Photo, above: Malcolm X with his daughters, Attallah (right) and Qubilah, in 1963. Today would have been his eighty-ninth birthday.  His tumultuous life, from surviving a murderous Klan attack in Kansas when he was a small child to his conversion to an Islam filled with compassion and generosity toward all people, is an example of the blossoming of human potential.  If this history is unfamiliar to you, read The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Wikipedia: Malcolm X (May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965), born Malcolm Little and also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz  . . . By March 1964 Malcolm X had grown disillusioned with the Nation of Islam and its head, Elijah Muhammad, and ultimately repudiated the Nation and its teachings. He embraced Sunni Islam and, after a period of travel in Africa and the Middle East, returned to the United States to found Muslim Mosque, Inc., and the Organization of Afro-American Unity. While continuing to emphasize Pan-Africanism, black self-determination, and black self-defense, he disavowed racism, saying, "I did many things as a [Black] Muslim that I'm sorry for now. I was a zombie then . . .  pointed in a certain direction and told to march."  In February 1965, shortly after repudiating the Nation of Islam, he was assassinated by three of its members. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, published shortly after his death, is considered one of the most influential nonfiction books of the Twentieth Century.

JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW

Co-host: Thaddeus McCotter, WJR, the Great Voice of the Great Lakes.

Hour One

Monday  19  May  2014  / Hour 1, Block A: Reza Kahlili, author, A Time to Betray, and Daily Caller, in re: As State Dept is entirely aware, Iranian leaders announced to the world press that the P5+1 negotiations in Geneva were fraudulent, that the Western negotiators were "stupid" to participate, that Iran has no intention of slowing its race toward nuclear war capability.  These unambiguous statements clarify – pelucidly – that Iran does not now and never has intended to yield an inch in its thrust toward capability to incinerate Saudi Arabia, multiple Sunni nations, a good chunk of Europe and as much of the US as it can reach.  So far, almost the only incentive to Iranian moderation in this matter has been economic sanctions, which have seriously bitten the lucre-dazzled ayatollahs.  Regrettably, the current Administration in Washington has moved in ways overt and surreptitious to lift the effective sanctions. Maréchal Pétain on the Potomac.

Monday  19  May  2014  / Hour 1, Block B: Francis Rose, Federal News Radio, in re: The zombie that won't go away and die: NEW: IRS office in DC heavily involved in tea party assault

 
That contradicts former IRS employee Lois G. Lerner's initial claim that the ... “These new documents show that officials in the IRS headquarters ...   Judicial Watch Obtains New Documents Showing IRS ...

Documents: Close Coordination Between IRS and Senate ...   The White House on Monday framed the resignation of the Department of Veterans Affairs' top health official as a measure of accountability for a backlog of disability claims and series of deaths at VA hospitals -- but called the demands for further action premature before the completion of an internal investigation. White House press secretary Jay Carney faced a litany of questions from reporters about the ouster of Dr. Robert Petzel, the VA's under secretary of health, who had already been scheduled to retire this year. President Obama's top spokesman both claimed credit for the personnel decision and insisted that broader conclusions could not be drawn until a review by the administration was completed.

“I would hope that you had noted that the top official in charge, he was ... requested to resign by the American Legion, and he did so the day that -- one day after his Senate testimony,” Carney said when one reporter questioned the magnitude of the Petzel resignation. What Carney did not mention, however, is that the American Legion also called for the resignation of Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki. The White House continues to express confidence in the top official at the VA. And Carney hit back at critics who suggested Obama had not done enough to address the controversy. “I think it is important to allow the investigations — investigation and review — to come to a completion, so we can see what the facts are and you can see the actions that Secretary Shinseki and others at the VA take in response to any revelations that are contained within those,” he said. Obama has not publicly spoken about the VA controversy since conducting a press conference in Asia three weeks ago. Carney said Monday that the president would “soon” address the issue.

