John Pennington, our own "Brownie"

Over at Blue Oregon Jonathan Singer tells us how the incompetent and unqualified Michael Brown is still on the FEMA payroll. This is not surprising since I'm sure the administration wanted to keep a leash on his mouth so they could keep him on the payroll or kill him. I'm happy for Mr. Brown that they decided on option one.

This is a good time to remember that we have our own "brownie" here in the Pacific Northwest. As my partner in New York, Jazz, told us earlier:

Everyone is talking about how the head of FEMA is apparently an unqualified, incompetent bit of dreck from a massive Federal system of cronyism. But we can all take comfort in the fact that the country is broken up into a number of FEMA regions, and each has its own regional FEMA chief to supervise matters on a more local basis. Up there covering the states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Alaska, you've got Bush appointee John Pennington.

Jazz quotes The Seattle Times to tell us about Pennington:

John Pennington, the official in charge of federal disaster response in the Northwest, was a four-term Republican state representative who ran a mom-and-pop coffee company in Cowlitz County when then-Congresswoman Jennifer Dunn helped him get his federal post.

Before he was appointed regional director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Pennington got a degree from a correspondence school that government investigators later described as a "diploma mill."

So we can only hope that St Helens or another cascade volcano doesn't go super nova, we have a major earthquake or a Pacific Typhoon finds it's way to the Northwest.