Library Chronicles

Mysteries of Stonehenge

2012-02-13T18:00:00.000-06:00

Some say it's an ancient calendar. Others claim it has religious significance as a site where strange pagan rituals were once performed.

Whatever its purpose, this arrangement of chairs was spotted along the parade route Saturday just prior to the arrival of the Krewe of Pontchartrain. I think I spotted it when I was on my way to pick up a combination bahn mi from Le Viet Cafe where, as you can see here, they also offer a $6.00 "bag of crawfish."

I'm not sure what a bag is by weight but, according to this T-P feature, a few weeks ago a pound of boiled crawfish was selling for about $4.00 and prices were falling. Meanwhile, gasoline is averaging $3.44 and climbing. when we get to the point where they equalize, we can start running our vehicles on crawfish. But until that time, or at least until Mardi Gras is over with, plan on walking. The traffic out there right now is just impossible.

Pontchartrain looked good. Or at least according to this sign, somebody looked good.

The weather was nice anyway which made for pretty photos.

Here's the head of Pontchartrain's signature Captain Sam float. Captain Sam looked good.

The St. Mary's Academy Marching Band looked good.

The Big Easy Roller Girls looked good.

Even NOPD looked good in their new reflective vests.

Pontchartrain's theme was Louisiana Festivals which I'm almost certain they've done before... perhaps more than once. The float titles were presented as fill-in-the blank puzzles as Pontchartrain likes to do every year. They're pretty easy to guess at if you want to play the game. Here's the Stawberry Festival, for example.

And the always popular Shrimp and Petroleum Festival.

They even provide you with a scorecard at the end of the procession in case you feel like grading yourself. (If you score a 4 or below, that looks pretty bad.)

I'm sure Sparta and Pygmalion looked just as good Saturday night but I was maybe a little too cold... or more accurately a little too much into the liquor by that point to get many photographs out of the deal. I did manage this shot of Pygmailion's new "Pygmammoth" float. Looked pretty good.

Finally there's this bit of surprising news. Rouses red velvet king cake, while it may look like holy hell... actually not all that bad.

Seriously try some. As for whether or not you want to try infusing it into your vodka... well, I'll leave that up to you.

There's more from Sunday but I'm having trouble getting all my photos uploaded right now and, besides, this post is too long anyway. Will try and catch up later in the week.

Quote of the Day

2012-02-13T16:18:00.003-06:00

“If I spent time verifying who was being honest, it would take all day.”

Deputy HDLC Director Eleanor Burke regarding a rather weird demolition request.

Sunday Morning Carnival Photo

2012-02-12T11:35:00.002-06:00

Krewe of Pontchartrain yesterday afternoon

And now I'm out to enjoy what looks like it might be the last day of nice weather this season.

Neurotic

2012-02-12T11:24:00.002-06:00

This business of who does or doesn't "deserve" help when they need it is the ugly core of our paralysis.

And as more middle-class families like the Gulbransons land in the safety net in Chisago and similar communities, anger at the government has increased alongside. Many people say they are angry because the government is wasting money and giving money to people who do not deserve it. But more than that, they say they want to reduce the role of government in their own lives. They are frustrated that they need help, feel guilty for taking it and resent the government for providing it. They say they want less help for themselves; less help in caring for relatives; less assistance when they reach old age.

The poorer we get the more cruel our disposition toward the poor becomes. It's a brutal neurosis and a self-defeating vicious cycle that almost certainly guarantees ruin.

But at least we're keeping the medieval magicians who want to dictate what sorts of health care choices are available to women happy. So we've got that going for us.

All in the family

2012-02-12T11:09:00.003-06:00

Jarvis Deberry posits that Ray Nagin's real fault is that he cares too much for his family. And if you count Aaron Bennett, Greg Meffert, and Frank Fradella as part of "The Family", in a sense, he probably has a point.

Saturday morning video

2012-02-11T11:48:00.003-06:00

Given where we are a year and a half later with regard to crime and public safety in New Orleans, now might be a good time to review this RT V panel discussion led by Tulane criminologist Peter Scharf. The panelists are Safe Streets executive director Allen James, Jon Wool director of the Vera Institute for Justice's New Orleans office, Police Chief Ronal Serpas, and Independent Police Monitor Susan Hutson.

You may feel the need to fast forward through Loki's extemporaneous opening invocation.

Rising Tide V: Public Safety Panel - Part 1 of 2 - (28 August 2010) RUSH VIDEO from Sophielab on Vimeo.

Rising Tide V: Public Safety Panel - Part 2 of 2 - (28 August 2010) RUSH VIDEO from Sophielab on Vimeo.

Bonus RT trivia: Many remember this as the day Serpas spent about an hour and a half illegally parked over the yellow line.

And then there was a parade... sort of

2012-02-10T20:56:00.006-06:00

If, for whatever reason, you've decided to make Oshun's Friday night procession through Uptown your first ever experience of a Mardi gras parade, don't expect to be blown away. This parade is as bare bones simple as they get. There are about 15 or so floats even the largest of which are light enough to be pulled by pickup trucks and vans. The riders aren't throwing much. Our entire haul tonight consisting of one toy tomahawk plus one frisbee recycled from an Endymion parade is pictured below.

On the other hand, if it's your first time around, there's no better introduction to the basic template than this. Slight crowd, uncomplicated floats, one or two dance teams, and several very good marching bands like Mcdonough 35 here.

The cynic may come away from this parade feeling a bit ripped off but I don't think that's the right attitude to take. Often this time of year we will resort to a cliche which reminds us that Mardi Gras is a marathon, not a sprint. If that's true, then Oshun is only the first quarter mile and all we're trying to do is get our feet moving and find a comfortable pace.

To that end, we decided to go ahead and take the opportunity to experiment a little here in the early going. Earlier, I'd said that I was contemplating making my own king cake flavored vodka on the cheap. Well... yep pretty much.

As you can see, what we've done here is we've broken off a little chunk of plain Rouses king cake and dropped it into a shot glass filled with regular Stolichnaya. That's step one. Step two is... well actually that's pretty much it. What happened next was I just left this on the counter and moved on to drinking Abita Jockamo IPA which is conveniently now available in cans just in time for parade season.

By the way, I don't understand why anyone would want to complain about having a parade in cold weather. I can fit a large number of these cans in my jacket pockets for easy carrying. And, of course, they stay cold longer there in this weather. This is what I took with me on a walk around the neighborhood scouting out parade route food.

The only discovery of note is that Le Viet Cafe near St. Charles and Jackson is offering a $5 breakfast special this year (Eggs, grits, and biscuit or sausage) that I may have to take them up on at some point. Either that or just order the pho which is every bit as effective as a hangover cure.

After the brief walk came the parade, which didn't take long, and then it was back home where the slice of cake had begun to dissolve into that vodka still sitting out in the kitchen. It tasted... sugary... cakey... and only slightly vodka-ey on account of all the sugar having taken the edge off. Not being a fan of any flavored vodkas, I'll defer to Menckles who says it's actually better than the now famous Lucky Player King Cake vodka she tasted a few days ago. I realize that's not saying much.

Anyway if you must do this horrible thing to either your king cake or your vodka this year... and I've got a feeling it will be all the rage... rest assured in the knowledge that it isn't the worst of all possible combinations. This is.

That's a raw oyster and horseradish sauce suspended in a shot of vodka which the good people at Acme are all too happy to sell to any idiot who asks them to. Take it from this idiot, that shit could definitely use a little icing.

This week in Carnival stuff

2012-02-10T16:11:00.000-06:00

The Royal Sonesta Hotel engages in a famous ritual each year where they prepare for the final weekend of Carnival by greasing the poles supporting their Bourbon Steet balcony. The idea.. or really the joke.. behind the ceremony is that this prevents drunken revelers from shimmying up onto the balcony should the spirit direct them to attempt such a thing. But really, the whole thing is done for laughs.

Meanwhile, our tradition of applying fresh signage each year to the library bookdrop just before the first parade crowds gather may be more practical in its purpose, but it has become a similar ritual by which we welcome the season ourselves.

Spent Sunday afternoon at the Thoth den party. Thoth's theme this year is "Streets of New Orleans" Expect to see a lot of this logo next weekend.

Meanwhile, Menckles had an opportunity to help decorate a few of this year's Zulu coconuts. This one, she says, is an homage to Varg's work.

If you're looking for an alternative to Saturday night's Uptown parades, you might check out the shoebox Krewe of 'tit Rex because, if you're pissing off the Rex organization, you're obviously doing something right.

In fall 2011, members of the Rex organization contacted the microkrewe about the use of its registered trade name.

"I was shocked and bemused," Yuslum says. "I almost thought I was being punked."

Some of the 'tit Rex founders met with a lawyer from the Rex organization.

"We tried to amicably resolve our concerns with regards to the copyright issue and their use of the name Rex," says King Logan, a spokesman for Rex.

Both sides describe the meetings and correspondence as friendly, and both say they want to find a mutually agreeable solution, but it is unlikely one will be reached before the tiny krewe parades Saturday. Rex offered to license the use of its name to 'tit Rex, but the krewe rejected the offer. Yaslum says the proposal included an admission of copyright infringement and went on to define the small krewe in ways members deemed restrictive. Logan says the offer proposed various points but a legal agreement was not drafted. The group altered its name by replacing the e with a schwa and offered that to Rex officers as a solution.

"We tried to honor what they wanted and maintain the identity of our parade," Schrenk says.

The proposal has not yet been considered by Rex and won't be until after Mardi Gras, Logan says.

In the meantime, the issue has spilled over into the parade. The 2012 theme is "Napoleon Avenue Complex."

Earlier in the week, NOPD met with representatives of Mardi Gras Indian gangs in an effort to reach a better understanding about how the tribes will be treated on Fat Tuesday.
Chiefs from both sides left the meeting hopeful but circumspect.

“A seed was dropped. And hopefully we can cultivate that seed and watch it grow,” said Big Chief Tyrone Casby of the Mohawk Hunters tribe. Big Chief Darryl Montana from the Yellow Pocahontas nodded. “I feel like we’re getting there. But only time will tell,” he said.

“I think this awareness will pay dividends,” said NOPD 1st District Commander Bobby Norton. “The task is to get every officer to understand the Indian tradition.”

Norton — whose district includes Indian hubs such as St. Bernard, Claiborne and Orleans avenues — is convinced this year will be a good one for Indians, who travel the streets chanting and drumming while visiting places of honor and engaging in elaborate games of hide-and-seek.

Indians have for years complained that police squad cars often vex them by blaring sirens without reason. “We’ve totally said no to that,” Norton said. “No to lights and sirens. No to pushing Indians off the street.”

And if there’s an issue with a tribe, it won’t be resolved by an officer yelling over his intercom. “Officers will get out of the car and go directly to the chief,” Norton said.
All of this, we've heard before, of course.

If you're going to the parades this week, keep an eye out for the O.P. Walker Marching Band. Odds are, they're in whatever parade you're watching.

O. Perry Walker is taking on a demanding schedule this year. Six of their nine parades will be back to back, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. In spite of all the physical stress inherent in the activity, one student dreads a decidedly different aspect of marching. “It’s tough not stepping in horsepoop because you can’t really see at night. Then your whole night’s messed up until you find some grass.”

I'm still not in a... um... festive enough mood to blow $27 on a bottle of novelty flavored vodka. But I'm working on ways to make my own in the meantime.

Finally, it's starting to look like the weather is clearing up before Oshun gets set to roll. Driving around today, though, I noticed several trucks and scattered equipment which I am told is the Treme crew filming in front of The Columns hotel on St. Charles. If it's not gone by 5:00, I'm calling Parks and Parkways to see if they'll come haul all that shit to the landfill.

Does this mean we have to wait a while before Volume II of "Katrina's Secrets" comes out?

2012-02-09T22:53:00.004-06:00

Merry Christmas four or five years too late, everyone.

