Photo, left: La gauche caviar (Limousine Liberals).  See: Victor Davis Hanson: Europe is hopeless. Lost.
French Leftist:  “I’m for a liberal socialism.”    French Rightist: [Whereas] “I’m for a social liberalism.”
 
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Co-host: Larry Kudlow, CNBC senior advisor; & Cumulus Media radio
 
Hour One
Tuesday  29 March 2016 / Hour 1, Block A: Steve Moore, Heritage chief economist, in re: Chairman Yellen’s remarks at today’s noon meeting of the Economic Club of New York. “Queen of the Doves.” She said, in essence, Be silent; no Fed rate hikes for a good long time. Forget between now and July.  “My studio is filed with doves.”  Larry’s Wall Street friends are [spoiled]; fool’s gold, as though cheap money is he solution tour economic problems. Which I do not think is true. They paper over a lot of structural problems – Americans are cranky and anxious – 1% or 2% growth doesn't do it. Q4 was 1.4; Atlanta Fed estimating 0._  Briefly: interest rates are misleading – when very low, can be a sign of tight, not loose, money: inflation and growth are nil. When interest rates are high, might mean that inflation is high so the Fed is too easy.  . . . This goofball president who can't tell the difference betw communism, socialism, capitalism . . .  The Fed cannot create 3% and up growth – that comes from tax and regulatory reforms.  Uncle Milton taught us 50 years ago: Monetary policy has no lasting effect on unemployment and economic growth.    Fed needs to keep inflation close to zero; forget the Phillips Curve models. Replace the Fed with computers.   We had low interest rates in the Thirties! 
Janet L. Yellen, the Federal Reserve chairwoman, said Tuesday that growth in the United States economy remained on track because problems caused by the weakness of the global economy had been offset by an easing of domestic financial conditions.  Ms. Yellen, in remarks prepared for delivery to the Economic Club of New York, said the economy’s performance this year had been “somewhat mixed.” But she said the Fed expected better days ahead. And she said the central bank remained on a careful, patient course toward higher interest rates as the economy improved. Ms. Yellen’s text substantially repeated her remarks at a recent news conference after the most recent meeting of the Fed’s policy-making committee. She did not directly address the timing of the next increase in the Fed’s benchmark rate.
“I consider it appropriate for the committee to proceed cautiously in adjusting policy,” Ms. Yellen said, according to an advance copy of her remarks.  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/30/business/economy/janet-yellen-speech-fed-interest-rates.html?_r=0
Tuesday  29 March 2016 / Hour 1, Block B:  Steve Moore, Heritage chief economist, in re: Is the Obama Adm discouraging to investment and growth? Yes – it’s been in effect antibusiness.  The president said communism, socialism and capitalism are the same.  Who’d be better for he capital markets, Trump or Hillary?  She wants to increase the capital gains tax to 45%; Trump, 15%.  . . .  We need a growth candidate.  Milton Freidman: “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” – TAANSTAFL. The fed got it wrong with bad models, Austen Goolsby even agreed. Look at market price indicators.  Milton Friedman, Robert Mundell, Arthur Laffer. [Robert Mundell holds that economic expansion can occur not only indefinitely, but in fact forever.]
Tuesday  29 March 2016 / Hour 1, Block C:  Victor Davis Hanson, Hoover and via Works and Days; in re:   Fidel Castro threw the bouquet back over the fence – keep your economy. Obama’s world view is a composite of 1960s and 1970s. He went to Nicaragua and was insulted there by Ortega – Pres Obama responded, “Don't blame me; I was only three years old.”  Obama doesn't seem to know anything about the Cold War – “This policy doesn’t work” – but it in fact did work.  . . .  The photo op under the gigantic mural of Che Guevara. I was insulted: not only did he hate America but he was responsible for the death of tens of thousands of people in Latin America.  He pulled the trigger himself in dozens of deaths.   . . .  The next apology tour will head to Baghdad and Teheran, then back through Lebanon, Ankara, etc.  . . . The only way we’ll get rid of ISIS is to go in and blow it up. To boot, Europe is finished. Hopeless.  The only way to deal effectively with the jihadists in Europe is to go against EU law – which effectively ends the EU. No transcendent religious beliefs, can't assimilate immigrants.
The Apology Tour of Our Next President, by Victor Davis Hanson via Works and Days.   In Havana recently, President Obama talked of the similarities between Cuba and the United States, as if a constitutional republic of some 240 years and a thuggish and murderous communist dictatorship were kindred souls.
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America can still avoid sharing Europe’s fate. But only if we take action. Because of what Europe has become, it now has few viable choices in dealing with radical Islamic terrorism. Its dilemma is a warning to Americans that we should turn away from a similar path of national suicide.  After suffering serial terrorist attacks from foreign nationals and immigrants, a normal nation-state would be expected to make extraordinary efforts to close its borders and redefine its foreign policy in order to protect its national interests. But a France or a Belgium is not quite a sovereign nation any more, and thus does not have complete control over its national destiny or foreign relations. As part of the European Union, France and Belgium have, for all practical purposes, placed their own security in the hands of an obdurate Angela Merkel’s Germany, which is hellbent on allowing without audit millions of disenchanted young Middle Eastern males into its territory, with subsequent rights of passage into any other member of the European Union that they wish. The 21st-century “German problem” is apparently not that of an economic powerhouse and military brute warring on its neighbors, but that of an economic powerhouse that uses its wealth and arrogant sense of social superiority to bully its neighbors into accepting its bankrupt immigration policies and green ideology. The immigration policies of France and Belgium are unfortunately also de facto those of Greece. And a petulant and poor Greece, licking its wounds over its European Union brawl with northern-European banks, either cannot or will not control entrance into its territory — Europe’s window on the Middle East. No European country can take the security measures necessary for its own national needs, without either violating or ignoring EU mandates. That the latest terrorist murders struck near the very heart of the EU in Brussels is emblematic of the Union’s dilemma.
RELATED: Europe Quietly Awakens to the Islamist Threat — and Resigns Itself to Inaction
As far as America is concerned, a fossilized EU should remind us of our original and vanishing system of federalism, in which states were once given some constitutional room to craft laws and protocols to reflect regional needs — and to ensure regional and democratic input with checks and balances on statism through their representatives in Congress. Yet the ever-growing federal government — with its increasingly anti-democratic, politically correct, and mostly unaccountable bureaucracies — threatens to do to Americans exactly what the EU has done to Europeans. We already see how the capricious erosion of federal immigration law has brought chaos to the borderlands of the American Southwest. It is a scary thing for a federal power arbitrarily to render its own inviolable laws null and void — and then watch the concrete consequences of such lawlessness fall on others, who have been deprived of recourse to constitutional protections of their own existential interests. Europe’s immigration policy is a disaster — and for reasons that transcend the idiocy of allowing the free influx of young male Muslims from a premodern, war-torn Middle East into a postmodern, pacifist, and post-Christian Europe. Europe has not been a continent of immigrants since the Middle Ages. It lacks the ingredients necessary to assimilate, integrate, and intermarry large numbers of newcomers each year: There is no dynamic and fluid economy, no confidence in its own values, no belief that class and race are incidental, not essential, to one’s persona, no courage to assume that an immigrant made a choice to leave a worse place for a better one. And all this is in the context of a class-bound hierarchy masked and excused by boutique leftism.  . . . 
Tuesday  29 March 2016 / Hour 1, Block D:  John Fund, NRO, in re: How many agents pursuing Mrs Clinton?  Over years?  One over FOIA requests. The ral story is the FBI will have a report long before the Dem Conventions; it’ll leak, and the Dems will watch poll numbers. If she drops 5 or 10 points, they’ll manoeuver someone else into the candidacy. If not, she’ll be nominated.  . . . You always interview the subject at the very end.  Once she’s the presumed nominee, then Justice will be [interrupting] large momentum of the Democratic Party.  Note that Bernie Sanders isn't that far behind her.  Dems have a rules clause: no delegate is forced to vote for anyone one the first ballot if s/he cannot do so in good conscience.  If she learned anything from the Bill Clinton scandals, it's to wait everything out.  Jim Comey is a tough cop; will leak everything.  A killer. Yes – but it depends on her poll numbers. If they tank, she’ll be pushed out; if not, she’ll soldier on.  FBI will sit on the report for weeks, but her aides are in jeopardy 0 can prove intent, and ore. Will one of the aides [spill the beans?]  Why Cruz Is Poised to Stop Trump.  http://www.nationalreview.com/ ; HRC emails and the nomination struggle: Second judge opens door to depositions in Clinton email case hill.cm/qurCJcI
 
