With so much bad news in the air, this Dec 16 item from ABC News made me smile: All (Illegal Immigrants) Aboard ICE Air.

SAN MIGUEL, El Salvador, Dec. 16, 2008 - ICE Air could be the busiest airline you’ve never heard of. It serves 30 countries, tickets are free and unlike most carriers, it gives each passenger a complimentary meal. But to secure a flight, you need to be an illegal immigrant.

ICE is a one-way airline operated by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. At a time when most airlines are cutting flights and adding fees for aisle seats, extra luggage and snacks, ICE air is growing by about 10 percent a year.

“We’ve actually added aircraft to our fleet, and we’re actually seeing an increase in the number of aliens being moved around the country and out of the country,” said Michael Pitts, the chief of flight operations.

ICE has 22 detention facilities all over the country. When illegal immigrants are caught, they’re flown to one of three hubs in Texas, Arizona or Louisiana. From there, ICE Air has daily flights to Central American countries such as El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, and also frequent flights to Nicaragua, Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia and the Caribbean. When it gets enough immigrants to fill a plane, it also flies to Asia, eastern Europe and Africa.

Naturally it’s preferable when foreigners self-deport, thereby saving us taxpayers the price of shipment. But all things considered, ICE Air is a fine use of resources ($680 per alien, including reusable cuffs).

Do you ever get the sinking feeling that the biggest difference between Bernie Madoff and most of the public figures our age is that he admitted he was running “a giant Ponzi scheme?”

Madoffnomics consisted of making conspicuous donations to worthy ethnic causes in order to build a benevolent reputation in order to get an ever increasing amount of money flowing in to pay off those who had gotten on board early, but with no chance of later investors coming out ahead? How different is that from the Bush-Rove program of “compassionate conservativism,” as embodied in Bush’s jihad against down payments on home mortgages as denying minorities the American Dream?

Australian blogger/journalist Andrew Bolt writes:

The kind of headline that newspapers really should drop:

Congo’s plight shames us all

No, it doesn’t.

So, who should be ashamed about what’s happening in the Congo? Well, the Congolese who are doing the raping, looting, and killing should be ashamed of themselves, so should Robert Mugabe, who’s been part of the trouble for years, according to the article Bolt linked to:

“Zimbabwe was one of a number of nations then taking part in the second Congo war (1998-2003). It was allying itself, along with Angola, Namibia, Chad and Sudan, with the Kabilas. On the other side, though sometimes fighting each other, were Uganda and Rwanda.

All sides in this many-phased conflict, which has claimed more than 5 million lives in the past decade, have been engaged in extraction of Congo’s rich mineral deposits. These have been a cause of bloodshed in the region right back to the 1960s, following Belgium’s messy exit from its former colony. These riches are one reason why regional collaborations to end the conflict have so far failed; another is the historical effects of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.”

It sounds like there are a lot of people locally who should be ashamed of themselves, but not you and me.

Of course, what all of us in the civilized world are supposed to be ashamed of is not stopping the bad things from happening by invading and civilizing the place. However, we in fact did that, in 1880’s: it was called colonialism, and the “shames us all” brigade didn’t like it.

If anyone in the West should be shamed by the Congo atrocities,it’s the liberals and neoconservatives who united in their hatred of “racist” white people in Africa, in what used to be called Rhodesia and in South Africa, and made the US pressure Rhodesia and South Africa to surrender. See, for example The Zimbabwe Disaster: What Did We Expect?, and Neoconservative Applauds White Despoliation In South Africa by the late Sam Francis.