Bernard Kerik's withdrawal from consideration as Tom Ridge's replacement as Secretary of Homeland Security means revisiting the list of those rumored to want or be in consideration for the slot:

• Joe Allbaugh, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
• Asa Hutchinson, undersecretary for border and transportation security, and former Republican member of Congress.
• James S. Gilmore III, former Virginia governor.
• Bernard Kerik, interim Minister of the Interior for Iraq and former New York City police commissioner.
• Mike Leavitt, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator.
• Mitt Romney, the governor of Massachusetts.
• Frances Townsend, White House adviser on homeland security.

UPDATE: AP reports that Giuliani is not a candidate, and that it is "still possible that the White House would break the search wide open again rather than return to the previous stable of top contenders, said a senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity." The tipping point in Kerik's decision is reportedly a replay of the Zoe Baird nanny problem. Other potential problems had been emerging, however, particularly as people who followed his checkered past in New York began to speak out:

• Nine former employees of a Saudi Arabian hospital for which Kerik helped run security came forward to say that Kerik and his colleagues spied on employees' private lives in order to carry out the private agenda of hospital administrator Nizar Feteih -- who used Kerik and the rest of the hospital's security staff to track the private lives of women with whom he was romantically involved and men who came in contact with them. After an official Saudi investigation of Feteih and the security team in response to hospital employees' complaints of intimidation, six members of the hospital security staff, including Kerik, were fired and deported, and Feteih was sacked as hospital administrator.
• From the Village Voice:
  • "At the 9-11 Commission hearings last spring, one of the commissioners, John F. Lehman, secretary of the navy under Ronald Reagan, attacked him head-on, accusing both Kerik and Fire Commissioner Thomas Van Essen of hampering rescue efforts with their departments' bizarre command and control functions. Lehman called the situation 'not worthy of the Boy Scouts.' The commission's final report turned this acid comment into one of its most memorable thumb suckers: 'Whether the lack of coordination between the FDNY and the NYPD had a catastrophic effect is a subject of controversy.'"
  • Kerik used police detectives to do research for his autobiography, in order to research the claim that his mother was a prostitute. He was later fined, but that decision was apparently worth it, according to this bit the Voice quotes from Newsday: "At the World Trade Center, Kerik was in the back of his car dictating the last part of a book that was going to appear under his name. It had him writhing with delicious excitement. It was about his mother being a prostitute. 'That's what's going to make me all the money,' he told a friend of mine."
• And enough other controversies that Kerik was called a "ticking time bomb."