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 [...]

Second line, fifth anniversary, ninth ward: This Sunday, August 29th, on the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, in the hard-hit Lower 9th Ward there was a second-line parade commemorating the event — and celebrating the fact that, through so much hardship, the community was rebuilding, and was still here. Hundreds of people came out to [...]

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.

Five years after Hurricane Katrina, the media is descending on New Orleans once again to follow the progress of the city’s rebuilding. Last night, Rachel Maddow reported from Louisiana on the closing of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (Mr. Go), a canal that was directly responsible for channeling water into New Orleans when Katrina hit. It was yet another sign that her point of the night was true: when man fights nature, nature always wins.

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.

Getting a jump start on the five-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Soledad O’Brien‘s latest “In America” documentary New Orleans Rising premiered this weekend – airing tonight at 8pmET (and repeated next week).

Mixing coverage from five years ago with new reporting, the doc focuses on several families and highlights the various ways red tape has stopped the reconstruction.

Former Speaker of the House and potential 2012 Republican candidate Newt Gingrich took questions from a crowd at his “Real Jobs Summit” in New Orleans on Thursday and was put into an uncomfortable position by an audience member that referred to President Barack Obama as “the Kenyan” during a comment after Gingrich’s statements.

Here’s an SRLC speech you may have missed yesterday: Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal took the podium yesterday to give conference-goers a warm welcome to his home state– and a warning to Republican “staffers” to steer clear of the wrong side of town.

HBO’s new drama Treme premieres Sunday, and for fans of David Simon and The Wire, they’re anxiously anticipating this next Simon series for the network.

But Treme, about post-Katrina New Orleans, is different (here are Newsweek and the New Yorker‘s reviews). Mediaite spoke to one of the stars of the show, Clarke Peters (who also starred in The Wire as Lester Freeman) about filming in New Orleans, Wire comparisons and more.

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Expect this to turn into a much bigger story very quickly. Yesterday, a U.S. Attorney Jim Letten (a holdover from the Bush administration, according to Rachel Maddow) recused himself from the James O’Keefe case for “various relevant factors” that have yet to be disclosed in detail (though not for long one imagines!). There’s more.

The decade got off to such a nice start, didn’t it? At the stroke of midnight, as the nines turned into zeroes, our millennial fears were allayed by magnums of champagne and an army of Silicon Alley wizards. Cities around the globe twinkled with the light of an infinity of camera flashes. It was all [...]

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?