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Monday  19  May  2014  / Hour 1, Block C: Bill Roggio, Long War Journal and FDD, in re: Shabaab leader calls for mediation in Syria, says Zawahiri is 'our Sheikh and Emir'  Abu Zubayr, the emir of Shabaab, restates his support for Ayman

 al Zawahiri and calls for mediation in Syria. All the way from East Africa, Abu Zubyr pipes up in the global Sherwood Forest. Battle lines being drawn among jihadists; also, new groups emerging. Within ISIS, there must be a sizeable contingent deeply worried that their leader is going nose to nose against Zawahiri. This is extremely   fractious, insulting, cannot end happily. 

Muhajireen Army commander calls for Muslims to wage jihad in the Ukraine  Abdul Karim. Abdul Karim Krymsky, the deputy emir of Jaish al Muhajireen wal Ansar, calls on Muslims in the Crimea and the Ukraine to "start on the path of jihad" and conduct attacks in "Moscow or Poland."[?]  - i.e., if you can't go far away to wage jihad, then do so at home.  This is Putin's biggest fear; undergirds much of Russia's foreign policy. The Chechens are to Russia as the Terminator is to ______. When Bill puts up a video of Chechens calling for jihad, you can bet aht counterterrorist groups in

Treasury Department designates 2 'al Qaeda leaders' in Syria One of the two newly-designated jihadists, Abd Al Rahman Muhammad Zafir Al Dubaysi Al Juhni, has a lengthy al Qaeda pedigree and sat on al Qaeda's elite Shura council in Pakistan before relocating to Syria. Treasury says Al Juhni is now part of an al Qaeda group in Syria that is planning attacks against Western targets.

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John Bachelor recommends:

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Monday  19  May  2014  / Hour 1, Block D: Gordon Chang, Forbes.com, in re:  Apparently Washington has noticed that Beijing won’t be a fraternal partner in world affairs. It’s taken decades to acknowledge – "because of big money."  Meanwhile, China has arrogantly placed a huge, billion-plus-dollar oil rig smack in the middle of Vietnam's exclusive economic zone. Unconfirmed reports that Chinese troops are massing on the Chinese-Vietnamese border.  As two belligerent peoples go eyeball to eyeball, too much opportunity for unintentional armed hostilities. China testing US resolve?  Not – rather, t o prove to small Southeast Asian nations that the US wont defend them and oblige them to fall in lie behind China – which the small nations do not want to do  In a few months, look for an invitation from Hanoi to the US to send he US Navy to visit Cam Ranh Bay. 

1. Chinese police have launched an international manhunt for an alleged member of a separatist organization they say plotted a knife and bomb attack at a train station in the northwestern region of Xinjiang last month, official media reported. Police are accusing the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, or ETIM, for the attack that left three people dead in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, on April 30, the government's news agency, Xinhua, said on Sunday.

Xinhua quoted local authorities saying the attack was planned outside China by an ETIM member identified as Ismail Yusup and was carried out by 10 of his partners, two of whom were killed in the bomb blast, while the rest were captured. The report is the first time authorities have identified involvement by separatists. Chinese authorities had previously said only that two religious extremists were responsible for the attack, which occurred just a few hours after China's president, Xi Jinping, visited a mosque in Urumqi at the end of his first trip to Xinjiang since coming to power. Xinhua didn't say how authorities had identified Mr. Yusup nor specify in which country he is believed to be residing. But the report said police were hunting for him in cooperation with the International Criminal Police Organization, or Interpol.

2. Two Chinese ships on May 19 were preparing to evacuate Chinese workers from the Vung Ang port in Vietnam after riots last week targeted Chinese firms, officials said, AP reported. The boats could each carry 1,000 passengers. Unrest in Vietnam began when China moved forward with unilateral energy exploration in the South China Sea, using the placement of a deep-sea oil rig to assert its claims to the disputed Paracel Islands.

