Photo, left: "If any man can show just cause why they [Foreign Entanglements as the bride, and Uncle Sam as the groom] may not lawfully be joined together, let him speak now." – with the US Senate crashing through the glass window to the right.
 'Interupting the Ceremony.' John T. McCutcheon's 1918 cartoon on the Senate fight against the League of Nations.
 
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
 
Hour One
Friday  20 March 2015  / Hour 1, Block A: Harry Siegel, New York Daily News, in re:  Black lives matter.
Obvious as that should be, it’s needed saying. And saying it and hearing it said have been cathartic. Because too often, the choices Americans have made — and those of the leaders they elect and the police chiefs those leaders appoint — say otherwise. When you force Americans, especially white ones, to choose between safety and fairness, safety wins.
As potent as the Black Lives Matter movement has been in driving the media conversation, preaching to and amplifying the voices of the converted, it’s done little to convince . . .  [more]
Friday  20 March 2015  / Hour 1, Block B: Joshua Green, Bloomberg Politics, in re: THANKS FOR THE STOCK TIP, SENATOR   Inside the shadowy, poorly policed wold of 'political intelligence'   On April 1, 2013, an hour before the markets closed, a congressional staffer named Brian Sutter passed along to a lobbyist the kind of tip that can make a savvy investor a quick fortune: Medicare was about to raise some reimbursement rates, which would be a windfall for big insurance companies. Ten minutes later the lobbyist, Mark Hayes of Greenberg Traurig, whose clients included Humana, notified an analyst at Height Securities, a small . . .
Friday  20 March 2015  / Hour 1, Block C:  David A Graham, The Atlantic, in re: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/03/Swedish-Prosecutors-Travel-London-Interview-WikiLeaks-Founder-Julian-Assange-Rape-Charges/387721/
DAVID A. GRAHAM is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers political and global news. He previously reported for Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, and The National.
Friday  20 March 2015  / Hour 1, Block D: Tom Nichols, Naval War College, in re: America's Hollow Foreign Policy
Tom Nichols is Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval War College and an adjunct at the Harvard Extension School. His most recent book is No Use: Nuclear Weapons and U.S. National Security (University of Pennsylvania, 2014. You can follow him on Twitter:@TheWarRoom_Tom.
Hour Two
Friday  20 March 2015  / Hour 2, Block A:  Michael Vlahos, Naval War College, in re:   http://www.amazon.com/Wilson-A-Scott-Berg/dp/0425270068  / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles
Friday  20 March 2015  / Hour 2, Block B: Michael Vlahos, Naval War College, in re: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles
Friday  20 March 2015  / Hour 2, Block C:  Gene Marks, WashingtonPost.com, in re:  Win a March Madness pool? Don't forget to pay taxes  ;  Why your NCAA office pool is against the law   ;  44 Taxes We Pay as Residents of the Great City of Philadelphia  ;  Five tax breaks overlooked by small business owners  ; Look out, taxpayers: Student loans aren't being repaid  ;  Tax tips for military personnel
Friday  20 March 2015  / Hour 2, Block D:  Lanhee J Chen, Hoover, in re: Why Not 50 Different Affordable Health-Care Plans?   An obscure provision in the ObamaCare law says states can enact more market-friendly reforms.
Hour Three
Friday  20 March 2015  / Hour 3, Block A:  Michael Balter, Science Magazine, in re: http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2015/02/mysterious-indo-european-homeland-may-have-been-steppes-ukraine-and-russia ;   Archaeology: Humans and Neandertals likely interbred in Middle East
Friday  20 March 2015  / Hour 3, Block B:  Michael Pregent,  National Defense University, in re:  ttp://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/143022/michael-pregent-and-robin-simcox/isis-on-the-run
Friday  20 March 2015  / Hour 3, Block C:  Richard A Epstein, Hoover Institution, Chicago Law, in re: The DOJ must acknowledge that the killing of Michael Brown was a justifiable homicide. It must abandon its contrived legalisms and defend Wilson, by condemning unequivocally the entire misguided campaign against him, which resulted in threats against his life and forced his resignation from the police force. Eric Holder owes Wilson an apology for the unnecessary anguish that Wilson has suffered. As the Attorney General for all Americans, he must tell the protestors once and for all that their campaign has been thoroughly misguided from start to finish, and that their continued protests should stop in the interests of civic peace and racial harmony. In light of the past vilification of Wilson, it is not enough for the DOJ to publish the report, and not trumpet its conclusions. It is necessary to put that report front and center in the public debate so that everyone now understands that Wilson behaved properly throughout the entire incident . . .  [more]
Friday  20 March 2015  / Hour 3, Block D: Kirk Johnson, NYT, in re: Oil Company Lease Stirs Revolt in Green Seattle  Residents are up in arms over plans by Royal Dutch Shell that would tie the environmentally conscious city to Arctic Ocean oil drilling. 
