dollars. In 2009, Microsoft acquired Israel’s 3DV Systems for $35mn (Globes, July 20, 2015).

2. The Framingham, MA-based Heartware acquired Israel’s Valtech Cardio for $360mn, which could surge to $860mn, provided that milestones are met (Globes, September 3).

3. Medtronic, the Dublin and Minneapolis-based world’s largest stand-alone medical technology development company, is launching – along with IBM and Israel’s Office of the Chief Scientist – a digital medicine incubator in Israel. In April, Medtronics invested $2mn in Israel’s DreaMed Diabetes (http://www.fiercemedicaldevices.com/, September 15).

4. According to Frans van Houten, the Chairman and CEO of the global Dutch giant, Phillips: “Israel has a major record of achievement in innovation, which Phillips is a partner to through our extensive R&D investments in Israel.” Van Houten inaugurated a joint incubator, in Israel, with Israel’s TEVA Pharmaceutical Industries – a $25mn investment by each company. The joint incubator, Sanara Ventures, will be the home of digital health, monitoring and imaging early-stage startups. In addition, Phillips operates a research & development center, in Israel, which employs 850 people. Phillips is also manufacturing special elements for its imaging systems in Israel. During the last three years, Phillips experienced a 60% expansion of its Israeli operation (Globes, September 11).

Mr. Eid, who often uses a pseudonym, Qusai Zakarya, that he adopted while opposing the regime in Syria, now lives in Washington, D.C.

I kept asking why the administration wasn’t doing more to help my people. Then the Iran deal came through, and I knew.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I was meeting with high-level Obama administration officials in Washington, D.C., two months after escaping Syria in February 2014, and I had just described to them all the horrors I had seen: the torture of protesters, the rape of women, the bombardment of civilians, the barrel bombs, the massacres, the sieges, the starvation, and the gassing of hundreds of innocents with sarin in August 2013. I had recounted how I barely survived those sarin attacks and the siege of my hometown, Moadamiya, near Damascus; and how, by some miracle, I managed to trick the regime into letting me leave Syria.

Now, I was asking the officials to take simple steps, to do something, anything, that would protect the millions of civilians I had left behind from further starvation and slaughter. But as I pressed these officials for answers, their replies grew increasingly divorced from the Syrian conflict:

Why couldn’t there be military action to protect civilians? The reply: The U.S. is helping Syrians through humanitarian and nonlethal means. Me: Thanks for your generosity, but can Band-Aids take down a fighter jet as it bombs civilians? Them: President Bashar Assad’s air-defense systems are too strong for a no-fly zone. Me: Then how does Israel keep bombing the regime? Them: The U.S. wants to avoid a military solution. We also need to stabilize the whole region. Me: Assad’s barrel bombs and starvation sieges are driving extremism, I’ve seen it with my own eyes—you call that stabilizing the region?

Ahmed Mohamed appears to have been treated outrageously. After all, all he did was build a clock. But now the Left’s false-moralist brigades are using Ahmed as a pivot to portray America as an inherently racist, ignorant nation.

Take Sally Kohn. Learning of Ahmed’s situation, the CNN commentator launched a Twitter diatribe against conservatives. “I get it, conservatives don’t believe anyone in America treated differently because of race or religion — except for white Christians.” Many other liberals are joining this latest chapter of Kohn’s never-ending purity war against conservatives. But their reaction is tragic. While I’d be the first to highlight true examples of injustice against American Muslims, the available facts suggest that Ahmed’s treatment was a consequence not of racism but rather of one teacher’s ignorance and overreaction.

Ahmed Mohamed is a human Rorschach test. Look at that face and tell me what you see: Muslim-American? African-American? I myself see something very familiar: Nerd-American.

Mohamed, a 14-year-old high-school freshman in Texas and the son of an immigrant family from Sudan, is a cause célèbre just at the moment because he was handcuffed, frog-marched out of a classroom, and arrested for the crime of showing off his technological chops by building an electronic clock and bringing it to school to show his engineering teacher. (Let us now praise MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas, for the fact that 14-year-olds there have engineering teachers.) Apparently, an English teacher — it had to be an English teacher — thought the device looked like a bomb.

It didn’t. But it looked a hell of a lot more like a bomb than that half-eaten Pop-Tart in the possession of that seven-year-old in Maryland looked like a gun, yet the child was suspended; it was surely more reasonable to think that those circuit boards constituted a bomb than to think that the bang-bang! hand gesture of a ten-year-old in Milford, Mass., constituted a serious threat to shoot somebody; taking a high-school kid into custody after a teacher reports a possible bomb threat is surely no more irrational than arresting an eighth-grader over an NRA T-shirt.

Senator Cotton is one of the brightest, most principled and outspoken legislators in America. His resume is golden with academic and military records that are outstanding….stay tuned to his career…rsk

Congressional Democrats who backed President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran are “soft and gullible,” according to Senator Tom Cotton.

The Arkansas Republican suggested that Obama’s executive agreement with Iran would fail to bar the regime from obtaining a nuclear weapon, just as Bill Clinton’s executive agreement with North Korea proved unsuccessful.

“I think many of these Democrats are simply soft and gullible about the role of power in the world,” he said Tuesday evening. “Too many Democrats in the Senate and the House are soft in the sense that they don’t want to confront evil forces with force when necessary. . . . And they’re gullible to believe that the ayatollahs will follow this agreement.”

“Sen. Rubio is probably the most gifted candidate in the race. His command of the issues has already been observed by my fellow Corner denizens, but what is most attractive to me is his sense of himself. He does not feel the need to tell you he is young, bright, attractive, and likable – he just is. I do not envy shopworn Hillary Clinton or goofy Joe Biden the thought of a one-on-one against him. Rubio also showed some refreshing humility last night, confessing that it was a misjudgment to address illegal immigration in one massive piece of legislation, and suggesting that the enforcement components have to take priority. Conservatives are already favorably disposed toward Rubio but are suspicious when it comes to his instincts on immigration; he’s obviously working to allay those concerns and it’s effective – at least it’s effective on me. I still have questions about where he may be on radical Islam – not on terrorists but on the “moderate Islamists” that Washington is convinced are out there just waiting to align with us. But Rubio has obviously done his homework on more complicated issues, so there’s good reason to think he’ll get that one right, too.”

The night belonged to Carly Fiorina. It was too crowded, unwieldy and tediously Trump-focused a forum for there to have been more than a few memorable moments; in retrospect, she got all of them. Mrs. F has a razor sharp mind and a crisp delivery, especially when giving reactive answers rather than scripted ones. She combines these with an attractive dignity –she knew there was no need to lay it on thick in laying out Trump. Her skill set is tailor-made for debate forums. Now that she’s shown she belongs, she is going to get a different kind of scrutiny than she’s had before. It will be interesting to see how she handles it, but you can tell no one will be better prepared – she’s not going to be outworked.

I’ve never taken Trump seriously and last night his lack of seriousness was on display. I know what the polls say, but it’s mid-September. To my mind, what is notable about his candidacy has never had much to do with him. He is an exhibit that shows how angry the Republican base is at the Republican party, particularly over illegal immigration and, overall, the GOP’s fear of taking it to Obama. He is also a major celebrity in a culture sadly fixated on celebrity. But he’s not a conservative, he hasn’t really thought deeply about public issues (which is fine, unless you want to be president), and I just don’t think he has staying power. Maybe I’ll end up being wrong (wouldn’t be the first time) but I can’t get whipped up about him. It would have been a more interesting debate if CNN weren’t so whipped up about him (ditto Fox).