HOMELAND INSECURITY

Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., told congressional colleagues that agents stopped him from boarding airline flights five times in less than two months because his name resembled an alias used by someone on a "watch list."

The New York Times writes:

Instead of acknowledging the craggy-faced, silver-haired septuagenarian as the Congressional leader whose face has flashed across the nation's television sets for decades, the airline agents acted as if they had stumbled across a fanatic who might blow up an American airplane.

The matter was cleared up by the Department of Homeland Security -- weeks later.

If there's better evidence that the Department of Homeland Security is a feckless federal bureaucracy, I've yet to see it.

In fact, the department is little more than window dressing, as evidenced by it's "groundbreaking" announcement that al-Qaeda was casing financial centers in U.S. cities around the country -- FOUR YEARS after the fact (and conveniently as Kerry was getting relatively positive press coverage). DHS is also another bloated, slow-moving bureaucracy that has done little to effect change in either intelligence gathering or sharing.

Thankfully, the American Civil Liberties Union is suing to demand disclosure of how travelers wrongling included on the list can remove their names.