It's the "new normal" start of the fall campaign season -- the heightened terror alert:

Government officials have been quietly stepping up counterterror efforts out of a growing concern that al Qaeda or similar organizations might try to capitalize on the spate of extremely high-profile events in the coming months, sources tell ABC News.

Security experts point to next month's Olympics as evidence that high-profile events attract threats of terrorism, like the one issued this past weekend by a Chinese Muslim minority group that warned of its intent to attack the Games.

Anti-terror officials in the U.S. cite this summer and fall's lineup of two major political parties' conventions, November's general election and months of transition into a new presidential administration as cause for heightened awareness and action.

This is what the Department of Homeland Security is quietly declaring a Period of Heightened Alert, or POHA, a time frame when terrorists may have more incentive to attack.

All snark aside, the government is right on this one -- certainly the Olympics have been a target for terrorism (in 1972 and again in 1996 -- remember Atlanta?) and so have the first year of new presidents, in 1993 and again in 2001. What's annoying is the way that the Bush administration politicized terror alerts leading up to the 2004 election. That makes it harder for people to take new terror alerts seriously -- even if there might be something to it.

The rumor since Monday is that Philadelphia Magazine named Attytood "best blog" or some such thing -- in my world, it doesn't exist if it's not online, so I guess I'll need to buy the magazine for myself, and so should you. If it's true, I am grateful, humble, honored, and just like you, puzzled :-).

To anyone who saw the magazine and is visiting for the first time, hi! -- I'm on "book vacation" (how's that for an oxymoron?) and the regular blogging of multple daily posts won't resume until mid-August or so. I hope you'll stick around.

There's a story that's running currently in a well-known American paper that is exactly the type of thing that critics of modern journalism -- which is most of us, nowadays -- have been arguing has been missing in today's world of shrinking newsrooms and warped priorities.

It's investigative reporting on an issue that is locally important to its readers. It's pointing up major flaws in the hometown police department. What's more, the story is a good read that's presented with all the high-tech bells and whistles that you'd want in 2008 -- in an era when news organizations need more Internet traffic to survive, it is driving a ton of traffic to their site. Rather than dump a ton of information in a large unreadable blob, like newspapers did in the 1980s when circulation started dropping, the story has been neatly re-packaged into 12 bite-sized parts.

If you've read this far, and you're one of the handful of readers around here who cares about journalism reform, you'd probably be saying "awesome" and "right on" to the newspaper involved.

Now, what if I tell you that the local city is America's city, Washington, D.C.?

And that the murder victim is Chandra Levy?

Did your heart just drop? Did your opinion instantly change? Based on the amazing amount of scorn that's being heaped on the Washington Post for running this series, it probably did. Because the Levy story was so overcovered in 2001 -- not in the Washington Post, which should be covering an unsolved local murder, but foisted on national viewers by CNN, MSNBC -- and became shorthand for the national (again, not local) media obsession with sensationalism in the months right before 9/11 -- people judge her case on emotion now, not on reason. (The other criticism, which is why is the Post writing about Levy when most unsolved murders involve blacks, is a more valid one, in my opinion,)

Reason states that an a botched probe by your local police -- and check out who was D.C. chief in 2001; it might interest Philadelphians -- is worthy of investigative reporting. But when a young murder victim becomes political shorthand for the national media's failings, it's harder for that individual to get justice. I feel bad for Chandra Levy's family.

Heh. More here.

Of course, it always helps to get good press coverage with headlines like this: "McCain Will Be in Lehigh Valley Today -- But Where?"

Unrelated...no blood in ants.

This is an open thread -- that means you guys can talk about whatever you want for the whole day. I'm writing a book. Stop annoying me. :-) 

Wachovia, one of the more prominent banks that isn't based here in Philly but happily takes our money, just announced that it lost nearly $9 billion and is laying off 6,350 workers.

Do you think maybe this has something to do with it?

Wachovia has been suffering from its 2006 acquisition of Golden West Financial Corp. The bank paid roughly $25 billion for the California mortgage lender known for exotic loans.

The so-called "Pick-a-Payment" loans, which Wachovia inherited from Golden West, have proved a headache for the bank and a lightning rod for shareholders, defaulting at higher rates than other mortgages.

Wachovia recently discontinued offering the "Pick-A-Payment" loan option, which allows customers to pay a less-than-full interest payment on all new home loans. The bank also had hired The Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to conduct an analysis of its loan portfolio and advise it on strategic alternatives.

Why does the world seem to go completely off its rocker every 100 years or so. It happened in 1914.

It's happening now.

1. Promote the living daylights out of this study that shows Philadelphia is the fifth most walkable city in America. This was already one of the city's secret assets, but with gas at $4.08 a gallon, the whole world needs to know.

2. Bench Jimmy Rollins for the first game of the upcoming Mets series, for his ridiculous failure to run hard yesterday on a Victorino bloop on which he had a 50-50 chance of scoring, which would have snatched a victory from the jaws of defeat.

