He fell down and hit his head

 I'm sure it was just like this. 

Hammond Police said they pulled over a vehicle on the evening of Feb. 10 near Magazine and Apple Street that was registered to someone with an outstanding felony warrant. 

McCaskey and a passenger jumped out of the car, and officers chased them, police said. 

“The officer says he believes that he was reaching towards his waistband, at which point he tased the subject. Upon tasing the subject, it was Bobby McCaskey," Bergeron said, "Mr. McCaskey hit the ground. Upon hitting the ground, he hit his head.”

I do not like it when, upon hitting the ground, I hit my head. It's happened a few times. It hasn't happened to be while being tased, but I suppose it's probably similar.  It's not nice.  Of course, I don't think I've experienced any of these symptoms.

McCaskey's family said he's had to have multiple surgeries, including facial reconstruction. Plus, the family said he swallowed his partial teeth plate and is spitting up teeth. 

“From the MRI reports, it showed that he had multiple strokes, and his C-Spine was crushed," Hunter said. 

The family doesn't know exactly what happened before they found him in the hospital the night of February 10th, but they believe police used excessive force. 

“The phone call we got was that he was dead," Hunter said. 

The normal things that happen when you fall down and hit your head. 

Jeff Landry is an asshole

 Pass it on. 

The Public Service Commission on Wednesday removed commissioner Davante Lewis as its vice chairman after he called Gov. Jeff Landry an "a**hole" on social media. 

On a 3-2 vote, the commission chose to replace Lewis with Commissioner Eric Skrmetta in that role on the board. The vote followed public comment from a line of people arguing the move violated Lewis' right to free speech.

How thin is the Governor's skin? I mean asshole is not even that out of bounds.  The WBRZ version of the story doesn't even censor it. 

BATON ROUGE — The Public Service Commission voted to remove Davante Lewis as vice-chairman at a Wednesday morning meeting after Lewis called Gov. Jeff Landry an "asshole" on social media last week. 

The commission voted 3-2 to remove Lewis and named commission member Eric Skrmetta vice-chair.

Of course there is also the possibility that this is about a little bit more than just hurt feelings.  It might, for example, have more to do with protecting Entergy and Meta from public oversight than with people using rude words.  

Two environmental and consumer protection groups are challenging Entergy's plan to power a massive AI data center for Meta, Facebook's parent company, in northeast Louisiana. 

 The Alliance for Affordable Energy and the Union of Concerned Scientists have filed a motion asking the state's utility regulators to deny Entergy's request to build three gas power plants at a cost of over $3 billion until it follows standard procedure. If the regulators side with the advocacy groups, Entergy would have to scrap the proposal in its current form and resubmit it after proving the gas plants are the best option available.

The regulator being appealed to here, of course, is the Public Service Commission. And the ousted co-chair seems to have a different approach to the issue than the person who will replace him... on behalf of the Governor's hurt feelings, of course.  

PSC commissioner Davante Lewis said that it was too early to comment on the motion, but that the filing raises questions that the commission should look into.

"Having a review process is important to ensure we are building generation that is needed that is also the most cost-efficient," Lewis said.

Eric Skrmetta, another commissioner, similarly declined to comment on the motion specifically, but said that he believed the concerns over fast tracking the process or massive power needs to be unfounded.

There's no law anymore

He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 15, 2025

There are four constitutional amendments that will appear on your March 29 ballot in Louisiana. They're all very bad.  

One of them would allow the legislator to create something called a "business court." In practice, that will likely mean the state can take civil matters out of the hands of locally elected judges and move them into more corporate friendly venues whose scope is defined by the legislature. 

One of them would allow the legislature to greatly broaden the list of crimes for which children under 17 could be sent to adult prison. 

And another one would step up the timeline for special elections to fill judicial vacancies. 

There's no good reason to support any of these. But one, in particular, turns out to be such a mess that a lawsuit has been filed to take it off of the ballot.  Tyler Bridges explains.

During a two-week special session in November, Landry and the Legislature reduced income taxes, abolished the corporate franchise tax, raised the sales tax and kept tax credits used by film productions and developers of historic buildings, albeit at lower spending levels.

