Harry Shearer

We may be beyond we're surprised when hidden motives paraded before us are ignored by the corporate media. Have we also moved beyond public radio being held to a higher standard? ...

New Orleans made the good kind of news this past week, reams of stories about Jazzfest, the wave of music overcoming the rainy deluges, and... ...

No, it's John Barry, author of the seminal study of the 1927 New Orleans flood, "Rising Tide", in an Op-Ed in, of all places, the... ...

One of the most drearily fascinating things about this country's Bush-dictated six-year obsession with Iraq (as if it were the only country in the MidEast,... ...

Yesterday, the Times-Picayune carried a veryrestrained story about a potentially inflammatory subject: the Corps of Engineers has discovered a persistent leak in the 17th... ...

Apparently, when it's committed by somebody who's already in high office, as opposed to when it's committed by someone contending for high office. At least,... ...

That, apparently, is the kind of arcane knowledge you have when you're National Security Advisor in this admiistration. Here, before it disappears, is the NSA... ...

That could serve as the motto for the experience of New Orleanians, in and out of the city, in the wake of the failure of... ...

For those (including Katie Couric) who think criticism of her is sexist in nature, here's a clue: Monday's Howard Kurtz interview with Ms. Couric is... ...

That would be the tabloid, but not entirely inaccurate, version of the New Orleans story to date. The first half--the city being flooded by the... ...

The President's head of Gulf Coast recovery, Donald Powell, has submitted his resignation, and, judging by the time that has passed without the naming of... ...

Finally, an aspect of the credit crunch that we can all understand. It's simple: the (non) recession is killing the market for tax credits, so... ...

Voters decide, by what's on our minds, what stories make the news. Never knew you had that much power, did you? ...

The Spitzer switcheroo -- two fisted crime-fighting prosecutor to alleged Mann Act violator -- is not the most dramatic nor ironic of 180s among New York prosecutors-turned-pols. ...

Two events dominating this week's news demonstrate together how we've managed to build a society incapable of taking the long view--of anything. The mess that the two parties have made--the Democrats with their rules, the Republicans with their legislative mischief... ...

An Indiana blogger exposes a serial plagiarist in an interesting locale: the White House. The offender has already copped to the most recent offense. ...

A couple of weeks ago, when I blogged on the long-delayed Centers For Disease Control tests of formaldehyde levels in Gulf Coast FEMA trailers, a persistent commenter opined to the effect that the people in New Orleans should have just... ...

True story: One of these years, a major East Coast paper will reveal in a dramatic five-part series that New Orleans flooded because of design and construction flaws by the United States Army Corps and Engineers, and will win a... ...

It's understandable, if unfortunate, that the angle that most appeals to TV news talking heads--would-be journalists, after all--is the journalistic angle: why did the Times run the story now, why on the front page, why did it grant anonymity to... ...

When some folks looked ahead last year to the prospect of the 2008 NBA All-Star Game being played in New Orleans, they saw a repeat, or worse, of the gang-related violence ...

Lost in all of the major-league screwups--the botched design and construction of the levees, the FEMA response, the toxic trailers--that are now part of what's called "Katrina" is one crucial fact: the Corps of Engineers did not have large sandbags... ...

Finally, although there was no room for it in today's NYT, the Federal Centers for Disease Control comes out with the results of testing on the formaldehyde leves in the FEMA trailers on the Gulf Coast, and the bottom line... ...

Maybe the most absurd moment in an absurd day on Capitol Hill came midway through the Roger Clemens-Brian McNamee tussle Wednesday, and it centered on the most absurd issue raised at the hearing into steroid use among the players of... ...

Commenters to my New Orleans posts frequently suggest that the city has brought its problems on itself, due to its culture of corruption. Some of them like to ...

I've finally located a complete enough report on what Hillary Clinton's designated surrogate, the former President, said in his sole pre-primary New Orleans appearance on Friday to offer a thought or two about it. First, he appeared at Dillard, a... ...

At the Tulane University rally, Obama was passionate in his call for a more robust federal effort in mobilizing the rebuilding of New Orleans, but vague or worse in his actual policy proposals. ...

Okay, we've moved the ball a little bit on the subject of waterboarding. After an unseemly period of dodges and feints adding up to "We don't torture, so whatever we do isn't torture", CIA Chief Michael Hayden told a Senate... ...

Most of the national media have long since given up bringing the facts of why New Orleans flooded to the public's attention. Now, the candidates, all working their poll-approved themes, choose not to. ...

