Photo, above:  Today has been Russian Orthodox Christmas - С Рождеством. See Hour 2, Blocks C and D, Stephen F Cohen, NYU & Princeton Russian Studies professor Emeritus; author, Soviet Fates & Lost Alternatives. 

JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW

Co-host: Larry Kudlow, The Kudlow Report, CNBC; and Cumulus Media radio

Hour One

Tuesday  7 January  2014 / Hour 1, Block A: Larry Kudlow, in re:  discussion on the eleventh extension of unemployment insurance continuing payments ("If ten don't work, maybe rethink the practice?")  I t at least lowers the incentive to find a job/go back to work..   NBER in Cambridge, Mass, did study: repeated extensions have kept the UE number high.  Laurence Kotlikoff; If this Administration intends to drive the Main St economy, it needs not to hand out loser fees but cut corporate tax rates. Wages wd be higher and consumer prices lower if corporate taxes were lower/didn’t exist.

Democrats are trying to sway moderate Republicans. "Obama spoke with Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) about the need to extend the benefits. The White House also reached out to the office of Sen. Mark Kirk, but the senator said he wasn't able to connect with Obama. The Illinois Republican said Obama's outreach was evidence that the Senate Democrats don't have the votes." Burgess Everett in Politico

Tuesday  7 January  2014 / Hour 1, Block B:  Sudepp Reddy, WSJ, in re: Eqpt and software starting to pick up economically. Co's sitting on $2 trillion in stockpiles.  Core capital goods: orders and shipments up. Recently 150-200K/mo job increase.  As US lowers oil import, dollar will go up and thereby decrease likelihood of inflation. Shale oil & energy production, including exports – esp LNG .

5 Questions on the Economy to Be Answered in 2014


Is the Economy Set to Take Off? Factors to Watch
 Whether or not the U.S. economy finally moves past its sluggish growth will rest on several forces, including business confidence and housing, playing out differently from how they have since the recovery began.

Tuesday  7 January  2014 / Hour 1, Block C: John H. Cochrane,
 Hoover and CATO and University of Chicago Booth School of Business, in re: medical insurance:  . . .  can we negotiate price?  Cost-conscious stuff works best simply with transparent pricing.  How can we take care of the 10% of the population that's indigent, really poor?  Medicaid is rife with fraud but that's a separate question. First, let's clean up the huge mess we’ve made of medical insurance for the 90% rest of us. What to Do When ObamaCare Unravels  GOP has difficulty expressing charity, generosity, kindness. Question is not whether or not to give care – it’s how to do it.  In GOP, only Paul Ryan has expressed interest in pre—existing conditions.  Our market is such that you cannot walk into a hospital and find out how much it'll cost. 

Tuesday  7 January  2014 / Hour 1, Block D: Lanhee J. Chen, Hoover, in re:  . . .  Obamacare: if the risk pool is worse than expected and insurance companies have to pay more, there's a codicil that says that the feds will bail them out.    

Hour Two

Tuesday  7 January  2014 / Hour 2, Block A:  Taegan Goddard, Political Wire, and John Avlon, CNN, The Daily Beast, in re: Robert Gates publishes a memoir, Duty, about his time served under G W Bush and B Obama.  SecDef was present at al f the gossipy conversations we wished we'd heard. Pres Obama had not heart for his Afgh policy; same for Mrs Clinton: not for Iraq as she was running for the presidency.   In the 2012 presidential campaign, Romney's "47%" comment. 

Obama Doubted His Afghan Strategy   President Obama "eventually lost faith in the troop increase he ordered in Afghanistan, his doubts fed by top White House civilian advisers opposed to the strategy, who continually brought him negative news reports suggesting it was failing, according to his former defense secretary, Robert M. Gates," the New York Times reports.

"In a new memoir, Mr. Gates, a Republican holdover from the Bush administration who served for two years under Mr. Obama, praises the president as a rigorous thinker who frequently made decisions 'opposed by his political advisers or that would be unpopular with his fellow Democrats.' But Mr. Gates says that by 2011, Mr. Obama began expressing his own criticism of the way his strategy in Afghanistan was playing out."

