I totally agree with this article from today's TomPaine.com:
Civil Disservice
Submitted by Greg Anrig on October 22, 2007 - 5:32pm.
Greg Anrig is the author of
The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing.

Mocking career civil servants — sorry, "bureaucrats" — has become so deeply embedded into the conservative movement's liturgy that it is difficult to imagine anyone running for office as a Republican saying anything remotely positive about the workforce they want to be responsible for managing. But most of the well-documented failures not only of FEMA, but also the Bush Defense Department, Justice Department, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and so on can be traced to a systematic effort to shunt aside the people who knew what they were doing.

http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/civil_disservice?tx=3

Compelling Memorial from an Optimist

The Crisis Papers
Bernard is an optimist but also an accurate accountant of life since the terror took over.

Twenty-Two Things We Now Know Six Years After 9/11

By Bernard Weiner
Co-Editor, The Crisis Papers September 4, 2007

Each year around the anniversary of 9/11, I summarize what we ordinary citizens have learned since that awful day in 2001. This is the sixth annual look backwards, an update based on new information about those horrific events and what followed.

http://www.crisispapers.org/essays7w/22things.htm