Background Briefing - Sunday August 29, 2010

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Harry Shearer is an actor, author, director, and radio host. The Los Angeles native and New Orleans resident has enjoyed enormous success over the last twenty years for his voice work for The Simpsons, on which he plays a stable of characters including Mr. Burns, Smithers, and Ned Flanders. He is also known for his work in such films as This is Spinal Tap and A Mighty Wind, and his weekly radio program Le Show airs on radio stations across the globe. He has just completed a new feature-length documentary called, The Big Uneasy. It will screen in theaters nationwide for one night, tomorrow, August 30. Go to www.thebiguneasy.com for show times and venues near you. 

Leslie Carde’ is an Emmy Award-winning investigative broadcast journalist with deep personal and professional ties to New Orleans. Carde’ has covered stories from the hostage crisis in Tehran to the Daniel Pearl murder trial in Islamabad. She was one of the first anchors at CNBC when it launched in 1989, was a foreign correspondent for CNN, and went on to create a variety of news and entertainment programs. She wrote, directed, and produced the feature-length investigative documentary, “America Betrayed.”

John Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic where he has been a contributor since 1982. An active member of SDS and the left of the Sixties, he taught philosophy at Berkeley and at the San Francisco Art Institute. His books include The Paradox of American Democracy: Elites, Special Interests, and the Betrayal of Public Trust, William F. Buckley: Patron Saint of the Conservatives, and Grand Illusion: Critics and Champions of the American Century. His article “The Unnecessary Fall: A Counter-History of the Obama Presidency” appeared August 12 in The New Republic, and has generated considerable commentary. On August 25, Judis published a response to his critics, defending his analysis.