Tom Ridge's legacy

sacbee.com -- Opinion -- Editorial: Tom Ridge's legacy: "Ridge may be best remembered as the man who introduced color-coded threat levels, provoking criticism and ridicule. But even if the jibes were deserved, his far more important task was trying to aggregate the work of 22 separate agencies, each with its own agenda, into a new superagency.

Many gaps remain - in airline security, even though that has received the greatest attention; in seaport security - it's impossible to inspect every one of the millions of cargo containers that enter U.S. ports each year, but monitoring methods are improving; in hospitals, chemical plants, nuclear and other power plants; in water supplies, in shopping malls, in ....

The tension between security and liberty will not end, so one must hope that Ridge's successor - apparently former New York police commissioner Bernard Kerik - will be less deferential to the president and more willing to stand up and fight, not only to protect cherished freedoms but to do battle with turf-minded bureaucrats and profit-driven special interests that made Ridge's job harder than it ought to have been.

That sparsely populated states still get far more federal money per capita for security than obvious urban targets such as New York and Los Angeles is only one deplorable reflection of the impulse of the political class to tend to its favored constituencies no matter how grave the threat."