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JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Co-host: Larry Kudlow, CNBC and Cumulus Radio.
Hour One
Tuesday 11 August 2015 / Hour 1, Block A: Bill Whalen, Hoover, in re: Mrs Clinton's server is surrendered to the FBI, and the telling thumb drive is surrendered by her lawyer to DOJ.  . . . Trump: will he release a 14-pt program soon?  Matters of greatest interest to the American people: the economy, taxes, deficits, entitlements immigration.  "The IG for intell community notified that senior members of Congress that two of four emails [of Mrs Clinton . . . are more sensitive than was previously known.]"  The GOP has to be the anti-Trump, someone "with policy chops; "I'm not going to give details." –DT.   Trump has gone off against Mexico again, and Mexico will pay for it – "they've been taking us to the cleaners." Hunh?  "And there's been no net immigration for years because their economy is doing better than ours. Will Trump be the Smoot-Hawley of his time?"
Tuesday 11 August 2015 / Hour 1, Block B: Bill Whalen, Hoover and Inc.com, in re: Carly Fiorina did well – is extremely knowledgable and articulate; however, I heard nothing from her on economic growth.  We'll have our CNBC debate in Colorado in October. John Kasich: did well; Suffolk University shows Trump way ahead and Kasich in double digits, replaced Chris Christie. "He needs a clear economic plan, as does Scott Walker. Jeb Bush and  _____ are a  little better.  Let's use Jeb's 4% target.  Ted Cruz: working on a flat tax plan.  Coming: an ugly debate on . . .
4 Takeaways for Entrepreneurs from the GOP Debates  ;  Five Things to Watch For, While Watching the GOP Debate Republican presidential hopefuls on the stage prior to the Voters First Presidential Forum at Saint Anselm College August 3, 2015 in Manchester, N. H.  (Yogi Berra supposedly said: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” The baseball legend’s also credited with: “You can observe [...]    Is Now the Moment for Biden - or Has the Moment Already Passed?
Tuesday 11 August 2015 / Hour 1, Block C:  Gregory Zuckerman, 
Special Writer, Wall Street Journal, and  author, The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters ; in re:  Front-pager about the new king of the booming subprime market Average loan is $4,300, repaid in 19 months. "We verify that each borrower can repay" – algorithms and people checking. Recall Beneficial, Household Finance, advertised by baseball greats: local lenders, not banks, then shifted into risky practices.  Double-digit interest rates [26% !!] for short-term debt. It's not payday lending (400% annually);  are people borrowing to payoff old debts? State regulators, and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The answer is not better terms from Springleaf Holdings but a growing economy.  Springleaf Holdings borrows at close to zero, lending at double-digits. These private-equity lenders can afford the risk they're taking.  "On bank examiner per loan officer ["joke"].   No wage gains.
Tuesday 11 August 2015 / Hour 1, Block D:  Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post Right Turn columnist, in re:  . . .  Plouffe calls Sen Schumer "naïve."  Gone to far; and from the president, unseemly anti-Jewish attacks.  Both Michael and Jim Webb – neither one conservative at all  telling ht White House to knock it off.  On a trip to Israel this week, Steny Hoyer (number two in the House) seems to be opposing the Iran deal.  . . . It is the power of the American banks that will enforce the sanctions irrespective of what the Europeans do – US and some Asian banks dominate the world scene. – L Kudlow.    Jennifer Rubin: I agree a hundred per cent. 
How Obama’s deal would make the West complicit in funding terrorism  Putting money in the pockets of terrorists    ;   Obama smears Iran deal critics and liberals lash out  The president’s partisan appeals provoke a backlash.
Hour Two
Tuesday 11 August 2015 / Hour 2, Block A: Stephen F. Cohen, NYU & Princeton professor Emeritus; The Nation.com; author: Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War, & The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag after Stalin; in re: France 24 reports a surge of fighting in Eastern Ukraine.  Heaviest shelling in six months; north of Mariupol, on the road from Donetsk southward; the fight is over controlling that roadway.  Russian foreign ministry (MID), unusually, issues a call for restraint by Kiev. "Provocative actions against  the OSCE"  --something has changed; an attempt to provoke general war-fighting on the frontier.    Sergei Lavrov is said to have met with the Saudi foreign minister – and did not. Governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, was asked about foreign policy, went out of his way to say that when he's elected he'll arm Ukraine and deploy US troops in Poland! Donetsk and Lukhansk. Alarming that the worst intl crisis of our time is not being reported well anywhere; that you and I have to piece together scraps.  In fact, US troops already in Ukraine, called "trainers."  Six to eight thousand troops already being moved in and out of the Baltics and Poland.  Recall how we got into Vietnam: began w trainers and intell people, when we found proxies and armed them; then 600K US troops fighting and dying.  Short of a major US build-up, no way for Kiev to take back Donbass. A new thought circulating: "Let's just sever Donbass - it's too Russian."  WaPo editorial board issues an all-out attack on Minsk. It sees Minsk II as a Putin trick – then we'd have two Ukraines.  A frozen conflict like South Ossetia?  Would it join the Russian Federation, like Crimea?  This whole notion constitutes a new factor. 
US Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker promised in a nationally televised debate to arm Ukraine and deploy US troops in Poland and the Baltic states if he won the 2016 election.
Tuesday 11 August 2015 / Hour 2, Block B: Stephen F. Cohen, NYU & Princeton professor Emeritus; The Nation.com; & author; in re: [Steve Cohen on the WaPo editorial]  . . . Saakashvili suddenly becomes Ukrainian?  He's under indictment n Georgia and had to flee, almost started a major war with Russia – none of this is mentioned in the odd WaPo editorial. A kind of mini-American invasion of Ukraine, the US ambassador went to Donbass then blogged about how well things are going. This is specifically a provocation.  Someone has assembled this combination - the someones are in Washington, probably the same people who want to kill Minsk II.  . . . Odessa.   . . . to the extent that this is a war between Ukrainian nationalism and Russia, Odessa is profoundly a Russian city – culturally historically, politically.  The population is divided almost 50/50; why does the US urge Kiev to [lurch] to one side?  A Russian general to the BBCL: He, himself, had long ago been in charge of training foreign armies; when you do so, you're not just trainers but minders,, and must go to the front line with the troops. This means that more Americans will move to the eastern front, risking more Americans ' being killed.  In May 2014, 48 Odessans fled into a building, the pro-Kiev fascists [formally pro-fascist], Right Sector, locked the doors and set the bldg afire; when several people managed to escape, they were beaten or shot to death.  This was a massacre.  Now the US ambassador announces that he hadn't been to Odessa since "the fire."  It was a terrifying massacre;  the US ambassador has spoken an obscenity. 
Tuesday 11 August 2015 / Hour 2, Block C: Stephen F. Cohen, NYU & Princeton professor Emeritus; The Nation.com; & author; in re: Odessa. Putting Ukraine in an untenable position: European leaders are pushing Kiev toward a political solution that would only hurt the struggling nation.
Tuesday 11 August 2015 / Hour 2, Block D: Stephen F. Cohen, NYU & Princeton professor Emeritus; The Nation.com; & author; in re: How Robert Conquest’s History Book Made History
by GEORGE WILL August 8, 2015 8:00 PM @GEORGEWILLF
History books can be historic events, making history by ending important arguments. They can make it impossible for any intellectually honest person to assert certain propositions that once enjoyed considerable currency among people purporting to care about evidence. The author of one such book, Robert Conquest, an Englishman who spent many years at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, has died at 98, having outlived the Soviet Union that he helped to kill with information. Historian, poet, journalist, and indefatigable controversialist, Conquest was born when Soviet Russia was, in 1917, and in early adulthood he was a Communist. Then, combining a convert’s zeal and a scholar’s meticulousness, he demolished the doctrine that the Soviet regime was a recognizable variant of the European experience and destined to “convergence” toward Western norms. Books do not win wars, hot or cold, but they can help to sustain the will to win protracted conflict, producing clarity about the nature of an evil adversary. In 1968, five years before the first volume of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago was published in the West, Conquest published The Great Terror, a history of Joseph Stalin’s purges during the 1930s. In one episode, which could have come from Arthur Koestler’s classic 1941 novel Darkness at Noon, Conquest recounted a conversation between Stalin and an aide named Mironov, who was failing to extract a confession — to a political crime — from a prisoner named Kamenev:
   “Do you know how much our state weighs, with all the factories, machines, the army, with all the armaments and the navy?”
    Mironov and all those present looked at Stalin with surprise.
   “Think it over and tell me,” demanded Stalin.
    Mironov smiled, believing that Stalin was getting ready to crack a joke. But Stalin did not intend to jest. . . . 
   “I’m asking you, how much does all that weigh?” he insisted.
   Mironov was confused. He waited, still hoping Stalin would turn everything into a joke. . . . 
Mironov . . . said in an irresolute voice, “Nobody can know that. . . . It is in the realm of astronomical figures.’
   “Well, and can one man withstand the pressure of that astronomical weight?” asked Stalin sternly.
   “No, answered Mironov.