A federal grand jury is investigating whether city vendors gave former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin gratuities ranging from plane tickets to materials and equipment for his family's granite-countertop business and also helped the firm land an exclusive installation deal with a retailing giant while Nagin was in office, according to several sources close to the probe. The federal probe is zeroing in on Nagin along three parallel tracks: luxury travel and home maintenance provided by city technology vendors; a granite countertop installation contract that Nagin's family company got from The Home Depot; and the possibility that at least two businesses with City Hall dealings arranged for the delivery of free equipment or materials to the Nagin family's now-defunct firm.

For a long time I wasn't among those who thought Nagin was ever really going to be in the federal crosshairs. But that was before the Aaron Bennett stuff came out and it started to look like they had someone willing to talk a lot. Anyway read through the issues being pursued now and you'll find it touches nearly everything everyone Nagin ever accused of "hurting this recovery" by asking questions ever complained about.

But what I keep coming back to is this. Back while all these crimes were being committed was about the time we were reading the T-P squee all over the Pampy Barre trial and digging after whatever bones they thought Marc Morial might have left buried somewhere. But all that damage had already been done. And now Nagin's damage is done too. If Nagin does get indicted, I'm sure we'll all get a big kick out of it. Perhaps, if we're lucky, he'll elect to defend himself via his popular Twitter feed.

But while all that ghoulish business it going on, I do hope someone pays a little attention to the damage currently being done. Either way it's hard to see the pattern being interrupted any time soon.

Update: Dambala is right. Somebody owes him a drink.... at the very least. But more importantly, and in keeping with my point here, I'm interested in seeing the new snake countdown.

Going the wrong way?

2012-02-09T18:25:00.005-06:00

They're thinking of making the one-way section of Magazine Street between Calliope and St. Andrew into a two-way.

At Councilwoman Stacy Head’s request, the city’s Department of Public Works conducted an initial study of converting Magazine to two-way traffic from Calliope to St. Andrew. The project would involve changing traffic signals, signs and road striping — in addition to a six-month trial period — for a total cost of approximately $100,000.

My only complaint about the way it's currently engineered is I have to make two extra right turns in order to get to Surrey's. That doesn't seem like a big deal but, if I'm going to Surrey's, I'm probably too hungover to be driving in the first place so I could use all the help I can get.

Last year while Magazine was being resurfaced, I remember seeing Pat argue more than once that, if anything, the city should be going the other direction here and extending the one-way throughout the Uptown business corridor presumably creating a "complete streets" haven of diagonal parking and bike racks made out of candy canes or something.

One thing we do know is that the two-way Magazine Street above St. Andrew is one of the most dangerous stretches of road for cyclists, pedestrians, and motorists in the whole city. Okay well we don't know that without the statistics but there sure do seem to be a lot of accidents there. Anyway, that was probably on the mind of at least some of the folks at this meeting.

Both sides of the debate claimed safety concerns as the rationale for their decision. Proponents said that two-way traffic generally flows more slowly than one-way, so it would lower speeds of passing motorists, in addition to eliminating crashes from drivers inadvertently heading the wrong way. Opponents countered that the move would increase traffic overall, crowding out pedestrians and bicyclists.

But what's probably going on is people interested in lower Magazine real estate believe two way traffic is good for business. I mean, I figure it might help idiots like me get to Surrey's faster anyway. Plus it's hard to argue with house flipper Stacy Head's noted eye for real estate opportunities.

Land-based prior offenses

2012-02-09T18:11:00.002-06:00

Whatever criminal negligence BP commits on land... stays on land... or at least out of the courtroom.

U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier in New Orleans today issued rulings blocking the introduction of exhibits pertaining to the 2005 explosion at BP’s Texas City, Texas, refinery and a 2006 oil spill at its Prudhoe Bay field in Alaska.

The April 2010 Macondo well blowout and explosion killed 11 workers and caused the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history. The accident spurred hundreds of lawsuits against BP and its partners, including Transocean Ltd., the Switzerland-based owner and operator of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that exploded, Halliburton Co., which provided cementing services for the project, and Anadarko, the owner of 25 percent of the well.

“The prior incidents were all land-based, while the Macondo incident occurred in the Gulf of Mexico,” Barbier said. The circumstances of those accidents were “vastly different,” he said.

The Lost Cause

2012-02-09T16:09:00.002-06:00

Second guessing Les Miles' BCS game plan is bound to become a whole new genre of folk literature.

Jefferson said several plays the team had worked on were never called and at times he could not change plays, but would have if allowed. He said the Tigers should have spread the Alabama offense out more and used the wide receivers and tight ends more.

He also said the team didn't make the right adjustments for the second half and that moving into a pro style passing offense will help his potential NFL career as he prepares for the scouting combine. Jefferson also said he was being "scammed" in the bar fight incident by the alleged victim.

"Spamalot Bill"

2012-02-09T16:00:00.002-06:00

Between this and John Flemming thinking The Onion is real news, I'd say it's beyond time to get everyone's irony sensors recalibrated.

Mississippi State Rep. Steve Holland has had a busy afternoon. After we reported his introduction of H.B. 150 yesterday, a bill that aims to rename the Gulf of Mexico the very pro-'Merican, Onion-worthy title "Gulf of America," the Democrat's office has been flooded with press calls to respond to, essentially, "what the hell are you doing?"

Turns out Holland has a bit of a goof streak going on. He called Gambit to tell us the bill is his tongue-in-cheek single-finger salute to mock his Republican peers obsessed with illegal immigration.

Parks and Parkways Problems

2012-02-09T14:34:00.004-06:00

This afternoon, the city sent out its press release regarding Mardi Gras policies and enforcement via the NOLA ready email system. it's the same thing Gambit shared with us yesterday. One detail left out of the coverage and commentary of yesterday's press conference about all of this is spelled out in the press release.

The city’s neutral grounds are the direct responsibility of the Department of Parks and Parkways; therefore, any prohibited items that are placed on the neutral grounds will be removed and disposed of immediately.

As you can see, I've highlighted two bits of information here. The part I've highlighted in black tells us everything we need to know about how seriously we can take the bit in red. Oh well.

Update: Nate points out in commenting that City Hall has already contradicted the "removed and disposed of immediately" clause.

Landrieu last year -- during his first Carnival season as mayor -- vowed to tighten enforcement of several long-standing rules, including by removing sofas, tents, ladders and portable toilets that residents often set up on neutral grounds.

While city crews and contractors hauled off loads of furniture and other items, the articles weren't logged before they were dumped at the landfill, so the extent of the initiative remains unknown, mayoral spokesman Ryan Berni said.

At least one Uptown resident, however, complained that the cleanup effort wasn't as intense as the mayor's threats.

Dick Wegmann wrote last year in a letter to The Times-Picayune that during a drive up St. Charles Avenue on the Satuday before Fat Tuesday, "the neutral ground was 85 percent covered with ladders, tents, chairs, tables, portable toilets and all sorts of other objects staking out territory for tomorrow's parades."

"If you are going to enforce the laws, then enforce the laws," Wegmann wrote. "If not, then don't tell us you are."

Budget constraints this year will force City Hall to "scale back" their enforcement of improper neutral ground use, Berni said.

"We're just going to be asking for cooperation," he said. "We will continue to ask that there not be bulky furniture or structures on neutral grounds or in cross streets. And we will continue to ask that ladders be placed back from the street."

Berni may not be technically lying, of course. My best guess is that the un-logged items hauled off to landfills were actually abandoned and picked up by clean up crews after parades. But that's just a hunch. It could, in fact, be complete bullshit. But I'm not about to go digging through any West Bank levees for evidence of Mardi Gras detritus just to fact check.

Meanwhile, Mr. Wegmann's complaint is correct. As I documented last year, and as anyone who spent any time at the parades will attest, there was no evidence that any such enforcement had been done.

Calling all "Dangerous people of the internet"

2012-02-08T18:31:00.002-06:00

Did no one thing to YouTube this performance for posterity?

During a question-and-answer session Tuesday night before the Alliance for Good Government, a combative Gressett appeared determined to frame all of his responses with attacks on one of his opponents, District B Councilwoman Stacy Head -- regardless of the question.

Though he was warned repeatedly to stay on topic, Gressett called out Head every time. At one point, Gressett, a real-estate broker and a serial candidate, charged that Head had "destroyed" economic development in the Central Business District, though he cited no examples.

Sternly worded letter and associated press conference

2012-02-08T16:27:00.005-06:00

Tried this last year. None of it will matter until we see some actual enforcement.

CBD - As New Orleans gets ready to open the Mardi Gras Mainline down St. Charles Ave. on Friday, Mayor Mitch gathered city officials and the press today to remind everyone that there will be police officers everywhere during Mardi Gras, that it is possible to be rude to others on the parade route and that the City of New Orleans now employs elbow grease

.

I know we can't make it perfect but if NOPD would actively discourage the use excessive deployment of tents and festival chairs along the route, the experience could be quickly improved for a great many folks. This is something of a pet peeve of mine so expect updates as we go along.

Update: Gambit has a copy of this year's "Be nice at Mardi Gras" press release which you can read here.

"Gulf of America"

2012-02-08T16:24:00.002-06:00

Presumably because there is plenty enough oil in it for cooking your Freedom Fries.

Don't even know where to begin with this IG report

2012-02-07T17:26:00.003-06:00

But then, neither did Maldonado.

Every sentence of today's report from Inspector General Ed Quatrevaux on the City of New Orleans employee life insurance system is a potential news lede.

I might point out that the part where benefit claims were not filed for six of 21 City employees who died during a 2 year stretch is pretty staggering.

I've read about companies like Wal-Mart who take out secret life insurance policies on their employees and collect the benefits themselves. We know that from time to time the city discusses ways to turn its public resources, like its water system, into profit centers but, for now anyway, we'll assume they aren't planning to take this route where it regards their employees.

No, this looks like it's probably more stupid than it is sinister. Although, in this town, it is pretty difficult to know the difference since these factors so often combine to form... you know... tradition.

In the wake of the report, Hartford has also agreed to stop paying commissions to two agents, who each raked in more than $125,000 through the life insurance policies over the past eight years. Though the report does not name them, Quatrevaux identified them as Lionel Smith and L-Force Management Group, whose principal is Noah Lewis.

The two men, both of them contributors to Mayor Ray Nagin's political campaigns, were named by Nagin to insurance "committees," comprised of agents, that advised City Hall on insurance matters and shared in commissions. Both men were on an 11-member health insurance committee that city officials said in June 2005, after an unfavorable ruling from the state's Ethics Board, that they planned to disband.

The committees were a traditional source of patronage, and the members were reliable contributors to political campaigns. Observers said the system was antiquated and offered little of value to the city, and the ethics opinion of June 2005 said the committees violated state law.

Stranger than....

2012-02-07T16:31:00.001-06:00

Actually nothing is stranger than Newt. Don't believe me? Take the quiz.

$42,500 worth of keeping up appearances

2012-02-07T14:17:00.003-06:00

Said this before but even if you think Vic Richard is the best candidate to run the new NORD... and I have no reason to believe he isn't... you have to wonder if it's worth paying some consultant to collect resumes and spew bullshit about "best practices" and whatnot just so everyone can pretend they didn't intend to hire him all along.

The New Orleans Recreation Development Commission tonight appointed interim director Vic Richard as its new chief executive after a special hearing where the four finalists were interviewed.

All but one member of the commission, Bobby Garron, who abstained, voted for Richard’s appointment. The commission hired a headhunter for $42,500 and took 93 applications but ultimately landed on Richard, who was appointed to the job by Mayor Mitch Landrieu in 2010.

For some reason, I watched this whole hearing on Cox TV last night. I suppose it was better than waiting for the inevitable 4th quarter Hornets collapse. Unfortunately I can't say that watching the meeting taught me anything I didn't already know or suspect about the candidates or the process.

I suspected, for example, that Wanda Durden and Charlene Braud were token plants and heard nothing to dissuade me from this. For a moment I considered the possibility that Braud was a serious candidate when she told the commission about the time she fired 105 people and replaced them with Americorps volunteers. That sounds like the sort of thing Mitch's "public-private partnership" is interested in seeing more of. But since it was also clear that Braud has been and will continue to be available to advise the Richard and the commissioners it didn't really matter whether she got the job.

