Bad day to be an intern at the City Attorney's Office

Dear Mr. President, There are too many states nowadays. Please eliminate three. P.S. I am not a crackpot. pic.twitter.com/iw5hKWlgHf

— The Simpsons (@Simpsons_tweets) March 24, 2015

Some unfortunate peon has to clean out Mitch Landrieu's Gmail "Promotions" tab now.

The mayor’s use of a private email account for city business was revealed earlier this week by The New Orleans Advocate and other media outlets that verified its existence through public-records requests.

Landrieu’s office nevertheless insists that the mayor has followed the letter of the law.

“Although the mayor has fully and consistently complied with all public records laws since taking office, Mayor Landrieu will discontinue using his Gmail for work purposes, and all staff have been instructed to contact him through his .gov email account,” Landrieu spokesman Brad Howard said in an emailed statement. “The City Attorney’s Office will be granted access to his Gmail account and will review and archive all work-related emails.”

Meanwhile, the staff is going back to Snapchat.

Anyway, if you want to send a private message to a public official, it's probably best not to use the internet at all.  One thing you definitely do not want to do is tweet at the President.

After Barack Obama belatedly joined Twitter on Monday — in his official, presidential capacity — dozens of Twitter denizens began tweeting him sex jokes, threats and other unprintable inanities. (We counted nearly 500 tweets dropping f-bombs at POTUS in the past day.)

But the joke’s actually on them: Not only does the Secret Service already monitor Twitter for threats, but the White House is archiving each and every thing @POTUS tweeters say.

Fifty years from now historians will finally have access to the unsealed Secret Service files on people who tweeted to @POTUS during the Obama years.  If you start today, and are diligent about it, maybe one of them will notice your personal journal preserved there for posterity.  Maybe you'll end up as a chapter in the book.  Worth a shot, right? What else do you have to do?

At least nobody has to sift through the mayor's tweets. (Not yet, anyway. Maybe it'll come to that in court.) Probably not much there besides pictures of potholes. 

They should just give Nagin the records he wants

But then ask him if he thinks they are the records "that count."  Have him submit his answer in writing. At least 1500 words. Should be punishment enough.

Oh and here's Deberry's column.

When Nagin was mayor, you'll remember, he wasn't exactly generous with the records in his possession. In fact, he was downright stingy. When the press demanded to see email and other documents that the law was clear should open for public scrutiny, the mayor told us all to kick rocks.

More than that, much of the e-mail the press wanted to see then was destroyed by the Nagin administration. The mayor, whose love of gadgetry and technology seemed to have no limits, insisted that the city's storage capacity was finite and that email he had sent and received had to be destroyed to create more room. It apparently didn't occur to anybody in his techno-geeky administration to buy more storage space.

At one point just before he left office, Nagin dumped all of the emails still on his server onto the city's website where anyone could download them.  I did that.  But then that computer went ka-put so I don't have access to them anymore until I decide to do some data forensics of my own. 

Ray Nagin's Al Capone's vault

Show 'em what they've won, Geraldo.

None of the records -- 533 e-mail and calendar files created in Microsoft Outlook, plus 53 printed pages of e-mail messages -- offers much insight into the inner workings of the Nagin administration or the mayor's own activities.

Frankly I'm disappointed we couldn't have at least learned something about what the Mayor ordered for lunch everyday. Plus there appears to be no information whatsoever about Treme in there.

Update: I decided to post this after seeing the dead tree edition of the T-P this morning. Turns out the online version includes a PDF of the actual emails here. And while none of them are really earth-shattering, one or two are at least diverting enough to make it worth a look through.

Some jokes just write themselves

When you're frustrated with too much sunshine....

Earlier this month, (Louisiana Technology Council President Mark)Lewis and one of his associates held a news conference at which they said that an unknown tech-savvy person intentionally removed the mayor's e-mail inbox from the server. Nagin lashed out at the non-profit afterward, arguing that assigning blame "is not their charge."

Nagin also suggested that the non-profit technology council his administration hired to find the data, not only was eager for "15 minutes of fame, " but also was in over its head. "I just hope that this is not a case where . . . we did not get the company with the expertise that we needed," the mayor said.

The city has hired a new firm, SunBlock Systems of McLean, Va., to continue searching for the missing e-mails, according to a city news release and SunBlock's founder.

