The John Batchelor Show

Monday 11 May 2015

Air Date: 
May 11, 2015

Photo, left: Labour risisng, NYT August 6, 1945.
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Co-host: Thaddeus McCotter, WJR, The Great Voice of the Great Lakes; and author, Liberty Risen.
Hour One
Monday  11 May 2015  / Hour 1, Block A: Tom Joscelyn, FDD; in re: Al Qaeda’s deputy general manager killed in US drone strike  AQAP has confirmed that Nasser bin Ali al Ansi was killed in a US drone strike. Al Ansi was a senior AQAP official, as well as al Qaeda's deputy general manager. He was considered one of Osama bin Laden's "special ones."
Monday  11 May 2015  / Hour 1, Block B:  Jed Babbin, Washington Times, in re: The mini-summit with Arab leaders this week has already failed. All but two have bailed out. They've given up on Obama for very good reason: he's dedicated to giving Iran the nuclear weapons it's wanted for decades.  JED BABBIN: Obama's Iran nuclear deal conflicts with Arab summit goals - Washington Times
Monday  11 May 2015  / Hour 1, Block C: Claudia Rosett, FDD & Forbes.com, in re: Iran Shipping Sanctions Run Aground?  Officially, the Obama administration remains committed to enforcing sanctions on Iran’s main merchant shipping fleet, the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines, also known as IRISL. But in practice, since the Iran nuclear talks began early last year, many of IRISL’s cargo ships appear to be operating . . .  [more]
The Azergoun, a new container ship, built for the Iranian shipping line; when US sanctions were imposed, the ship went on a  peregrination under other flags, ownerships, paint colors.  There’s one seven-digit number, the hull number issued under the Intl Maritime Authority, that stays constant. Now it's harder to ascertain sanctions. Azergoun has just left Venezuela, is sailing hell-for-leather under the Iranian flag for Bandar Abbas.  Treasury refused to comment; State: We are not aware of any sanctions that have been triggered by this particular port call.” This Administration has a long list of special cases, exemptions, that it refuses to release to the public, there are 117 on the US blacklist; of these, 112 have been reflagged back to Iran.  United against Nuclear Iran: accused this ship of specifically illegal ship-to-ship transfers.  Was in Taiwan earlier this year. Iran doing potentially quite dangerous deeds knowing that the US will ignore them. We now have a de facto lift of sanctions. Note another Iranian ship on US blacklist sailing from Bulgaria through Suez.  Hunh?  These are easily among the ships running  guns to the Houthis with impunity.  Iranian ships currently are continuously sailing up and down the Red Sea.  Iran ahs already made its decision, are undermining its own sanctions by failing to enforce them – but the Administration needs to be held to account. 
Monday  11 May 2015  / Hour 1, Block D:  Gordon Chang, Forbes.com, in re: North Korea tests submarine launch ballistic missile (it says) ; also, Xi in Moscow (Ши в Москве; he is).  Photo: in foreground, Kim Jon-eun next to a military man ion a vessel; in the distance, what looks like Moby ick to do a loop and return to the water  The Moby Dick figure is a missile.  Experts say this is a real photo, pronounced authentic by both ROK intell, as has Rick Fisher. See: foam as it breaks the surface, plus darker clouds showing missile ignition. Probably bought the subs from the Russians; probably also at least one missile from Russia. Navigation system probably Chinese. Definitely have sold launch system to DPRK.  China’s short-tem interest is to help DPRK to throw off balance US, ROK and Japan; but long-term, this is China, whom the North Koreans detest.  Chinese with some Russians are bldg huge condominium towers on 57 Street – money is exiting China at perhaps $100 billion per month.  North Korea’s ability to shoot these missiles from subs puts most of the United States at high risk.
