Tomorrow, the United States Senate’s Homeland Security Committee just might vote Tara O’Toole out of committee and send her to the floor for confirmation.

The committee may want to look again. Nominated by Janet Napolitano, there is a late breaking disparity in Ms. O’Toole’s testimony — disparate enough to suggest she is hiding some very close times to John Murtha. And the tangled web of lobbyists, high dollars, and corruption just might infiltrate the Department of Homeland Security.

Ms. O’Toole is the head of the very well respected Center for Biosecurity. According to written testimony to the United States Senate on June 10, 2009, in response to a question about ties between Ms. O’Toole’s Center for Biosecurity and a group called the Alliance for Biosecurity, Ms. O’Toole told the Senate

the Alliance for Biosecurity [is] a group initiated by the Center for Biosecurity in 2006. . . . The Center for Biosecurity receives no money from any member of the Alliance and funds all costs associated with running the Alliance out of our philanthropic funds. No biotech or pharmaceutical firm provides the Center with financial support of any kind.

Odd, in new written testimony to the Senate — testimony not even fully publicly available — Ms. O’Toole now claims there are no “financial connections” between the Center for Biosecurity and the Alliance for Biosecurity. In fact, Ms. O’Toole now disavows all connections between the Center and Alliance.

Why?

Well, let’s follow the money.

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Whether or not you agree with my politics, don’t worry: you’re probably in here somewhere.  It’s a report from last month called the “Domestic Extremism Lexicon,” and it’s quite comprehensive.  Did you know that anti-abortion protesters and animal rights activists are domestic extremists?  Yes, the same sloppy language as last time. So bad, in fact, that they tried to bury it…

Hot Air and The Daily Beast are both covering this one, and I agree with both that the categories are disturbingly broad, and cross-spectrum. The phrase “[members of group X] have been known to advocate or engage in criminal activity and plot acts of violence and terrorism to advance their extremist goals” appears far too often for comfort. The reason that this is discomforting is that it strongly implies that DHS isn’t distinguishing between (for example) animal rights activists who don’t intend to break the law to further their agenda and animal rights activists who do. Why, in fact, does DHS even care about animal rights activists who aren’t breaking the law? Or anti-abortion activists? Anti-technologists? Green anarchists? Heck, they even know that there’s several different flavors of skinheads, and they lump them all together in one big ball anyway. What gives?

Well, what gives is that we’re talking about DHS, which was created in haste: we are apparently starting to hit the ‘repent in leisure’ point. The real problem is not any one particular memo, of course. The problem is the mindset that created those memos, and I’ve yet to see any indication that people are working on fixing that mindset. This should alarm you, no matter where you stand on which status quo to disrupt: apparently just wanting to change it at all is enough to worry Homeland Security in the Obama era…

Moe Lane

Unlike Ed Morrissey I am not automatically upset at the rather gaping lack of any discussion of Islamist (or Muslim) extremists in the lexicon: I’ve read the introduction, and it suggests that there’s a separate report out there that specifically handles that particular issue. This would be logical, given that the threat from Islamist extremists to this country is greater than that of every domestic extremist group combined… but the longer it is before that report gets leaked, the worse PR it’s going to be for this administration.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Which of these is more common: Democrats abusing their positions of power to waste money, or Democrats showing they no longer take seriously the threat of terrorist attack? This scandal has them both.

House Homeland Security Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) is pushing earmarks worth millions of dollars for homeland security projects at the small Mississippi college that he attended, though the school could not explain what the earmarks are for and does not yet appear to have the capacity to provide the services that Thompson wants to fund.

In an earmark request for 2010 appropriations, Thompson’s Web site indicates that he is seeking $23 million for the “National Institute for Education and Training” at Tougaloo College for “an Operational Test and Evaluation Activity (OTEA) in Vicksburg, Mississippi…”

The money would be “an addition to existing programs” at the institutions, [Thompson's Chief of Staff Lanier] Avant said. Tougaloo “has one of the most renowned engineering programs of all the [historically black colleges and universities] in the country. … It’s not like Tougaloo is some kind of new kid on the block,” he said.

But Tougaloo does not offer an engineering major. The school’s course catalog indicates that there is not a single engineering class being taught at Tougaloo this semester. The school does have a joint program with the Georgia Institute of Technology that allows students to transfer there to get their engineering degree after finishing their liberal arts coursework at Tougaloo.

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Just got off the phone with Roy Blunt. He was calling about the Department of Homeland Security report and called it “stupid.”

He said he is pretty offended by it and we “cannot let the government get away without paying a price in public opinion,” which, he said, is really about all the Obama administration cares about right now.

He said Missouri made the same mistake claiming that Ron Paul and Bob Barr supporters, among others, needed to be monitored. Then, he said, “the feds have now madd the same stupid mistake.”

Missouri’s Governor, like the Obama administration, tried to blame the outgoing Republican administration in Missouri, but just as Congressman Blunt’s son noted, neither he nor George Bush would ever have let something like that get out of government.

This is all the Obama administration.

“People protesting taxing and spending is offensive to taxers and spenders. But it is really outrageous that the taxers and spenders would put people on a watch list because they want to restrain government spending,” Congressman Blunt said.

I totally agree and hope we continuously remind people that the Obama administration believes that people who want the government to operate within the parameters of the constitution are considered extremists.

Uh-oh:

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano avoids mention of terrorism or 9/11 in remarks prepared for her first congressional testimony since taking office, signaling a sharp change in tone from her predecessors.

Napolitano is the first homeland security secretary to drop the term “terror” and “vulnerability” from remarks prepared for delivery to the House Homeland Security Committee, according to a copy obtained by The Associated Press.

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