"Many now question"

 Pretty darn late to the party, "many." 

Orleans Parish replaced almost all of its traditional public schools with charter schools after Hurricane Katrina. Other school districts have since added charter schools to varying extents. Proponents at the time said charter schools, most of which are run by private companies with some local or state oversight, would provide better results than traditional public schools, but many now question those claims.

The majority of the charter schools in Louisiana are performing poorly. Of the 138 charter schools with Department of Education performance scores listed last year, 85 were rated D or F.  Plus, many of the charters with high performance scores were found to have fewer economically disadvantaged students than required by law, according to a previous audit from Waguespack’s office.

“I think what this report tells us is that charter schools haven’t been the panacea that their supporters suggest, and poverty is the strongest indicator of poor school performance,” Moller said.

Even the "many now question"  is a strange way to phrase things. The post-Katrina school privatization scheme was always an obvious play to bust up unions, and degrade the institution of public education. We've been talking and writing about this for decades. It's only the mainstream press who refuses to admit there's anything wrong until far too late in the game. And even then, it's a both-sidesing presentation. 

Anyway, the results are plain as day.   

Black students are more than five times as likely to attend a D- or F-rated public school as White students, according to a state audit released Monday morning.

About 41% of Black students attend a school at the bottom of the grading scale compared to 8% of White children, a report by Legislative Auditor Mike Waguespack says.

Definitely feeling this vibe

I think it's because I'm nearly the same age as Atrios but this throwaway bit about not always having the juice to make a blog post every time something happens does hit home a little. Although I think for me it's less about feeling like I have to have something interesting to say and more about being exhausted that the same things keep happening over and over regardless of what we say about them. 

Still, the reason I put stuff here is so I'll remember what happened... even if the temptation to fade blissfully away into oblivion is stronger every time a new city council trots out yet another draconian ban on neighborhood bars because of a crime panic, to pick one example.  The same stuff keeps happening in cycles. But every time it comes around again, things are one degree shittier than they were the last time. The rent is a bit higher, the land is a bit lower relative to the sea, the cops and cameras are a bit more aggressive, the mayor is a bit stupider and meaner. The usual things, except moreso every time. And no one is coming to help. 

Anyway, for some reason I still have this compulsion to take notes. And so that's what I'm still doing.  For instance, if Billy Nungesser says this and I don't write it down somewhere, how will I know it happened?

At Washington Mardi Gras, @BillyNungesser reiterates that @AGJeffLandry is "not a good person."

"He personally reported me to the FBI three times." #lalege #lagov

— Julie O'Donoghue (@JSODonoghue) January 25, 2023

 

Similarly...

Watch @mayorcantrell defiant response to a reporter's question on allegations she had an affair with the head of her security detail. "accused of sleeping with half the city of New Orleans, both genders and all pronouns. I'm known as Teedy sometimes and Teddy other times." pic.twitter.com/j8QZ8TepV3

— Down For Whatever (@emersonspop) January 25, 2023

I wonder what Billy was threatened with

Until very very recently, Billy Nungesser was very very certain he would be running for governor.  And then all of a sudden he wasn't.  Wonder how that went down?  

I just had the Lt. Governor on, and he didn’t mince words regarding Louis Gurvich of @LAGOP.
“He is a disgrace to the Republican party. He’s a disgrace to Louisiana. He’s a dictator. He ought to resign. He is an embarrassment.”
-@BillyNungesser

— Newell Normand (@NewellWWL) January 19, 2023

Update:

Meanwhile, back in the much less dysfunctional Louisiana Democratic Party, their chairperson is set to launch a (perhaps her own?) campaign... 

NEWS: Team Louisiana PAC has placed a $300K statewide TV buy for a spot featuring Dem Chair Katie Bernhardt, according to AP Marullo, the PAC's underwriter. Ad offers a bit of a cliffhanger in terms of what to expect on Dem side of #LaGov race. Major air time begins Mon. #LaLege pic.twitter.com/PmmT47IdOU

— Jeremy Alford (@LaPoliticsNow) January 20, 2023

That seems super-ethicsy.  Nothing like what the disgraced former chair would have done, I'm sure... 

