The Partnership for Civil Justice has just released the results of their Freedom of Information Act request about the Department of Homeland Security coordinating activities against the Occupy movement. No actual smoking gun about the apparent coordination that marked the police operations, but it's not too difficult to figure from the documents they released that there are some things they're not saying:

A trove of documents released today by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in response to a FOIA request filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, filmmaker Michael Moore and the National Lawyers Guild Mass Defense Committee reveal that federal law enforcement agencies began their coordinated intelligence gathering and operations on the Occupy movement even before the first tent went up in Zuccotti Park on September 17, 2011.

On September 17, 2011, a Secret Service intelligence entry in its Prism Demonstrations Abstract file records the opening of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. The demonstration location that the Secret Service was protecting? The “Wall Street Bull.” The name of the Protectee? The “U.S. Government.”

American taxpayers might find it odd to learn that the Secret Service was on duty to protect the Wall Street Bull in the name of protecting the U.S. Government. But there it is.

These documents, many of which are redacted, show that the highest officials in the Department of Homeland Security were preoccupied with the Occupy movement and have gone out of their way to project the appearance of an absence of federal involvement in the monitoring of and crackdown on Occupy.

On the street it would be called “Three Card Monte,” a swindler’s game to hide the ball -- a game of misdirection. The House always wins.

The DHS, as revealed in the newly released documents, has engaged in what appears to be a effort to avoid looking for Occupy related materials where it is likely to be found, including in Fusion Centers and DHS sub-divisions such as the Operations Coordination & Planning sub-division which is responsible for DHS coordination with local and federal law enforcement partners.

On November 16, DHS Press Secretary Matthew Chandler transmitted an e-mail to top ranking DHS officials, including the Chief of Staff to Janet Napolitano, the Chief of Staff to the DHS General Counsel, among others, in which he reports:

“We’re getting inquiries from CBS, AP, Daily Caller and others on an un-sourced Examiner.com piece that says that DHS and FBI are collaborating with cities by providing tactics and information on removing Occupy protestors. A check of I & A [Intelligence and Analysis] and FPS [Federal Protective Services] shows that this type of outreach is not occurring in any wholesale manner.”

The Press Secretary is careful to couch the official statement, that such is not occurring in any “wholesale” manner, leaving the door open to possible future revelations of such conduct.

But this official statement was based solely on a mid-November inquiry to two DHS sub-sections: Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) and Federal Protective Services (FPS). And by the date of that statement, Federal Protective Services and apparently also the I&A Directorate had already purged, “restricted and/or rescinded,” any Occupy related intelligence products, as discussed further here.

it is not surprising that Press Secretary Chandler’s statement that no “wholesale’ coordination of Occupy related actions is based on incomplete information.

The Press Secretary, following the script, conveniently avoided other likely DHS repositories and departmental components, including the personnel deployed to Fusion Centers or to the DHS Operations Coordination; Planning sub-division, which according to the DHS web site is “responsible for monitoring the security of the United States on a daily basis and coordinating activities within the Department and with governors, Homeland Security Advisors, law enforcement partners, and critical infrastructure operators in all 50 states and more than 50 major urban areas nationwide.”

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Police and military types have an overwhelming lust for the latest, greatest and most expensive technology -- and a talent for rationalizing the budget expenditures. Since 9/11, it's been one long Christmas list of weapons of war and anti-terror, and Santa Congress denies very little. In the meantime, anything that directly benefits We The People gets slashed. It's time, as this LA Times article suggests, that we take a much closer look at what we get for all that money. I'd also like to suggest a name change - "Homeland Security" reminds me very much of Nazis:

A decade after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, federal and state governments are spending about $75 billion a year on domestic security, setting up sophisticated radio networks, upgrading emergency medical response equipment, installing surveillance cameras and bomb-proof walls, and outfitting airport screeners to detect an ever-evolving list of mobile explosives.

But how effective has that 10-year spending spree been?

"The number of people worldwide who are killed by Muslim-type terrorists, Al Qaeda wannabes, is maybe a few hundred outside of war zones. It's basically the same number of people who die drowning in the bathtub each year," said John Mueller, an Ohio State University professor who has written extensively about the balance between threat and expenditures in fighting terrorism.

