Photo, left: Syria, Russia, China  
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
 
Hour One
Friday  2 October 2015  / Hour 1, Block A: Jim McTague, Barron's, in re: Jobs report lowers chance of Fed rate hike this month  “Holy disappointing jobs report! Headline weakness coupled with nonexistent wage growth, and a further decline in the participation rate suggests the U.S. labor market is undergoing a significant slowdown in the second half of the year. Furthermore, keep in mind, weakness in the labor market generally translates into weakness in headline economic activity as well….From the Fed’s perspective—I imagine they are thinking one word: Phew! Thank goodness we bypassed September. With two consecutive months of significant headline weakness, in our opinion, October is very much off the table, as is a rate increase by the end of the year.” –Lindsey Piegza, Stifel
Friday  2 October 2015  / Hour 1, Block B:  Seb Gorka, Marine Corps University, in re: Obama Blasts Russia over Strikes inside Syria  President Barack Obama criticized Russia for what he called indiscriminate airstrikes in Syria this week against members of the opposition fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime as well as against Islamic State.
Friday  2 October 2015  / Hour 1, Block C: Mary Anastasia O'Grady, WSJ, in re:  Colombia's Dubious Deal with Terrorists
Friday  2 October 2015  / Hour 1, Block D:  Claudia Rosett, FDD, in re: Obama’s Talk and Putin’s Blitz: A Russian Middle East Coup in Three Acts In New York, the United Nations is still lumbering through its Sept. 28th – Oct. 3 general debate. But even with today’s declaration by aging potentate Mahmoud Abbas that the Palestinian Authority will no longer respect the Oslo Accords (did they ever?) the headlines are elsewhere. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin not only stole the UN show, but in Syria — and beyond — is stealing a march on President Obama that makes the current world scene look ever more like the disastrous penultimate year of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. That 1979 run of debacles opened with Iran’s Islamic Revolution, and rolled on to the Soviet Union’s December invasion of Afghanistan — lighting the fuel under the cauldron whence sprang, in due course, a great many horrors, including the Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda attacks on the United States. . . .  [more]
 
Hour Two
Friday  2 October 2015  / Hour 2, Block A:  Michael Vlahos, Global Security Studies program, Johns Hopkins University; Center for a New American Security; in re:  Obama: Russia heading for 'quagmire' in Syria President Barack Obama said Friday that he was willing to work with . . .
     The Spanish Civil War (Spanish: Guerra Civil Española), widely known in Spain simply as the Civil War (Spanish: Guerra Civil) or The War (Spanish: La Guerra), was a civil war fought from 1936 to 1939 between the Republicans, who were loyal to the democratic, left-leaning Second Spanish Republic, and the Nationalists, a falangist group led by General Francisco Franco. The Nationalists won, and Franco then ruled Spain for the next 36 years, from April 1939 until his death in November 1975.  (1 of 2)
Friday  2 October 2015  / Hour 2, Block B: Michael Vlahos, Global Security Studies program, Johns Hopkins University; Center for a New American Security; in re: Obama: Russia action in Syria is 'recipe for disaster'  (2 of 2)
Friday  2 October 2015  / Hour 2, Block C:  Holly Fretwell, PERC Montana, in re:  “NPS Franchise: A Better Way to Protect our Heritage” – As part of the George Wright Forum’s National Park Centennial Essay Series, PERC’s Holly Fretwell proposes an arrangement in which the National Park Service offers a franchise opportunity for entrepreneurs to run new park sites deemed of national significance. Land and structures would remain in private hands, but receive “national park” stature. Find out more on how a franchise structure could benefit parks here.   http://www.perc.org/blog/national-public-lands-day-2015#sthash.sQZGMtY4.dpuf
Friday  2 October 2015  / Hour 2, Block D: Kirk Johnson, NYT, in re: Exuberance and Disappointment at Shell’s About-Face in the Arctic   Environmental activists celebrated Shell’s announcement that it would suspend drilling for oil in the Alaskan Arctic, while others lamented the potential lost jobs and tax revenue.
 
Hour Three
Friday  2 October 2015  / Hour 3, Block A: Harry Siegel, New York Daily News, in re: Bill de Blasio, master jawboner, is determined to play on the big stage.