Lots of unfortunate "could have"s

 Whoops

Improperly calibrated monitoring equipment at Entergy’s Waterford 3 nuclear power plant could have low-balled the public health threat of radioactive gases released had there been an accident during three months in 2022, according to the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Entergy officials notified NRC inspectors of the problem during an Oct. 23 to Dec. 7 inspection of Waterford’s emergency preparedness programs. Incorrect engineering conversion factors for measuring gases were loaded into the radiological dose assessment modeling software of two “wide range gas monitors” at the plant that are used in emergency responses, according to a Jan. 12 NRC letter.

The letter — from Mary Muessle, director of NRC’s division of radiological safety and security, to John Ferrick, a vice president with Entergy Operations Inc. — said the errors resulted in readings that were 30.5% lower than the actual radiological conditions, which would have made public health and on-site dose calculations inaccurate

The thingy that measures how hot the radioactive gasses *could have* been *if* any such gasses were to escape has since been fixed.  One wonders if it had been turned down too far to overcompensate for this. 

Waterford 3 was actually placed under increased oversight by the NRC in September because of another incident involving improper calibration of radiation monitors that could have triggered unnecessary evacuations.

It’s unclear whether last year's inspection was added as a result of the earlier problem, where NRC found radiation monitors at the plant were being calibrated improperly between January 2011 and February 2022.

Anyway this is why I always say it's a good idea to get one of those hanging oven thermometers so you can watch whatever it is you are baking instead of just relying on what the display says. Who knows what's really going on in there.

Carnival re-mystification

The above is, of course,  the Phorty Phunny Phellows streetcar rolling down St. Charles Avenue last Friday. We've long made a little ritual of walking out to wave at them and this year was no different. In recent years, also, a person may stand right there and I'm sure they'll see the Funky Uptown Krewe following close behind. 

One small thing I've continued to enjoy about walking out for PPP is that, unlike every parade that goes through town, the Phellows' streetcar ride is un-tracked. 

The previous decade brought us the convenience of parade tracker apps. Their use has expanded to the point where one can follow the progress even of parades rolling outside of Carnival like the Halloween Krewe of Boo, the St. Patrick's Day weekend parades, or even parades organized for corporate events like the Sugar Bowl and Bayou Classic. Of course, that's all been a great benefit.  But there's something refreshing about having to just... use The Force.. and guess when the Phellows are coming. It's a little bit of nostalgia for a long lost divining skill we used to apply to every parade.

Perhaps it is in this spirit that our famously chaotic mayor has offered us a new guessing game to play this year. Where and when is your parade rolling in 2023? Well, that depends, doesn't it. 

NEW ORLEANS —The New Orleans mayor has set a deadline for Mardi Gras krewes to submit their security plans.

According to New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell, krewes have until January 23rd to submit their plans for security in order to return to their original routes. 

Last week, Mayor LaToya Cantrell said krewes could return to their routes so long as there is additional security staffing in place.

The plan laid out here is the city is offering to pay additional police from out of town to work the parades. They'll even house them during their stay. But for some reason it is up to each individual parading organization to ensure the route is adequately staffed? Anyway they've got until January 23 to let somebody know.  But who knows how solid that is. According to some reports, Thoth and Cleopatra have already secured their traditional routes.  But the mayor didn't confirm that today.  I'd say just keep checking the apps but will they even know by the time this is settled? 

One thing we do know is that Endymion is going back onto Orleans Avenue. Although, when they go there they won't have the full complement of participants originally announced. 

NEW ORLEANS — Controversial Hollywood actor Mel Gibson will not participate in the Krewe of Endymion parade the krewe announced Sunday afternoon, less than 24 hours after it had made the announcement that he would participate as a co-Grand Marshal.

The krewe cited threats as the reason, though they did not provide any specifics or examples of threats.

“The Krewe of Endymion has received significant feedback about our grand marshall announcement yesterday evening. Some of this commentary included threats that cause us great concern," said a statement from Dan Kelly of the Krewe of Endymion.

“In the best interest of the safety of our riders, special guests and everyone that welcomes us on the streets, Mel Gibson will not ride as a Co-Grand Marshal for our 2023 parade.”

Don't ask Kelly for any details about these "threats."  Very likely he only means that people reacted negatively to the krewe's deliberately provocative selection of Gibson as Grand Marshall. Last year, Endymion was criticized for featuring genocidal racist Raymond Arroyo but clearly did not learn from that experience. Rather, they took it as a signal to double down with an even higher profile figure known more for his anti-Semitic, racist and misogynist virulence than for any of his recent work in show business. So, after a year to think about it, and after inviting Gibson on purpose, anyway, here they are pretending to have been blindsided by cancel culture. The powerful and the bigoted are always the victims. Because that's the game we play now.

