Yesterday Obama ordered the Department of Homeland Security to come up with some BS cover for him to not enforce immigration laws. Today Chuck Schumer tells Republicans give in because you can't beat a lawless tyrant bent on the destruction of the rule of law.

It's crystal clear where the issue of immigration reform is headed, and Republicans have only two choices to make. They can either help pass comprehensive reform which will greatly reduce the flow of illegal immigrants, grow our economy by bringing in needed workers in high tech and agriculture areas, and provide a hard-earned path to eventual citizenship for the 11 million in the shadows, or they can sit idly by and watch the President greatly curtail deportations while 11 million continue to live in limbo here in America. The choice is clear; a reform bill has the support of liberals, moderates, and conservatives and all we need is the courage of the Republican leadership to make the right and obvious choice.

Even if you're on Team Amnesty are you really willing to be blackmailed by Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer?

Shouldn't McCain, Rubio, Boehner and the rest make a stand for the Constitution and insist they won't support any deals with a President who refuses to recognize any check on what he can do?

Instead of passing meaningless bills, Boehner needs to make it clear there will be a price to pay if Obama continues to flaunt the laws. If the GOP won't stand up for the rule of law, what exactly is their purpose?

Posted by: DrewM at 09:05 AM | Comments (292)
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This has stopped being a morbid curiosity and become something more menacing.

Two sources said an unidentified aircraft that investigators believe was Flight MH370 was following a route between navigational waypoints - indicating it was being flown by someone with aviation training - when it was last plotted on military radar off the country's northwest coast.

...

A third source familiar with the investigation said inquiries were focusing increasingly on the theory that someone who knew how to fly a plane deliberately diverted the flight...

The Andsmans are a chain of hundreds of islands off the coast of India. Most are uninhabited.

India has announced a reconnaissance of the islands.

Indian officials have begun searching hundreds of uninhabited islands in the Andaman Sea using heat-seeking devices in the search for the Malaysia Airlines flight that disappeared six days ago.

...

The archipelago, which stretches south of Burma, contains 572 islands across an area of 52 x 720km. Only 37 are inhabited, with the rest covered in dense forests.

It has been assumed (I think) that the plane had to land at an airport, either a functioning one or abandoned one, but if one is on an uninhabited island with some logging machines and a bulldozer, couldn't a group make their own dirt-strip landing area?

More at Hot Air, including a report from ABCNews that Flight 370's two communication systems were shut off separately, suggesting, again, that this was done by human action.

Many people are probably fearing the worst. Allah notes that one general was willing to Go There.

Gen. Tom McInerney casually wondered this morning on Fox News whether maybe jihadis targeted the plane because they need a delivery mechanism for, er, a nuclear weapon.

Something horrible like this would explain why there has been no terrorist chatter about the event (assuming it actually is terrorism). You don't talk about Act I until you've accomplished Act II.

Speculations: If one or more pilots intended suicide, they just would have crashed the plane, not flown it for hours more.

If it were a hijacking with an intended 9/11-style crash into a nearby city (like New Dehli or Bombay), presumably they would have just done that (assuming they had the fuel to reach those places, which I provisionally assume they would have).

However, if the intended target city was in America, presumably hijackers would have to fuel up the plane. I think planes are not loaded with excess fuel, only enough to reach their destination and a quantity of reserve fuel. So a plane bound for China would not have the fuel to reach North America.

I doubt the tanks could even hold so much fuel, but I don't know. This is pure speculation of the worst kind -- uninformed speculation.

If a 9/11-style attack on the American mainland is intended, it could be that the plane had to be landed in order to retrofit the passenger cabin with additional fuel tanks (and these of course would need to be connected to the main tanks, which would take time and tools and expertise).

Given what we uninformed people are now learning about radar and satellite coverage, it seems as if a plane can fly over thousands of miles of ocean without fear of being detected at all. It would only be when a plane comes within several hundred miles (or so) of a well-radared country that it would even be detected.

Which would give American airspace control only a half hour or hour to make a decision about passenger plane flying without transponders and without a flight plan.

Even worse, terrorists could keep most of the passengers alive and pack them aboard the plane -- thus giving the US the choice of killing over one hundred Chinese nationals or letting a plane crash into a US city.

