Painting, left: This may or may not portray David with the head of Goliath; it almost surely is not by Caravaggio. See Hour 4, Block C:  Leslie Scism, NYT, in re: http://www.wsj.com/articles/young-financiers-insurance-empire-collapses-1426881926?mod=WSJ_hp_EditorsPicks
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
 
Co-host: Thaddeus McCotter, WJR, The Great Voice of the Great Lakes; and author, Liberty Risen.
 
Hour One
Monday  30 March 2015 / Hour 1, Block A: Thomas Joscelyn, Long War Journal senior editor, & Bill Roggio, Long War Journal and FDD, in re:
Monday  30 March 2015 / Hour 1, Block B: Thomas Joscelyn, Long War Journal senior editor, & Bill Roggio, Long War Journal and FDD, in re:
Monday  30 March 2015 / Hour 1, Block C: Christopher Whiton, DCI Advisory & Hamilton Fdn president, in re: Why are Obama politicos working for a pro-Sharia candidate in tomorrow's Nigerian election?  (See: The Commentator) The Nigerian election and the fight against Boko Haram. Democracy is not an election – need an agreed-upon process whereby the loser doesn’t start a civil war. Goodluck Jonathan vs Muhammadu Buhari.  Nigeria, the most populous sub-Saharan African nation.  For a long time, only pro-bono types focused on this region. Gen Bukhari stands for sharia all over Nigeria, not just in the north where Islam prevails,  Jonathan's term has included much corruption.  The West seems to think that the trappings of democracy are sufficient – a sense of guilt for a colonial past that the US doesn’t have? Yemen is an example f imposing Jeffersonian democracy not working. We operate as though our ideas work best in a country where everyone carries an AK-47.  The notion f "core al Qaeda" is insupportable Meanwhile, Houthis came "over the transom" and are wining.  Fighting Islamism – Sunni and Iranian – is something that most Americans get.  Iran has the blood of thousands of Americans on their hands in Iraq.  The old argument that Mubarak should have stayed in order to honor the institutions of democracy.  . . . One of Hillary Clinton's last acts was to usher Saleh out, allowing Hadi in and the current chaos. n the current Administration, "democracy"" is a bad word; its biggest act was cozying up to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.  Communist govts during the Cold War could not be reformed, had to be replaced – the State Dept doesn’t get this at all; many of the seriously non-Boy Scout characters we allied with could, in fact, be reformed. 
Monday  30 March 2015 / Hour 1, Block D:  Gordon Chang, Forbes.com, in re: Does #Iran have secret nukes in #NorthKorea? See:  http://t.co/b6E1eYpX7b @thedailybeast ; also: https://twitter.com/GordonGChang/status/582377908204761088
Does Iran have Secret Nukes in North Korea? in Forbes.com
State Dept argues: look at the list of states that went rogue and acquired nukes over the last 70 years and became more stable – North Korea, Pakistan China, Iran – they were predator states that acted frightened and scared their neighbors, but now feel powerful and although they’re blots on the globe are "safer."  China got the bomb, sent it to Pakistan, which distributed.  Iranians and North Koreans have been running a joint nukes program for a decade; established a large site just south of Chinese border; sod weapons-grade uranium; Syria's nuclear reactor was a North Korean design filled with North Korea. A mutual defense pact between Iran and Syria.  Three thousand lives on 9/11 is nothing compared to what's coming up.  There's no cop on the beat.  US could have sanctions, an embargo.
Hour Two
Monday  30 March 2015 / Hour 2, Block A:  John Fund, National Review Online, & David M Drucker, Washington Examiner Senior Congressional correspondent, in re: John Fund's father has passed away at 87, was a Korean War veteran; John went to Korea as his proxy: "You’d be amazed and impressed at what your valor created – a vibrant democracy of 50 million; an impressive demonstration of the good that America can do in the world. Jeb Bush has put together a digital operation comparable to Mr Obama's.
Jeb Bush seeks inroads with younger voters  . . . was the biggest draw for the series of meet-and-greets with GOP 2016 contenders at this . . .   As former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush gears up for the 2016 Republican presidential primary, he's facing a stiff challenge: winning over younger voters in a contest that pits him against candidates decades younger than he is.