   “Now then, don’t tell me any more that Kamenev, or this or that prisoner, is able to withstand that pressure. Don’t come to report to me,” said Stalin to Mironov, “until you have in this briefcase the confession of Kamenev!”
In 1968, Conquest’s mountain of evidence of the diabolical dynamics of the Soviet regime disquieted those, and they were legion, who suggested a moral equivalence between the main adversaries in the Cold War, which, they argued, had been precipitated by U.S. actions. In 1986, Conquest published The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, his unsparing account of the deliberate starvation of Ukraine in 1932 and 1933, which killed, at a minimum, 7 million people, more than half of them children. At one point, more Ukrainians were dying each day than Jews were to be murdered at Auschwitz at the peak of extermination in the spring of 1944. . . . [more: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/422253/robert-conquest-death-sovie... ]
Hour Three
Tuesday 11 August 2015 / Hour 3, Block A:  Salena Zito, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review & Pirates fan, in re: The 300 turquoise folding chairs inside Clayton Auction Center filled long before the auctioneer's gavel began the bidding. [ LINK ]  The only time folks got up was to buy hot dogs, kielbasa and kraut, or pie at the concession stand. Retired couples, farmers, antique dealers and suburbanites looking for shabby vintage, young people seeking college-dorm bargains — they all packed the room to bid on or buy items they knew little about: Is that bike safe for my kid? How sturdy is that dresser? Is that real crystal? How much life does that tractor have left?
Everything at an auction is pretty much a gamble; everyone attending is an equal, regardless of background. It is sort of like when you enter the voting booth and pull the lever for someone you know nothing about, other than the name. Especially when you're casting a protest vote. Mississippi Democrats did just that on Tuesday by choosing Robert Gray, an independent truck driver, as their nominee for governor, said state party chairman Richey Cole.
“Just like that reality-TV auction show on storage bins, you never know what you get when you vote for an unknown person until you open up the door,” said Cole, who was as surprised as the nominee who won the race. “I guess I just got the luck of the draw, although several of my friends called it divine intervention,” Gray, 46, told the Tribune-Review. “I know my opponents campaigned heavy. I didn't. I went to one or two rallies, if you even want to call them that — there were only a dozen or so people there, and I didn't say much. I thought it was . . .
Tuesday 11 August 2015 / Hour 3, Block B:  John Bolton, AEI, in re:  Defeating ISIS requires U.S. Leadership   Iran's nuclear weapons program is not the only deadly threat to America and its allies currently being botched by Washington. Close behind, and for many related reasons, is the metastasizing peril of ISIS. Although not yet the existential nuclear threat to Israel and nearby Arab monarchies Tehran is fast becoming, ISIS is nonetheless a more imminent terrorist danger for us all.
As U.S. counter-proliferation policy collapsed in the Vienna nuclear deal, our counter-terrorism policy was also collapsing across North Africa, the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan. President Obama's inadequate efforts to defeat the terrorists in their homelands were coming apart. Even news of longtime Taliban leader Mullah Omar's death (two years ago, and in his bed!) has not brightened America's prospects.
Obama repeatedly has characterized his goal as degrading and ultimately defeating ISIS. But his policies do not even vaguely match his rhetoric. Moreover, the complexity of the hostilities involving ISIS, now underway in more than half-a-dozen countries, seems beyond the administration's grasp.
America can reverse this slide. But time is short. Indeed, by Obama's last day in office, it might be too late. By then, ISIS could consolidate a new terrorist state from bits of Syria and Iraq, making pre-9/11 al-Qaida and Taliban in Afghanistan look like Obama's famous “JV” team.
Chaos Reigns   Startling twists and turns in recent weeks demonstrate how the Middle East is descending into chaos. Consider just a few examples.
The White House recently authorized the Pentagon to use force to protect ­— whether from ISIS or from Bashar al-Assad's forces — the “moderate” Syrian opposition, which has been poorly vetted, trained and equipped. Of course, the “moderates” were supposed to be the ones carrying the fight to Assad.
But Obama's policy has been so inept they apparently cannot even defend themselves, let alone contemplate offensive action. One can only ask when the word “quagmire” first will be applied to these circumstances where Obama has now committed our forces.
Turkey initially encouraged anti-Assad rebels against its longtime adversary but has reversed itself after realizing that much of the opposition had joined ISIS and other terrorist gangs. And Ankara has reversed even seemingly vigorous domestic political trends in Turkey, such as rapprochement with the Kurdistan Workers Party (“PKK”), a Marxist guerrilla band seeking full Kurdish independence.
Ankara now is targeting PKK fighters, thus placing it at odds with three separate, mutually antagonistic forces on its southern border (and within Turkey itself); it is a feat of acrobatic political contortion. President Obama has been attempting to arm Iraqi Kurds, deemed friendly to the United States, but now has agreed Turkey should take military action against the PKK.