We now have their promise to "do better" although what they might mean by that is anybody's guess. Maybe next year we'll have an app that explains these mysteries as well. 

Hello, and welcome to a fabulous New Year of blogging yellowly

Unfortunately this new year is still among the 2020s which, as we all know, are categorically bad. Anyway, I know I've been saying it is time to get the Yellow Blog back into running shape for a while and I know that every time Twitter starts to die, it seems like that is the time to crank it back up over here. But I really do mean it. Maybe this will finally be the thing that does it. 

Twitter CEO Elon Musk has confirmed that the character limit for tweets will increase from 280 to 4,000 characters early next month.

The feature, which was first proposed in December, is one of a number of changes to the social media platform that the tech billionaire plans to roll out over the coming months after purchasing it for $44 billion last October.

The increase in character length will be only the second time in Twitter’s 17-year history that it has changed the limit, having previously boosted the original 140 limit to 280 in 2017.

As the big social media sites have absorbed and siloed off the whole internet over the course of the past decade, so has Twitter eaten up more and more of my blog posts. That's mostly because I am incredibly lazy and it's easy to just tweet a half-baked thought out and let it go. But, when I'm doing it right, a blog post shouldn't be longer than one or two tweets anyway. Ideally, this is where the half-baked thoughts are supposed to go. 

But, also, this is supposed to be where I put stuff that I want to remember later. And a chronological, taggable, searchable web log of annotated bookmarks is far better for that purpose than the increasingly unreliable instant gratification machine currently being dismantled by a chaotic billionaire.  And if the tweet stretches out to blog post length anyway, (I just checked. So far this post isn't even over 2,000 characters.) it might as well be posted over here instead.  So this time, we mean it. We're gonna try and put the stuff that happens this year on the Yellow Blog so that it doesn't all blow by in a confusing haze this time. Besides, 2023 makes 20 years of posting here so we need to have a nice round archival number. 

I think what we'll do for a while is try to get at least one post up every day or so that collects some of those annotated bookmarks I mentioned. There are a couple of drafts of longer form writing that have been lingering for a while which I would like to finish but let's wade back into this a step at a time.

With that in mind, here is today's stuff I wrote down so I might remember it later. 

The Louisiana Democrats will need to find their own loser candidate for governor instead of borrowing a Republican loser

Late last year, there was a parlor game discussion going around trying to parse whether Dem-aligned power brokers and/or centrist establishment media would rally around a Bill Cassidy campaign for Governor in 2023. Cassidy is a "weird dude" and a perpetual darling of the Advocate editorial page. But that's not exactly an unassailable coalition to ride up against the Jeff Landry juggernaut. The last reporting we've seen has Landry wielding a $3 million war chest plus the official endorsement of the state Republican Party and multiple Super PACs all of which multiplies his fundraising capacity many times over. Anyway, Cassidy decided it wasn't worth it. Much better to sit around in the World's Greatest Deliberative Body doing nothing forever than to take on that headache. His fellow Senator John Kennedy (although he theoretically might have posed a stronger challenge to Landry) reached a similar conclusion last week.

When Bill said he wouldn't run, all of that speculation about Democrats and media picking a favorite Republican shifted over to Lt. Governor Billy Nungesser. For a long time it seemed like Billy and Jeff deserved each other.  For example, we know they both have a problem with librarians. Landry is on a typical "anti-woke" crusade to burn them all while Billy is retaliating against them for blowing the whistle on his corruption. Heck, since the day they were elected to their current positions, we've had them neck and neck in a pool to see which of the two would be the first one indicted and whose scandal would be the stupidest.  Maybe this is just a sign of the times, since despite the fact that each has had his share of doozies over this term, neither has yet landed in jail. Guess we should have bet the over.

And like any pair of like alpha dunces vying for the same space, Jeff and Billy clearly do not like each other.  Nungesser hasn't been shy about saying so. In December, Nungesser said that he had to run against Landry if Kennedy didn't because "Jeff is a bad person." That's was after a long summer of scrambling for endorsements and pre-announcing that he was planning to announce a candidacy.  