Hour Four
Friday  20 March 2015  / Hour 4, Block A:  Liz Peek, The Fiscal Times & Fox, in re: “Liz Warren is Obama with conviction.”  “Liz Warren is Hillary without the baggage.”  Actually, the Massachusetts senator is a progressive firebrand whose family issues could cause serious problems for the country.  She is dynamic, she has fire in her belly and she hates --- absolutely hates – banks.
Why does Liz Warren hate the banks? It’s personal -- bankers were mean to her “Daddy.” When Elizabeth Warren was 12 years old, a bank repossessed one of the family’s two cars. Because the bank threatened to take the Warren’s home, too, and because her father was out of work, her mother needed to bring in some desperately-needed money. She weepily struggled into a too-tight black dress, hobbled to Sears, Roebuck on uncomfortable high heels, and got her first-ever job. It was, as Warren recounts in her memoir, the day she grew up.
Her father, whom she calls “Daddy” throughout A Fighting Chance, was a serial flop who ultimately worked as a maintenance man “cleaning up around an apartment building” after he had lost his sales job with Montgomery Ward. Earlier in his life he had failed to enlist as a fighter pilot in World War II. After the war, . . . Related: Elizabeth Warren—Candid, Gutsy and Making Enemies
Friday  20 March 2015  / Hour 4, Block B:  John Tamny, Forbes.com, in re: Global Warming Hype Is Mocked by the World's Most Powerful Market Signal    A frequent reply to deniers from those on the true believer side of the global warming debate is the oft-mentioned stat revealing 97% consensus among climate scientists that humans are the cause of global warming.  Supposedly the number confirms what warming’s believers feel strongly, all the while exposing the skeptics as willfully blind to an allegedly monolithic view held by those seen as most qualified to comment on climate. It’s an interesting statistic, but to quote Nigel Lawson, scientific truth “is not established by counting heads.”
Whatever the actual rate of belief among scientists, nothing in this column should be construed as a presumption of scientific knowledge, or what scientists believe.  While some skeptics well-immersed in the debate have called into question the validity of the 97% number, this piece doesn’t presume to referee who is right or wrong about 97%.  In fact, what’s written here will actually attempt to shift the statistical debate back toward the kind of head counting frequently used by warming’s deepest believers.
In that case, let’s accept the 97% number as fact for the purposes of this piece.  People like Lawson have been criticized for presuming to have an opinion about the science behind global warming for not being scientists, and implicit in such a view is that one must have very unique schooling and training to know the actual warming truth.  In short, climate scientists are rare, presumably a microscopic percent of 1 percent of the world’s total population.   And once again for the purposes of this piece, they almost to man and woman believe that global warming is caused by humans.
More interesting, they’ve convinced non-scientists like Vice Media founder Shane Smith that the threat of global warming is truly dire.  As Smith put it on Vice’s HBO show last year, the melting glaciers [purportedly caused by global warming] “scare the . . .
Friday  20 March 2015  / Hour 4, Block C: Drake Bennett, Bloomberg Businessweek, in re: How Canada Goose Parkas Migrated South—Drake Bennett available to discuss the thousand-dollar coats you see everywhere. http://bloom.bg/1wDyWKk
Friday  20 March 2015  / Hour 4, Block D:   Robert Zimmerman, behindtheblack.com, in re: An iron rain fell on Earth early in its formation    New research attempting to explain why the Earth but not the Moon has so much iron splattered through its mantle has found that iron can be more easily vaporized during impacts than previously thought, and thus rained down on the planet during the early asteroid bombardment.
The principal investigator, Kraus, said, “Because planetary scientists always thought it was difficult to vaporize iron, they never thought of vaporization as an important process during the formation of the Earth and its core. But with our experiments, we showed that it’s very easy to impact-vaporize iron.” He continued, “This changes the way we think of planet formation, in that instead of core formation occurring by iron sinking down to the growing Earth’s core in large blobs (technically called diapirs), that iron was vaporized, spread out in a plume over the surface of the Earth and rained out as small droplets. The small iron droplets mixed easily with the mantle, which changes our interpretation of the geochemical data we use to date the timing of Earth’s core formation.”  The Moon’s gravity in turn wasn’t sufficient to pull its own iron vapor down. Thus, it doesn't have much iron in its mantle.
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