Image, left: Islam's contributions to the Western world; here: chess.  See Hour 2, Block A,  David M Drucker, Washington Examiner Senior Congressional correspondent; John Fund, National Review Online, on Pres Obama's having spoken of Christianity's history inaccurately, which suggests that he's poorly-read in the matter: uninformed - and also about the massacre of Jewish-French citizens.  Concerning Christianity:  in seminary, we were warned that 'we'd spend our life among people who are theologically illiterate; that it would be our job not to castigate but to inform. 
 
 
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
 
Co-host: Thaddeus McCotter, WJR, The Great Voice of the Great Lakes; and author, Liberty Risen.
 
Hour One
Monday  3 February 2014  / Hour 1, Block A: Paul Gregory, Hoover, in re: My advice to the Obama administration: No more visits by top American officials to Kiev until you are willing to do something other than ramble on about military support that may come one of these days. Ukrainians should paraphrase President Petro Poroshenko’s jibe before the U.S. Congress that “we cannot win a war with blankets” to “we cannot win a war with hot air.”   [more]
Monday  3 February 2014  / Hour 1, Block B:  James Taranto, Wall Street Journal, in re:   Obama’s Crusades   Get off your high horse. The chickens are coming home to roost. 
Monday  3 February 2014  / Hour 1, Block C: Mona Charen, NRO, in re: Borrowed Valor  The Left envies the heroism it defames.  People who know, don’t say. This includes veterans who've served under fire; this connects to general disdain for the military from one part of one party.  In a way,  he was paying tribute to people who truly deserve honor. Contrasting borrowed valor – Brian Williams and Hillary Clinton – with the tone that so often comes from the left, recently evidenced in reaction to American Sniper. If ever we were to run out of brave young men to defend us, we'd be lost.  TGM:  One of the most painful deeds of a Congressman is to have to meet the families of soldiers who were killed.  MC:  The current Secretary of State testified that US soldiers were comparable to Genghis Khan - and it turned out that none of his allegations could be factually substantiated He's never apologized, or acknowledged that he was wrong, A mark of shame. He said that he'd thrown his medals over the White House wall and disposed of them. Years later, there were the medals, framed, on his office wall. The cruelty of all this is that Brian Williams is being held to account while Kerry and Mrs Clinton are not.   TGM: On our first codel, to Germany, one of our party asked a soldier in his hospital bed, "How do you feel about your experience?" "I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy," said the young man. 
Monday  3 February 2014  / Hour 1, Block D:  Gordon Chang, Forbes.com, in re: Twice as many expats are leaving China as moving there, moving company says.  Bad air, bad economy, bad politics.  Even the Beijing mayor has said his own city's air is "unlivable."  A growing sense that China is unsafe for expats – people speaking of a cultural revolution.   Many Taiwanese leave PRC and return home to tell tales of life there – not flattering. Peoples Bank of China (PBoC) are trying to lift the value of the reminbi to stanch capital outflow, which is said to be $50 billion per month.  Domestic forex reserves are diminishing.  If the top tiny percentage of guys who own most of the money do, in fact, leave, they can probably take the whole country's forex with them -  the top 1% own 80% of the national wealth.  Sept 2014 report: 47% of China's rich intend to leave China within five years. Number-one destination is the USA.
http://t.co/biFZxfB3l6 (Photo: EPA) http://t.co/PgcoNSHSZE ; https://twitter.com/ChinaRealTime/status/564930779369988098
Hour Two
Monday  3 February 2014  / Hour 2, Block A:  David M Drucker, Washington Examiner Senior Congressional correspondent; John Fund, National Review Online, in re:   Pres Obama spoke of Christianity's history inaccurately, suggesting that he's poorly-read in the matter: uninformed; also about the massacre of Jewish-French citizens.  In the case of Christianity:  In seminary, we were warned that 'we'd spend our life among people who are theologically illiterate; that it would be our job not to castigate but to inform.  Why is he doing this? Because he's always intended to restructure US foreign policy; here whatever is emanating from extremist activities.  Mainly, to downplay jihadism as being not different from much else, and to re-cast US intl policy and its alliances.   He now feels liberated since he can’t be elected again "I can use prayer breakfasts, which I don’t like, to shake up the audience."  TGM: His re-casting is about as successful as Neville Chamberlain's.  . . .  DMD:  The president's budget was an aspirational document.  Won't see much cooperation from wither side in Congress/WH except cybersecurity and . . . president is disengaged, no close ties to his advisors or original staff; has only Valerie Jarrett and a few others. Must be frustrated, knows he won’t be seen as a hero.  Needs funding for his library.  He's running out the clock.  TGM: Not aspirational; rather,  _________.   JF: Mrs Clinton will be signalling to Northeastern donors, especially Jewish donors.  Immigration is not an Iowa caucus-killer  ;  Republicans need to pass a budget  ; Getting Medieval  President Obama needs a history lesson. ;  THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION ; The Politicized DOJ  Holder leaves behind a “historic” legacy.  ;  Fund & von Spakovsky
Monday  3 February 2014  / Hour 2, Block B: David M Drucker, Washington Examiner Senior Congressional correspondent; John Fund, National Review Online, in re:  I'm puzzled how Jeb Bush can put together all the GOP aspirations in Cuba, China, Mespotamia – globally.  He's had a front-row seat to the biggest foreign-policy decisions of the last thirty years. However the big-donor set want a return to a more Reagansque approach. How does Jeb delver this without the taint of W's having taken it a bit too far?  . . . If you don’t know a candidate's policies, yu tend to project your own upon him.  Mrs Clinton is a smart-power person.  . . . The theory of democratic capitalism.   The republican base voter doesn’t necessarily want to go back to a boots-on-ground foreign policy, Will Jeb go after Mrs Clinton on Libya? Not yet. The person to cast the first stone will be Carly Fiorina. 
