RUTHFULLY YOURS

Presidential hopeful and former Hewlett-Packard HPQ -3.70% CEO Carly Fiorina has built her entire campaign around the fact that she comes from the business world, not politics.

“A fish swims in water, it doesn’t know it’s water. It’s not that politicians are bad people, it’s that they’ve been in that system forever,” she said at Wednesday night’s second debate among Republican candidates for the 2016 Presidential Election.

The line was consistent with Fiorina’s pitch to voters as a no-nonsense executive who knows how to revitalize the U.S. economy, but to hear one of her chief Republican rivals tell it, the business track record she leans on isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

“Hewlett-Packard was a disaster. Lucent, the company she was at before Hewlett-Packard, was a disaster. These were two disastrous reigns,” said Donald Trump in an interview with CBS’ Face The Nation.

For all Trump’s bluster on the campaign trail, he has a point here. Under Fiorina’s reign at HP shareholders took a beating. During her tenure, HP shares lost 42% while the broader market slid just 6%. The day she was fired in February 2005, the stock popped 7%.

Nobody thinks Hillary Clinton’s email controversy is funny, which is why her past attempts to make jokes about the issue have fallen flat. But the Democrat presidential hopeful doesn’t seem to have learned from her past stumbles.

She laughed derisively when asked on CNN to respond to recent comments made by Governor Chris Christie regarding her problematic email arrangement.

At the GOP debate last night, Governor Christie, a former federal prosecutor, took aim at Hillary’s email problem, saying: “The question is, who’s going to prosecute Hillary Clinton? The Obama White House seems to have no interest. The Justice Department seems to have no interest. I think it’s time to put a former federal prosecutor on the same stage with Hillary Clinton, and I will prosecute her during those debates on that stage. She knows she’s wrong, and she cannot look in the mirror at herself and she cannot tell the American people the truth.”

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.