Robert Schlesinger: Stupid Relief Tricks.

Every day seems to produce more near-unbelievable stories of bungled relief efforts for the Gulf Coast. Today's include:

- 18 trucks loaded with ice meant for the Gulf Coast rolled into ... Gloucester, Massachusetts on Monday. (They had made it as far as Alabama.)

Hundreds of truckers from Minnesota, Alabama, Georgia and even Massachusetts have been crisscrossing the country since the beginning of September, moving loads of ice from storage facility to storage facility and earning big bucks from the federal government to do little more than sit in their cabs and not unload their precious cargo. ... "I guess they sent us up here because of the big ice crisis you're having in Gloucester," said Dan Hanson, who picked up his 44,000 pounds of ice in St. Paul, Minn., before traveling to Maxwell and spending "eight days and seven minutes" waiting.

- Meanwhile, the Brits sent a bunch of food to the region and the U.S. government reportedly plans to ... burn it. (And I don't mean overcook.)

HUNDREDS of tons of British food aid shipped to America for starving Hurricane Katrina survivors is to be burned.

US red tape is stopping it from reaching hungry evacuees.

Instead tons of the badly needed Nato ration packs, the same as those eaten by British troops in Iraq, has been condemned as unfit for human consumption.

I know MREs are bad (actually, they're not that bad), but reallly...

[The Huffington Post | Raw Feed]

It just continues.  6:48:41 PM