RUTHFULLY YOURS

In Monty Python’s “The Life of Brian,” which depicts the events of the life of a man named Brian who is mistakenly thought to be the Messiah in ancient Judea, an argument breaks out among a revolutionary group, the People’s Front of Judea (or is that the Judean People’s Front?) along the lines of “What have the Romans done for us?” The conclusion is that, aside from roads, aqueducts, sanitation and sundry other benefits that improved the quality of life dramatically, the question remains, “What have the Romans done for us?” The skit could be redone, but instead of ancient Judean radicals, it could be depicted as an argument among members of BDS, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Picture a college campus in which a BDS group says Israel is the pits, it is the worst country on Earth, and aside from life saving drugs and medical procedures, the technology that powers PCs, handheld devices and the internet itself, cutting edge security and even a life-saving mask for a sick rhinoceros, “What has Israel done for us?” So to, educate the BDS crowd on what they are missing, and to give the rest of us something to kvell about, here are 53 amazing gifts Israel gave the world in 2015.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt visited Israel this past summer and praised the country for its advancements in high tech. He gave credit for the tech successes to the Israeli attitude, or, as we’d call it in these parts—chutzpah—in the positive sense: “Israel is booming in terms of Entrepreneurship, because you have a culture to challenge authority and to question everything. You are not going by the rules.” Thinking outside of the box also gives Israel an edge in medical advancements, and patients brave great personal danger to travel from all over the Middle East, even from war torn countries hostile to Israel, to seek medical treatment in the Jewish State. Last spring, Israeli doctors were able to perform innovative, lifesaving surgery on an Iraqi Christian girl whose family was fleeing the onslaught of ISIS. The girl’s heart was on the right side instead of the left and had malfunctioning ventricles, and it was a challenge, but the operation was a success.

In an ABC News interview, Hillary Clinton apologized for using a private e-mail while secretary of state, a notable departure after months of not letting the slightest crack show in her steadfast public defense of her arrangement.

The interview was progress. But she has a lot to apologize for. A more fully and properly contrite Hillary might sound something like this:

I’ve repeatedly said that my private system was permitted by the State Department. As anyone who has done a little Googling knows, the State Department’s manual for employees has said since 2005 that day-to-day business should be conducted on the authorized system. When I said “permitted,” I merely meant that no one physically stopped me. I take responsibility for this misunderstanding.

Please forgive me for trying to excuse my classified communications — the ones, it pains me to recall, I used to insist never occurred. Yes, the material wasn’t marked “classified,” but the e-mails couldn’t be marked “classified” because I had my own system bypassing the formal process whereby they could be so designated. As for my contention that the material was only classified retroactively, much of it was “born classified,” and I had the obligation to recognize it as such and handle it properly. In this, I simply let everyone down. I promise to do better next time.

I’m sorry I said that Colin Powell did the same thing I did. He didn’t. Of course, he never set up a private server. Moreover, as he explained on Meet the Press the other day, Secretary Powell had two computers on his desk, one for classified material, the other for routine communications. I regret the error.

The White House announced that it plans to admit 10,000 Syrians next year through the refugee resettlement program, on top of the 1,500 or so we’ve already admitted. But the number could go much higher, since the president claims the right to “parole” into the United States anyone he wants, in any number he wants, for any reason he wants. As Senator Grassley put it this week after being informed by Secretary of State Kerry of Obama’s 2016 refugee edict:

But when pressed, the administration indicated that they were considering opening the floodgates and using emergency authority to go above what they proposed to Congress in today’s consultation. The administration also has not ruled out potentially paroling thousands of Syrians into the United States.

Here’s why we shouldn’t be resettling any more than a handful of Syrians:

Cost. Reihan yesterday at a panel discussion cited a study that found caring for a refugee resettled in Norway costs 25 times more than in the Middle East. In the U.S., such costs are borne almost entirely by the taxpayers of the local communities where the State Department dumps its refugees (without even informing the local authorities). Even the resettlement groups and local “sponsors,” such as churches, only assume responsibility for their costs for several months, until they’re signed up for welfare; in fact, the main function of “sponsors” is to get refugees signed up for welfare. That’s why more than 90% of recent Middle Eastern refugees are on welfare. Concern over costs seems to be the basis of a bill offered by Representative Brian Babin (R-Texas) to suspend refugee resettlement until the GAO thoroughly studies its costs.

