During the winter of 2001 and throughout 2002, Miller produced a series of stunning stories about Saddam Hussein’s ambition and capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction, based largely on information provided by Chalabi and his allies—almost all of which have turned out to be stunningly inaccurate.

At what point are some in the media going to admit they Judy Millered the impact of the oil disaster?

The Washington Post: Scientists report undersea oil plume stretching 21 miles from BP spill site

Academic scientists are challenging the Obama administration’s assertion that most of BP’s oil is either gone or rapidly disappearing — citing, among other evidence, the discovery of an undersea “plume” of oil stretching more than 21 miles from the well site.

The New York Times: Gulf Oil Plume Is Not Breaking Down Fast, Research Says

“I expect the hydrocarbon imprint of the BP discharge will be detectable in the marine environment for the rest of my life,” Ian MacDonald, an oceanographer at Florida State University, told Congress in prepared testimony on Thursday. “The oil is not gone and is not going away anytime soon.”

The Wall Street Journal: Study Says Gulf Oil Spill Caused Manhattan-Size Plume

At the height of the Deepwater Horizon spill, oil escaping from the damaged well was trapped underwater in a drifting plume of hydrocarbons the size of Manhattan and helped turn the Gulf of Mexico into a test-tube of experimental petroleum chemistry, scientists who probed the submerged spill region said Thursday. …

By confirming the existence of this submerged plume, the new data also challenge government estimates that the vast majority of the 4.9 million barrels of spilled oil is already gone from the Gulf or being rapidly broken down by bacteria, several marine experts said.

Instead, some of that oil may persist deep underwater and in seafloor sediments—at levels thousands of times higher than those caused by the natural oil seeps that dot the Gulf sea floor—where it can elude conventional detection and clean-up efforts, scientists said.

Meanwhile, here’s ABC News’ front page at this moment. It contains news about Jennifer Aniston, the “Mystery of Beer Goggles Revealed,” the new girlfriend of cable star Jesse James, and something about blind waiters serving people in the dark … but not word one about the reappearing oil, much less the tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico:

Who doesn’t like pizza? (A damn Communist, that’s who.) And who doesn’t like Italian Pie? That’s right, nobody. So we at Gambit World HQ in Mid-City were excited when we learned that Italian Pie was uprooting itself from its neighborhoody Bienville Street location and moving to the little Restaurant Row that’s sprung up around Canal and Carrollton since the storm. More lunch options for us!

But then we realized there are now four pizza places within about a block of one another:

(Clockwise from top: Wit’s Inn, Venezia, Theo’s Pizza, Italian Pie. Gambit World HQ is in the upper-right corner. And we left off the national-chain pizza place that’s on this map, which would’ve made five.)

Now, they’re all substantially different. Wit’s Inn serves good bar-food pizza and is a great place to watch a game and have a few drinks. Venezia serves the epitome of the red-sauce “pizza pie.” Theo’s has an amazing cracker crust and some toppings that sound eccentric but turn out to be delicious. And Italian Pie is a go-to spot for basic pizza that’s ideal for takeout (although the new location, which opened today, has little flat-screen TVs built into the booths, so they seem ready for football season).

No complaints with any of these pizza purveyors. But between them and the surfeit of Mexican/Central American places in the same area (three!), we’re just wondering: Can we get a good Thai restaurant up in here? Or po-boy shop? Or Vietnamese joint? (Doson Noodle House has Vietnamese noodle bowls, but not one of those Da Vinci Code-sized menus you get at Vietnamese places on the West Bank.) What kind of food would you like to see on Mid-City’s Restaurant Row?

Because there is, finally, if such a thing is possible — enough pizza.

EDITED TO ADD: Don’t get us wrong; we’re very grateful. You know who’s really screwed when it comes to lunch? Our colleagues at The Times-Picayune, that’s who. Ever tried to get something to eat around 3800 Howard Avenue?