"So if your chance of being killed by a terrorist in the United States is 1 in 3.5 million, the question is, how much do you want to spend to get that down to 1 in 4.5 million?" he said.

One effect is certain: Homeland Security spending has been a primer-pump for local governments starved by the recession, and has dramatically improved emergency response networks across the country.

An entire industry has sprung up to sell an array of products, including high-tech motion sensors and fully outfitted emergency operations trailers. The market is expected to grow to $31 billion by 2014.

Like the military-industrial complex that became a permanent and powerful part of the American landscape during the Cold War, the vast network of Homeland Security spyware, concrete barricades and high-tech identity screening is here to stay. The Department of Homeland Security, a collection of agencies ranging from border control to airport security sewn quickly together after Sept. 11, is the third-largest Cabinet department and — with almost no lawmaker willing to render the U.S. less prepared for a terrorist attack — one of those least to fall victim to budget cuts.

The expensive and time-consuming screening now routine for passengers at airport boarding gates has detected plenty of knives, loaded guns and other contraband, but it has never identified a terrorist who was about to board a plane. Only 14 Americans have died in about three dozen instances of Islamic extremist terrorist plots targeted at the U.S. outside war zones since 2001 — most of them involving one or two home-grown plotters.

[...] State and local emergency responders have undergone a dramatic transformation with the aid of $32 billion that has been dispensed in Homeland Security grants since 2002, much of it in the early years spent on Hollywood-style tactical gear, often with little connection between risk and outlay.

"After 9/11, it was literally like my mother running out the door with the charge card," said Al Berndt, assistant director of the Emergency Management Agency in Nebraska, which has received $163.7 million in federal anti-terrorism and emergency aid grants. "What we really needed to be doing is saying, 'Let's identify the threat, identify the capability and capacity you already have, and say, OK, what's the shortfall now, and how do we meet it?'"

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It's only a matter of hours before a Michelle Malkin files a criminal complaint against this kid's mother, don't you think?

The mother of a Maryland second-grader who questioned First Lady Michelle Obama about the Obama administration's immigration policy will not be deported, federal officials said Thursday.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement will not take action against the mother, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

“ICE is a federal law enforcement agency that focuses on smart, effective immigration enforcement that prioritizes criminal aliens who pose a threat to our communities," spokesman Matthew Chandler said in an e-mail. "Our investigations are based on solid law enforcement work and not classroom Q and As.”

On Wednesday the little girl asked Obama why the president was "taking everybody away that doesn't have papers."

"That's something that we have to work on, right? To make sure that people can be here with the right kind of papers," Obama said.

"But my mom doesn't have any papers," the student said as the first lady ended her answer.

The exchange went viral almost immediately and provided the most unscripted, "real world" moment of an otherwise over-scripted series of events in honor of Mexican President Felipe Calderon's state visit.

In an interview conducted in Spanish after the event, the 7-year old girl told a reporter: “I’m a big girl and I don’t want to be left with nothing. I could almost die.”

“My mommy wants papers so that she can be here legally, so that she doesn’t have to go to Peru,” the girl said (according to a rough translation by the bilingual Eye.)

Ed.: Sure enough, the disappointment is palpable at Malkin's place.

As Art Linkletter useta say ...

"My mom said … Barack Obama is going to take away everybody that doesn't have papers," one girl told the first lady.

"Yeah, well, that's something that we have to work on, right?" Mrs. Obama replied. "To make sure that people can be here with the right kind of papers, right? That's exactly right."

The girl countered, "But my mom doesn't have any."

"Well, we have to work on that, we have to fix that and everybody's got to work together in Congress to make sure that happens. That's right," Mrs. Obama said before moving on to the next question.

I know Rahm Emanuel and his Blue Dogs wanna put immigration reform off for as long as they can. But I'm not sure how long they're going to be able to. The real-world pressure to solve this mess is mounting. And the best part is: progressive solutions will work.

As the LA Times piece notes:

"This heartbreaking exchange says more about the current state of the immigration debate than the remarks of the two presidents in the Rose Garden," said Frank Sharry, executive director of America's Voice, a pro-immigration reform group, noting that deportations nationally have gone up under Obama.

The Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency says its priority is to remove illegal immigrants who are violent criminals. But it maintains a goal of 400,000 deportations this year, which would be a record. Most of those people would not fall into the criminal category, agency statistics show, and some probably would include parents of children who are U.S. citizens.

No doubt the right-wingers will demand that federal officials track down this little girl's mother and deport her posthaste. Sounds like a job for Stalkin' Malkin.

Stories on mainstream sites that begin with "sources tell..." but do not name those sources usually end badly. This one is no exception. Because OMG, can you believe this? Faisal Shahzad has been on a Homeland Security List since 1999!!! CBS News says it, so it must be true, right? As usual, the answer is yes, and no.

The Department of Homeland Security and concept of 'no-fly' lists were not born until 2002 -- November 25, 2002-- to be exact, when President Bush signed the Homeland Security Act. Here's a handy timeline.

CBS News Investigates, in their own words:

Sources tell CBS News that would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad appeared on a Department of Homeland Security travel lookout list - Traveler Enforcement Compliance System (TECS) - between 1999 and 2008 because he brought approximately $80,000 cash or cash instruments into the United States.

Well, that doesn't really square with the large headline saying he was "ON A LIST", does it? Sometime between 1999 and 2008 is not "since 1999", no matter how you spin it.

TECS is a major law enforcement computer system that allows its approximately 120,000 users from 20 federal agencies to share information. The database is designed to identify individuals suspected of or involved in violation of federal law.

Yeah, not so much on the purpose of the TECS database, CBS. Here's the official word from the DOJ archives on what TECS is. TECS II is a container database for specific data on people entering and leaving the US. The key passage:

As noted above, IBIS is a multi-agency database of lookout information that was initiated in 1989 to improve border enforcement and facilitate inspection of individuals applying for admission to the United States at ports of entry and pre-inspection facilities. IBIS is a joint effort of the INS, the Customs Service, and the Departments of Agriculture and State.11 It combines lookout information from 27 agencies into the Treasury Enforcement Communications System II (TECS II) database. The system, created and maintained by United States Customs Service, supports federal agencies by collecting information on individuals suspected of illegal activities.

TECS II was created to maintain and receive information on persons entering the United States and now serves as the central database for IBIS.

I can see why the CBS News Investigates person was confused. Use of the generic term "the system" could certainly lead one to conclude the reference was to TECS II. It could also lead one to conclude that the IBIS database is the "lookout" database which is part of the larger system combining Treasury Enforcement Data. Whatever it was, it was initiated in 1989, and the TECS database contained the IBIS database.

I'm mostly disturbed by the 30-point bold headline on the CBS.com site and article suggesting some sort of failure on someone's part because this man may have landed on a list years before the DHS was even a glimmer in Cheney's eye.

Yes, he was in a database. So am I. So are you. So what? He brought cash into the country in excess of $10,000. Maybe they suspected him of dealing drugs. Who knows? The existence of a name on a list is evidence of absolutely nothing beyond evidence of a list. And a name.

(h/t The Political Carnival)

Janet Napolitano is probably getting some satisfaction from the fact that reality has proven the bulletin issued by her Homeland Security department last year -- warning that the nation was about to be hit by a fresh wave of right-wing extremism and its attendant violence -- all too prescient.

Especially the part where it warned that these extremists were working hard to recruit military veterans:

Returning veterans possess combat skills and experience that are attractive to rightwing extremists. DHS/I&A is concerned that rightwing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to boost their violent capabilities.

At the time the bulletin was issued, the right-wing media put up a hue and cry claiming that DHS was smearing veterans as potential terrorist threats, and demanding Napolitano's head. And even though Napolitano rebutted their nonsense, the conventional-wisdom talking point out of the affair was that DHS had unfairly smeared folks in the military.

Now it's clear that the Pentagon is aware that it has a problem: From Stars and Stripes:

The Pentagon is cracking down on extremism in its ranks with a new set of rules restricting servicemembers from participating on the Web sites of supremacist groups.

A new Defense Department directive on dissident and political activity issued on November 27 — the first since 1996 — says servicemembers “must not actively advocate supremacist doctrine, ideology, or causes.” This includes writing blogs or posting on Web sites.

... Last July, Stars and Stripes reported that 130 members of newsaxon.org, a social networking Web site affiliated with the National Socialist Movement, had listed “military” as their job in “Facebook”-style user profiles. Swatsikas, Nazi symbolism and militant imagery emblazon the site.

