Tuesday 29 July 2014
Photo, above: Donetsk rally pro-Russia.
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Co-host: Larry Kudlow, The Kudlow Report, CNBC; and Cumulus Media radio
Hour One
Tuesday 29 July 2014 / Hour 1, Block A: Avik Roy, Manhattan Institute/Forbes.com, in re: A speed bump for Obamacare.
Tuesday 29 July 2014 / Hour 1, Block B: Avik Roy, Manhattan Institute/Forbes.com, in re: Obamacare, Hobby Lobby and Contraception.
Tuesday 29 July 2014 / Hour 1, Block C: Pavel Yakolev, Duquesne University, in re: A new Mercatus study shows that higher state taxes lead to less economic prosperity or cause residents to move to other states.
Tuesday 29 July 2014 / Hour 1, Block D: John Fund, National Review Online, in re: Hong Kong, Dubai and Singapore use the LEAP model to leap into the 21st Century. Obama’s immigration policies.
Hour Two
Tuesday 29 July 2014 / Hour 2, Block A: Steve Cohen, The Nation, in re: U.S. rushes new Cold War Debate.
Tuesday 29 July 2014 / Hour 2, Block B: Steve Cohen, The Nation, in re: US imposing new sanctions against Russia’s energy, financial, defense sectors – Obama.
Tuesday 29 July 2014 / Hour 2, Block C: Steve Cohen, The Nation, in re: U.S. says Russian artillery firing into Ukraine.
Tuesday 29 July 2014 / Hour 2, Block D: Steve Cohen, The Nation, in re: New sanctions could leave Russia isolated from the international community.
Hour Three
Tuesday 29 July 2014 / Hour 3, Block A: Sohrab Ahmari, in re: The Wall Street Journal, Russia’s Polonium Widow.
Tuesday 29 July 2014 / Hour 3, Block B: Bob Zimmerman, Behindtheblack.com, I in re: SEE-# engine restart fails but private space effort continues.
Tuesday 29 July 2014 / Hour 3, Block C: Ann Marlowe, Hudson Institute, in re: Canadian embassy in Libya suspends operations. Fuel depot fire endangers civilians in Libya.
Tuesday 29 July 2014 / Hour 3, Block D: Paul Gregory, Hoover Institution, in re: Times report casts shame on Obama’s handling of Ukraine crisis.
Hour Four
Tuesday 29 July 2014 / Hour 4, Block A: The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation, Oliver Bullough, Author, Part 1
Tuesday 29 July 2014 / Hour 4, Block B: The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation, Oliver Bullough, Author, Part 2
Tuesday 29 July 2014 / Hour 4, Block C: The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation, Oliver Bullough, Author, Part 3
Tuesday 29 July 2014 / Hour 4, Block D: The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation, Oliver Bullough, Author, Part 4
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Guest blog
Palestinian families rush out of their homes and flee southward with no destination in mind, just terrified to spend another minute in a possible target zone. During the last few days, Hamas intercepts them, demands they stay in their homes and possibly get bombed or else try to leave and definitely get shot by Hamas.
A widow living alone inside Israel about 100 yards from a Gaza border says she and her neighbors have heard unexplained tap-tappings underground. They contemplate the news that multiple Hamas tunnels have been found nearby with supplies of syringes and handcuffs for kidnappings, and the village lives in fear.
All this began when Hamas decided to send large barrages of rockets over the Gaza border into nearby Israel at civilian populations. Many of the rockets are primitive, can barely be aimed, and land in a statistical distribution that promises to hit a few private homes every few days and, meanwhile, scare the daylights out of civilians. Once in a while they go the wrong direction entirely and blow up civilians in Gaza.
Better-quality rockets have been used recently. A main outside supplier now is Iran, usually but not always via Syria. A very recent report has Hamas about to buy a few hundred thousand dollars' worth of rockets from North Korea. Since Hamas was officially flat broke at the beginning of this war not much over two weeks ago, one has to suppose either a generous cash infusion (such as the one now offered by Qatar, the EU, and the US), or maybe a barter deal between Pyongyang and Teheran of oil for rockets.
As for the already-arrived missiles, the police in a small town named S'derot collected the disfigured metal pipes that were beginning to clutter the streets and piled them up into a rusted hill behind a small commercial building. A week ago, a young cinematographer named Kosta contemplated this testament to human madness, picked through the pile and carefully arranged many chunks of twisted pipe on some old steel shelving he'd dug up somewhere. Soon, he had a tiny museum of spent rockets from Gaza.
Each chewed-up pipe section had been marked by the senders: Hamas, Qassam Brigades, al Quds Brigade, Islamic Jihad, al Qaeda, and the raft of Gazan family gangs. Each crew had its own markings, colors, scripts, and inscriptions. Sort of like gang colors on the streets, but here both a weapon of death and an act of performance art in a globally-fought public relations war.
As inferior as main Western media tend to be (all along the political spectrum), Arab media are factually abominable. In recent days they've used hair-raising footage from Syria and claimed it was from Gaza (a few Syrians recognized the backgrounds); quoted numbers that surpass the physical capacity of events; and played the information war in a way that even most US or European TV producers, bless their frozen hearts, wouldn't dare to do.
This raises the question of what the world will be like, what most of the seven billion of us will think, when beastly little tyrannies everywhere become media sophisticates and the notion (rarely achieved) of dispassionate and accurate reporting has vanished. / 2014-07-28
For a short video on the rockets, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZ2-miK19ow&feature=youtu.be