Looks like Captain Duct Tape and Plastic could become the permanent head of FEMA:

With hurricane season two months away, President George W. Bush is likely to nominate the acting director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, David Paulison, as his permanent choice to head the agency, a Republican official said on Sunday.

Paulison, a veteran firefighter, was named acting director of FEMA after Michael Brown resigned last September in the face of bitter complaints about the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina.

The Republican official said it was expected that an announcement would come soon nominating Paulison, 59, to the position, which requires Senate confirmation.

Of course he is not the first choice. As matter of fact, by reports, he is not the second or third choice:

The calls went out across the nation, as Bush administration officials asked the country’s most seasoned disaster response experts to consider the job of a lifetime: FEMA director. But again and again, the response over the past several months was the same: “No thanks.”

Unconvinced that the administration is serious about fixing the Federal Emergency Management Agency or that there is enough time actually to get it done before President Bush’s second term ends, seven of these candidates for director or another top FEMA job said in interviews that they had pulled themselves out of the running.

“You don’t take the fire chief job after someone has burned down the city unless you are going to be able to do it in the right fashion,” said Ellis M. Stanley, general manager of emergency planning in Los Angeles, who said he was one of those called.

Mr. Stanley summed it up perfectly in that article. Who ever runs FEMA in the future is going to be under continuous scrutiny and a close eye. This is not the future head’s fault or even the fault of Mike Brown. This is the fault of George Bush and his sick desire to put cronies in charge of some of our nation’s most vital department.

When I was a firefighter we always knew that no matter what we didn’t do enough. We could get to the scene in three minutes and someone would complain that we should have been there in two. It is the nature of the beast. Of course this is common place for a response that is normal. When you take a fiasco like Katrina then those complaints are not petty, they are a deadly reality.

We still see numerous people trying to put all the blame on state and local officials for what happened after Katrina. It amazes me that after the White House, Congress and the GAO have all released reports placing a majority of fault on federal officials that people still defend the administration so blindly.

On the wake of killer storms hitting the southeast and leaving 27 people dead, we are still learning that our government has not learned from the mistakes exposed in Katrina. We have two months until our next hurricane season and are in the same, if not worse, position than we were in August of last year. This is just one example of how Bush has destroyed our nation as a whole.