Harry Shearer

The penultimate, if not the ultimate, shoe dropped in the FEMA trailer scandal in New Orleans this week, with the publication of a report from...
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Pardon the George Bush 41-inspired wordplay, but what can one think of the National Basketball Association's attempt to get at least a P.R. handle on ...

That would be"Anything But New Orleans", as reflected in the whopping bill, ostensibly to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and anywhere else...
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One of the unalloyed joys (really) of being in show business is getting to meet and know people you've admired. I grew up listening to...
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Two new reports, two more confirmations that New Orleanians are not yet out of the federal woods. From the Corps of Engineers came a draft...
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It's not widely known, at least in this country, but it was front-page news last week in the UK: the agreement the Bush Administration is...
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The jockeying for consideration as Vice President has begun in earnest in both parties, and the Washington-New York media will soon be awash in useless...
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Hedges, onetime NYT Baghdad bureau chief, writes what sounds like prose that could have been lifted wholesale from Vietnam dispatches, almost as if the distinctions... ...

Extraordinary rendition--it sounds like a Steven Seagal movie title, but it's the practice, which the Administration denied, then admitted but said it abandoned, of capturing... ...

Just in case Scott McClellan wasn't keeping count, the Center for Public Integrity was: at least 935 falsehoods told by the president and his aides in the runup to the war. ...

It's probably not escaped your attention that the Administration has Iran in its sights. The President, while denying in his Richard Engel interview that the... ...

This week, I got a tour of the Lower Ninth Ward. It was by no means my first visit to the area; virtually every time... ...

Or the Myanmarese, or whatever that horrible government prefers to call the people whose aid it's pilfering. That's the question raised in Wednesday's New Orleans... ...

When people outside New Orleans ask, "what happened to all the federal money?", the question is echoed by those in the city. One answer: the... ...

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 ...