Harry's Huffington Post Feed

It Was Forty Years Ago Today (Kinda)

Paris Hilton's stint in an LA jail is getting the American ink, along with CNN's self-serving over-coverage of the two premature presidential debates in New Hampshire. There was a little oxygen left for one 40th anniversary -- of Sgt. Pepper -- but none for the 40th anniversary being covered by...

A Simple Question for All the Candidates

With two presidential debates coming up this week, it might be an appropriate time for someone -- a panelist, a citizen, anybody -- to ask each of the candidates one simple question: why didn't you read the NIE, the National Intelligence Estimate requested by the Senate and prepared by the...

How to Torture New Orleans: The Road Home Program

One of the persistent myths of the post-Katrina story is the "the federal government sent all this money to New Orleans". Well, yes and, really no. Yes, the feds sent trailers--the big ones still sitting in Hope, Arkansas, the little ones the subject of debate about the level of...

A Challenge to Political Journalists: Tell Us What We Need To Know

In the 2000 Presidential election, George W. Bush ran as a "compassionate conservative", and political journalists, mining his history as Texas governor for relevant examples, tended to take him at his word. When, after the debacle of the election, Bush took office as a minority-popular vote President, it was possible...

"He's Hiding, and We're Looking"

That's President Bush, from today's news conference, answering a question on the whereabouts of Osama bin Ladin. He repeatedly defended the Iraq War as a means of preventing al Qaeda from using that nation as a haven. The word not spoken, by either the President or the still-somnabulistic press corps,...

The Congressional Democrats: Only a Best-Case Scenario?

The decision by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to throw in the towel on the Iraq-withdrawal timeline has been widely denounced by the left and acknowledged by the Conventional Wisdomariat as the Dems coming to terms with "political reality". That reality, of course, is that George W. Bush was prepared...

How's New Orleans Doing? Some Facts

A friend in the city administration passed on to me the latest assemblage of empirical data about the state of post-flood New Orleans and environs. Now this is me passing it on to you. Comments welcome.

The Template Dies Hard

Today, twenty months after the Katrina story began, one of the durable myths of the story's template resurfaced on NBC's Nightly News. Martin Savidge, nominally of the network's New Orleans bureau, flatly stated in the opening to a piece on continuing racial divisions in the city (unlike, say, which other...

New Orleans Diary: Catching Up

I got to spend a month in New Orleans, a month so full of activity that there was, in fact, no time to blog about it, hence my recent online silence. But plenty was going on in the city: the French Quarter Festival, about which I'd only heard before, but...

New Orleans: "A Lot of People Want to Come Home"

Some people outside New Orleans appear to assume that everything's okay now, because we're having Mardi Gras and (this weekend) Jazzfest. Others seem to imagine that the city is still substantially under water. Today's Times-Picayune helps to correct the picture, with the results of a door-to-door survey done in...