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From its earliest days as America's homegrown whiskey elixir, Kentucky Bourbon has been traveling on boats.

In fact, boats were a key reason why Kentucky became the king of bourbon. In the late 1700s, trade depended on rivers, and distillers in the state had a big advantage: the Ohio River. They'd load their barrels onto flatboats on the Ohio, which flowed into the Mississippi, taking their golden liquor as far down as New Orleans.

Back then, placing barrels on boats was a necessity. These days, it's become a novelty: Eighth-generation Kentucky bourbon distiller Trey Zoeller is using the motion of the ocean to produce bottles worth $200 each.

"We're going back to how bourbon was initially aged," Zoeller tells The Salt. "The color and flavor came from the rocking on the water. Bourbon was loaded on to ships in Kentucky, and by the time it travelled to the people buying it, the flavor improved."

Bourbon is a family legacy for Zoeller. His great-great-great grandmother was among the first female distillers and his father, Chet, is a bourbon scholar. Zoeller has been in the artisanal whiskey business since the 1990s with his Jefferson's Bourbon. Five years ago, Zoeller was celebrating his birthday on a friend's boat off the coast of Costa Rica. As two Kentucky boys are wont to do, they were raising glasses full of bourbon. That's when Zoeller got the idea to send barrels of bourbon out to sea.

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The Conservative Political Action Conference ended in Washington Saturday, after giving Sen. Rand Paul a second consecutive victory in the presidential straw poll that's seen as an indicator of how Republicans see their leaders.

From Politico:

"The Kentucky senator received 31 percent, far ahead of second place Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who received 11 percent. Neurosurgeon Ben Carson finished third with 9 percent, ahead of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who received 8 percent.

"The announcement came at the end of the group's annual three-day confab. Organizers said that 2,459 attendees voted on computer kiosks.

"Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum tied for fifth place, with 7 percent."

The extremists now committing a wave of attacks in Iraq's Anbar province are better trained, funded and equipped than the al-Qaida-linked groups American soldiers battled there, says Brett McGurk, one of the State Department's top officials for Iraq.

The militants, who have drawn strength amid the war in Syria over the border, have taken over parts of Anbar over the last three months.

McGurk says that between 300 and 500 fighters have set up a defensive perimeter around the city of Fallujah, where American soldiers fought some of the fiercest battles of the war. They are armed with high-velocity sniper rifles.

Speaking last week on the sidelines of a conference in northern Iraq, McGurk says they don't have same iron control over the rest of the province. But still the militants have driven out more than 400,000 people since January. And their operations aren't confined to Anbar province. The group has become increasingly and lethally active again across Iraq.

"A key data point are suicide bombers, because suicide bombers – we know that they consider them their most precious (in a very perverse way) and their most strategic resource — they are now able to deploy about 30 to 40 suicide bombers a month here in Iraq," McGurk says.

That's contributing to a horrifying spike in the number of violent deaths. So what's the plan? McGurk says that the Iraqi government has undertaken to employ 10,000 of the tribesmen of Anbar in the security forces. These Sunni tribes complain of neglect by the Shiite-led government and some have even supported the militants. There's also a police training program.

Will that be enough? Zaid al-Ali, who recently published a book, The Struggle for Iraq's Future, says that the problems are broader than that. In Sunni-dominated places like Anbar, they won't be solved by security measures alone. He thinks that chronic unemployment also needs to be addressed, and more importantly, entrenched sectarian practices by the security forces. Detention without charge and torture are far more common in places like Anbar, he says, which feeds hatred of the government.

"It's been a major issue because there is a lot of abuse of detainees in Iraq, and there are a lot of cases – this is not a secret, everyone knows about this – there are a lot of cases of people being detained for no reason, or very long periods of time, without access to attorneys, without access to judges, without access to any type of recourse, and that really needs to change extremely urgently," al-Ali says.

Al-Ali also says that endemic corruption is feeding insecurity. He says that crooked purchasing practices mean that ineffective bomb detectors are widely used, and al-Qaida-linked groups have infiltrated the police and army.

"It's as a result of four, five years incompetence and corruption in the security sector, and it's going to be very hard to overturn at this stage," he says.

All eyes are on Iraqi elections, which are due to happen at the end of April. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has built his political legitimacy on his ability to maintain a modicum of security in Iraq. As he pushes for a third term, such security remains in short supply.

There's always a risk in flying, but the phase in which a plane is cruising at high altitude is widely considered to be safe. And that's what makes the mystery of what happened to Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 so confounding.

"Whatever happened happened quickly and resulted in a catastrophic departure from the air," Mark Rosenker, former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board who is now a consultant with CBS news, told NPR's Melissa Block.

There have been a number of cases in which planes have fallen from the sky — from factors that include catastrophic failure and sabotage. As Patrick Smith, a commercial pilot who runs the popular Ask The Pilot website, writes:

"All we know for sure is that a plane went down with no warning or communication from the crew. That the crash did not happen during takeoff or landing — the phases of flight when most accident occur — somewhat limits the possibilities, but numerous possibilities remain. The culprit could be anything from sabotage to an inflight fire to a catastrophic structural failure of some kind — or, as is so common in airline catastrophes, some combination or compounding of human error and/or mechanical malfunction."