PLA Navy sends two of its biggest ships to protect oil rig, Vietnamese PLA Navy sends two of its biggest ships to protect oil rig, Vietnamese media report Among the scores of vessels China has sent to protect an oil rig in the disputed South China Sea are two of the PLA Navy's biggest amphibious landing ships and a missile frigate, Vietnamese state media report. Military experts said the sending of warships to waters also claimed by Vietnam would, if confirmed, indicate Beijing's determination to defend national interests.

The government-owned Vietnam Investment Review yesterday cited the country's Coastguard Command as saying that by the end of Tuesday, China had deployed as many as 86 vessels, including two ships equipped with helicopters, around the drilling rig Haiyang Shiyou 981.

The Jinggangshan and Kunlunshan are 19,000-tonne Type-071 ships and are equipped with eight surface-to-air missile launchers, a 76mm cannon, and four 30mm cannons. They are two of the PLA Navy's biggest amphibious landing ships. Carrying up to 800 troops, four hovercraft, fast patrol boats and two large Z-8 helicopters, the Type-071 ships are more versatile than . . .

Hour Two

Monday  19  May  2014  / Hour 2, Block A:  David M Drucker, Washington Examiner Senior Congressional correspondent, in re: Cruel behavior during the Mississippi primary as Cochran and McDaniel campaigns don’t explain why a blogger launched an attack on Mrs Cochran, said to be suffering from dementia.  A reporter from The Hill inquired; candidate said he didn’t yet know what had happened.  In the next breath, the campaign manager said that they'd be issuing a statement shortly. 

Nursing home:  Cochran cancels appearances over concerns about ill wife's privacy  HERNANDO, Miss. — Sen. Thad Cochran cancelled all campaign appearances on Saturday after news broke that a supporter of his opponent in the June 3 GOP primary allegedly took illegal pictures of Cochran's wife and posted them on the Internet. The Clarion-Ledger newspaper of Jackson, Miss., reported Saturday morning that local police arrested Clayton Thomas Kelly, 28, who runs the weblog “Constitutional Clayton.” He allegedly slipped into the nursing home where Rose Cochran, who suffers from dementia and is bedridden, has lived since 2000, and took illegal photographs of her. Clayton allegedly incorporated the Images in a political video targeting Cochran that he posted on his blog. The video has since been taken down.

Cochran, 76, is facing a challenge from state Sen. Chris McDaniel — the first obstacle to re-election the six-term senator has face since being elected in 1978. He had been scheduled for a day of campaigning, including attendance at the annual spring festival in the suburban Memphis community of Hernando in bellwether DeSoto County. The Cochran campaign confirmed that the senator’s appearances here and elsewhere were canceled in order to focus on the issue with his wife. McDaniel, who made the rounds at the Hernando festival before moving on to other Saturday appearances, released a sharply worded statement condemning Clayton and his actions. The McDaniel campaign said it has no relationship with Clayton, in either a volunteer or official capacity. “I’ve reached out to Sen. Cochran directly to express my abhorrence for the reprehensible actions of . . . Read more…                  

Q&A: Chris McDaniel pledges 'conservative resurgence' in his bid to unseat longtime Sen. Thad Cochran in Mississippi 

OLIVE BRANCH, Miss. — Chris McDaniel is running to be America’s senator. The insurgent state legislator is challenging longtime incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran in Mississippi's June 3 Republican... Read more…

Monday  19  May  2014  / Hour 2, Block B:  Jillian Kay Melchior, National Review Online, in re: Beware Midas’s Touch  Taxpayers pay for an Obamacare contractor whose employees have “little or no work to do.”  Last year, the Obama administration gave a British-based company called Serco a contract worth up to $1.336 billion to manage paper applications for Obamacare. But this week, a local television station broke the story that Serco’s taxpayer-funded employees in Missouri were being paid to do nothing.

Don’t say you weren’t warned. Serco has a Midas touch, at least in the way that King Midas ruined what he came into contact with and still ended up with a pile of gold. The Missouri story is just one case in point: A current Serco employee said that hundreds of taxpayer-funded workers spent their days “staring at computer screens with little or no work to do,” reported Chris Nagus of St. Louis’s KMOV-TV.

