Photo, left: 1956 Chevrolet Pickup 1/4 Mile Drag Racing Timeslip Specs 0-60.
 
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
 
Co-host: Larry Kudlow, CNBC senior advisor; & Cumulus Media radio
Hour One
Tuesday  26 May 2015  / Hour 1, Block A: James Pethokoukis, AEI, in re: LK: Yellin has the right procedure for the wrong reason.  JP:  No recession, but weak growth and very low interest rates for a long time. Larry, you live in the corridors of power in Manhattan; I live in the country and have seen an injured snail. LK: History – the 1950s - repeating itself economically. Inverted yield curve, plunging oil prices. JP  Economy permanently re-setting? It's not as though we have some perfect policy mix; rather, we're doing little properly and this is not where we need to be.  Food stamps and Obamacare.   
Sat May 26 1956: Third-best year expected by GM, says Harlow Curtis, pres of General Motors. 
Tuesday  26 May 2015  / Hour 1, Block B: James Pethokoukis, AEI, in re: Lack of start-ups, fear of spending income on gas; student loan issue; you see the fear in people just not starting families. Regulation, taxes, ever more govt licenses – you can get away with a lot if growth is at 4%, but not at 2%.  Risk-aversion. The amount of paperwork to start an LLC. It's almost impossible even to start a beauty salon. . . .  The GOP must start to talk about helping small, new, and other businesses – not big corporations; and reverse the current anti-business atmosphere.
Inside OMB:  OIRA – Ofc of Info & Regulatory Affairs: one of the most powerful govt agencies – could immediately roll back any number of regulations and tons of paperwork.
Tuesday  26 May 2015  / Hour 1, Block C: Seth Lipsky, New York Sun, & author, The Floating Kilogram, in re:  The dollar went from 1/256th of an ounce of gold under Bush to 1/1,800th of an ounce of gold under the current Administration. Were the dollar linked to gold, what would be different:  . . .  The dollar was strengthening under Reagan; this problem began to manifest in the middle of the G W Bush presidency – gold plunged; had we made adjustments then, we might not be in this predicament now.  The dollar fell about 40%. The collapse of he dollar almost neutered the tax cuts.  Now a bill in Congress to have a look at how the Federal Reserve is working. We're almost fifty years into fiat money – how's that been working out?  The power to do this belongs o Congress.  Suggested connection between the jobless number and the currency. Unemployment was 4.6%  from WWII to 1971, 'twas the era of Bretton Woods (dollar was 1/35th of an ounce of gold).  The U6 – unemployment – has never returned to that low. Personal bankruptcies rate; high inequality rate – these belong to Congress to sort out, to see if they’re related to fiat money.  To return to a fixed dollar:  could take a page from Steve Forbes, who wrote a good book on gold: If Congress announced it'd go back to a gold link – at the end of one year, wherever the gold price in the market gold is where we'd peg it.  In 1875 we restored the gold standard with the Specie Payment Resumption Act of January 14, 1875.  We can do it again. 
Tuesday  26 May 2015  / Hour 1, Block D: James Taranto, Wall Street Journal, in re:  Fifth Circuit  Court of Appeals (New Orleans) denied lifting the stay of the Obama immigration policy, which won’t take effect before the 2016 election. Decided purely on procedural grounds, will wok its way though courts.   Administration touted it as a major change in policy – but a lot of it is memos from DHS, nugatory.  Court said: this was a significant enough change that the DHS was obliged to have a notice and comment period – open it up to notice and comments, but by that time, there'll be another election First, WH will probably try to appeal this to the Supreme Court, but there's every incentive to let it play out politically.  Celebrating our Constitution:  The Executive proposed bypassing the Legislative; Judiciary said no.  LK: I wanted a pound of flesh regarding the Executive overreach. Even liberals like Jonathan Turley agreed.  JT: The Executive has a certain amount of [jurisdiction] in [some immigration] matters. LK:  Marco Rubio made a strong speech against same-sex marriage, "Armageddon for Christianity"  – this is catering and pandering to a specialized audience. 
