Wish You Were Here

So "you're doing a heck of a job, Brownie's" boss, Michael Chertoff has decided that New York's federal anti-terror funding should be slashed by 40% (and Washington, DC's as well by the same percentage) while Omaha, Nebraska's is increased by a whopping 61% because--get this-- the DHS found that New York had "no national monuments or icons."

Holy Empire State! You better not tell that to the 38 million tourists who flock to New York every year to take pictures of themselves and their goofy kids in front of NYC's former, and once again, tallest building, or the New York Stock Exchange, the USS Intrepid, Radio City Music Hall, Rockefeller Center, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Metroplitan Museum of Art, Carnegie Hall, Grand Central Station, St. Patrick's Cathedral, United Nations, Ellis Island, the New York Public Library, oh, and don't forget the Statue of Liberty. And then, make sure you tell that to those pesky terrorists who keep trying to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge.

DHS officials said the allocation of funds was based on a detailed analysis of an area’s vulnerability to threats and on peer reviews from other local and state officials. OK, that makes sense, but then why the cut? Because although New York's grant application to the DHS requested monies to

oufit the entire Financial District with surveillance cameras, equip more cops with radiation detectors, staff the NYPD's counterterrorism bureau, deploy heavily armed cops at critical locations, modernize Fire Department emergency communications, train thousands of firefighters to respond to a chemical or nuclear incident, build the capacity to vaccinate 8 million people in four days, establish a system for analyzing thousands of environmental specimens to determine whether whole neighborhoods need decontamination or even closure

Federal officials said yesterday that the city had not only done a poor job of articulating its needs in its application, but had also mishandled the application itself, failing to file it electronically as required, instead faxing its request to Washington. Let me get this straight: The Agency that had to watch CNN to learn that the Superdome was under seige, and has 11,000 unused FEMA trailers rotting in an Arkansas cow pasture is dinging New York for faxing the application instead of filing it electronically? Well, I have one thing to say: You're doing a heck of a job, Mikey!

Look, I respect (even if I don't agree with) the Federal Government's right to debate whether its money should go to pay for continuing costs, like overtime for police officers who stand guard 24/7 at the Brooklyn Bridge (DHS says it shouldn't) or support semi-permanent safeguards like better gas masks or improvements in communications systems. Moreover, I can count along with the best of them and acknowledge that there's only so much Federal money to go around: The anti-terror '06 budget is less than a billion dollars and we spend close to a billion dollars a week in Iraq. But something is "rotten in Des Moines" when that city-- that stronghold of American icons-- receives the same amount of funding per capita as New York, or Wyoming is allocated $14.83 per person compared to $2.78 per person for New York. I ask you: Is that an effective allocation of monies to protect our Homeland? A fair one?

I say, hell no, and I ain't swallowing this while New York is on its knees especially after Chertoff reminded me--FOUR times on Thursday, thank you very much--that New York City is the "number one" terror target, and the average American, and I dare say most terrorists, know that the collateral damage from attacking Wall Street or Pennsylvania Avenue far outweighs a hit to Churchill Downs (yes, Louisville's anti-terror funding was increased 70%.)

I think this is shameful, and stinks to high heaven as does the DHS' newly-devised, and predictably opaque "scientific method" (so called "peer review") used to divvy up the funds, which as Undersecretary George Foresman's explained, takes into account the "perception of risk" by "the individual local community sheriff in a rural county somewhere across the country." Huh? Did he really say that? Is that really one of the main criterion the DHS is utilizing in its analysis? Yep.

Question: I'm just looking at the list and it looks like the big cities still got the biggest chunk, but New York, if I'm reading this correctly, last year got $207 million, this year is getting $124 million.

Under Secretary Foresman: ....[ w]e need to make -- and this continues to be the challenge -- we have to look at the risk of New York City in relation to the rest of the risk in the country, as well. So this is not simply looking at one particular geographic area. I mean, it's in relative rank order, if you will, to the rest of the nation, because you're only as strong as your weakest link. And so part of this is realizing that to the individual local community sheriff in a rural county somewhere across the country, their perception of risk is different than a major metropolitan area, but it's their perception based on where they live and where they are. We've got to look at it holistically.

Holistically? Good God. How many terrorists have a map of downtown Cheyenne in their napsacks?

The Daily News sums it up best in its usual succinct fashion: "Andy of Mayberry trumps Commissioner Ray Kelly."

As does Mayor Bloomberg's take on the outcome: "I think the facts are clear. What they've really done is taken what was supposed to be threat-based and just started to distribute it as normal pork."

Rant over. More spareribs anyone??

(Posted by "I feel much safer now" Portia.)