That source told Nagus: “There are some weeks that a data-entry person would not process [a single] application. . . . They’re told to sit at their computers and hit the refresh button every ten minutes, no more than every ten minutes — they’re monitored — to hopefully look for an application. Their goals are set to process two applications per month, and some people are not even able to do that.”  In a follow-up report, a different former employee recounted to Nagus how employees would fall asleep at their desks and whittle away the hours playing Pictionary and word games — all at the U.S. taxpayer’s expense. Nevertheless, the original whistleblower claims that “Serco, as a contractor, gets paid for the number of people that they employ. So they want us there even if we’re not doing anything.” The Department of Health and Human Services’ invoicing instructions for this contract instructed Serco how to . . .

Monday  19  May  2014  / Hour 2, Block C:  Gregory Copley, StrategicStudies director & author, UnCivilization, in re: Bomb blast kills four in Nigeria
 A bomb blast in the northern Nigerian city of Kano killed at least four people late Sunday, according to local police.  A Jihadist's Face Taunts Nigeria from the Shadows    MAIDUGURI*, Nigeria — He was the quiet one who walked silently to meet fellow disciples in a house by the railroad tracks, declining to greet other men on the street. But when he became agitated — over taking up arms against the government, or about his hatred of Christians and Jews — it was no use arguing with Abubakar Shekau.

A junior disciple who did so discovered the cost: Locked in his room by Mr. Shekau for a week with no food or water in the 100-degree heat, he barely survived. And on torrid evenings here in Maiduguri, Mr. Shekau’s antigovernment harangues resounded through the dusty streets.

A decade ago, the sect did not yet call itself Boko Haram, but its ideology was as hard line then as it is now.   “He was gingering up the boys to become wild,” said Aji Modu, a producer at the state television station here, who recalled the harsh-voiced Mr. Shekau preaching near his house in the Gwange neighborhood in 2008. “ ‘The government is no longer doing anything for you,’ ” Mr. Modu recalled him saying . . .

* pron: my-DU-goori

Nigerian soldier says army that would face Boko Haram is ill-equipped, underpaid  ... A Nigerian soldier has said that the army that would bear the primary burden of hunting down the Islamist group Boko Haram is ill-equipped to do so, and lacks the will to take on the group accused of kidnapping 276 schoolgirls last month. 

The soldier made his claims anonymously to Sky News over the weekend, saying "If my superiors know I have spoken to you, I will be jailed and tortured." He described how many soldiers are feeling frustrated with the conduct of the war against militants in the northeast of Nigeria, claiming that the terrorist's guns are "past the Nigerian army weapon."

"They give us just AK47s to go into the bush to fight Boko Haram," the soldier said. "Our equipment doesn't work and they give us just two magazines to go into the bush." Two magazines contain approximately 60 bullets.  The soldier said that many in the Nigerian army have also been discontented by delays in receiving their salaries, sometimes waiting weeks or months to . . .

Monday  19  May  2014  / Hour 2, Block D:  LouAnn Hammond, DrivingtheNation.com, in re: The best piece I've seen on the GM recall has been done by CNBC’s Phil Lebeau, entitled, Failure to Recall: Investigating GM. The episode goes through the process of the ignition switch, the lives lost and how quickly they're fixing the problem. GM has said it will take until at least October 2014 to change out the ignition switches. CNBC also takes NHTSA to task because, I believe, NHTSA’s ombudsman, Ray LaHood, in 2008 during the nation’s economic free-fall, was too busy securing $60 million in earmarks for his district, of which $9 million went to campaign donors. Those funds came from the federal taxes you and I pay to fund NHTSA. [more]

