The John Batchelor Show

Thursday 18 February 2016

Air Date: 
February 18, 2016

Photo, left: A cluster bomb ejects explosive bomblets that are designed to kill personnel and destroy vehicles. Other cluster munitions are designed to destroy runways or electric power transmission lines, disperse chemical or biological weapons, or to scatter land mines.  Massive exterminations in Aleppo:  The international community has wised up to Russia’s dumb bombing campaign in Syria and the toll it has taken on civilians. Yet Russia says it knows of not one civilian killed by its archaic bombing tactics. They must have magic vodka that they pour on their munitions so that they only kill “terrorists”—as in anyone who apposes the Assad regime, during their hourly dumb bombing, carpet bombing and cluster bomb slinging operations. http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/this-video-shows-cluster-bombs-detonating-in-the-dense-1759289467   Also see: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/-qUPxvKGJJc/maxresdefault.jpg
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Co-hosts: Mary Kissel, Wall Street Journal Editorial Board & host of Opinion Journal on WSJ Video. Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents.
 
Hour One
Thursday  18 February 2016 / Hour 1, Block A: Veronique de Rugy, senior research Fellow at the Mercatus Center, in re: Obama budget: $4.1 billion, incl a $10 Bbl tax on oil. The irony of demonizing privately-owned, energy-based businesses, the US might have had 0% growth over the past through years.  Pres Obama’s POV is, “It’s not about economics, it's about my ideology. Gouge the gougers; make the villains pay! . . .  In fact, the losers are those who have to fill up the tank and like to have a few dollars left over with which to buy food. Since Mrs Clinton is [in effect parroting] Pres Obama, it looks as though Mr Obama has already succeeded.  . . . Does the White House know that this’ll cost citizens five dollars extra every time they fill up at he gas station?  You'd think so, since he has a Council of Economic Advisors. On the other hand, I’ve never seen another Council be this partisan.  If the president doesn’t know what’s the Council doing?  . . .  In fact, in the fort budget year, the president said, “I want a trillion-dollar tax hike. End of story.” In 2011, he remarked on how a high gas price interfered with ability to buy groceries. Has he changed his mind?  Or must we impugn intent?  He knows what he’s doing and he’s not a compromiser.  . . . Explosion of programs like Social Security, et al.  This budget is Mr Obama’s las t call to punish those he doesn't like, rewerd those he does. 
 
Did you know that the government wants to collect an extra five dollars from you every time you fill up at the gas pump? As you probably already know, President Obama proposed a 10 dollar per barrel gas tax in his final budget.  In Creators Syndicate:  In his final budget request, President Obama will include a call for an additional $10 in taxes per barrel of oil. This terrible idea would roll back the tremendous energy gains made in recent years and harm the economy.
The biggest and most obvious impact of the Obama gas tax would be its impact on the pocketbooks of American drivers. That's right; one of the most underrated findings in economics is the fact that the person cutting the tax check isn't always the one shouldering its burden. In this case, you can tax "oil companies" as much as you want, but the burden will be passed on to consumers. And indeed, estimates show the $10 per barrel fee could translate to roughly 22 cents per gallon of gasoline. That would more than double the current federal gasoline tax of 18.4 cents per gallon. The president, in other words, wants Uncle Sam to collect $5 or more every time you fill up.
I assume the president understands the consequences of what he is proposing, so apparently he now thinks that more money in consumers' pockets is a bad thing. Or maybe it's because he can't claim credit for it. Indeed, the price of oil has dropped considerably, thanks to an energy revolution that he opposed every step of the way, even though it has significantly benefited the economy. Unable to prevent positive developments like fracking despite the determined effort of his regulators, the president instead is now seeking to offset the benefits of greater energy production by attaching to it the ideological baggage of austerity environmentalism. http://www.creators.com/opinion/veronique-de-rugy/presidents-oil-tax-puts-americans-over-a-barrel.html
Thursday  18 February 2016 / Hour 1, Block B:  Edward Hayes, Esq., criminal defense attorney par excellence, in re:  John Batchelor and Eddie Hayes agree that there’s a stronger police presence on New York City streets than before; Mary Kissel disagrees: homeless people ranting on subway cars; at the next stop, mass exodus .  A lot of the people on subways and streets are mentally ill, refuse to take their medicatio0ns, and are violent and dangerous.  The big question is, what happens when it gets warm?  Eddie: Agree!
Thursday  18 February 2016 / Hour 1, Block C: Chris Berg, Senior Fellow,  Institute of Public Affairs (Melbourne, Australia), in re: During the meteoric economic rise, Australia became dependent on selling commodities to China -  25 years of straight growth – but now we have slowing growth concerns with pure political system, and the like.   One of the stablest democratic systems in the world, a freer economy than does the US, excellent human right, etc. But macro-economic trends . . .
 
