Keep the neutral ground neutral

St. Charles Avenue Lundi Gras 2012
 
Just as a follow-up to this Gambit article I'd like to offer the title of this post as a suggested T-shirt slogan for a public awareness campaign.  Since we know the city isn't going to do too much in the way of aggressive enforcement, it falls on us to keep things in line.  Last year I wrote an op-ed for NOLA Defender where I tried to suggest that we're actually pretty good at this.

Even when one considers the rowdy exceptions conjured by the occasional concentrations of college fraternity types and/or inexperienced tourists here and there, the typical scene along the parade route is genuinely pleasant and almost magically cooperative. Strangers at a parade become fast neighbors and loosely acquainted neighbors become friends who drink and dance and share throws in an improbable ritual expression of community that New Orleanians seem to accomplish naturally but few other populations have figured out how to get right.

Anyone who has watched a sprawling crowd of festively over-served revelers chasing stray baubles from a passing float turn on a dime to corral themselves and their children into a tight shoulder-to-shoulder squeeze along the curb just in time to avoid the wild swinging of the St. Aug Marching 100's drums will tell you there's something more than NOPD crowd control mastery at work here. We just plain know how to do this. And when we're doing it well, we're respecting the fact that enjoying the parade also means sharing the experience with the people who came to enjoy it with us. The unfortunate fact, though, is that in recent years we've seen the growth of certain practices that diminish the grand communal spirit so essential to the Carnival experience.

The best thing the city could do to fix the problem would be to allow for a greater variety in parade routes. Not only would it ease congestion on St. Charles but it could spread the much touted economic impact of Carnival further to small businesses along streets currently not sharing in the "cultural economy" boon.  Also, from an aesthetic standpoint, it would help restore a bit of the grass-roots neighborhood spirit of this "party the city throws for itself" we like to brag so much about.*

But de-consolidating the route requires more heavy lifting than the city is willing and able to perform at the moment so we'll have to focus on the things we can do. Mostly this just means being considerate of one another. Here's part of my email to Gambit that didn't get printed.

There's never been a time that I can remember when people did not bring ladders, chairs, couches, grills, tables, whatever with them to the route. Here's a picture I took in 2008 of a television.  Most  of these items are in my opinion perfectly acceptable.

(There are two exceptions which I think are real problems; the tents take up too much space and there are too many festival chairs arranged in theater style rows near the curb.)

What has gotten noticeably worse over time, though, has been people's expectation that they are able to use their chairs, ladders, etc. to mark off inviolable territory along what is supposed to be a shared public event. This makes it harder for the crowd to shift and flow as the day or evening goes on and decreases the number of people per square foot who can enjoy the event.

Because we're all jammed together, we're going to have to learn to get along in that small space. In other words we have to remember that we're supposed to share it.  And that we're actually quite good at this when we try.


*The proliferation of newer smaller events like Chewbacchus and  'tit Rex is a healthy sign that "grass roots" Carnival does still live on.  But even these are gravitating toward one side of town. Chewbacchus will parade in Bywater this year.

Update: Here, thanks to Jon Frosch via Twitter, is a map of metro New Orleans parade routes crica 1977.


 

Creatively Maladjusted

Quote of the Day today is Martin Luther King via Andrew Young via this recent Jarvis DeBerry column

Featured in a PBS documentary in the mid-1990s, Young said, "Martin always said, 'Look, normal people don't challenge the law of the land.' He said you got to be strong enough to be creatively maladjusted. And sometimes he said, 'Andy, you're too well-adjusted. You can adjust to segregation and you can teach other people to accept it. And rise above it personally. But we need people around who can't be adjusted. People who have to upset things.' '"

The market for king cake vodka

A little more than a week ago we reported on the crucially important matter of the wide variance in prices for competing brands of king cake flavored vodka. At the time, the Lucky Player king cake flavored vodka was running at a full thirteen dollars more than the Taaka king cake flavored vodka.


January 12, 2013: Make yourself ill for either $5.99 or $28.99


This afternoon we noticed the prices have moved already.  Taaka is up sixty cents while Lucky Player has crashed a full four bucks.




Taaka's entry into the market has forced the price of Lucky Player below even last year's price of $26.99 when supplies were so tight that Rouses was imposing rations.



