Quick Hits

Here are a couple of links from yesterday and earlier today. Josh Marshall has been offering fairly wide-ranging coverage at Talking Points Memo. Yesterday he linked to this article about a mortician ready for deployment to Gulfport as part of a Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team to help with the dead. The mortician says he's been told to "expect up to 40,000 bodies." A lot of people are linking to this, but I haven't seen any further confirmation (although if the number's true, it's no surprise that officials wouldn't want to publicize it).

In another post, Marshall had this article about 1,400 firefighters from around the country who came to Atlanta to help the relief effort only to discover that their assignment will be to hand out FEMA fliers. Well, that's what most of them were told they'd be doing. About 50 elite firefighters had a different assignment:

But as specific orders began arriving to the firefighters in Atlanta, a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew's first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas.

Daily Kos and Billmon discuss a picture they found of those intrepid firefighters and their companion (who's even rolling up his sleeves, as if he's actually going to do something).