 Is the government chasing growth, or just revenue? - The Drum.  Roundtable on Australia's economic and political drama these days.  The global commodity collapse has created wholes in the narrative of globalization.  Australia is looking to survive the decline with a mixed package of economic drivers.  The inquiry is how is AU doing, and what does this do for the politics of a democracy?  
Observe that the US is in political turmoil because of the presidential contest.  At the same time, there is a strong theme of globalization rejectionism in the discourse.  The Democrats and Trump are making noise about protectionism and tariff wars.  It may get worse.  In Europe, there is a fever of nativism about the refugee crisis in Mesopotamia, the Horn of Africa, sub-Saharan Africa. In sum, Australia can be both a warning and a guide.
How Australia Is Surviving the Commodities Rout Big resource exporters such as Brazil and Canada have been slammed by the falling commodities trade that was sparked by China’s deceleration. As evidence mounts that Australia’s economy is also slowing, one surprising consensus is emerging: It isn’t nearly as bad as it should be.
Australia’s resilience owes largely to two broad trends—strong infrastructure investment in recent years and an economic shift to services from mining. The trend has been helped by a weak Australian dollar and slow wage growth. All of this has made Australian goods and services more competitive globally, allowing the country, in some cases, to grab more market share. Spill = fight within a Party: put the leadership to the vote.
Thursday  18 February 2016 / Hour 1, Block D: Natalie Angier,  New York Times science journalist, in re:   A special part of the brain responds happily to music (from wind chimes to Mozart to hip-hop). Also specific circuits respond to speech.  . . . 
 
