By popular demand

I guess I'm not allowed to quit. Anyway . . .

Here's an education-related story for you. It's an axiom now that every time the Bush re-election effort starts losing steam, there's a terror alert soon to follow. This week, after Bush's dismal debate performance, Cheney's lies at his own debate, and the prospect of a dismal jobs report (which turns out to be true--listen to MaxSpeak), the terror alert was right on schedule. The target this time? The children.

Won't somebody please think of the children!

The alert was based on the school siege in Beslan a couple months back; terrorists, they say, could be planning the same thing here. And, though they say today's news is "not related" to that alert (an alert, again, "not based on specific intelligence"), the release of this new information just adds fuel to a fire.

Turns out that our guys in Iraq--that country which has not attacked us and which we know was growing less likely to attack us--found a CD-ROM "containing photographs, layouts and other material pertaining to American schools in six states." "Oh no," you might think, "the terrorists will infiltrate our schools and, Masterminds-style, commit horrendous acts of barbarity!"

Except for one thing: "A Department of Homeland Security official said the intelligence community determined there was no threat." So why the alert? Why the panic? Why the ruckus, if you will?

Security Moms, obviously. Bush needs to win women if he expects to have a chance of winning. More women vote than men, and they tend to vote Dem. In fact, data show that the again-safe lead Kerry has in New Jersey may be solely due to women.

Now, Security Moms may not actually exist:

"[I]f any security moms do exist, they seem to be picking Kerry over Bush. Nearly every poll shows that women are more likely than men to think that Kerry will do a better job of handling Iraq, the war on terror and foreign relations than will Bush. If anything, polls show that the gender gap is larger on security issues than domestic ones, suggesting that Kerry actually does better among women on these issues than does Bush.

Bush has to believe that these Securty Moms do exist, though; he even has Margaret Carlson and Frank Luntz pimping the idea for him. If they don't exist, they can't vote for him and he loses. But maybe, just maybe, if he can convince the moms of this country in the next few days that those scary dark-skinned people have blueprints to your child's school, he can pull out the squeaker.

Oh, but here's the funny part. This CD they've found with school plans? Belongs to a guy planning schools: "[I]t could not be established that this person had any ties to terrorism. He did have a connection to civic groups doing planning for schools in Iraq."