Hour Two
Tuesday  26 May 2015  / 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:       (1 of 4)
http://news.yahoo.com/obama-says-russia-adopting-increasingly-aggressive...
http://www.newsweek.com/will-putin-gamble-all-broader-ukraine-invasion-335078
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9c7bcbf6-ffd5-11e4-bc30-00144feabdc0.html...
http://www.thenation.com/article/207689/neo-mccarthyism-and-us-media#
Tuesday  26 May 2015  / Hour 2, Block B: Stephen F. Cohen, NYU & Princeton professor Emeritus (2 of 4)
Tuesday  26 May 2015  / Hour 2, Block C: Stephen F. Cohen, NYU & Princeton professor Emeritus (3 of 4)
http://csis.org/files/attachments/150518_Russia_War_Games_Report.pdf
Tuesday  26 May 2015  / Hour 2, Block D: Stephen F. Cohen, NYU & Princeton professor Emeritus (4 of 4)
Hour Three
Tuesday  26 May 2015  / Hour 3, Block A: Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living (Icons) by Paul Collins (1 of 4)
Tuesday  26 May 2015  / Hour 3, Block B: Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living (Icons) by Paul Collins (2 of 4)
Tuesday  26 May 2015  / Hour 3, Block C: Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living (Icons) by Paul Collins (3 of 4)
Tuesday  26 May 2015  / Hour 3, Block D: Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living (Icons) by Paul Collins (4 of 4)
Hour Four
Tuesday  26 May 2015  / Hour 4, Block A:  Francis Rose, Federal News Radio, in re: DENVER (AP) -- Construction crews are returning to work at the veterans hospital outside Denver after a last-minute deal with congressional leaders avoided a shutdown of the half-finished project. But the really heavy lifting will be done 1,500 miles away in Washington. The U.S. Senate agreed Friday to raise the project's spending cap by $100 million, enough to continue work for three weeks. The House approved the measure Thursday. Congress and the Veterans Affairs Department still must find up to $830 million to finish the vastly over-budget hospital without taking services away from veterans elsewhere and possibly scale back the project. "Much hard work remains to be done," Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., said after the Senate acted.
The VA also must convince skeptical lawmakers that it's serious about punishing those responsible for the problems and making internal changes to avoid a repeat. "They've been offering us crumbs of reform," said Tyler Sandberg, a spokesman for Colorado Republican Rep. Mike Coffman. "We want the whole loaf." The hospital in suburban Aurora is expected to cost $1.73 billion, nearly three times the estimate the VA gave last year. The VA said Monday that it was nearing the $800 million spending cap Congress put on the project and work would have to stop next week if Congress didn't act. Contractor Kiewit-Turner said winding down the work and then cranking it up again would add up to $200 million to the cost.
Tuesday  26 May 2015  / Hour 4, Block B:  Robert Zimmerman, behindtheblack.com, in re: ISS reconfiguration moves forward  In anticipation of the arrival of privately-built manned capsules, NASA will continue the rearrangement of its modules on ISS on Wednesday.  NASA intends to televise the event, if you wish to watch.
Tuesday  26 May 2015  / Hour 4, Block C:  Michael Ledeen, FDD, in re: He can’t depersonalize it, not even for one sentence.  His world consists of whatever he’s got on his very own mind, and he expects us all to believe whatever that may be.  He does, and he’s the smartest guy in the room.  Just ask him. -- from Faster, Please!: http://pjmedia.com/michaelledeen
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/michaelledeen/2015/05/24/obama-the-jews-the-muslims-and-us/   [1] Eli Lake has pointed out: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-05-24/obama-cares-too-much-ab... [2] New York Sun:  http://www.nysun.com/editorials/legitimizing-anti-semitism/89167/w
Tuesday  26 May 2015  / Hour 4, Block D: Terry Anderson, PERC, in re: How taxing organic products could solve California's water problem