Harry Shearer

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, ...

After all the speculation about whether speculators were behind this summer's oil price spike, there seems to be widespread agreement (see here, here, here, here,...
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When George W. Bush famously said after his first meeting with Vladimir Putin,"I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be... ...

This July was good to New Orleans. No major storms nearby, and a wealth of visitors packing the streets, clubs, restaurants. The Essence Music Festival, ...

The St. Bernard Parish animal shelter, just east of New Orleans, has run out of room, and a lot of dogs and cats either have to be adopted or....you know the rest.
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Let's be charitable. Let's assume that it's CNN morning anchor Heidi Collins'local-news background that accounts for her ability to ad-lib during a conversation with...
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For those outside New Orleans who ask,"what happened to all the Federal money down there?", another guide appears in Saturday's Times-Picayune, a Cook's tour...
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Verbs are important. The Bush Administration has gone from saying we"know"something--as in,"we know Saddam has nuclear weapons"--to we"believe"something. Which is ...

When Clear Channel saw my"Songs of the Bushmen"ads, their tone changed from oleaginously friendly salesman to angry schoolmarm -- the art was"not acceptable,"a curt email informed me. ...

Anybody who was alive and sentient during the Vietnam War had to do at least one double-take during Sunday night's NBC telecast of the Miss...
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We know about the Photoshopping (authorized copy or bootleg?) of the fourth missile into the photo of the Iranian missile launch printed around the world ...

No links, not even any patties, but anyone who's been paying attention the last couple of days, since the Iranians test-launched (with the help of ...

NEW ORLEANS--Aside from his recent 180 on the recent legislative pay raise bill (which spawned recall petitions against, among others, him), Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's...
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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,... ...