With apologies to Golden Gopher fans, Minneapolis, Minn., is probably not most people’s idea of a destination city. Unless, that is, the traveler in question is Somali, in which case Minneapolis is the closest thing this side of the Atlantic to home.

Thanks to American refugee-resettlement and family-reunification policies, Minneapolis has the dubious distinction of hosting the largest concentration of Somalis in the United States — some 30,000, according to census records, though Somali leaders say that underestimates the population by tens of thousands. The influx began in the 1980s, as Somalia succumbed to internal violence, and continued through the ’90s, as it was consumed by civil war. A quarter-century later, Somalia remains among the least stable countries on Earth, and Somalis continue to come to the United States in droves. Before the Obama administration welcomes 10,000 (or more) Syrian refugees, it should consider the Somalis.

I have been wearing readers and my keyboard out for five months over the Republican strategy that abets President Obama’s aiding and comforting of Iran, rather than fighting it with every tool in the constitutional chest. These critiques of the Corker bill (enacted in May as the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015) have seemed unduly harsh to some GOP leaders and right-of-center pundits.

There is a purpose, however, behind my Cassandra-like lament: I have been trying to minimize the damage by persuading Congress to avoid giving the president’s atrocious deal — in particular, its erasure of the sanctions regime that had been squeezing the Iranian regime — the status of formal law.

Without congressional imprimatur — by either approval of a treaty or an authorizing statute — Obama’s deal would be a mere executive agreement. While harmful for the next 16 months, an executive agreement could be fully renounced when the next president takes office in 2017. In the meantime, Congress could enact resolutions stressing that the sanctions remain on the books and should be enforced. On notice that they could face crippling penalties once Obama is gone, individuals, corporations, and countries would be discouraged from commerce with Iran. Iran might even reject the deal.

By contrast, formal law binds our country. Laws must be faithfully executed by presidents — at least presidents not named Barack Obama.

Meet Alfonso Flores, the decorated former Green Beret who is rallying Los Angeles parents to fight the unions and reform the worst public schools, one school at a time.

Anaheim, Calif.

When most people think of this quintessential California suburb, the Angels baseball team or Disneyland probably comes to mind. But a five-minute drive from the “happiest place on earth” takes you to Palm Lane Elementary, ground zero in a fight between teachers unions and parents who are trying to fix California’s broken public schools. The conflict—as so often in American education—boils down to unionized teachers trying to stop minority children from attending charter schools.

Ninety percent of Palm Lane students come from low-income families. About 85% are Latino, and more than half aren’t native English speakers. Palm Lane has been on the California Education Department’s list of underperforming schools since 2003. In 2013 a mere 38% of students scored proficient or better in English on state tests. And Palm Lane is hardly an exception in the area: Four other elementary schools in Anaheim rank even lower on the state’s Academic Performance Index.

But Alfonso Flores is leading a grass-roots insurgency against the union-controlled regime at Palm Lane. The former teacher and father of four kids who attend public schools in Hesperia has used the state’s “parent trigger” law, passed in 2010, to force changes at a half-dozen schools in California. The law stipulates that if a majority of parents at a struggling school sign a petition, they can compel changes in school management or personnel. Sometimes, the parents contract with a charter-school operator. In one case, they hired a new principal. Parents have also used the law as a negotiating tool to force the district to make improvements like adding more staff.

As the new school year was getting started, Mr. Flores sat down with me in the park next to Park Lane that has served as a meeting place and training ground for parents in the trigger campaign. The 45-year-old decorated Gulf War veteran has plenty of stories to tell about doing battle with teachers unions that bring heavy artillery to every fight.

“It’s grass-roots,” he says of parent-trigger efforts, “and that’s what scares the teachers unions.”

Mr. Flores, a self-described “anchor baby” of Mexican immigrants, knows firsthand the value of escaping bad schools. As a child in the 1970s, he spent three hours daily on a bus trekking to and from a school in the San Fernando Valley under the Los Angeles Unified School District’s desegregation plan. Busing to achieve racial integration is hardly optimal, but Mr. Flores says it did allow him to avoid the horrendous schools in the Los Angeles inner city.

It helped ensure the posterity of the ever quotable Samuel Johnson.

The world’s greatest biography was composed by a depressive, a heavy drinker, an inconstant husband and a neglectful father who suffered at least 17 bouts of gonorrhea. That biography is, of course, James Boswell’s “Life of Johnson.” Nothing like it came before in form and content, and nothing like it has appeared since. Biography we call it, but in some ways it also qualifies as an autobiography of its author, who regularly obtrudes in its pages and may even be said to be its secondary subject.

