Sculpin

Meet our Northwest FEMA chief: John Pennington, a former four-term Republican state rep with a diploma-mill “degree”. The guy was hired despite his having no real disaster management experience — but he was Cowlitz County’s Bush campaign co-chair in 2000. GOP star Jennifer Dunn, the state chair of the Bush campaign that year, helped snag the post for him.

At least this guy is said to have bothered to get a decent staff. Perhaps one of his decent staff could replace him. Like, tomorrow.

King County Emergency Services Director Eric Holdeman: “It’s important that you be a professional emergency manager. Walking through an emergency room doesn’t make you a doctor. Likewise, you want the people overseeing a disaster to know what it’s all about.” No shit.

Here’s a crazy thought: how about we don’t fuck up the agency devoted to responding to disasters? I understand that the Bush administration hands out plum positions right and left to the party hacks and their roommates, but are there really so many useless GOP weasels that there’s no more space for them elsewhere? Yes? Then I propose a compromise: simply start up a federal Department of Sinecures and leave FEMA (and the FDA, the EPA, and the rest of it) to people who can actually manage the work. It’d be expensive, but not as expensive as what we’ve got now.

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