James Joyner at Outside the Beltway just yesterday had a post about why we’ll never see the terror alert system will never be anything other than yellow or orange (i.e., it’s always going to rest on just two out of five of its possible levels). Today, we have a red alert being used for (what I think is) the first time. Of course, it’s limited in scope to planes coming from the UK to the US. Maybe in the same vein, we could finally lower the terror alert to blue in a limited scope (maybe we can set the terror alert to blue for people in the international space since, as far as we know, jihadis have yet to make escape velocity — at least not with all pieces of them at once).
Anyway, I still think James’s logic was pretty much right… if just slightly off as today’s events have shown.
And he’s certainly right about my Homeland Security Alert Levels parody.