HOMELAND SECURITY is not only a joke, it’s a joke that a lot of people who have been supporting the war aren’t finding very funny. The combination of ineptitude with bureaucratic power-grabbing is looking like a real vulnerability for the Administration.

JOE BIDEN’S RAVING LUNACY — (and Orrin Hatch’s) and why it means homeland security is a joke. My FoxNews column for tomorrow is up.

GREAT MOMENTS IN TROLLING: Not A Joke: Taliban Asks for International Aid to Help It Fight…Climate Change.

Kyle Shideler, the Director/Senior Analyst for Homeland Security & Counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy, said it best: “They may have a 7th-century law code, but they grift with the best of the 21st century.” The Taliban does indeed appear to have caught on to one of the most lucrative gravy trains of the first part of the 21st century and are eager to get in on the loot; the jihad terror group has issued a call for aid from international organizations to help it fight the scourge of climate change.

Apparently, the Taliban would have us believe that in between executing allies of the United States, confiscating guns, setting women on fire and making sure they don’t work or go to school, and persecuting Shi’ite Hazaras, their jihadis just really want to spend some time working on clean energy programs and making Afghanistan green.

Showing a fine grasp of how the game is played, Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen explained: “Afghanistan has a fragile climate. There is need for tremendous work.” Accordingly, “some climate change projects which have already been approved and were funded by Green Climate Fund, UNDP, Afghan Aid, should fully resume work.”

Would environmentalists be safe working in Afghanistan? Why, sure! The Taliban, said Shaheen, would make sure of that: “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is committed to providing security and a safe environment for the work of NGOs and charity organizations.”

Of course. This is the group, mind you, that abducted and murdered five aid workers from Save the Children in April 2015. In May 2019, Taliban jihadis murdered five aid workers from the American organization Counterpart International because, they said, Counterpart was promoting women being in the proximity of men in public. Then in June 2020, the UN accused the Taliban of “deliberate attacks” against health care workers.

Earlier: As Brendan O’Neill of Spiked wrote in August, the Taliban are keen consumers of Western media:

This was always the West’s problem in Afghanistan: it lacked faith in the very values it claimed to be delivering to that benighted country. We will liberate women from life under the burqa, Western officials said. But isn’t it ‘Islamophobic’ to criticise the burqa, or any other Islamic practice for that matter? Our elites have insisted for years that it is. We will replace your intolerant Islamist system with a civil society fashioned by clever professors, the West promised. But isn’t it judgemental and possibly a tad racist – certainly an offence against the ideology of multiculturalism – to imply that Western democracy is superior to Islamist theocracy? As one British think-tank says, in its definition of the term ‘Islamophobia’, it is wrong to suggest that Islam is in any way ‘inferior to the West’. The West’s post-9/11 bluster was continually undermined by the West’s broader descent into moral relativism. How can you assert the civilisational authority of Western values when your entire educational and university system is devoted to questioning and demeaning Western civilisation? You cannot partake in a clash of civilisations if you loathe your own civilisation.

Anyone who thinks the Taliban did not pick up on all of this, on the Potemkin nature not only of the Afghan government but also of Western civilisation itself, is kidding themselves.

The trolling will continue until morale improves — in both nations.

BIDEN’S RETURN TO NORMALCY: Homeland Security Chief Calls for ‘Volunteers’ as the Southwest Border Crisis Spins Out of Control.

Seems like the kind of thing a really competent president like Biden would want to hold a press conference about.

AIRPORT SECURITY: STILL A JOKE: “So there you have it: The government believes it is in possession of a technology so vital it is willing to dose its citizens with ionizing radiation, but a decade after the Sept. 11 attacks it still hasn’t figured out a way to utilize this technology in one of America’s most sensitive airline terminals. It’s not for nothing that Senator Collins is skeptical of the TSA.”

It was a mistake to create the TSA. It — along with the entire department of Homeland Security — should be abolished, and airport security should be privatized.

SOME OF MY LEFTY READERS are writing to ask why I wasn’t criticial of Homeland Security under Bush? From this, I assume they didn’t start reading my site until Obama was elected. Hey, all that extra traffic had to come from somewhere. . . .

But for those who are late to the game, try this or this. Or just go here and keep scrolling.