Monday  3 February 2014  / Hour 2, Block C:  Claudia Rosett, FDD, in re: http://www.securityaffairs.org/issues/number-27/our-nagging-north-korea-problem The Journal of International Security Affairs
Monday  3 February 2014  / Hour 2, Block D: Philip Terzian, Weekly Standard, in re: http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/martin-gilbert-1936-2015_841074.html#.VNUip5a2JK0.gmail
Hour Three
Monday  3 February 2014  / Hour 3, Block A:  Peter Berkowitz, Hoover, in re: "University's Free Speech Policy Is the Exception, Sadly," Real Clear Politics, January 24
Monday  3 February 2014  / Hour 3, Block B: John Tamny, RealClearEconomics, in re: The popular explanation for a city's demise among pundits and economists usually involves the departure of a company, or the demise of an industry.  This bit of non-wisdom gets it backwards.  Dynamic cities regularly shed the work of the past, while dying ones cling to it.  Detroit implodes not because GM, Ford and Chrysler are limping monuments to a glorious past, but precisely because all three still create jobs in and around Detroit.  New York City was once the top U.S. manufacturing city, and it booms today precisely because manufacturers long ago left.  Forbes.  Detroit Is Dying Because GM Stuck Around, New York City Thrives Because Nabisco Did Not
Monday  3 February 2014  / Hour 3, Block C: Williamson M Evers, Hoover, in re:  One of the most influential books in social science in the last 50 years is the economist Albert O. Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. In this pivotal 1970 book, Hirschman discusses how individuals react when services they rely on deteriorate. The basic responses available to us are “exit” and “voice,” Hirschman points out, where exit means turning to a different provider or leaving the area, and voice means political participation.
We tend to think of these responses as stark alternatives. Hirschman, as a social scientist, wanted us to consider the interplay between them. Exit usually has lower costs than voice for the individual. With exit, you can avoid the long slog of politics and simply turn to someone else or move somewhere else. But there is a limiting case: Exit can have high costs when individuals are loyal to institutions—thus the third component in Hirschman’s trio of exit, voice, and loyalty.  In the 1830s, when Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States, he found Americans intensely loyal to their local schools. Americans saw schools as extensions of their families and neighborhoods. They viewed public schools as akin to voluntarily supported charities and as part of what social scientists today call civil society. Tocqueville described township school committees that were deeply rooted in their local communities. State control of local public education took the form of an annual report sent by the township committee to the state capital. There was no national control.
Today, Americans retain much of the sentiment about local schools they had in Tocqueville’s day. But, increasingly, parents and taxpayers view the public schools as an unresponsive bureaucracy carrying out edicts from distant capitals. Today, we are dealing with a deteriorating situation in a declining institution, namely widespread ineffective instruction in the public schools. The Common Core State Standards have come to the fore precisely at a time when civically active individuals care much more than they usually do about exit, voice, and loyalty. But the common core has denied voice and tried to block exit. The common core’s designers have taken the existing bureaucracy and increased its centralization and uniformity. By creating the common-core content standards behind closed doors, the authors increased the alienation of the public from schools as institutions worthy of loyalty. The general public had no voice in creating or adopting the common core.
