Ridge to resign from Homeland Security Dept.

Posted November 30, 2004, 12:52 p.m.

Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge will announce his resignation from the Bush cabinet today, according to mainstream media reports. Ridge was the first secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, which was formed in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The creation of DHS was the largest reorganization of the federal government since the creation of the Department of Defense in 1947.

While it is normal for a round of resignations and new appointments when a president wins reelection, Ridge and six previous resignations since the election account for nearly 47 percent of President Bush’s fifteen-member cabinet. Ridge joins Secretary of State Colin Powell, Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, Education Secretary Rod Paige, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and Commerce Secretary Donald Evans.

President Bush has so far only announced four replacement nominations, and all nominees must be confirmed by the Senate before taking office.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.

Quotes

There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts.

For when I look at these various anti-Christian truths, I simply discover that none of them are true. I discover that the true tide and force of all the facts flows the other way.

Brooks’s Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

Let us recollect that peace or war will not always be left to our option; that however moderate or unambitious we may be, we cannot count upon the moderation, or hope to extinguish the ambition of others.

In all toil there is profit, but mere talk tends only to want.

The price system works so well, so efficiently, that we are not aware of it most of the time. We never realize how well it functions until it is prevented from functioning. . . .

Those who oppose ‘corporate personhood’ should consider how difficult it will be to win a settlement against a company that you cannot sue because it is not a legal person.

It is not virtuous to be victimized by a bully, even if that bully is oneself.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

But not everyone who is failing is a victim, and not everyone at the bottom wishes to rise, although many do, and many manage it.

There is an implicit but astonishing arrogance in the idea that all the apostles, all the church fathers[,] and all the millions of ordinary Christians were fundamentally mistaken about Christ for nineteen centuries, and only a few theologians, sitting at their desks, in a very different culture, nineteen centuries later, finally understood him.

If you wish to attain holy recollection, you will do so not by receiving but by denying.

Don’t bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.

We who believe in strong defense are the true peace party.

With insufficient data it is easy to go wrong.

The observational record tells us unambiguously that the universe is getting more interesting as time goes on.

We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.

I have not lost faith in God. I have moments of anger and protest. Sometimes I’ve been closer to him for that reason.

The very idea of converting what was formerly a confederation to a consolidated government is totally subversive of every principle which has hitherto governed.

The socialists were more intrinsically capitalist than the capitalists. They believed just as strongly in money. They just thought that if different people had the money, the problems plaguing humanity would vanish. This is simply untrue.