Color Them Fatalistic Mr. Ridge offers five colors to warn against infiltrations. (This being Washington, officials hotly debated including white in the terror pinwheel, but decided against it, perhaps fearing it would look like a white flag.)

I think it would be far more useful, however, if we had a wheel with five colors to warn against incompetence.

Holy heather: At this level, John Ashcroft stays so busy whiting out lines of the Constitution, diluting Justice’s civil rights division, lionizing the Second Amendment and robing naked statues that he forgets to give the president a detailed F.B.I. memo describing the time and place of the next terrorist attack.