Hour Two
Thursday  18 February 2016 / Hour 2, Block A:  Victor Davis Hanson, Hoover, in re:  The nightmares in Mesopotamia, where a war between Turkey and Russia is under way.   These years after the intervention:  Three fundamental decisions. In 2011, Iraq was very quiet; the Arab Spring had bypassed it.  When the US pulled out 40,000 peacekeepers, Al Qaeda grew massively..  Susan Rice, Mrs Clinton, and Pres Obama decided to go into Libya. Then in Syria, Pres Obama claimed he’d bomb Assad but didn't, then later claimed that he, himself, had never spake a red line – incomprehensible.  Pres Obama seemed to think that  the calm in Iraq was a natural outcome of his being in the presidency.  When that turned out not to be the case, he basically hid from events.  |  Why has he devoted so much energy to the Ikhwan, the Muslim Brotherhood?  He seems to think that local resistance movements are authentic and prefers to empower them willy-nilly.  The coffeehouse thinks that if you’re anti-American you're authentic. And Erdogan?  He trashed Europe, was anti-American and anti-Israeli – and the WH immediately latched on, and greenlighted the authoritarian conduct in Turkey. Sordid.  Pres Obama’s apparent enmity toward Israel? If you're pro-Western, you deserve contempt – Israel is inauthentic, is neocon, is not as authentic as Palestinians.  The mindset of a 22-year-old grad student in perpetuity.  Yemen?  He believes there’s something pathological about the West that t’s unappreciated Islam, and that his unique mission is to bridge that gap. Disastrous foreign policy. Also has a bad habit of psychoanalyzing Putin and others – like analyzing Hitler and missing the Anschluss.   (1 of 2)
Thursday  18 February 2016 / Hour 2, Block B:  Victor Davis Hanson, Hoover; in re: The Trump boom.  Napoleon spoke of needing an authoritarian protector; the people turned over the rains of govt and in five years had a full-fledged tyrant.   Trump keeps mum on policies lest the electorate disagree with any specific.  Isn't this what Obama did?  They both love the first-person pronoun – I , me, my; and personalizes relationships with world leaders. Thus the US is veering from one unknown to another. “Hope and change:” is banal; now we have “I’ll make American great again.” Every program – abortion, Social Security, take the whole list - and he’s a Democrat on all policies.  He’s taken the Limousine Liberal and turned it on his head.  “I’m your man of the people.”
Last eve, a GOP source remarked that Trump probably is not a Republican, and what there is of policy from Trump is that of a Democrat.  Both parties are fragments.  The strong man is rising in Ankara, Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo, Paris . . .
Nations in the Middle East that once aligned with America are now indifferent. Interests who opposed the United States grow defiant. Fence-sitting countries that calibrated their policies to the perception of U.S. strength are leaning toward our adversaries. Chaos is the result. The upheavals in the Middle East reflect a shared perception that the U.S. cannot or will not promote pro-Western forces in the Middle East. Obama’s foreign policy is written off as either confused or reformulated to favor revolutionary societies that are deemed more authentic and legitimate that traditional U.S. allies. Three landmark events over the last four years fueled the general Middle East chaos . . .  http://www.hoover.org/research/speak-loudly-and-carry-twig
--and this prescient piece from last fall: Is Trump Our Napoleon?   (2 of 2)
Thursday  18 February 2016 / Hour 2, Block C:  Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents, in re: Russia Plans to Sell Iran up to $8B Worth of Weapons: Reports
Thursday  18 February 2016 / Hour 2, Block D:  Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents, in re:  Exclusive: Obama Refuses to Hit ISISs Libyan Capital  The terror group is gaining ground in Libya. But the Obama administration has said no to a . . .  How Much of Libya Does the Islamic State Control?  Barack Obama's ISIS Strategy: Ignore Libya
 
Hour Three
Thursday  18 February 2016 / Hour 3, Block A:  Tyler Rogoway, FoxtrotAlpha, in re: DARPA Released Official Images of Its Cutting Edge Sub Hunter Drone Ship Watch These 62-Ton M1 Abrams Tanks Drift Through the Frigid Norwegian Wilderness  ;  'Nitro Zeus' Was a Massive Cyber Attack Plan Aimed at Iran If Nuclear Negotiations Failed: Report  ;  This Video Shows Cluster Bombs Detonating in the Dense Syrian City of Aleppo  ; Saudi Arabia to Send Jets to Turkey as Russia Says 'A New Cold War' Has Begun  ; F-22 Raptors Deploy to South Korea As Tensions Rise Between the North and South  ;   Surface to Air Missiles Arrive on China's Island Outpost in the South China Sea ; Russian News Crew's Drone Gets Extreme Close-Up of Artillery Rockets 
Thursday  18 February 2016 / Hour 3, Block B:  Tyler Rogoway, FoxtrotAlpha  (2 of 2)
Thursday  18 February 2016 / Hour 3, Block C:  John Bolton, AIE, in re: Nino Scalia’s legacy / 
February 15, 2016

    Antonin “Nino” Scalia will rank as one of America’s greatest jurists, not only for his decades of service as an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court, as a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and as an Assistant Attorney General at the Justice Department, but for his legal scholarship as well. As a professor at several prestigious law schools and as a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Scalia had, and will continue to have, an enormous influence in American legal thinking.

For decades after the judicial revolution of the 1930s, conservatives were at sea in knowing how to respond to the Supreme Court’s seemingly limitless willingness to decide questions well beyond its historical — and constitutional —  remit. What Yale Law professor Alexander Bickel had once labeled “the least dangerous branch” was wreaking itself upon the country, doing untold damage to the very concept of representative government.