But Bush, the son of one president and brother of another, has managed to attract some dedicated young supporters. In early February, more than 500 young professionals packed a Washington, D.C. restaurant for a fundraiser benefitting Jeb Bush's political action committee. A few weeks later, at the Conservative Political Action Conference just outside the nation's capital in National Harbor, Md., Bush filled another restaurant to capacity. This time, he was the biggest draw for the series of meet-and-greets with GOP 2016 contenders that the College Republican National Committee hosted for younger voters in town for CPAC.  These conservative college students lined up hours before the early evening event, filling up a rented eatery to its 400 fire-code capacity 75 minutes before Bush would speak at 5:15 p.m. Only Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky came close to matching the interest in Bush during similar events hosted by the college Republicans during the annual gathering of conservative activists. "He might be older when it comes to age. But the PAC is tech savvy — and he is as well. I think that's something that . . . " [more]
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If You Ever Wonder if America Has Been a Force for Good . . . by JOHN FUND    Over 60 years ago, my father served with the Army’s Third Infantry Division during the Korean War. He was always proud of the role that the U.S. and over 15 other nations played in keeping South Korea free of Communist domination. He then watched from afar as the war-ravaged nation rose from being one of the poorest in the world — per capita income was less than $100 a year — to the 13th largest economy in the world with per capita income of over $24,000 a year. It also has shaken off authoritarianism to become a vibrant democracy that’s an example to other Asian nations. My father always wanted to return to South Korea and see how it had changed, but he never did. Last week, I attended a conference in Seoul sponsored by the Washington Times and Segye Times of Korea. In my speech I was able to express my father’s pride in the economic and democratic miracle that South Korea has become. “Sometimes when you fight for others, you also fight for your own values and principles,” I told the audience. “By becoming the nation you have become, you have made him even prouder he is an American who fought for your freedom.” I knew my father’s health was failing as I made that speech, and I planned to see him in California on my way back from Asia this week to tell him more of my experiences there. Sadly, it was not to be. He passed away a few days ago at the age of 87. But he told me he was immensely happy I was able to see what he had fought for. He slipped away with me having an even better understanding of what he believed in life and wanted me to champion. I owe my parents, now both deceased, so much in helping me understand the principles of freedom and how fighting for them could bring out that which is the best within me. May they rest in peace.
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Monday  30 March 2015 / Hour 2, Block B: John Fund, National Review Online, & David M Drucker, Washington Examiner Senior Congressional correspondent, in re: Mr O'Malley. Jim Webb.  On the stage with either of these two – both accomplished governors – Ms Clinton will be facing impressive contestants. They're waiting for either her to bomb with voters or for more scandals to emerge.  She could lose her temper, or look peeved. Otherwise, probably won't be denied the nomination of her party. 
Monday  30 March 2015 / Hour 2, Block C:  Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents, in re: Dem Congressmen warned about the deterioration of relations between Israel and the US. Two Dems and two GOP sent a msg as part of a general climate dvpg that endorses better relations; Mrs Clinton specifically spoke against "politicized" relations.  Whatever differences occurred, then remedial steps taken – look at the issues in the region; it’s essential that the US and Israel work together in most realms.  When Khamenei yells "Death!" he first calls out Death to America, then Death to the Jews. Senate voted 100 to zero in favor of Kirk's amendment.
The negotiations are not transparent.  No course now. Framework:? If he content isn’t made public, there'll be resentment in Congress while the Administration keeps repeating that it won’t include Congress. Iran repeatedly lies; this is not a mystery.  The fundamental differences in worldview.  Shipment of enriched uranium back to Russia was always a fundamental part of any agreement; today, a US official said it never was.  Very odd. Today Sergei Lavrov left Switzerland in a pique as P5+1 gave in to Iranian demands not to send U to Russia. Also Fordow: underground, access limited,. Once you keep the infrastructure in place, can always revert Olli Heinonen says the breakout time is seven or eight months.  Each successive talking point disappears; the Administration gives in to every Iranian demand. We started with dismantlement, now talking about containment. Iranians put down hard markers and don’t yiel d whereas the P5+1 keeps edging closer to Iran's positions. 
Hillary Clinton: U.S.-Israeli ties must return to 'constructive footing'  ... including a two-state solution pursued through direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians,” said Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice ...  Hillary Clinton enables Obama's anti-Israel vendetta ... Israel via a third party, Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.  Clinton: US-Israeli relations need to be 'constructive'
Monday  30 March 2015 / Hour 2, Block D: Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents, in re: Y: collapse today after five days of Saudi attacks. Weekend: emergency mtg of Arab League summit on air power, warships. Unanimity till Pres Sisi read a letter of support from Putin; Prince Faisal rebuked Mr Putin for supporting Mr Assad in Damascus.  Russia is signing big deals with Jordan – billions for reactors – and with Egypt and other countries; but there's a lot of anger at Russia's role in Syria, which the Saudi foreign minister denounced.  Russia's forward base in Latakia.   Russia hasn’t eh resources to make a big difference but can sell whatever he can.  Palestinians: Mahmoud Abbsa in the eleventh year of a four-year term, asks the Arab League to send troops to Ramla, and to send air strikes to Gaza. Also strike Hamas with an iron fist.  A big refugee camp had an election for a sports director where Abass's son roundly lost.   After Abbas? That's the big question – he's trying to stave off Dahlan and others, but has lost support inGaza. Israel has just found a 2.8 km tunnel into Gaza.  Tensions between Egypt and Gaza, and Abbas's role increasingly challenged.   