Friday  2 October 2015  / Hour 3, Block B:  Lee Smith, Weekly Standard, in re: The End of Pax Americana  Obama’s ‘accomplishment.’  The United States, President Obama said at the U.N. General Assembly last week, “worked with many nations in this assembly to prevent a third world war—by forging alliances with old adversaries.” Presumably, the president was not referring to his deeply flawed Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the recent agreement that the White House has marketed as the only alternative to war with a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. Rather, it seems he was referring to the post-World War II period, when the United States created and presided over an international order that prevented an even larger, potentially nuclear, conflict with the Soviet Union. Now, that Pax Americana may be ending. 
Indeed, Russia’s airstrikes against CIA-vetted Syrian rebels last week looked like a punctuation mark. When the secretary of state holds a joint press conference with Moscow’s foreign minister after Russia has [obliterated] American proxies bearing American arms, we are not witnessing anything like a return to the Cold War. Rather, we’re witnessing a new order being born. It is an order that is being designed by others, without any concern for American interests. Its cradle is not the conference rooms of the U.N., but the killing fields of Syria. After four and a half years, the Syrian civil war and the refugee crisis it has spawned threaten to disrupt two zones of American vital interest, the Persian Gulf and Europe. America’s Cold War prosperity depended on our ability to trade with the rest of the world across both oceans. The United States built a powerful blue-water navy and far-flung bases as tokens of our willingness to protect our allies and stand up to their, and our, adversaries. What facilitates both trade and the movement of a military as large as America’s is access to affordable sources of energy, which is why the security of the Persian Gulf has been a vital American interest for 70 years. 
The nuclear agreement with Iran signals that Obama doesn’t see things this way. From his perspective, no core American interest would be threatened by either the domination of the Gulf by revolutionary Iran or the likelihood that other regional powers will go nuclear. The JCPOA told American partners in the Middle East that the old alliance system was finished. Israel and Saudi Arabia would get stiff-armed, and Iran would get to call plays in the huddle. What Obama sought, as he said in a New Yorker interview, was a “new geopolitical equilibrium.” Vladimir Putin understood Obama’s rhetoric and actions as confirmation of what he’d already surmised. Putin showed NATO to be a paper tiger when he moved against Georgia; then ordered a Russian crew based in Syria to shoot down a jet flown by a NATO member, Turkey; then annexed Crimea, to little response. In July, the JCPOA opened the way for Russian and Iranian cooperation in Syria. The Americans, Putin understood, had no stomach for a fight. But the White House may have helped create the conditions for a conflict much larger than the war already under way in Syria, a conflict that could someday force the United States to defend its vital interests.
“There already is a third world war under way,” says Angelo Codevilla, professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University. “It’s the war between Sunnis and Shiites. It’s a world war because it engages people all around the world who happen to be Muslims.”  Codevilla thinks it unlikely that the war will expand past the Middle East but notes that Pakistan, a nuclear Sunni power, could present problems. In any event, the Obama administration has little ability to shape outcomes. “Once you seize a position by force, as the Russians have,” says Codevilla, “you are in the diplomatic driver’s seat. Putin is schooling the U.S. foreign policy establishment in foreign affairs. He has put his armed forces not at the service of Bashar al-Assad, but at the service of Russian interests.”
And Obama? The White House believes in a balance of power without winners and losers, an abstract international system with room for every nation to pursue its rational interests. But this is fantasy: Whatever order exists belongs to the power that imposes it. The Syrian war threatens two of the pillars of the order we formerly led.  “At what point does the Syrian conflict create political instability in places like Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing states in the Persian Gulf?” asks Walter Russell Mead, professor of foreign policy and humanities at Bard College. “As long as nothing is happening to block the oil flow, it’s the refugee flow that makes Syria an international issue.”  But even before the refugees, European security services were overwhelmed trying to keep tabs on potential jihadist recruits traveling from Europe to the Middle East and back. The influx of hundreds of thousands more migrants from the region is likely to generate political instability and could carry the war between Sunnis and Shiites into Europe.