The net savings would disproportionately benefit the wealthy and big companies, who, Landry said, would use the money to invest in Louisiana and grow the state’s economy.

At Landry’s behest, the Legislature also passed House Bill 7, which in 115 pages authorized a series of other changes to the constitution if approved by voters on March 29.

The lawsuit says the 91-word question is hopelessly complicated.

“There is no person in the State of Louisiana – including the legislators who passed HB7 – who understands all of the proposed changes to the constitution,” the lawsuit says. “The voters, however, are to be asked to vote on the proposed changes.”

The lawsuit also says the 91 words include only the sweeteners in the proposed amendment – language aimed at drawing favorable votes.

“None of the unappealing changes are included,” it says. “The ballot language is all dessert, no vegetables.”

That article goes on to explain that even the "dessert" part of the menu is misleading.  For example, the ballot language implies that voters would be enacting a teacher pay raise. But what the amendment actually does is pay down a certain amount of debt on the teachers' retirement system to free up enough money to extend a one time stipend for another year. 

The rest of the amendment is incredibly complicated. It lowers income taxes on high earners. It adds a cap to mandatory spending on education and health care. It eliminates the so-called "rainy day fund." It also makes several convoluted changes to multiple taxation rules at once. It really is a lot to put to voters in one ballot item. 

But is it legal? Well that's going to be up to the judges, isn't it. So anyway, about those judges... 

The Louisiana Supreme Court is about to receive a second new member, following a series of moves orchestrated by Gov. Jeff Landry, who has reshaped the court more than any governor in decades.

Cade Cole, an attorney, former prosecutor and tax judge in Lake Charles, will join the court next month after winning election to an open seat because no one opposed him.

The seat for Cole opened up after Landry paved the way for then-Justice Jimmy Genovese to resign from the Supreme Court last year to become president of Northwestern State University.

John Michael Guidry, who had been the chief judge on the Baton Rouge court of appeal, became the other new justice in January after winning his election unopposed.

The seat for Guidry opened up after Landry got the state Legislature to redraw the Supreme Court district boundaries last year in a way that favored a Black Democrat for an open seat that Guidry would ultimately occupy.

Because the map Landry pushed now has two Democrats – Piper Griffin from New Orleans is the other Democrat besides Guidry – the other five districts favor the election of White conservatives in the coming years.

Landry has sought to undermine the influence of Chief Justice John Weimer, a maverick who is a no-party registered voter without a clear ideological line.

Anyway, there's more background on how Landry is working to re-shape the courts in that article.  Suffice to say, though, it's going to become more difficult to appeal his legislative shenanigans there in the future. 

President Grok

One thing I think this article does a good job of doing is providing the context for understanding the AI takeover of government. Rather than a sudden jolt of revolution, this is just the next step in a long process.  It's half a century of movement conservatism fully automated. 

But the biggest issue with using AI is twofold: the routine wild inaccuracy of AI tools, as well as the particularly haphazard manner in which DOGE wants to use it. The Biden administration had been slowly integrating AI into government tasks, but it was pretty clear about guarding against potential risks: errors in coding, for example, or added security vulnerabilities. The Musk team is not going to care about that at all. If a one-line code error flags billions of dollars in “wasteful” spending improperly, that’s probably seen as a feature, not a bug. If the AI goes haywire and starts making things up, or the code breaks systems that need to be redundant and reliant, oh well, government isn’t supposed to work well anyway. And if back doors are opened up to allow hackers or adversaries to poke through, maybe they’ll develop a patch later.

That’s the Silicon Valley mindset: move fast and break things, like Social Security. And it has merged with the MAGA mindset. Without transparency in what AI is supposed to look for, you can bet it will be reverse-engineered to spit out a desired result, whether about climate change or DEI or whatever.