YOUR HOMELAND SECURITY DOLLARS AT WORK: “Photographer Duane Kerzic was standing on the public platform in New York’s Penn Station, taking pictures of trains in hopes of winning the annual photo contest that Amtrak had been running since 2003. Amtrak police arrested him for refusing to delete the photos when asked, though they later charged him with trespassing.” They had no legal right to ask him to delete the photos. He should sue. I also think — as I’ve said before — that we need federal civil rights legislation to protect photographers’ rights. There are too many situations like this, where idiot security officers violate the law. And homeland security is still a joke.

HOMELAND SECURITY: A politicized backwater?

Here’s an interesting point about the Eliot Spitzer scandal, which we noted yesterday: One of the aides to New York’s governor who was implicated in the improper use of state police to gather material for a smear campaign against state Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno was William Howard, Spitzer’s assistant secretary for homeland security.

Readers may remember that three years ago, New Jersey’s Gov. Jim McGreevey declared himself a “gay American” and confessed to an affair with a male aide, whom the media described as his “homeland security czar.” (The ex-aide, Golan Cipel, denies the affair, accuses McGreevey of sexual harassment, and says “czar” overstates his role, which was to act “as a liaison between the governor’s office and the various state agencies responsible for law enforcement and homeland security.”)

Homeland security is the common thread linking these two very different scandals, both involving Democratic administrations in states that were among the hardest hit by 9/11. Democrats tend to talk a lot about homeland security, because by and large they aren’t wild about either military or intelligence operations. But this at least makes us wonder if they take homeland security all that seriously either.

It may be that this is a bipartisan problem, as evidenced by President Bush’s abortive nomination of Bernard Kerik as secretary of homeland security.

I can’t say I’m surprised. I’ve been saying that homeland security is a joke for quite a while.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, on the Spitzer front, Professor Bainbridge is talking about Nixon: “My gosh. If Spitzer were a Republican, people would be making comparisons to Nixon and calling for impeachment.”

And Radley Balko comments: “Spitzer denies any knowledge of what his closes aide was doing, which seems improbable. But hang on. Even he didn’t know, isn’t this the same guy who wants corporate executives held criminally liable for the mistakes of their underlings, even if they had no knowledge of those mistakes? Isn’t this the guy who wanted to make not knowing about those mistakes a crime in and of itself?”

Lots more at Slate’s roundup.

I PICKED ON HOMELAND SECURITY A LOT for a while, then I just kind of gave up. But Homeland Security is still a joke, and the Bush Administration needs to do something about it. If there’s a major attack, all this stuff will be out there, and they won’t have the excuse that it never happened before.

I realize that organizing all those bureaucratic functions into a new department is hard — which is why I thought it was a lousy idea to begin with — but having decided to go that route, the Administration has to devote the effort to making it work. And Congress, which overwhelmingly supported the move, needs to help, too.

UPDATE: An example of Congressional failure, here.

I’VE GOT STEVEN BRILL’S NEW BOOK, but Homeland Security — or something, anyway — still looks like a joke. But Matt Welch isn’t intimidated by threats from The Man. Er, well, The Man’s wife, anyway. . . .

CHUCK HERRICK’S POST made me wonder: Have I been too hard on Homeland Security? And then the answer came to me: No, I haven’t been.

Some political advice for the Administration: Homeland Security is a joke. It’s the butt of jokes (and worse) on talk radio, which is inhabited mostly by people inclined to support you. It’s treated (unfairly, as I noted in the post that somehow precipitated all this) as fascism descending by the Left. And, it’s not going to work.

September 11th, 2002 is coming up fast. After the networks are done with their commemoratives, people are going to notice that a year has passed. On the home front, at least, what they’re going to see is a record of screwups and pointless intrusiveness, summed up in many people’s minds by the airline tweezer-ban, and the mentality it represents. If there’s a major terrorist event in America between now and then, all this stuff will look stupid and ineffective (which it is). If there’s not, well, it will still look stupid and ineffective. And there’s no sign that the people who dropped the ball are ever going to be held accountable, even as ordinary Americans are called to account for all sorts of things.

Not long after that, there’s going to be an election.

UPDATE: Here’s an email I got in response, from Clayton Cramer, who I didn’t realize read InstaPundit. But I get these kinds of things all the time:

I really want to support Homeland Security. But they are clearly applying rules in a way that suggests that they have hired a bunch of robots. My son is 14. (And no, his name is not Mohammed, nor would anyone mistake him for one of the suspect nationalities.) He flew to California recently. On his return flight, he left his skateboard adjusting tool in his backpack. Picture something rather like a multipart socket wrench. They confiscated it as a weapon. They didn’t even give him a chance to check it. It was only $10 down the tube, but it shows what morons the TSA has doing this work.

