NEW ORLEANS -- I've been rather consistently critical of the Obama administration's largely MIA stance toward New Orleans, with the singular exception of the appointment of a new FEMA administrator who, by all reports, has cut the red tape and started the long-appropriated funds finally flowing to fix the damage...

NEW ORLEANS -- In the wake of the Underpants Bomber, lobbyists for companies that make full-body scanners -- including, notably, former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff -- have unhesitatingly pushed their products, on media interviews and on Capitol Hill, as this year's must-have anti-terrorism accessory. But fashion and profit...

In the welter of State of the Union news, this tidbit got to me: the administration is letting the Office of Gulf Coast Recovery quietly die. It should make Glenn Beck glad; that's one "czar" off the government payroll. And it's arguable that the job, whether in the hands of...

NEW ORLEANS--I'm preparing to begin shooting a feature-length documentary on the subject of why, in August 2005, 80% of the city of New Orleans experienced catastrophic flooding. The city, of course, is in an ecstatic mood this week, and there seemingly isn't a conversation that doesn't begin and end with...

This relayed by my friend Lolis Elie, reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, who describes Beverly Bell's work in Haiti as "selfless and inspiring":

Friends: There are ways that your donation, no matter how small, can have a big impact. They are not via the huge bureaucracies, but via the...

LONDON--The British have been doing something so deliciously un-American: looking backward. The Chilcot Inquiry into the origins of the Iraq War is back after its Christmas recess, garnering live TV coverage Tuesday when Tony Blair's still-loyal former spin doctor-in-chief, Alistair Campbell, delivered a rousing display of what "loyalty...

While the president and the punditocracy alike have no compunctions in talking about Guantanamo Bay, Obama's promise to close it, the missing of the deadline, the problem with the Yemeni prisoners, et al., the word that continues to be unspoken is Bagram, the name of our oh-so-secret prison in Afghanistan,...

Dick Cheney certainly isn't spending the first year of his retirement from the vice presidency growing a beard. Instead, he's playing a very clever game, exemplified by his latest "exclusive" screed released in written form to the apparently compliant folks at Politico.com.

In it, as is well known...

Now that the reassurance machine has kicked into high gear, with statements from everyone from President Obama to Janet "The System Worked" Napolitano, we're being asked to believe that what has become the usual syndrome in post 9/11 response -- overreaction in compensation for failure -- is good enough. So...

Something rather interesting is going on in Great Britain these wintry days--an official inquiry, broad-ranging in its declared scope, into the way that country got involved in a little conflict in Iraq. Early testimony has dribbled out some interesting tidbits--doubts that were obliterated in the public pronouncements, intel that was...

For a crystalline example of what's wrong with American journalism, and the American political conversation, at this exact moment, go no farther than Sunday's 60 Minutes interview with President Obama, specifically to 7:12 in.

Steve Kroft begins his question with this sentence: "You're a student of history". The subject...

The man (and his wordsmiths) can write. President Obama's acceptance speech in Oslo was elegant, nuanced, and intelligent. Faced with accepting a peace prize while waging war, he chose not to salute his predecessor Henry Kissinger and leave it at that, but he dove instead into the intellectual thicket...

More Tiger ads. Still keepin' it real...

Tiger's new ad campaign: Keepin it real.

The spectacle of near-celebrities going on Larry King Live to ask for the return of their privacy has been one of the long-running jokes of our era.  Now Tiger Woods puts a new spin on it with his profound-apology-but-give-me-my privacy press release. 

Memo to Tiger: if you really wanted...

As the Salahis begin their media tour with an admirable descent into self-described victimhood, we're being treated to an even more familiar spectacle, perhaps.  White House news secretary Robert Gibbs assured his questioners yesterday that all attention in the investigation of the State Dinner crash focuses on the Secret Service...

As the stage is being set for an “AfPak Surge,” it might be time to take a look at Surge 1.0, in the now-forgotten war (the one we barged into when we forgot the Afghan War, which we’re now remembering), the one in Iraq.  What we’ve been told incessantly, especially...

This should be the year that made clear the distinction between the publicity-hungry, irremediably ego-needy actual denizens of show business (like myself) and the way more grotesquely hungry and ego-needy residents of the show-business underworld known charitably as "reality TV." If the Heenes weren't warning enough, here came the...

Now we're getting somewhere, and it's only day three of Britain's inquiry into the origins of the Iraq war, a quaint little enterprise to strip away years of political folklore.  Britain's ambassador during the period leading up to the invasion places the date when Tony Blair signed up for...

The Guardian sums up the second day of the official Chilcott inquiry into the origins of the Iraq War.  Hm, why can't we have one of those?  Oh, that's right, we move forward.  Anyway, some juicy revelations that casts even more of a cloud on Bush administration assertions that...