{"id":7895,"date":"2006-07-10T14:06:40","date_gmt":"2006-07-10T18:06:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/7895.html"},"modified":"2006-07-10T14:06:40","modified_gmt":"2006-07-10T18:06:40","slug":"its-july-2006-do-you-know-where-your-terror-alert-level-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/its-july-2006-do-you-know-where-your-terror-alert-level-is\/","title":{"rendered":"It&#8217;s July 2006 &#8212; do you know where your terror alert level is?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Garance Franke-Ruta had <a href=\"http:\/\/www.prospect.org\/weblog\/2006\/07\/post_776.html#003131\">an item<\/a> today on an issue that&#8217;s just waiting for more attention.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Funny how we&#8217;ve only had one elevation of the national threat level since President Bush was re-elected, and how the last such alert based on &#8220;new and unusually specific information about where al-Qaeda would like to attack&#8221; was lowered on November 10, 2004. Since then we&#8217;ve had a single alert, for the rail transportation sector after the London bombings (and which was a less panic-inducing than usual, as it came with a warning that there was &#8220;no specific, credible information suggesting an imminent attack here in the United States&#8221;).<\/p>\n<p>Is America really that much safer from al-Qaeda plots than it used to be? Or has the Department of Homeland Security simply changed the threshold it uses for issuing alerts?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Or was the old threshold a joke anyway? Let&#8217;s not forget that former DHS Chief Tom Ridge explained, after leaving his post, that &#8220;there was only <a href=\"http:\/\/www.usatoday.com\/news\/washington\/2005-05-10-ridge-alerts_x.htm\">flimsy evidence<\/a> to justify raising the threat level,&#8221; which, coincidentally, happened quite a bit in 2004. Remind me, was there some kind of presidential election or something going on at the time? Something about the need for people to be afraid?<\/p>\n<p>The Boston Globe <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boston.com\/news\/nation\/washington\/articles\/2006\/07\/10\/gop_turns_its_focus_to_n_korea_terror\/\">noted today<\/a> that the GOP is putting all of its midterm-election eggs in the national security basket. Does that mean a return to threat-level orange before November? It&#8217;s tempting to think the administration would hesitate before pulling <i>too<\/i> blatant a stunt, but if desperation sinks in, I have to assume every option is on the table.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, it is a shame that the Bush gang has made cynicism the norm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Garance Franke-Ruta had an item today on an issue that&#8217;s just waiting for more attention. Funny how we&#8217;ve only had one elevation of the national threat level since President Bush was re-elected, and how the last such alert based on &#8220;new and unusually specific information about where al-Qaeda would like to attack&#8221; was lowered on [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7895"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7895\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}