This is the face of Homeland Security, folks.

THE LEFT ISN’T GOING TO ENJOY LIVING UNDER THE NEW RULES THEY’VE CREATED: Kevin McCarthy: I’m Kicking 3 Democrats Off Their Committees If Republicans Win Back House In 2022.

McCarthy made the remarks in an interview with Breitbart News and said that the move comes in light of to Democrats kicking two Republicans — Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) — off their committees.

“The Democrats have created a new thing where they’re picking and choosing who can be on committees,” McCarthy said. “Never in the history [of Congress] have you had the majority tell the minority who can be on committee. But this new standard which these Democrats have voted for—if Eric Swalwell cannot get a security clearance in the private sector, there is no reason why he should be given one to be on Intel or Homeland Security. He will not be serving there.”

“Ilhan Omar should not be serving on Foreign Affairs,” McCarthy said. “This is a new level of what the Democrats have done.”

McCarthy also said that Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff would be kicked off of that committee as well.

Kurt Schlichter tried to warn them in 2015: Liberals May Regret Their New Rules.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Flashback: Hair pulling time:

There’s an old joke about a boy who complains to his mother that his little sister keeps pulling his hair.

“Oh,” responds the mother, “she doesn’t know that it hurts.”

A few minutes later, the mother hears the girl scream and runs into the other room. “She knows now,” the boy explains.

There’s a lesson for Republicans in that old joke, if they’re smart enough to absorb it.

Maybe this time they are.

THIS IS CNN: CNN Contributor ‘Anonymous’ Will Remain With Network After Lying On Air.

CNN contributor Miles Taylor will remain with the network despite lying on the air about being the anonymous administration official who wrote a book condemning President Donald Trump.

A CNN spokesman said Wednesday that Taylor would stay on, the same day he identified himself as “Anonymous,” the author of the book A Warning in 2019 and a New York Times op-ed in 2018. In both, he slammed Trump as tempestuous and unfit for office. Taylor also boasted in the op-ed he was one of the “senior officials” working to “frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”

Taylor was an aide to former homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen before resigning last year, and he joined CNN as a contributor in September. However, Taylor lied to anchor Anderson Cooper on Aug. 21 when he denied being “Anonymous.”

“I wear a mask for two things, Anderson: Halloweens and pandemics, so no,” he said.

Hey, it’s CNN, so he won’t be alone as a contributor who has lied on air or on social media:

● ‘Please Think About Others:’ Chris Cuomo Pretends He Didn’t Break Quarantine Already.

● Anderson Cooper says Twitter account hacked after tweet calling Trump a ‘pathetic loser.’

● Not a Joke: Dan Rather on [CNN’s] ‘Reliable Sources’ Slamming Trump’s ‘Fantasy Land.’

● Stelter Claims Left-Wing Media Not Dedicated to ‘Tearing Down Trump.’

UPDATE: “When reached by a reporter via email, the former DHS official directed them instead to contact his agents with United Talent Agency, a Los Angeles–based firm that recently signed Paris Hilton.”

J.D. TUCCILLE: Please, TSA Workers, Don’t Come Back. And take the rest of your federal colleagues with you.

Along those lines, it’s nearly ideal that the federal sick-out has begun among TSA employees, since their agency is so astoundingly incompetent and abusive at its assigned tasks and is skilled only at angering travelers of all political persuasions. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) may be more explicitly malevolent, but their fans and detractors tend to break down along ideological lines. Even the Internal Revenue Service can find boosters among whoever it is who keeps weeping over those regurgitated press releases about how hard it is to be a tax collector. But sharing vicious comments about the TSA clowns squeezing people’s junk is a game we can all play while suffering in line at the airport.

Not that there’s any point to all of that groping beyond the purely recreational aspect. Undercover investigators were able to smuggle weapons and explosives past TSA agents 95 percent of the time, according to a 2015 Homeland Security Investigator General report. . . . They really aren’t getting paychecks at the moment, but I can’t really think of a good reason why their jobs should exist at all.

Airport security is a joke, and always has been. Plus:

And maybe they could take their federal colleagues—including those at the ATF and the DEA—with them.