Hour Two
Monday  11 May 2015  / Hour 2, Block A:  Mona Charen, Syndicated Columnist; Senior Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center; NRO; David M Drucker, Washington Examiner Senior Congressional correspondent, in re: Clinton will take no questions? We all know that the only thing you can do wrong in Washington is to be insufficiently cynical, but Mrs Clinton has responded to one question once every three days. An opera singer on stage who refuses to sing?  She might be looking at the example of Barack Obama, who’s given precious few press conferences.  Since she’s not talking to the media, she and her campaign have calculated that speaking any more would be detrimental to her campaign.  She’s long been convinced that the press all detest her.  She notes that the press would love to have a rousing Dem primary, as it sell papers; but that’s not at all what she wants.  What’s she afraid of?  She did not perform well a the UN presser on her private server – she seemed stiff, rude, old.  She’ll do availabilities when she chooses to with good lighting on a sofa in a pink sweater.  This is a send-up of a democracy. Clintons are dealing with multiple potential scandals.  The one taking questions is Bill Clinton.
Monday  11 May 2015  / Hour 2, Block B:  David M Drucker, Washington Examiner Senior Congressional correspondent, and Mona Charen, Syndicated Columnist; Senior Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center; NRO; in re:  The chattering Republicans, and Elizabeth Warren running counter to her president on the trade bill.  Fiorina, Huckabee and Carson join the cavalcade; & Cameron election /Dr Carson, Gov Huckabee, Mrs Fiorina. Mrs Fiorina has taken over 2300 questions while MRs Clinton ahs taken eight.  The GOP over the weekend: all see a benefit to their speaking to the press, so they talk a lot.  JB: I like Carly Fiorina.  MC: She’s impressing people. Has a good story about HP: she says took a tough position, says she was fired in “a barroom brawl.”  She’s accomplished and articulate.  This could be a stage of a dozen candidates.  Elizabeth Warren running not necessarily for the presidency but for leadership of the Democratic Party –a really big, influential voice in the direction of the Party. Could be setting herself up for four years from now. Were she to run right now, the Party would embrace her.  Pres Obama can never imagine that his opponent might have a good motive so he’s impugning her as jut another pol.
Monday  11 May 2015  / Hour 2, Block C: Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents, in re:   http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Gulf-states-passive-aggressive-behavior...
Monday  11 May 2015  / Hour 2, Block D:   McKay Coppins, Buzzfeed, in re: HillaryClinton.net Redirects to Carly Fiorina’s Campaign Website  Carly Fiorina has been asked 200 questions in the last week, and an adviser says the URL snafu has come up in almost every interview.  [more]
Hour Three
Monday  11 May 2015  / Hour 3, Block A:  Mary Kissel, Wall Street Journal editorial board & host of OpinionJournal.com; in re: The Senate’s Trade Killers    Harry Reid and Rob Portman are the strange bedfellows of U.S. decline.
Monday  11 May 2015  / Hour 3, Block B: Ed Crooks, FT.com, in re:  Carmaker Tesla looks to spark revolution in domestic power   Tesla Motors, the Silicon Valley electric car company, has taken a big bet on domestic power storage, highlighting the . . .
 
Monday  11 May 2015  / Hour 3, Block C:  Tunku Varadarajan, Hoover, in re: http://www.politico.eu/article/uk-election-ten-takeaways/
 
Monday  11 May 2015  / Hour 3, Block D:   Philip Terzian, Weekly Standard, in re:   http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/it-s-all-about-willas_928590.html#.VTqnXEBpSjQ.gmail
Hour Four
Monday  11 May 2015  / Hour 4, Block A:  Conrad Black, author, Rise to Greatness: The History of Canada from the Vikings to the Present, in re:    Future for the Tories Lies to the Right in a Tilt to UKIP  My wife, Barbara, a renowned political scientist, in the absence of conclusive evidence of humanly generated climate change, suggests that some ineluctable and universal forces are possessing electorates to smite themselves, as if deranged by a self-destructive political bilharzia, inadvertently carried passively by the press.
In the United Kingdom, all three leaders lost the 2010 election, and the country entered the first peacetime coalition since 1935. The Conservative and Liberal Democratic government has had an economically competent record that balanced austerity well enough with fiscal incentives, and has a lower level of unemployment and a higher rate of economic growth than Canada, despite being a comparatively poorer country, tucked into a less promising economic association with Europe than Canada enjoys with the United States.  But David Cameron has waffled on everything else. The National Health Service, which surpasses all other British sacred cows — even the BBC — was to be reformed, and then not; the education department, which has produced steadily less educated students in inverse proportion, as in most other Western countries, to the resources committed to education, was to be reformed, and then not.
