Three Way News
Your Source. For everything. Really.
Contributors
- Hammer
- Jambo
- Libby Mae
Current Poll
Recurring features
Hammer's Favorites
- Dobson v. Sponge-Bob
- Calvin, the nest egg
- Pat's predictions
- Bachmann spins Cupertino
- 205 atheists assume the bench
- Fox spins Oil for Food
- Fact check: highest taxed state
- Gen. Myers v. Reality
- Janice Rogers Brown
- Killing Field
- Kline hates Big Bird
- Vote Luca Brasi!
- Cornyn's Stalinist Supreme Court
- Rumsfeld's hidden metrics
Jambo's Favories
- Dolphin research updates
- We all shine on
- If you have to write...
- Columnist NY Times should have
- Truth about taxes
- Fourth of July
- Movie objects
- Lost in supermarket
- Dysfunctional Farmer Labor party
- Punks you hated
- Some preacher from east
- Winning issues
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Threat levels
Jambo was wondering, so I checked. According to the feds:The threat level did not change all that much in 2004. It looks like 2003 was the far busier year. There were two advisories toward the end of the Summer of 2004. The first warned that terrorists might use heavy commercial vehicles, but did not raise the threat level. The second, on August 1, raised the threat level for the financial districts of New York and D.C.
There was more activity in 2003. The threat level was raised March 17, lowered April 16, raised May 20, and lowered May 30.
The Homeland Security Department's web site is not great, so I might be missing some threat change events. I'll poke around more. It looks like we've been mostly save since the election, but it also looks like the threat level was not changed nearly as much as I would have guessed in 2004. Perhaps Ridge realized that the color scheme had become laughably irrelevant due to the machinations of 2003. Or, perhaps Ridge was too busy giving stump speeches to work the Homeland Security Threat Level Manipulator 3000(tm).
2 Comments:
Hmm, I thought there was more activity in 2004 as well. Thus the original question about the possible political motives behind the raised threat levels in 2004. Maybe I am just remembering politically timed talk about terrorism without an actual raising of the threat level. The whole subject came up after I heard a story on NPR where a guest mentioned Tom Ridge breaking the news about newly discovered intel (that they had had for several years) the night after the Democratic convention. Not only was the intl old, it was misleading and Ridge knew it.
By 
, at
11:08 AM
Tom Ridge was out campaigning for Bush throughout 2003. He spent a lot of time issuing dire warnings which were, in fact, thinly veiled threats about electing Kerry. He also released official information with questionable timing. There's no fighting that. The Dems need to own national security. No more trying to close the gap -- it's time to aim higher, by advocating a smarter, more aggressive war against terror rather than tragic sideshows like Iraq.
<< Home
