Friday 6 December 2013
Photo, above: DoD 2013
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Hour One
Friday 6 December 2013 / Hour 1, Block A:9:00 Megan McArdle, Bloomberg View
Obamacare the product: what kind of product are people getting?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/
Friday 6 December 2013 / Hour 1, Block B: 9:15 Dan Goure, Vice President, Lexington Inst
Private drone fleets: Jeff Bezos introduced the idea of drones that deliver your Amazon.com purchases. What are the ramifications of a sky full of private drones? Who decides who can fly them and for what purposes?
It’s holiday season in the West...it’s purging season in Asia. There is a connection between the purges in North Korea and China; and those purges may keep an American in prison in North Korea..
Friday 6 December 2013 / Hour 1, Block D: 9:45 Michael Casey, Marketwatch
Bitcoin’s stock has gone up over 8700% (not a typo, eighty-seven hundred per cent) since January. And many people don’t even know what it is. But Bitcoin could be a challenger to some of the world’s oldest financial instruments - fiat currency.
http://www.marketwatch.com/
Hour Two
Friday 6 December 2013 / Hour 2, Block A: 10:00 Tom Temin, Federal News Radio
The administration claims Healthcare.gov is “fixed.” Many observers believe the surface of the site looks good, but the insides of the site are still not working right. Tom explores many of the ways the site still doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, and why the references to IT procurement problems aren’t accurate.
http://www.federalnewsradio.
Friday 6 December 2013 / Hour 2, Block B: 10:15 Keith Fitz-Gerald, Money Map Press
Holiday shoppers have an old option to bring home gifts...but that option is turning up in new places. Rent-to-own has been around a long time, but mostly on the fringes of the retail sector. Now big box stores like KMart and Best Buy are getting into the rent-to-own business. But it’s a mostly unregulated arena, and there are parallels to the mortgage crisis of 2008-09..
Friday 6 December 2013 / Hour 2, Block C: 10:30 Jim McTague, Washington Editor, Barron’s
Two Washington-centric news items moved the stock market nearly 200 points today. The economy added 203,000 jobs, and the unemployment rate fell to 7%; and Congress is on the verge of making a budget deal. Are these trends or anomalies, and what do they mean for the stock market and the Christmas selling season?.
Friday 6 December 2013 / Hour 2, Block D: 10:45 Todd Harrison, Senior Fellow, Center For Strategic and Budgetary Assessments
A budget deal in Washington may mean relief for the Defense Department. It could end up with more money than it expected. But that’s not guaranteed; and the question remains, what will they do with the money they get, since the Defense Department has never been able to have its books audited?
Hour Three
Friday 6 December 2013 / Hour 3, Block A: 11:00 Michael Vlahos, professor in the Strategy and Policy Department at the U.S. Naval War College
Strategies abound at the Defense Department. The 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review is in place; the 2014 QDR is in process; and as many as a half-dozen others exist. The question becomes, does the Pentagon have strategies...or “a” strategy?
Friday 6 December 2013 / Hour 3, Block B: 11:15 Michael Vlahos continues.
Friday 6 December 2013 / Hour 3, Block C: 11:30 Christopher Bergin, President and Publisher at Tax Analysts. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is not the only entity asking the Internal Revenue Service for documents about the Exempt Organizations division. Tax Analysts has been asking the IRS for training materials - and hitting the same brick wall as the Oversight Committee.
Friday 6 December 2013 / Hour 3, Block D: 11:45 Gordon Lubold, Foreign Policy A Chinese PLA officer asks for training manuals...at an American military base. The forcefulness of his request has started an investigation inside the Army.
Hour Four
Friday 6 December 2013 / Hour 4, Block A: David Hawkings, Senior Editor, Roll Call Congress is on the verge of a budget deal. We may learn about it as soon as Monday or Tuesday. The next trick will be for each party’s leadership to sell it to the rank and file. If they do, an unprecedented-in-recent-years
Friday 6 December 2013 / Hour 4, Block B: Julia Sweig, Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations Alan Gross is in prison in Cuba tonight. He and his family have been outspoken in their criticism of the United States government...but he still wants to come home. His case is generating a wave of attention from Congress, human rights groups, and the media this week. Why now?
Friday 6 December 2013 / Hour 4, Block C: Ron Marks, former CIA analyst and intelligence advisor to two Senate Majority Leaders The National Security Agency collects five billion phone locations a day. What do they do with it all? For years they said they couldn’t collect all that data; can we now believe them that they’re only using it to find terrorists?
Friday 6 December 2013 / Hour 4, Block D: Charles Clark, Government Executive magazine The investigation into the IRS is heating up again. Another argument between Darrell Issa and Elijah Cummings over documents and testimony - this time by William Wilkins.
http://www.govexec.com/
http://www.govexec.com/
.. .. ..
Music
Hour 1: Frost/Nixon. Tomorrow Never Dies.