Harry Shearer


Huffington Post

The Difference Between Show Business and Business

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... ...


You Save Us, We Redeem You

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 ...


President Elect Obama: Denounce and Renounce

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? ...


How to Come Down From Euphoria

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... ...


If You Like FEMA, You'll Love HUD

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... ...


Design Flaws: The Other (Minneapolis) Shoe Drops

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. ...


Forget the Yanks, Here Come the Dutch

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. ...


What's Made the Price of Oil Take a Swan Dive?

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 ...


The Failure of"Because I Say So"

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 ...


Alchemy Lives!

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 ...


Bush Favors Texas Over Louisiana--Even Bobby Jindal Notices

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 ...


Dick Cheney Lied--to a Republican

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 ...


New Orleans Exhales, Then Gasps Again

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 ...


New Orleans: Nobody Asked, Why Not Sooner?

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 ...


Harry Shearer:"Katrina and Cronyism"

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 ...


The Base Hillary Didn't Touch

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. ...


All Those Federal Funds: Why the New Orleans Recovery is Slow

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 ...


What Bush Said in New Orleans Today, and What He Didn't Say

"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, ...


Oil: Supply vs. Demand

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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Putin's Lesson

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... ...


Why Not Trust The Corps? They're"Scrambling"

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, ...


Some Hounds from St. Bernard (and some cats)

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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CNN Anchor Heidi Collins--Incredible

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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Louisiana's"Road Home"--the Goalposts Keep Moving

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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Intel Goes Down the Memory Hole Again

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 ...


Even Paid Speech Isn't Free

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. ...


Miss Universe in Vietnam--Isn't That Wild?

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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The Iranian Missile Photos--Be Very Afraid

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 ...


Is There a Echo in Here? Echo in Here? Echo in Here?

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 ...


Bobby Jindal, the Ball is In Your Courts

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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FEMA's Trailers: The Cheapest, The Most Toxic

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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The NBA's David Stern Does Doo-Doo Diligence

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 ...


Congress'(and the President's) Priorities: ABNO

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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George Carlin

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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New Orleans: The Corps Gets It Wrong Again, and Charting the Bumps in the Road Home

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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Bush's July Deadline for A Permanent Presence in Iraq

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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Vetting the Veeps: One Question to Ask

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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Some Light Weekend Reading--Chris Hedges on the Nature of War

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... ...


Rendition Gets a Little More Extraordinary

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... ...


935 Lies

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. ...


Connecting the Absence of Dots

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... ...


The New Orleans Recovery Continues, Feds Welcome to Jump Aboard

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... ...


Who Are We To Lecture the Burmese?

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... ...


In New Orleans, the Road Home Adds a New Bump

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... ...


The Military Analyst Scandal Dies -- Even on NPR?

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? ...


After the Festival, the Celebration

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... ...


Why the Feds Should Pay to Protect New Orleans--And It's Not Me Saying So

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... ...


Best Case Scenarios Failed. Time to Trot Out the Worst-Case Scenarios

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,... ...


Oops! Just a Little Leak

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... ...


When Is a Gaffe Not Newsworthy?

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,... ...


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