. . . Lavrov left the talks on Monday afternoon to hold official meetings in Moscow, but his spokeswoman said he would be on hand to return to the talks in Lausanne if necessary.
Hour Three
Monday  30 March 2015 / Hour 3, Block A:  John Bolton, AEI, in re: .. . .  Pres Obama doesn’t accept the results of the Israeli elections. US money went into Israel to bring out Arab voters to vote against Netanyahu, against whom Obama has a personal animus.  (John Podesta was one of the in situ organizers over months.   One American billionaire bragged widely that he'd given "as much money as my lawyers would allow me to," which turned out to be $1 million.) . . .  Flirtation between the PA and Hamas means that  the Palestinians have no one who can be seen as a partner for peace – there's no one on the Palestinian side with whom Israel could reasonably think it could secure a peaceful existence.  Obama's criticisms yield up collective punishment against everyone in Israel. "L'etat, c'est moi."
Mischief at the U.N.   Obama toys with cutting Israel adrift in the Security Council (Weekly Standard)  Immediately after Israel’s March 17 election, Obama administration officials threatened to allow (or even encourage) the U.N. Security Council to recognize a Palestinian state and confine Israel to its pre-1967 borders. Within days, the president himself joined in, publicly criticizing not just Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom Obama has had notoriously bad relations, but sectors of Israeli opinion and even Israel itself.
The administration leaks suggesting that Israel be cut adrift in the Security Council in effect threatened “collective punishment” as a weapon in U.S.-Israel relations. This is especially ironic coming from “progressives” who have repeatedly accused Israel of “collective punishment” by forcefully retaliating against terrorist attacks. But more important, exposing Israel to the tender mercies of its Security Council opponents harms not only Israel’s interests, but America’s in equal measure. Roughly half of Washington’s Security Council vetoes have been cast against draft resolutions contrary to our Middle East interests.
America’s consistent view since Council Resolution 242 concluded the 1967 Arab-Israeli war is that only the parties themselves can structure a lasting peace. Deviating from that formula would be a radical departure by Obama from a bipartisan Middle East policy nearly half a century old. In fact, Israel’s “1967 borders” are basically only the 1949 cease-fire lines, but its critics shrink from admitting this tedious reality. The indeterminate status of Israel’s borders from its 1948 creation is in fact a powerful argument why only negotiation with relevant Arab parties can ultimately fix the lines with certainty.  That is why Resolution 242’s “land for peace” formula, vague and elastic though it is, was acceptable to everyone in 1967: There were no hard and fast boundaries to fall back on, no longstanding historical precedents. Prior U.N. resolutions from the 1940s, for example, had all been overtaken by events. Only negotiation, if anything, could leave the parties content; externally imposed terms could only sow future conflicts. Hence, Resolution 242 does not call for a return to the prewar boundaries, but instead affirms the right of “every State in the area” to “secure and recognized boundaries.” Ignoring this fundamental reality is fantasy.
So what drives Obama to conjure his Security Council threat? Obviously, deep antipathy for Netanyahu is one reason. Obama didn’t like Netanyahu before Israel’s recent election, and liked him even less after Bibi’s speech to a joint session of Congress. Hoping to motivate lukewarm or indifferent Likud voters to pump up his election-day support, Netanyahu emphasized his opponents’ efforts to turn out anti-Likud Arab voters, and Obama flayed him for it. Obama also opposed Netanyahu’s pre-election criticism of the “two-state solution” and disdained Netanyahu’s efforts to clarify his comments after he won. So Obama’s list of complaints about Netanyahu is long and getting longer. But if the criticisms were really about Netanyahu’s campaign tactics, threatening to let slip the dogs of political war in the Security Council would hardly be an appropriate response. Obama’s punishment would simply not fit Netanyahu’s crime.
