These charges have been a long time coming. I was in New Orleans throughout the floods and in the days after, and I still remember the sense that something had gone amiss when we first heard of the incident on Danziger Bridge, the way our anger grew.

Occupants of the Oval Office might come and go. But some other faces at the White House never seemed to change. Eugene Allen's was one of them. As a butler, he served eight presidents, a discreet stage hand who for three decades helped keep the show running in the most important political theatre of all. From his place in the wings, and occasionally in a tiny supporting role, he witnessed many momentous events. None surely, though, was as momentous as the one he witnessed in retirement as a specially invited guest, barely a year before he died: the inauguration of a fellow black man to the highest office in the land.

Michael Moore's new documentary doesn't just lay into the bankers behind the recent financial Armageddon.

Alexander Haig was never elected to any office. His one run for the US presidency ended before anyone really noticed. Yet few people were closer, and for longer, to the epicentre of American power. Haig was a prime specimen of that uniquely Washington creature, the political soldier, whose career was a shuttle between the military and the government.

Alexander Haig was a four-star general who served as a top adviser to three US presidents and had presidential ambitions of his own.