Obviously we'd shoot it down. But maybe live Chinese passengers, killed by US jet pilots, is their Plan B, in case of a shoot-down.

Commenter Objections: Several commenters make the point that while a dirt-strip runway could be used, in a pinch, for a landing, it couldn't be used for a subsequent take-off. A heavy plane will sink, they say, into the dirt on anything other than tarmac or some other engineered surface.

I still don't think this rules out my Uninformed Speculation.

The fact is, the US military builds airports pretty quickly.

But Drew says:

A triple 7 weighs 600,000 pounds empty. On a dirt strip? Even paved you have to have a runway several feet thick. It's not like putting down 2 inches for a side road.

Again, you're ignoring what it takes to land a commercial jet and the amount of technology that pilots use to backup their approach.

Also, the plane took off at midnight local and flew for *west* for 6 or 7 hours total. It would still be dark by the time they got to these islands.

You have a great movie script but not one based on actually landing one of the largest commercial aircraft out there.

Posted by: Ace at 07:53 AM | Comments (704)
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Cobloggers CAC and Ben K. join Ace and Drew to discuss various election-related topics and the perennial fan favorite Obamacare.

Intro/Outro: Adam Ant - Desperate But Not Serious / Space - Female of the Species

In ChillGroove^® Infotainment Format.

Questions & comments here: Ask the Blog

Listen: [Stitcher] | [MP3 Download] | Subscribe: [RSS] | [iTunes]

Follow on Twitter:
AoSHQ Podcast (@AoSHQPodcast)
Ace (@AceofSpadesHQ)
Drew M. (@DrewMTips)
Gabriel Malor (@GabrielMalor)
John E. (@JohnEkdahl)
Andy (@TheH2 and @AndyM1911)

Open thread in the comments.

Posted by: andy at 12:10 PM | Comments (219)
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FRIDAY, WOOOO!

I missed this one while I was gone: "McConnell was the Ted Cruz of campaign finance laws."

On Obamacare: "They have a lot more information than they're letting on," one industry source said of the Obama administration.

Et tu, NYTimes? "The defeat was devastating at a time when Democrats are desperate to change the prevailing story line that 2014 could cost them the Senate, with the House already out of reach."

I did happen to see some of this insane story on Twitter yesterday. The short version: (1) Pro-abortion activists chanted "Hail Satan" at a protest. (2) Sen. Cruz tells the Susan B. Anthony List gala that pro-abortion activists chanted "Hail Satan" at a protest. (3) AP's hack reporter Philip Elliott reports that Sen. Cruz called abortion supporters "Satan worshipers." What a douchebag. AP grudgingly issued a correction by early evening, although the correction isn't much better than the original misleading piece.

The podcast will be up later. more...

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:48 AM | Comments (228)
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Big Ole Link Dump that is.

The Fundamental Value of the Ukraine Crisis

Here CDR Salamander lists some of the hard truths learned/relearned thus far from the Ukraine crisis.

You don't know the future: Do not think that just because you want history to leave you alone, that it will. Just because you want to be most concerned about the Pacific and Indian Ocean AOR - that doesn't mean history will let you. We need to be very careful following people who are so convinced about their ability to see the future. They can't. I can't. You can't. All you can do is maintain intellectual and operational flexibility against other nations' abilities, not their intention. Hedge, hedge, hedge.

Weakness invites aggression: Russia saw an opening to take what they have wanted since the fall of the Soviet Union; the Crimea. Ethnically and from a historical perspective, they have a leg to stand on. All they needed was for the time to be ripe. Kiev in chaos, NATO weak and thin, and the USA led by the C-team. Thinking like a Russian, I can't say I blame them. There were a few territorial loose ends from the breakup of the Soviet Union that they want to clean up. That leads to the next point ....

Hmmm: Mummified Michigan Woman Dead Since 2008 Managed to Vote in 2010 Election

Mummified remains were discovered in the Pontiac home belonging to 49-year-old Pia Farrenkopf last week, when a contractor was dispatched to the property when it went into foreclosure.

The remains found in the backseat of a jeep parked in the home's garage have not been positively identified yet, but authorities believe the body belongs to Farrenkopf.