Sunblock? Really?

Update: Looks like Clancy Dubos thinks it's funny too. Although I have to, once again, disagree with Clancy's Nagin-Nixon analogy. As I've said many times, Nagin's stoogey pseudo-businessman-turned-pol idiom likens him more to George W Bush than to Nixon.

Suspiciously over-dramatic victimhood

At least they didn't call a press conference to announce it.

A local computer analyst who claims that his recent work at City Hall revealed the intentional deletion of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin's e-mail and other material told authorities his Metairie home may have been vandalized last week as a "scare tactic" related to his public contract.

According to a Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office incident report, Louisiana Technology Council President Mark Lewis arrived home on June 30 to find all four of the exterior doors to his home sealed shut. Nothing inside the home had been disturbed, and no one had been home all day.

But then, again, they must have leaked it to the paper somehow, which seems to be about the same thing to me. But I'd at least take it half-seriously if it weren't for this bit which looks like an overreach to me.

Lewis, who eventually entered his home through a window, told deputies that "a similar incident occurred to the public relations associate Cheron Brylski when she was handling a sensitive matter involving a New Orleans Church in Jan. 2009."

Brylski, who handles public relations for Lewis' nonprofit technology group, confirmed that she found the exterior locks to her home sealed shut on the same day her husband received a criminal trespass citation from New Orleans police for refusing to leave a Catholic church set to be shuttered by the local archdiocese.

So we're supposed to believe that the same shadowy figure is out there retaliating (in an oddly passive manner) against people hired to search the Mayor's computer AND people protesting the Archdiocese's church closures. While there isn't much to connect the supposed motivations of the actor in these supposed acts of vandalism, there is a connection between the parties claiming to have been vandalized upon. These individuals, and this article by extension, are getting into some pretty stupid conspiracy theory here.

Transparency lets the light in on you too

Although I've been writing about this from the perspective of someone who is (perhaps overly) gleeful to see Stacy Head embarrassed, I actually agree with David's concerns here.

The idea that private citizens who contact their public servants with their concerns automatically expose themselves to the same sort of scrutiny we apply to the public officials themselves is not only absurd on its face but is a nifty way of intimidating people into disengaging from the process altogether. Ms Head has already observed that she is receiving significantly fewer emails from the public these days. And at the risk of appearing to say something half-way nice about her, it is clear that she at least demonstrates concern with her ability to respond to such requests while Tracie Washington seems to be telling the public that they initiate them at their own risk.

This shouldn't be so difficult a thing to sort out. It was the point we tried to make last week when confronted with Joe Longo's ridiculous assumption that we should treat the random musings of a local blogger the same way we would Head's email record. The private life is not dead as David has Ms Washington suggest. But it is in need of more careful protection and certainly deserves better than to become a tool of disruption for shielding public officials from their constituents.

Stacy Head's "respectable Republican cloth coat"

Adrastos is very funny; very astute as usual.

Joe Longo's "warning to us all"

In a guest column for today's T-P, Nolafugees.com editor Joe Longo asks us all to "Think that you might be wrong" ... or something since "the digital age" has suddenly laid bare our "electronically cataloged" "narcissistic malevolence" if I'm using those quotations in the correct spirit. (He also made certain to mention the buzzwords "Facebook" and "Twitter" within the space of his column which I thought was a nice touch.) Longo is expressing a seemingly noble sentiment. But what he's really doing is dampening the discourse with a mushy kind of thinking which ignores obvious distinctions of context in the interest of everybody getting along.

Longo's main trick is to compare Stacy Head's widely-discussed "Wal-Mart" email with a Salon.com blog entry by local art gallery employee Leeandra Nolting elegantly entitled, A Guide to the Douchebags Who Come Into My Gallery That's right. We're reading someone start with the ridiculous assumption that the statements of a public official are weighted equally with those of some art-chick's blog entries and then run with that. It is Longo's assertion that the two literary works in question are guilty of the same sort of "venomous thoughts about other people" which overrides and nullifies all other context of the authors' differing stations, class, or subject matter. Longo, in fact, goes out of his way to make this exact point.

