Digest mode

Busy day. Busy time of year in general, really. Here are some more half-assed bulleted blurbs to fill the space in the meantime.

• This Digby post about the White House caving to cheap bullying idiots is all well and good but until we draw the logical conclusion that it means the failed White House occupant needs to be replaced with someone who will actually stand up to this shit then we're not going to learn anything constructive from it.



• Mayor: N.O. needs a new City Hall
  The Chevron building is still available, of course. I wonder if the City Council will agree to buy it for this mayor... and what the rationale will be.
  
  Meanwhile, this Mayor remains committed to his very critical priority of raising money to make commercials with.

  NEW ORLEANS -- New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu is continuing his pitch for millions from BP to promote tourism.
  
  The mayor appeared Sunday morning on CNN, talking about tourism and saying local and state leaders will continue to push the head of the compensation fund, Kenneth Feinberg, to make sure Louisiana business owners are made whole as quickly as possible.

  And you know he's got a point. It's expensive to lie pretty enough to make all these dead fish go away. Maybe BP can help them do that too.



• Speaking of dead fish, check out Bob Marshall's feature from the front of Wednesday's T-P: Louisiana blue crabs are tough, but Gulf oil spill might be tougher
  
  

  "Forty percent of the most productive stations are within the confines of the oil spill," said Vince Guillory, a biologist with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, which manages a fishery that produces about 30 percent of the nation's blue-claw crabs, a crop with a reported annual economic impact of $237 million.
  
  "We are quite concerned that we will see significant mortality of larvae as they encounter oil or dispersants."

  
  
  Dad had a hard time finding fresh crabs this past weekend, but the boil came out nice and pretty anyway.
  
  



• Senate subcommittee OKs $35.6M for coastal restoration
  Uh oh. Hope they're not raiding Road Home for this too.



• James Gill on Senator Vitter's Birther pander
  
  

  Vitter was not about to confuse matters with the truth, and did not hesitate to play to the gallery. "I support conservative legal organizations and others who would bring that to court. I think that is the valid and most possibly effective grounds to do it," he said.The birthers could only see that as an endorsement, although anyone with a lick of sense knew Vitter was faking it. Whatever the voters want, Vitter will fake. As soon as it became obvious that a roomful of voters wanted stupid, Vitter obliged.




• The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center has published a new report intended to measure the potential job cost of the oil disaster along the coast. Here's a quick description of the report culled from GNOCDC's newsletter

  This data is meant to serve as a baseline against which the impact of the oil spill can eventually be measured.
  
  In addition, it provides much needed information on residential patterns along the coast, many months before the Census 2010 headcounts are to be released. This data can be useful for nonprofits and state agencies planning services for coastal populations.
  
  The brief also highlights some important findings about the economic importance of our coast. Specifically:
  
  * High concentrations of jobs appeared in many coastal areas prior to the oil disaster. In fact, the coastal periphery was second only to urban areas as employment nodes.
  
  * Plaquemines Parish was home to 11,687 jobs but only 6,950 resident workers in 2008, indicating that people in neighboring parishes rely on this especially vulnerable parish for their livelihood. Oil-related impacts on the economy of Plaquemines parish, therefore, could reverberate region-wide.
  
  * In Lafourche Parish, worker residences were more clustered in northern and central areas, while jobs tended to locate at the southern end—namely Port Fourchon, a key node in the regional petroleum and offshore economy.
  
  * Among southeast Louisiana parishes, Terrebonne had the highest absolute number (6,089) and percent (11.5) of jobs in the oil and gas industry, far more than even the urbanized New Orleans metro parishes with much-larger populations. These jobs were particularly concentrated in two Houma zip codes that together are home to over 5,500 such jobs—more than double the number of oil and gas jobs in downtown New Orleans.
  
  This brief is based on 2008 Census Bureau data from company payrolls. As such it does not capture the thousands of self-employed fishermen not included in company payroll data—indicating that coastal Louisiana is even more important to job creation than our numbers suggest.

  
  
  Stick that in your crab soup along with your 11,000 some odd job losses associated with the Avondale closure and suck it down.
  
  Meanwhile, Businessweek insists we're still bucking the trend (sort of)



• Finally, a few signs that summer is in full swing. First of all, it's hot. Damn hot. How hot? So hot the streets are melting. Here's a typical New Orleans summertime asphalt sinkhole I found on Carondelet street the other day.
  
  
  
  A few years ago, in nearly the same spot, one opened up that was big enough to swallow a car.
  
  The good news is it's almost time for Saints camp which brings all sorts of ridiculous distractions including new posts from the Ashley-nominated Moosedenied.
  
  The bad news is we're getting into the thicker part of storm season. And this has brought with it even thicker food metaphors.
  

  A tropical disturbance in the Gulf oil spill would act as a mixing agent for oil and water.
  
  --It's a process known as "emulsification."
  
  --It would create a mayonnaise-like mix of three or four parts water and one part oil.

  
  
  Mayonnaise. No remoulade?