Harry Shearer

The news reports about General Stanley McChrystal's new position, "leading a three-member advisory board... to help service members and their families," don't fail to mention the mildly scandalous Rolling Stone article that got the General relieved of command in Afghanistan... ...

NEW ORLEANS -- The 2010 census figures about New Orleans made news (here, here, and here, for example), but the stories all came out at the height of the uprising in Egyptian cities, so you may have missed them. But, since they were all written from within the conventional narrative of the 2005 flooding... ...

NEW YORK--Not content with having crafted a recovery plan which helped banks and financial services firms recover far more nicely than other folks, President Obama... ...

If mental disturbance is at the root of the shootings in Tucson, that leaves another question: what's at the root of all the rancor about political rancor? ...

Amid all the fun finger-pointing, the least we can do is acknowledge that we all, Dems and Reps, libs and cons, have failed the mentally disturbed among us. ...

News organizations have lately opted to hire fewer reporters, and to cut newsrooms' Saturday staffs. As NPR and Reuters issued erroneous reports of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' death this weekend, the downside of such cuts seems clear. ...

Assange is this season's Obama: a man from nowhere, suddenly burst on the scene with a message of hope -- and smart and media-savvy enough to out-think his questioners and the audience. ...

My friend David Corn has done yeoman work in fact-checking "Decision Points" regarding the issues surrounding the Iraq War and the outing of Valerie Plame... ...

NEW ORLEANS--The story in a nutshell: realizing that NPR (which recently announced its initials no longer stand for "National Public Radio") would not do a... ...

For those folks--including the people at the CBS Evening News who, on the Friday before the 5th anniversary of the 2005 flood, ran a glowing,... ...

LONDON--Okay, game on. Louisiana's Democrats and Republicans have come together to propose something that should be uncontroversial--that 80% of the fines BP is to pay... ...

LONDON--Thursday's NYT puts it plainly enough: the divided appeals court ruling against victims of CIA torture abroad was: "... a major victory for the Obama... ...

The American media seem spellbound by Terry Jones (who has threatened to burn copies of the Koran on the 9th anniversary of 9/11) as a stuntmaster; the only thing they don't seem fascinated by is Terry Jones the person. ...

NEW ORLEANS--Sorry, can't be sure that's the planet he's living on, but this intelligent, well-informed man surely can't be living on this orb. Otherwise, he... ...

NPR announced recently that it's no longer National Public Radio. Like CBS and NBC before it, it has decided that its initials are now so... ...

NEW ORLEANS--President Obama comes here this weekend to deliver a speech on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the city's near-destruction. Since he's got... ...

The trouble with the proponents of this premise, that immigrants are coming to this country to have babies that will get automatic citizenship and grow... ...

As we approach the 5th anniversary of the flooding of New Orleans, it's clear that, though the city has seen a profusion of "Katrina" art and music, the major enduring presence of the catastrophe has been on the bookshelf. ...

LONDON--The fifth anniversary of the flooding of New Orleans occurs at the end of this month, and the Times-Picayune takes the occasion to print thank-you... ...

It's one thing to be in love with New Orleans, as I have been for almost two decades. It's another thing entirely to spend almost... ...

As we approach the five-year anniversary of the Katrina flooding next month, it becomes increasingly clear that almost every piece of information spread about the event by the national media has turned out to be wrong. ...

NEW ORLEANS--It's not as if the US isn't sufficiently anti-intellectual (see the Climate-gate "scandal", e.g.), but we have been led into three consecutive neo-imperial expeditions... ...

We only got to read about McChrystal&Co's imprudence because the RS reporter was a freelancer, not a Pentagon beat reporter desirous of maintaining his relationship with an important source. ...

NEW ORLEANS--Yes, it does come as a surprise that they're still putting out the LA Times, especially when it publishes a story like this one,... ...

LONDON--The British media have been ablaze with patriotic defensiveness, upset that President Obama keeps calling BP "British Petroleum". Strange: I was at the Tate Britain... ...

It's all there in the HuffPost archives, posts about the Corps of Engineers choosing what they admit is a "technically (not) superior) solution for the... ...

Yes, he played cat-and-mouse with Rachel Maddow on the subject of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but, as he rightly points out (pun intended), that's... ...

I've been writing about Bagram because it stands as a rebuke to the president's pledge for change. What's happened at Bagram -- and you can Google it -- is perhaps worse than our history at Guantanamo. ...

NEW ORLEANS--Ray Nagin is Na-gone, the city is enjoying a second springtime when it should ordinarily be early summer, hot and muggy, and yet, walking... ...

NEW ORLEANS--Mid-Saturday morning, storm clouds are motorcycling across the sky. We're seeing, and feeling, the winds we've been hearing about for two days, the winds... ...

Now, just weeks away from the fifth anniversary of the federally-caused flood, New Orleans has recovered, physically, economically, even spiritually, to a degree un-dreamed of... ...

How enraptured is New Orleans with David Simon's portrait of the city in "Treme", which just premiered last Sunday? This enraptured: news of the series'... ...

I'm old enough now to remember a time--check this, kids--when journalism meant, more than anything else, telling you what was new (hence, news). Hence my... ...

So I guess this war is enough like the Iraq war that President Obama, like his predecessor, can only visit the troops at night, in... ...

While the Cheneys continue to hammer away at the accusation that Obama has a terror trial "mindset" problem, another bullet-hole has been leveled at their argument by Germany. ...

Defenders of "enhanced interrogation techniques" have continually insisted that the treatment does not cross the line into the forbidden land of torture. But now we have some hard evidence that it does. ...

The Sunday yak shows have been abuzz with Republicans, from Dick Cheney on down (up?), hammering on their poll-tested theme of the moment: that the... ...

NEW ORLEANS--I've been rather consistently critical of the Obama Administration's largely MIA stance toward New Orleans, with the singular exception of the appointment of a... ...

NEW ORLEANS--In the wake of the Underpants Bomber, lobbyists for companies that make full-body scanners--including, notably, former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff-have unhesitatingly pushed their products,... ...

In the welter of State of the Union news, this tidbit got to me: the administration is letting the Office of Gulf Coast Recovery quietly... ...

NEW ORLEANS--I'm preparing to begin shooting a feature-length documentary on the subject of why, in August 2005, 80% of the city of New Orleans experienced... ...

This relayed by my friend Lolis Elie, reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, who describes Beverly Bell's work in Haiti as "selfless and inspiring": Friends:... ...

LONDON--The British have been doing something so deliciously un-American: looking backward. The Chilcot Inquiry into the origins of the Iraq War is back after its... ...

While the President and the punditocracy alike have no compunctions in talking about Guantanamo Bay, Obama's promise to close it, the missing of the deadline,... ...

Dick Cheney certainly isn't spending the first year of his retirement from the vice presidency growing a beard. Instead, he's playing a very clever game,... ...

Now that the reassurance machine has kicked into high gear, with statements from everyone from President Obama to Janet "The System Worked" Napolitano, we're being... ...

Something rather interesting is going on in Great Britain these wintry days--an official inquiry, broad-ranging in its declared scope, into the way that country got... ...

For a crystalline example of what's wrong with American journalism, and the American political conversation, at this exact moment, go no farther than Sunday's "60... ...

The man (and his wordsmiths) can write. President Obama's acceptance speech in Oslo was elegant, nuanced, and intelligent. Faced with accepting a peace prize while... ...

The spectacle of near-celebrities going on Larry King Live to ask for the return of their privacy has been one of the long-running jokes of... ...