The John Batchelor Show

Monday 6 January 2014

Air Date: 
January 06, 2014

Photo, above: WJR radio transmitting building, Southwest corner of Sibley and Grange Roads in Riverview, Michigan.  Welcome: WJR, Rep Thaddeus McCotter, Kevin Metheny, Rich Luzenski.

JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW

Co-host: Thaddeus McCotter, at WJR in Detroit – the great voice of the Great Lakes

Hour One

Monday  6 January  2013 / Hour 1, Block A: Thomas Joscelyn, Long War Journal senior editor, and Bill Roggio, Long War Journal and FDD, in re: Report: Ex-Guantanamo detainee and member of Bahrain's royal family joins Syrian jihad An ex-Guantanamo detainee, Sheikh Salman Bin Ibrahim al Khalifah, has reportedly traveled from Bahrain to join the jihad in Syria. According to a leaked Joint Task Force Guantanamo threat assessment, Sheikh Salman had ties to senior al Qaeda and Taliban officials prior to his detention in Pakistan and transfer to Guantanamo.

(Originally caught in Pakistan, recognized in G'mo as someone who rubbed elbows with the top levels of al Qaeda & Haqqani.)  Fallujah: having been contained, conquered, secured under the US Army, now is under the control of tribal allies of al Q.  Half of Fallujah under Islamic State of Iraq and al Shams; other half, under tribes affiliated with al Q.  US was serving as sort of mediator, reassured both groups that neither was operating against the other. When the US pulled up, they all lost logistics, intell, air support; Maliki immediately began . . .  Jihad from Baghdad to Aleppo – the worst-case scenario of the Black Flag arising in the Middle East. You could see this coming.  A first-order threat to the West and others in the Middle East.  "It's all gone to Hell."

Monday  6 January  2013 / Hour 1, Block B: Thomas Joscelyn, Long War Journal senior editor, and Bill Roggio, Long War Journal and FDD, in re: Hezbollah has overrun Beirut. Sunnis leaving en masse. Abdullah Azzam Brigades, founded as "an al Q theater group" that's attacked Iranian embassy, oil rigs, etc., now dead. This Administration refuses to define what al Qaeda is – says it’s a bunch of creaky old guys in Pakistan, when its goal has always been to establish a global caliphate. Until we define it and then have the will to deal with it, we'll make small, tactical victories but lose the war. Russia: tries to keep it all from falling apart.

Monday  6 January  2013 / Hour 1, Block C: Lara M Brown, political analyst and author, and Salena Zito, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review & Pirates fan, in re: Kathleen Kane Is the Democrats' New 'It Girl': A former midlevel prosecutor's ambition and rise in Pennsylvania politics is a sign of the times in American politics.  In under a year, Kathleen Kane has gone from an unknown Lackawanna County assistant district attorney to the powerful position of the state's attorney general. If you believe the gossip surrounding her, she is a prospective candidate for every elected office imaginable, including governor, U.S. senator and president.

For a Pressured President, a Real and Rare Vacation in Hawaii  For the first time since President Obama took office and began making a regular Christmas sojourn to Hawaii, no urgent news broke while he was there.

Obama Administration seeks to un-block birth control mandate   Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor earlier this week temporarily blocked Obamacare's birth control mandate for religious employers.

Obama Urges Congress to Restore Unemployment Benefits

Monday  6 January  2013 / Hour 1, Block D: Thaddeus McCotter, in re: Detroit. Orr issues stay on freezing pensions for Detroit workers as mediation continues
Detroit Free Press ‎- by Matt Helms ‎- 1 hour ago 
Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr quietly issued an executive order freezing the pensions of city workers as of Dec. 31 — a move that . . .

Trial on Detroit Swaps Deal Is Delayed

Detroit backs off pension changes _ for now

Hour Two

Monday  6 January  2013 / Hour 2, Block A:  David M Drucker, Washington Examiner Sr Congressional correspondent, and   John Fund, National Review Online,  in re: Red Dawn, A new mayor for New York.   Obama: Make jobless benefits 'first order of business'  DeBlasio is a cat's=-paw of the Working Families Party, which has captured every New York pol and is run by public and private unions – not fuzzy, but hardcore, sometimes Stalinists, to rape the taxpayer.  Horses: DeBlasio wants to develop part of the West Side but some horse stables are in the way.  The new mayor's first priority is to murder some 200 horses, send them to the glue factory.   / The Republican plan this year is to keep the lights on and talk about Obamacare. Keeping the lights on is an improvement over how the GOP handled the shutdown last year. 

Monday  6 January  2013 / Hour 2, Block B: David M Drucker, Washington Examiner Sr Congressional correspondent, and  John Fund, National Review Online,  in re:  the coming State of the Union speech. President Obama channeling Saul Alinsky?  What can the president try to do in the next three years?  Every president in his second term feels free from the yoke of re-election and entertains grand plans.  Also ted to rest on their domestic laurels; shd be an opportunity to focus on intl affairs, but there seems to be a policy of disengagement and withdrawal.  Progressives need to keep alive the myth that the first African-American president is a major historical event. Immigration? he doesn't have the juice at present – the politics of this are so poisoned for so many reasons. In fact, Barack Obama as the first African-American president is consequential. 

