Photo, above: Egypt's anti-government protesters celebrate army's ultimatum. See: Hour 1, Block A, Sam Tadros of the Hudson Institute and author of Motherland Lost: The Egyptian and Coptic Quest for Modernity.

Egypt teeters on brink of overthrow, seven reported killed in clashes

JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW

Hour One

Tuesday  2 July   2013  / Hour 1, Block A:  Sam Tadros, Hudson Institute, Georgetown U, author of Motherland Lost, in re: Egyptian turmoil.  Proverb: "Egypt is the only nation in the ummah; all the rests are tribes." The military and the Muslim Brotherhood are the only real players now; protestors are disorganized; Salafis are watching from sidelines and split.  Morsi is the first elected president of Egypt; used "legitimacy" more than 40 times in his brief speech today.  "We have a process, we had an election, I've made mistakes, but the solution is not to give up on the democratic process,"  Morsi said.  By now, of course, it’s too late – the electorate no longer trusts him.  Nasser was thirty years old when he made his coup and had time on his side; Morsi is in his late fifties, is extremely ambitious, does not have Nasserite dynamics.  The 80 ml people of Egypt; the economy has collapsed, tourism dead, civil society broken down on streets – citizens and foreigners alike are accosted and stabbed.  Upper middle class sees that the MB is unwilling to accept real democracy; in the Delta, north of Cairo, approaches are more driven by ___ for Mubarak.  Coptic Christians: cheering for the military, which is not secular or favorably disposed toward Copts, but at least doesn’t denounce them.  Same time: accusations that the whole set of demos is driven by Copts!  Tonight, Cairenes are certainly at home, but not necessarily getting much sleep. Seeing final moments when players will put their cards on the table. Today Morsi's speech clarified a zero-sum game: either tanks roll in Cairo on Wednesday or Morsi will have won. 

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Egyptian joke of the day:  Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak tried to get rid of the Muslim Brotherhood. Only Morsi succeeded.

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Tuesday  2 July   2013  / Hour 1, Block B: LouAnn Hammond, Drivingthenation.com, in re: Auto sales maintain momentum, led by pickups    GM's sales rose a better-than-expected 6.5 percent in June. In addition to pickups, the Chevrolet Cruze small car was a big . . . 
Car Sales Hit Levels Not Seen Since 2007.   Will the US need more manufacturing plants in the US, or will they build in Mexico? For that matter, why's everyone producing in Mexico?

     Need trucks to build a new home. Correlate new home starts with sales of pick-ups.  Chevy Silverado and GMC.  Made in US, so US jobs here are secure. 

     Ford, Nissan set pace as June sales rise 9% on trucks, crossovers; SAAR surges past forecasts to 15.98 million.  Even the Fiat 500 EV is sold out! Nissan is doing well (except its Infinity; mgr used to be with Audi US, now is headquartered in HK). 

Tuesday  2 July   2013  / Hour 1, Block C: Larry Johnson, NoQuarter, in re: Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?  Edward Snowden?  He's irritated most everyone, now including the Russians. Has no passport, and a passport is inestimably precious.  A dozen countries have refused to give him sanctuary. Possible that Cuba will issue some diplomatic papers; countries favoring the US won’t allow overflight. He has four laptops (we're told), plus one or more thumbdrives. Does he sleep? Have they been purloined?  He's surrounded by Wikileaks staff.  That photo of him sure didn’t look like a transit area – graffiti on the wall behind him; and reading a German paper – if I were Russian intell, I’d get copies of all the digital data.  He now knows what it feels like to be a ping-pong ball in an intl table-tennis match. As for the quality of the data, might be not steak but spam.  There's no such thing as a friendly intelligence service.  US would like to avoid encouraging future dummies like this, and is interested  to know if it's sigint; or is important CIA data?

The plane carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales home from Russia was rerouted to Austria on Tuesday after France and Portugal refused to let it cross their airspace because of suspicions that NSA leaker Edward Snowden was on board, the country’s foreign minister said.  Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca denied that Snowden was on the plane, which landed in Vienna, and said France and Portugal would have to explain why they canceled authorization for the plane. “We don’t know who invented this lie. We want to denounce to the international community this injustice with the plane of President Evo Morales,” Choquehuanca said from Vienna, where the plane landed.  Morales had earlier met with Russian President Vladimir Putin at a summit of major gas exporters in the Kremlin.  In an interview with Russia Today television, Morales said . .

Tuesday  2 July   2013  / Hour 1, Block D:  Peter Berkowitz, Hoover, in re: Harvard is concerned enough to create a report on humanities: student have ceased studying them; decline over half a century. Half the students arriving at Harvard desiring to study humanities shift – this is a 50% attrition rate.  Cambridge conclusion: "Harvard needs to keep doing what it’s always done, only better."  PB disagrees, and JB calls it pompous. Curricula on narrow and abstruse subjects; no requirement that students gain some little knowledge of the classics of Western literature, philosophy, religions, arts.  Languages are almost totally neglected – "multiculturalism" proclaims that all cultures are equal.   Needs deans to become champions of liberty and fair process. Lots of classes in: history of gay gardening; in Stanford, none on history of the military. 

