In the DHS grant listings to be released today, dozens of cities will receive less anti-terror money this year than last, Associated Press’ Devlin Barrett reports. DHS will spend $220 million next year on Lower Manhattan’s “ring of steel,” sources tell The New York Daily News’ James Gordon Meek. In 2005, DHS bought El Paso County a $246,000 armored vehicle designed to meet “everything from weapons of mass destruction to natural disasters. Since then, it’s been used 52 times for ordinary police work,” The Colorado Springs Gazette’s Pam Zubeck relates.

Feds: Responding to GAO warnings, congressional Dems want DHS to suspend a new threat alert system until the program is retooled to meet state and local needs, The Wall Street Journal’s Siobhan Gorman relates. Lawmakers are scrutinizing DHS’s role in Maryland State Police spying on activists, “raising concerns that the operations were supported with federal dollars,” The Baltimore Sun’s Laura Smitherman and Matthew Hay Brown recount. Returning warriors can expect friendlier treatment under an agreement reached by TSA, FAA and Pentagon to avoid a repeat of last fall’s stranding of a troop plane on the Oakland tarmac, The Washington Times’ Audrey Hudson reports. Since beginning a series of investigative reports on TSA — including its mushrooming watch-list — CNN’s Drew Griffin has found himself on that list, The Raw Story says — and see CNN, again, on a solon’s press for an inquiry into the matter.

McBama: It’s become increasingly clearer “that Obama’s capacities as a national strategist — the most important qualification for a commander in chief — far outshine McCain’s,” Harold Meyerson maintains in The Washington Post. “Obama is right on regional strategy, but shaky on how to implement it. McCain seems out of touch with shifting Mideast realities, and too linked to Bush visions of reshaping the region,” The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Trudy Rubin weighs. “Both candidates are embracing, rather than challenging, the fundamental irrationality of Bush’s ‘war on terror,’ which substitutes hysteria for rational analysis,” Creators Syndicate’s Robert Scheer slams. “We should be asking the presidential candidates: Is our war in Afghanistan ending terrorism, or provoking it?” Howard Zinn urges in The Boston Globe.

The water’s edge:Speaking in Berlin yesterday, Obama summoned Europeans and Americans together to “defeat terror and dry up the well of extremism that supports it,” MSNBC mentions. “We are informed by Aaron Klein that one or more of the worst terrorist gangs value Obama so much they are deploying their forces to protect the visiting Obama” in Israel, Emanuel A. Winston confides via NewsReleaseWire. “Many Palestinians are beginning to hope that the Democratic candidate might really represent change they can believe in. And some Israelis are starting to fear exactly the same thing,” The Toronto Globe and Mail mentions. How can anyone who “even just picks up a newspaper now and then fail to know that Czechoslovakia doesn’t exist as an entity anymore or that Pakistan and Iraq do not share a border,” BuzzFlash assails McCain.

State and local: More than 15 DHS facilities in the D.C. area hope to speed the daily sign-in for civilian employees with a new security system, The Washington Examiner mentions. Having unanimously voted to create a DHS last month, with no public discussion, the Niagara County Legislature now entertains second thoughts, The Buffalo News notes. Alabama’s homeland chief told a House field hearing this week that addressing attacks or disasters in rural America could be hampered by manpower and funding shortages, The Athens (Ala.) News Courier relays. “In many cases, taking a police officer off the street for [counterterror] training means there will be no police officers on the street,” The Fort Payne (Ala.) Times-Journal, relatedly, critiques.

Bugs ‘n bombs: “We’ve all seen the same movies — a government lab in your backyard. Movies with conspiracy theories,” Durham’s Independent Weeklyquotes a DHSer making light of North Carolinians’ concerns about hosting a bio-terror lab. The next president should promote laws to require greater terror-proofing of chemical plants, a Washington Times op-ed asserts. Hawaii’s emergency response was tested Tuesday with a scenario at Honolulu’s airport featuring an inbound airliner carrying passengers exposed to avian flu, the Advertiser advises. Tuberculosis cases continue to fall in the United States but some immigrants have disturbingly high rates of the disease,APsees a study saying in a call for more aggressive action. Kazakhstan plans to move 300 tons of spent nuclear fuel, raising obvious concerns, The WashTimes also reports.

Coming and going: A man arrested after trying to board a Southwest Airlines flight with a box cutter concealed inside a hardcover book has been given a year’s probation, The Tampa Tribune tells. “Hundreds of foreigners are being allowed to work in high security parts of Britain’s airports without passing proper criminal record checks,” The Daily Telegraph has a government report fretting. Security is getting tighter on Canadian ferries, “but it’s nowhere near that of the ferry system in the United States,” The Toronto Globe and Mail mentions. “In a post-9/11 environment, the government wants to be seen to be pursuing a hard line,” a former Irish Republican Army man tells The Houston Press in a piece on the threat DHS poses to some 15 released IRA prisoners living here. Smugglers tried to use Hurricane Dolly as a cover in at least three attempts to move drugs or illegal aliens through Texas, CNN quotes Border Patrollers.