...

Army and Defense Department officials said at the time that extremist activity was not considered “an Army-wide issue.” And there was confusion, Potok said, about what defined “active participation.” Previously, membership alone in an extremist group was not enough for disciplinary action, though banned activities included distributing materials and demonstrating.

“The one worry here is that enforcement of these regulations may be very uneven. It leaves the decision up to local commanders and we’ve really yet to see how that’s going to work,” Potok said. “The hope is that this clarifies that even advocacy of these kinds of ideas is not consistent with being in the military.”

The arrests of the Hutaree militia made clear that the concern was full grounded in reality. As Newsweek observed in its report on the rise of right-wing extremists:

The rambling rants of the Hutaree might seem funny, in a sick sort of way, but they are far from harmless. The FBI busted nine members last month for allegedly plotting to trigger an "uprising" against the government by assassinating a local police officer and then ambushing colleagues who attended the funeral by blowing up improvised explosive devices. They may have had some professional instruction: one of the men in the group, Michael Meeks, is a Persian Gulf War veteran who served four years in the Marines and was a decorated rifle expert, according to Marine Corps records. Another member, Kristopher Sickles, is an Army vet (discharged "under other than honorable conditions," according to prosecutors).

After all, as we explained at the time, the DHS report's assessment of the situation vis a vis veterans was if anything understated:

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It was almost exactly a year ago at this time that a "controversial" report was released by the Department of Homeland Security. This finding, labeled "Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," explained that the lunatic fringe might use the recession and ascension of the first African-American president to recruit members and then plan violent attacks on the homeland.

Although this effort was initiated under the administration of George W. Bush, the usual bed-wetters on the Right--especially a large Oxycontin-laced, self-indulgent buffoon with the ever-appropriate name Rush--whined and hissed about how it was a political jihad.

Here we are a year later, and it is starting to feel very 1995 out there right now. While the Obama Administration and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle genuflect before the NRA, we are not only doing not nearly enough to keep high-power weaponry out of the hands of, for lack of a better word, "evil-doers," but the NRA is leading state legislatures around by the nose in attempts to actually weaken gun laws we do have on the books. As it was aptly put in in an editorial in the Charleston, WV Gazette:

Almost any criminal, psycho, drunk, wife-basher, drug addict or other prohibited person can buy a pistol illegally at a gun show - no questions asked. Test after test has found that many gun show dealers, licensed or unlicensed, sell deadly weapons to practically anyone with money, evading federal laws that forbid sales to the unfit.

In fact, once the practices of these gun shows were exposed by undercover investigations, such as those planned by Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York and his organization, Mayors Against Illegal Guns (Disclosure: I consult for MAIG; I am speaking for me, and only me, in this piece, however), the response was not to make it harder for criminals, terrorists and the mentally unstable to get guns at gun shows. It was to try and pass legislation to make such investigations illegal. Brilliant plan! Sweep it under the rug, and it is sure to go away.

It is no matter that, as my friend Brian Rothenberg, Executive Director of Progress Ohio, has said, it is easier to get a gun at a gun show than cold medicine. Or that the recent shooting at the Pentagon, by an anti-government radical and mentally disturbed man named John Patrick Bedell, was able to occur because even after the state of California deemed him mentally unfit to have buy a gun, he just went to Nevada and bought em through the infamous gun show loophole.

No background check. No questions asked. And then off to shoot innocent people at the Pentagon.

But if you think this is bad, it is only going to get worse. Tea Partiers are showing up to rallies brandishing signs with Brownings and the obvious implication. You know, the gun founded by the guy who the state of Utah would like to honor instead of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Michelle Bachmann and the rest of the itsy-bitsy IQ brigade now like to put targets on legislators, encourage their supporters to "reload," and are using other violence-infused imagery. Meanwhile, Christian Militia groups are putting together videos worthy of Al Qaeda while planning to murder Michigan police officers with guns and IEDS.

Seriously, stop and watch this spooky video for a second (they even got the German music right!).

