Fun and Games with Homeland Security

We’ll start with this WaPo piece on a decision by Judge Richard Leon of the federal district court in Washington D.C. finding the Bush Administration’s arbitrary cut-offs of rent aid to tens of thousands of refugees from hurricanes Katrina and Rita to be… arbitrary to the point of unconstitutional. (Judge Leon is a commie pinko appointed by… George W. Bush.)
Elsewhere in Homeland Security World, Secretary Michael Chertoff apologized for fucking up , blaming administrative “bean-counting” for screwing New York, the nation’s primary terrorist target, from receiving tens of millions of dollars in homeland security grants which were instead ear-marked for places more likely to vote for Republicans. Given that the plan didn’t work, and the Republicans lost control of Congress… Chertoff now acknowledges that the plan might not have been… good. Or something.
It appears that the border control system requiring fingerprinting and photographing of furriners to make sure they’re not terrorists at great expense and inconvenience has been remarkably successful: it netted a terrorist suspect (in 2005). So… the system must be deterring all those terrorist wannabes… that, or we’ve successfully tied them all down in Iraq…
Speaking of which, the Iraq study group, headed by Bush-family-retainers James Baker and Lee Hamilton (I realize he’s nominally a Democrat, but he did such a good job helping to whitewash things with the 9-11 Commission that he’s always welcome… not like that backstabber Woodward…) have sorta reached their conclusion: keep the troops in Iraq, but move them back to barracks and bases. I don’t quite understand what it means either– I guess it’s “pragmatically staying the course” without “cutting and running” and “helping them stand up so we can stand down”… and whatever other cliches are currently available for the situation. Let’s just say that I’m just not gleaning the magic bullet that will somehow turn Iraq from what it is and has always been intended to be– a bloody and expensive diversion designed to keep Iraqi oil safely in the ground and not sloshing around world supply lines– into the glorious military and political victory that will somehow lift Dubya’s legacy above “disaster”. Of course… that’s just me.
This has been… fun and games with homeland security.