Photo, left: French Youth Go on Rampage at Anti-Jewish Protest in Paris     . . .  In July, there was anti-Jewish rioting in the Sarcelles area of Paris during a pro-Palestinian rally, with Jewish businesses looted and a synagogue attacked. Not for the first time, there were chants of "gas the Jews" and "kill the Jews". One Jewish eyewitness said it "took us back to 1938", an apparent reference to Kristallnacht, when Jewish businesses were attacked across Nazi Germany and Austria.
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Co-host: Thaddeus McCotter, WJR, The Great Voice of the Great Lakes; and author, Liberty Risen
Hour One
Monday  12 January 2015  / Hour 1, Block A:  Thomas Joscelyn, Long War Journal senior editor, & Bill Roggio, Long War Journal and FDD, in re: CENTCOM sites hacked, publish pro-Islamic State propaganda  Hacker(s) purportedly serving the Islamic State took over CENTCOM's official Twitter feed and YouTube page on Monday. Video shows terrorist responsible for Paris market attack pledging allegiance to Islamic State  A newly released video shows Amedy Coulibaly, who killed a French policewoman and attacked a kosher market in Paris, swearing allegiance to the Islamic State. Coulibaly says he worked in concert with the Kouachi brothers, who attacked Charlie Hebdo's offices and claimed allegiance to al Qaeda.   Al Nusrah Front suicide bombers strike in Lebanon, kill at least 7  Al Qaeda's official branch in Syria launched a double suicide attack in a predominately Alawite neighborhood of Tripoli.
Monday  12 January 2015  / Hour 1, Block B:  Thomas Joscelyn, Long War Journal senior editor, & Bill Roggio, Long War Journal and FDD, in re:  Jihadists in Mali step up attacks, kill 7 soldiers  Despite a French-led counterterrorism operation in Mali and the Sahel, al Qaeda-linked violence continues to be a problem.
“American history in shrewd hands is a weapon.”
Monday  12 January 2015  / Hour 1, Block C: Mona Charen, NRO, in re:   Mitt Romney attacks Jeb Bush on education.  The little beavers in the educational establishment are always working to effect their vision of the world and shift the history taught to American students – are doing it via the AP college boards*, not Common Core.  American history in shrewd hands is a weapon.  As my children were going through grade school I constantly had to deprogram them.  In teaching our history we certainly must not present a sanitized version – we need to explain clearly our errors; however, this version emphasizes racism, sexism and Japanese internment. These are all historically accurate, yet oughtn’t be the primary foci of the entire 200-plus years.
*Seeking public comment on the new standards – please go have a look to take the sample test and leave your comment on the proposed history-teaching methods.    Article:  http://www.nationalreview.com/article/396008/battle-us-history-mona-charen
Monday  12 January 2015  / Hour 1, Block D:   Gordon Chang, Forbes.com, in re:  China’s troubles at Hong Kong.  Also:  (@washingtonpost)  Arrest of the inspirational editor Shen Hao marks end of an era for Chinese journalism wapo.st/1wGCu9c / @batchelorshow Charlie Hebdo Attack Shows Need for Press Limits, Xinhua Says   http://t.co/aPQfxH6hUQ via @chinarealtime
Hour Two
Monday  12 January 2015  / Hour 2, Block A:  David M Drucker, Washington Examiner Senior Congressional reporter, in re:  Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, Paris marches.  Romney was an antique – he ran a good campaign for 1998.  How many years of tax returns will he release?  -- All ten, and no waiting.  -- Also, he ran a campaign as Mr Fix-It artist without saying why or what he planned to do.  If he ran the same, “I’m competent and can turn the country around” without saying why, then it’ll be the same old thing.  . . . He kept moving from Michigan to California to Massachusetts.  – The Party would be better off with someone fresher, more forward-thinking, newer; that’d help the Party immensely.  Being able to develop a new leader of the Party is really important – in some ways it’s caught in the Reagan vortex – from thirty yeas ago!  It can keep the values but needs to formulate them for the present and find a new leader. 
Dempsey jokes about White House 'micromanagement' of Pentagon
Negotiators head to Iran nuclear talks under pressure for a deal Negotiators hope to have the outline of a deal by March, and to finalize it before the...
Obama's math doesn't add up on free tuition, critics say
Monday  12 January 2015  / Hour 2, Block B: David M Drucker, Washington Examiner Senior Congressional correspondent, in re:  GOP got 63 votes for the Keystone XL pipeline.  There are only 53 Republicans in the Senate. TGM: The genius of the Republican Party – in the age of instant communications, revert to Silent Cal.
Monday  12 January 2015  / Hour 2, Block C:  LouAnn Hammond, DrivingtheNation.com, in re: Detroit auto show. GT carbon fiber: two-seater, deep & dramatic scoops; will cost about $200K.  Truck of the year: Ford F-150, with a remote you click twice and the tailgate automatically goes down.  The VW Golf is more fun in multiple new flavors in the series.  Most exotic-looking, futurist vehicle at the show:  Mercedes-Benz F15 concept lounge – a silver capsule, plug-in hybrid that drives itself, in which the two front seats rotate 180 degrees to the back so you can play bridge with the rear passengers while the car heads off whithersoever (would you trust that?).