Courts and rights: One of the Fort Dix Six defendants has sent the trial judge a letter stating his innocence and praying for a just outcome, The Newark Star-Ledger notes. The fourth day of Osama bin Laden’s ex-driver’s Guantanamo tribunal opened yesterday with him apologizing for a disruption the day before, USA Today tells — while The National Review disputes the notion that Salim Hamdan is a small fry. The judge in the trial of convicted 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui says she told jurors that they made the right decision in sparing his life, AP reports. A naturalized U.S. citizen accused of helping to lead an Iranian terrorist group must face trial, AP reports. A high court ruling this week moved a radical Brit imam a step closer to facing trial in the United States on conspiracy charges, The New York Times tells.

Pakghanistan: “The future of Afghanistan is the key to our success in the global war on terror,” The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review quotes the Army Secretary. Strong suggestions by the United States that it could resort to unilateral intervention against jihadists in Pakistan are generating increasing anxiety there, the Times tells — while Agence France-Presse has the ruling coalition insisting Pakistan will not be used as a base for terrorism nor will attacks on Pakistan be tolerated. Washington’s real aim “is to push the armed forces of Pakistan to the wall, get the control of nuclear arsenals and use bogey of ‘Islamic terrorism’ for the containment of China,” Pakistan’s Post posits. The United States plans to shift nearly $230 million in anti-terror aid to upgrading Pakistan’s F-16s, which critics say have no counterterror role, the Times tells. A senior al Qaeda leader, meanwhile, has urged Pakistanis to help Afghans fight U.S.-led forces, AP reports.

The Silver Scream: “America’s profound disconnect from the Iraq War has been nowhere more evident than in Hollywood . . . [T]here has yet to be a truly memorable or defining movie about the conflict,” Ethan Brown essays for Mother Jones. “Holy terror! Has the new Batman flick plundered its plot from 9/11? The imagery here is blatant,” The Times of London’s Jeff Dawson essays. That movie “turns the Manichean morality of comic books — pure good vs. pure evil — into a bleak post-9/11 allegory about how terror (and, make no mistake, Heath Ledger’s Joker is a terrorist) breaks down those reassuring moral categories,” Slate’s Dana Stevens reviews. Batman represents “a darker response to the terrorist threat. He sets up a form of domestic surveillance . . . He uses torture to uncover the details of an ongoing plot,” The New York Times editorial board blogs. Once “a city to which any self-respecting American movie buff might like to make a [pilgrimage, Casablanca is] under siege of suicide bombings,” Jonathan Kiefer writes in a Charleston City Paper look at “What does ‘Casablanca’ mean in a post-9/11 world?”

Kulture Kanyon: The popular culture needs its current bevy of superheroes, because “our space-age, wireless technology didn’t keep terrorists from taking down the World Trade Center,” an academic tells The Denton (Texas) Record-Chronicle’s Lucinda Breeding. “There’s a kind of ... intellectual terror in this town. People are terrorized; they’re afraid to say what they think,” David Horowitz hyperbolizes to The Washington Times’ Amy Fagan for a piece on Hollywood’s closeted conservatives. The author of “right-leaning thrillers that fret about militant Islam,” Brad Thor’s latest, “The Last Patriot” (Atria) “is about the hunt for an ancient secret that will do to radical Islam what Raid does to cockroaches,” Dwight Garner encapsulates in The New York Times Book Review. “It would be easy to denounce the treatment of David Addington and Omar Khadr as an example of moral equivalence. But moral equivalence would be a step up for David,” William McGurn writes in a Wall Street Journalattack on press coverage of terror topics.

They tried to make me go to rehab but I said ‘no, no, no’: “A major alert erupted at Heathrow airport today when Amy Winehouse stepped through the security scanner and did not set off any alarms,” The Spoof spoofs. “Speaking of the incident, which baffled airport staff, security chief Keith Clamshell said: ‘This is highly unusual. We are using some of the most advanced and sophisticated equipment in the world. For example, this machine here can detect a speck of heroin smaller than buckwheatsbutt’s brain.’ Winehouse was detained by airport police until the machine had been repaired and recalibrated. The singer was then arrested and charged with carrying 58 kilos of cocaine in her carry-on bag, and two packages of uncut heroin in her knickers. When she was later released on bail, her lawyer said, ‘There must be some mistake. Amy never wears any knickers.’”