3. Make a deal to get those two idiotic slots parlors off of Delaware Avenue and then make the whole world relatively happy by combining them into one giant casino and entertainment zone at the South Philly sports complex, right where the Spectrum is being knocked down.

4. Don't make this stupid trade for Colorado's Matt Holiday and mortgage the next 4-5 years of baseball in Philly for what would probably be a soon-forgotten four-day one-and-done in the 2008 playoffs. Please develop what little young talent you have left.

5. Michael Nutter's 2008 has been a little like Jimmy Rollins' -- not a lot of errors, but little inspiring play, either. Here's an idea -- use your bully pulpit as mayor to get those 10,000 black men out in the street.

6. Cancel those insufferable Lehigh workouts and go straight to the NFL regular season.

7. Build this 1,500-foot skyscraper, (pictured at top, via Philly Skyline). even though the developers have no experience and probably no idea what they're doing. Like the walkable city study, a dramatic skyline tells the world that Philly is a happening place.

8. Stop shooting one another.

9. Build a 9,000-seat arena in Chester to house the soon-to-be homeless Phantoms and Kixx -- Delco is probably the market for those teams, anyway, and then Chester will have just about everything except for, of course, a supermarket.

10. Impeach George W. Bush while there's still time. Hey, that would make the world a better place, and Philly was part of the world last time I checked.

We can't let this kind of talk inside the United States:

QUNU, South Africa — Nelson Mandela celebrated his 90th birthday Friday by calling on the wealthy to share with the poor and wishing that he had been able to spend more time with his family during the long anti-apartheid struggle.

In an interview at his home in rural southeastern South Africa, the icon was asked if he had a message for the world.

"There are many people in South Africa who are rich and who can share those riches with those not so fortunate who have not been able to conquer poverty," Mandela said.

At least Mandela is off the terror watch list, thanks to legislation. What about 400,000 other people -- some of whom are your law-abiding neighbors or relatives, or you -- still on that list? Frankly, I don't understand what the Democrats and Obama don't make more hay about this -- it's a civil rights issue that outrages most people, and can't easily be demagogued like Gitmo and some of the others.

Saying he is "sympathetic to late night comedians' struggle to find jokes to make about me," Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill) today issued a list of official campaign-approved Barack Obama jokes.

The five jokes, which Sen. Obama said he is making available to all comedians free of charge, are as follows:

Barack Obama and a kangaroo pull up to a gas station. The gas station attendant takes one look at the kangaroo and says, "You know, we don't get many kangaroos here." Barack Obama replies, "At these prices, I'm not surprised. That's why we need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil."

-- Comedian Andy Borowitz

No doubt about it, the flap over that Obama New Yorker cover has created a crisis for political humor in this country. I actually seem to be in the minority in thinking that the cover was funny and an effective satire (there's a broader issue there I may write about when I come back full-time); I also tend to agree with Maureen Dowd (that's rare these days) and others who say it would be good if Obama and his supporters could lighten up a little.

Why don't they?

Forget Monty Python -- here's the real "killer joke" of American politics.

Al Gore invented the Internet.

Of course, he never really said that, but after a year of repetition from a brain-dead political media, amplified by late-night comics looking for punchlines about two pretty dull-seeming candidates in 2000, you'd be hard pressed to find a voter in November 2000 who didn't think Gore had really said that. It was one of a number of exaggerations and outright falsehoods that became running jokes about Gore in 2000, that he'd claimed cleaning up Love Canal, etc. It was a joke, perhaps, but Gore's credibility became a "serious" issue for enough voters that Gore lost Florida by a few hundred votes, lost the Electoral College, and George W. Bush became president.

Eight years later, 4,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians are dead, New Orleans is still in shambles, and so is the American economy. Ultimately, all because of a "a joke."

It's just hard for people to laugh anything off anymore.

Two months and one day ago:

"Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along," said Bush, in what White House aides privately acknowledged was a reference to calls by Obama and other Democrats for the U.S. president to sit down for talks with leaders like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"We have heard this foolish delusion before," Bush said in remarks to the Israeli Knesset. "As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American Senator declared: 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

Today:

WASHINGTON - A top U.S. diplomat heading to Tehran has no plans to meet separately with Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, but the mere presence of the Bush administration official at talks between the Iranian negotiator and representatives of other world powers will be a sharp break with past administration policy.

Neville Chamberlain aside, the Bush people would be crazy not to push diplomacy, when the alternative seems to be an Israeli air strike that could plunge the region into a wider war than the one we have now. John McCain is already down in the polls with $138-a-barrel oil -- how do you think he'd do with $238-a-barrel oil?

Is the All-Star Game over yet? I have an idea for any time it goes more than 10 innings -- bring in Josh Hamilton's 71-year-old coach to pitch the 11th to both teams.

Open thread -- discuss whatever.