Arm in arm with France, Britain charged into Libya, ran out of missiles, and, in a time-honored pattern, called for American assistance; the whole mission, inspired by the boudoir politics of the former French president (Sarkozy), has been a fiasco. Ukraine, Syria, Iranian nuclear weapons: in lock-step with and robotic mimicry of the abstentionist regime in Washington, purposeful words were followed by shilly-shallying. Mr. Cameron started as a Euro-enthusiast, dismissing the United Kingdom Independence Party as skinheads and racists (which they are not), and ended committed to a referendum on continued membership in the European Union, making ambiguous claims for a better deal from the Brussels at which he formerly beamed contentedly. He started his term as an alarmist on global warming driving a snowmobile around the Arctic on campaign film, and is now a background-noise mumbler about climate change (which in practice is a reminder that winters are colder than summers in the northern hemisphere).
Having been over-confident about Scotland going into last summer’s referendum campaign, and having then panicked, mid-campaign, in vintage Jean Chretien (1995 Quebec referendum) style, when the unionists won the referendum he again panicked and promised wholesale devolution. He was back at it again on election night, even though the Nationalist sweep of the Scottish constituencies didn’t imply any increased support for the nonsensical cause of secession. (The Nationalist percentage went up slightly but against five opposing parties, not a monolithic No coalition as in the referendum; for the Cameron government, panic is the default page).  Mr. Cameron manages to make even the most mundane announcement a booming pronunciamento worthy of Cromwell dismissing Parliament, regardless of whether he is proclaiming a position 180 degrees from his previous recent stance on the same subject. In the hacking scandal, he went in a week from being the (presumably) unpaid advance man for Rupert Murdoch’s squeeze-out of the minority at Sky Television to screaming at the dispatch box that Murdoch’s company had to be “reformed root and branch.”
Mr. Cameron’s good fortune was that the leader of the opposition Labor Party, Ed Miliband, was even more unconvincing than Mr. Cameron. Mr. Cameron wanted the Conservatives to go back to before Thatcher, but Mr. Miliband wanted to excavate the Labor cretinism that antedated Tony Blair. Thursday’s election was a monumental illustration of the vagaries of the Parliamentary system. The Scottish National Party, though only slightly up from its referendum result, smashed the Labor Party’s hold on Scotland, elected 56 MPs (a little like Brian Mulroney’s destruction of the Liberal lock on Quebec in 1984,which has not been regained). The SNP got eight per cent of the whole Parliament on about five per cent of the total vote in the country.
UKIP, from a standing start, won more than twice as many votes as the Liberal Democrats, more indeed than the LibDems and SNP combined, but elected only one of the country’s 650 MP’s. UKIP had the strongest of the party leaders, Nigel Farage, but he lost his own election and is retiring as leader, as are Mr. Miliband and Liberal Democratic leader and outgoing vice premier Nick Clegg. (The most pleasing individual defeat was of George Galloway, formerly of the payroll of Saddam Hussein and who declared his constituency an “Israeli-free zone.”)
In sum, the Conservatives bombed their Liberal Democratic partners into oblivion, gained only slightly from Labor, but emerged with 51% of MP’s with 37% of the vote, while the ScotsNats, unencumbered by any mandate except to speak strongly for the local interest at Westminster, amputated a whole leg of Labor’s and from the middle of election night on have been roaring like a fire-breathing, whiskey-raddled dragon, determined still to shake the centuries-old Union of Britain and Scotland by the eye-teeth.