What has been the response to the crescendo of incidents like these over the past few months? The Obama Administration is missing in action. Meanwhile, Republican legislators, like Senator Tom Coburn, are actively trying to put guns in the hands of the mentally unbalanced. That's right, Coburn tried to attach an amendment to the health care bill to restore gun rights to veterans declared "mentally incompetent." Seriously, does the man, and the 45 who voted with him, remember Ft. Hood?

The service and sacrifice of veterans must be honored and those who fight for their country must be respected as the courageous individuals that they are. But that doesn't mean giving those vets who have taken a different path, who have committed crimes, terrorist acts or are mentally unbalanced, easy access to weapons that kill. Timothy McVeigh was a veteran. Lee Harvey Oswald was a veteran. Charles Whitman was a veteran. And guess what? The report issued by Homeland Security specifically spoke of veterans, who might have certain skills and be suffering from PTSD and other ailments, being sought out for recruitment into these right-wing groups. The suicide rate among veterans is skyrocketing too, so perhaps guns aren't the answer.

In fact, maybe if the Right loved veterans as much as they love soldiers (or millionaire estates) we would have fewer of these problems. But that is for another piece.

Thankfully, Coburn's idiotic measure failed, the second time the NRA has lost on the floor of the Senate after 5 years of only knowing victory. So there is the bright side of this. While we have a long way to go to get to common sense, perhaps we're slowly getting there. Now we need the Obama Administration to get in the fight, as well as Congress. And we all need to be vigilant in this effort.

As some in the comments will, I am sure, remind me, criminals and terrorists will still get their hands on guns. Agreed. But should we be helping them? I mean, rapists don't stop committing rape because we made it illegal, but by making it illegal, it at least makes it harder for them to both do it and get away with it. Shouldn't we apply the same effort to keeping weapons that kill out of the hands of those who intend to, or don't effectively know what they're doing? Common sense folks.

Speaking of that, it is amazing how every time a Democrat is elected President Republicans seem to lose theirs en masse. Remember Bush's big speeches about defeating the terrorists. Well, now the law & order crowd on the Republican Right suddenly loves themselves some criminals and terrorists. They want to do all they can to arm them. Isn't it wonderful for the rest of us?

Which brings me back to where I began. It is starting to feel very 1995 out there. We must do all we can to hold our politicians to account, to do what they can to stop the madness. Starting with (but not ending with) closing the gun-show loophole. Because we all remember how 1995 ended up.

Fox News' anchors seemed eager to assure viewers today that the plane-crash attack on IRS offices in Austin this morning was not an act of domestic terrorism.

Oh really?

Now, it's true that Homeland Security officials originally released this statement:

“We believe there’s no nexus with criminal or terrorist activity”

They later amended this to just say "terrorist activity." Fox's Catherine Herridge also reported that Homeland Security officials had briefed President Obama on the incident, and that he had been told "this was not an act of terrorism."

So how did Fox's anchors interpret all this?

Greg Jarrett:

And the president was told this was not an act of terrorism. We have not received word, though, as to whether the F-16s are still airborne, just in case, until the Department of Homeland Security and the military is absolutely satisfied that this is the act of a single individual who used a dangerous instrumentality, to be sure, a plane, as a weapon.

And it is akin, I suppose, Megan, to, you know, somebody who gets angry at a workplace, and takes a gun, or a knife, and goes in and begins to attack people. This is unusual because instead of a gun or an automobile, it was indeed an airplane. But it has happened before.

Megyn Kelly:

Our Homeland Security contacts telling us, this does not appear to be terrorism in any way that that word is conventionally understood. We understand from officials that this is a sole, isolated act.

Well, this is true only if the conventional understanding of the word "terrorism" has now been narrowed down to mean only international terrorism and to preclude domestic terrorism altogether.

Since when, after all, is attempting to blow up a federal office as a protest against federal policies NOT an act of domestic terrorism?

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Fred Hiatt, always watching those tricksy Democrats for an opportunity to poke them in the eye, complains in his paper that it's really been the Democrats who have been politicizing national security, not the Republicans. In particular, he points to the sudden silence regarding the mandate for 100 percent cargo screening that Congress laid on the Department of Homeland Security in 2007.

Port security hasn't been in the news lately, so you could be forgiven for not seeing a connection between Brennan's incendiary charge and shipping containers. But not so long ago, Democratic politicians were absolutely convinced, or so they claimed, that President George W. Bush was putting the nation in grave danger by failing to inspect every container that arrived on our shores in a cargo ship.

