Photo, left: RNC Miami Convention, 1968
 
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Co-host: Larry Kudlow, CNBC senior advisor; & Cumulus Media radio
 
Hour One
Tuesday  25 April 2017 / Hour 1, Block A: Bill Whalen, Hoover.
 
Tuesday  25 April 2017 / Hour 1, Block B:   Whalen continued
 
Tuesday  25 April 2017 / Hour 1, Block C: John Tamny, RealClearMarkets.com
That the dollar corrected downward after President Trump said it was "too strong" was yet another reminder that the Fed is a sideshow when it comes to the dollar's value.  Presidents always get the dollar they want.  It was true in the 20th century when FDR and Nixon both devalued the dollar despite loud protests from the Fed, and it's true now.  The dollar is a political concept; the president and Treasury the two important mouthpieces.  Our point in the op-ed is that weak dollar presidents (Nixon, Carter, Bush Jr., Obama - first term) are invariably unpopular simply because a weak currency is anti the very investment that always and everywhere drives prosperity.  If Donald Trump makes a weak dollar policy, he'll fail.  Plain and simple.   Steve Moore and I wrote this for Investor's Business Daily.
 
A Weak Dollar Won't Make America Great Again
 
Tuesday  25 April 2017 / Hour 1, Block D: Larry Kudlow.
The Tax Cut and Republicanism in 2018.
 
Meanwhile, Democrats denounced the 15 percent corporate tax rate and criticized Mnuchin, who said that faster economic growth would generate enough new tax revenue to compensate for the corporate rate cuts.
Asked whether the 15 percent target was workable, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) told reporters: “It is, if you want to blow a hole in the federal budget and cut a whole lot of things like Meals on Wheels and Lake Erie restoration and then lie about the growth rate of the economy.”
He said that the Trump administration would have to do something “huge” such as scrapping mortgage interest deductions, adopting a border adjustment tax or relying on “outrageously inaccurate projections.”
The Trump tax package has won the support of most of the business community, but divisions remain.
The biggest winners from the corporate tax cut would include companies in industries such as retailing, construction and services that have had trouble taking advantage of the loopholes in the existing tax code.
The list of losers from tax reform could include technology companies, domestic oil and gas drillers, utilities and pharmaceutical firms that have been adept at playing the current system by using loopholes to deduct interest payments, expense their equipment and research, and transfer profits to foreign jurisdictions with lower tax rates. Under the Trump plan, many of those tax breaks would be eliminated in return for lowering the rate.
“Retail companies are the ones who pay closest to the rate of 35 percent,” said Len Burman, a fellow and tax expert at the Urban Institute. “They can’t ship their profits overseas. They can’t take advantage of the research and experimentation credit.”
A study of 2016 data for all profitable publicly listed companies by Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, showed that U.S. firms pay vastly different income tax rates.
On average, engineering and construction firms, food wholesalers and publishers paid about 34 percent. At the other end, oil and natural gas companies paid 7 to 8 percent on average
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/washington-braces-for-de...
 
Hour Two
Tuesday  25 April 2017 / Hour 2, Block A:  Stephen F. Cohen, NYU & Princeton professor Emeritus; American Committee for East-West Accord; author: Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War, & The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag after Stalin; in re: 
(1 of 4)
Tuesday  25 April 2017 / Hour 2, Block B: Stephen F. Cohen, NYU & Princeton professor Emeritus; American Committee for East-West Accord; in re:  
 (2 of 4)
Tuesday  25 April 2017 / Hour 2, Block C: Stephen F. Cohen, NYU & Princeton professor Emeritus; American Committee for East-West Accord (3 of 4)
Tuesday  25 April 2017 / Hour 2, Block D: Stephen F. Cohen, NYU & Princeton professor Emeritus; American Committee for East-West Accord (4 of 4)
 
Hour Three
Tuesday  25 April 2017/ Hour 3, Block A:  Gregory Copley, Defene & Foreign Affairs.  
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Live Fire Exercise Duelling in North Korea.
 
HONG KONG — North Korea staged huge artillery drills on Tuesday to mark the 85th anniversary of the founding of the nation’s military, as China pressed its efforts to tamp down tensions over signs that Pyongyang was preparing for a nuclear test.
The long-range artillery drills were conducted near Wonsan, along North Korea’s east coast, according to the South Korean military. They coincided with military maneuvers by the United States and its allies as well as the arrival of the U.S.S. Michigan, a submarine armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles, in the port city of Busan in South Korea.
The United States Navy described the arrival of the submarine as “routine,” but its presence reflected the heightened military readiness on both sides of the Korean Peninsula.
In addition to holding joint naval exercises in the Yellow Sea, the United States and South Korea have been staging military maneuvers in Pocheon, northeast of Seoul, demonstrating some of their latest weapons. A North Korean state newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, said last week that the joint maneuvers were taking the tense situation on the peninsula to the “verge of explosion.”…
 
