Spot the negative pregnant in this news story:
Homeland Security Re-Prioritizing Grants
By LARA JAKES JORDAN
The Associated Press
Tuesday, January 3, 2006; 1:55 PM
WASHINGTON -- Communities facing greater risks will receive a bigger share of federal grants this year to counter terrorism and other threats, the Homeland Security Department said Tuesday as it announced that nearly four dozen metropolitan areas will be eligible.
(Source: Washington Post)
If you guessed "The Homeland Security Department just announced they don't take terrorist threats seriously even now" you WIN. By implication, the Department of Homeland Security admits they distributed funds based solely upon
political concerns, not concerns of possible
terrorist threats. How can W and his Bush League minions claim that
national security demands warrantless wiretaps and also claim that politics rather than threat assessments should determine how we spend money to defend ourselves? (Continued below)
Even now, DHS is only saying they are going to
start taking the threat of a terrorist attack into consideration when allocating funds. This means two things:
- DHS made no attempt to prioritize their spending based upon perceived terrorist threats until just now, and;
- The threat of a terrorist attack still isn't the primary consideration in defending our country - pork-barrel politics has merely been downgraded from the exclusive determining factor to a major factor.
Pop quiz: If the threat posed by terrorists isn't severe enough to outweigh pork-barrel politics, why is it severe enough to ignore federal wiretapping laws?