Pun Salad

''I said, 'Wait a second, I know this guy,' " said Fields, a big baseball fan. ''Schilling . . . Schilling, there's only one Schilling I know, and he's a baseball player! It blew my mind."

Solemn vow: I will never boo Curt, or even say anything remotely uncomplimentary about Curt, even if he never throws another strike.

The response by DHS and FEMA was abysmal, and demonstrated how little we've been getting for all our security spending. It's unconscionable that we're wasting our money on national ID cards, airline passenger profiling, and foreign invasions rather than emergency response at home: communications, training, transportation, coordination.

There's plenty of criticism that can be aimed at other places than DHS and FEMA, but Schneier's main point seems on-target. It smells very much as if homeland security spending is aimed politically, rather than at things that might actually save lives.

Since such spending typically has "broad bi-partisan support", it's particularly hard to make it a visible political issue, since neither party has anything to gain by complaining that the money they had a hand in spending was wasted.