Clinton Opposed Iraq Surge for Political Reasons    In his new book, former defense secretary Robert Gates says "both President Obama and Hillary Clinton have admitted -- to varying degrees -- that they opposed the 2007 surge in Iraq because they faced each other in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary," theWashington Post reports.

From the book: "Hillary told the president that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. ... The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying."

The Fix: "Bob Gates might just have handed Republicans (and maybe even a Democrat or two) an issue in their potential fight to keep Hillary Clinton from the presidency in 2016.

Tuesday  7 January  2014 / Hour 2, Block B: Taegan Goddard, Political Wire, and John Avlon, CNN, The Daily Beast, in re:  Mrs Cllnton gathering the clan for 2016.  On the dais who gained: Clintons or De Blasio?  Somewhat more the Clintons.  In the Clinton inner circle as Robert Reich, who wrote The Work of Nations – provided Pres Clinton the platform from which to support free trade. Reich several days ago spoke of The Year of the Great Redistribution – richest 10% of Americans own 80% of the stock market.  At the New York mayoral swearing-in, some speakers denied the fact that New York now has a much lower arrest rate than twenty years ago, simultaneous with a much lower incarceration rate.  Were New York City a state, it'd be the eleventh-largest state.

Tuesday  7 January  2014 / Hour 2, Block C:  Stephen F Cohen, NYU & Princeton Russian Studies prof Emeritus; author, Soviet Fates & Lost Alternatives, in re:  Putin is focussed on security at Sochi games: 3-mile perimeter through which you can’t pass unless your name is on a list.  Terrorists thus will try soft targets like hospitals and restaurants. Acceptable for Putin if iit doesn’t tarnish his security image at the games. He's given up on US opinions because there's nothing he can do to get good press. "Orthodox Church came back slightly under Stalin, was left alone thereafter if it didn’t trespass on politics." Four hundred years of tsars, 70 years of Communism, 20 years of post-Communism – how can Putin blend all these to create a national-ism?  Doku Umarov, emir of North Caucasus, sworn to kill as many as possible; struck twice in Vologograd (the former Stalingrad); they’ve struck in Moscow, St P, on the train, in airports.  They see the US as being as detestable as the Russians are.  If they can strike in the US, they will.

Countdown to Sochi: Vladimir Putin's alternative Winter Olympics
  Watch as Russian President and self-styled action man Vladimir Putin shows off the disciplines that sadly didn't quite make the cut at the ...

Putin celebrates Orthodox Christmas in Olympic Sochi

Putin skis, plays hockey while touring Olympic sites

Putin raises Olympic security after Volgograd bombings
The Guardian ‎- 10 hours ago
Russian troops in Sochi on combat alert as access to resort restricted a month before winter Games begin.

Putin Visits Volgograd, Site of Two Suicide Attacks

Can Putin Be a US Ally?  by John Batchelor

Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin enjoyed a remarkable year of successes that were capped with a cunning act of mercy by releasing his longtime rival Mikhail Khodorkovsky as well as two members of the dissident band Pussy Riot from their Siberian cells. Victorious in the tug of war with the European Union in Ukraine, dominant in the interim agreement between the P5+1 (the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany) and Iran, well positioned to manage the Geneva 2 negotiations to end the Syrian civil war in Russian ally Bashar al-Assad’s favor and poised to preside over an extravagant televised Winter Olympics at Sochi, Putin starts 2014 as the most powerful leader in Europe and Asia.

Putin is, in fact, an easy match in continental authority and personal ambition to the disconsolate, retreating U.S. President Barack Obama.

Why this equation of Putin and Obama matters now is that there is a body of evidence that the last decades of globalization have reached foreboding limits. There is a well-articulated case that the strategic map begins to resemble the eve of world conflict in 1914.

Once again, the great powers are pawing the ground at each other’s borders. The planet is anxious that the global cop on the beat — Great Britain in 1914 and the United States in 2014 — has withdrawn in order to tend a weedy, unpaid-for garden. Once again, the threat of regional skirmishes exploding into global war is no longer unforeseeable.