Domestics vs imports for cars & trucks.       2016 Buick Cascada - first Buick convertible in more than two decades, 1.6-liter, turbocharged four-cylinder engine — new engine for Buick and the US market. The list of intros is still under wraps, but hints of Nissan Titan, Chevrolet Volt, Toyota Tacoma and Mirai fuel cell vehicle, a Maserati Ghibli Ermenegildo Zegna concept car, a Ford Fiesta, BMW 6 Series and Lexus GS F, an Alfieri 2+2 concept car, and Audi Q7, Acura NSX, inter al., will debut at the Detroit Auto Show.
http://autoweek.com/auto-shows/detroit-auto-show
• North American debut of the Jaguar XE at NAIAS 2015
• Jaguar Land Rover is to introduce advanced, highly fuel-efficient, clean-diesel powertrain options on virtually every Jaguar and Land Rover model sold in North America
• The Jaguar F-PACE performance crossover to join Jaguar lineup in 2016
• Land Rover Range Rover HSE Td6 and Range Rover Sport HSE Td6 debut in U.S.; on sale in 2015
• 2016 model year Range Rover Td6 and Range Rover Sport Td6 diesels to deliver 32 percent increased combined fuel economy; 28 miles per gallon on the highway
• Jaguar Land Rover announces global sales up 9% in 2014
• Diesel technology thought to become available in the Land Rover lineup in future.
• GM brought out the Bolt (everyone thought the name was a joke).
Monday  12 January 2015  / Hour 2, Block D:  Michael Auslin, AEI, in re: North Korea: the provocations of a failed, rogue state. Aggression.   Chris Hill was the chief US negotiator in the Six-Party Talks: no matter what North Korea did, we’d negotiate with it, and ask China to help us.  This is State Dept theory. Of course, we always get the same result.  China knows that there’ll never be a penalty, so it can slow down the pace of talks and [meddle]. Chris Hill [witlessly] wrote that we can organize a realignment of relations – why would China help the US with its problem in North Korea?  None.  China controls a great deal of what occurs in North Korea and does not share any goals with US in military, economic, research, or matters of intl relations concerning DPRK.  Kim Jong-eun killed his uncle, who’d been the conduit between DPRK and China for many years, so China may have provided a billion dollars in subsidies but seems to have lost influence by a large percentage.     “Strategic Clarity on North Korea,” by Christopher Hill.
Hour Three
Monday  12 January 2015  / Hour 3, Block A:  Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents, in re: The attack in Paris on a French kosher market: attacks on Jews in France are now commonplace – right before Christmas, a shooing outside a synagogue: a couple of guys with an air rifle shot through a window and nothing was done.  Jews constitute about 600,o00 people, of whom maybe 10% moved to Israel, and – 100,000? moved to England, where the Islamist population is also huge Jews have been in France fo 1,000 yeas, but recall Vichy and Drancy tragedies.  France has recent been unpleasant in the Security Council with attacks on Israel, and using lawfare and ICC manipulations.   There’s been a pattern in France, with an election coming up, a 10% Muslim population, and Hollande doing his best to accommodate them.
A gang went and said, “We’ve come to rape a Jewish woman” and did so.  The murders of the small children.  Abbas of PA and the PM of Turkey, both of whom are overtly and rabidly anti-Jewish, were invited to join at the front of the march in Paris.  There needs to be an ethical line drawn. Twenty per cent of French Muslims are sympathetic to IS.  MI5 in Britain is warning of upcoming attacks. In the US, NYPD inter al. have been doing a great deal.  It will happen everywhere. Al Qaeda is planning mass attacks against transportation and gathering places across the West. To counter this, we must identify it by name, no euphemisms.
French Prime Minister:  If Jews Flee, the Republic Will Be a Failure theatlantic.com/international/…
Monday  12 January 2015  / Hour 3, Block B:  Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents, in re:  Salena Zito tweets: The Secret Service was not asked to vet Paris, meaning that no one  from Washington ever intended to go to the demonstrations.   . . . The International Criminal Court rep said that “Gaza is occupied.”  What?  It’s not   - in no fashion; hasn’t even had one non-Gazan living there since 2006, is wholly controlled by Hamas.  When it was pointed out to the ICC that Gaza is not, in fact, occupied, the woman responded, ”It is because the international community thinks it is.”  /  Iran: Secy Kerry meeting with Zarif again; nothing good is happening while Iran is sending planeloads of Iranians into Iraq.  Iraqis say, “The resident of Iraq is Rouhani.”  The widespread fear is that Iran will use its nukes against all its neighbors.