And yet, today, Billy says, nevermind all that. 

“But the worst pandemic in our lifetime and a series of devastating storms leaves me with unfinished business to bring tourism back to its peak performance, especially for the near 250,000 families who rely on this industry for their livelihoods. For that reason, and after much thought and prayer, I have decided to seek re-election to the Office of Lt. Governor"

Those devastating storms and the pandemic did not happen just this last month, though.  So who knows what really got Billy to back down? The upshot is the Democrats no longer have an easy way to just quietly sit out a Governor's election they had clearly been planning to just quietly sit out.  Can't wait to see what they come up with. They don't seem to be generating a lot of excitement these days, that's for sure. 

Ad-hoc garbage service

This Sunday morning, we were stunned to see a Richard's Disposal truck picking up on our block. Turns out they're dealing with a "backlog" maybe? What is going on here?

In a statement Monday night, Richard said the company is addressing the backlog with 70 additional personnel, pulling from crews in Baton Rouge and Jackson, Miss. Richard said he and the company "look forward to working cooperatively with the city council, mayor and all of city government to address the market conditions and other circumstances that affect timely trash collection,” according to the statement.

The statement did not address the administration's decision to turn over some routes to different contractors. 

Those "other contractors on some routes" is confusing. Apparently the city is juggling the routes that contractually belong to Richards among Waste Pro and IV Waste, the companies who recently took over Metro's territory. Now they're encroaching on Richards bit by bit as well. But it all seems to be happening according more to whim than a comprehensible scheme. 

Richard’s contract expires in March, 2024, though the city can terminate it for cause or "convenience," which essentially means it can be ended at the city's discretion. Officials have previously said they want to rebid the contract this year, but they have not laid out a time frame. 

Asked how long he expects his company to supplement Richard’s, Torres said officials had advised him “to be prepared to do it until they put it out to bid.”

Meanwhile, they're just making it up as they go. And paying a premium for it. 

My FNBC jury duty notice was sadly lost in the mail

 I didn't even get invited to the tailgate party.  Anyway, the trial is kicking off. 

A jury was seated Monday in the federal bank fraud trial of First NBC Bank founder Ashton Ryan, Jr., as lawyers readied for what is expected to be a weekslong trial probing the actions of Ryan, other executives and bank borrowers ahead of the institution's stunning 2017 collapse.

I have said many times there is probably a good book someone could put together centered around this bank collapse that might tell a broad story about the post-Katrina era of New Orleans politics, real estate, education, and non-profit corruption.  I don't really see this trial telling that whole story but... I may have liked to take a look at this list.

Lawyers involved in the case have said the prosecution's witness list initially was between 100 and 200, though it will call far fewer over the next few weeks. Witnesses are likely to include at least some of those who have taken guilty pleas in the case, including Gregory St. Angelo, the bank's former top lawyer.

Speaking of post-Katrina failures and corruption...

This is part of a series the T-P has been running about "changing streets" or some such. I think the idea here is to frame the massive displacement and dispossession New Orleanians have endured as just "inevitable progress" or whatever. But some of this stuff you can't gloss over. 

According to statistics from the New Orleans Data Center, since 2000, the area encompassing the Marigny, Bywater, St. Claude and St. Roch neighborhoods has gone from 61% Black and 32% White to 17% Black and 72% White. The number of households with annual income over $100,000 a year rose from 3% to 19%.

The article trots out familiar apologists CW Cannon and Rich Campanella to sigh and shrug but at least Cashauna Hill is here to point out that these aren't just natural forces at work. They are deliberate policy choices.  

Many of those pushed out crossed St. Claude Avenue, where the process continues today, said Cashauna Hill, executive director of the Louisiana Fair Housing Action Center. 

Hill said population changes and demographic shifts are often inevitable, and said opposing gentrification does not mean opposing investment.

The problem, she said, is that the city’s leaders have consistently favored policies that encourage gentrification — pouring millions into Crescent Park and the Rampart-St. Claude streetcar line and failing to rein in short-term rentals — while neglecting policies that would prevent it — primarily funding affordable housing.

No need to catalog all of the atrocities right now. But I will point out that the City Planning Commission is once again this month rolling out yet another round of STR regulation that looks on track to once again favor wealth over residents.  We'll catch up on that later. But seeing this picture of where our neighborhoods are today, reminded me of this remark from Mitch Landrieu when he took office as mayor. 