“ATF operations nationwide employed rogue tactics, including tapping those with mental disabilities … then charging them with gun crimes,” the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported in 2013 as part of a series of horrifying stories on the federal agency. Among the failures of the agency tasked with regulating firearms, “ATF agents lost track of dozens of their own guns.”

The DEA “has existed for more than 40 years, but little attention has been given to the role the agency has played in fueling mass incarceration, racial disparities and other drug war problems,” the Drug Policy Alliance notes. That’s what DEA agents do when they’re not enjoying “‘sex parties’ with prostitutes hired by local drug cartels,” as The Washington Post puts it.

Without even turning to the larger federal apparatus, isn’t a widespread sick-out among government workers sounding like a pretty attractive idea right about now?

Yes.

EIGHT YEARS LATER, THE FEDS DECIDE TO CLOSE A HUGE SECURITY GAP IN GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS: It took nearly a decade, a critical inspectors general report and a Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group story but the federal house-keeping agency is now going to close a major anti-terrorist security gap.

A 2008 Homeland Security directive ordered federal agencies to stop using easily counterfeited ID badges for employees and contractors. The General Services Administration oversees thousands of federal facilities, including courthouses, laboratories, ports of entry and data centers, and is responsible for ensuring such directives are observed. But nothing changed for eight years.

Then TheDCNF posted a story Thursday reporting a watchdog report that noted the eight-year delay and pointed out that having thousands of easily counterfeited badges “increases the risk of a security event, such as an active shooter, terrorist attack, or theft of government property, as well as exposure of sensitive and proprietary information.”

On Friday, GSA Administrator confirmed late in the day to TheDCNF that her agency is now moving on “discontinuing the practice of issuing building-specific local badges.” She declined to say if anybody at GSA would be disciplined or fired for the eight-year delay. And no, this is NOT an April Fool’s Day joke.

WHEN YOU CLEAN UP THE RAMPANT SEXUAL MISCONDUCT AMONG POLICE AND PROSECUTORS, THEN MAYBE WE’LL TALK ABOUT CONSENSUAL SEX-FOR-MONEY AMONG CIVILIANS: ACLU of Rhode Island Slams ‘Sex Trafficking’ Cops for Focusing on Consenting Adults: The chief result of the stings—which involved Homeland Security and the FBI—was the arrest of 14 sex workers and 14 men seeking sex from undercover cops.

And this is what Homeland Security is doing? What a joke.

I’M SO OLD I REMEMBER WHEN PROFILING WAS BAD: Utah Fusion Center Warns Cops: Watch Out for Don’t-Tread-on-Me Flags.

The report includes several “visual indicators” to help police determine whether they’re dealing with “extremist and disaffected individuals.” These range from images associated with specific political groups, such as the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters, to a more generic patriotic symbol, the Gadsden flag—a famous Revolutionary War banner featuring a coiled rattlesnake and the slogan “Don’t Tread on Me.” One of the “indicators” is a slightly altered version of a picture popular with fans of the Grateful Dead; the guide does not note this potential source of confusion, describing it only as “common sovereign citizen imagery.”

Homeland Security remains a joke.

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN WE’D SEE NEW HIGHS IN HOMELAND-SECURITY PARANOIA — AND THEY WERE RIGHT! British pair arrested in U.S. on terror charges over Twitter jokes. “‘I almost burst out laughing when they asked me if I was going to be Leigh’s lookout while he dug up Marilyn Monroe. ‘I couldn’t believe it because it was a quote from the comedy Family Guy which is an American show.” Yeah, but in Homeland Security’s defense, it kinda sucks.

NUCLEAR SURVIVAL: Get Indoors And Stay There:

The advice is based on recent scientific analyses showing that a nuclear attack is much more survivable if you immediately shield yourself from the lethal radiation that follows a blast, a simple tactic seen as saving hundreds of thousands of lives. Even staying in a car, the studies show, would reduce casualties by more than 50 percent; hunkering down in a basement would be better by far.

But a problem for the Obama administration is how to spread the word without seeming alarmist about a subject that few politicians care to consider, let alone discuss. So officials are proceeding gingerly in a campaign to educate the public.

“We have to get past the mental block that says it’s too terrible to think about,” W. Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said in an interview. “We have to be ready to deal with it” and help people learn how to “best protect themselves.”

Officials say they are moving aggressively to conduct drills, prepare communication guides and raise awareness among emergency planners of how to educate the public.

They told me if I voted Republican, we’d be plunged deep into a scary 1950s-style pre-nuclear-war “duck and cover” posture. And they were right!

This is old news, though. Even back in the 1960s there were Civil Defense debates on whether to give warning in case of an attack, based on studies that showed more people would be sheltered by where they happened to be than would benefit from a warning, since many people would immediately either try to flee, or to return to their homes, winding up in more exposed positions when the bomb went off. And although heavily mocked by antinuclear activists in the 1980s, the duck-and-cover advice from the 1950s was pretty good, considering, and would have saved many lives if it had been followed in the event of a nuclear attack.

But I love this:

Administration officials argue that the cold war created an unrealistic sense of fatalism about a terrorist nuclear attack. “It’s more survivable than most people think,” said an official deeply involved in the planning, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “The key is avoiding nuclear fallout.” . . . White House officials say they are aware of the issue’s political delicacy but are nonetheless moving ahead briskly.

Entirely true, and I applaud them for pursuing this policy. I find that my law students — effectively post-Cold War generation — know next to nothing about nuclear weapons, fallout, and basic civil-defense stuff that most people knew back when I was a kid. So education is warranted. But is this the kind of change that Obama voters were expecting?

I doubt it, but once again InstaPundit was ahead of the curve. And so was Stanley Kurtz, who wrote back in 2006 that “We’ll be back to duck and cover if we don’t stop Iran first…” And here we are!

UPDATE: Rushing anti-radiation drugs to market? “Judging by the timeline for the anti-radiation drug program, U.S. officials see a rapidly escalating CBRN threat against the homeland over the next five years.” You’ll also want some iodine pills. And there’s some evidence that very large doses of Vitamin E have a protective effect, as I recall.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader C.J. Burch emails: “We’ve elected LBJ.” That’s silly. For that analogy to hold, we’d have to be involved in a foreign war that we’re not willing to win, but not willing to give up in, while dumping huge amounts of money into social programs that will wind up costing vastly more than predicted. And there’d have to be some sort of daisy-girl ad raising the nuclear threat but blaming some poor innocent small-government Republican.

MORE: A cogent objection from Rand Simberg: “Nonsense. LBJ knew how to wrangle Congress. He wasn’t led around by the nose by the Speaker and Majority Leader.”

And Jim Bennett writes:

Mocking duck and cover drills was always a display of ignorance. Duck and cover was taken from a straightforward analysis of casualties at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the big conventional explosions like the Halifax harbor explosions. Of course if you’re at ground zero they are useless, but a great many people on the periphery were killed or blinded by glass shards or other splinters driven by the blast waves. Many of them would have been avoided by simple duck-and-cover procedures.

Well, yes. But the Venn diagram for “antinuclear activist” and “deep ignorance” always featured near-100% overlap. . . .

MORE STILL: “Did Obama and his people get a burst of Lileksian nostalgia? . . . It’s all of a piece with ‘we could absorb a terrorist attack’. What they’re telling you is that you’re going to get nuked, there’s nothing they can do about it, they have no intention of trying to do anything substantive about it, and the best thing for you to do is to learn to be a contortionist — it’s hard to bend over far enough to kiss your ass goodbye. . . . A strong America might well absorb a terrorist hit with little damage, even a nuclear one. A weak America, especially an America with weaklings in its highest offices, might very well feel it had something to prove, and that could be very dangerous to miscalculators — and more so to their innocent bystanders.”

STILL MORE: Reader D.K. Kittel writes:

Regarding your post on government recommendations for nuclear survival:

I am quite impressed to see anyone on the left actually studying and contemplating how best to handle a disaster and how best to release this valuable information.

It wasn’t too many years ago the newly formed Department of Homeland Security under then Secretary Ridge released a memo that stated how best to handle a disaster. That memo had numerous items listed included important things like keeping water and food supplies sufficient for at least 72 hours since that was the earliest you should expect help from the Federal Government.

Unfortunately that memo also included the, very accurate and potentially life saving I might add, information about keeping duct tape and plastic on hand (which online also referenced nuclear fallout I think)

It was pilloried by those on the left and it became the joke of the year. Everyone from Senator Reid to most liberal Congressmen and The Daily Show on down to Letterman and Leno ripped into this recommendation for days if not weeks. Oh they had some fun.

Unfortunately instead of helping to improve and support public safety and responsibility they chose to make political points.

A year and a half later Katrina hit. Hardly anyone in the primarily liberal districts hardest hit had ever heard the first 10 or so items on that list (if I recall it was 15 or so). They certainly didn’t have food or water stocks and how were they to know help would take at least 72 hours! If only the Government had let them know!!! Wait, they did but the left chose politics rather then reinforce the factual information in that memo. Lives could have been saved.

So to see Democrats putting public safety over scoring political points is quite a pleasant (if not a little tardy and a bit hypocritical) surprise.

Indeed. Meanwhile, Joe Hultquist writes:

I was in Switzerland in October, and we stayed in a downstairs apartment in a very nice Swiss couple’s home. We had access to their basement and laundry room, and to get there required walking by a room that had two doors for one opening. The inner door was pretty standard, but the outer door was approximately six inches thick, and made of solid concrete and steel. The same type of closure was mounted as an inside shutter for the only window, and there was a hand-cranked blower with a high-efficiency air filter in line. The room had reinforced concrete walls and ceiling. The owner told me that, in that canton, all new homes were required to have such a room until around 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union. Some cantons still require them, and even inspect them on an annual basis. We encountered an example of that while visiting some friends in Uster.

One only needs to spend a little time in Switzerland to realize just how well prepared they are for invasion, military threats and even nuclear attack. No wonder they haven’t been successfully invaded since the Romans occupied their land. And that, of course, predated the Confederation Helvetica. The message is clear: don’t mess with the Swiss.

Yes, the Swiss are off their game a bit these days, but they’re still way ahead of us. And another reader writes about fire dangers:

Incredibly, the word “fire” does not appear a single time in the NYT article. Color me skeptical of the “survivability” of a nuclear attack, at least in Southern California. . . . My guess is that if even a single “small” nuclear bomb went off just about anywhere in coastal Southern California, there’s a decent chance that *every* forest, city, town, and man made structure from Ensenada to Santa Barbara would burn to the ground in the following days, weeks, and months. Hundreds of thousands dead *by fire*, not blast or fallout, with many millions more displaced. Our “plan” for survival = GTFO.

Well, a terrorist bomb will likely be a surface-burst (or in a port, a water-burst if it’s smuggled on a ship, a plausible scenario) which will reduce the fire-setting role of the flash. But, yeah, if you read the report (and I skimmed it last night) they seem to be thinking mostly about NY or DC. Note, too, that sheltering for even a few hours can make a big difference. Following the old “rule of 7” the radiation is 1/10 its peak 7 hours later. (And 1/10 again — that is 1/100 at 7 x 7 hours — two days, basically). Also, of course, sometimes you’re just screwed, which is why nuclear attacks on one’s town are to be avoided if at all possible.

Here, by the way, are the shelter-in-place FAQs from Ready.gov.

IN THE MAIL: From Bruce Schneier, Schneier on Security. I’ve said repeatedly that homeland security is a joke, but Schneier does a better job of explaining why.

PEGGY NOONAN: “We are debating port security. While we’re at it, how about airport security? Does anyone really believe that has gotten much better since 19 terrorists hijacked four planes five years ago?”

I don’t.

UPDATE: More here: “Security experts say U.S. ports have long been ill-prepared for a terrorist attack — regardless of the nationality of the owner.”

Homeland Security remains pretty much a joke — air, sea, and land. The good news is, the Dubai deal won’t make things worse at Baltimore:

At least one of the ports where DP World is set to operate, Baltimore, has been dogged by security shortcomings for years. A Baltimore Sun investigation in June 2005 revealed that the port’s fiber-optic alarm system on the perimeter fence malfunctioned and was usually switched off, and that port police were so understaffed that their patrol boats often dry-docked because there was no one to operate them. The newspaper also found that a pair of “video cameras” guarding the entrance to one important marine terminal were actually blocks of wood on poles.

Last summer, a tour of the port, the nation’s eighth largest, revealed gaps in perimeter fences, unattended gates, surveillances systems that didn’t work and insufficient police patrols on land and sea. State officials have acknowledged security gaps and said they have been working to close them.

It can only get better, apparently . . . .

Read this piece by Jim Glassman, too: “Isn’t this precisely what the United States preaches? Don’t we want places like Dubai to fight terror and to grow, to invest, to buy, to trade, to adopt Western commercial practices, to expose themselves to the rest of the world and thus become tolerant and moderate?” Read the whole thing.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Over at WizBang, a correction is offered regarding my views on airport security. I stand corrected.