Meanwhile, the consultant demonstrated at least some sense of humor by presenting us with ex-NFL star Reggie Williams as a so-called finalist. Williams, who at one point assured the commissioners, "I do know that I have phenomenal skills," exhibited a phenomenal ability to 1) flail his arms about and fidget in his chair while 2) responding with some variant of "I don't really know a whole lot about that" to something like 75% percent of the questions asked. Later, Williams stood up and touched his own toes; a phenomenal skill he said he owes to his experience in ballet.. which also contributed to his success in football. Williams returned many times to the topic of his pro football career.

The one occasion when Williams directly addressed a question put to him was also an error. Asked by the Mayor to describe "your biggest mistake" the other three candidates followed the standard job interview script by choosing instances of "mistakes" that were either someone else's fault, or better, evidence of their own over-charged ambition. Williams instead talked about a time he assented to something he knew was a stupid idea for the sake of political expediency. Also he pronounced the Mayor's name, "Land-row".

So I guess $42,500 can buy you some entertaining patsy competition for your hand-picked appointee if that's what you think you need. In this case, it hardly seems worth the bother.

Also they have the world's most sublime fried mozzarella

2012-02-07T13:50:00.004-06:00

As classic New Orleans neighborhood restaurants go, Pascal's Manale is certainly "worth it."

I've been enjoying this Blackened Out series reviewing the classics, but this article in particular agrees precisely with my experience of the place. Everything at Pascal's is great except the barbecue shrimp for which they are most famous. Order the giant cheese logs instead.

Meanwhile, I guess we'll never learn whether Pancho's was "worth it." I hadn't been since I was a kid. For some reason I thought there'd always be enough time to get back.

Today in gay marriage

2012-02-07T12:43:00.003-06:00

1) Prop. 8: Gay-marriage ban unconstitutional, court rules

A federal appeals court Tuesday struck down California's ban on same-sex marriage, clearing the way for the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on gay marriage as early as next year.

The 2-1 decision by a panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found that Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot measure that limited marriage to one man and one woman, violated the U.S. Constitution. The architects of Prop. 8 have vowed to appeal.

The ruling was narrow and likely to be limited to California.

Because the ruling comes from a three judge panel, it could still be appealed to the full Ninth Circuit or possibly to the US Supreme Court but I don't think that's going to happen. Anwyway, if you like reading federal court decisions you can read this one at this link here.

2) Former Saints running back Ricky Williams, who was once gay married to and then gay divorced from Mike Ditka, announced his retirement today. Best of luck, Ricky.

Once again legal in California

A few quick paragraphs about the Superbowl

2012-02-07T09:28:00.005-06:00

For all the bitching college football fans like to do about the BCS every year, at least it presents us with an annual match-up between the consensus best team in the country and... often though not always... a team who probably deserves to play against the best team in the country for a title. This year's Superbowl, by contrast, matched up two teams who, even now, no one can argue were even in the NFL's top 5 this season. Say all you want about how a 9-7 team who lost to the Saints by 25 points before accidentally stumbling into the playoffs by virtue of Dallas' bumbling "earned it on the field." But, rest assured, if it were, say, a New Orleans rather than a New York market team who had done this, we'd be wading in a morass of 500 national sportswriters arguing that we weren't really looking at a "legitimate" champion.

But even a game between two teams "nobody thought would make it this far" can make for good television. I like an underdog story as much as the next guy. The trouble with that is, there's no way to tag either the Patriots' declining evil empire or an entitled whiny New York team as an "underdog." If you're going to have an unlikely Cinderella in the title game, it helps if she's even remotely likeable. In this case, we were presented with two unlikely participants nobody likes. It was as if the glass slipper fit two of the wicked stepsisters and their reward was they got to hang out with Gisele Bundchen and Madonna and Rush Limbaugh picking his nose at the worst ball in history while America looked on in horror.

Wicked stepsisters sharing a moment of wickedness

One nice thing we can say about the way this worked out is we're not reading any stories this week about the brilliance of allowing your opponent to score touchdowns on purpose. Although it was momentarily amusing to watch Ahmad Bradshaw become the first man in Superbowl history to cross the goal line in the manner of a tired dog turning in place to lie down, going ahead and taking those points was undoubtedly the right thing to do. Why? Well, as the Giants themselves admitted afterwards, the crappy opposition didn't merit any risky precaution.

The Giants scored with 57 seconds remaining, and Jacobs said that while quarterbacks like Green Bay’s Aaron Rodgers or New Orleans’s Drew Brees had the firepower to go the length of the field that quickly, he did not think Brady and the Patriots could do it.

They would need a lot more than 57 seconds to win the game, Jacobs said, “so I wasn’t worried about it.”

Welp, as Madonna might say, life is a mystery. The good news is now we can get on with Carnival season and try to forget any of this ever happened.

Why does Kristin Palmer hate the Constitution?

2012-02-06T16:50:00.001-06:00

Courreges edtition.

"it's probably not the first time they've touched the genitals of an obviously distressed US citizen"

2012-02-06T14:00:00.001-06:00

We're basically living in a crazy police state already.

The year without a winter

2012-02-06T10:07:00.004-06:00

The weather has been weird this year. It's not just your imagination.

...today's rare tropical disturbance over South Florida is symptomatic of how whacked-out our 2012 atmosphere has been. In isolation, the strange winter weather of 2011 - 2012 could be a natural rare occurrence, but there have been way too many strange atmospheric events in the past two years for them all to be simply an unusually long run of natural extremes. Something is definitely up with the weather, and it is clear to me that over the past two years, the climate has shifted to a new state capable of delivering rare and unprecedented weather events. Human emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide are the most likely cause of such a shift in the climate, as I discussed in my post last week, Where is the climate headed?

Best throw of KDV

2012-02-06T09:31:00.001-06:00

Jack Daniels beads.

May be the only option remaining for defeating Superdome security in the future.

Today in Carnival stuff

2012-02-04T14:44:00.000-06:00

On Thursday I picked up a copy of the Krewe du Vieux's annual news pamphlet Le Monde de Merde with my morning coffee.

You can view the document in its entirety as well as archives from its previous years at this link. Please take a minute to do so. Is there any organization that more perfectly captures Carnival's roguish spirit of celebratory misrule, of turning the everyday mundane existence upside down with joy and laughter, he asks rhetorically? No there is not, he rhetorically responds.

Somehow this doesn't stop NOLA Def's "theater critic" Jim Fitzmorris from complaining anyway. According to Fitzmorris, the organic creative atmosphere of our citywide celebration that spans all class, race, and neighborhood boundaries somehow stifles the flowering of a more formal "theater scene"... and this supposedly a bad thing. Even if he's right.. and I don't think he is... who wouldn't prefer Carnival to whatever his idea of a slightly improved local theater might be?

Besides, if Mardi Gras is ever going to destroy theater in this town, it's going to have to wait in line behind the city council chambers on any given weekday.

Keep in mind, the above video was shot before local gadfly Sandra Hester picked a fight with Jackie Clarkson over whether or not council members could cast votes for their colleagues.

Later that day, a mysterious white people second line was spotted making the turn from Magazine Street onto Napoleon Avenue.

I still haven't gotten a solid answer from anyone as to just who they were. My first guess was that they're some kind of convention group. Something about the generic flag and the identical white handkerchiefs they were all waving said tourists to me. And since we've already seen one corporate event... um... masquerading as a Mardi Gras parade this year it's seems a likely explanation.

Until I learn differently, though, I will assume they were representatives of the Lucky Player company on their way to deliver the first cases of King Cake flavored vodka to Rouses where you can pick up a bottle now for the low low price of $26.99. The good people at Rouses ask only that you limit your purchase to 2 bottles per customer.... so as to avoid the inevitable rioting such a coveted product can inspire.

And that's all I got for now. Get out to KDV tonight, if at all possible. But try to keep dry.

Reality based community

2012-02-04T12:49:00.002-06:00

When are people going to realize that political punditry has nothing to reality? There's no amount of empirical evidence that will win an argument with the so-called 1 percenters. Even if their policy recommendations are demonstrably bad for the rest of us, they're still good for them. That's the whole point.

Taking bets

2012-02-04T12:37:00.003-06:00

Which transaction will be completed first?

Drew Brees' contract extension or Garland's repayment of Heebe's loan?

Careful now. They're both trickier propositions than you may think.

I hope no one has too many and says the wrong thing

2012-02-04T12:10:00.002-06:00

$1,000 cocktail hour with the Mayors doesn't necessarily seem like a setting for trouble at first glance. But recall the venue has something of a reputation. Also one of the principals involved is unusually touchy when it comes to name calling.

Parade season advice

2012-02-04T11:21:00.001-06:00

Whatever you do, don't get yourself arrested. Seriously you don't want to be locked up in this place.

100 - 400 gallons of oil per day leaking into the Gulf since 2004

2012-02-04T10:51:00.002-06:00

And that's just this one pipleline.

The Waterkeeper Alliance and several Gulf Coast Waterkeeper organizations filed suit Thursday against Taylor Energy Co. for failing to halt the flow of oil from wells off Louisiana's coastline that were severed by an underwater landslide during Hurricane Ivan in 2004. The organizations filed suit under provisions of the federal Clean Water Act and Resource Conservation and Recovery Act that allows citizens to go to court to enforce federal laws. In an October notice to the company and federal agencies that the groups intendedd to sue, they said between 100 gallons and 400 gallons of oil a day were being released by the wells.

Hard to imagine this is the only such case given the scope, age, and lax oversight of our offshore infrastructure.

Roughly half of the Gulf's more than 3,000 production platforms are 20 years old or more, and a third date back to the 1970s or earlier, long before the development of modern construction standards. More than half have been operating longer than their designers intended, according to federal regulators.

Older structures are more prone to accidents, especially fires, and more dangerous for workers. According to a Wall Street Journal analysis of federal accident records, platforms that are 20 years old or more accounted for more than 60% of fires and nearly 60% of serious injuries aboard platforms in 2009.

"There is an infrastructure issue confronting the industry," says Charles Swanson, a managing partner with Ernst & Young's Oil & Gas Center in Houston. "We're reaching a point now where we're not going to be able to ignore it any longer."

Dr. Jindal's scalpel

2012-02-04T00:11:00.002-06:00

Major cuts to LSU's Interim Public Hospital in New Orleans.

A drop in state tax revenues necessitated the midyear budget reductions, which where ordered by Gov. Bobby Jindal's administration. The cuts affect the seven-hospital system anchored in New Orleans. The system and its $780 million budget also include facilities in Baton Rouge, Bogalusa, Houma, Independence, Lafayette and Lake Charles. Separately, LSU hospitals in Shreveport, Monroe and Pineville must consider their own cuts.

The Jindal administration maintains that LSU effectively brough the cuts on themselves by budgeting based on money that was never actually appropriated.

Ugly ugly stuff.

Pinkwashed

2012-02-02T17:48:00.002-06:00

Anyone still wondering why we get so cranky during the pinkwashing period of the NFL schedule, well now you know.

Still doesn't answer the question

2012-02-02T15:35:00.002-06:00

Good to see James Gill writing about this horrible ordinance.

...the cops aren't as nuts as the City Council. They are not about to enforce an ordinance that forbids "any person or group of persons to loiter or congregate on Bourbon Street for the purpose of disseminating any social, political or religious message between the hours of sunset and sunrise."

Thus, Newt Gingrich's supporters, say, are free to solicit votes on Royal, but Mitt Romney's could get six months for doing the same a block away. Someone should wise the council up to the First Amendment.

In fact, the council does seem to have heard of it, for the preamble to the ordinance claims an intention "to recognize free speech rights for all citizens." The exception for citizens on Bourbon Street after dark, spelled out on the seventh of eight pages, seems like an afterthought.

But, as was noted last week, the ordinance was sponsored by District C Councilmember (and primary curfew proponent) Kristin Palmer. So the question, "Why does Kristin Palmer hate our freedoms?" remains before the floor.

Year of the Dragonslayer

2012-02-02T13:36:00.004-06:00

Latest on Jindal's push to privatize the State Office of Group Benefits.