'The Heart of the Matter," the just-released report by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, deserves praise for affirming the importance of the humanities and social sciences to the prosperity and security of liberal democracy in America. Regrettably, however, the report's failure to address the true nature of the crisis facing liberal education may cause more harm than good.  In 2010, leading congressional Democrats and Republicans sent letters to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences asking that it identify actions that could be taken by "federal, state and local governments, universities, foundations, educators, individual benefactors and others" to "maintain national excellence in humanities and social scientific scholarship and education."  In response, the American Academy formed the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences, with Duke University President Richard Brodhead and retired Exelon CEO John Rowe as co-chairmen. Among the commission's 51 members are top-tier-university presidents, scholars, lawyers, judges, and business executives, as well as prominent figures from diplomacy, filmmaking, music and journalism.

Hour Two

Sad picture, below: Winnie the Pooh caught as he tries to leave Rabbit's house after stuffing himself with too much honey. See: Hour 2, Block A, Bliss Index report on truck in Golden Gate Bridge toll gate.

Tuesday  2 July   2013  / Hour 2, Block A: Jeff Casey Jones Bliss, The Bliss Index, in re: ‘This Is Why California Can’t Have Nice Things’  “Behold Caltrans, the state transportation agency in California that, despite having some $14 billion or so to spend every year, cannot manage to follow its own rules,” Kevin Williamson writes at the NRO Corner today. As Williamson writes, “California has been building a new eastern span for the Bay Bridge, a $6.4 billion project scheduled to open in about two months,” which, as Williamson writes, “California would like very much to ensure that the bridge does not fall down.” There’s just one problem…

Tuesday  2 July   2013  / Hour 2, Block B: David M Drucker, Washington Examiner Sr Congressional correspondent, in re: In a stunning development, the Obama administration announced on Tuesday it is going to delay the implementation of the employer mandate, a major aspect of President Obama’s health care law initially set to go into effect on Jan. 1, by a year.

In a blog post, the Treasury Department wrote that it has been in talks with businesses about the implications of the mandate and has decided to delay implementation to provide them with more time to adapt to the requirement. There are a number of major implications for politics and health policy stemming from this decision to delay the mandate until 2015.  To start, the purpose of imposing a $2,000 (or $3,000) penalty per worker on businesses with over 50 employees which did not offer acceptable health coverage was to discourage businesses from dropping coverage in response to the health care law and dumping their workers on new government-run exchanges. But absent that penalty, will more businesses now be motivated to drop their current coverage? Also, the delay is said to be one year, but if business lobbyists were successful in convincing the Obama administration to delay it for a year, will it actually ever go into effect? Congress routinely votes to delay scheduled cuts in physician payments under Medicare. Will this be . . .  [more]

Tuesday  2 July   2013  / Hour 2, Block C:  Robert Zimmerman, behindtheblack.com, in re:  A Russian Proton rocket went out of control and crashed mere seconds after launch today at Baikonur. It appears the rocket’s avionics had completely failed so that the engines could no longer control its flight. Obviously, that's speculation. What's clear is that the failure was not because of a problem with the rocket’s Briz-M upper stage, which has been the source of the five Proton failures during the past three years.

        This is very, very, very bad news for the Russian commercial rocket effort. They've been trying to recover from those earlier failures, and with the string of successes this year had appeared to doing so. Instead, they now have had their worst and most spectacular launch failure in decades, so spectacular it's reminiscent of the rocket failures of the 1950s. Worse, the failure is not because of the relatively new Briz-M upper stage, but lies in their well-established, decades-old first stage, indicating that there are some fundamental quality control problems in their manufacturing process that they have not fixed.  This cannot be good for their business, especially as they have some serious competition. Arianespace, though expensive, is very reliable. SpaceX, though new and essentially untried, is very competitive in price. So is Orbital Sciences.   Expect a lot of heads to roll.
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         The competition cools off! NASA’s Space Launch System, costing billions per year, will make its second manned flight only in 2025.   SLS is to make its maiden flight in 2017, when it will carry an empty Orion crew capsule to near-Moon space and back. Another flight would follow in 2021 and, depending on factors both technical and political, could see a crew of astronauts travel to a captured asteroid NASA wants to redirect to a high lunar orbit using a yet-to-be-built robotic spacecraft.  Notionally, SLS would next fly in 2025, giving the rocket a launch rate of once every four years. NASA has been spending about $1.8 billion a year on SLS development, including construction of a rocket test stand in Mississippi, and associated launch infrastructure at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Add in the cost of the rocket’s companion crew capsule, the Lockheed Martin-built Orion, and the tab rises to nearly $3 billion a year.

At that launch rate, NASA’s space effort is slower than China’s, which has a pace that considered tortoise-like. But don’t worry, buckos! NASA will be keeping the seats warm in its thousands of government facilities, employing thousands of government workers doing little or nothing.