In this week's State of the Union address, President Bush remedied an omission in last year's address: He actually deigned to mention New Orleans. There are those, among them Senator Mary Landrieu, who saluted the fact of a mention, much... ...

The story of the "FEMA trailers"--the thousands of late-arriving, hard-to-get-hookups-for tin cans that have been home to thousands of New Orleanians for more than two years--never was a pretty one. Rather than give people with flood-ravaged homes a voucher to... ...

The theft of US nuclear secrets, the diverting of them to Pakistan and possibly Saudi Arabia, the involvement of Israel in the scheme -- all of these would justify as jaw-droppingly newsworthy in a rational journalistic universe. ...

The decorations on the houses in my neighborhood have gone from green and red to purple, green and gold, the annual signal of the transition from "your" holiday season to "ours". ...

American media woke up to the story of Pakistan momentarily, when Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. But, just as quickly, Pakistan disappeared from the US media radar screen. This week, the NYT led its Tuesday front page with a story both... ...

In the wake of the "stunning" failure of public-opinion polls to predict accurately the result of the Democratic New Hampshire primary, perhaps it's appropriate to revive a ...

After a period in which the administration's credibility on matters foreign has been tattered, why is the "incident" with Iran being reported totally out of Pentagon press releases? ...

Barack Obama delivered a rousing didn't-I-almost-win speech Tuesday night in New Hampshire, and John McCain delivered a stirring I'm-the-comeback-don't-call-me-kid address on the occasion of his victory. What they, and all the other candidates in the ...

NEW ORLEANS--In Saturday night's Democratic debate, moderator Charles Gibson opened the proceedings with a question about Pakistan and one about nuclear terrorism. Not one of the candidates connected the dots: the chief proliferator of nuclear knowhow ...

Bill Carter, writing about the return of writers to the returning Letterman and Ferguson shows in today's NYT, asserts, in passing, that Donald Trump "is not" a member of the Screen Actors' Guild. That's relevant, because, as a supposed non-member ...

That's the quote of a shock trauma expert, puzzling over the ever-more-puzzling case of the assassination -- or bumping into the sunroof lever -- of Benazir Bhutto, as reported in this Washington Post story. The details get progressively more troubling: ...

New Orleanians get no shortage of hortatory messages about self-reliance from other parts of the nation they thought they belonged to. So Sunday's Times-Picayune sends the message right back. Here's a story full of as many touchstones of self-reliance ...

Barely twenty-four hours after her assassination, Benazir Bhutto, whose corporeal remains were buried in Rawalpindi, may have had her less tangible remains inserted firmly into Karachi's spin machine. Today we're told by the Pakistani government's ...

It's not the job of political satirists, I've believed, to pal around with politicians. Only Mort Sahl, in my ken, has been able to do that kind of socializing without trading his teeth for a comfy set of gums. I have met two American presidents ...

That's the question that comes to mind when you read Leslie Eaton's NYT piece on the former leader of St. Bernard Parish, Junior Rodriguez. On the plus side, it's probably the first MSM look at Da Parish, a standing rebuke to the media meme that ...

Something important is happening in New Orleans this week. Under the leadership of John Barry (full disclosure: I know this man), the new consolidated levee board has invited Dr. Bob Bea to the city, and, according to today's Times-Picayune, Bea ...

Every once in a while, I'm reminded of the bizarre technological dance we're being forced to go through in the federally-mandated switch to digital television. First, it's interesting for federalists and libertarians to note that, while it took ...

In the old, pre-disaster days, this week was the quiet time, the brief period (before the Sugar Bowl inundation) when the tourists left New Orleans, and the city belonged to the locals. Now as I drive or walk through the Quarter, my spirits lift ...

I'm not a big fan of surveys or polls. People who want to prove how dumb the public is--usually people in New York or LA--can always cite a survey showing that a significant slice of the populace can't locate China on a map. Or can't locate a map ...

For those people who still don't believe that the federal government is doing everything possible to avoid any responsibility for anything connected to the flooding disaster in New Orleans, this note: remember FEMA's pledge to test its trailers ...

New Orleans remains baffled and outraged by the decision of the Commission on Presidential Debates to bypass the city's application for a debate next year. Following up on questions asked by commenters to my previous post, I asked Anne Milling, ...

Any reader of the independent reports on the causes of the New Orleans flooding disaster, and comparing them with the Corps' serial versions of the event -- in initial public statements, and ultimately in its "IPET" report -- has to ...