Before the Roosevelt Court, there had been no pressing need to articulate a philosophy of judging because the implicit understanding of the Constitution, and the judiciary’s limited role, had been so widely shared. Once that tacit, implied consensus disappeared, however, there was nothing immediately at hand to replace it and provide bulwarks against the new judicial activism from the Left. Accordingly, for a considerable period, conservatives failed to check the spreading chaos because they could not reformulate a philosophy of judging that constrained what was increasingly becoming the federal government’s third political branch.

Various approaches were tried and failed. “Judicial restraint” proved inadequate, as did “strict constructionism.” Neither approach afforded a systematic, principled approach for the judiciary, smacking instead of being attitudes rather than philosophies.

Then came Scalia and other important scholars who developed what we now know as “originalism,” the concept that, for constitutional adjudication in particular, judges must strive to find what the drafters and ratifiers of disputed constitutional provisions actually meant. It was that understanding that they had sought to embody in the law, and it was that understanding that bound those who came after.

Originalism’s central tenet was that the only acceptable meaning of constitutional provisions was what the nation’s political bodies adopted at the time. Later efforts by creative judges, politicians, and (worst of all) academics to imagine new meanings for the words before them were subject to no limitations except that of the human imagination. These were unhinged from the basic political decisions of the institutions of representative government that had adopted the Constitutional text in question. Once untethered, it was truly the judges who ruled and not the people.

The unlearned political commentariat insists still on calling Scalia’s judicial philosophy “conservative,” although it is no such thing. Originalist analysis can lead to judicial activism in eradicating mistakes by prior courts which incorrectly interpreted the Constitution. As Scalia and others argued, stare decisis is not a powerful analytical tool in constitutional law, since only the judiciary can correct mistakes made in earlier judicial decisions, unlike cases involving statutory construction, which Congress and the executive can correct without judicial involvement.

This existential struggle is far from over, and only underlines why the nomination and confirmation of Scalia’s successor is so important. He would relish the fight.

In September, 1986, when Scalia was confirmed, I was Assistant AG for Legislative Affairs, and was deeply involved in his and William Rehnquist’s nominations. Scalia was confirmed 98-0 in an unusual evening vote, shortly after Rehnquist’s far more contentious nomination to be Chief Justice was approved. By prior arrangement, from an office just off the Senate floor, I called Nino to tell him the outcome. He was attending a dinner being held in the massive banquet facility of the Capital Hilton Hotel. In those days before cell phones, I had the number of the kitchen manager, and a waiter went out to Scalia’s table to bring him back to the manager’s office so we could speak. I congratulated the new Justice-to-be, and said that vote had been 98-0. There was silence at the other end of the line, and then he asked quietly, “who were the two who didn’t vote?” I explained that both Barry Goldwater and Jake Garn were absent because of health issues, both also having missed the Rehnquist vote. Nino broke out laughing at the irony that two of the most conservative senators had not voted for him.

It won’t be so lopsided this time. But if Scalia were reincarnated as the nominee for his seat, he would not hesitate for a moment to enter the fray. It is that important.
Thursday  18 February 2016 / Hour 3, Block D:  Daniel Henninger, WSJ editorial, in re: The death of Supreme Court Justice Scalia has disrupted the GOP’s fantastic journey. Republicans now face the 18th-century warning of Samuel Johnson: “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.  http://www.wsj.com/articles/electability-on-steroids-1455752210?tesla=y
  
Hour Four
Thursday  18 February 2016 / Hour 4, Block A: The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, by James Shapiro, Part One (1 of 4)
Thursday  18 February 2016 / Hour 4, Block B:  The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, by James Shapiro, Part One (2 of 4)
Thursday  18 February 2016 / Hour 4, Block C:  The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, by James Shapiro, Part One (3 of 4)
Thursday  18 February 2016 / Hour 4, Block D:  The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, by James Shapiro, Part One (4 of 4)