      Third Anniversary This past weekend, Behind the Black celebrated its third anniversary. I did it by posting very little, as the news in space, to my mind, has been very quiet, while the news in politics and culture has been very depressing, something I am growing tired of reading. If you've liked what I've written and posted these past three years, then please consider contributing to the website. The tip jar is in the right column, near the bottom.   Also might want to consider reading the new ebook edition of my first book, Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8. It tells the story of one of our country’s grandest achievements, and how that triumph ironically ended up teaching an entire generation all the wrong lessons.

Tuesday  2 July   2013  / Hour 2, Block D: David Hawkings, Roll Call,  in re: How the Student Loan Impasse Went From Bad to ‘So What?’ Next Tuesday has already been established as a critical date in the House, because it’s when Republicans will meet to decide their next move in the immigration debate. But July 10 also looms as a big day in the Senate, because that’s when a pair of roll calls will decide whether the student loan impasse will be broken before it becomes a potentially expensive hassle for millions. It’s much more difficult than usual to predict the ultimate outcome, given the unusual legislative dynamics behind the standoff. The normally united caucus of Democratic senators has split over what to do next, while the Republicans are sounding [more]

Hour Three

Tuesday  2 July   2013  / Hour 3, Block A: Stephen Cohen, NYU, in re: Snowden withdraws Russian asylum bid after Putin says he must 'stop harming' US – Dateline: Moscow - NSA leaker Edward Snowden withdrew a request for political asylum in Russia after President Vladimir Putin said he should stop. 
Devilishly Clever, That Putin Fellow
 

Putin Toys with Obama as Syria Burns and Snowden Runs Free. (Putin: "Like shearing a pig – a lot of squealing and not much wool.")  Putin's foreign policy is not anti-American, it’s non-American. The core is nonintervention in the affairs of other nations; he sees the US intervening in Iraq, Iran, Libya, Afghanistan.  Putin says to Snowden, "If you want to stay here, OK; but if you stay here, you may not release American secrets because the US is our partner.  However, Snowden thinks he's a human rights activist, will not stay, and should move on as soon as possible." Putin is so briefed and ready to go on every subject that he makes Clinton, called a policy wonk, look like a college sophomore. Hillary Clinton said of Putin, "He has no soul"; to which he replied, "At least I have a brain."  Both Russia and the US shared one notion on Syria: preferring that it stay a unitary state (and disagreeing on almost all other related matters). Into this parachutes Snowden.

 

Photo: right: Vladimir Putin rides the asteroid into Russia.  See: Hour 3, Blocks A & B: Stephen Cohen, NYU.

Tuesday  2 July   2013  / Hour 3, Block B: Stephen Cohen, NYU, in re: Russian O&G supply diminished; Russia turns eastward toward China.   Us spying on Europe? Merkel's chief aid exclaims, "What are they thinking? The Cold War is over!"  Magnitsky Bill has dropped from US-Russia discourse.  Europe may increasingly see Russia as a useful buffer to US power.  Russia's accelerated movement toward China in the last year causes one to think that equibalanced relations between East and West are good.  Egypt: regime change, instability, confirm Russia's view that the so-called Arab Spring is not about democracy.  Putin's enemies in Moscow want zero cooperation with the US; in Washington, McCain's position is the same vis-à-vis Russia. Only strong leadership can protect us from that and I haven’t seen [satisfactory] leadership from Obama. 

 

Tuesday  2 July   2013  / Hour 3, Block C: Sebastian Gorka, FDD, in re:  Obama to Egypt's Morsi: 'Democracy is about more than elections'

Tuesday  2 July   2013  / Hour 3, Block D: Michael McDonald, Bloomberg, in re:  School (not student) debt. Cornell, Awash in Debt, Chases Donors in ‘Pay-as-You-Go’ Expansion – A legacy of rapid expansion across academia has left universities overburdened from borrowing. Cornell, even with a $5 billion endowment, is saddled with $1.9 billion in debt. With endowment returns unpredictable, tuition revenue flat and public support retreating, colleges are setting higher bars for fundraising to meet the pressure for growth. [more]

Hour Four

Tuesday  2 July   2013  / Hour 4, Block A:  Eric Trager, Washington Institute, in re: Egypt teeters on brink of overthrow, seven reported killed in clashes   Egypt teetered on the brink of overthrow late Tuesday after a defiant Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi rejected an ultimatum issued by the ...

Photo, below: Eleanor Roosevelt, seated at a 50-A microphone at radio station WOL, Washington, D.C.,
presenting a “My People” program, devoted to African Americans. See: Hour 4, Blocks C & D, New York City Radio (Images of America [Arcadia Publishing]) by Alec Cumming and Peter Kanze

Tuesday  2 July   2013  / Hour 4, Block B: Michael J de la Merced, NYT, in re: Merger Activity Was Down but Not Out in First Half  Despite a strong start that yielded four blockbuster transactions in one week, the first half of 2013 was the slowest first six months for mergers in four years.

Tuesday  2 July   2013  / Hour 4, Block C: New York City Radio (Images of America [Arcadia Publishing]) by Alec Cumming and Peter Kanze (1 of 2)

Tuesday  2 July   2013  / Hour 4, Block D: New York City Radio (Images of America [Arcadia Publishing]) by Alec Cumming and Peter Kanze  (2 of 2)

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Music

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