NEW ORLEANS--In a Monday blog post, WashPost's Al Kamen reports that the incoming Obama administration will bring back James Lee Witt, who successfully whipped FEMA into shape under Bill Clinton, to...whip FEMA back into shape. Obama, according to Kamen's sources, also plans to liberate FEMA from the Homeland Security...

When the Bush administration -- yeah, they're still in office, and they like it when we're not paying attention -- first trotted out its marketing campaign for the Iraq war, the three main criteria for attacking that country stuck in my mind. Hey, I thought, I know a nation that...

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 includes in his rants, for good measure, the execs of NBC News, NBC, and GE. He goes so far as to accuse those executives...

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 Arianna Huffington) what role they thought Colin Powell should play in the new Obama Administration. Surprisingly, three of the panelists, including the Proprietress, allowed...

I spent most of the weeks between the conventions and the election reading two essential books: Jane Mayer's The Dark Side and Barton Gellman's Angler. Both cast essential light, the first from a systemic perspective and the second from a personal one, on the degree to which Vice...

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 yet having gone to jail or introduced a line of trousers with codpieces. He was a protest candidate, and a vote for him, running against...

Not content to spearhead the bulldozing of thousands of habitable public-housing apartments in New Orleans while the erstwhile residents remain in exile, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, according to Thursday's Times-Picayune, is slow-walking renters on assistance in the wake of the 2005 flooding out of tens of...

Conservative blogger Ed Morrissey (hat tip: Robinson/Long) writes in justifiable outrage over the liberals in Minnesota who raced to the politically convenient (for them) conclusion that the bridge collapse in Minneapolis was the result of lack of funding for proper maintenance. The actual cause of the collapse, as reported...

NEW ORLEANS--Today's Times-Picayune points out what's painfully obvious: the biggest man-made engineering disaster (per Dr. Bob Bea, co-author of the ILIT report) ever to befall an American city has fallen completely off the national radar screen. New Orleans got only one passing mention, in reference to its growth...

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. When homes and jobs and the whole damn economy seems at stake, the pump has stopped, at least in the media's focus, appearing to be...

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 the polls, it's easy to understand why those with the most hotly contested elections this November were the least eager to sign...

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 current credit meltdown that seems to be escaping a lot of attention. I know President Bush wants to solve the problem,...

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 is dispositive, I think, as to the difference between even the nastiest of hurricanes (the Ike event) and the breaching in more than fifty places...

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 is a journalistic celeb who gets to flack his wares on 60 Minutes.

His WashPost colleague Barton Gellman, though, scored the bigger...

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 as my friends and neighbors (the ones who didn't stay) make their way back into town, they're greeted today by another shoe dropping: the...

LOS ANGELES -- Of course, the primary hope is that this question remains, if not rhetorical, at least not forensic. The hope is that Hurricane Gustav doesn't prove the fragile repairs of the deeply defective levee and floodwall system in New Orleans have been repairs in name only, that the...

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. And in Denver tonight, exactly three words were spoken that served as a shout-out from the powerful and the would-be powerful to a city on...

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 -- ending the war (!), universal health care, helping the middle class. In a speech that ran nine minutes past its end-of-prime deadline, there...

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 city's recovery so slow?", an authoritative answer is now available, thanks to this report in today's Times-Picayune.

Some highlights:

Researchers concluded that "enormous obstacles"...

"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, and George W. Bush stood today in Jackson Barracks, the National Guard h.q. in the Lower Ninth Ward, and spoke those words. They were...