Now comes word that if Morgan Keegan, which is being paid $150,000 to determine the financial value of OGB, will rake in a bonus of up to $750,000 more if OGB is subsequently privatized.

Commissioner of Administration Paul Rainwater promised that Morgan Keegan, which contributed $1,000 to Jindal’s 2007 election campaign, will provide “unbiased advice” in its efforts to help market OGB.

In what is becoming an all-too-familiar refrain, OGB board Chairman James H. Lee attempted to obtain a copy of the Morgan Keegan contract from the administration in November but was told it was not finalized.

The contract, however, was signed by Morgan Keegan’s managing director on Oct. 31 and an OGB representative on Nov. 2.

We've been following the OGB story for some time. It's fairly typical of Jindal's use of the privatization rubric to pretend his destructive and inefficient brand of cronyism is actually some sort of "good government" program. This also describes the Medicaid reform that went into effect yesterday as well as his plan to "gut public education."

And so, just for laughs, let's have another look at how Times-Picayune editorial cartoonist heralded the advent of the reign of our champion.

How's that workin' out for ya?

Update: Link fixed. Sorry

Whose tubes? Our tubes!

2012-02-02T11:44:00.003-06:00

At least in Lafayette, this is true. One very rare case of something getting done the right way in Louisiana.

More than 800 miles of fiber-optic cable hum invisibly underground in Lafayette, a city of 120,000, delivering Internet speeds of up to 100 megabytes per second — rare for even major cities. The cutting-edge connectivity in the heart of Cajun country is due not to a private telecom giant but to a public municipal service that offers higher speeds and often lower rates than the private sector.

And it was a long time getting done. And it was a tremendous pain in the ass to do thanks to telecom opposition and thanks to the Jindalista movement to privatize everything (including broadband access).

The Lafayette Pro-fiber blog has been chronicling this initiative for almost 8 years now. It's a great archive for anyone interested in the story.

Where's the birth certifimitt?

2012-02-02T11:24:00.002-06:00

Trump endorsing Mitt is funny for many reasons including this.

All joking aside, in American popular culture, Donald Trump is iconically tied to the phrase “You’re fired.” And not a pained “You’re fired” but the pleasure of chopping wood job well done “You’re fired.”

Also, isn't Mitt, by his own estimation, something of an anchor baby anyway?

But mostly it's just funny because, well, there's Trump again pretending to matter. And, of course, we're all playing along for some reason.

US plans pretend withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2013

2012-02-01T15:26:00.002-06:00

Based on the pretend withdrawal from Iraq in 2011.

Mr. Panetta offered no details of what stepping back from combat would mean, saying only that the troops would move into an “advise-and-assist” role to Afghanistan’s security forces. Such definitions are typically murky, particularly in a country like Afghanistan, where American forces are spread widely among small bases across the desert, farmland and mountains, and where the native security forces have a mixed record of success at best.

The defense secretary offered the withdrawal of the United States from Iraq as a model. American troops there eventually pulled back to large bases and left the bulk of the fighting to the Iraqis.

More on how the pretend Iraq withdrawal worked.

Thinking of a number between "bullshit" and "tell me how much you want"

2012-02-01T12:52:00.004-06:00

Jindal's Medicaid privatization scheme goes into effect today.

The move overhauls much of the traditional fee-for-service system in which the state makes direct payments to health care providers who treat Medicaid patients and puts Louisiana alongside dozens of states that have implemented some kind of managed-care system for Medicaid. As of today, beneficiaries enrolled in the new system will receive their care from providers within their specific network, rather than selecting from among any provider that accepts Medicaid. The networks each won three-year contracts.

When implemented statewide, the system will affect more than 800,000 people and shift $2.2 billion in Medicaid insurance spending — about a third of the total $6.7 million budget that comes mostly from the federal treasury — to the private firms.

The network providers are due to make a significant profit for reasons that will be clear in a minute. But first note that the process by which they were selected was contentious and slightly marred by the fact that Jindal's DHH secretary Bruce Greenstein had awarded a separate claims processing contract to his former employer, CNSI.

In December a PAR study criticized the plan for several reasons including lack of legislative oversight, concern that the private networks may not be subject to open records laws, and this.

Managed-care networks, as the descendants of unpopular health management organizations that proliferated more than decades ago, are sometimes accused of producing those savings through denying needed treatments, rather than by improving care.

David Hood, a former DHH secretary who now leads PAR’s health care policy efforts, noted that Bayou Health will include, generally, the healthiest portion of the existing Medicaid population: the children and non-disabled adults. Among that population, Louisiana has among the lowest per-patient Medicaid spending in state-by-state comparisons. That, Hood said, could leave little room for the network managers to find savings -- and, thus, generate profit -- without denying needed care.

Oh but I'm sure they'll figure something out. And even if they don't, it doesn't mean we can't figure out a way to pay them. At least if I'm reading this correctly.

The network’s profit will be a management fee that is a portion of what the state calculates is saved through reducing unnecessary diagnostic tests, hospitalizations or other treatment.

And so we refer you back to the title of this post.

At least he's being honest

2012-02-01T11:22:00.000-06:00

Mitt doesn't care about poor people. This sets him apart from his eventual opponent President Obama who sometimes pretends to.

I wanted to say some more things about the Florida vote

2012-01-31T18:15:00.000-06:00

But I ran out of time today before polls closed. I'm guessing Mitt breaks 40% tonight while Newt struggles for 30 if that much. Saul Alinsky could surprise with 5 to 10% though so keep an eye on that.

Someone needs to shake a finger at Jan Brewer

2012-01-31T18:10:00.001-06:00

Haven't seen the last one of these fights. Not by a long shot.

With a sweeping series of bills introduced Monday night in the state Senate, Republicans in Arizona want to make Wisconsin’s battle against public unions last year look like a lightweight sparring match.

The bills include a total ban on collective bargaining for Arizona’s public employees, including at the city and county levels. The move would outpace even the tough bargaining restrictions enacted in Wisconsin in 2011 that led to massive union protests and a Democratic effort to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker.

“At first glance, it looks like an all out assault on the right of workers to organize,” Senate Minority Leader David Schapira (D) told TPM on Tuesday. “And to me, that’s a serious problem.”

Oddly enough he's still underrated

2012-01-31T17:04:00.004-06:00

Jim Henderson was (is) as good as it gets in his profession. That he spent so much of his career in one market is unusual. But it's the sort of thing that's much more likely to happen in New Orleans than in most places.

Henderson's trick was his eloquent and understated style actually allowed him to get away with as much or maybe even a little more irreverence than some of the more boisterous local sports dudes have over the years. When Buddy D or even Ron Swoboda or someone like them picked a fight... usually with Saints brass, but also other people... they often ended up just as bruised as their targets in the altercation. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But Henderson had a kind of finesse that allowed him to be just as critical and just as independent without also getting thrown off the plane or, perhaps, "cold cocked" as Ray Nagin would put it. That's a rare talent.

Those of us who are old enough to remember ESPN's Sportscenter in its heyday will recall that Dan Patrick often got away with more as the dry straight man than his showboaty partner Keith Olbermann did. Today Patrick's nationally syndicated radio sports talk show is eminently more listenable than Olbermann's serial cable news embarrassments. Jim Henderson could have been Dan Patrick if he wanted to. He had (has) that kind of talent.

But Henderson, probably in the ultimate testament to a sense of judgement superior to that of anyone we can compare him to, decided to stay in New Orleans instead. My guess is it was worth it.

Maybe

2012-01-31T14:47:00.002-06:00

But if Dambala is right about this, I don't think the oil industry is suddenly lacking for a local mouthpiece. I mean, they'll always have the city funded GNO Inc., right?

PAC tracking

2012-01-31T14:20:00.002-06:00

As Florida Republicans go to the polls to give Mitt what looks like a sizeable victory today, the various Super PACs are filing finance reports for the final quarter of 2011. Here's what we know so far. Stephen Colbert's gag Super PAC appears to have out-raised PACs associated with ex-candidates Herman Cain and Rick Perry.

Colbert's PAC included a copy of its form (PDF) with a press release sent out this morning which included the following comment.

"Colbert Super PAC has brought in a staggering $1,023,121.24, which my accountant explains to me that is a number far above 'one,' 'two,' 'five,' or even 'many'" said Stephen Colbert, President and Returning Champion of Colbert Super PAC. "We raised it on my show and used it to materially influence the elections – in full accordance with the law. It's the way our founding fathers would have wanted it, if they had founded corporations instead of just a country."

Buried lede of the day

2012-01-31T13:48:00.002-06:00

Beneath this sad headline, Gingrich Sued Over Use of ‘Eye of the Tiger’ we find a much sadder story being told here.

“My legacy, my life, has been ‘Eye of the Tiger,’ ” Mr. Sullivan told the Chicago Sun-Times, which reported about the legal action on Monday. “Those copyright laws are there to protect people like me who are lucky enough to create a copyright. ‘Eye of the Tiger’ is an iconic copyright. It’s become a lifelong legacy — something you want to pass down to your kids.”

Suggested revised headline: "Man not at all ashamed of horrible song he still accepts money for having created"

Carnival items

2012-01-31T12:23:00.003-06:00

So far, this is the year of high-falutin' King Cake elaboration. Unsatisfied with the standard slate of 50 or so possible flavors, local bakers are pushing the King Cake to whole new dimensions of unnecessary variety.

La Dolce Nola and La Divina have improbably each added a Nutella and an apple-goat cheese flavor although I am told they did this without having coordinated. According to this NOLA Def article, Maple Street Patisserie has a chocolate marzipan king cake available.

But it's not just the specialty bakeries pushing these baroque ideas on the public. On a recent stop at Rouses we found a "triple chocolate" king cake, a "Black Forest" king cake, and, yes, many many "red velvet" king cakes.

That snapshot doesn't do justice to the horrifying bright red of the actual item. Stop in and gawk for yourself sometime. Meanwhile, that King Cake vodka we were promised is still mysteriously unavailable... although suddenly it doesn't seem so weird anymore.

Anyway, I'm thinking I might pick up one of these this weekend just to get into the spirit and whatnot.

Quote of the Day: Gambit's Alex Woodward previews this weekend's Krewe Du Vieux

The impending 2012 apocalypse was an obvious thematic choice for members of Krewe du Vieux — humorous doom and gloom, puns and portmanteaus involving death and anything else are right up the krewe's alley. Instead, it opted for a different theme, one that draws attention to a local women's rights organization — but the krewe isn't skimping on its gratuitous sex jokes and paper mache penises. Krewe captain Lee Mullikin notes, however, "There's not so many penises this year."

So that's good to know. On a more serious note, Mullikin worries about whether or not KDV is in danger of getting too big for its... often prominently displayed... britches.
And as the krewe ages and grows, it also fears becoming what it hated: a "bead-throwing krewe" it set out to mock in the first place. So far it's kept as quiet as possible (the krewe is tight-lipped about its membership and float themes), and tried to avoid crowd sizes that would jeopardize its route through the French Quarter. But the Polo Club Lounge at the Windsor Court named a drink after the krewe, and Mullikin remembers the fine-dining crowds asking waiters to hold their tables while they caught the parade.

"We don't want to blow our own horn too much. We don't want our crowds to get so big they won't let us march anymore. But we don't want to pretend like we don't exist," says Mullikin, who hopes the krewe "educates people to dance with us, laugh, look at what we're doing."
Maybe they should have thought about that before they agreed to appear on Treme. Oh well. Can't be helped. Just keep changing the route every year (yes, there's a new one this year again) and everything should be fine.

Finally, this afternoon we learn that the Lakeview women's marching club, Krewe of Brid won't be parading this year due to "money problems." The short article doesn't elaborate but I'm curious as to just what it was such a small operation couldn't afford. If they had trouble putting the money together for a parade permit, I can't imagine the ladies of Lakeview would have to worry too much about being pepper sprayed if they just decided to march anyway. That's not the sort of thing that's done in their neighborhood.