I’M AFRAID I HAVE TO AGREE WITH MATT WELCH that James Taranto’s characterization of Democrats who booed the Patriot Act as the “al Qaeda Cheering Section” is over the top.

I’ve been a Patriot Act skeptic — to put it mildly — since pretty much day one. It’s not all bad (and even John Kerry pointed that out last night on ABC) but the overall mindset, and the bureaucratic opportunism, that it represents is a bad thing. And “Homeland Security” remains pretty much of a joke today: lots of pork and gold-plating, lots of new bureaucracy, and not a lot of obvious benefit for security. What’s more, Steven Brill’s account of Ashcroft’s role in the Patriot Act’s drafting, which I blogged here back in April, is just devastating.

There’s no question that the Democrats have demonized the Patriot Act and tried to turn it into a political weapon against Bush — and it’s hypocritical given the 1994 and 1996 “crime” and “terrorism” bills, which were basically more of the same. But that hardly turns them into an “Al Qaeda cheering section.”

UPDATE: Steve Sturm says that Matt and I are wrong.

NOW HERE’S AN ISSUE FOR THE DEMOCRATS, but I’ll bet they won’t pick up on it:

Because she is fluent in Turkish and other Middle Eastern languages, Edmonds, a Turkish-American, was hired by the FBI soon after Sept. 11 and given top-secret security clearance to translate some of the reams of documents seized by FBI agents who, for the past year, have been rounding up suspected terrorists across the United States and abroad.

Edmonds says that to her amazement, from the day she started the job, she was told repeatedly by one of her supervisors that there was no urgency – that she should take longer to translate documents so that the department would appear overworked and understaffed. That way, it would receive a larger budget for the next year.

“We were told by our supervisors that this was the great opportunity for asking for increased budget and asking for more translators,” says Edmonds. “And in order to do that, don’t do the work and let the documents pile up so we can show it and say that we need more translators and expand the department.”

Edmonds says that the supervisor, in an effort to slow her down, went so far as to erase completed translations from her FBI computer after she’d left work for the day.

(Via World Wide Rant). Homeland security has been a joke since day one. Is it better now that Tom Ridge and the Department of Homeland Security have taken over? Nope. He’s off engaging in bureaucratic mission creep by chasing “child predators.” What does that have to do with terrorism?

My TechCentralStation column will have a lot more about this.

UPDATE: Michael Demmons notes that the Democrats didn’t speak up when six competent translators were fired because they were gay, making it unlikely they’ll complain about mere budget-padding. Good point.

ANOTHER UPDATE: WyethWire says that some Democrats objected. Is that responsive to Demmons point above? I link, you decide. But it’s not as if they were making attack ads on the subject. That’s saved for other topics.

YEAH, I KNOW, I HAVEN’T BLOGGED MUCH TODAY: We’ve done a spell of spring cleaning at the InstaPundit household, and various other family activities have had priority. But hey, there’s a lot of new stuff over at Virginia Postrel’s page, and Charles Murtaugh has a lot of new stuff up, too.

And here’s an indication that war is near: Civil Reserve Air Fleet activation.

Meanwhile, don’t miss Colbert King’s thoughts on Harry Belafonte and Colin Powell, in light of Powell’s Security Council speech.

UPDATE: Okay, as I dip lightly into my ocean of email, here are a couple more worth reading: an indication that Homeland Security is still a joke, with armed uniformed Cubans not being noticed until after they’ve landed and given themselves up, and Steven Den Beste’s thoughts on the latest French diplomatic counteroffensive.

Den Beste’s worried about it. I’m not. First, I wouldn’t be surprised if bombs started falling before this jells (see above). But more importantly, the argument has now shifted: the question is now not whether Iraq should be occupied, but by whom. American troops? Or the French army?

Some questions answer themselves. Though it would serve the French right if we waved them in with bands playing, and with a warning that if Saddam does anything untoward, they’d best duck.

Of course, the French will abandon this when they realize that it was originally an American idea. Unless this is all some sort of devious diplomatic ballet. . . . Nah. Couldn’t be.

BRETT GLASS REPORTS that Denver is using antiterrorist measures to collect on traffic tickets.

It’s a parody but probably won’t be for long. That’s usually how these things work.

Homeland security is a joke. And not a funny one, despite Glass’s best efforts.