Image, left: Notion of a military safe zone in southern Syria next to Jordanian border; maybe ten by twenty miles; security to be provided by “moderate” Syrian rebels. 
“A Safe Zone in Southern Syria”  http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/a-safe-zone-in-s...
 
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Co-host: Larry Kudlow, CNBC senior advisor; & Cumulus Media radio
 
Hour One
Tuesday  25 October 2016   / Hour 1, Block A:  Brett Arends, MarketWatch.com, in re:  Republicans decide to allot $25 million to six Senate races. . . .  It’ll be gobbled up by ground game, which is a good thing.  If Hillary wins, 50/50 in the Senate is broken by the vice-president. The House is the ultimate firewall; it may lose a few seats, and the Senate is too close to call.
Presenting the AT&T proposed TW purchase at this time in the middle of a contentious election is bone-headed beyond belief.  As Holman Jenkins said, “The ultimate ___-seeking.”  What’s attractive is the combination of wireless and cable broadband; may have a natl broadband carrier. Holman again: AT&T database has 90 million consumer names.  Who should be opposing this are AT&T stockholders! Not a horizontal merger, it's vertical, but it's not good for stockholders.  Up to their eyebrows in management buzzwords and jargon – but no solid reason given for this purchase.  K Street may extract more fees out of this than even the investment bankers. Why would TW be worth more than . . . “It’ll be on mobile” – you can do that anyway.  A natl wireless broadband offering consumers all these things . . .  Both stocks are down although TW went somewhat up and now is falling.  I can watch Game of Thrones on a mobile network, HBO or SlingTV. If you sign your iPad on AT&T rather than Sprint, “you’ll get it cheaper.”  I doubt it. 
AT&T and Time Warner deal: Everything you need to know  AT&T and Time Warner deal: Everything you need to know. The telecom companies’ CEOs make the case for the merger as investors and politicians balk.
Tuesday  25 October 2016   / Hour 1, Block B:  Brett Arends, MarketWatch.com, in re: Will Goldman bankers or stock prosper under Clinton?  If she’s elected, she’ll poach talent from Goldman and other Wall Street shops. I re-read her speeches and realized how she cannot get out of her own way; in private she said nothing remarkable and in fact was engaging.   . . . In London in the Nineties, Tony Blair poached [investment bankers].  The fact that people are talking abut her [expensive] speeches shows how difficult it’ll be for Goldman, Eliz Warren: a wet blanket, a bulldog, an ankle-biter supreme.  Sanders and Warren will make it heard to hire [Wall Streeters].  She’s an effective oratorical trouble-maker. Banks probably prefer Clinton, since they know what they'll get, unlike with Trump.   The left of the Democratic Party holds the cards.
How did Hillary Clinton ‘lose’ $6 billion at the State Department?  How did Hillary Clinton ‘lose’ $6 billion at the State Department? Donald Trump didn’t get the story right.  Alas, the audit says only that State Department contracts worth about $6 billion were missing some paperwork (and that is out of a total budget over the same period of $200 billion).
10 things the Goldman Sachs tapes reveal about Hillary Clinton  She spoke more freely in those small, elite gatherings than she typically does on the stump.
Tuesday  25 October 2016   / Hour 1, Block C:  Joe Rago, WSJ, in re:  Paul Ryan on a killer travel schedule, with visits everywhere, dozens of speeches a week.  Gruelling, and exactly what he intially said he’d prefer not to do.    GOP so divided that it’s managed to coalesce around six proposed reforms.  30-30-30: districts pro-, anti- or wavering Trump.  . . .  Possibility of a deal on corporate tax reform?  Chuck Schumer said to be negotiating with Ryan on a deal whereby there’d be repatriation of overseas cash of American companies – dunno rates – to try to bring a couple trillion back home, then there might be  . .  . Schumer couldn't sell it to the left flank, incl Sanders and Warren , who said, “Not now,”  Senate GOP not happy with it and got hung up on rate: GOP wanted high single digits while Dems wanted it much higher.  . . .  Awfully hard to work out details.  I was at a WSJ financial conference; Barney Frank said, “Paul Ryan will be the first House Speaker to run for president.” (John Nance Garner?)  Therefore, he’ll be more amenable to making deals and we might be surprised.  That’s about forty “ifs” in a sentence . . .  He has small children and probably does not want to run, but in an existential crisis of the GOP, he might.   . . . Plausible to think of losing House seats?  Anything above that would be a wipe-out wave.   http://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-paul-ryans-congress-rescue-mission-1477090636?mod=djemMER ; http://thehill.com/news/house/302576-rep-meadows-to-run-for-freedom-cauc...
Tuesday  25 October 2016   / Hour 1, Block D:  Larry Kudlow, in re: Trump: the closing argument on the economy and regulation (Obamacare).  . . . A lot of stuff in Trump’s Gettysburg speech were pretty good.  Reagan winnowed his platform down to four major points, We also went to look at Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address – maybe one of the top five in any language: “We must preserve the Union, and thus the American democracy experiment, so these youth are not dying in vain; and we must free the slaves.” He did that in 272 words in just over two minutes.
Trump’s word count was over the 1,000. Really too bad.  He never had a good comms operation or stable of good speechwriters.  I submitted names that never were acted on.  . . . Mrs Clinton will push the Brady plan. Healthcare needs to be rewritten; regs, NLRB – so much has to go. Entitlement reform is trickier.
 
