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This is very very interesting. Follow me on this. This had to be in the works since Ridge was made a cabinet-level advisor. So, we had the idiot Democrats whining that Ridge wouldn't testify -- now he will be required to do so because he's the head of a Congressionally-approved department. We had the idiot Democrats first accuse Bush of knowing the attack was going to happen. Then the idiot Democrats said that Bush should have known. Then the idiot Democrats said that Bush should have had a better (than Clinton) system in place to deal with the bureaucracy.

Well, now the idiot Democrats got exactly what they asked for. On top of it all, the lower-level bureaucrats that Bush will appoint for this will probably sail through Senate confirmation because they were so blindsided.

More important than that, money will be taken from some of these other departments and funnelled to Homeland Security.

Methinks somebody is leading the Democrats by the nose: Giving them bait on which they'll surely bite.

I like it. :)

I also liked the this part,

"The staff of this new department will be largely drawn from the agencies we are combining"

That means they will screen out any entrenched clinton holdovers and get the very best of the agencies. Gotta love it. They keep playing checkers and Bush is playing chess :-)

I think it was Ridge's job from the first to figure out whether this needed to be done, and if so, how to do it. Which branches of which agencies to combine, what the functions were, how to organize the whole thing, which people are good, who needs to go. You know how nobody has been able to figure out what Ridge has been doing? Well, this is it. I'll bet my bottom dollar that there's a big fat book containing the written plan, and the research that went into it.

I'm delighted with this plan because it makes complete sense. When you have new problems, you need new solutions.