Hour Two
Tuesday  29 March 2016 / Hour 2, Block A:  Stephen F. Cohen is Prof. Emeritus of Russian Studies/History/Politics at NYU and Princeton. He is also a member of the Board of the recently-formed American Committee for East-West Accord (eastwestaccord.com); in re: Palmyra and the Russians. http://gizmodo.com/isis-damage-to-ancient-city-of-palmyra-is-enormous-1767711181  ; http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2016/03/syrian-army-allies-retake-palmyra-from-islamic-state.php ;
Tuesday  29 March 2016 / Hour 2, Block B:  Stephen F. Cohen, American Committee for East-West Accord (eastwestaccord.com); in re: Palmyra. NATO blaming everything on Putin, incl forcing Russian resident Muslims across the border into Finland in order to emigrate into Europe as refugees. http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-03-24/how-russia-is-weaponizing-migration-to-destabilize-europe
Tuesday  29 March 2016 / Hour 2, Block C: Stephen F. Cohen, American Committee for East-West Accord (eastwestaccord.com); in re:  http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-29/ukrainian-parliament-approves-chief-prosecutor-s-resignation
Tuesday  29 March 2016 / Hour 2, Block D: Stephen F. Cohen, American Committee for East-West Accord (eastwestaccord.com); in re:  http://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-politics/1990964-poroshenko-and-duda-to-discuss-donbas-and-upcoming-warsaw-nato-summit.html
 
