Tonight will find us in Orleans Parish, along the banks of Lake Pontchartrain. The backdrop for our live broadcast is a lot like the mantra here: Katrina might as well have been yesterday. There has been no attempt to clean up the wreckage, still fresh, that you will see behind us at our camera location.

In tonight's broadcast: the long-delayed U.S. opening to Iran... David Gregory will head up our reporting. Also today, the president commented for the first time about the killings at Haditha in Iraq. Martin Savidge will join me here for a status report heading into tomorrow's first day of hurricane season. I will speak with New Orleans native Walter Isaacson on the recovery effort and we'll report on Lance Armstrong's news today.

I saw Harry Shearer at today's event. Harry, a great and talented entertainer and writer is also a veteran blogger. He has had his issues with our coverage in the past (on one issue in particular involving the initial construction of the levees) and so we will interview him tomorrow and include his comments in our coverage of the status of the levee and pump repairs going on here.

Special thanks to the folks at Tulane University (the largest employer in this city) for hosting me today as part of a day-long seminar on the lessons learned and the future direction of civic planning and re-building in this city post-Katrina. I was deeply honored to be the latest recipient of the president's medal -- awarded by the entirely too generous President of Tulane, Scott Cowen. I apparently now hold one of only 10 such medals ever awarded -- and I tried to explain that those most deserving of this honor are those we will probably never meet: the Coast Guard chopper pilots, the women who kept the babies alive inside Charity Hospital, the volunteers and public servants of every stripe, who stayed on the job to lift this city out of a nightmare.  Having said that, it was a humbling day at Tulane.