CNN’s Jake Tapper joined me and today’s co-host Jamie Weinstein of the Daily Caller to discuss the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines 370, Senator Rob Portman’s and Joe Scarborough’s viability as 2016 candidates.

Audio:

03-11hhs-tapper

Transcript:

HH: If you’re just joining us, co-hosting with me today, Jamie Weinstein of the Daily Caller. Jamie will be filling in for me tomorrow when I go to see an advanced screening of Noah. And we are joined from Washington, D.C. by Jake Tapper, host of CNN’s The Lead. Hello, Jake.

JT: Hey, Hugh, how are you? Hey, Jamie.

JW: Hey, Jake, how are you?

HH: Now Jake as of tomorrow, you will be closer to 50 than you are to 40. How you feeling on your birthday eve?

JT: I was wondering if tonight was my last moment in the key demographic for television viewing. I think I have until 49, actually. But oh, I don’t know, after 40, it’s all creaks and moans. You know, I’m a pretty lucky guy.

HH: It’s your first time on the air when you are hosting The Lead on your birthday. Have you got a keen eye on your production staff, who I now know to be very sneaky about these things?

JT: They are sneaky. But I assume they won’t do anything on air. But one never knows. One never knows.

HH: All right, let’s get…

JT: They’re always up to no good, those meddling teenagers.

HH: I just proved to Jamie who’s out from D.C. under the classic of watch, do, teach, that you are my show prep. We were watching you earlier with your two experts on the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines 370, and on the Senate Intelligence Committee. I began my show talking to Portman about that. But okay, putting everything aside, Jake Tapper, do you think this is terrorism?

JT: No, I guess I don’t, just because nobody has claimed responsibility for it, yet. And generally, that would be the case, although I know it has happened that there have been dry runs. But it just feels like somebody would have announced that they had something to do with it. And in general, when it comes to life, when given the choice between something happening because of just bad luck or incompetence versus evil, generally, it’s incompetence or bad luck. Continue Reading

On Thursday the Subcomittee on Defense Appropriations of the House Committee on Appropriations will meet for a hearing at which Secretary of Defense Hagel and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Dempsey will testify.  (A second closed oversight hearing follows Friday.)

Here is the background on the Department of Defense spending caps for 2014 and 2015.  These “caps” are destructive of our nation’s defenses and dangerous for the country.

They are also largely illusory, as Todd Harrison explains in this excellent op-ed for The Hill from today.  The budget for DOD is essentially in chaos, and this is terribly damaging on the ability of the Pentagon to plan and prepare.  Unlike every other part of the federal budget, the Pentagon’s budget truly does need to have long-range spending plans locked down and priorities and weapons systems selected and funded, and not weapons acquisition systems, but also for career military personnel who have to develop skills sets over the 20+ years of their service that equip them to be the leaders of the nation’s military in the 2030s and beyond.  One example of the complexity of the budgeting issue: The Navy has 18 Ohio class submarines, 14 of which carry ballistic missiles, 4 of which have been converted to carry a variety of weapons systems including cruise missiles, and these have to be refurbished or replaced over a 15 year time frame.  This force becomes more and more important as does our carrier fleet as the People’s republic of China surges out a blue water Navy, as does our fleet of submarines.  The Marine Corps –funded either at 175,000 or 182,000 depending on which page of the budget you look at– also needs a clear horizon and if the Army is being slashed, the USMC must at least be maintained at its levels of recent years to provide an expeditionary force

Not since the nadir of the Carter years has military spending fallen into such confusion and uncertainty.  The Subcommittee has to begin the process of turning that around by sending a serious budget to the full Committee and the Committee forwarding it on to the House.  The caps have to be set aside and the focus put back on the Congress’ first job of protecting the United States.  If the events in Ukraine have had any good effect, it will be the light shed on the fact that the world isn’t the way President Obama has long asserted it was.  There will be more terrible surprises ahead –from Iran, the PRC, the Norks.  The Congress needs to do its job even if the president won’t.  Send him a Department of Defense appropriations bill that is serious about national defense, and make 2014 a referendum not just on Obamacare but also on president’s radical plans for the nation’s military.

Thriller writer extraordinaire C.J. Box is back with me today, discussing his new novel, Stone Cold which has a subplot that is torn from today’s headline story from the New Yorker on  Peter Lanza, the father of Sandy Hook killer Adam Lanza.  The dilemma of what to do about disturbed young adults before they actually commit mayhem is as tough a problem as there is in domestic law enforcement, and the latest in Box’s Joe Pickett series will turn you upside down on that problem as well as the dilemma of “private justice.”

C.J. will be on in hour two, and veteran Riverside County prosecutor Mike Hestrin, seeking o become that massive county’s DA in June, joins me in hour three.  My law partner, Joseph Timothy Cook, longtime civilian aircraft disaster litigator and A-4 carrier pilot joins me in hour one to sift through the mounting mysteries surrounding  the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines 370.

Marine Corps Captain Reid “Eeyeore” Nannen  died in a training exercise in Nevada flying the F/A-18C this week, and a memorial fund to benefit his four children has been established here.