What is the equilibrium price of king cake flavored vodka?  Probably somewhere between a head and stomachache.

"I wouldn't like that"

Not all of us are old enough to remember the full weirdness of the "Chocolate City" speech, I guess. But those of us who did experience it will recall that the mayor began by relating to the audience an imaginary conversation he had with Martin Luther King Jr.  No, Dr. King was not represented on stage by an empty chair or a fake girlfriend's Twitter account or anything, but that didn't make it any less strange.

Now, I'm supposed to give some remarks this morning and talk about the great Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. You know when I woke up early this morning, and I was reflecting upon what I could say that could be meaningful for this grand occasion. And then I decided to talk directly to Dr. King.

Now you might think that's one Katrina post-stress disorder. But I was talking to him and I just wanted to know what would he think if he looked down today at this celebration. What would he think about Katrina? What would he think about all the people who were stuck in the Superdome and Convention Center and we couldn't get the state and the federal government to come do something about it? And he said, "I wouldn't like that."

 This afternoon, Nagin is apparently still communicating with Dr. King across the great beyond.

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." MLK Jr.
— CRayNagin (@RayNagin) January 19, 2013

If we could ask Dr. King what he thought about his words on social justice being invoked to justify petty white collar crimes by politicians, I'm guessing he might say something along the lines of "I wouldn't like that"

Awards season

Gambit: Times-Picayune wins award for prison series produced by many laid-off journalists

Nice job, guys.  Couldn't have fired a better bunch.

WDSU:

Americans for the Arts and The United States Conference of Mayors announced Thursday that Mayor Mitch Landrieu is one of three recipients of this year's Public Leadership in the Arts Awards.

I assume this award is a statue in the form of a shuttered music club. 

Also still waiting on word as to whether of not Ray Nagin has to give back his Bernardo "Excellence In Recovery Award" or maybe there's still time left for a plea deal involving that.

This will go down on your permanent record

And later we will sell that to somebody.

New York is one of five states that have agreed to share confidential NYC student and teacher data in Phase I with the “Shared Learning Collaborative” or SLC, a project of the Gates Foundation.

The other states and districts in Phase I include North Carolina (Guilford Co.), Colorado (Jefferson Co.), Illinois (Unit 5 Normal and District 87 Bloomington) and Massachusetts (Everett). Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, and Louisiana are in Phase II, according to the Gates Foundation, intend to start piloting the system in 2013.

These records are to be stored in a massive electronic data bank, being built by Wireless Generation, a subsidiary of News Corporation. News Corporation is owned by Rupert Murdoch and has been found to illegally violate the privacy of individuals in Great Britain and in the United States.

These records are to be stored in a massive electronic data bank, being built by Wireless Generation, a subsidiary of News Corporation. News Corporation is owned by Rupert Murdoch and has been found to illegally violate the privacy of individuals in Great Britain and in the United States.

Over the next few months, the Gates Foundation plans to turn over all this personal data to another, as yet unnamed corporation, headed by Iwan Streichenberger, the former marketing director of a company called Promethean that sells whiteboards, based in Atlanta GA.

This new corporation intends to make this confidential student information available in turn to commercial enterprises to help them develop and market their “learning products.” This new corporation is supposed to be financially sustainable by 2016, which means either states, districts or vendors will have to pay for its upkeep and maintenance. All this is happening without parental knowledge or consent.

Also in Louisiana, the commodification of student records may one day lead to the development of "learning products" which either do or do not contain any actual science.

The gluttony glut

I know Carnival-SuperBowl season seems like a good time to try launching a bunch of new restaurants. But, as Craig Giesecke's latest column points out, the business can be brutal.

Of course, a quality product is supposed to help draw customers and therefore help you make money. But unless the cost of inventory, labor and other overhead remains at a certain level, the place won’t make it for very long. We tend to forget this as Carnival, Super Bowl and our Festival seasons appear before us. Everyone’s having a good time and the food and drink are selling so well that many owners think it will just continue that way after Memorial Day.

Also, for locals anyway, Carnival isn't when anybody is thinking much about having a nice sit down meal. Usually it's a box of Popeyes or a something bought from a truck somewhere until after Fat Tuesday... and then everybody goes on a diet.  But then maybe the restaurant business isn't really about the local market anymore.