Douchebag Headlines Of Our Century Presents

2012-01-31T11:12:00.002-06:00

Occupy protest in Oakland divides movement, rekindles debate about flag-burning

Get it? Because there's kindling going on! And... you see.. IT'S FUNNY, DAMMIT! Oh nevermind.

On the bright side, since nobody's paying any attention to what's left of the #Occupy movement anymore anyway, there's nothing left for these stupid kids to damage.

Mayor Landrieu growing tired of his own bullshit

2012-01-28T15:00:00.003-06:00

September 19, 2011 New Orleans Mayor Landrieu Addresses Committee Members At NLC Policy Forum

Mayor Landrieu stressed that while Washington maintains a “slash and cut” ideology — reducing investments in key areas such as public safety, infrastructure, community development and education — the citizens of our hometowns still expect and deserve an outstanding government that represents and fights for the growing needs of the country’s communities. So while New Orleans has not been immune to the same fiscal difficulties that plague other cities, its mantra has been to “cut smart, reorganize and invest in the future.”

“Our approach is not mired in ideology,” Mayor Landrieu said. “It’s not about politics or egos. It’s based on flexibility and efficiency. It’s about producing results for the people of New Orleans… Our goal is not just to do more with less, but to be smarter with less, better with less.”

October 17, 2011 Landrieu presents NOLA budget

The mayor said he will continue to try and do more with less, saying department will face cuts, with the notable exception of the New Orleans Police Department.

"We're not cutting the police department," the mayor said. "As a matter of fact, we're going to add the first recruit class for this administration."

The mayor said the city must do something about ever-increasing expenses, noting that 25 cents of every dollar must be dedicated to covering the city's growing pension obligation.

November 14, 2011 Despite public’s pleas for basic repairs, mayor wants to cut public works spending

Despite that clear call, the mayor has proposed cutting overall departmental spending by $4 million from, $23 million in 2011 to $19 million in 2012. General-fund spending will shrink by $840,774 or four percent. The Landrieu administration maintains that the cut won’t affect the quality of services because of increased efficiency within City Hall. Wielding data that shows steady improvements in meeting monthly goals for pothole fixes and streetlight repairs, the administration says that will continue an upward performance spike, regardless of cuts in personnel and operating spending.

“We are doing more with less,” Deputy Mayor of Facilities, Infrastructure and Community Development Cedric Grant said at a budget hearing Monday in City Council Chambers. “These are difficult times and we are making difficult decisions.”

All of which brings us to this week's press conference.

Mayor Mitch Talks Guns Following Morning Murder in Algiers

Piggybacking on President Barack Obama's call for "nation building at home" during last night's State of the Union address, Landrieu talked about the need for more funds at home.

"When Washington and the state of Louisiana says do more with less, it's a myth," Mayor Mitch said. "You can only do less with less."

Perhaps.. it's learning.

Protecting the tourists from the First Amendment

2012-01-28T11:05:00.002-06:00

Why does Kristin Palmer hate free speech?

Although the law, sponsored by Councilwoman Kristin Gisleson Palmer, spelled out the justification for the crackdown on aggressive panhandlers, it offered no explanation for the blanket ban on letting people assemble on Bourbon Street at night to voice their views on politics or religion.

Aw the poor dears

2012-01-28T10:06:00.003-06:00

900 words of "Ow you hurt our poor feelings"

A different kind of F-word is stirring a linguistic and political debate as controversial as what it defines. The word is "fracking" -- as in hydraulic fracturing, a technique long used by the oil and gas industry to free oil and gas from rock.

It's not in the dictionary, the industry hates it, and President Barack Obama didn't use it in his State of the Union speech -- even as he praised federal subsidies for it.

The word sounds nasty, and environmental advocates have been able to use it to generate opposition -- and revulsion -- to what they say is a nasty process that threatens water supplies.

Here's what hydrofracking operations do to the surrounding groundwater supply.

Some ingredients mixed into the hydraulic fracturing fluids were common and generally harmless, like salt and citric acid. Others were unexpected, like instant coffee and walnut hulls, the report said. Many ingredients were “extremely toxic,” including benzene, a known human carcinogen, and lead.

Companies injected large amounts of other hazardous chemicals, including 11.4 million gallons of fluids containing at least one of the toxic or carcinogenic B.T.E.X. chemicals — benzene, toluene, xylene and ethylbenzene. The companies used the highest volume of fluids containing one or more carcinogens in Colorado, Oklahoma and Texas.

The report comes two and a half months after an initial report by the same three lawmakers that found that 32.2 millions of gallons of fluids containing diesel, considered an especially hazardous pollutant because it contains benzene, were injected into the ground during hydrofracking by a dozen companies from 2005 to 2009, in possible violation of the drinking water act.

A 2010 report by Environmental Working Group, a research and advocacy organization, found that benzene levels in other hydrofracking ingredients were as much as 93 times higher than those found in diesel.

But by all means lets watch our language so as not to hurt anybody's feelings.

Today's episode of shit Obama is talking about 3 years too late

2012-01-27T14:18:00.004-06:00

Of course even this isn't quite enough. And of course it's an empty campaign stunt. But at least he gets the conversation in the right direction.

President Barack Obama will announce a plan to shift some federal dollars away from colleges and universities that don't control tuition costs and new competitions in higher education to encourage efficiency as part of an effort to contain soaring college costs.

Meanwhile, some quick notes regarding some of the seemingly "populist" theme of Obama's State of the Union address. I recommend Taibbi's inconclusive but helpful speculation here. Even Obama's mortgage fraud investigation unit led by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman could be just more clever cover for letting the banks get away with whatever they want.

The question is, how real of an investigation will we get? The fact that Schneiderman’s co-chairs are Lanny Breuer and Robert Khuzami make me extremely skeptical. I’m actually not sure that both men, in an ideal world, wouldn’t be targets of their own committee’s investigation.

Before joining the SEC, Khuzami was senior counsel of the fixed-income desk at Deutsche Bank, which was creating exactly the sort of dicey CDOs that this investigation ought to be targeting.

Breuer, meanwhile, worked for the hotshot defense firm Covington and Burling, which among other things provided legal help that led to the creation of the electronic mortgage registry system MERS.

The MERS issues are probably more the province of the foreclosure settlement, but the banks’ joint efforts to evade the paper registry system are certainly an element of the larger effort to defraud MBS investors that will be covered by this committee. In fact, I’m not sure that mortgage securitization and the proliferation of CDOs and CDS could have taken place on anywhere near the scale that it did without MERS.

So having those two guys attached to Schneiderman’s hip makes me wonder what is going on here. Khuzami’s presence is especially odd. The theoretical reason we need a committee like this in the first place is because the federal agency that is supposed to be doing this work – the SEC – has stubbornly refused to do so.

And that, more than anything, is the tell. If after three years of refusing to bring the already in place enforcement apparatus against the banks, why on Earth would anyone expect the President to sanction suddenly radical action by some newly created committee? As David Dayen suggests here, this is all just more horrific Obama political phoniness.

Only this isn’t a victory at all, at least not yet. Schneiderman may be trying to work from within, but he’s saddled with a panel full of co-chairs tied to banks with a history of obstructing accountability. The united front of Justice Democrats has been nicked. Kamala Harris, facing enormous pressure to go along with the settlement (she remains opposed at this point), now must contend with being the main big-state holdout AND having a family member co-chairing the investigation panel!

This is a classic Obama move, putting a threat or a rival inside the tent. It happened with Elizabeth Warren and David Petraeus and Jon Huntsman, and it’s happening again. It divides the coalition against a weak settlement, which will at the least shut down state and federal prosecutions on foreclosure fraud and servicing issues. It puts hopes in yet another investigation, one with little chance for success.

Obama, much like Bush before him, was always primarily interested in protecting the banksters. Why should anyone expect that to suddenly change just because there's an election coming?

In sweeping reform, Mayor Landrieu appends the suffix "stat" to a bunch of stuff

2012-01-26T17:20:00.000-06:00

With an eye toward crime, Landrieu administration starts tracking quality-of-life issues

Basic idea: New Orleans has, for some time, had a lot of potholes, broken streetlights, and abandoned vehicles. Oh and murders too.

So what we're going to do is this. We're going to take all of that stuff and put it down on a spreadsheet. (Except not the murders. Those are kept on a separate spreadsheet so that they can be easily matched to the arrest records of the victims... well usually, anyway.)

Next we'll take that spreadsheet to a meeting where we will frown at it in such a way that "target(s) the ills that (we) think lead indirectly to crime."

While the initiative aims to monitor a slew of matters that create minor headaches for residents -- from potholes to illegal signs to unpruned trees on neutral grounds -- officials plan to target the ills that they think lead indirectly to crime, Chief Administrative Officer Andy Kopplin said.

The strategy aligns with Landrieu's vow to make reducing the city's soaring homicide rate his top priority.

"It's not that we're not going to be focused on potholes all over the city," Kopplin said. "But we're truly going to be trying to prioritize those things that we think are as closely related to the crime-fight as possible."

So, in order to maintain our stance that homicide is our "top priority," we're going to also "prioritize" and "target" but not necessarily physically do anything that we weren't already doing about a set of other public nuisances. We realize this may seem silly at first but keep in mind, and this is the key point, we'll be doing it all "with an eye toward crime." So there. Oh and we're putting a "stat" on the end of it as well just so you'll know how serious we are.

Dubbed QualityofLifeStat, the program becomes the latest effort by Landrieu to set clear performance goals and measure progress toward them. Like the Police Department's ComStat program, QualityofLifeStat will involve regular meetings during which mayoral aides review their progress toward established goals.

Put on a box-back coat, and an ankle bracelet

2012-01-26T16:12:00.005-06:00

The Lens:

In what appears to be a departure from the recent New Orleans Police Department practice of releasing criminal records of homicide victims, the department has not released the arrest record of the Good Samaritan killed in an Algiers carjacking Wednesday. Superintendent Ronal Serpas has been widely criticized for releasing the records of victims, in some cases citing arrests, but not convictions, from more than 10 years ago. Critics say the practice tends to blame the victim, but Serpas said there’s a connection that shouldn’t be ignored between a homicide victim and his or her criminal past.

During yesterday's press conference where the Mayor proposed a scheme to funnel more money to bail bondsmen, he also managed to angle for Sheriff Gusman to get a larger piece of the exploding murder pie.

Ryan Berni, a Landrieu spokesman, said the mayor isn't asking that judges specifically adopt the $30,000 cash bond policy, but set higher bonds and use their discretion. In New Orleans, many judges set bonds that can be paid through a commercial bond agents, who charge 13 percent of the bond amount for a person to get out of jail.

Landrieu also asked that any gun-charge defendants who are released be electronically monitored by the Orleans Parish sheriff's office. If possible, the defendant should pay for this service, he said.

All of this begs one question. If future murder victims are found to have firearms-related arrest records, and Serpas is going to release that information to the public anyway, shouldn't we just go the whole nine and require the corpses to wear ankle bracelet monitors too?

Everybody curfewed?

2012-01-25T14:08:00.001-06:00

Mitch is responding to the latest wave of killings with yet another presser starting at about 2.

Watch here.

Update: Looks like the plan is to ask judges to set higher bonds for firearm offenses and to get Gusman more mileage out of his no-bid ankle monitoring contract. So, hey, big profit all around. The Sheriff and the bail bondsmen should make a... um... killing.

Offended

2012-01-25T13:01:00.004-06:00

Bobby Jindal is offended

A day after teachers unions blasted the rhetoric Gov. Bobby Jindal used in rolling out his plan to overhaul the state education system, the governor fired back and said he was offended by a comment a union official made about school vouchers. The comment, by Louisiana Association of Educators Executive Director Michael Walker-Jones, suggested that parents may not have the resources to make informed decisions about their children's schools.

He's not the only one.

What bothers me though about Jindal is his not-at-all-subtle attack on teachers. Consider his rhetoric. In rolling out his plan he made the following two statements about teachers:

1. "Short of selling drugs in the workplace or beating up one of the business's clients, they can never be fired."

2. "We are going to create a system that pays teachers for doing a good job instead of for the length of time they have been breathing.

Ugh. First teachers are easily fired. In fact, every teacher in New Orleans was fired after the flood. And my principal friends tell me all one needs to do is document the poor performance in yearly evaluation forms and the contract will be terminated. And notice in his business model he calls students "clients." Second, my wife is a public school teacher and I find this idea about her pay being based on simply living to be very offensive. My outrage is influenced by that fact that my kids and I all suffer due to the incredible work load placed on her shoulders. Ask anyone married to a public school teacher. Some of us call ourselves "teacher widows" and "teacher widowers." It's a major sacrifice. I look forward to June when I can have a wife again.

The Obama-Jindal-John White "school choice" plan will eventually widow us all from the very concept of universal public education. But God forbid anyone offend the Governor's sensibilities by pointing that out.

So long, and thanks for all the duck

2012-01-25T12:20:00.002-06:00

Sorry to see J'Anita's go.

Sometimes even being really great at what you do isn't enough to sustain your small business forever. Best of luck to those guys in whatever comes next. Meanwhile it looks like I'll be wrapping my own cheese-stuffed apricots in bacon for a while.

It's getting to be that time again

2012-01-25T09:57:00.003-06:00

Parade season is coming. With that in mind, Uptown Messenger's Jean-Paul Villere provides with a list of guidelines for parade goers. Most of them are worth heeding although I am resistant to the suggestion that night parades aren't appropriate for children. Maybe they're not for your particular children but then again maybe you're a paranoid, overbearing jerk of a parent. How should I know? Lucky for us the city has proposed to relieve us of the burden of making that decision via the new curfew law. Good for them.

Still most of what Villere has to offer is helpful. Here he reminds us of the increasing difficulty parade goers have these days with the concept of sharing the public space.

4) A ladder is not real estate. None of the neutral ground is. The median namesake has no owner, hence “neutral.” You want a spot to hang with your friends? Great. Maintain it. With your own actual physical presence. None of this roping off or placing endless empty chairs “saving” a spot. Abandon it and expect to lose it. This is the code.

Actually I don't think that makes the point precisely enough. A parade is a shared experience that takes place on a public street. Expect neighbors to flow into and out of "your spot" as the event goes on even while you "maintain" that spot with your "physical presence". It's okay. Move a little bit for them once and later they'll move a little bit for you. At least that's how it's supposed to work. Lately such movement tends to be obstructed by obstacles like the strung ladders pictured above and more and more, (and also perhaps worse) row after row of festival chairs like these.

Last year, just prior to the major parades, Mayor Landrieu issued a warning to neutral ground hogs that the city would be more vigilant about enforcing the ordinances designed to maximize everyone's enjoyment of the spectacle. After that, unfortunately, beyond some unrelated pepper spraying of revelers in the Bywater not much actual enforcement occurred.

And so we're not particularly optimistic about anything changing this year. But, as Villere's example demonstrates, it can't hurt to remind folks of the preferred etiquette.

SOTU Drinking Game

2012-01-24T17:18:00.006-06:00

Chug an entire bottle of Jack Daniels when the President engages in rhetoric that has no or little meaning when coupled with the policies he intends it to sell. For example, when he says,

No, we will not go back to an economy weakened by outsourcing, bad debt, and phony financial profits. Tonight, I want to speak about how we move forward, and lay out a blueprint for an economy that’s built to last – an economy built on American manufacturing, American energy, skills for American workers, and a renewal of American values.

Go back and read this feature story from Sunday's New York Times describing the scope of the slave labor global economy Obama has no serious plan to ever confront.

To Apple executives, Foxconn City was further evidence that China could deliver workers — and diligence — that outpaced their American counterparts.

That’s because nothing like Foxconn City exists in the United States.

The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. “The scale is unimaginable,” he said.

Foxconn employs nearly 300 guards to direct foot traffic so workers are not crushed in doorway bottlenecks. The facility’s central kitchen cooks an average of three tons of pork and 13 tons of rice a day. While factories are spotless, the air inside nearby teahouses is hazy with the smoke and stench of cigarettes.

Foxconn Technology has dozens of facilities in Asia and Eastern Europe, and in Mexico and Brazil, and it assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia, Samsung and Sony.

“They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined to discuss specifics of her work. “What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”

Obama will speak in flattering terms tonight about the need to "restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot." He will meekly propose a return to the still laughably unfair system of taxation that was in place prior to the Bush tax cuts applied to the wealthiest earners. Keep in mind, Obama and congressional Democrats have already failed to clear even this ridiculously low set bar once during his term. This is, of course, just fine with the President for his purposes tonight and in the campaign to come. It's something he can continue to encourage us to "hope" for.

But as for that "blueprint for an economy that’s built to last"? Yeah good luck with this.

On Tuesday, Mr. Obama will flesh out his populist message with new proposals to spur manufacturing, including tax breaks for companies that “insource” jobs back to the United States; to double-down on clean-energy incentives; and to improve education and job training initiatives, especially for the millions of long-term unemployed, the officials familiar with the speech said.

The former industrial base of the American economy has shifted away to totalitarian states like China where slaves are kept in dormitories to service massive Dickensian monoliths like Foxconn and Obama's proposal to compete with that is tax breaks for "insourcing"? What nonsense. More from Sunday's Times

But such calculations are, in many respects, meaningless because building the iPhone in the United States would demand much more than hiring Americans — it would require transforming the national and global economies. Apple executives believe there simply aren’t enough American workers with the skills the company needs or factories with sufficient speed and flexibility. Other companies that work with Apple, like Corning, also say they must go abroad.

Manufacturing glass for the iPhone revived a Corning factory in Kentucky, and today, much of the glass in iPhones is still made there. After the iPhone became a success, Corning received a flood of orders from other companies hoping to imitate Apple’s designs. Its strengthened glass sales have grown to more than $700 million a year, and it has hired or continued employing about 1,000 Americans to support the emerging market.

But as that market has expanded, the bulk of Corning’s strengthened glass manufacturing has occurred at plants in Japan and Taiwan.

“Our customers are in Taiwan, Korea, Japan and China,” said James B. Flaws, Corning’s vice chairman and chief financial officer. “We could make the glass here, and then ship it by boat, but that takes 35 days. Or, we could ship it by air, but that’s 10 times as expensive. So we build our glass factories next door to assembly factories, and those are overseas.”

Corning was founded in America 161 years ago and its headquarters are still in upstate New York. Theoretically, the company could manufacture all its glass domestically. But it would “require a total overhaul in how the industry is structured,” Mr. Flaws said. “The consumer electronics business has become an Asian business. As an American, I worry about that, but there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Asia has become what the U.S. was for the last 40 years.”

Once again, the President's answer to a fundamentally changed world built upon the criminal and inhuman exploitation of slavery by international industrialists is... more of the sort of tax loopholes that allow Mitt Romney to pay a 14% marginal rate in the US.

What a sick joke all of this is. But, of course, it will be taken quite seriously by many. And enthusiastically so at that. Hope you have plenty liquor on hand.

And I thought 2012 was sucking for local sports fans

2012-01-24T15:28:00.003-06:00

Good God check out what's happened to Mitt's favorable/unfavorable ratings in January.

$76,000 or whatever is in this box?

2012-01-24T13:36:00.003-06:00

Congratulations, Gulfport, the box is empty!

"They're taking a tough position," city council president Ricky Dombrowski said. "We're just going to continue to push them. How could (the claim) be worth zero when it was originally worth $76,000? I think they've just drawn a line in the sand."

BP initially offered the city $76,000 for tax losses, but the city previously rejected that offer.

BP has paid only two loss of revenue claims to local governments in Mississippi, BP spokesman Ray Melick said. BP records show the city of Moss Point was paid more than $57,000, while the city of Ocean Springs received almost $133,000. Melick said a total of 60 loss-of-revenue claims have been paid to governments along the Gulf of Mexico.

Admittedly Gulfport did ask for $11.8 million including $6.1 million in "community damages" which BP says can only be paid out via the NRDA process. I'd be interested in knowing if they're interpreting their liability through the Oil Pollution Act correctly, there. Unfortunately the article doesn't settle that question.

Elevated

2012-01-24T12:20:00.001-06:00

Having proven its mettle through stellar management of the state hazard mitigation program, Shaw will be allowed to truck away the rest of the Road Home money too.

Hornets don't live in a "Hive"

2012-01-24T11:02:00.003-06:00

And for that matter, neither do shrimp.

Update: Another way to look at this, of course, is the entity involved in spending BP money to suppress concerns over the safety of Gulf seafood is considering purchasing the "naming rights" to a publicly funded and maintained building. And using BP money to do that.

Upperdate: Dambala has a similar take here.

I'd watch a debate every night if they'd let me

2012-01-23T18:46:00.003-06:00

I know it's fun to complain about the fact that tonight's GOP debate number elevety ka-billion and three feels excessive. But it's not the number of debates alone that makes it that way. What voters are actually fatigued over is the length of the campaign and the repetition of canned speeches, deceptive ads, and stupid lazy press narratives that go with that.

But the debates themselves actually make for the best opportunities for one or two revealing moments of spontaneity to break through all that scripted crap. Granted, the tight ground rules and poorly managed moderation by our nation's celebrity journalists mean such moments are few and far between. Often the best we can hope to see is an irrelevant gaffe, sighs, or "oops!" But every now and then an actual thing happens during the debates. And that's more than we can say for most campaign events.

If the campaign season were shorter, less expensive, and less stupid it could still contain a debate every few days and we'd be just as well off.

Ending in Slaughter

2012-01-23T14:37:00.003-06:00

Just like everything else the LA Democratic Party plans.

The tour is designed to connect party officials with state Democrats on the subject of "rebuilding and the party's future," party spokesman James Hallinan said.

He said the tour will begin in the north Louisiana cities of Monroe and Bastrop on Thursday and end Feb. 4 in the Baton Rouge area town of Slaughter.

That'll help buck the trend

2012-01-23T14:25:00.002-06:00

Maybe not such an excellent time to buy some dirt in Louisiana.

Allstate Corp. is asking to raise rates for 144,000 Louisiana homeowners who get their insurance coverage from two Allstate companies. According to the state insurance department, Northbrook, Ill.-based Allstate wants an average 11.3 percent increase for 71,000 homeowners covered by Allstate Insurance Co. The company is proposing an average 5.9 percent hike for 73,000 homeowners covered by Allstate Indemnity Co. Together, the requests total just under $17 million in higher rates.

Right on the heels of...

With dire warnings that New Orleans' aging drinking water, sewer and drainage systems face "serious risk" without significant infrastructure investments, Sewerage & Water Board officials today will begin trying to build public support for a plan that would more than double customer rates by 2016.

Go home and think about wetlands

2012-01-23T13:50:00.001-06:00

With a wink and a nod and probably an apology to Editlla, I'm trying out a new catch-phrase.

Anywhoo, in the spirit of the above... the state has released released its 50 year master plan for coastal restoration which you can access at this site. Today out at UNO the state is presenting the plan in a public meeting beginning at 1 PM with a formal hearing and comment session beginning at 5:30.

If you're going to the hearing, or if you're just interested in the plan at all, you may benefit from reading these short analyses from the Times-Picayune's Bob Marshall and The Lens' Mark Moseley.

Marshall begins by telling us the plan instills him with a sense of hope because it appears to take a harder, clearer line regarding the political obstacles to saving the coast.

The importance of that one accomplishment cannot be overstated. As author and levee authority member John Barry has pointed out, the biggest obstacle to solving our problems was never engineering, but politics. Not necessarily the Washington kind, but the local politics of competing interest groups.

Everyone has wanted to "fix" the coast, but often only if that fix didn't mean impacting their lives. From the shipping industry to sports fishers, if a project to stop land loss was going to hurt their interests, a quick phone to their Congressional members could scuttle the plans.

It's heartening to read that Marshall is encouraged here, but I would advise continued skepticism. It's one thing for a document like this to enumerate the choices it recommends our leaders make. It's another thing entirely to expect that to suddenly change the process by which those choices are made, as even Marshall has to admit later in the article.

The CPRA doesn't have the authority to put this plan into action. That lies with the Legislature and governor. In the week since the plan was released there's already been push back from interest groups who could be damaged. I'm not saying the plan is perfect, or expecting it to race through untouched. Maybe the plan can be tweaked to lessen impacts, but the politicians need support to resist ignoring science.

Something about Louisiana politicians needing to resist ignoring science doesn't inspire the greatest of confidence.

Meanwhile Moseley further diminishes our confidence in the practicality of the plan itself by focusing in on one peculiar item.

The coastal plan is a fine document, but the real headline, in my view, is the state’s belief that they can deliver 500-year storm protection for Greater New Orleans for the bargain price of $1.8 billion. And the subheadline to that should be: “Inexplicably, they suggest we wait decades to do it.”

That is quite the curiosity. I'd be interested to learn whether or not it draws much follow-up during tonight's hearing.

Possible Headlines of the Future

2012-01-23T12:55:00.001-06:00

Les Miles severely injured by runaway float

The Krewe of Zeus has announced that Louisiana State University football players Jarrett Lee and T-Bob Hebert will preside as grand marshals of the parade on Lindi Gras, which is Feb. 20.

Is this all about getting Heebe?

2012-01-23T11:50:00.001-06:00

Clancy seems to think so. I'm not so sure Broussard isn't a big enough fish all on his own, though.

Flashback

2012-01-22T22:20:00.002-06:00

People watching from the St. Charles Avenue neutral ground as the Giants beat the Patriots in Superbowl XLII on Bacchus Sunday 2008.

Feel any better, yet?

2012-01-22T21:44:00.000-06:00

So this pathetic team who barely made the playoffs and was destroyed 49-24 by the Saints and who the Saints should have been hosting today just made it to the Superbowl. AND this is the best possible outcome at this point. Just kill me.

Of course this means he'll lead the league in interceptions next season

2012-01-21T13:27:00.002-06:00

Brees Family Announces Third Child On The Way

The last time this happened the entirety of the local Tweeter Tube dedicated itself to naming the poor unfortunate child who ended up with something worse than even the internet could imagine for him. This time around we only offer Menckles' suggestion that if it's a girl she should be called Bea Fimaq Bress. Give it a sec if it doesn't make sense at first.

Because I can't help it

2012-01-21T11:56:00.007-06:00

Here's a guess at the South Carolina results. Because it's an open primary, I might be tempted to vote Cain were I a resident.

Newt: 40

Mitt: 30

Santorum: 15

Paul: 10

Cain: 5

Update: What Atrios said

Not that I need to add anything to Atrios' pithy line but this is the quintessence of why our entire system of elections and the people who cover them is corrupted beyond all recognition. King writes,

But disgust with the corrosive effects of super PAC money and coolness toward the likes of Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum are no excuse for trying to disrupt the presidential election system, as it appears Colbert has tried to do.

Um... yes, yes that is precisely what you do when you recognize that the system is a sham. You disrupt the fuck out of it or shut the fuck up. Otherwise you're part of the problem.

Upperdate: Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi has a guess on tonight's results at the end of this post as well. He also offers these thoughts on the GOPony race to this point.

I've given up trying to predict this race. Watching the events of last night, I saw plausible nomination scenarios for all four candidates. Don't forget that if the merry-go-round of incompetence continues much longer – if Romney and Newt and Santorum keep hot-potatoing frontrunner status and primary victories – Ron Paul is going to waltz into the convention with a mass of delegates and a legit argument that he was the strongest and most consistent candidate.

Sure, sure, that's fun to think about. But I'm sticking to my Romney inevitability thesis. If there's one candidate who most perfectly personifies the utter hollowness of American democracy at this stage in our history, it's Mitt. If there's another, it's the current President but that fact only strengthens my conviction here.

Building a better police state

2012-01-21T11:46:00.002-06:00

Mitch picks up a few pointers in DC.

Lanier, Washington's police chief since 2006 who appeared with Landrieu at a U.S. Conference of Mayors panel discussion on youth crime, said some changes were accomplished relatively quickly.

She noted a "texting" program in which young people are encouraged to use their cellphones to report crimes and other suspicious activity in their neighborhoods.

Of course if we're going to enlist teenagers as a kind of secret police informant force in New Orleans, we may want to let them out of the house after 8PM

Maybe

2012-01-19T21:12:00.002-06:00

Good grief, Mitt.

Asked by CNN moderator John King whether he would follow his father, former presidential candidate George Romney, and release more than a decade of returns, Romney was noncommittal.

“Maybe,” he said, prompting boos and jeers from the audience. “I don’t know how many years I’ll release.”

I was out while Newt was answering the question about his ex-wife with a prolonged "Fuck You," but my open relationship with this campaign allows that sort of thing. By the time I got to my TV, Newt was on to telling us about his big thinking about doing big things which is okay since we already know he's a big person.

Let's see, what else?

Mitt attacked Newt for having only 4 years experience as Speaker compared to Mitt's 25 years experience in business. But if you score it in terms of damage done to people's lives, it all works out kind of evenly. Maybe he should have converted to dog years.

Mitt also told us something about being, "from the real streets of America," video evidence of which is provided below.

Paul and Santorum held an elevated discussion on the merits of putting more Americans out of work so as to depress the price of the consumer goods they won't be manufacturing and so won't be able to afford anyway. I think Santorum even suggested more tax credits to "make American manufacturers competitive" or something like that. Perhaps he meant for them to be able to purchase suicide nets.

Mitt and Newt both seemed eager to outsource immigration enforcement to Visa and Mastercard.

Paul appeared to suggest that abortions happen because money is fungible before concluding that "South Carolina is known for its respect for liberty" which was almost as funny as Newt's closing plea that we vote for him as a means to avoid "radicalism."

The bobbleheads are all saying that Newt and Santorum "won" this debate. Whatever that means, it's pretty obvious that Mitt lost.. or at least looked (even) worse than he had in the 70 previous such appearances. Anyway, I'm going to change the channel now so I don't have to listen to Erick Erickson talk anymore. I suggest you do the same.

Saints D Spags out

2012-01-19T17:05:00.001-06:00

After having spazzed out in San Francisco, that is.

Saints coach Sean Payton gave lip service to taking his time and talking to a lot of people in order to find his defensive coordinator. In truth, the Saints were zeroed in squarely on the biggest name left on the market.

New Orleans hired Steve Spagnuolo to be their next defensive coordinator, according to Jay Glazer of FOX Sports.

Uh oh time to extend the curfew again

2012-01-19T16:38:00.002-06:00

Have to keep those "white men with salt-and-pepper hair" out of the Whole Foods, you know. For their own protection.

More things you can do with consultants

2012-01-19T10:51:00.001-06:00

I'm not sure if BP got this right. River Birch would have called her a lobbyist.

U.S. officials say a former BP executive was paid $107,000 a month to do consulting for a company lawyer, but allege the money may have been designed to influence her testimony during a deposition in litigation over the Gulf oil spill.

What SOPA/PIPA would actually do

2012-01-19T10:11:00.003-06:00

We learned this week that our congresspersons still find it politically expedient to claim ignorance of the basic concept of the internet on the grounds that it is something only a "nerd" could understand. They're lying, of course, but there's a good reason why that lie works for them politically.

Mainstream news coverage (meaning big network TV, radio, and major papers) of the SOPA debate has been, until very late in the process, has been practically non-existent. But even when it is covered, it still happens within a vague political frame where little if any attention is paid to informing the audience precisely why the issue even matters in the first place.

And this is particularly striking when one considers just how easy it is to get it right. Take, as the rare example, this Ezra Klein interview with Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon. (H/T Michael F.)

Wyden has been this legislation's primary opponent for over a year now. And, who knows, maybe Wyden is actually a "nerd" (we're pretty certain Klein is) but that hardly makes this any less simple.

EK: What makes PIPA and SOPA cluster bombs? If you agree there is a problem, why aren’t these acceptable solutions?

RW: PIPA and SOPA, at their heart, are censorship bills and blacklisting bills, and they undermine much of the architecture of the internet. I recognize that you don’t have discussions about the domain name system at every coffee shop in America. But it’s essentially the directory to the net. If you didn’t have a universal naming system -- for my Senate site, wyden.senate.gov -- it would just be gibberish. What the bills do is say, when you get a court order, you can’t use the domain-name system to resolve to the IP address.

EK; When you say “resolve to the IP address,” exactly what that means. Let’s say I run EzraTube.com. And someone has uploaded copyrighted content to my site. What happens next?

RW: When you type EzraTube.com into your browser, your browser is asking Comcast to ask other servers where that goes. These servers basically act as phonebooks. What the so-called “DNS remedy” in the bill does is enable the attorney general to get a court order that tells Comcast, ‘when people want to find EzraTube.com, don’t send them there. Send them to a Department of Justice site instead.’ People who want to work around this would be able to. There are already third-party tools that use foreign servers or other domain-name servers outside of Comcast’s network. But that’s a problem because, for the last 15 years, we’ve spent all this time building the DNS system into a secure standard. Because of this effort, all of the important work on the net is built around the DNS system. In the national security space, everything we’re trying to do on cybersecurity is built around DNS system.

EK: And so their remedy to piracy is to make it a hassle for me to go to sites that include potentially pirated content, but the side effect is that the remedy corrupts the primacy and impartiality of the DNS system?

RW: Right. Though, by the way, it should be said that over the weekend, Chairman Leahy said he would make changes in the DNS part of the bill. We haven’t seen details of that. If it’s just a directive to “study it” before it goes into law, I would oppose that. So we have questions about that provision. We have questions about the authority the Justice Department has to get a court order to keep a search engine from directing to the site. That’s censorship. We have questions about the definitions applying to information-location tools, which our reading suggests that could apply to almost anything. That makes the legislation too broad.

Hedge funds are people, my friend

2012-01-19T09:42:00.003-06:00

(Via Atrios)

People with human rights, presumably.

The novel approach would have the funds arguing in the European Court of Human Rights that Greece had violated bondholder rights, though that could be a multiyear project with no guarantee of a payoff.

Evidently this all comes from these damn Europeans having gotten the wording wrong.

Legal experts suggest that the investors may have a case because if Greece changes the terms of its bonds so that investors receive less than they are owed, that could be viewed as a property rights violation — and in Europe, property rights are human rights.

It's "pursuit of happiness," people! Damn don't you guys know how to write a legally vague enough constitution over there?

Just in case you thought this was excellent news for Newt

2012-01-19T09:31:00.004-06:00

Newt is not going to win this.

In 1999, after refusing to take the seat he won in the 1998 elections, Newt Gingrich left his second wife, Marianne, for a much-younger staffer with whom he’d been having an almost-ignored affair. As in his first marriage, he did so shortly after Marianne was diagnosed with a serious illness; as in his first divorce, he fought Marianne tooth and nail over any financial settlement. And then he had the Atlanta archdiocese inform Marianne that their marriage was invalid in the eyes of his fiancée’s faith; 9 years later, he completed his conversion to Catholicism.

I shall fall Like a bright exhalation in the evening,
And no man see me more -- Henry VIII Act 3 Scene 2

This car is running out of clowns

2012-01-19T09:18:00.001-06:00

Once again the coveted Jindal endorsement is up for grabs.

Perry will hold a press conference at 11 am in North Charleston, South Carolina, where he is expected to announce he will drop out of the Republican primary for president, ending a campaign that began in mid-summer.

"You are hurting this recovery and you need to stop it!"

2012-01-18T22:22:00.002-06:00

Whenever they tell you you're not being "positive" enough, you're probably on to something.

After the meeting, Glapion suggested to a reporter from The Lens that stories focusing on the committee’s failure to comply with the open-meetings law might not be in the best interests of New Orleans.

“If we want to move the city forward, we’ve got to stay positive with our pen,” Glapion said to the reporter as Glapion walked from the room.

Sophisticating up the gang-banging

2012-01-18T16:12:00.004-06:00

According the Tweeter Tube, moments ago Ronal Serpas said this.

"If you have a very organized gang you have greater opportunities to do intervention strategies that are successful."