Adam Sisman ends his excellent book “Boswell’s Presumptuous Task” by noting that “never again will there be such a combination of subject, author, and opportunity.” Boswell was 22 years old and Johnson 54 when they met in 1763. Johnson was widowed from his beloved, roughly 20-years-older wife, Tetty; Boswell was the unanchored and still disappointing oldest son of the Scottish laird and magistrate Lord Auchinleck. Famous both as a talker and as the author of the Rambler, “Rasselas” and his Dictionary, Johnson was already recognized as a great man. Upon meeting him, Boswell must have sensed that this large, strange, twitch- and tic-ridden man was his passage to a permanent place in literary history.

Boswell saw not merely a great subject in Samuel Johnson, but an exemplar, a teacher, a reality instructor, for the two men were vastly different in outlook, stability and, above all, good sense. Johnson came to love Boswell without ever quite treating him as an equal. “You are longer a boy than others,” he told him when Boswell was in his mid-30s. In Johnson’s eyes, he would remain a boy, always in need of straightening out, through their 21-year relationship, which ended with Johnson’s death in 1784 at 75.

Why it takes six years to build a road in America. And how to do it faster.

Anyone who rattled down highways replete with moon craters while traveling on Labor Day weekend knows: The government doesn’t excel at managing roads. A major improvement would be bulldozing a permitting process that delays new public-works projects for up to a decade, and a new report from the nonpartisan group Common Good offers a road map.

In 2009 the Obama Administration air-dropped $800 billion of taxpayer cash known as the stimulus package, but as of last year a piddling $30 billion had been spent on transportation infrastructure. One reason the projects proved not as “shovel ready” as promised is that proposals must undergo extensive environmental and permitting reviews, which leave no tedium behind in part to avoid litigation.

No single official oversees the process, and agency turf wars are the norm. A project must comply with every federal, state and local outfit that declares itself relevant—Fish and Wildlife, the town fire department. A desalination plant in San Diego, for example, kicked off a permitting adventure in 2003 that lasted nine years and endured 14 legal challenges, which makes California’s failure at drought relief less of a mystery.

The Syrian refugee disaster is a result of the Middle East’s failure to grapple with modernity and Europe’s failure to defend its ideals.

The migration crisis enveloping Europe and much of the Middle East today is one of the worst humanitarian disasters since the 1940s. Millions of desperate people are on the march: Sunni refugees driven out by the barbarity of the Assad regime in Syria, Christians and Yazidis fleeing the pornographic violence of Islamic State, millions more of all faiths and no faith fleeing poverty and oppression without end. Parents are entrusting their lives and the lives of their young children to rickety boats and unscrupulous criminal syndicates along the Mediterranean coast, professionals and business people are giving up their livelihoods and investments, farmers are abandoning their land, and from North Africa to Syria, the sick and the old are on the road, carrying a few treasured belongings on a new trail of tears.
It is the first migration crisis of the 21st century, but it is unlikely to be the last. The rise of identity politics across the Middle East and much of sub-Saharan Africa is setting off waves of violence like those that tore apart the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries. The hatreds and rivalries driving endangered communities to exile and destruction have a long history. They probably have a long future as well.

In two prior postings (here and here), I listed flaws in the constitutional arguments of opponents of birthright citizenship for children of aliens living here illegally.

For children to be American citizens by virtue of the Fourteenth Amendment, they must be born within American territory and they (or rather their parents) must be “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. Those opposing birthright citizenship hurt their own case by basing it principally on the claim that visiting foreigners never qualify as “subject to the jurisdiction.”

The problems with that claim are:

The congressional debates cited to support it represent only weak evidence of meaning and are ambiguous on the subject, at best.
Before adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, many (probably most, perhaps all) African-American were legally foreigners, so the Amendment had to include foreigners to achieve its purpose of extending citizenship to them.
The U.S. Supreme Court has decided twice that the meaning of “subject to the jurisdiction” is governed by the English common law doctrine of allegiance. That doctrine grants local citizenship to the children of most visiting foreigners.

I do not have a dog in this hunt. But if I were legal counsel for opponents of birthright citizenship, I would take their legal argument in an entirely different direction. And I would try to square my case with precedent instead of arguing that precedent should be disregarded.