Meanwhile

Wonder what this could be about.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's executive counsel Gary Graphia resigned Friday after only three months in the position. Graphia, a former top executive for the Shaw Group who was appointed in mid-October, will be replaced by deputy counsel Thomas Enright.

More lives and cycles

I don't think this stuff is part of today's indictments but today is a good day to remember that  the Emperor Nagin Has No Clothes moment of critical mass at least as far as the local media was concerned happened around the time of the NOAH scandal which came to light largely through the efforts of Karen Gadbois (and a few others).

NEW ORLEANS — The citizens of this scarred city have grown accustomed to promises of grand official projects that will infallibly transform life here but somehow never do. Their attention is diminishing.

But not in the case of Karen Gadbois. She jumps in her car and checks up on the promises, driving for hours across the city, then blogs about the results on her kitchen table while her dogs yap around her. A few months ago, she discovered a city renovation program that was not actually fixing up houses. 

Today the most complete archive of NOAH related stuff is still up at the now dormant WCBF in case you are feeling nostalgic. 

Karen has since gone on to found the local non-profit investigative journalism website The Lens which happens to be celebrating its third anniversary today.

They do a pretty ok job over at The Lens when they're not just retweeting everybody in town. 

This might be a good day to give them a pat on the back.

Truths and cycles

I took that picture under the Claiborne Avenue overpass on MLK Day Weekend 2006.  It's one of a set I took that day following an "All Star Second Line" march through parts of Treme and downtown. The city at the time was barely getting itself restarted only a few months after the Federal Flood. A lot of people showed up for this march.  Every moment and image that day felt especially poignant. Solemn, even.  For me, it  felt like the true beginning of a new year and a new, uncertain time in our city.

One day later, Ray Nagin delivered his infamous "Chocolate City" speech.  Two days later Sean Payton became the 14th head coach of the New Orleans Saints.  Seven years later, on  another MLK weekend, Ray Nagin has been indicted and Sean Payton is about to become head coach of the Saints once again.

What does it all mean?  Don't know. Not much, probably. 




Update: Maybe could have gone with this song instead. Similar "cycles" lyric. More local  references.

More Nagin notes

Here are a few of the most telling moments from Ray Nagin's career that spring to mind for me.

First there's this Details profile by Ethan Brown where we learn that Nagin is reading Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine and that he very well may be reading it as a how-to manual.

“I understand exactly the premise that they’re presenting,” Nagin says, holding the book aloft, “that’s for sure. Look, man, after this disaster there is big money! The shock-and-awe piece of what they’re talking about is absolutely correct.” I ask if he’s read the chapter in which Klein laments that the public sphere in New Orleans is “being erased, with the storm used as the excuse.” Nagin replies cheerily, “I haven’t gotten that far! I just picked it up.”

And then there's this interview where we find what I think is nearest to the essential Ray Nagin in his own words we'll ever get.

Nagin also talked about growing up in a lower middle class family, watching his father work as a custodian at City Hall, attending Catholic and public schools, and eventually plodding a career in business and eventually politics.

"Politics in New Orleans is the dominant industry, so I decided to get in," he said. "Besides tourism, politics dominates everything. I just think it's part of our legacy and our history. Politics is definitely a sport and something that the citizens pay attention to." 

Meanwhile some fun stuff:

First, the once verboten shout-out

Nagin’s image as a crime fighter first started to crumble in 2006 and 2007, when the blog American Zombie and Gordon Russell of The Times-Picayune exposed inside dealing in Nagin’s technology office.

And finally, the near-boundless frivolity  much of which is conveniently assembled here. 

Because it's Friday afternoon

A grand jury has just issued a "list that counts" of 21 indictments against former Mayor Ray Nagin.  The charges range from coldcocking,  to exploding pies, to keeping the brand out there and probably some other things.  I'm sure it will all come out in Volume 2 of Katrina's Secrets.  

Update: This relatively recent look back at Nagin's adventures by Mark Moseley is a timely read. 

You know it's Carnival time when...

The Rex organization is suing somebody.

"If this is blocked up, we'd better give up the coast and move away,"

Oil company trying to dam up Mississippi River crevasse in Plaquemines Parish.

After further review

Did 2012 even happen?  In a few weeks there will be only that hole where a 2nd round draft choice should be left to prove it.