The Syrian state itself has collapsed, with every likelihood of partition, assuming Assad can even maintain control over an Alawite enclave and perhaps Damascus. He might yet fall entirely — not to those hard-to-find Syrian moderates but to ISIS.
Of course, from Assad's perspective, the Iran nuclear deal, Obama's latest signature achievement, could be a gravy train, representing extensive new assistance from Tehran against their mutual enemies. The same gravy train also could strengthen Hezbollah, aiding the terrorist group both in Lebanon and in its support for Assad in Syria.
Iraq also already has collapsed as a state, with the Kurds de facto independent and the Sunni Arabs determined not to be subjected to an overwhelming Shia Arab majority increasingly under the thumb of Persian ayatollahs in Tehran. In what would be a fine irony were it not both tragic and dangerous, the Obama administration has been advising Iraq's almost entirely Shia army, dominated by Iran, the world's central banker for terrorism.
Jordan's monarchy, perennially in danger, today is extraordinarily vulnerable to an ISIS regime decapitation strike — and the then-inevitable descent into the same horror now engulfing Syria. And Yemen's multi-party civil war, in which ISIS has unpredictably emerged, continues its chaotic path.
Israel, by the way, has all but lost diplomatic contact with the Obama administration.
Washington can reverse ISIS' forward progress, but not by “leading from behind.” Arab and other regional states lack both the will and the military capability to do so on their own. They need the full measure of American leadership, political and military, and they need the tangible demonstration of U.S. commitment: our forces on the ground next to theirs. These regional states have much to lose and should bear the fullest measure of the burden. But America also is mortally at risk. We cannot afford to contract out U.S. security to weak hands.
Iran's march toward deliverable nuclear weapons and ISIS' march toward a global caliphate must be at the center of 2016's presidential debates. No bromides can conceal the extent of the threat or the consequences of failure. Whoever steps up to this Gordian knot will be the president we need.  [ read this article online ]
John Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, was the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations and, previously, the undersecretary of State for arms control and international security.
Tuesday 11 August 2015 / Hour 3, Block C:  Robert Zimmerman, behindtheblack.com, in re: The mobile launch building at Vostochny  At their new spaceport at Vostochny, the Russians are building a moveable launch building that will enclose their Soyuz rockets prior to launch.  Painted in elegant blue and white and standing almost 50 meters high, the Mobile Service Tower, MBO (for Mobilnaya Bashnya Obsluzhivaniya), is designed to provide personnel access to the Soyuz rocket during the countdown to liftoff from its launch pad in Vostochny. The structure can be also used to service the pad after launch and to process the rocket in case of an aborted liftoff.
With the tower in place, technicians can easily reach practically any part of the rocket as high as 37 meters above the surface of the launch pad. Internal access bridges of the tower surround the upper portion of the first and second stage, the third stage and the payload fairing
Stratolaunch shifts to the small sat market  The competition heats up: Even as Vulcan Aerospace, the company building the Stratolaunch air-launch system, considers its options for the second stage rocket that it will use, it has decided to shift its focus towards the small satellite market, including cubesats. In a sense, they are now aiming at the same cubesat/smallsat market that Virgin Galactic wants with its LauncherOne air-launched rocket. Whether they can build a system cheap enough for these small satellites to afford, however, remains the big question. Their shifting focus, like Virgin Galactic’s, does not bode well for them.
Tuesday 11 August 2015 / Hour 3, Block D:   Henry I Miller, Hoover, and Forbes, in re: "Anti-Golden Rice Activists Want to 'Save the Whales' but Let Children Go Blind."
Hour Four
Tuesday 11 August 2015 / Hour 4, Block A:  Bill McGurn, WSJ, in re: http://www.wsj.com/articles/chuck-schumer-hero-1439249571
Tuesday 11 August 2015 / Hour 4, Block B:  Yuri Agaev, Hoover, in re: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/421963/iran-deal-alternative-regime-change-human-rights
Tuesday 11 August 2015 / Hour 4, Block C:  Liya Palyagashvili, Mercatus Center, in re: Uber and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio provides a vibrant illustration of what economists call “public choice”—basically, the study of politics through the lens of economic theory. Liya Palagashvili, an affiliated scholar with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, explains in her op-ed at InsideSources
Tuesday 11 August 2015 / Hour 4, Block D:   Cornelia Dean, NYT, in re: When Dams Come Down, Salmon and Sand Can Prosper  The removal of a dam on the Elwha River in Washington has found a beneficiary other than fish: a beach.