How Homeland Security sets its priorities

Ever wonder how Homeland Security evaluates its security investments?

Maybe you imagine dozens of super-sharp analysts, veterans and geeks alike, weighing risk and assigning probabilities, preparing carefully reasoned analyses which their superiors review and confirm.

Oops. No, that a flash from the alternate reality where Gore became President, bin Laden and Zawahiri are dead, we're not in a recession, and we didn't commit ourselves to a 1.5 trillion dollar war in Iraq.

In the Bush administration it goes more like this ...

Airport passenger screenings to be reviewed - USATODAY.com

...Chertoff's department is about to issue requirements for crews and passengers of private jets to provide their names, birthdates and other information an hour before takeoff, so they can be checked against terrorist watch lists.

The next step could be requiring that private jets be scanned and passengers screened by U.S. Customs agents overseas, Chertoff said. The procedures might be "a little inconvenient," he said, but if a bomb got into the USA on a private jet, there would be calls to "shut all private aviation off."

Chertoff said he grew more concerned about the issue last year when a senior executive of a private-jet company told him, "I don't know who the heck gets on my planes, and it worries me."...

I'm imagining Chertoff is hitting up some GOP donor at one of those $2,000 a plate dinners, and somehow this comment lodges deep in his dormant brain. Maybe it was the fine Scotch. Who knows?

Fire.

Chertoff.

Now.

Please.

Then fire his boss.