Hour Two
Tuesday  25 October 2016   / Hour 2, Block A: Chris Harmer, Institute for the Study of War, in re:  The battle for Mosul: Iraqi forces supplemented by Shia militia and Iranian Guards Corps and probably also US air power. City of one to two million people.  War crimes, mass murder, horror within the city, people herded into areas to be use as human shields as Iraqi force move slowly, not in a hurry.
Fascinating to see how ISIS runs the end of its control in Mosul; incapable of governance, local rebellions had begun. ISIS has tunnels, IEDs, 5-8K fighters in Mosul, are prepared to fight to the death, so Iraqis have left a big escape route to the West rather than fight to the death, themselves. In 1915, when the Turks showed up the Bedouin fled, and vice versa.  
The US wants ISIS destroyed­–they don’t negotiate or ever learn new ways; but Iraqis just want ’em out of Iraq. Choose manoeuver over fighting.  Move them into eastern Syria, leave behind a few suicide bombers.   Pesh merga found tunnels, living underground, a beehive of cutthroats left behind, like Japanese in the eastern Pacific late in the war; these sometimes launched suicide attacks as late as a year after the end of he war. Here, however, Mosul residents will turn on them; Iraqis will pour barrels of gas down there and light them.
Over the winter, the Mosul populace ill starve; the West won’t allow that to occur; ISIS wants them all to starve to death, as many civilian deaths as possible also as a warning to future population victims.
ISIS atrocities in Mosul.  Isis commits atrocities around Mosul in bid to quell uprising, UN says  Islamic State has seized and murdered dozens of people in areas around Mosul that it still controls in an apparent bid to quell opposition and . . . Mosul battle: UN receives reports of IS atrocities
Tuesday  25 October 2016   / Hour 2, Block B:  Chris Harmer, Institute for the Study of War, in re: Russian flotilla in the  Eastern Med: massive number of surface ships; biggest Russian naval deployment since he Cold Ward. The air wing is small compared to US; a strategic message unit: Russia is there to win it, till the finish. Cruise missiles into Aleppo.  Want to finish by the end of inter – a stretch, but that’s what Russia intends. Adm Kuznetsov: 36 combat aircraft  a heavy cruiser w aviation capacity. A US aircraft carrier houses aircraft, has little defense capacity; but Adm Kuznetsov is ready to put surface-to-surface missiles out plus some aircraft (and the pilots aren't trained enough).  Assad has been killing civilians: if he kills off the moderate rebels and depopulate the civilians, then the only remaining possibility for governing is ISIS, and he knows the West won’t support that. Assad and Russia violate the laws of armed conflict daily.
If the US establishes safe zone, on the border between Syria and Turkey, and border betw Syria and Jordan – an admission that we’ll let Russia continue to flatten Aleppo. 
Predictable.  As soon as ISIS can no longer function as a governing entity, it will revert to its core nature as a terrorist organization.  As long as it has responsibilities of governance, it’s somewhat limited in what it can do in overseas attacks.  Once it’s relieved of the responsibilities of governance, it will be free to conduct overseas attacks.  http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/defense/302708-after-the-fight-for-mosul-expect-isis-to-take-the-war-to-us-soil
Tuesday  25 October 2016   / Hour 2, Block C:  Robert Zimmerman, BehindtheBlack.com in re:  Hot Jupiter Exoplanets (1 of 2)
Tuesday  25 October 2016   / Hour 2, Block D:  Robert Zimmerman, BehindtheBlack.com in re:  Hot Jupiter Exoplanets (2 of 2)
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Interjection: “Searching for Planet Nine.”  “…Not to be deterred, Planet Nine enthusiasts can now invoke two more lines of evidence. As they spin around the sun, the known planets, asteroids, and most TNOs stay in roughly the same plane, known as the ecliptic. But this year yielded some striking exceptions. One new object, known as 2016 NM56, has an orbit tilted so far out of the ecliptic that it essentially orbits backward. Another has a near-perpendicular orbit relative to the ecliptic. In a talk at the meeting, Batygin showed how Planet Nine might create these wonky trajectories. Through what’s known as the Kozai mechanism, a massive object can induce a gravitational ratcheting effect that slowly changes the inclination of smaller worlds and “leads their orbits to flip upside-down,” he says.
Batygin and Brown’s proposed orbit for Planet Nine is itself rather slanted, poking out about 30° relative to the ecliptic. Their graduate student, Elizabeth Bailey, showed how the tilted orbit could potentially explain a curious feature of the sun: Rather than being pointed perpendicular to the ecliptic, its north pole is off by about 6°. Researchers have tried to explain the anomaly, discovered in the 19th century, by invoking interactions between the early sun’s magnetic field and the disk of gas and dust that gave rise to the solar system. Bailey’s simulations showed instead that, over the course of the solar system’s history, the lopsided orbit of Planet Nine would have exerted a gravitational force on the sun that could have pushed it almost exactly 6° to one side. Astronomer Rodney Gomes of the National Observatory of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro and his collaborators independently came up with the same idea in July…” http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/10/objects-beyond-neptune-provide-fresh-evidence-planet-nine
 
