Harry Shearer

"We always prefer the civics-class myth to the gritty reality" More »

We are at a moment where it's possible to see the utter and complete failure of the war model as applied to what happened to America on 9/11. More »

Last week Britain was convulsed in a media frenzy. Unlike the one in the United States the week before, this controversy did not center around an event which, even if it had been true in every particular, still would have legitimately been a major news story only for broadcasters in Colorado. The UK fracas was over the invitation to the leader of the British National Party, Nick Griffin, to appear on the BBC's prime-time television debate program, "Question… More »

After a couple of weeks in London and one in New Orleans, I'm back in L.A., immersed in the American media culture (!) once more. The health-care debate, which, for better or worse, would have been concluded in about two or three months in any other Western democracy, grinds on, positions being repeated pretty much as they were before the big Town Hall scare of August. About all that's changed is that the current wave of health-reform commercials inundating cable… More »

LONDON--We're being prepared, it appears, for the sacrifice of the public option in whatever health-care reform bill manages to crawl out of Congress. This might be a good time, therefore, to look at another form of public option in another country. Specifically, the BBC's news channel.It's on my mind now because, aside from having it on in my hotel room, it was the target a couple of weeks ago of a broadside attack by the head of its chief competitor, Sky News. … More »

LONDON--I've been spending two and a half weeks in search of the British summer. Like American culture, it's elusive at best. And, despite the cross-Atlantic jokes, the two countries have so much in common. The UK is following America down a second consecutive warpath (although the "P-word" has not yet been used as Britain's opposition parties react to 8 military deaths in one day in Afghanistan, no one has yet called Gordon Brown "Barack Obama's poodle). … More »

It ill behooves a humorist to take a public position on another comic's jokes, so I'll just say that people, like Chris Matthews, who abjure Letterman's "knocked up" joke on grounds that the language is unacceptably rough must have missed the fact that a major movie studio released a picture by that very title to wide public support. But, as to Sarah Palin's response: I'm gratified to see one politician who sees fit to avoid the current fad of pretending to have a… More »

Full disclosure: I'm a New Orleanian, not by birth but by adoption. We adopted each other, New Orleans and me. While some of my friends, who suffered no damage from the 2005 floods, used the moment to flee the city (and even to denounce it in the New York Times), I saw the moment as more akin to what you do when a stranger hideously attacks your loved one: unless you're Newt Gingrich (who famously demanded a divorce from his first wife on her cancer bed), you… More »

As far back as the time when he was selling videotapes of his lectures at a relatively obscure college, Newt Gingrich has marketed himself as a man of ideas. You could do a credible impression of the man (at least I did) just by dropping the names "Deming and Drucker" into every other sentence, and the words "American civilization" into every other paragraph. And now, back out of power and back into the media, Speaker Gingrich (as likes to be called) is again… More »

NEW YORK--In the early years of this decade, we saw a wonderful business planl play itself out....literally. The record business, lulled by twenty years of selling new copies (on CD) of music people already owned and loved (on LP), found itself up against an odd problem of its own devising: having decided to focus its business on teens and early 20s, it found that those people, having more time than money at their disposal, were helping themselves to the music via… More »

First, like Dick Cheney, I had other priorities during the Vietnam War. So, when Memorial Day rolls around, I'm extra careful to remember certain facts about those in our military service. Like our government's eagerness to send them into the Iraq War without the armor, on their vehicles and their bodies, to protect them. Or like the ability of their command structure to ignore the eerie similarity in their "individual abuses" at Abu Ghraib to the legally… More »

This is not about Pakistan. There's plenty being written and said these days about Pakistan. But back in 2002, as it was selling the Iraq war "product", the Bush administration advanced three criteria for invading a country like Iraq: it had harbored terrorists, it had WMD, and it had threatened or invaded its neighbors. Even then, it was possible (thanks to the published statements of intelligence analysts Greg Thielmann in the US, Dr. Brian Jones in the UK… More »