I was making myself some
breakfast, and I connected a few things. Today in Albany (where my NPR station is based), a
mosque was raided by the FBI, and they claim to have discovered a plot to acquire a surface to air missile (no reports of a launcher, or anything). It was the way it was reported that most interested me, and led me to think that what I was hearing was the future of terror alerts.
We all know that polititians use the local news to their advantage-- they make visits, and that garners a huge amount of free media for relatively little actual news value.
Local reports of terrorist goings-on likewise result in a huge amount of media, and most of that media is going to be serious examinations of how we could have someone like that in our midst, and how great it is that the kindly Feds have made our neighborhood safer.
This has the dual effect of making terrorism seem like a danger to even us provincials (everybody's a target!!!!!), and it makes it appear that the government (ably led by Bush) is on the case.
So, I'm thinking that they've scared the cities (New York and Washington) enough, and for a while now-- probably up until the convention-- there will not be any (or many) large scale Ashcroftian terror announcements. Instead, I figure that the administration has decided to shift the focus of terror alerts to the local level. I'll probably never hear about the guy arrested for purchasing bleach in Ft. Lauderdale, the similar arrests in Detroit or Portland, but I damn well will hear about the bang up job that the FBI is doing in Albany, NY.
This, of course, will make me far more amenable to having Men With Big Guns guard my way to the voting booth in November; it will also mean that I will not be outraged about the same thing happening in urban areas in swing states.
As a final comment, I made this for my mom. As you can tell, I have no artistic abilities, but I do have photoshop (thanks, government department!). Any suggestions to make it more purty (her anniversary is soon, so I thought I'd do something extra-special this year)?