BY MATT DAVIS

Academy Award nominated director Spike Lee is in New Orleans for the premiere of his new HBO documentary, If God Is Willing And Da Creek Don’t Rise, tonight at the Mahalia Jackson Theater. Gambit caught up with Lee over his second Arnold Palmer cocktail as he enjoyed some corn and crab soup in the French Quarter before the screening.

The following are excerpts from our interview, which will appear in the next issue of Gambit.

GAMBIT: How did it feel, asking Ray Nagin how he thinks he’ll be judged by history?

SPIKE LEE: Ray was kinda on edge, that interview, and it was really, we had Ray and we were supposed to interview Landrieu, and the only time Mitch could do it was right after Nagin, so were trying to keep them from seeing each other. We’d finished with Nagin, we were trying to get him to leave and he was staying in front! Someone must have told him that [Mitch] Landrieu was coming.

But for me that wasn’t the hardest question. The hardest question to ask him was to ask what he thinks about the most. And I think it was his best, when he talked about the eight hour window to call the mandatory evacuation, and he waited until the eighth hour, and I know…well, he didn’t talk about it, I didn’t ask him, I think that’s something that’s going to haunt him the rest of his life. It would haunt anybody. Because he knows, we all know that by waiting til the eighth hour, people are no longer here. That decision meant the difference between living and dying, and I give him, you know I respect, because he didn’t have to answer that, but he did.

When he got elected, he didn’t know the city was going to be 80% under water, there was no playbook, but I feel people’s problem with Nagin was really what he did in his second term, or what he didn’t do in the second term versus something that happens that he had nothing to do with.

…

Someone you’ve been critical of in the past was Larry Bird. Now Mitch is the first white mayor of New Orleans since his father, Moon Landrieu left office in 1978. Is Mitch Landrieu the Larry Bird of New Orleans mayors?

He can’t shoot like Larry. Or I’ve never seen him. I don’t know if he even plays basketball. But look, I like Mitch, I like his sister, but as he says in the film, he’s got a hard job. Right now New Orleans is on pace to have 203 murders this year, which by use of the population makes it the murder capital of the United States of America. Think about this: Greater New Orleans has 700,000, New York has eight million people. Eight million. They’re going to have more murders than New York City here, and New York City has eight million people! That’s, you’re talking about like, Iraq odds, I mean, crazy.

I know you interviewed [Tulane University homicide expert] Peter Scharf for the film.

Yes. He was very very informative. He’s the go-to guy for homicide. His figures he has are chilling, and it’s young black men killing young black men, and it’s not something that’s just owned by New Orleans. It happens everywhere.

SPIKE LEE, PHOTOGRAPHED FOR GAMBIT BY CHERYL GERBER

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It was Michael Grunwald’s July 29 story in Time — “The BP Spill: Has the Damage Been Exaggerated?” that set off a cascade of disingenous national media stories asking “Where is the oil?” And there’s nothing more disingenuous than the use of the question mark in that headline, which allows for all kinds of wiggle room and crawfishing when people sit down and consider the obvious: that an oil disaster several times worse than the Exxon Valdez spill does not just “vanish.” Grunwald may have been careful to make it clear that the long-term effects were unknowable, but that didn’t stop other media outlets from running with that horrible, misleading, crawfishing headline as the takeaway, and so we had things like this:

So today I’m wondering if this report by actual marine scientists — not BP officials, not BP-paid experts, and not cable-news blowhards — will get the same splashy treatment:

A report released today by the Georgia Sea Grant and the University of Georgia concludes that up to 79 percent of the oil released into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon well has not been recovered and remains a threat to the ecosystem.

The report, authored by five prominent marine scientists, strongly contradicts media reports that suggest that only 25 percent of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill remains.

“One major misconception is that oil that has dissolved into water is gone and, therefore, harmless,” said Charles Hopkinson, director of Georgia Sea Grant and professor of marine sciences in the University of Georgia Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. “The oil is still out there, and it will likely take years to completely degrade. We are still far from a complete understanding of what its impacts are.”

