TSA is planning a massive expansion of aviation security that for the first time will regulate thousands of private planes now flying with no security rules, USA Today’s Thomas Frank relates. TSA’s hiring — and then firing — of a disgraced Minnesota securicrat “is raising fresh questions about the effectiveness of DHS,” The Minneapolis Star Tribune’s Tony Kennedy recounts — while The Duluth News Tribunerelays welcome word that DHS plans to start vetting potential hires with a Google search.

Feds: Striking the right balance between contractor and government employees has been a longstanding challenge for DHS, which has even outsourced its quadrennial review, Washington Technology’s Alice Lipowicz surveys — and see a think-tank report urging a merging of homeland and national security budgeting and oversight. CBP has spent more than $51 million over the past four summers flying nearly 64,000 illegal immigrants home to Mexico City, The Arizona Republic’s Brady McCombs mentions — and check CQ’s own Jeff Stein on “the billions being thrown at germ war research labs — with insufficient attention to security.”

McBama: Campaign terror talk “has tended to focus almost exclusively on the two war zones, [but] neither candidate is paying enough attention to another key element in counterterrorism policy: homeland security,” FOX News’ James Rosen cites an expert. Everything is “secondary to winning the war in which our nation’s survival is at stake... I am convinced that John McCain was born to be Commander in Chief in this war,” Bruce Herschensohn promotes in The American Spectator. The people who applaud [Barack Obama’s] rhetoric . . . dishonor every veteran who has ever fought for freedom from socialism, fascism, terrorism and every other form of tyranny,” Henry Lamb bleats for WorldNetDaily.

Poly-ticks: “An active, engaged VP can step into the leadership of the country if the situation arises — even more critical in a world rife with terrorism,” a Richmond Times-Dispatch commentary contends. Aubrey Immelman, contesting a Minnesota GOP congressional primary, “served in the South African Defense Force and said he gained some experience in counterterrorism there,” The St. Cloud Times profiles — while The Georgetown Record spotlights Bay State GOP Senate contender Jeff Beatty, “a former CIA counterterrorism officer.” During the middle period of the Iraq War, comedian and Dem contestant for a Minnesota U.S. Senate seat Al Franken “took many positions with which he now disagrees,” The MinnPostpoints out.

State and local: The community around Michigan’s Selfridge Air National Guard Base welcomes a new tenant: a CBP air wing, The Detroit News notes. “New York has largely lost its title as the terrorism-trial capital,” status now owned by the Guantanamo terror court complex, The New York Times spotlights. Those on Wisconsin’s “front lines are worried the progress made so far to ensure people’s safety after Sept. 11 will come to a standstill” as DHS grants continue to dwindle, Madison’s Channel 3000 broadcasts. When Connecticut authorities opposed an anthrax vaccine that allegedly sickened soldiers, they never imagined they were motivating the vaccine’s inventor now implicated in the 2001 anthrax mailings, The Hartford Courant recounts.

Bugs ‘n bombs: “If I were the terrorist, anthrax is the agent I’d be very interested in,” the Institute for Bio-Security’s director tells the Post-Dispatch — as AP is told how the an al Qaeda chemical weapons expert’s death in a U.S. missile strike hobbles its ambitions to build WMDs. The deportation of a Croatian hijacker after 30 years behind U.S. bars has agitated victims and investigators who believe him implicated in the bloody 1975 LaGuardia bombing, the Times tells. Many among the 5,000 Africans injured in the dual U.S. embassy bombings 10 years ago last week feel “the U.S. government should compensate them for their shattered lives,” CNN reports. A U.S.-Canada border crossing was closed Sunday night after Canadian authorities reported a bomb had been left at the Blaine Peace Arch, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports.

Bid-ness: The company that employed the nine firefighters killed in a California chopper crash “is regarded as a national leader in the private fire-combat business,” The Oregonian spotlights. “Numerous private civilian contractors have died in Iraq under KBR’s watch, yet the firm is immune [to] U.S. law,” The Washington Independent informs. U.S. companies’ supply of high-tech surveillance gear to Beijing, raises the question of how it might be used after the Games, BusinessWeeksurveys. An $18.2 million DHS contract for a foot-and-mouth vaccine is an ace in the hole for GenVac — which posted a $6.5 million loss this past quarter, The Washington Business Journal spotlights. Veratect’s bio-threat early warning services “enable corporations to not only better defend themselves, but to also find strategic opportunities to grow and become more profitable amidst the disruption,” CPI Financial profiles.