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/25/world/asia/north-korea-military-anniversary-artillery-drills.html
 
Boeing Selling B737 MAX to an IRGC Veteran, & What is to be done? @eottolenghi @FollowFDD
 
Boeing announced last month it would sell 30 B737 Max aircraft to Aseman Airlines –Iran’s third-largest carrier – in a deal valued at around $3 billion. The deal appears to be permitted under the 2015 nuclear agreement, which lifted U.S. sanctions against the Islamic Republic’s aviation sector. There is, however, a problem: Aseman’s CEO, Hossein Alaei, is a decades-long senior member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, which remains under U.S. sanctions.
Since 1979, Alaei has held senior positions in the IRGC’s military establishment. He joined the Guard shortly after the 1979 Iranian revolution and quickly rose to be commander of IRGC forces in two northwestern provinces. In the 1980s, he commanded the Karbala Garrison in the southern front during the Iran-Iraq War. In 1985, then-Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini appointed him commander of the newly established IRGC Navy. Under his leadership, it began using high-speed boats and mines to target commercial and military vessels during the so-called Tanker War with Iraq.
Like his ideological peers, Alaei openly voiced his desire to confront America. In 1987, during the Tanker War, he warned of having “drawn up plans to utilize all our military capability to destroy the U.S. fleet and solve the Persian Gulf issue once and forever.” It did not quite turn out that way, but not for want of trying. Under his command, the IRGC Navy targeted U.S.-owned commercial vessels and Navy vessels, on one occasion injuring U.S. sailors.
Direct confrontation with the U.S. proved costly for Iran, but Alaei nevertheless rose higher still. After the war, he became chairman of the IRGC’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Guard’s third-highest position at the time. In the 1990s and early 2000s, he was deputy minister at the U.S.-sanctioned Ministry of Defense.
- See more at: http://www.defenddemocracy.org/media-hit/emanuele-ottolenghi-ceo-of-iran...
 
Sally Yates and the Russia Investigation Star Power. @ThadMcCotter
 
“Former acting attorney general Sally Yates is scheduled to appear at a congressional hearing next month on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a Senate committee announced Tuesday.
Yates is to appear May 8 along with James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, at an open hearing of the crime and terrorism subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
It will mark her first appearance on Capitol Hill since she was fired in late January after refusing to defend President Donald Trump's travel ban. She had been scheduled to testify weeks ago before the House intelligence committee, but that hearing was canceled and has yet to be rescheduled.
At this point, the Senate Judiciary hearing will be the first opportunity for the public to hear Yates' account of her role in the firing of Trump's first national security adviser, Michael Flynn. That subcommittee is conducting an investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 election. The House and Senate intelligence committees are conducting investigations as well.
Yates alerted the White House in January that Flynn had been misleading in his account of a December phone call with the Russian ambassador to the United States in which economic sanctions against Russia were discussed. Flynn was ousted after those discrepancies were made public.
The White House said last month that it had never tried to prevent Yates from testifying. The assertion followed the publication of a series of letters in which her attorney pushed back against what he suggested was Justice Department guidance on what Yates could say about conversations she had with the White House….”
 
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/04/25/former-acting-attorney-genera...
Tuesday  25 April 2017/ 
 
Hour Four: Bob Zimmerman, BehindtheBlack.com
In its effort to provide legal protections to private companies attempting to do asteroid mining, it appears that the U.S.’s most recent space law directly contradicts the UN Outer Space Treaty.
The United States recently passed a law that contains an article that directly concerns asteroid mining and legalizes it. This law is the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act (CSLCA), which was signed into law by President Obama in 2015. The CSLCA addresses resource extraction in Article IV, and states, “A U.S. citizen engaged in commercial recovery of an asteroid resource or a space resource shall be entitled to any asteroid resource or space resource obtained, including to possess, own, transport, use, and sell it according to applicable law, including U.S. international obligations.”

The issue here is that US law is in opposition to a UN treaty, to which the US is a signatory. The Outer Space Treaty is one of the oldest and most important agreements in the history of international space policy. Under the Outer Space Treaty, asteroid mining is illegal, since it is an appropriation of a celestial body by a State. Since the human being or organization that is doing the resource extraction is under the purview of some State, that State is responsible for the actions that are done by the nationals or organizations that are doing the mining.

This responsibility was given to the State by the sixth article of the OST and is strengthened by the Liability Convention of 1972. Since the State is responsible and liable for the actions done by their nationals, this means that the State could be interpreted as appropriating the asteroid.
I am surprised and encouraged to see two different articles about the problems of the Outer Space Treaty appear in the press less than a week after my op-ed on the very subject. I am sure there is no connection, other than the subject is increasingly topical, and others are recognizing the same things I am. Still, that these stories are appearing suggests that the chances are increasing that something will finally be done to either change or abandon the treaty.
 
http://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/u-s-spa...