Now is the time the tentative United States needs a strong ally with a stable regime and a global punch, and this curriculum vitae aptly describes Putin, beginning his 15th year as czar of all the Russias in everything but crown and blood.

In sum, Putin can offer a helping hand in each region where the U.S. is regarded as obtuse and untrustworthy, such as the Middle East, North Africa and East Asia.

1914 versus 2014   Historian Margaret MacMillian presents the potent similarities between 2014’s tangle of competing powers and the collapse of the powers 100 years ago. She argues that the burgeoning, interconnected globalized trade of 1914 — the Panama Canal, the colonial partition of resource-rich Africa and Asia, the trans-Atlantic merchant fleets — didn’t deter the crowns of Europe from throwing away their prosperity in a spasm of mobilization any more than the wired-together world markets today would cool a fever of patriotic bloody-mindedness.

MacMillan, a Canadian granddaughter of wartime British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, points to the Middle East — with its weak rulers, paralyzed governments and clashing militias — as the equivalent of the perpetually warring Balkans that ignited the 1914 crisis.

She closes her warning by speculating that the U.S. may not be willing or able to guarantee global stability much longer and that it may take an international crisis to engender a new “stable international order.”

In fact, the building blocks of global crisis are at hand. The Syrian civil war, the surrogate war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the Iranian nuclear weapon threat, the nuke-armed rogue Kim Jung Un, the contrived escalations by China in the East China Sea and South China Sea, the deep enmity between Beijing and Tokyo, the neocolonialism for raw materials in defenseless Africa, the relentless homicides of Al-Qaeda — all are the tinder of planetary strife.

Putin the equalizer   With three years to go in Obama’s weary presidency, the administration and Congress should seize the opportunity for greater global stability by finding a way to construct an alliance with Putin.

Reasons against such a partnership are legion. Putin is a crude Russian nationalist, most decidedly not a Jeffersonian democrat, and like all romantic dictators, he is unlikely to relinquish power in his lifetime. He has angered Western leaders with his crackdowns on dissidents and LGBT-rights activists. Nevertheless, the Obama administration’s suspicions about Putin, like the George W. Bush administration’s, are chiefly based on a homegrown moralistic arrogance, what the scholar Walter Russell Mead argues is an American intellectual assumption that “liberal capitalist economics and liberal political values is carrying the world swiftly and smoothly toward the triumph of Anglo-American values.”

Reasons for an expedient alliance with Putin start with a recalculation of the balance of power in the Middle East. Putin and Obama share an understanding of and disgust with nihilist deviltry tricked up as jihadism. Putin seeks stability with Tehran and Damascus, if just to maintain a Shiite wedge that can help contain the spread of jihadism in Central Asia. The U.S. needs help immediately to leave Afghanistan and longer term to contain the fury between Riyadh and Tehran. Both Putin and Obama are adamant in defending Israel and its large Russian population from the cutthroats. There is also a shared fear of nuclear weaponry, based on 60 years of their countries’ always being at the horizon of mutually assured destruction.

Significantly at present, Washington and Moscow have reason to doubt the awakening Chinese revanchism in the hands of militant Xi Jinping and the provocative People’s Liberation Army. Russia’s energy fields are in sparsely populated Siberia within easy reach of Chinese diplomatic aggression. U.S. allies South Korea, Japan, the Philippines and Australia are in the way of China’s unilateral claims on land and sea.

In 1914 the great powers destroyed each other because none of them were capable of refusing the rush to launch textbook offensives. A European nightmare followed not only through 1918 but for the rest of the 20th century. In 2014 the U.S. needs an ally as iron fisted and well seated as Putin to guard against accidents that will be all nightmare from the first instant.

John Batchelor is a novelist and host of a national radio news show based in New York City.