Adding more mystery to the gruesome discovery is the fact that Farrenkopf registered to vote in 2006 and even cast a vote in the 2010 elections, though authorities believe she died at some point in 2008.

The GOP really needs to step up its mostly-dead, dead-dead, and un-dead voter outreach programs.

What's Really Behind the Ban Bossy Movement

Think about what's coming up in the next year or two and you'll see why the movement is starting up now.

Also The Hidden Motive Driving Modern Politics by our own Zombie.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:43 PM | Comments (811)
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Not just any deal mind you. No it's the best kind of deal...a bi-partisan one.

Two leaders of the negotiations —Sens. Jack Reed, D-R.I., and Dean Heller, R-Nev. — said in a statement that the deal would be retroactive to Dec. 28, when the emergency benefits program expired.

"We're not at the finish line yet, but this is a bipartisan breakthrough," Reed said.

Heller expressed satisfaction that "Democrats and Republicans have come together on a proposal that will finally give Americans certainty about their unemployment benefits."

...

Lawmakers said the proposal was fully paid for, with the bulk of the money raised by extending some customs fees through 2024 and changing how some companies set aside money for pensions, in effect increasing their taxes. More federal revenue would be raised by letting some companies make earlier payments to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., which guarantees workers' pensions.

"Retroactive"? So people will be getting checks to cover the last 2/5 months? Ok.

And the deal is for 5 months so....we'll be back here in August doing it again. Just in time for the start of the campaign season and another round of "Republicans hate the unemployed".

Of course that's if the House passes this. And that's the rub. Because five idiot Republicans can't stay on script the House will now be pressured "to do something".

Prediction...after weeks of wrangling and MSM hits on the the House GOP for being big meanies, Boehner will bring this bill to the floor and let it pass with Democrats and a handful of liberal Repubicans.

Maybe we should just cut to the chase this time.

Here are the Republican sellouts.

5 GOP Senators on board with jobless benefits deal: Heller NV, Portman OH, Murkowski AK, Kirk IL & Collins ME

— Jamie Dupree (@jamiedupree) March 13, 2014

Ever notice the Democrats never have any problem finding Republicans who will sellout to help them? Even when the Democrats have 59 votes and the GOP is down to a rump caucus they can find a few turncoats. Hell, even when the GOP has a majority the Democrats can find allies across the aisle that will stymie the Republican message.

But yeah...go Team GOP. Yay! Or something.

Maybe if there were some evidence that endless unemployment benefits hurt people in the long run these idiots would do the right thing. If only. Oh wait.

Posted by: DrewM at 06:31 AM | Comments (308)
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• Looks Like Russia Is About To Carve Up Ukraine Even More
  
• Justice Department Blocking Probe
  
• Apparently More Crappy Advertising Campaigns Are Going To Save Obamacare
  
• Paglia: Put The Sex Back In Sex Ed
  
• Russia Massing Military Forces On Border With Ukraine
  
• Russian Airlines Divert Flights To Bypass Ukraine
  
• Ron Paul: Putin Has Law On His Side With Crimean Invasion
  
• The AP Story On Abortion Opponents Is Ridiculous
  
• The Republican Party Is Changing, Deal With It
  
• Are You Ready For Transgendered People In The Military?
  
• Harry Reid Takes Money From Companies Under Investigation For Bribery Law Violations
  
• CDC Warns That Gonorrhea Is On The Verge Of Being Untreatable
  
• Scott Brown Launching Exploratory Committee In NH
  
• The Country That Makes Saudi Arabia Look Good
  
• Hockey Fans Sue Arena Over Beer
  
• Hilarious: Pug Picks A Fight With A SWAT Team (video)
  

Follow this old man on twitter.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 04:36 AM | Comments (472)
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The bombshell from the WSJ is either right, right in the basics but wrong in the particulars (it wasn't the engines sending that data to a satellite, but an onboard system monitoring all systems), or just completely wrong, depending on who you ask.

I did good work today. I'm knocking off early.

Open Thread.

Oh: Maybe there should be some actual politics on a political blog.

So here's Chris Matthews saying the Senate is lost to Harry Reid.

And here's Harry Reid proving that old maxim from the Bible, "Wow, that old guy smells like ass and talks like stupid."