Monday  12 January 2015  / Hour 3, Block C:  Dr. David H Grinspoon, Astrobiology chair, Library of Congress; astrobiology curator, Denver Museum of Nature & Science, in re:  Kepler 438b isn't Earth's twin – there are more habitable planets out ... Earth's twin will resemble ours in size and take about a year to orbit a star similar to the sun. Kepler 438b fails to qualify and so isn't an ideal ...   NASA's Space Observatory Kepler Points at Three New 'Earths'
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/07/alien_earth_with_a_red_sun_discovered_470_lightyears_away/  Potential Signs of Ancient Life in Mars Rover Photos ...
 www.astrobio.net/news.../potential-signs-ancient-life-mars-rover-photos/
... striking similarities between ancient sedimentary rocks on Mars and ... as well as older fossils of microbial mats in Bahar Alouane, Tunisia; ...
Monday  12 January 2015  / Hour 3, Block D: Tunku Varadarajan, Hoover, in re: Times of India: Why the Paris massacres are even more shocking than Peshawar.   An excerpt:
The assault on Charlie Hebdo — terrorists’ killing cartoonists — can have left no rational person unscathed. As an assault on the moral senses, it had, arguably, an even greater impact than the mowing down of schoolchildren in Peshawar only days ago. In that last attack, the children were pawns who had death dealt to them because of their institutional association with the Pakistani army. Their deaths were blood-curdling, but also random. They were a hapless conduit to another target: the army itself, and, by extension, the Pakistani state.
In Paris, at Charlie Hebdo's offices, the dead were chosen by name—yes, names were called out, and men who answered to them were shot; men who had been staked out and stalked, chosen expressly for slaughter for acts they had committed in the pursuit of their profession. It was cosmic justice that the murderers of these magazine-men died at a shootout in a printing works. But before this justice was delivered, these murderers had, themselves, delivered a message to the West: We, and many others like us who were born in your midst, who live in your midst, who mingle and melt away in your midst, will kill you for the things you say, and think, and draw, and write. Be warned! 
Hour Four
Monday  12 January 2015  / Hour 4, Block A: McKay Coppins, Buzzfeed, in re: The Last Temptation of Mitt  How Romney got from 11 no’s to “maybe” on the question of 2016 — and what he has to decide before he takes the plunge. “Can you imagine what Ted Cruz is going to do to Jeb Bush?” one Romney insider asks BuzzFeed News.
Monday  12 January 2015  / Hour 4, Block B:  Michael Ledeen, FDD, in re:   Terrorist Attack In Paris Proves We Must Defeat the Islamist Jihadists   We are at war with a large army of Islamist jihadists who intend to dominate or destroy Western civilization.   Ever since 9/11, Western leaders have scrambled to convince the public of two things: that terrorist acts are not driven by religious beliefs, and that Islam is a “religion of peace.” The Paris massacre should put to rest those dangerously misleading nostrums.
Back when the Clinton White House was preparing to welcome Yitzhak Rabin and Yassir Arafat for their historic handshake, a Clinton speechwriter called Professor Bernard Lewis, the great scholar of Islam.
“We need a quotation from the Koran about peace,” he asked. Lewis instantly provided one.
“Thanks, but the president has already used that one,” the speechwriter said. “We need a different one.”
Lewis replied that, so far as he knew, that was the only one.
Therein lies a big problem. Islamic doctrine has a lot to say about war, especially about holy war against non-Muslims—jihad—but not so much about peace (even though most Muslims certainly prefer peace, and are not actively engaged in war against infidels).
Of the dozens of comments I’ve read about the Paris massacre in the offices of Charlie Hebdo, George Packer has put it best in the New Yorker:
A religion is not just a set of texts but the living beliefs and practices of its adherents. Islam today includes a substantial minority of believers who countenance, if they don’t actually carry out, a degree of violence in the application of their convictions… For some believers, the violence serves a will to absolute power in the name of God, which is a form of totalitarianism called Islamism—politics as religion, religion as politics. “Allahu Akbar!” the killers shouted in the street outside Charlie Hebdo. They, at any rate, know what they’re about.
Just so. We are at war with a large army of Islamist jihadists who intend to dominate or destroy Western civilization. They constitute a messianic religious mass movement, just as the Communists, fascists and Nazis did in the last century. And just as we were quite prepared to tolerate totalitarian Communists, fascists and Nazis, both abroad and in our own society, until their direct attacks against us became too perilous to ignore, so today we refuse to condemn the jihadis for what they are. We prefer to appease them than . . .  [more]
Monday  12 January 2015  / Hour 4, Block C:  Anna Nemtsova, The Daily Beast, in re:  The End of Putin’s ‘New Russia’ Fantasy?
Infighting, corruption and murder. Novorossia is falling prey to Russia’s old demons.  First Charlie Hebdo, Now Echo of Moscow?
An editor asks listeners if it’s OK to publish Muhammad cartoons and the Chechen responds with threats of violence. Is this how it works now?     Is Putin Turning to Terrorism?
 In this nervous city in an embattled country, even small explosions can have a big impact.
Monday  12 January 2015  / Hour 4, Block D:   Coral Davenport, NYT, in re: For States That Don’t File Carbon-Cutting Plans, E.P.A. Will Impose ‘Model Rule’  - Republicans and the coal industry were quick to criticize the move, which is meant to pre-empt states that refuse to submit plans of their own.