In August, when Mayor Landrieu announced his plan for spending New Orleans’ hard-won recovery dollars he warned a famously tradition-bound city that the time had come for change. “It’s especially important that we stop thinking about rebuilding the city we were and start creating the city we want to become,” he said, echoing his inaugural address.

This is the city we chose to become.  

When the "cyberattack" eats your homework

Amazing story from over the weekend. Let's see if we can sum it up in under 4,000 characters. I think we can. 

So, to start with a cop shot a dog. Apparently this was not the first dog this cop shot either. Which is why the owners of the dog that was shot (the second dog) requested the Public Integrity Bureau file on the first shooting as documentation for their lawsuit against the city. The city agreed to hand over the document. Except  WHOOPS it turns out the city cannot actually produce it because it is locked away in the Iron Mountain. 

Document storage company Iron Mountain is withholding hundreds of boxes of files it is storing for the city of New Orleans because of an ongoing financial dispute with Mayor LaToya Cantrell's administration, a City Hall spokesman confirms.

So, according to this report, the city hands over "hundreds of boxes" of public records (which departments and types of records is unknown although clearly NOPD is one) to a private contractor who can, apparently, hold them up for ransom in the (seemingly inevitable) event that the city falls behind on its bill.  That's very interesting! We'd love to know more about that situation. But, WHOOPS guess what. 

But there is no record of a contract to store old paper files for the NOPD or any other department. Iron Mountain’s local administrator, Robert Leamann, spoke to a reporter in early December and declined to provide information about the company’s scope of services for the city. He also said at the time he was unaware of a dispute with the city or the subpoena. After being sent a copy of the court records, he referred subsequent requests for comment to a corporate email address, which did not respond to multiple emails.

The company’s local attorneys, Kellen Matthew and Kathleen Cronin, also failed to respond to emails seeking comment.

Joseph could not say why the city purchasing office could not locate a contract with the company, but noted that all contracts and purchase orders contained in the city's BuySpeed and AFIN databases were lost in a 2019 cyber attack.

Oh man that "cyberattack" sure did a number on public records, huh. Man that is a shame that nobody can get anything from those databases. Unless, somebody... looks it it up and gives it to them... wait.. what? 

What?

Here are Buyspeed purchase orders the city pulled for @misaacstein last year. https://t.co/jffDInLBzN https://t.co/KuGGmE7HWD

— Charles Maldonado (@Maldonado_CB) January 9, 2023

Sometimes the cyber attacks and sometimes it doesn't, I guess. Just a mystery we'll never fully get a grip on. I wonder if it is going to attack those unwritten garbage contracts next.

Keep Doing What You're Doing

Honestly, I have no idea what Saints fans are so upset about this week. They're all ready to fire Dennis Allen after one season as Head Coach even though that one season was the greatest of his entire NFL career to date. In three prior seasons with the Raiders, the dude had never won more than 4 games. This year he won three whole games more than that. That's a 75 percent improvement! 

I'm never clear on what it is Saints fans are really after these days. We already won football in 2009 so there's no need to stress over that anymore. From that point until the time when the brutal criminal enterprise that is the NFL collapses under the weight of its own contradictions,  I just want to see as many interesting things happen as possible. A lot of interesting things happened to the Saints in 2022.  We listed some of them here. Whether those things are "good" or "bad" is really a matter of taste. 

All pro football teams are pretty evenly matched talentwise. Most games are decided according to a combination of dumb luck and which team is the least injured that week. Most of the jawing about whose fault that is or is not is just how fans have fun. NFL fans are basically conspiracy theory hobbyists constructing grand bullshit theories to draw certainties out of what is essentially unknowable. You feel a lot better about it all once you understand this.  Not everybody wins the Superbowl every year. Most teams, in fact, do not! Hopefully fans of the teams who do not don't see this as a complete waste of their time. How sad, that would be if they did. 

Anyway, I can't have strong feelings about Dennis Allen one way or the other.  He seems like a pretty boring middle-management guy. That's probably why he's risen to this particular point of mediocrity.  I definitely don't think the Saints got the most out of their offensive players this year. That seemed like a coaching issue to me. But, again, I'm just spinning theories like anybody else there. Whatever they do, I hope they don't bring those awful black helmets back.  I don't think those helped matters one bit.