Hour Three

Monday  19  May  2014  / Hour 3, Block A:  Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents, in re: Iran insists acceptance of: R&D, 19,000 centrifuges, preservation of Arak, heavy defensive missiles in silos, and removal of all sanctions at once. Clearly, they will not give up Fordow or Arak (Pn reactor).  "US commitment t ensuring that Iran will not get a nuclear weapon" reiterated; Rouhani says that a compromise deal would be in the interests of both sides.   [A set-up.] Iran is obviously being hurt by reduced oil exports. Women are in a second week of very courageous protests against tyranny. Much of the discussion is a repeat of what we've long gone over and over.  Israel: Juniper Cobra – mil exercises between US and Israel, year after year. Day-to-day intell sharing , raining in ballistic missile defense and humanitarian responses. Hagel said that he US will be involved with all of Israel's missile defense [mechanisms]. More exercises cong in Jordan, which is under siege.  . ..   Aoun [is haggling]; huge Syrian refugee population in Lebanon, destabilizing the country.  "58 countries appeal to send Syria to ICC" 

Ten thousand Syrians have died in the last two months; twelve mfg places of chem. weapons still intact, 27 tons of chem. weapons or precursors intact.

Chechens fighting in Syria exppect to return to Russia; Putin can’t afford to allow  them to return. Thousands carry US and Euro passports, intend to return as trained killers.  Putin bought off murders of tens of thousands in Russia by his friendship with Iran.  Growing influence in Russian army of jihadists. Long-term very serious challenge.

     

Monday  19  May  2014  / Hour 3, Block B: Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents, in re: President of Israel is elected by the fractious Knesset, not popular vote.  Shimon Peres has enlarged the role; each one defines the role by his personality.  Reuven Rivlin, Likud . . .   election on 0 June. Need ten Knesset embers to endorse you to be a candidate; then contention within the group to be president.  Indian Congress Party; BJP long has had good trade links with Israel ad Modi has endorsed closer ties. Created financial bonanza in Gujarat, where Israelis have invested billions.  China has invested $300 mil in a joint research an education center in Israel – water, health energy: Israel, China announce $300 million research center Tel Aviv University and the Tsinghua University in China establish XIN Research Center focused on nanotechnologies.  . . . Last year, the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology announced a smaller $150 million Israel-China academic project that will see the building of the Technion-Guangdong Institute of Technology at Shantou University.

Monday  19  May  2014  / Hour 3, Block C: Ira Boudway, Bloomberg Businessweek, in re:  RANKING: THE SMARTEST SPENDERS IN SPORTS   Bloomberg's "Smartest Spenders in Sports 2014" ranks all 122 franchises in the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB, rating them based on how much they spent in player payroll for every win during the last five seasons. The NHL’s Chicago Blackhawks come in #1 thanks to their five playoff trips, two Stanley Cups, and placing 13th in spending. The Blackhawks are followed by MLB’s St. Louis Cardinals at #2, NHL’s Boston Bruins at #3, NFL’s New England Patriots at #4, and MLB’s Tampa Bay Rays at #5. Coming in last on the ranking at #122 is MLB’s Chicago Cubs. See the interactive ranking.

Monday  19  May  2014  / Hour 3, Block D:   Gene Marks, NYT, in re: Taxes are going UP!  Here's what to do.      Here are three reasons why we should be thanking Donald Sterling   Zuckerberg at 30: How he and Facebook have impacted IT [more]

Hour Four

Monday  19  May  2014  / Hour 4, Block A: Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World (Hinges of History) by Thomas Cahill (1 of 4)

Monday  19  May  2014  / Hour 4, Block B: Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World (Hinges of History) by Thomas Cahill (2 of 4)

Monday  19  May  2014  / Hour 4, Block C: Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World (Hinges of History) by Thomas Cahill (3 of 4)

Monday  19  May  2014  / Hour 4, Block D: Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World (Hinges of History) by Thomas Cahill (4 of 4)

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Music

Hour 1:  Pacific Rim. Underworld. Rise of the Vikings. Inside Man.

Hour 2:  True Grit. DaVinci Code. The Kingdom. Robocop.

Hour 3: 

Hour 4: