Burn Baby, Burn: Bushco Inferno...

This piece from Lisa Rosetta at The Salt Lake Tribune demands the widest possible dissemination. (Hand salute to Ariadne.)

Frustrated: Fire crews to hand out fliers for FEMA

As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters - his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week - a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta...

Many of the firefighters, assembled from Utah and throughout the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, thought they were going to be deployed as emergency workers...

Instead, they have learned they are going to be community-relations officers for FEMA, shuffled throughout the Gulf Coast region to disseminate fliers and a phone number: 1-800-621-FEMA.

On Monday, some firefighters stuck in the staging area at the Sheraton peeled off their FEMA-issued shirts and stuffed them in backpacks, saying they refuse to represent the federal agency.

Our Rovewellian federal government at work--diverting desperately needed, skilled emergency workers for its desperately needed image repair campaign.

That some of these firefighters had the strength of character to refuse to cooperate gives me a flicker of hope for America's future.

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As I typed this, MSNBC ran a piece on the need for more firefighters in New Orleans.

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I was thinking of crafting some joke about Bush and the Gang burning in hell, crying for someone to put out the fire, and being told to dial 1-800-621-FEMA.

But I'll leave that to someone else.

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Though I can't resist this:

"Burnin' in hell for all eternity is hard work. But we got just the right team assembled here to get the job done. We're problem solvers."