I think that's from Psalms.

A fuller explanation, from someone in or close to the CIA I think, for the current scandal alleging the CIA spied on Congress.

Via @rdbrewer4, somethin' cute:

Posted by: Ace at 01:56 PM | Comments (1117)
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As usual, Paul makes a sound point and then buries it in an avalanche of hyperideological crankery.

He's quite right that sections of nations ought to have the right to secede from the body of the nation. I'm not sold on this baseline assumption that randomly drawn borders from 1930 represent the best possible unit of self-governance.

I think the non-Allowite areas of Syria should be permitted to secede from Syria. I wish Iraq had simply been broken into pieces in 2004. (Although there are significant problems with doing so -- such as the Shi'ite areas having most of the oil and the Kurds the most of the rest, with very little in the Sunni-held areas.)

In a perfect world, I'd like to see a massive property exchange in Kashmir, so that Muslims can move (voluntarily) to areas closer to Pakistan and Hindus can move to an area closer to India; then partition it.

A lot of people are dying for a border some guy drew on a piece of paper 50 years ago, or dying for the right and privilege of having a political superiority over another Tribe of people.

So I don't object to Paul's basic point that a Crimean secession from Ukraine is somehow unthinkable.

What I object to is the rest of it, the denial of obvious facts as being ideologically inconvenient -- as regards the Russian invasion of Crimea, he says Russia has a treaty to maintain a naval base at Sevastapol, so, if I'm following this correctly, obviously they also have a right to send in tanks and APCs.

He also claims "we" are in there as well, that is, America and the EU. The fact that "we" did not bring our tanks and APCs seems to be a minor point that hardly merits a mention.

Paul has some points right, but then he buries those points in relentlessly anti-American "Empire" narrative no different at all from the same pap preached by Howard Zinn and Oliver Stone.

But you can be the judge.

Allah considers this all, as well as the possible impact on Rand Paul's candidacy.

So What's Going On Here? I'll ask since you didn't.

Most people would like to conceive themselves as idealists and do not like confessing to selfish impulses.

Now, much of isolation is predicated on a selfish impulse: Let them work it out themselves; we will not trade the lives of our boys to spare theirs.

This selfishness is... not a bad thing. It does make a great deal of sense to question, whenever America is going to undertake a military response, if the lives of the people we hope to save are equal in number and value to the lives we will be sacrificing in their favor.

How many foreign lives is one of our Boys worth? I'd say -- and you can say I'm selfish or I hate foreigners, but I'd just respond that I'm inclined to favor my own countrymen -- one of Our Boys is worth at least 100 foreign civilians, and probably more than that.

Now, I know those foreign civilians would see it differently -- but of course the foreign civilians are doing the same thing I am, valuing a life more highly based on its closeness and connection. An American is close and connected to me in a way an Iraqi frankly is not. I wish the Iraqis well, but of course I value American lives more.

So there is a selfishness here, or at least a self-interestedness, and this is also a subjective thing; I value American lives more because they are American. Period.

But people do not like admitting they are ever capable of being selfish or that they engage in subjective reasoning. They must always claim to be acting out of altruism, and engaging in purely objective reasoning.

So the real answer as to why we shouldn't go intervening everywhere around the world -- because we're selfish of our treasure and protective of those in the American Family -- isn't favored by those claiming to be Idealists.

And what do Idealists do, then, if the best explanation to justify their preferences doesn't seem elevated enough?

Well, what they do then is begin working to offer a different explanation, one that doesn't sound selfish or subjective.

And the explanation they wind up offering, most of the time, is that America is evil, American exercise of power is evil (and not merely misguided or a poor trade of American lives for foreign ones), and the evil done by foreign powers is either only as evil, or even less evil, than the evils worked by Americans.

Now they're speaking in terms of Idealism, not Selfishness: They, like interventionists, are crusading against evil.

It's just that that evil is principally located in the dark heart of the American Empire.

Rather than saying "I'm against going on crusades against dragons overseas," and acknowledge there are indeed evils afoot in the world which he will not support action against, the Idealist is still determined to go on crusades against an evil dragon himself: And that evil dragon is called the United States of America.

In this way many isolationists poison their movement and set people against it.