Download the UGA scientists’ report here … and then keep an eye out to see if it gets the same sort of screaming headlines that Grunwald’s story did.

In an era when Jon Stewart is an integral part of the news scene, it shouldn’t be a surprise that a satirist like Harry Shearer is the person who turns out a seminal documentary about an underreported aspect of the circumstances surrounding Hurricane Katrina and the federal floods. Judging from the images of the flooded city in the trailer for The Big Uneasy, one might assume it was another film about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It’s not. What Shearer has produced is a documentary about … engineering.

Opening with shots of street signs – Abundance, Arts, Humanity, Piety – Shearer segues into near-stock-footage of Carnival. “We all know what Mardi Gras is like,” he says over shots of Bourbon Street boobs, beads, and beer, before dissolving to the real Mardi Gras: the meeting of the courts, the Society of St. Ann, Indians, families on St. Charles Avenue.

It’s a neat metaphor for the central misunderstanding of “Katrina” itself – “Katrina,” in the American mind, being a hurricane that destroyed New Orleans, rather than a Cat 1 storm that overwhelmed shoddy defenses erected by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Shearer then goes on to show how Katrina left New Orleans largely unscathed, but through a series of animations (and a minimum of upsetting footage), he offers a timeline and explanation of the levee breaches, failures and collapses.

Using documents and some previously unseen footage, as well as new interviews with people like the now-controversial Dr. Ivor van Heerden, former deputy director of the LSU Hurricane Center, and Maria Garzino, an unwelcome whistleblower at the Army Corps of Engineers, Shearer pieces together a damning report on the Corps, its disastrous civil engineering and the sad outcome for the New Orleans metro area. (A Corps spokesperson, Karen Durham-Aguilera appears in the documentary on the condition Shearer only discuss what the Corps is doing now and not bring up the past. “A disaster had occurred,” she intones blandly while recounting the catastrophe.)

This is neither light nor funny stuff, and Shearer doesn’t Michael Moore-it-up with theatrics and gimmicks, nor does he neglect the other factors that led to the federal flood. He introduces the country to the MR-GO, “a 75-mile ditch” and “the one cut that led to a thousand deaths.” He points out Hurricane Betsy flooded 20 percent of the city, while Katrina flooded 80 percent of the city 40 years later despite improved bulwarks, and explains why (answer: the disappearance of the wetlands).

The few lighter moments are provided by John Goodman in segments called “Ask a New Orleanian,” where he poses questions like “Why don’t they just pick up New Orleans and move it somewhere else?” and “Why are the New Orleanians sitting on their asses waiting for the government to bail them out?” Those questions are answered by a roundtable of locals that includes musician Philip Manuel, Gentilly activist and counselor Vera Triplett and Gambit’s own Clancy DuBos, who admits “It pisses me off.”

By the end of The Big Uneasy, Shearer has answered a lot of questions about the levee failures, and raised others. Defective pumps: do you remove them and leave the city with no protection while new ones are rebuilt, or do you work with what you have? Can Americans understand (or will they care) about the difference between Option 1 and Option 2 levees? And what of the cities protected by the more than 100 other levees in this country maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers? How safe are other places, and how will we know?

Shearer presents all this straightforwardly, but as a near-full-time resident of New Orleans, it’s clear where his sympathies lie, and his hurt and outrage are palpable despite his documentarian, dispassionate tone. Late in the movie, St. Bernard Parish president Craig Taffaro says, “We are members of this nation,” and in Shearer’s lens, it’s not a statement of pride, but of rebuke.

• The Big Uneasy will be shown simultaneously around the country in dozens of theaters on Mon., Aug. 30, including New Orleans’ Prytania Theater and The Theatres at Canal Place. Shearer will appear at a Q&A after the 7:30 p.m. screening at the Prytania.