On this Hump Day, I hope you got to be or will be able to assume whichever role you want - either humpee or humper. I wonder what the candidates' stance on Hump Day is? Inquiring minds want to know!

I've got nothing else "Intro" - wise; I've felt like my alarm just went off all day today. So, on to tonight's Countdown diary!

Did you miss this? Satirist Harry Shearer www.KCRW.com/etc/programs/ls interviewed Arianna Huffington, Webby Award-winning blogger who is editor-in-chief of Huffingtonpost.com, and a regular panelist on the station’s popular political week-in-review show, Left, Right & Center www.kcrw.com/news/programs/lr. Right is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe. It’s serious fun. Listen here:

Harry Shearer's Le ShowKCRW's Left, Right and Center

Conservative Amity Shlaes sits in for Tony Blankley today. Her book about FDR and the failings of the New Deal in part will drive some of the discussion on today's Left, Right and Center 2:30 pm Pacific on radio (89.9 FM) and live stream at www.KCRW.com. She'll be talking about some of Obama's ideas as a new New Deal -- the good, the bad and the flat-out wrong. Hope you'll listen online or on air. More after we record the show today. And Arianna Huffington will stick around to do an interview with our house satirist Harry Shearer (Le Show, Sundays 10 am PT http://www.kcrw.com/... he blogs on HuffingtonPost.com and will be interviewing Arianna about her new book "Right is Wrong," to air later in June.

I tried to research whether this has been diaried. Kept getting a Error Server message. I'm sure since Harry Shearer has won a 2008 Webby and the site MYDAMNCHANNEL.com is very well designed and entertaining, a lot of you know of him. But I just found it, watched the vid, liked it, wanted to make sure others enjoyed too. I scout for art. I love art. I share art.

CNN's latest TV promo implores their viewers to "declare their independence." The spot claims the network has "no spin, no agenda, no affiliation" and urges viewers to "get the facts." Hmmmmm. Nice try CNN.  

Sit back and relax, gonna share with you a link to some great videos of New Orleans.  I was surfing the NOLA blogs, and came cross this at the wild and irreverent gentilly girl (who, by the way, is one of the best ranters I have ever beheld).

Harry Shearer has made a wonderful series of videos at his cool site, my damn channel.  With great piano music as background and really nice filming, he gives us an intimate look at the wonderful wounded city of New Orleans.

Makes me wish I were there ... right now.  Join me below the flip.

And now:  Al Shearer and Harry Gore!

Okay, well it was actually Al Gore and Harry Shearer, last night in Los Angeles to kick off his "The Assault on Reason" book tour.

The moderator, after a lovely runup to the intro, mucked up the names.

Al looked calm and relaxed as he took the stage after the muddled name thing.  After making nice, Harry said he was going to quickly turn into the "turd in the punchbowl" and ask some tough questions.

I thought Al fielded the questions well; my friend did not.  

Original at Booman Tribune.

Assbackery 101, second semester, 2007.

This story came in last night, but The Guardian picked it up this a.m.:

The 2006 hurricane season turned out to be mild, and the new pumps were never pressed into action. But the Corps and the politically connected manufacturer of the equipment are still struggling to get the 34 heavy-duty pumps working properly.

The pumps are now being pulled out and overhauled because of excessive vibration, Corps officials said. Other problems have included overheated engines, broken hoses and blown gaskets, according to the documents obtained by the Associated Press.

How can you fix something that is going to continue to be defective?

I'm really beginning to wonder whether they want New Orleans to return at all.

     I've lived in Florida a long time.  I've seen just about every Hurricane that has come through (I slept through a few two years ago - terribly unexciting). There is someting extremely morbid about almost all the Katrina converage lo these last few weeks.  Is anyone else either filled with extreme hope or weighted down by tragedy after just a few minutes of anything resembling a "news" program lately?

This is absolutley must see video from the HuffPo, showing both the true sides of pathetic hack Tweetybird Matthews and Tom Delay.

It appears to be off-the-air Hardball footage in which Tweety is talking to Delay about some focus groups Luntz did, reveling in the fact that all the Democrats did poorly, including Hillary Clinton, to which Delay responds:

"There's nothing worse than a woman know-it-all"

Watch the video

Several times I've expressed concern about a willy-nilly embrace of framing and narratives by liberals. I understand the compulsion to resist the right wing nuts on their own territory, but it's easy to forget, as we all become neo-narratologists, that there's a good reason why it's their territory. It's inherently fictional. Fictions don't benefit liberals. There's no advantage in the long term to joining the wingers in trying to infantilize the public any further. We'll do best by insisting on facing up to the facts, which the GOoPers have spectacularly failed to do.

Harry Shearer threw garish light on the question last week in his own inimitable way. Here is the link at Le Show from Feb. 12, 2006 (ca. 34 minutes into the show). I provide a transcript on Side B.

The Times-Picayune has it, via Harry Shearer's "smoking gun" HuffPo article this PM:

The engineering mistakes that led to the canal levee failures that flooded most of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina were found and then dismissed in the Army Corps of Engineers' design review process in 1990, an investigative team reviewing the failures says.

Documents, obtained by The Times-Picayune and provided to forensic engineers studying the levee breaches, show project engineers made a critical mistake in assessing soil strengths on the 17th Avenue Canal project, said Robert Bea, a University of California-Berkeley professor who is a member of the National Science Foundation team.

As I was driving to work last night, I was listening to the Sunday night NPR lineup on WBEZ-FM in Chicago. I caught the tail end of "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me", and then Harry Shearer's "Le Show" came on.

Well, Harry was doing a "year-in-review" show, playing bits that he'd done throughout the year. But as I don't get to hear "Le Show" every week, I was caught by surprise when he started talking about one of our favorite characters from 2005, James D. Guckert, or as we first knew him, Jeff Gannon.