[Elspode]

Quoting UT's quote of a WaPo story: "Five of eight top Federal Emergency Management Agency officials came to their posts with virtually no experience in handling disasters and now lead an agency whose ranks of seasoned crisis managers have thinned dramatically since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks."

Although its impact cannot even be remotely compared to the Katrina/FEMA debacle, Missouri has experienced something similar. In our fair state, the Governor gets to decide who shall operate (and therefore profit from) the extremely valuable Fee Agent License Bureaus, where those of us who have no easy access to one of the very few State operated locations must go to get our vehicle licenses. Our freshman governor, Mel Blunt, whom I've ranted about before on The Cellar, has made a special groovy major fuck of it on his watch.

He has given many bureaus over to patrons who have absolutely *no* fucking clue about what to do with them, to the extent that many perfectly functional offices were closed (and remained closed for months) while the new owners tried to figure out what to do with them. In another spectacularly ballsy move, Blunt also closed License Bureaus that were *operated by the State of Missouri*, sold off their equipment assets at pennies on the dollar to the new Fee Agents, and allowed them to reopen those Bureaus as private Fee Agent locations. According to all reports, service, speed and accuracy of these *government mandated transactions* has gone right through the goddamn floor, becoming virtually impossible in many locations.

It helps if you understand that these Fee Agent offices are not bid for. There are no requirements or qualifications to be a Fee Agent. It is purely and simply a political plum that our State's highest elected official gets to dole out to his supporters. Folks, such patronage is dishonest at best, and apparently outright dangerous at worst, if you look at the case of all the losers heading up FEMA in a time of actual crisis. Oh, yeah...It was okay when they were sitting back holding press conferences, weariing nice suits and collecting fat paychecks for having done nothing more than knowing what to kiss and when, but now that they need to do an important and life-critical job, all they can do is point fingers and try to figure out a way to hang the blame on the people in the afflicted region.

As to the Left wanting to make political hay out of this...don't think for a moment that the Right wouldn't be just as quick and twice as righteous about it if the situation was reversed. In the end, the Right will come up with a game plan completely laying this at the feet of the Democrats, the Clinton Presidency, etc, and their little sycophants will praise Jesus and line up to spout the party line.

It would be the same if the Left was in power, too.