Holy CRAP. From the first presidental debate:

KERRY: Jim, let me tell you exactly what I’ll do. And there are a long list of things. First of all, what kind of mixed message does it send when you have $500 million going over to Iraq to put police officers in the streets of Iraq, and the president is cutting the COPS program in America?

What kind of message does it send to be sending money to open firehouses in Iraq, but we’re shutting firehouses who are the first- responders here in America.

The president hasn’t put one nickel, not one nickel into the effort to fix some of our tunnels and bridges and most exposed subway systems. That’s why they had to close down the subway in New York when the Republican Convention was there. We hadn’t done the work that ought to be done.

The president — 95 percent of the containers that come into the ports, right here in Florida, are not inspected.

Civilians get onto aircraft, and their luggage is X-rayed, but the cargo hold is not X-rayed.

Does that make you feel safer in America?

This president thought it was more important to give the wealthiest people in America a tax cut rather than invest in homeland security. Those aren’t my values. I believe in protecting America first.

And long before President Bush and I get a tax cut — and that’s who gets it — long before we do, I’m going to invest in homeland security and I’m going to make sure we’re not cutting COPS programs in America and we’re fully staffed in our firehouses and that we protect the nuclear and chemical plants.

The president also unfortunately gave in to the chemical industry, which didn’t want to do some of the things necessary to strengthen our chemical plant exposure.

And there’s an enormous undone job to protect the loose nuclear materials in the world that are able to get to terrorists. That’s a whole other subject, but I see we still have a little bit more time.

Let me just quickly say, at the current pace, the president will not secure the loose material in the Soviet Union — former Soviet Union for 13 years. I’m going to do it in four years. And we’re going to keep it out of the hands of terrorists.

LEHRER: Ninety-second response, Mr. President.

BUSH: I don’t think we want to get to how he’s going to pay for all these promises. It’s like a huge tax gap. Anyway, that’s for another debate.

So, Mr President, you can bankrupt the nation for a useless war in Iraq, or spend money deploying a National Missile Defense system which has failed to perform even with scripted tests, but as far as actual homeland security…well, that just might cost too much money. Unfsckingbelievable.

Now I will direct you to go and read all of Trudy Lieberman’s eye-opening article Imagining Evil in this month’s Columbia Journalism Review.

What about those unscreened cargo holds, anyways?

Last May in Indianapolis, the I-Team investigators at WISH-TV presented their viewers with a frightening bit of news: the belly of an ordinary passenger plane carries commercial cargo that probably has never been screened.

Using government reports, interviews with air safety experts, and their own test of packages containing questionable items that they sent through the mail on airplanes, reporters at the CBS affiliate documented a gaping hole in air safety. They showed that federal legislation passed after 9/11 required the screening of all mail and cargo carried on commercial passenger jets — cargo that could carry explosives, dirty bombs, or deadly biological agents. But they then used the government’s own investigations to show that those screening procedures had never been put into effect, largely because of industry resistance.

The team’s revelations made something of a mockery of the elaborate screening procedures that passengers endure at the nation’s 445 commercial airports. Yet WISH-TV’s six-part series on air-cargo safety, which began with an anonymous tip, is a rarity. CJR searched for stories on air-cargo safety in the mainstream media, including national and regional newspapers, news magazines, and major broadcast outlets, and found that although news outlets mentioned the problem from time to time, they often did so in the context of other stories. Time magazine, for example, ran a survey of homeland security vulnerabilities in its August 2 edition, in the wake of the 9/11 commission report; the part about air cargo was limited to a single sentence.

In June, WISH-TV saw an opportunity to show viewers the difference between the security talk and the political walk, and followed up on the story. That month the U.S. House of Representatives defeated — by a vote of 211 to 191 — a bill that would finally have ensured inspection of all cargo shipped on passenger planes. The station reported that Indiana’s House delegation voted against the bill, and included comments from one member, who had earlier told the I-Team that he found unchecked cargo “troubling.