Coming and going: People with firearms licenses still can’t take guns into non-secure areas of Atlanta’s airport, the Journal-Constitution has a federal judge ruling yesterday. A South Korean is accused of an e-mail threatening to blow up Air China planes, which affected four flights last week, Agence France-Presse reports. The cold reception given to ICE’s rollout of a three-week pilot self-deportation program is an apt metaphor for the current state of immigration enforcement efforts, the Post surveys. Travelers who’ve had recent radiation treatment account for the “vast majority” of radiological alarms at border terror portals, along with people transporting tile, kitty litter, granite and bananas, Newsweek notes. More than 90 percent of guns seized at the border or after incidents in Mexico have been traced to the United States, the Los Angeles Times surveys.

Talking terror: Largely abandoning post-9/11 efforts to explain America to the Muslim world, State now plans “to promote alternatives to radical violent extremism and nurture the local forces deemed best suited to countering it,” The Christian Science Monitor’s Howard LaFranchi spotlights. “A new, government-linked think tank with an expansive mandate may be the best mechanism for incubating strategies to fight terror,” Jonathan Stevenson urges in The Wall Street Journal. “It is hard to make the case that the invasion of Iraq has allowed the United States to fight terrorists overseas rather than here on the CONUS. If anything, that war has made the United States less secure,” Homeland Security Watch’s Jonah Czerwinski thumbsucks. “Perhaps ironically, much of the internal strife within al Qaeda can be traced back to its greatest success,” Macleans’ Phillipe Gohier writes, recalling a jihadi cleric’s 2001 characterization of 9/11 as “a catastrophe for the Muslims” — and see Slate for Daniel Byman’s op-ed marking the group’s 20^th anniversary Monday.

Strategerizing: Pentagon chief Robert Gates’s anticipation of the day when terrorism is just a law-enforcement “nuisance,” comes “dangerously close to the position that got John F. Kerry in trouble in 2004, William D. Hartung comments in The Boston Globe. “After studying the record of 648 terrorist groups between 1968 and 2006, we’ve found that military force has rarely been effective in defeating this enemy,” a Christian Science Monitorop-ed maintains. Russia’s invasion of Ossetia as the Olympics’ pageant unfolded in China offered “the best possible illustration of why Islamic terrorism may one day be considered the least of our problems,” aPost columnist comments. “Think you have what it takes to join the Islamic resistance? Here’s how Hamas militants in Gaza have been spending their summer,” a Foreign Policy photo essay invites.

Courts and rights: A Pakistani woman suspected of al Qaeda links and accused of trying to kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan was granted urgent medical attention by a U.S. judge yesterday, Reuters reports.Defense attorneys for four men accused of plotting to blow up fuel lines at JFK Airport will soon be traveling to the Caribbean to conduct their own investigations, Trinidad and Tobago’s Newsday notes. “The United States has been in a constitutional crisis since the Civil War,” a constitutional scholar assures a Chico News & Review reporter weighing the consequences of Bush’s terror-era doctrines. “Nothing that Bush is even alleged to have done comes close to matching Abraham Lincoln’s decision to suspend habeas corpus during the Civil War,” The American Spectator adds.

Over there: State says it will retain North Korea on the terror blacklist pending verification of its nuclear programs, Bloomberg relates. In a rare English-language message, al Qaeda’s No. 2, it is believed to be, claims Pakistan is now “virtually ruled from the American Embassy,” AP reports. Two alleged Islamists accused of preparing a bomb attack went on trial in Denmark yesterday, the International Herald Tribune relays — as another AP item has three Kenyans out on bail after being charged with harboring a suspected mastermind of the 1998 embassy bombings.

Moseying on: “After having bravely endured rising fuel costs, unemployment, and a massive drought in consumer confidence, all 300 million Americans announced Monday that they will soon begin the long journey westward, abandoning their stakes in the crumbling housing market to seek the golden future that surely lies past the horizon,” The Onion reports. “Struggling to eke out a living for the past 20 decades, the U.S. populace has supported itself with odd jobs in the fur trade, tinkering, information technology, and pharmaceuticals industries, but [now] plans to strike out on its own come fall, when the weather’s cooler, hoping to make its fortune and perhaps find a little patch of soil to call its own in the sprawling wilderness between O’Hare International Airport and the Great Pacific Ocean . . . [T]he House of Representatives will begin debate on bipartisan measure H.R. 3492, declaring a state of emergency on the East Coast and providing tax breaks to those who remain behind, as soon as Congress reconvenes next month at a cabin in Rock Springs, Wyo. At press time, the approximately 2 million square miles of land that make up the American West are experiencing the most severe rash of wildfires and earthquakes in recent history.”