Relief ship held offshore right after storm passed, no FEMA order to help

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How many stories does it take for people to realize these people didn't have to die? What the hell is going on in this country?

Why have all of these agencies and volunteers been turned away from the beginning? Mass murder has occurred in our country, there are no words.

I feel so helpless.

This story is one of many - such as the many Chicago police and rescue experts that were offered on Monday and never received an OK, the Loudoun County sheriffs deputies and EMTs who drove towards Louisiana at the request of a local sheriff, and then turned back when they couldn't get an official OK, the plane loads of emergency supplies that Canada had loaded on jets that couldn't get permission to land anywhere in the US, and many other stories. The experience of the FEMA director helps to explain these screwups. His background was in Arabian horses, and he wasn't even very good at that.

"FEMA head takes heat in spotlight
www.chicagotribune.com
September 4, 2005

For the decade prior to joining the Federal Emergency Management Agency, , Director Michael Brown was commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association, a Colorado-based group that organizes breeders and horse shows. Then he was asked to resign. "He didn't follow the instructions he was given," then-IAHA President William Pennington confirmed Saturday.

Less than five years after that dismissal, Brown, 50, finds himself heading the federal agency charged with responding to one of the nation's worst disasters. Brown has been one of the leading public faces of a federal response sharply criticized as too little and too late. His statements and sometimes even his demeanor under the camera's glare have been questioned by critics--and often divergent from the grief-stricken reality on the ground.

During one of his first televised news conferences Wednesday, when violence and chaos were spreading in New Orleans and bodies were beginning to be seen floating in the water, Brown laughed and joked as he took reporters' questions. At points last week, he described security in New Orleans as "pretty darn good." He said he had received no reports of "unrest," nor any information about uncollected corpses. And on Thursday night, he told CNN the agency had just learned that thousands of people had huddled at the New Orleans Convention Center, even though the city had directed them to go there, and journalists had been reporting their plight."

There are a lot of DC VIP's coming in and out of NOLA. Do you think they are keeping this hospital ship on standby in case one of BushCo's beautiful people need medical care while in NOLA???

hhhmmmmmm....