There is a great difference between two underlying theories for isolationism:

America is too good to put itself at risk for the benefit of the rest of the world

versus

The rest of the world is too good to be tainted by America.

Why people like Paul always have to come down to that second formulation escapes me.

Posted by: Ace at 01:02 PM | Comments (378)
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Interesting interview at the Federalist.

Some observations he makes:

“The left indicts anything that it cannot immediately identify as leftist as political,” Mamet said and insisted that his early plays for the stage and screen, including the aforementioned trio critics called “anti-capitalist”, were “apolitical.”

...

“The combative nature of human beings in relationships with each other and in the understanding of themselves is the essence of the tragic view,” Mamet said before continuing, “The marvelous thing about my discovery of conservative philosophy and economics is that it made sense with my previous experience in the world. It is saying that there are things beyond our understanding, but by observing them we might be able to deal with them. We can never completely do away with the final remainder of discomfort, mutual loathing, and self-doubt, because that is part of the human condition. Whatever we do, the price of failure will be chaos, but the price of success will also be chaos.”

Mamet sees a lot of problems in modern society's determination to take the competitive aspect -- animal spirits -- of life out of life, to denature it, to neuter it. (On this point he would probably have a great deal of agreement with dissident feminist Camille Paglia.)

It is the well-intentioned, but destructive attempt to assuage the fear of matriculation ["matriculation" is Mamet's term for the passage from adolescence to true adulthood -- ed.], and the lack of incentive to prove one’s worth, competence, and skill, that have created a culture of conformity, weakness, and banality. “If one tries to save the young from the rigors and traumas of life, you’re saving them from life,” Mamet said.

He asks, regarding sex, and what (my words, not his) could be characterized by a Brave New World sort of "Orgy-Porgy" trivialization/juvenlization of sex...

“What’s happened when a 19-year-old American male is jaded about sex?”

And answers his own question:

“Part of the matriculation process for a young man has always been”, Mamet continued, “I don’t know how to make a living, but I better figure it out or I’m never going to get laid. When you take that away, you take away the strongest goad he will ever experience in his life.”

He discusses one of my personal obsessions, shibboleths, a bit, though he calls them "recognition symbols" (which is of course all "shibboleths" mean).

“What is college? Nothing. Students learn five recognition symbols that make them comfortable in conversation with other people who know nothing. And they don’t realize that they’ve learned to rely too much on others.”

He also talks about another pet obsession, which is the idea that modern society really can only be understood by accepting that it is still very much a primitive society on its fundamental level:

His study of the Native Americans, which began with an article for the Smithsonian National Museum on Buffalos and the “national shame” of American atrocities toward Natives, led him to the discovery that “One sees how a primitive society has all the elements of ours, which is just another primitive society with a lot more technology.”

He talks more explicitly about politics (and race, and LBJ's Great Society, and so on) but I'll direct you to the article for that.

I think his unifying philosophy is this:

Society has become too allergic to conflict and competition, and has created too many rules and penalties for such. This began (as most projects do) with a decent enough goal -- let's reduce conflict; let's make life not so terribly competitive -- but it has gone too far, and society now punishes these things too much, and therefore punishes basic human nature too much, and too strongly represses the vital animal spirits that propel humans and drive human betterment (on both a human and societal level).

And this tends to make people bored (he talks about the boredom of modern society a lot), cowardly, passive, unproductive and ultimately empty.

A "we had to destroy the village in order to save the village" sort of take on the project to denature the human spirit.

That's my guess.

Awesome: D-Lamp links this:

"MEN WANTED for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful, honor and recognition in case of success.

Ernest Shackleton 4 Burlington st.

Now not everyone, of course, can be Shackleton. But we seem to admire men like him less and less.

Shackleton's achievement, in case you don't know, was born of failure: His expedition to the Antarctic failed catastrophically. I think his ship got iced in and was immobilized and then lost.

But what he did then was amazing: he led his crew back to safety, despite impossible odds. I think they ultimately used rowboats, paddling through the open polar ocean, to make their way to the southernmost tip of South America. And even when they got that far, they had a long slog back to actual civilization.

Posted by: Ace at 11:42 AM | Comments (283)
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