To stem the refugee crisis, the White House is broadly hinting it is willing to go along with Tehran and Moscow and let Assad stay in power, at least for now. But it is Assad and his allies—not, as the administration seems to suggest, the Islamic State—who are responsible for the vast majority of the refugees. If the Obama administration accommodates Russia and Iran on Assad, it will be acquiescing in a plot to extort and destabilize Europe. In the Gulf, Mead says, “if the Sunnis continue to feel that they’re losing an existential conflict with Iran, they may move toward a closer relationship between governments and radical groups. Keeping oil money out of the hands of truly radical jihadists has been a core U.S. interest since September 11, but if the Gulf states don’t feel we are keeping our part of the bargain by providing security, they could take matters into their own hands.” Of course, another option for the Gulf states would be to enlist Russia, which, unlike the Obama administration, has shown its willingness to act on behalf of its own interests. Now that Obama has forsaken America’s post-World War II patrimony, life is more dangerous for America and its allies. This won’t be easy to reverse, no matter who succeeds Barack Obama.     Lee Smith is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
Friday  2 October 2015  / Hour 3, Block C: Rocky Barker, PERC Montana, in re: How Free-Market Environmentalism Is Transforming Parks Free-market ideas can continue to make "America's best idea" even better. [more]
Friday  2 October 2015  / Hour 3, Block D:   Carson Bruno, Hoover, in re: Hoover Golden State Poll:  Californians Open to Sacrifice When It comes to Addressing the Drought. As California copes with its four-year drought, a new Hoover Institution survey shows that the Golden State’s electorate is amenable—across ideological and regional divides--to continued water conservation and sharing groundwater resources with neighboring communities. “The drought is that rare occurrence that affects Californians from all walks of life,” said the Hoover Institution research Fellow Bill Whalen. “The good news in this survey is that voters are open to sharing and sacrifice –even though it might require some skilled salesmanship from the state’s leaders.” The Hoover Institution’s Golden State Poll, administered by the survey research firm YouGov and designed in conjunction with Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for the American West, reveals “dealing with the state’s water problems” as Californians’ lead priority for state government at this time.
According to Hoover’s findings, 54 percent of likely California voters support required water cutbacks, with limits and fines. Only 24 percent preferred no limits, with higher costs per gallon for heavier use. Sixty-two percent of likely voters support required sharing of groundwater supplies; 67 percent supported restrictions on groundwater use. “The poll suggests that, if the drought persists, Californians will support changes in the way California currently stores and allocates its water,” concludes Bruce Cain, director of Stanford’s Bill Lane Center for the American West.  “Crisis might present an opening for the much needed compromise that has for so long eluded California’s water politics.” 
The survey, which interviewed 1,500 adult (18 and up) Californians who live in the San Francisco Bay Area, Central Valley, and Southern California, was conducted from August 31 to September 11. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percent for the full weighted sample. 
•       When not made aware of how wastewater recycling works, only 10 percent of Californians outside Orange County (which already has a wastewater-recycling program) said they’d drink it. Eighteen percent said they’d cook with it; 22 percent would bathe in it. Knowing more about the scientific facts behind water recycling, support grows to 20 percent, 29 percent, and 43 percent, respectively.
•       Californians prefer an “all of the above” approach to augmenting water storage: building dams and reservoirs (70 percent of likely voters), desalination (82 percent), more storage in underground aquifers (89 percent), collecting and recycling storm water (91 percent).
•       Fifty-three percent of likely voters favored relaxing environmental laws to build water storage and transportation, an  issue that’s a tougher sell with Democrats (36 percent ) than Republicans (76 percent) or Independents (65 percent).
•       Opinion was more closely divided on the reduction or elimination of subsidies for farmers' water, with 49 percent in favor of ending them versus 30 percent opposed. Republicans split 40 percent in favor to 43 percent opposed; Democrats were 56 percent to 21percent; Independents, 49 percent to29 percent.
•       Support for giving some of the water currently used for agriculture to residential and other business use varied with voters’ familiarity. With no information, only 29 percent favor and 39 percent oppose reallocating agricultural water. When told that agriculture currently uses 40 percent of California's water, 38 percent favored and 36 percent opposed. When a third group was told that agriculture uses 80% of the water put to human use in California, the numbers shifted to 47 percent in favor and 30 percent opposed.
For full poll results, go to Hoover Golden State Poll
 
Hour Four
Friday  2 October 2015  / Hour 4, Block A: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers - the Silo Effect (Hardback) - Common, by Gillian Tett (1 of 4)
Friday  2 October 2015  / Hour 4, Block B: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers - the Silo Effect (Hardback) - Common, by Gillian Tett (2 of 4)
Friday  2 October 2015  / Hour 4, Block C: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers - the Silo Effect (Hardback) - Common, by Gillian Tett (3 of 4)
Friday  2 October 2015  / Hour 4, Block D: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers - the Silo Effect (Hardback) - Common, by Gillian Tett (4 of 4)