Sen. John F. Kerry lambasted Bush during the 2004 campaign for screening only 5 percent of incoming cargo. After Bush's reelection, Sen. Robert Menendez helped shepherd through Congress a bill mandating 100 percent inspection by 2012 and said that anything less "is irresponsible and downright negligent." Then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Bennie Thompson -- now chair of the Homeland Security Committee -- piled on.

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Fast-forward to the Obama administration; screening policy hasn't changed. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano signaled more than a year ago, and confirmed in December, that the 2012 deadline mandated by law will not be met. The technology doesn't exist, she explained, and neither does the money. In fact, the administration's 2011 budget reduces funding for cargo inspection overseas and for pilot programs aimed at reaching the 100 percent goal.

The reaction from Democrats? Near silence. Rep. Thompson, at the end of a statement praising Obama's homeland security budget, allowed that he was "disappointed" on the matter of container screening. Menendez wrote to Napolitano last March expressing "concern," and a spokesman told me he is writing another letter. A Nadler spokesman said that "since we haven't had an official pronouncement from the administration" that the deadline won't be met, "we haven't made an official response."

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So was the nation not in imminent danger when Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff was pursuing a policy identical to Napolitano's, and getting beat up for it? Were Democrats, in Brennan's shocked words, "misrepresenting the facts to score political points?"

They were, of course. But there's a more serious point than noting that both sides do it. Democrats were playing politics with national security -- but they also were raising legitimate questions about al-Qaeda's ability to smuggle in a nuclear device. As Obama reduces the screening budget, the real danger may be the lack of serious oversight from Democrats who once raised alarms.

Now you may need a moment to just get past Fred Hiatt's tactic of misdirecting the Brennan issue on the Repubs' flagrant politicization of whether the FBI should turn the Underwear Bomber over to the military for "enhanced interrogation" or on the general issue of Republican hypocrisy on, oh, so many things - national security and otherwise. But this issue of cargo scanning is particularly interesting, in that while the original House resolution was sponsored by a Democrat and cosponsored by 205 others, it did in fact pass the House with 68 Republican votes. Interesting how 128 House Republicans were able to vote against a bill titled "Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act."

The Senate agreed to the conference report by a vote of 85-8. The eight Republican Senators who decided that the US government should not implement the 9/11 commission's recommendations included those true patriots Jon Kyl, Liz Dole, Tom Coburn, Jim Inhofe, Jim DeMint, Lindsey Graham, John Barrasso, and Michale Enzi. You know, the usual wack-jobs. To be clear, this public law wasn't just about cargo screening, but also a number of other homeland security initiatives (including the stand-up of a National Biosurveillance Integration Center, WMD proliferation prevention, and enhancing interagency coordination on defenses against rad/nuke weapons).

That said, the idea that the US government should physically scan every cargo container entering the United States was and continues to be an extremely bad one. It was an issue that was not carefully considered, that was generated in the heat of discussions about "nuclear terrorism," without regard to the cost and impact of its implementation. It was always a bad idea, and Big Business knew it was a bad idea. It would delay shipments and increase costs, and those are Bad Things, even when homeland security is the issue. Republicans understood this, and while many supported the passage of this bill, they took no action to actually push the Bush administration into doing anything about its delay on implementing the cargo screening actions.

So now the Dems are in charge, it's their people in DHS who have to explain that they can't meet the public law's requirements, given the state of technology, the potential cost of implementing such a strategy, and the potential impact on the flow of economic goods. And the Dems are quiet in Congress. Shocked? I'm not. Maybe it's sinking in that this was not a well-thought out plan, that its basis for being (interdicting nuclear weapons or radiological material) was perhaps more emotional than logical. Instead of pointing out the obvious, that this was a bipartisan screw-up and perhaps we need a better, less emotional approach to homeland security, Fred would rather politicize the example to poke the Dems in the eye on national security. Because the Repubs have been such good stewards of national security and aren't at all hypocrites. What an asshat.

Hey Fred, why don't you hire more previous Bush administration officials to write for the Post? Your op-ed page isn't conservative enough with regular entries from George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Kathleen Parker, Bob Kagan and William Kristol. And then there's that f***in' retard Michael Gerson.