Monday  6 January  2013 / Hour 2, Block C: Scott Paltrow, Reuters, in re: third and final part of Reuters's investigative series on the Pentagon’s inability to account for more than $8 trillion since 1996. The report finds that the Pentagon’s books are in such a disarray that the DoD has never been audited, and that the department likely won’t meet a 2017 deadline to be audit-ready—and won’t incur a penalty even if it misses that deadline.  Part Three explores how and why the DoD finds it impossible to upgrade its management and accounting systems. As a result, billions of taxpayer dollars are wasted. For example, in 2005, the Air Force bought technology intended to streamline the tracking of military hardware. Seven years and $1 billion later, the Pentagon killed the project, realizing far too late that the technology was inadequate. This type of waste was not isolated: the Defense Logistics Agency, which buys and distributes military supplies, spent $2 billion to improve its efficiency and make itself audit-ready. It failed.

Expeditionary combat support system, abandoned in 2013 because – typical of the process DoD uses to bld new computer systems: brings in contractors; people turn over four or five times; designers never consult with users; after $1.3bil, Air Force killed it.  The amount of money involved pales in comparison to other computer systems – probably all together 50 to 100 times greater. Army trainees trying to organize things call this "the Valley of Despair." Amazing lack of coordination, projects all started at different times; now that they're built, have to jerry-rig ad hoc patches/connections. In 2010, Defense Logistics Agency spent $210 billion. No penalty for abject failure!

Monday  6 January  2013 / Hour 2, Block D:  Gordon Chang, Forbes.com, in re: The one sure-fire investment in China this year  George Soros now sees the writing on the wall; Fareed Zakaria is [in effect, clearing his throat on the matter]; even the pinhead Tom Friedman is [waking up] to the fact that the Chinese economy is precarious.  American people don’t grasp how the Chinese economy is structured. A lot of [rich] Chinese people have got passports, and as soon as it breaks up will be on planes to everywhere.  The price of an airline ticket on United will go to $5 million.

Hour Three

Monday  6 January  2013 / Hour 3, Block A:  Jillian Kay Melchior, in re: NEW YORK CITY, Horse Pucky  A new mayor would ban horse carriages. Our new mayor has made the demise of an entire industry as his first order of business; New York has an 8.9 % unemployment. These horses are owned by people who own one horse and carriage. There are five separate city agencies monitoring the horses's welfare, plus the ASPCA. Regulations on stalls, weather (winter coats and rain coats), max of nine hours' work a day, plus vets, plus a guaranteed five weeks's vacation in a pasture every year.  If the horses aren’t working, they're in danger of being slaughtered (not in the US, but sent to Canada) – 100,000 horses slaughtered annually.  Will need the City Council to do this and could violate the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.  Horses have been in New York since 1858, the opening of Central Park.  There are 200 horses now; he wants to replace them with antique electric cars – solar powered? This is like having the WCTU shut all the bars and replacing them with Starbucks. These 200 are to be sent to a horse retirement home and so displace other horses, who'll be sent to the glue factory.

Monday  6 January  2013 / Hour 3, Block B: Edward Wyatt. NYT, in re: U.S. Struggles to Keep Pace in Delivering Broadband Service fast broadband is anything above 10Meg/sec. Riga and San Antonio: Riga's connections are multiple faster than in Texas; average speed all amortized together, Riga is 2-1/2 times faster.  Copper wires bottleneck; US infrastructure is way old-fashioned. 

Monday  6 January  2013 / Hour 3, Block C: Ken Belson, NYT, in re: New Tests for Brain Trauma Create Hope, and Skepticism  Researchers at U.C.L.A. hope a new test will help them find degenerative brain disease among former football players who are still alive. But experts say claims of the tests’ validity are premature.

Monday  6 January  2013 / Hour 3, Block D:  Gene Marks, NYT, in re: Employers Contemplate Private Health Care Exchanges

Hour Four

Monday  6 January  2013 / Hour 4, Block A:  Jason Koebler, free-lance science writer, in re:  Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, living off the grid.

Monday  6 January  2013 / Hour 4, Block B: Fouad Ajami, Bloomberg View, in re: Murder in Beirut

Monday  6 January  2013 / Hour 4, Block C:  Eli Lake, The Daily Beast, in re:  Sunni sheikhs take the fight to al Qaeda

Monday  6 January  2013 / Hour 4, Block D: Zeke Faux, Bloomberg,  Secret Handshakes Greet Frat Brothers on Wall Street– As students vie for 2014 internships in an industry where 22-year-olds can make more than $100,000 a year, interviews with three dozen fraternity members showed a network whose Wall Street alumni guide resumes to the tops of stacks, reveal interview questions with recommended answers, offer applicants secret mottoes and support chapters facing crackdowns.  

..  ..  ..

Music

Hour 1:  Elysium. Brothers Grimm. Road to Perdition. 

Hour 2:  Red Dawn. I, Robot. The Road. Appaloosa. Fast & Furious 2. 

Hour 3:  Field of Dreams. Land of the Dead. 

Hour 4:  Land of the Dead. Antarctica. 

..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..