Last week in New Orleans, James Carville and Mary Matalin hosted a day-long conference on "Taking the Poison Out of Partisanship", the latest in many attempts to get the partisan voices lowered in what passes for political discourse in this country.

But I wasn't there, I...

August. The month that Democrats seem to think doesn't count. Think John Kerry in 2004. Think Barack Obama the last two years. Somebody had better look at Washington Democrats' calendars and circle August in red. It might help.

This August, in addition to the media swoonfest over Michele Bachmann's meaningless...

NEW ORLEANS--So now we're at the six-year anniversary of the event which everyone calls Katrina, even though, as has been explicated in these pixels many times, the flooding of this city was, in the words of a co-author of one of the two independent investigations of the event, "the greatest...

LONDON -- As I write this I'm flying back to America, specifically New Orleans, to celebrate July 4 by watching fireworks over the Mississippi River. I say that right up here at the top to establish my Yank bonafides. In addition, my parents sought out this country as a refuge...

NEW ORLEANS -- It's righteously hot at the beginning of June, a time for this area to take an involuntary intake of breath, if not a full-on gasp, before getting on with finding some shade. June 1 is the official start of the hurricane season. No whistles blow, no bands...

The news reports about General Stanley McChrystal's new position, "leading a three-member advisory board... to help service members and their families," don't fail to mention the mildly scandalous Rolling Stone article that got the General relieved of command in Afghanistan. That just makes it sound like...

NEW ORLEANS -- The 2010 census figures about New Orleans made news (here, here, and here, for example), but the stories all came out at the height of the uprising in Egyptian cities, so you may have missed them. But, since they were all...

NEW YORK -- Not content with having crafted a recovery plan that helped banks and financial services firms recover far more nicely than other folks, President Obama has reached out to the rest of the business community with a plan for all federal agencies to reexamine their regulations,...

If mental disturbance is, as it seems (and as I discussed in my last post), at the root of the shootings in Tucson, that leaves another question: what's at the root of all the rancor about political rancor?

Sure, some of it is outrage that outrage on the other side...

NEW ORLEANS -- In the race to "explain" the Tucson shooting, the sprinters have been those who've found the cause in the rhetoric of one side or the other of the political spectrum. Close behind them have been those who see once again the folly of a society, almost unique...

NEW ORLEANS -- Back when Princess Diana died, it was already happening. Now it's gotten much worse.

"It" is the thinning out of news -- especially broadcast news -- ranks on the weekends. Princess Di's horrific accident happened on a Saturday, just like the shocking shooting incident in Tuscon....

LONDON -- We're being urged by the Washington-NYC punditocracy to regard the post-shellacking performance of the lame-duck Congress as some sort of revival of President Obama as a getting-things-done-type leader. After all, look at what's been passed by the Dem leadership on their way out the door.

Okay, let's look....

NEW ORLEANS--It's a beautiful, warm, sunny Thanksgiving Day in the Crescent City. The Saints are winning, the Hornets--despite stumbling this week--are winning, the oysters (though expensive) are back. There's much to be thankful for here.

But my gratitude this season is directed at three people I've met who have had...

My friend David Corn has done yeoman work in fact-checking Decision Points regarding the issues surrounding the Iraq War and the outing of Valerie Plame (available at mojo.com). A Twitter buddy sent me the chapter concerning Hurricane Katrina, expecting that I'd have some factual light to shed on...

NEW ORLEANS -- The story in a nutshell: realizing that NPR (which recently announced its initials no longer stand for "National Public Radio") would not do a news story on The Big Uneasy, my documentary film about why New Orleans flooded, I decided to buy "underwriting announcements" (ads to you...

For those folks -- including the people at the CBS Evening News who, on the Friday before the 5th anniversary of the 2005 flood, ran a glowing, two-and-a-half-minute-long video paean to the US Army Corps of Engineers' work on the "new, improved" hurricane protection system in New Orleans -- who...

LONDON -- Okay, game on. Louisiana's Democrats and Republicans have come together to propose something that should be uncontroversial -- that 80% of the fines BP is to pay for fouling the Gulf Coast should go to the affected states for a program of...Gulf Coast restoration. Otherwise, the...

LONDON--Thursday's NYT puts it plainly enough: the divided appeals court ruling against victims of CIA torture abroad was:

"... a major victory for the Obama administration's efforts to advance a sweeping view of executive secrecy powers."

There's continuity we can believe in.

LONDON -- The American media seem spellbound by Terry Jones as a stuntmaster. They can't stop talking about his threat to burn copies of the Koran on the 9th anniversary of 9/11, or asking other notables, from generals to cabinet members, to comment about it. The only thing it doesn't...

NEW ORLEANS--Sorry, can't be sure that's the planet he's living on, but this intelligent, well-informed man surely can't be living on this orb. Otherwise, he wouldn't have been able to start off his speech at Xavier University Sunday afternoon with this reprise of his town-hall remarks here last October:

"It...