So on one level, you can expect the inexperienced coders trying to find trillions in cuts by lazily feeding government data through AI tools to make mistakes, trigger cybersecurity breaches, and neglect AI hallucinations. On another level, you can expect government data to be highly politicized. The White House plans to make chief information officers at the agencies political appointees, who would have loyalty to the president and a willingness to manipulate data for ideological purposes. We’ve already seen this with the installation of Musk ally Tom Krause overseeing the Treasury payment system.

For more background, here is a recent interview with the historian Quinn Slobodian.  The main insight here has to do with ways in which the techno-feudal impulse unfolding under Trump II is in line with the natural course of the neoliberal order and not a radical departure from it. 

 

Finally, one more point about this Silicon Valley "move fast and break things" ethic. There is an accelerationist argument from the left that supposes this all works out for the best in the end. But this is a gross fantasy.  Here is a recent Adam Johnson column pointing out that Elon is never going to "break" the things we might actually like to see broken. 

It’s worth noting that not all of Musk’s attacks on the administrative and liberal state are equally pernicious. There are real issues with USAID and its role as a soft power arm of meddling US imperial bureaucrats, as well as a political shield for U.S. atrocities, from Yemen to Gaza, as I’ve noted here and elsewhere. But USAID also does objectively useful work because many countries grow dependent on them, and it’s very clear that, based on recent statements made by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, what is most likely going to happen is the sinister activity USAID does will simply be folded back into the State Department directly or the CIA (as it used to be) while the Incidentally Good Stuff USAID does will be be eliminated. Despite his faux libertarian posturing, Musk, of course, doesn’t care about the anti-imperialist argument. He hates USAID because he thinks it helps keep black and brown people alive, which—by virtue of the US being a largely unipolar empire—it very much does, regardless of motives.

But it does no good to cheer on the looting of the entire social contract by Nazi robber barrons because of some bank shot hope that it ushers in the "real class war" or whatever.  It doesn't work that way. The US is just Russia in the 90s now.  The tech oligarchs mean to put us through a decade of "pain." They have literally said as much. 

American politics and its glorification of the individual "yeoman farmer/homeowner" tradition is easily poisoned by narcissistic millenarism.  The internet age, particularly the post-COVID internet age, makes that process happen all the more smoothly.  But even in the context of extreme alienation and parnoia we live in, it still stuns me that we can't know or do better. There's no reason anyone who has lived through the events of this century; Katrina, the financial crisis, COVID, etc etc; can't have figured out by now that none of these calamities ushers in the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.  They just form the context for the next round of looting. And thre's always another one of those on the way. 

Run gubmint like a bidness

 Always a scam proposition.  It's been modernized. 

In an essay dated April 2022, Yarvin updated RAGE to something he described as a “butterfly revolution.” In an essay on his paywalled Substack, he imagined a second Trump presidency in which Trump would enable a radical government transformation. The proposal will sound familiar to anyone who has watched Musk wreak havoc on the United States Government (USG) over the past three weeks.

Wrote Yarvin:

We’ve got to risk a full power start—a full reboot of the USG. We can only do this by giving absolute sovereignty to a single organization—with roughly the powers that the Allied occupation authorities held in Japan and Germany in the fall of 1945. This level of centralized emergency power worked to refound a nation then, for them. So it should work now, for us.”

(The metaphor of “full power start” comes from Star Trek and entails a risky process of restarting a fictional spaceship in a way that might cause “implosion.” The World War II metaphor casts the federal government as a conquered enemy now controlled by an outside force.)

Yarvin wrote that in a second term, Trump could appoint a different person to act as the nation’s “CEO.” This CEO would be enabled to run roughshod over the federal government, with Trump in the background  as “chairman of the board.” The metaphors clarify the core idea: Run the government as a rogue corporation rather than a public institution beholden to the rules of democracy.

The "children and families" mayor

It says something that, in a moment of crisis like this one, when people are trying to figure out if they have to march or if they have to strike, and their elected representatives are clumsily grasping at ways to respond to an apparent coup, LaToya Cantrell's instinct in a moment like this is... to cut funding to public schools.

