[Ramius]

I would assume that they are emails within the FEMA mail system. The ownership of them is not in question. It's the part about making them public merely for the purpose of ridicule that is a cheap shot. They are nothing more than informal chitchat between colleagues. To insist that such informal communications should never or must never happen is simply unrealistic and counterproductive. There is nothing inherently wrong with letting employees use a mail system for the whole range of communications, from very formal to very informal. There is even a certain amount of sense in letting employees have some reasonable lattitude for personal use. Its all about reasonableness.

There's nothing in these that is unethical, or illegal, or even all that unwise. It's just chat between colleagues when one of them has been on TV. If I were suddenly on national television, I wouldn't be surprised if some of my co-workers sent me some emails about my appearance, joking or otherwise. Big deal.

[Quick1]

In today's business world, people should be smart enough to know that work e-mail is for WORK. If my entire record of work email was published right here, there would be nothing embarassing on it , nor would there be any examples of utter incompetence for anyone to use, because I'm not incompetent, and I'm smart enough to know that my work e-mail is not private.

Not only was Brown obviously incompetent for this job, but he was so stupid that he sent these types of emails using his work account during one a major crisis. Heck, I'd fire someone just for being that stupid if they were in a critical leadership role.

Let's stop whitewashing this. Brown obviously had no idea what he was doing. Yes, there was plenty of incompetence on the local and state levels, but Brown utterly failed at his job, and deserved to be fired.

The real tragedy is that he is still on the payroll to the tune of $148,000 a year, to find out what he did wrong! UGH!