Virginia homeland security funds near $60 million

Arthur Collins, executive director of the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission, which will administer the funds. “It will be put to very good use.” As we reported on….., Hampton Roads stands to benefit from an initiative by its congressman, Randy Frobes, who heads the Congressional Simulation and Modeling Caucus: Last week the caucus persuaded the House to designate simulation and modeling as critical industries, which means tha more federal money would flow to the Hampton Roads region, an area which is now regarded as a national hub for the simulation and modeling industries.

The Richmond area no longer is eligible to receive funds for high-risk urban areas, but Northern Virginia is a major beneficiary as part of the National Capital Region. The region, also encompassing Washington and suburban Maryland, will receive more than $61 million this year under the Urban Area Security Initiative, an increase of almost one-third over last year’s grants.

Northern Virginia also may benefit from a one-time award of $11.7 million under the Commerce Department program for emergency communications, but state officials aren’t sure because the federal grant announcement shows the same amount of money going to the District of Columbia. Virginia officials also were much happier than last year about statewide homeland-security grants, which increased 40 percent from last year’s awards. “I honestly did a happy dance,” said state grants coordinator Susan Mongold.

* There were suggestions that Ball borrowed the phrase from Ian Fleming’s Diamonds are Forever, in which “M,” James Bond’s boss, is heard to mutter to himself: “Nothing propinks like propinquity.” Ball, who was born in Iowa and never lost the Midwestern skepticism of foreign entanglements, was suspicious of the influence of Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinsky, and other non-native-born Americans on U.S. foreign policy. After he retired from office he did not hesitate to give expression to his views, at times in a manner that some judged to be less then gentlemanly. For example, in a famous 1972 interview with the Italian journalist and author Oriana Fallaci, Kissinger told her, “I see myself as a cowboy leading the caravan alone astride his horse, a wild west tale if you like.” A few years later, Ball, in a review he wrote of Kissinger’s first volume of memoirs, White House Years (published in 1979), reminded readers of Kissinger’s statment to Fallaci, then added: “Mr. Kissinger may not know it, but here we say wagon train, not caravan” (Kissinger, by the way, later wrote that the Fallaci interview was “the single most disastrous conversation I have ever had with any member of the press”).