The Conservatives were the best traditional party on offer, but are the one-eyed man in the valley of the blind, and beneficiaries of the capricious luck of elections, of the implausibility of  . . . [more]   cbletters@gmail.com. From the National Post  (1 of 2)
Monday  11 May 2015  / Hour 4, Block B:  Conrad Black, author, Rise to Greatness: The History of Canada from the Vikings to the Present, in re:    Future for the Tories Lies to the Right in a Tilt to UKIP (2 of 2)
 
Monday  11 May 2015  / Hour 4, Block C:  Larry Johnson, NoQuarter & The Hill, in re: http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/241573-report-obama-lied-about-bin-laden-raid / The retired official said there had been another complication: some members of the Seal team had bragged to colleagues and others that they had torn bin Laden’s body to pieces with rifle fire. The remains, including his head, which had only a few bullet holes in it, were thrown into a body bag and, during the helicopter flight back to Jalalabad, some body parts were tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains – or so the Seals claimed. At the time, the retired official said, the Seals did not think their mission would be made public by Obama within a few hours: ‘If the president had gone ahead with the cover story, there would have been no need to have a funeral within hours of the killing. Once the cover story was blown, and the death was made public, the White House had a serious “Where’s the body?” problem. The world knew US forces had killed bin Laden in Abbottabad. Panic city. What to do? We need a “functional body” because we have to be able to say we identified bin Laden via a DNA analysis. It would be navy officers who came up with the “burial at sea” idea. Perfect. No body. Honourable burial following sharia law. Burial is made public in great detail, but Freedom of Information documents confirming the burial are denied for reasons of “national security”. It’s the classic unravelling of a poorly constructed cover story – it solves an immediate problem but, given the slightest inspection, there is no back-up support. There never was a plan, initially, to take the body to sea, and no burial of bin Laden at sea took place.’ The retired official said that if the Seals’ first accounts are to be believed, there wouldn’t have been much left . . .   http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-osama-
A story published on Sunday alleges that President Obama deceived Americans with his narrative of the 2011 assassination of Osama bin Laden.   The author Seymour Hersh accuses Obama of rushing to take credit for the al Qaeda leader's death. This decision, Hersh argues in the London Review of Books, forced the military and intelligence communities to scramble and then corroborate the president’s version of events.  “High-level lying nonetheless remains the modus operandi of U.S. policy, along with secret prisons, drone attacks, Special Forces night raids, bypassing the chain of command, and cutting out those who might say no,” Hersh wrote of the Obama administration’s counterterrorism policies. 
      Hersh based his report on a single, anonymous source. This individual, he said, is a “retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abottabad.”  Hersh’s source alleged that the Pakistani government had an active role in approving and implementing the raid on bin Laden’s compound.  In addition, the source said that the Obama administration originally agreed to announce bin Laden had been killed in a drone strike rather than shot during an active Special Forces mission.  “Obama’s speech was put together in a rush,” Hersh wrote of Obama’s announcement of Operation Neptune Spear to Americans.  “This series of self-serving and inaccurate statements would create chaos in the weeks following,” he added.  “This was not the fog of war,” Hersh quoted his anonymous source as saying.  “The fact that there was an agreement with the Pakistanis and no contingency analysis of what was to be disclosed if something went wrong – that wasn’t even discussed,” the source added.  “And once it went wrong, they had to make up a new cover story on the fly,” the source said of Obama’s advisers’ response to his speech on the raid, Hersh wrote. 
      Hersh’s report also accuses the Obama administration of embellishing the details of the raid itself and presenting al Qaeda as a bigger threat than it actually was before bin Laden’s death.   Hersh on Monday defended the report after a big blowback; critics have called the report thinly sourced and questions have been raised about inconsistencies within the piece.  The White House, for example, on Monday panned the report.  "There are too many inaccuracies and baseless assertions in this piece to fact check each one," White House National Security Council spokesman Ned Price said in a statement shared with The Hill.  “Every sentence I was reading was wrong,” former acting CIA Director Michael Morell added Monday on “CBS This Morning.”  “The source that Hersh talked to has no idea what he’s talking about. The person obviously was not close to what happened," he added. "The Pakistanis did not know. The president made a decision not to tell the Pakistanis. The Pakistanis were furious with us. The president sent me to Pakistan after the raids to start smoothing things over.”
Monday  11 May 2015  / Hour 4, Block D:   Chris Heller, The Atlantic, in re: “The Onion Is Not a Joke”: The Onion unveiled its new website on Friday, revealing a glimpse of how the satirical newspaper-- and it’s profitable in-house advertising agency-- plans to turn itself into a bonafide digital media empire. Chris Heller explores how fake news and real advertisers are working to succeed where traditional media has not.
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