Tuesday  7 January  2014 / Hour 2, Block D:   Stephen F Cohen, NYU & Princeton Russian Studies prof Emeritus; author, Soviet Fates & Lost Alternatives, in re:  Pres Obama has decided not to attend the Sochi Olympics.  When he [made a grave mistake anent Syria], he was saved by Putin. Further, Russians played a major role behind the scenes in the Washington-Teheran talks;. this constituted a huge gift to pres Obama – who repaid it by sending a delegation Putin on ______, with the whole delegation composed of three gay people, which was known to be a source of confusion and displeasure to Putin.  Putin will do all he can to pursue a positive outcome; Kerry said sotto voce that there's a way for Iran to be at the table – which is what Russia asked for, since Iran is a major player.  If Assad goes down, there'll be a jihadist govt in Syria.  A decade ago it looked as though Russia and the US would have to ally against China; now, not so at all. 

Hour Three

Tuesday  7 January  2014 / Hour 3, Block A:   Eli Lake, senior national security correspondent, Newsweek/Daily Beast, in re: The al-Qaedastan Threat   Affiliates of the terrorist organization took over Fallujah, Iraq, last week. The bold operation was a victory—but it could also be the group’s Waterloo.  On Monday, Iraqi army forces and other tribal fighters started to encircle the city of Fallujah and, according to some reports from the ground, began shelling al-Qaeda positions inside. The news is reminiscent of the battle of Fallujah nearly ten years earlier when . . .

Tuesday  7 January  2014 / Hour 3, Block B:  Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, in re:  Clintons Christen Bill de Blasio to Shore Up Hillary’s Left  The new mayor of New York is far more liberal than Bill Clinton, so it’s a surprise the former president would swear in the progressive idol. Until you consider 2016.

So the year opens with a bit of a surprise, a little piece of news that however symbolic certainly made me look twice. As Bill de Blasio takes the oath of office to be the new mayor of New York at high noon today, it’s Bill Clinton who’ll be doing the swearing in. This is interesting not because De Blasio asked, assuming that’s how this was set in motion, but because the Big Dog agreed. This gives us a little hint of how the Clintons are catching the scent of the prevailing Democratic winds—and serves as a nice down payment on the 2016 New York primary, because . . .

Tuesday  7 January  2014 / Hour 3, Block C: Catherine Rampell, NYT, in re: Study Suggests Recovery in U.S. Is Relatively Vital Two Harvard economists conclude in a new study that, relative to previous American financial crises, the current economy is doing substantially better. Academic heavyweights have been debating whether the current United States economy is so sluggish because of too much government stimulus or not enough, or because slower growth had become the norm even before the recession.  But maybe these arguments share a faulty premise.

The American economy is actually doing reasonably well — at least compared with what would be expected after a major financial crisis — according to a provocative study from Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, Harvard economists and financial crisis historians whose work has been attacked and embraced by the political right and left. The study, presented over the weekend at the annual meetings of the American Economic Association, rejects comparisons with regular postwar American recoveries, as other economists have made, and instead examines 100 major, or “systemic,” financial crises that have occurred over the last two centuries,  . . .

Tuesday  7 January  2014 / Hour 3, Block D:  Robert Zimmerman, behindtheblack.com, in re: SpaceX launches its second geosynchronous commercial satellite. After ten years of trying, India finally succeeds with its GSLV rocket. Cygnus tomorrow. Earth-sized exoplanet galore! 1   Earth-sized exoplanet galore! 2

Hour Four

Tuesday  7 January  2014 / Hour 4, Block A: 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars by Kurt Eichenwald  (1 of 4)

Tuesday  7 January  2014 / Hour 4, Block B: 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars by Kurt Eichenwald  (2 of 4)

Tuesday  7 January  2014 / Hour 4, Block C: 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars by Kurt Eichenwald  (3 of 4)

Tuesday  7 January  2014 / Hour 4, Block D: 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars by Kurt Eichenwald  (4 of 4)

..  ..  ..

Music

Hour 1:  Inside Man.  Stars and Stripes.  Robin Hood.

Hour 2:  Perfect Storm.  Red Dawn.

Hour 3:  War of the Worlds.  Rome.

Hour 4: