Photo, above:  Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who on Saturday night was a rock star in Madison Square Garden, filled to overflowing with enthusiastic Indian Americans; no ticket available for love nor money.   Slate: Mad About Modi
 Why the controversial Indian prime minister drew 19,000 cheering fans to Madison Square Garden.


JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW

Co-host: Larry Kudlow, CNBC senior advisor; & Cumulus Media radio

Hour One

Tuesday 30 September  2014 / Hour 1, Block A: Larry Kudlow, CNBC senior advisor; and Cumulus Media radio, in re:  Ebola. Iowa.

Tuesday 30 September  2014 / Hour 1, Block B:  Steve Moore, Heritage:  Iowa. Energy, EPA.

Tuesday 30 September  2014 / Hour 1, Block C: Mark Mills,  Manhattan Institute ("A Four-Step Energy Strategy") , & Steve Moore, Heritage, in re: Energy, esp Keystone Pipeline. US can be the world's largest producer  - about to – as well as world's largest supplier, which [is a game-changer]. We're not being bold; we need an Apollo Mission goal, which we don’t have.  The mere announcement would be huge; the futures mkt would arbitrage it. Pres Obama will not; my hope is on the next president.  Putin was again negotiating gas prices with Europe the day after we announced we'd be the world's largest supplier.  Dark side:  progressive Dems using scare tactics: we had this debate 40 years ago with eh great Alaska pipeline – of which no one rational now would say it was an error.  Absent oil & gas, there would have been no recovery in this country. Under the Permian Basin they’ve found another, larger – the Wolf Camp.  In Oklahoma, exploration of a multibillion-barrel field; another, Green River Shale, is ten times the size of the Bakken. If we move the world into overproduction, price collapse – bad for producers, nice for consumers.  Many still think we’re in a lucky bubble; don’t understand the magnitude of the physical resources of shale in North America are in the thousand-billion Bbl order; we use only a few thousand a year.  GOP should run on a Keystone Pipeline Authorization Bill. The Alaska Pipeline Authorization Bill of the 1970s passed with bipartisan support. ISIS getting millions a day from oil; huge natl security relevance.  There are 20,000 small O&G producers who took the risks and brought this into existence.  Not the huge corps; this is a classic American story.             Alaska's Lessons for the Keystone XL Pipeline
 
Environmentalists say the new pipeline will be a disaster. We lived through these scare tactics before.

Tuesday 30 September  2014 / Hour 1, Block D: Gregory Zuckerman, WSJ & author, The Greatest Trade Ever, & The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters, in re:  PIMCO – Mohamed el Erian & Bill Gross.  Bill Gross "raised his voice" at two Wall Street Journal reporters; then suddenly left (just before being fired by the Executive Committee).  "One tweet tells it all."   Over time he became ever more difficult with his colleagues and underlings; when his performance went from stellar to not-too-good, it [blew up].  Bond market:  hedgies pore over the PIMCO portfolio; if there’s a rush to the exits by clients, hedgies will have to sell.  A $2 trillion firm suddenly losing clients – never had such an event before; competitor will fight for every dollar.  Gross built the firm from scratch from zero to $2 trillion; he's 70, no one can [hit it out of the park] every time forever. 

Hour Two

Tuesday 30 September  2014 / Hour 2, Block A:   Stephen F. Cohen, NYU & Princeton professor Emeritus ;  author: Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War, & The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag after Stalin; in re: . . .  Euros and Ukraine agreed to defer for a year or more the agreement that triggered the whole [mess]. which in effect gives Putin what he wants. IMF gave a preposterous explanation:  suspending it so Poroshenko could carry out needed economic reforms.   . . .  He's apparently not receiving substantial weaponry from Washington so he's on his own. The 30 km buffer zone: Poroshenko had to remove his heavy artillery from Donetsk and Luhansk; then the cities, including all the population, are safe.  Cities badly damaged by three months of shelling. Need to rebuild, esp the coal industry.

Tuesday 30 September  2014 / Hour 2, Block B: Stephen F. Cohen, NYU & Princeton professor Emeritus & author; in re:    Economy.   Russia ready to start gas supplies to Ukraine after partial debt repayment — minister

Tuesday 30 September  2014 / Hour 2, Block C: Stephen F. Cohen, NYU & Princeton professor Emeritus & author; in re:  Ukraine's Poroshenko Continues to Look West Despite Russia's Opposition.   Kiev is now importing coal from Nigeria! Huge deal for nat gas brokered by Europe with Russia.  Hungary stopped shipping gas from Russia into Ukraine.    Merkel.

Tuesday 30 September  2014 / Hour 2, Block D: Stephen F. Cohen, NYU & Princeton professor Emeritus & author; in re:

Hour Three

Tuesday 30 September  2014 / Hour 3, Block A:   Francis Rose, Federal News Radio, in re: VA to Make Phoenix Whistleblowers Whole   Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert McDonald today announced that the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), working closely with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel . . .

Tuesday 30 September  2014 / Hour 3, Block B:  Salena Zito, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review & Pirates fan, in re: Lament of the fed-up voter   “America keeps sending messages to Washington in elections, and Washington keeps reading those votes as verification rather than repudiation.”

[link here]

Marv Rach spent 38 of his 69 years as a registered Democrat. Now the Vietnam War veteran and retired factory supervisor is a Republican, not because he has a great love for that party but because his old party left him no choice, he said. “I am not one of those ‘extreme' Republicans the media likes to pigeonhole conservatives as,” he explained. “I love my country, I fought for my country and . . . ”

Tuesday 30 September  2014 / Hour 3, Block C:   Tunku Varadarajan, Hoover, in re: Obama’s second chance with India  “Minimum government, maximum governance,” the words on-screen read, quoting one of the prime minister’s many mottos. “Red carpet, not red tape, to foster growth.”  “the intention to do big things for small people”  [more]

At Madison Square Garden, Chants, Cheers and Roars for Modi

Tuesday 30 September  2014 / Hour 3, Block D:  Seb Gorka, Marine Corps University & Breitbart, in re: Pres Obama's strategic mistakes in the war against ISIS.

Hour Four

Tuesday 30 September  2014 / Hour 4, Block A:  Morton Keller, Hoover, in re: The twentieth-century state took a variety of forms. Hitler's Germany, Lenin and Stalin's Soviet Union, and Mao's China rose and fell in their distinctively destructive fashions. Tinhorn versions of the totalitarian model cropped up in Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Authoritarian kleptocracies became the norm in much of Latin America, the Middle East, and post-colonial Africa. Most of Western Europe along with its Canadian and Australasian outliers adhered to a third, far more benign model of representative democracy. But whatever the form, the trend line was the growth of the big-spending state. Between 1870 and 2007, government spending as a portion of national income rose from 9.4 to 44.6 percent in Great Britain, from 10 to 43.9 percent in Germany, and from 12.6 to 52.6 percent in France. And then there is the United States, in so many ways the West's outlier . . .   [more]  (1 of 2)

http://www.hoover.org/research/rise-and-stall-american-state

Tuesday 30 September  2014 / Hour 4, Block B: Morton Keller, Hoover, in re: The twentieth-century state took a variety of forms. Hitler's Germany, Lenin and Stalin's Soviet Union, and Mao's China rose and fell in their distinctively destructive fashions. Tinhorn versions of the totalitarian model cropped up in Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Authoritarian kleptocracies became the norm in much of Latin America, the Middle East, and post-colonial Africa. Most of Western Europe along with its Canadian and Australasian outliers adhered to a third, far more benign model of representative democracy. But whatever the form, the trend line was the growth of the big-spending state. Between 1870 and 2007, government spending as a portion of national income rose from 9.4 to 44.6 percent in Great Britain, from 10 to 43.9 percent in Germany, and from 12.6 to 52.6 percent in France. And then there is the United States, in so many ways the West's outlier . . .   [more]  (2 of 2)

http://www.hoover.org/research/rise-and-stall-american-state

Tuesday 30 September  2014 / Hour 4, Block C:  Michael Tomasky, Daily Beast, in re: Hey, Congress: Vote on the Damn' War  Already, the ISIS war has hit some snags. Americans are worried—but so far, supportive—and Congress is nervous. Is this how to win a war

Tuesday 30 September  2014 / Hour 4, Block D:   Robert Zimmerman, behindtheblack.com, in re: Proton rocket returns to flight  The competition heats up: A Proton rocket has successfully placed two classified Russian satellites into orbit, the first time a Proton has launched since a May 16 launch failure. Russian investigation begins on failed Soyuz solar array  The Russians have established an investigation committee to look into the failure of a solar array to deploy during the most recent Soyuz manned launch.

They are also going to have the array inspected by Russian astronauts during a planned spacewalk in October. Still no word, however, on the capsule’s viability as a lifeboat for the next five months with one failed solar array.