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...

Admittedly, we have so many more important things on our minds, but the Brits -- backward-looking sort, don't you think? -- have just opened an official inquiry into how that country got into the Iraq War.

Here, of course, where the word "history" is a synonym for "toast", the idea...

Of course, Republicans defended George W. Bush and blamed state and local officials when independent investigations (here and here) pointed to the US Army Corps of Engineers' culpability for the 2005 flooding of New Orleans.  Now Democrats are doing the same thing when critics, like myself, find the...

When Ruth Seymour announced earlier this week her retirement as general manager of Santa Monica's pioneering public-radio station, KCRW, it really did mark the end of an era.  Ruth basically founded the modern KCRW, and set the template for much of modern public radio as a result.  She built it,...

Okay, now it's official, or as official, at least, as the considered ruling of a Federal district judge can make it.  The United States Army Corps of Engineers has been found by Judge Stanwood Duval liable for the damages inflicted on at least three plaintiffs by its failure to...

"It's scary," says Tom Jackson, a regional levee commissioner and engineer, of the admission by the Army Corps of Engineers that a section of lakefront levee in East Kenner (a western suburb of New Orleans) is contaminated with construction waste, and will have to be lopped off, before scheduled...

When the Fox network staged a special Veterans' Day version of its NFL pregame show at Bagram AF Base last Sunday, two hours was apparently not long enough to mention one interesting fact about Bagram: It's the site of America's other Gitmo, a prison where detainees have been kept for...

Following up Matthew Hoh's resignation letter of a couple weeks ago comes this missive from William Polk who, like Hoh, finds the only prudent course of action regarding Afghanistan to be a timely removal of foreign (i.e., US and NATO) troops.  If you don't know why the "tribal...

One of the questions New Orleanians have heard most often from outsiders since the 2005 flood is, "Why didn't you all have flood insurance?"  The answer bewilders those outsiders: Mortgage holders told homeowners, you're living inside a federal levee system, you don't need flood insurance.  When the system proved catastrophically...

For anyone who wonders why New Orleanians worry about what the Corps of Engineers is doing in the "rebuilding" of the levee-floodwall system -- now renamed the Hurricane and Storm Damage Risk Reduction System -- AP's Cain Burdeau gets the money quote of the year:

"On the East...

It was maybe March of this year that I first said to someone who asked what I thought of the then-new President that he was in the process of making two major, perhaps historic, mistakes: pretending that Afghanistan had patiently waited for seven years while the United States dithered with...

NEW ORLEANS--I'm preparing to make a documentary film on the causes of the flooding of New Orleans, and where the city goes from here, and so I decided to attend one of the community outreach meetings the Corps of Engineers holds, and advertises in the local paper.  So I found...

In case you haven't noticed, the "debate" about Afghanistan going on inside the White House (thanks for the transparency) has already been decided, and the answer is: we're staying.  The remaining question being considered is: how many troops?   The question not being considered, if leaks are any indication, is why?

Sam Stein's report that musicians are signing on to a Freedom of Information request for documents relating to the use of music as a torture tool at Gitmo leaves two questions unanswered.

First, why do human-rights campaigners fall for the misdirection inherent in the focus on Guantanamo Bay?  Yes,...

Last post on this subject this week, I promise.  The Times-Picayune's Mark Schliefstein reports on the visit of the White House Council on Environmental Quality's chairperson, Nancy Sutley, to New Orleans (a visit paired alongside the President's own).  We are ten months into the administration, the facts about the...

LONDON--Thanks to WWL-TV, I watched the Obama Town Hall in New Orleans live.  Clearly the people in the room enjoyed being in his presence.  But, for those of us looking for even the semblance of substance, for just the sign that this President is not as clueless about the situation...

LONDON--President Obama is visiting one school in New Orleans today.  That's a symbolic nod in the direction of a major change wrought in the city since the flood, a large turn toward charter schools, which, according to latest reports, has resulted in improved test scores for the city's students.  New...

President Obama spends four whole hours tomorrow in New Orleans, site of what the UCBerkeley ILIT report calls "the greatest man-made engineering disaster since Chernobyl," the "man" in question being the federal government's Army Corps of Engineers.  Four hours.

By contrast, when he departs NOLA, he goes to San...