First off, there are at least a couple thousand americans unaccounted for, so the NIMBY analogy doesn't hold water. Second, I haven't seen much on Fox News that
wasn't tsunami-related for the last few days, 'cept the New Year's junk. CNN's website is similarly chock-full of tsunami news... its hard to filter it out and see what else is happening worldwide (which is a LOT by the way).
I wouldn't view a delay in a public press release as a sign that the government response was slow. The U.S. military had significant assets in play the morning of December 28th... that's a VERY fast response time.
Note the many "if's" in this quote from from a Department of Defense press release. At the time, even they weren't sure what was going on. Yet they were mobilized anyway. Hooray for our side. Nobody else's relief efforts come even close in actual on-site assistance. I think an entire Marine brigade is even shipping out to Sri Lanka.
Donating money for humanitarian relief is fine and dandy, but what really counts right now is getting people on the ground to assess damage and directly help, and transport necessary cargo. The U.S. is definitely doing a bang-up job in that regard. I keep close tabs on the military deployments, and they're considerable and growing. Here, visit the U.S. Navy's newspage to see what's going on with
just that branch of the military. There are even two oceanographic survey ships heading out to check out the earthquake site.
http://www.navy.mil/