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After rainstorms you see a lot more activity by slugs, after hurricanes the slugs mutate into leeches to suck up the money made available by FEMA.

The local no-new-tax Republicans discover that public facilities that no one ever remembers seeing have been destroyed by the hurricane. Some of these facilities have been talked about for years, but the officials wouldn’t raise the taxes to build them.

Florida’s Democratic Senator and former Insurance Commissioner, Bill Nelson, set off alarm bells when he saw the reports on FEMA aid and discovered that millions of dollars had been paid out in the Miami-Dade County area. None of the four hurricanes hit that area, so the Senator wanted an investigation as to why the money was spent there.

The multi-talented Jillian posting at the home of the marsupial of miniscule, skippy, gives you a taste of of some of the items covered.

For those who have forgotten, the Sun Sentinel reminds us that one of the storms, hurricane Frances in the first week of September, 2004, looked like it might strike Miami, so John Ellis, our money-grubbing…er Republican governor, asked for a federal declaration of emergency in Miami-Dade and 17 other counties. The initial Presidential declaration only included 5 counties in the area where the storm did strike, about 100 miles north of Miami, but FEMA later added all of the counties on JEB’s wish list without conducting an initial survey for damage.

Of course, no one should assume that the fact that Cuban-Republican voters are centered in Miami, that Florida’s governor is the President’s brother, or that Florida was a close Presidential race, had any effect on the decision to dispense the taxpayers’ money with such largess.

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