The other approach in times of a deteriorating public service is offering better exit options. But the common core’s proponents have created an almost inescapable national cartel. There has long been a monopoly problem in public education, which was why economist Milton Friedman called for opportunity scholarships (also known as vouchers) to create a powerful exit option. But even in the absence of opportunity scholarships and charter schools, we had some exit options in the past because of competitive federalism, meaning horizontal competition among jurisdictions. The economist Caroline Hoxby studied metropolitan areas with many school districts (like Boston) and metropolitan areas contained within one large district (like Miami or Los Angeles). She found that student performance is better in areas with competing multiple districts, where parents at the same income level can move to another locality, in search of a better education.
We have also seen competitive federalism work in education at the interstate level. Back in the 1950s, education in Mississippi and North Carolina performed at the same low level. North Carolina tried a number of educational experiments and moved ahead of Mississippi. Likewise, Massachusetts moved up over the years from mediocre to stellar. The common core’s promoters are endeavoring to suppress competitive federalism. The common core’s rules and its curriculum guidance are the governing rules of a cartel. The common core’s promoters and their federal facilitators wanted a cartel that would override competitive federalism and shut down the curriculum alternatives that federalism would allow.  The new common-core-aligned tests, whose development was supported with federal funds, function to police the cartel. All long-lasting cartels must have a mechanism for policing and punishing those seen as shirkers and chiselers, or, in other words, those who want to escape the cartel’s strictures or who want increased flexibility so they can succeed.
The new leadership of the College Board by David Coleman, one of the common core’s chief architects, is being used to corral Catholic schools, other private schools, and home-schooling parents into the cartel. The proponents of the common core have now established a clearinghouse for authorized teaching materials to try to close off any remaining possible avenue of escaping the cartel.  What was the rationale for the common core? The name given to the Obama administration’s signature school reform effort, the Race to the Top program, promotes the idea that the federal government needs to step in and lead a race. Central to this rhetoric is the idea that state performance standards were already on a downward slide and that, without nationalization, standards would inexorably continue on a “race to the bottom.”
I would disagree. While providers of public education certainly face the temptation to do what might look like taking the easy way out by letting academic standards decline, there is also countervailing pressure in the direction of higher standards.  If state policymakers and education officials let content standards slip, low standards will damage a state’s reputation for having a trained workforce. Such a drop in standards will even damage the policymakers’ own reputations.  In 2007, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute looked empirically at state performance standards over time in a study called “The Proficiency Illusion.” The study showed that, while states had a variety of performance standards (as would be expected in a federal system), the supposed “race to the bottom” was not happening. The proponents of the common core are wrong in their claims that state performance standards were inevitably on a downward slide.
The common core, in fact, provided relief from competitive pressure from other states. Sonny Perdue, the governor of Georgia at the time that the common core was created (the initiative was launched in 2009, and the standards were released in 2010), did not like it when the low-performing students of his state were compared with students in other states with standards different from Georgia’s. He became the lead governor in bringing the National Governors Association into the national standards effort. Nationalizing standards and tests eliminated them as differentiated school reform instruments that could be used by states in competition over educational attainment among the states. The common core undermines citizens’ exit option and competitive federalism. It was designed to do so. It likewise evades and negates the voice option. But the makers of this malign utopia have forgotten a few things. They forgot that the desire for a voice, the desire for political action, can become particularly intense when people are faced with the prospect of nowhere to exit to. They forgot that hemming in parents and teachers would create a demand for alternatives and escape routes. Alternatives to the national common-core-aligned tests have arisen. States are dropping these national tests. States are also struggling to escape the common-core cartel itself. Parents are opting out of common-core testing.
By trying to block exit and voice, the designers and proponents of the Common Core State Standards have caused blowback: A large parent-, teacher-, and community-based movement has arisen to oppose the common core and its national tests.
Williamson M. Evers is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He was an assistant U.S. secretary of education for planning, evaluation, and policy development from 2007 to 2009, during the George W. Bush administration.  This first appeared as a Commentary in Ed Week.
Monday  3 February 2014  / Hour 3, Block D:   Francis Rose, Federal News Radio, in re: http://www.federalnewsradio.com/204/3791098/This-used-to-be-an-honor-Now-its-a-joke
Hour Four
Monday  3 February 2014  / Hour 4, Block A: Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security, by Sarah Chayes (1 of 4)
Monday  3 February 2014  / Hour 4, Block B: Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security, by Sarah Chayes (2 of 4)
Monday  3 February 2014  / Hour 4, Block C: Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security, by Sarah Chayes (3 of 4)
Monday  3 February 2014  / Hour 4, Block D: Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security, by Sarah Chayes (4 of 4)
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