On Monday morning, a crowd of 30 officials – including state legislators, City Councilmembers, Orleans Parish School Board members, District Attorney Jason Williams, and school leaders  –  condemned Mayor LaToya Cantrell for trying to torpedo a $20 million settlement with the school district, which is trying to plug a deficit of at least $36 million, maybe significantly more.

The settlement would have resolved a six-year-old lawsuit by OPSB, which had discovered that the city was skimming a portion off of the top of its OPSB tax payments.

Cantrell cannot now take the position that “the city cannot afford to stop stealing money from schoolchildren,” said OPSB member Carlos Zervigon, noting that the city has skimmed at least $100 million due to the district. “We need the mayor to get out of the way.”

We all thought the mayor had gotten out of the way.  A few months ago, she and members of her administration all got up and played hero. Their settlement announcement came to the rescue of a school district budget crisis precipitated by a still unexplained "accounting error."  

It's hard to tell what's changed since then besides the federal government's payment systems having been taken over by an unpredictable corrupt junta. Everyone is at least a little bit worried about that situation.  But one can't help but wonder if the mayor has special insight into the Trump administration's M.O. It does take one to know one, after all. 

In any case, it is remarkable to consider that a mayor who came into office branding herself around concern for "children and families" will be remembered for her efforts at de-funding public schools and libraries.

The wannabees

The only thing worse than what Elon is doing to the federal government right now are his pathetic emulators sprinkled across the states... including your very own.

Landry was inspired to create the commission by the federal Department of Government Efficiency headed by billionaire business owner Elon Musk.

“I think we in Louisiana are facing some of the same issues that President Trump is facing with his DOGE,” Hodges said. “We are very aware that the voters who elected us are demanding quick action. And we intend to deliver.”

State legislators, speaking privately, said they believe Landry created the commission to placate conservatives unhappy that they had to vote for a sales tax increase in November and that Landry has made no serious attempts as governor to reduce the state government spending that lawmakers control.

Conservatives are also miffed that Landry vetoed a high-profile bill that supporters said would reduce payouts to car accident victims and their trial attorneys.

Landry issued the executive order creating the government efficiency group on Dec. 12.

“In Louisiana, we always strive to have a government that is of, by, and for the people,” he said in a statement that day. “A government that runs efficiently and effectively is a government that best serves her people.”

His executive order called for Orlando to serve as its chair. Orlando made a fortune by owning an offshore supply company that he sold several years ago. He is a neighbor of Landry’s in Broussard and frequently accompanies the governor on fishing trips.

As far as anyone can tell they aren't monkeying around in the treasury just yet. The state does have an independently elected treasurer so it's not as simple a matter. (The state treasurer is ultra-MAGA sandwich magnate John Fleming, though, so it's not much of an improvement on the situation.)  Anyway, according to Bridges, this commission is just writing up a report for now. It is due at the end of the year. 

 

it's just tuesday

 what's happening now

The former executive did point to a meaningful difference between X and DOGE, however: The government is big and complex. This may be an asset during an assault. “Even if you try to take a flamethrower to the government, the destruction won’t be quick. There’ll be legal challenges and congressional fights, and in the months and weeks, it’ll be individuals who keep essential services running,” they said. The government workers who know what they’re doing may still be able to make positive incremental change from within.

It’s a rousing, hopeful notion. But I fear that the focus on the particulars of this unqualified assault on our government is like looking at X’s bottom line, in that it obscures Musk’s real ambitions. What are DOGE’s metrics for success? If X is our guide, health, functionality, and sustainability are incidental and able to be sacrificed. The end game for Musk seems to be just as it was with Twitter: seize a polarized, inefficient institution; fuse his identity with it; and then use it to punish his enemies and reward his friends. DOGE is a moon-shot program to turn the government into Musk’s personal political weapon.

tune in again tomorrow to see what burns and how 

Famous last words

 Ghassan Korban is talking about his legacy today.  

In May, Korban will leave behind an agency that is still challenged but in better condition than when he found it, he said in a recent interview. Among his accomplishments are two infrastructure projects to supply reliable power to drainage pumps and installation of smart meters he says will eliminate problems with water billing.

You sure about that, bro?  

Can't wait to find out