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Feds Cut Anti-Terror Funding in NYC, D.C.

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Posted on Jun 1, 2006

The Department of Homeland Security slashed anti-terrorism money for Washington and New York in favor of cities like Jacksonville and Sacramento. Stunner: “A DHS risk scorecard for the city asserted that the home of the Empire State Building and the Brooklyn Bridge has ‘zero’ national monuments or icons.”


Washington Post:

The Department of Homeland Security yesterday slashed anti-terrorism money for Washington and New York, part of an immediately controversial decision to reduce grant funds for major urban areas in the Northeast while providing more to mid-size cities from Jacksonville to Sacramento.

The announcement that the two cities targeted on Sept. 11, 2001, would suffer 40 percent reductions in urban security funds prompted outrage from lawmakers and local officials in both areas, who questioned the wisdom of cutting funds so deeply for cities widely recognized as prime terrorist targets. The decision came less than five months after Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff unveiled changes in the grants plan intended to focus funding on areas facing the gravest risk of attack.

Potential targets outside the Northeast also took painful hits, including New Orleans, San Diego and Phoenix. New Orleans’s grants for security and disaster preparedness were cut in half even as it struggles to rebuild after Hurricane Katrina.

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By Bluestocking, June 1, 2006 at 8:04 pm Link to this comment
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Speaking as a longtime resident of New York City, there are in my opinion no words strong enough to adequately describe what an utterly appalling outrage this is. This is an affrontery, an INSULT—a slap in the face and a stab in the back to every man, woman, and child of this great city. Only two years after Dubya brought a caravanserai of neocons to this city for the Republican National Convention and exploited 9-11 for all it was worth so that he could get re-elected, the Bush administration has decided that we really don’t matter that much??? INGRATE! HYPOCRITE! Thanks for nuttin’, Dubya!  Bush is always running his mouth off about terrorism and the need for security, but he’s not “walking the talk’—not by cutting funds to port cities like New York and New Orleans and leaving them even MORE vulnerable than they already are.

NO ICONS IN NEW YORK?? Puh-leeeeeeeze..what sort of icons do Kentucky or Wisconsin have that represent the United States the way that the Statue of Liberty does?? Oh, wait a minute…I get it. The Statue Of Liberty is too closely associated with immigration—it’s not POLITICALLY CORRECT anymore! Could this possibly have anything to do with the fact that New York is a “blue state” while Kentucky is a “red state”? I mean, let’s be realistic here—what is the statistical likelihood that Islamic terrorists are going to attack KENTUCKY? And for that matter…what about DC, for crying out loud? The Capitol Building, the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial? You can’t GET images much more iconic than that and our federal government is BASED there—yet their funding got cut too.

Are we still certain that the President is entirely compos mentis? I for one am inclined to wonder. Forget about the coffee…wake up and smell the freaking Thorazine, people! If I were anymore suspicious and paranoid than this administration has already encouraged me to become, I might be inclined to think that there’s more to this than meets the eye…that we’re being deliberately left vulnerable to another hit before the election so that Bush and the GOP can regain their flagging popularity. I wouldn’t put it past them—hell, I consider these folks capable of virtually ANYTHING at this point. I keep trying to convince myself that things can’t possibly get any worse…and then along comes Dubya to prove me wrong.

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