Far more disturbing, Obama’s postelection statements demonstrate something much deeper than just animosity toward Netanyahu. Obama said that “Israeli democracy has been premised on everybody in the country being treated equally and fairly. If that is lost, then I think that not only does it give ammunition to folks who don’t believe in a Jewish state, but it also, I think, starts to erode the meaning of democracy in the country.” With these comments, Obama is criticizing not just Netanyahu, but the very legitimacy of Israel’s democracy, giving an implicit green light to those prepared to act violently against it. Obama’s remarks are substantially more egregious than Secretary of State John Kerry’s 2014 criticism that Israel’s unwillingness to follow the White House lead in the Palestinian negotiations made it understandable if there were another Palestinian intifada or further efforts by the international “boycotts, sanctions, and divestiture” movement against Israel. Obama is thus going well beyond acting unpresidential or even immature. Whether one takes his or Netanyahu’s side, the administration’s approach is now squarely contrary to America’s larger strategic interests. And the global harm that will be done to common U.S. and Israeli interests through Security Council resolutions if Washington stands aside (or worse, joins in) will extend far beyond the terms of one prime minister and one president.
Consider the inevitable damage merely from the sort of council resolution threatened by Obama’s leakers. Declaring that a Palestinian state exists outside of Israel’s 1967 boundaries would instantly terminate all bilateral Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy on these central issues. What else would there be to talk about? Resolution 242’s basic premise would be upended; rather than enhancing the role of diplomacy between Israel and the relevant Arab parties, a Palestinian statehood resolution would eliminate it. The reverberations would echo even wider. Already, Obama’s representatives on the U.N. Human Rights Council declined to defend Israel during the HRC’s annual festival of Israel-bashing, another first from our transformative president.
More seriously, Israel’s “occupation” of West Bank lands would immediately render it in violation of the statehood resolution, thus exposing it to international sanctions, including from the Security Council if Obama continued to stand aside. Prosecutions of Israeli officials in the International Criminal Court would instantly have a jurisdictional basis, and those officials would also be exposed to “universal jurisdiction” statutes that have become all the rage with the international left in recent decades. And won’t the White House be surprised when “Palestine” gains admission to the entire U.N. system, triggering a statutorily required cut-off of U.S. contributions to each agency that admits the new state!
No end of mischief will flow from even one undisciplined Security Council resolution, let alone whatever else Obama is prepared to allow. Obama’s criticisms, with the implied charge of racism not far beneath their surface, have once again brought Israel’s very legitimacy into question. We are all too close to resurrecting the U.N.’s 1975 “Zionism is racism” resolution. Daniel Patrick Moynihan would not recognize Obama as a president from the Democratic party. Obama needs reminding that petulance is for teenagers, not presidents. U.S. interests extend beyond personalities and temporary frustrations. As in many other policy areas, Obama’s “l’état, c’est moi” approach is laying foundations for enormous problems both today and long after he leaves office. If anyone wants a convincing argument why national security must be at the very center of America’s 2016 presidential contest, Obama has surely supplied it.
John R. Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 2005-06. For more of Amb. Bolton's analyses, please follow us on Facebook & Twitter  Click here to read this article online.
Monday  30 March 2015 / Hour 3, Block B: Laura Kasinof, author & Reuters, in re:  Who's fighting for whom in Yemen's proxy war? - Reuters  An aerial campaign on Yemen's capital, launched by a Saudi-led pan-Arab force, has escalated what had in many ways . . .   Saudi Arabia bombed a refugee camp, dozens dead. People in Sanaa terrified and can’t escape: airports and pots are close; roads sealed off.  Can go to some stores during the day; bombings start in evenings or even atfernoons. Nothing can get in so there's a food emergency. 
Monday  30 March 2015 / Hour 3, Block C:  Francis Rose, Federal News Radio, in re: http://www.wisn.com/news/congressional-committees-travel-to-tomah-va-for-hearings/32083320
Monday  30 March 2015 / Hour 3, Block D:   Henry I Miller, M.D., Hoover & Forbes.com, in re: The Direst Health Threat You've Never Heard Of.
Hour Four
Monday  30 March 2015 / Hour 4, Block A:  Debra Saunders, San Francisco Chronicle, in re: http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/saunders/article/The-federal-government-s-H-1B-racket-6162219.php?cmpid=twitter-tablet
Monday  30 March 2015 / Hour 4, Block B:  Eric Trager, Washington Institute, in re: Egypt's Yemen Campaign  Cairo's entry into the conflict represents an important opportunity to clarify U.S. policy toward Egypt, improve tense bilateral relations, and bolster Gulf security interests.
Monday  30 March 2015 / Hour 4, Block C:  Leslie Scism, NYT, in re: http://www.wsj.com/articles/young-financiers-insurance-empire-collapses-1426881926?mod=WSJ_hp_EditorsPicks
Monday  30 March 2015 / Hour 4, Block D:  Kenneth Shea, Bloomberg Surveillance, in re: Food purchasing habits of Millennials vs those of Boomers.