Hold that alert!
A lot of people jumped on Howard Dean for saying the heightened terror alerts may have been politically motivated. But as usual, the media missed the most important part of what was said. Here it is:

"If this information was three years old, and if this Al Qaeda operative, the most recent capture, was on July 13, that means that this administration knew about this at least three weeks ago, that the information was three years old, that they could have chosen any date they wanted to reveal this to the public," Dean said on MSNBC. "Isn't it unusual they might choose two days after the Democratic National Convention, when John Kerry was in the middle of his bounce?"

Exactly. If it was so urgent that the public have this information, why wasn't it released within a few days of its discovery? Probably the same reason the record deficit wasn't announced until the Friday after the Democratic convention.