Harry Shearer

In an excerpt from his book on former SecDef Donald Rumsfeld, Brad Graham quotes Mr. "Stuff Happens" thusly on the subject of the hated media:... ...

If you were inclined to disbelieve the three independent forensic engineering reports that blamed design and construction errors by the US Army Corps of Engineers... ...

After four years of hearing, from commenters on the New Orleans disaster, that "they never should have built it there...they should just move it inland/upstream/away",... ...

New Orleans has an affordable-rental-housing crisis, in the wake of the failure of the federal levees in 2005. Best estimates are that some 80,000 rental... ...

NEW YORK--When I say, as I did in a recent response to a commenter critical of New Orleans, that that city's people are the most... ...

Sunday morning Colin Powell went on "Face the Nation", ostensibly to debate the future of the Republican party. But late in the interview, Powell was... ...

That was how Dick Cheney summarized what the International Red Cross described as treatment "tantamount to torture" handed out to certain US detainees. You pays... ...

CLEVELAND--Regular readers know I've been critical of the Obama administration for its do-nothing approach to redeeming the President's promise to redeem the promises Bush made... ...

In the latest phase of what I'm proud to name The War on Torture, we've definitely entered Mirror World. In the regular world, we've become... ...

Monday's NYT piece on the unraveling of the torture program during the second Bush term provokes a key question, and provides a stark answer. If,... ...

Let's see...Mayor Nagin's embroiled in twin scandals, involving his Sanitation Commissioner turning over private emails from city councilpeople and his former technology czar's ties with... ...

Several years too late, we've been dragged kicking and screaming into what a democratic republic should be engaged in: a public debate on whether such... ...

As if Formosan termites weren't bad enough (they devour everything, not just wood), now New Orleans, and Florida, are coming to grips with their latest... ...

Reading the history of Joe Cassano's stewardship of AIG Financial Products, one thing--aside from the frequent lying about the lack of risk in the bets... ...

Sunday's Washington Post article, recapitulating much of Ron Suskind's earlier reporting, that Abu Zubaydah wasn't the feared number 3 of Al-Qaeda, and that the intelligence... ...

Mainstream media have portrayed Ed Liddy, currently the $1-a-year head of embattled AIG, as a good guy who gamely took on a bad job, unwinding... ...

That's a question that's often asked by commenters here critical of my repeated suggestions that the Federal government, under both Bush and Obama, has failed... ...

The clock is ticking. Congress told the Army Corps of Engineers to give New Orleans what it thought it had, so-called Category 3 hurricane protection,... ...

"Sense of Urgency Grips Coastal Restoration Summit", reads the headline in Thursday's New Orleans Times-Picayune. The story, about a summit of scientists and state officials,... ...

It may be apparent to constant readers of my posts, or listeners to my radio show, that I've avoided satirizing, opionizing, or otherwise making public... ...

NEW ORLEANS--Yes, there's bitching and moaning about what's in, and not in, the stimulus package. And then there's this, from last Friday's Times-Picayune: The giant... ...

LONDON--Yes, that pesky"history"thing rears its ugly head, this time in a quote from General David"Surge"Petraeus in today's Washington Post. It's neat... ...

Watching the wave of euphoria sweep over Washington, and the country, I'm reminded of the last time an emotion this deep and wide settledt over ...

Even while the rest of the country may have not noticed Bush's parting insult, New Orleans sure got the message. ...

President Bush and Dick Cheney, far busier with the Bush-Cheney Legacy Tour than with their final days exercising executive (or whatever branch Cheney's in) power--we ...

Help me. I'm confused. Are we supposed to ignore the past, forget finger-pointing and blame-gaming and look forward? Or are we supposed to demand accountability? ...

The Sunday-morning yak shows on the networks have long since all adopted the late Tim Russert's habit of confronting guests with previous statements that contradict...


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It's holiday time and we probably all want to be thinking about something other than bloodshed and disaster. But the editors at The Nation... ...

Tuesday's edition of the Bush Legacy Project Television Show involved a visit by a suddenly softballing Candy Crowley to the White House for a CNN... ...

Friends of mine assure me that that little item is a stealth priority -- New Orleans is an issue that Obama cares so deeply about he dare not mention it yet. ...

NEW ORLEANS--In a Monday blog post, WashPost's Al Kamen reports that the incoming Obama administration will bring back James Lee Witt, who successfully whipped FEMA ...

When the Bush administration--yeah, they're still in office, and they like it when we're not paying attention--first trotted out its marketing campaign for the Iraq ...

In show business (masquerading as"television journalism"), Bill O'Reilly on Fox News Channel excoriates not only his time-slot rival Keith Olbermann for left-leaning views, but... ...

At a Sunday night live broadcast of KCRW's"Left, Right and Center"an audience member asked the panel (Tony Blankley, Bob Scheer, Matt Miller and ...

This question needs to be asked of the president-elect: do you plan to denounce and renounce these extra-Constitutional ways of doing business, and the illegal policies that resulted, before you take office? ...

I first voted for an African-American for President 40 years ago yesterday. The man was Eldridge Cleaver, then a well-known author ("Soul on Ice") not... ...

Not content to spearhead the bulldozing of thousands of habitable public-housing apartments while the erstwhile residents remain in exile, the Department of Housing and Urban... ...

Both liberals and conservatives would prefer not to confront an uncomfortable fact: something in our system of providing for major infrastructure has gone terribly wrong. ...

New Orleans may be, according to the old slogan,"the city that care forgot", but, judging by this campaign, it's certainly the city America forgot. ...

It all seems so quaint and distant now, that debate about the cause of sharply rising oil prices during the first half of this year ...

LONDON--Over dinner last night, i was trying to explain to a British friend why the majority of House Republicans fled the bailout bill compromise. Reading ...

I'm not an economic idiot--I remember what"elasticity of demand"means--but I may be an economic special-needs person. Even so, there's one fact about the ...

As horrible as Hurricane Ike was to Texas, and it was, one can't help noticing the disparity in death tolls between Ike and Katrina. It ...

Of course, the Wall Street swoon is bigger news. But bigger news as well were the somewhat newsworthy revelations in Bob Woodward's book--bigger because Woodward ...

Gustav, as far as New Orleans was concerned, was not"the mother of all storms", in the latest immortal words of Mayor Ray Nagin, and ...

LOS ANGELES--Of course, the primary hope is that this question remains, if not rhetorical, at least not forensic. The hope is that Gustav doesn't prove ...

My friends in New Orleans are either deciding what to pack, or deciding to hunker down. There's an ominous mass gaining power in the Gulf ...

Hillary Clinton's job, we were told, was to unite her supporters behind Barack Obama. The speech she gave had several mentions apiece of her chosen themes -- only one thing was left out. ...

For commenters to my posts on New Orleans who keep asking a variant of"why, with all the federal billions sent down there, is the ...

"Never before has our nation seen such destruction by nature". It's almost three years after the federal levees failed and flooded 80% of New Orleans, ...