Hour Three
Tuesday  29 March 2016 / Hour 3, Block A: Lara M Brown, George Washington University, and Salena Zito, Pittsburgh Tribune-review, in re: http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/29/politics/scott-walker-endorsement-wisconsin-primary/index.html  ; http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/29/trump-campaign-manager-charged-with-battery.html
Tuesday  29 March 2016 / Hour 3, Block B:  Lara M Brown, George Washington University, and Salena Zito, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, in re:  http://www.newsweek.com/clinton-sanders-focus-wisconsin-441127
Tuesday  29 March 2016 / Hour 3, Block C:   James Taranto, Wall Street Journal, in re:  Commentator in Chief: What happens when you hand a politician a microphone.

Sources Inside My Head: Media figures look in the mirror. What they see isn’t pretty.
Tuesday  29 March 2016 / Hour 3, Block D:  Josh Green, Bloomberg, in re:   Software improvements could transform political fundraising.   Steve Spinner just fixed the worst thing about being a politician:  The guy at the heart of the Solyndra scandal has gone into business with his former Republican oppressors — and he’s selling the solution to both sides.  http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/features/2016-03-23/steve-spinner-s-software-revup-could-transform-fundraising-for-politics-and-beyond
 
Hour Four
Tuesday  29 March 2016 / Hour 4, Block A:  Robert Zimmerman, behind the black, in re: DARPA to build satellite repair robot DARPA has started a new project to develop a robot satellite designed to refuel and repair satellites.  I wonder if this is linked to the satellite refueling demo that has been doing simulations of exactly this kind of repair work on ISS for the past five years.
Computer chip company sues SpaceX  The competition heats up: A computer chip manufacturer has sued SpaceX, accusing it of stealing both its engineers and the computer chips they were designing.
Broadcom’s co-founder and chief technology officer Henry Samueli met with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk in October 2015 in attempts to solidify an agreement, at which time Musk insisted Broadcom keep its “A-team” on the project, according to the complaint.
But even as Samueli and Musk were meeting, other SpaceX representatives were attempting to uncover the identities of the “A-team” engineers working on the Space X project, Broadcom says in its complaint. Five Broadcom engineers – all of whom worked on the SpaceX project – resigned their positions with the company effective March 11, and refused to disclose their new employer, according to the complaint. Broadcom says SpaceX confirmed they hired the five engineers on March 9, saying nothing prevented them from hiring other Broadcom engineers.
For its part, SpaceX says the Broadcom engineers – all named as defendants in Broadcom’s complaint – approached them. “SpaceX did not pursue or lure engineers from Broadcom,” a SpaceX spokesman said. “On the contrary, these engineers reached out to SpaceX anticipating significant layoffs at the Broadcom Irvine location.”
Tuesday  29 March 2016 / Hour 4, Block B:  Robert Zimmerman, behind the black, in re:  TMT consortium considers India for telescope   India is now a second candidate location to replace Hawaii for the Thirty Meter Telescope. Hanle in Ladakh has been short-listed as a prospective site by the TMT board following major hurdles in Mauna Kea, Hawaii – the first choice for the project. An international team is expected to visit Ladakh in a couple of months. … India is already building edge sensors, actuators and system support support assemblies, besides contributing to the software of TMT. India is expected to invest $212 million in the project.
Tuesday  29 March 2016 / Hour 4, Block C:  Dr. Charles Hawkins, Utah; Dr. Dave Buchwalter,  North Carolina; in re:  Miguel Cañedo-Argüelles, "Saving freshwater from salts" http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6276/914.short ; http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6276/914.full  (1 of 2)
Tuesday  29 March 2016 / Hour 4, Block D:   Dr. Charles Hawkins, Utah; Dr. Dave Buchwalter,  North Carolina; in re:  Miguel Cañedo-Argüelles, "Saving freshwater from salts" http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6276/914.short ; http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6276/914.full  (2 of 2)
 
 
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