Still waiting for the context of that but it sounds eerily similar to former New Orleans Inspector General Robert Cerasoli's statement that the problem with municipal corruption here was that it isn't sophisticated like it is in other cities.

Serpas also appears to be defending his policy of slandering murder victims by releasing their prior arrest records. "Well now the community is talking about it," says Serpas apparently regarding the often irrelevant but damaging personal information he attaches to public notices of violent deaths in New Orleans.

And then there's this.

Serpas: "100% of people were unemployed who were killed."

Any minute now we're expecting Councilwoman Palmer to suggest a curfew for all unemployed persons in New Orleans... for their own protection, of course.

Update: Here's the story Matt Davis (the source of the above quoted tweets) wrote for The Lens about Sepras' appearance at City Council today.

Bi-Partisanship!

2012-01-18T15:35:00.001-06:00

Always brings us the most sensible policies.

Both bills have roughly an even number of Republicans and Democrats signed on as co-sponsors, making it difficult for members to apply to this hot-button issue their usual calculus about where they want to position themselves on the ideological spectrum.

Helicopter-mounted dog catcher?

2012-01-18T15:27:00.002-06:00

Newt: Palin Will 'Play A Major Role' In My Administration

Feel free to make up whatever imaginary "major role" seems the best fit for Newt's imaginary administration.

They'll be back with pepper spray

2012-01-18T12:49:00.002-06:00

PIPA and SOPA Co-Sponsors Abandon Bills

Still no guarantee these bills won't pass. They've been baking for quite some time now and continue to have very powerful and determined support. Even, on the off chance that SOPA and PIPA don't make it through this time around, unless the MPAA and the entire Hollywood lobby suddenly vanishes into thin air the internet is eventually going to be censored. It's only a matter of time.

"He does not allow his ignorance to undermine his confidence"

2012-01-18T12:26:00.001-06:00

James Gill's review of Ed Blakely's book. The above line alone demonstrates that Blakely is the quintessential man of our age.

Kristen Palmer: "Won't somebody think of the children!"

2012-01-18T10:46:00.003-06:00

Councilmemeber Palmer appears in today's Times-Picayune once again lying (or at least deluding herself) about the recently passed curfew law. The law which Palmer disgustingly justifies on the grounds that it "protects children" in fact exists in order to codify the misguided notion that the oldest most iconic section of our city belongs more to tourists and the tourism industry than it does to the actual residents of New Orleans.

Palmer writes

The over-arching question has been, why the French Quarter and this particular section of the Marigny? The answer is simple. No other neighborhood in the city, state or nation sized at .66 square miles, just 12 blocks wide, contains more than 350 alcohol beverage outlets, and includes adult entertainment establishments and numerous strip clubs.

To begin with that's not the "over-arching question." The over-arching question is why does council claim the police authority to limit the movements of citizens in a free society at all based solely on their age? But, if you're an important person like Kristen Palmer who isn't likely to be randomly stopped just for being outside you don't care about that sort of thing in the first place.

What important people like Kristen Palmer care about is what makes other important people comfortable. In this case the important people in question are the operators of those beverage outlets and entertainment establishments who don't want their customers scared away from their Disneyland by the sight of unapproved characters. Nevermind any of this hooey about protecting minors. Most of the (also wrongheaded) popular support for these curfew laws is based on residents' and business owners' fear of, not fear for unsupervised minors.

Moreover, the very idea that there are sections of a city which are solely dedicated to one style of business flies completely in the face of the entire concept of urban living. Even today in its sorry denuded state the French Quarter is still a mix of restaurants, specialty shops, grocery stores, residential space, museums, courthouses, churches, schools, and of course bars and music clubs. Thanks to leaders like Kristen Palmer and the short-sighted moneyed interests she serves, we haven't been the greatest stewards of this special historic neighborhood but we also haven't quite managed to kill it yet.

Meanwhile The Lens has published a refutation of Palmer's elitist lies by Quarter native C.W. Cannon. I encourage you to go read his column in its entirety but here is where he makes his strongest point.

Black critics claim that the law is intended to target black young people. They’re right, of course, but even if we pretended this were not the case, the idea stinks. I realize there’s a national trend to shield children from witnessing certain adult behaviors, e.g. drinking and smoking, but I fail to see what’s so dangerous about my kid hearing music through the doors of The Spotted Cat or d.b.a., just as, when I was a kid, we used to hang in front of the Faubourg or the Dream Palace. In fact, I WANT them to experience a radically integrated society, including different races, sexual orientations, and age groups. That’s precisely the reason I’m choosing to raise them in the old neighborhood. This law isn’t about protecting them, it’s about protecting tourists from seeing them.

This means we now have to add Tina Turner to the Armstrong Park sculpture garden

2012-01-17T17:24:00.002-06:00

Ed Blakely wrote a book about us.

In telling his own version, Blakely at times sounds like a dilettante who never really soaked up the city's essence. The book's cover features a picture of storm damage in Slidell, not New Orleans, according to the photographer who shot it. And when Blakely tries to make a case for New Orleans' cultural relevance on the book's very first page, three of the five musicians he names as natives -- Scott Joplin, Josephine Baker and Tina Turner -- have nothing to do with the city.

I have not yet gotten my grubby little hands on this long-awaited chronicle of greatness but I plan to rectify that oversight in short order. This is the book we've been waiting for. This is the jewel of our Excellence in Recovery Bookshelf which holds such mighty tomes as Ray Nagin's Katrina's Secrets (Vol. 1), Veronica White's How to Maximize FEMA Funding Michael Brown's Deadly Indifference and hopefully someday that book we all need to get to work on convincing Greg Meffert's wife to self publish.

All of these celebrated authors are renowned for their creative story telling as well as their dynamic personalities and they all have their strengths. White was the fashionable one, Nagin was the funny one, Brown was the enigmatic unknowable one, but Blakely... he was the IT girl of the group, so to speak. The guy could do it all. Or rather, he never failed to tell us about the many things he could do.. as opposed to the things he actually accomplished during his time in New Orleans... anyway.

I can't wait to get a look at this book for myself and I'm sure neither can you. In the meantime, just to tide you over, maybe let's take a look back at the Blakely retrospective we put together in 2008 when we thought his tenure was nearing an end. As it turned out he stayed on another full year before amazing the lot of us by flying away in a balloon powered by his own hot air.

"Every evil to which we do not succumb, is a benefactor"

2012-01-17T14:49:00.005-06:00

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

I still don't really know what to say about this. Every time I close my eyes I keep seeing this film over and over.

Wang gives a nice little pep talk here. And I'm trying to keep my head up about things in the spirit of the words at the title of this post. The Superbowl win in 2009 was a payoff to 40 years of accumulated evils Saints fans had absorbed but not succumbed to despair over. The eventual benefit of that was a moment of joy the likes of which we're not likely to experience again.

Lombardi Gras Parade crowd at Lee Circle February 9, 2010

But then again, if we can all manage the stamina to internalize a few more staggering evils like the one referenced above and, of course, this gut punch last year, maybe it won't be another 40 years before we've earned our next joy.

Uh oh Gonna have to extend the curfew again

2012-01-17T14:34:00.002-06:00

Daddy Mitch will be displeased with this behavior. Outside of his jurisdiction, of course.

DULUTH, Ga. -- Authorities say an argument over an NFL playoff game led to the shooting of two men in the parking lot of a restaurant in suburban Atlanta.

Gwinnett County Police charged 31-year-old Donald Ray Ayro with assault charges for the shooting of 30-year-old Christopher Middleton and 30-year-old Corey Adams in the parking lot of an Applebee's in Duluth on Saturday.

But I'm sure one of our reputable city leaders will find a way to blame this on black youths running free in the French Quarter. Surely we must find a way to protect our fine, upstanding, tourists from our city's untouchables before civilization comes to an end.

Poor people's campaign

2012-01-16T12:14:00.003-06:00

Meanwhile, yesterday's New York Times featured a cover story asking us all to take a "more nuanced" look at the super-rich in America. Call it a Rich People's Campaign. Whatever it is, it's what our nation's paper of record thinks is important for us to read on King's birthday.

Welp, it's been fun

2012-01-15T13:18:00.003-06:00

There are more free agents beyond just these three, but if the Saints are interested in putting together one last run at things before this group falls apart completely, they'll have to bring Drew Brees, Marques Colston, and Carl Nicks back. It's also extremely unlikely they'll be able to do that.

For one thing, the Saints and Brees spent the first half of 2011 trying to hammer out an extension before giving up on that idea in frustration. Brees is now holds several NFL records he did not own at the beginning of this year. If the Saints continue to lowball him, he has every right to either walk or hold out.

Colston, meanwhile, could unwittingly become a bargaining chip between the Saints and Brees where the Saints could claim that Brees will have to bend for them if he wants them to afford to bring back his best receiver. If I'm Colston I might walk just on the general principle of not wanting to be used in this way. He's already said, he won't be granting the Saints a "hometown discount" and I believe him.

Probably Brees will be back but expect the negotiations to be longer and tougher than you might think. Colston, I'd give about a 30% chance. Nicks is reportedly gone already.

They're going to hate you either way

2012-01-15T12:58:00.002-06:00

This Pro-Football Talk comment thread is pretty typical of what's flying around out there. Saints fans are "arrogant" Dome teams are illegitimate. Drew Brees is a "fraud" and a "stat whore." And, of course, everyone's favorite meme wherein they resent us for having endured a city-wide tragedy continues to be in evidence. America hates you, New Orleans. It always has. And that's the reason missing an opportunity to keep kicking them in the face stings the way it does.

It's been fun

2012-01-15T12:55:00.002-06:00

John Deshazier:

Regardless of whether aggression is in the DNA of the Saints' defense, defensive coordinator Gregg Williams and his staff absolutely shouldn't have been blitzing Smith on second-and-10 from the 49ers' 33-yard line, with 40 seconds left.

As contrary as two-deep coverage might be to their nature, and as much as the collective defense might break out in hives if asked to execute the scheme, if ever there was a time to run it, it was with 40 seconds remaining and the opponent 67 yards away from the end zone.

The rumor is that Gregg Williams will be taking his talents to St. Louis next season. We hope he enjoys that.

Welp, That's pretty much what a Saints - 49ers game feels like

2012-01-14T22:24:00.001-06:00

Hope you enjoyed the stroll down memory lane.

49ers Hate Day

2012-01-14T11:01:00.003-06:00

Took this photo at Fisherman's Wharf when I visited over the summer. No idea what they think "Cajun Shrimp Creole" is. Didn't stop to find out.

Apparently they also seem to think boudin is some sort of bread.

San Francisco. It's a nice place to visit but really people shouldn't live there.

Also please see Bob Marshall's column in today's T-P

It was 1987 and the Saints had still not experienced a winning season in 20 years of trying, but that was about the change. Jim Mora's second team shocked the league and ignited bag burnings across The Big Easy by not only having a winning season, but going 12-3 and making the playoffs.

It was the start of a six-year run that made the Saints regularly respected for the first time. Mora's formula was beautifully simple.

He had a stifling "Dome Patrol" defense that could keep teams out of his red zone, and he had an all-time great kicker in Morten Andersen who was money from 40 yards.

So he put together a "no mistake" offense: A quarterback to throw after a strong running game was established.

No risk, no failure. Let the other guys make mistakes.

In any other division except the NFC West, it would have led to a string of championships during that era. But fate was not yet ready to smile on the Saints, because one of the other teams in that group was the San Francisco 49ers. They had a coach named Bill Walsh, then George Seifert. Quarterbacks named Joe Montana and Steve Young. Receivers named Jerry Rice and John Taylor.

They tortured Saints fans the way the Yankees tortured Red Sox faithful; they were always just a little better, especially late. In his winning seasons from 1987-1992, Mora would go 3-9 against the 49ers, never sweeping them. Even when the Saints compiled a 12-4 season in 1992 and 12-3 in 1987, they still finished behind the offense-rich 49ers.

Fuck the 49ers, fuck their "Cajun Shrimp Creole" and fuck their stupid bread. Today is a day to collect very old debts.