What is interesting to observe about Head and Nolting is the way the class conflict element informs their prose. Head, an earnest gentrifier, can't get her mind around why poor people make lousy nutritional choices. Her sarcastic (one assumes) declaration that she will vote for "that freak" John McCain in the upcoming election reveals a liberal sensibility under strain, a mindset even the most empathetic New Orleanians have had to confront within themselves.

As for Nolting, art gallery prole, presumably just getting by on her meager hourly while she dreams of becoming Sarah Vowell once the larger world comes around and appreciates her cutting wit, the resentment comes from below.

Regardless of whether the anger that fueled the writing was righteous or mean-spirited, the fact is that these two locally grown electronic me-centered missives should serve as a warning to all of us.

What seems like an elevated appeal to our better angels of decorum is really a lazy attempt to gloss over facts in the interest of preserving niceties to the ultimate detriment of meaningful debate. Here is what Longo is telling us. He's saying that it doesn't matter that Head is an "earnest gentrifier" who has selected to place herself in a position of civic leadership the same way it doesn't matter that Nolting is a private citizen who appears to hold a customer service position which demands that she accept a tacitly subservient role to all manner of brutish personage on a daily basis. But it does matter. It makes all the difference in the world.

Head's public leadership position subjects her words to an entirely different sort of scrutiny than what we expect to fall upon Nolting's opinions. To those of us who read these pieces in their proper context, they tell us very different things. Head's tells us that an elected councilperson harbors irrational hatred toward citizens who receive public assistance. Nolting's tells us that an underemployed young woman feels a bit angsty when subjected to the endless parade of douchebags (and yes that term is quite apt) which makes a progress through the city's tourist-infested neighborhoods. However, according to Joe Longo, none of this matters so much as the fact that the tone of each work is a bit too dark. (This, incidentally, is a surprising criticism coming from the editor of Nolafugees.com but there it is.)

What, by the way, is this "warning to all of us" contained within this tale? In concluding his little fantasy, Longo needs to pull our heartstrings once again and goes immediately for the most sensitive one

Summer is approaching, and those of us who stick around will eventually get on one another's nerves. Then, odds are, in a few months we'll all be stuck in traffic together dodging a hurricane.

Then when we come back, we'll have mayoral and City Council elections to contend with, where the candidates will fan the flames of our rage toward whatever "them" we blame the sad state of the city on.

The last thing we need is a digital catalogue of our resentful selves.

So to sum up, Longo is warning us against the dangers of open discussion about petty things now so that when the time comes to sort out something important like another hurricane snafu, we'll know not to question each other then either. But at least no one will say anything mean.

Update: Since her post was mentioned in this morning's paper... and likely in response to the discussion in her comment thread (although the overwhelming majority of the comments are positive), Ms. Nolting has been intimidated into appending a "disclaimer" to the beginning of her post in which she sort of apologizes to the "99% of people who walk in the door to the gallery" who are "certainly NOT" douchebags. This is unfortunate and, frankly, ruins the artistry of the entire post for me.

Upperdate: On the other hand, I thoroughly enjoyed Ms Nolting's response in the NOLA.com comments to Longo's op-ed.

Even the T-P editorial board gets it

Some people object to the perceived motives of attorney Tracie Washington, who sought the council e-mails. New Orleanians may have different reactions to the e-mails' contents and to Ms. Washington. But there should be no debate about whether the records ought to be publicly released. Louisiana law gives anyone the right to see the council's e-mails without giving a reason -- and that makes the motivation for a request irrelevant.

Link

Suggestion

To any and all individuals, "activist attorneys", or news organizations in possession of additional Stacy Head emails. If you could agree to make all future releases of these documents happen via Twitter, I would be forever grateful.

I'll bet it has something to do with Daylight Savings

Missing calendar dates found.

E-maelstrom?

On the one hand, I don't like it because I think E is just trying to put his name up on the marquee. (Dude wants to be famous and all) On the other hand, I love it because it sounds like the sort of thing that can take down a "life-ark."

Not sure what part of this is funniest

I really want to spoil only one of the fun facts Red clues us in on in the post I'm about to link to but there are just so many..... Ok ok how's this?

Veronica White's attorney: Ralph Capitelli.

Oh well

I guess I can stop hitting refresh on nolapublicrecords.org for now.

Dear Internet Security-type people,

Is it bad when you start getting spam from yourself?