Ed Schultz, host of MSNBC’s The Ed Show, will be marking the sixth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina by hosting a free clinic for the uninsured at New Orleans’ Ernest N. Morial Convention Center on August 29. The event will be just the latest of the liberal firebreather’s efforts to lend a hand to the community’s [...]

Bloomberg’s Lizzie O’Leary has had a busy few months, thanks to BP and their inability to keep their oil under control. Turns out the press aren’t that easy to control either — though O’Leary says they’ve certainly tried. Not that she minds — she’s more than happy to come back to New Orleans from her [...]

I was in New Orleans this past weekend for the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and was fortunate to pay a few visits to the Lower 9th Ward — one of the hardest-hit neighborhoods, and on the front lines when the levees broke (literally — the neighborhood is right on the Industrial Canal Levee). In [...]

What would the coverage of Hurricane Katrina have been like in the age of Twitter? The question has been raised, as it often is when contemplating massive national events in the past – back in late August and early September 2005, we watched that story unfold, unbelievingly, on our TV screens and news reports and via the then-lighting-fast-seeming world of blogs, as the Times-Picayune brought their operation online from wherever they could get online.

My first introduction to New Orleans was from the air, flying high over the city with a view of the land – and water – below. Couldn’t help but feel a little like George Bush. I had just seen Harry Shearer’s documentary, “The Big Uneasy,” part of which was a discussion about engineering failures in the city, way before Katrina, relating to how it handled all its water – holding water back instead of finding ways to bring it through the city in controlled ways via canals, like the Dutch. Flying over New Orleans on our approach, I got it. There was no view of land without water – water in the great looming form of Lake Pontchartrain, water cutting through in tributaries, water flowing beside a long stretch of highway, water just – everywhere.

Fox News star anchor Shepard Smith is profiled in this month’s New Orleans Living, as we approach the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

Smith talked about the coverage of the disaster, in which he distinguished himself as one of the most compelling reporters on the ground there, as well as the opinion vs. news divide at FNC.

Forget Katrina, President Obama opened the headline floodgates this weekend and compared the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf to 9/11 noting that the BP spill may shape our thinking about the environment as dramatically as 9/11 did about foreign policy.

During today’s presidential press conference on the BP Oil spill NBC’s Chuck Todd asked President Obama the question that appears to be upper-most in the media’s mind. Said Todd: “Can you respond to all the Katrina comparisons people are making?”

President Obama‘s handling of the BP Oil spill seems to simultaneously be providing the public with a quick review of 20th Century history. Initially, the BP Oil spill was Obama’s Katrina. More recently Obama’s response inspired some not-so-flattering WWII comparisons from David Gergen. Yesterday, Shepard Smith said the spill could end up being worse than 9/11. And today it’s apparently Obama’s Watergate.

Despite the continuing Katrina comparisons, there’s no ‘heckuva job’ back slaps happening during this Louisiana disaster. Ahead of his press conference later today to discuss further restrictions on oil drilling and presumably the BP Oil spill, President Obama has fired Elizabeth Birnbaum, director of the U.S. Minerals Management Service. Birnbaum was reportedly head of Minerals Management Service “when it exempted Deep Water Horizon rig from most scrutiny.”

The BP Oil Spill is now a month old. Fairly early on the administration managed to shut down the initial storyline that this was President Obama’s Katrina by relentlessly pointing out that Katrina was primarily the result of government neglect and this time around the administration was fast-acting and in charge. It would appear Obama’s grace period on this comparison is about to come to an end.

Just how bad does the Obama administration want you to not compare the current catastrophe in the Gulf to Hurricane Katrina? Pretty badly it would seem. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar did a Full Ginsberg (and then some) on the morning shows Sunday and relentlessly employed the term “day one” (16 times relentless).

To Bill Maher, nothing is sacred. And while he spent most of his career proving that by supporting those on his side of the aisle, last night he took some time to criticize public officials he has vocally supported, including the recently-deceased Ted Kennedy. Maher is “really mad” at the way the Obama administration has handled the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and refused to let go Kennedy’s resistance to wind energy just because he was no longer alive.

After yesterday’s intimate pre-recorded interview with Matt Lauer on Today, Karl Rove stopped by the studio to talk to the host live about three of the most controversial issues of the Bush administration: the invasion of Iraq, the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, and the Valerie Plame CIA leak scandal. Unlike yesterday, this Rove showed no signs of remorse or vulnerability, and stuck to his points against an increasingly combative Lauer.

On more than one occasion we have pondered what would happen if George W. Bush had made some of the same decisions that President Barack Obama has lately been making. The different ways that the two presidents are received by the media (and by extension, the public) has been particularly glaring during the recent White House Vs. Fox debacle. But should Obama really be held to the same low standards?

Amidst this weekend’s wall-to-wall Ted Kennedy coverage, and the growing Sarah Palin anniversary retrospectives it was sometimes difficult to recall that Saturday marked the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans. Even Twitter seemed relatively quiet on the subject. Speaking of Twitter, it’s hard not to wonder how differently the aftermath of Katrina might have played out had Twitter been around just four years ago.