Thanks to beige_alert for pointing this one out:
Come One, Come All, Join the Terror Target List
It reads like a tally of terrorist targets that a child might have written: Old MacDonald’s Petting Zoo, the Amish Country Popcorn factory, the Mule Day Parade, the Sweetwater Flea Market and an unspecified “Beach at End of a Street.”
[…]
The database is used by the Homeland Security Department to help divvy up the hundreds of millions of dollars in antiterrorism grants each year, including the program announced in May that cut money to New York City and Washington by 40 percent, while significantly increasing spending for cities including Louisville, Ky., and Omaha.
“We don’t find it embarrassing,” said the department’s deputy press secretary, Jarrod Agen. “The list is a valuable tool.”
But the audit says that lower-level department officials agreed that some older information in the inventory “was of low quality and that they had little faith in it.”
“The presence of large numbers of out-of-place assets taints the credibility of the data,” the report says.
In addition to the petting zoo, in Woodville, Ala., and the Mule Day Parade in Columbia, Tenn., the auditors questioned many entries, including “Nix’s Check Cashing,” “Mall at Sears,” “Ice Cream Parlor,” “Tackle Shop,” “Donut Shop,” “Anti-Cruelty Society” and “Bean Fest.”
Obviously, the terrorists know that if they can disrupt the Mule Day parade in Columbia, TN, a wave of fear will culminate in the cancellation of the National Hollerin’ Contest in Spivy’s Corner, NC, and our very way of life will be destroyed. Either that, or the government is trying to very cleverly provide the terrorists with disinformation, drawing them away from the real targets. Which might work, if the terrorists were all complete idiots.
In the words of Lily Tomlin: “I try to be cynical, but it’s so hard to keep up.”