Hour Three
Tuesday  25 October 2016   / Hour 3, Block A:   Salena Zito, New York Post,  in re: Pennsylvania politics & millennial vote.
Tuesday  25 October 2016   / Hour 3, Block B:   Michael Tomasky, @THEDAILYBEAST, in re: Democrats.
Tuesday  25 October 2016   / Hour 3, Block C:  Professor Michele Acuto, University College London, in re:   “In October, the United Nations will launch its New Urban Agenda at the Habitat III conference on housing and sustainable urban development in Quito, Ecuador. This declaration aims to harness the power of cities as engines of sustainable development. Yet the road to Quito is uphill: cities are integrated poorly into multilateral diplomacy, and limits to their powers and budgets threaten their effectiveness as global change-makers." (1 of 2)  http://www.nature.com/news/give-cities-a-seat-at-the-top-table-1.20668 ...
Professor Michele Acuto, director of the UCL City Leadership Initiative and professor of diplomacy and urban theory at University College London, UK.  
Tuesday  25 October 2016   / Hour 3, Block D:  Professor Michele Acuto, University College London (2 of 2)
 
Hour Four
Tuesday  25 October 2016   / Hour 4, Block A:  Robert Zimmerman, BehindtheBlack.com, in re:   Crash Landing Mars. Software Failure Indicated Schiaparelli. Muskspeak.  Schiaparelli failure focuses in on altimeter data
The investigation into the landing failure last week of the ExoMars 2016 lander, Schiaparelli, is now focusing on a failure in the spacecraft’s altitude software. The most likely culprit is a flaw in the craft’s software or a problem in merging the data coming from different sensors, which may have led the craft to believe it was lower in altitude than it really was, says Andrea Accomazzo, ESA’s head of solar and planetary missions. Accomazzo says that this is a hunch; he is reluctant to diagnose the fault before a full post-mortem has been carried out. But if he is right, that is both bad and good news.
European-designed computing, software and sensors are among the elements of the lander that are to be reused on the ExoMars 2020 landing system, which, unlike Schiaparelli, will involve a mixture of European and Russian technology. But software glitches should be easier to fix than a fundamental problem with the landing hardware, which ESA scientists say seems to have passed its test with flying colours. “If we have a serious technological issue, then it’s different, then we have to re-evaluate carefully. But I don’t expect it to be the case,” says Accomazzo. (1 of 4) http://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/schiapa...
Tuesday  25 October 2016   / Hour 4, Block B:  Robert Zimmerman, BehindtheBlack.com (2 of 4)
Tuesday  25 October 2016   / Hour 4, Block C:  Robert Zimmerman, BehindtheBlack.com (3 of 4)
Tuesday  25 October 2016   / Hour 4, Block D:  Robert Zimmerman, BehindtheBlack.com (4 of 4)
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