Department of Porkland Security

In the spirit of Gerald Ford the new Homeland Security budget sent a clear message: DHS to New York: Drop Dead!

DHS chief Michael Chertoff announced that the anti-terror budget for New York City will be slashed by 40.1 percent. At the same time the budgets for some cities hitherto not known as prime targets for terrorist attacks were raised - Louisville, Kentucky + 41.2 %, Omaha, Nebraska + 38,8 %, Jacksonville, Florida 26 % etc. etc.

Mayor Bloomberg commented: "When you stop a terrorist, they have a map of New York City in their pocket. They don't have a map of any of the other 46 places or 45 places [that get funding]." He left no doubt, that it's pork barrelling that’s at play here: "We tried to do an analysis of some of the moneys and whether or not they were given out for political reasons, and in fact in many of the places where they got money — but arguably there's no threat — there are close connections either at the Senate level or the House level.“

In the meantime the Daily News got hold of documents, which revealed the criteria for the budget assessments. Turns out DHS classified New York as a city with no significant landmarks or national icons. Bloomberg's seen it too: "All I can tell you is if you look at their worksheets, and it says that New York City doesn't have any high visibility national icons ... I mean, I don't have to list the Brooklyn Bridge, the United Nations, Rockefeller Center, the Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building and the Stock Exchange."

The document did note a commuter population of more than 16 million around the city twice struck by fundamentalist terrorists and twice more targeted in plots halted in pre-operational stages. It noted the more than eight million residents and the largest rail ridership in the nation - more than five million. It is those commuters and rail riders who are expected to suffer most from the cuts since mass transit is listed on most DHS alerts as the top terror target.

Now the Daily News calls for Chertoff's resignation. Might be a good idea, before we get Katrina'd up the Hudson. Not that we New Yorkers aren't willing to support the war against terror, that still fills us with fear everytime the subways stops dead in a tunnel or makes us duck for a milisecond, when a jetliner flies by just a little to low or makes us worry, when there's stand-offs with apocalyptic leaders of Islamic nations harboring nuclear ambitions. But when some bureacrat cronies start to treat us like cannon fodder, we get a bit testy. Maybe secession is the solution. Make New York City a protectorate of the E.U., kind of a Hong Kong of the Western hemisphere. Hey - if New York City was a country, it would be the 17th largest economic power in the world. New Yorkers generate a GDP of 500 billion a year. That's more than Switzerland and almost as much as Russia. Let's see, how long the US would survive without us.

Farewell, au revoir, leb wohl, hasta nunca!