Whiplash

Bobby Jindal, who only a few years ago, vehemently opposed the renewal of an existing cigarette tax on the basis of strict ideological opposition to approving any "new tax" is today floating the idea of an entirely new tax on cigarettes.

Also we notice Jindal, in his effort to ditch the state income tax altogether, is still trying to preserve the system of income tax credit "business incentives" that make our current tax code as unfair as it is in the first place. The Louisiana Film Tax Incentive program is probably the most famous and controversial of these. 

Typically such incentives finance projects such as film production because the tax credits themselves are transferable. A production company can raise cash quickly by selling the credits to brokers or individuals (such as NFL players and coaches) at below face value.  If the income tax is eliminated the medium of exchange in these transactions will have to be altered. 

Perhaps they can sell cigarettes.

Bush league

The most embarrassing thing about the way our city fathers have behaved in the lead up to hosting this, the city's 10th SuperBowl is that, if you didn't know better, you'd get the impression New Orleans had never hosted such an event before.  Our leaders have taken on the aspect of a small town getting itself all brightened up for the one big thing that ever happened to it like the time the guy who played Cooter on the Dukes of Hazzard signed autographs in the K-Mart parking lot in Bunkie for half an hour. I think they may have closed the schools for a week.*

But New Orleans isn't Bunkie and Roger Goodell isn't anywhere near as cool as Cooter. And yet our leaders are nervously lecturing the rest of us about how to behave.

At a media luncheon hosted by the New Orleans Super Bowl Host Committee announcing the latest preparations for Super Bowl XLVII, Mayor Mitch Landrieu urged New Orleans to be on its best behavior — not only is the Super Bowl the city's time in the spotlight, and a time to show off its southern hospitality, but it also must prove it can do it again.

"It's a great joy and a blessing to have an opportunity to host this event," he told the crowd. "It's our time to shine, it's our time to tell our story. ... It's important to me that we do the thing we do better than anybody, which is be nice, and be hospitable. ... If Atlanta gets in the Super Bowl, I'm a struggle, but I promise you, I will be on my best behavior. ... Be gracious and wonderful hosts and show people the hospitality they deserve. This extends to Roger Goodell, too. I know everybody in the city is belly aching about the last year. But here's the thing: Roger Goodell has always been a friend to the City of New Orleans, and he and (former commissioner) Paul Tagliabue ... have worked really hard to make sure this stays here. ... Mind your P's and Q's."

It's astounding and insulting that the Mayor would assume New Orleanians won't be gracious hosts to Atlanta fans. We host major events here all the time many of which are also football games. Sure there are always some rude people in any crowd, but by and large, Saints fans are uncommonly gracious and friendly to visitors... especially the ones who want to dance with us.




I understand that there may be some bad feelings left over from the way 49ers fans treated visiting New Orleanians last year, but I don't expect that to be a problem. But if the Falcons are coming, well, we know those people already. We don't like their team or their city very much but we're used to having them come over.

Being grown-ups ourselves, we understand football fans are just people having a good time. But even the grown-ups in New Orleans do enjoy their pet outrages.  And right now Roger Goodell is cruising along that Michael Brown-Alan Richman-Ed Blakely-Spoons Butler plane of local infamy.  Shouldn't he be at least a little bit worried?  Probably not.  In our long history of collective civic pooh-poohing of individuals the closest we've come in modern times to converting our offense into action happened during an episode of a bad television show that writes us poorly anyway.  If Mitch Landrieu believes New Orleanians need to be told how to behave in front of visitors, he's also not getting our character right.  To hear him tell it, New Orleans is a city full of rube (buffoons if you like Ed Blakely's word) who can't be trusted to behave around their betters.

Furthermore, the Mayor hints... actually more than hints, he just comes out and says... that even if residents have a serious grievance against Mr. Goodell, it would be best that we swallow our pride and smile anyway because... again according to the Mayor... a city like New Orleans can't afford to offend a powerful and important man like Goodell.

This is all embarrassingly bush league. Major cities do not exist solely to service the convention business or cater special events.  In other words, these events are not doing us a favor simply by coming here.  They come here because New Orleans is a place people want to visit.  And this is, in large part, because of the people and culture that exists here not, as the Mayor implies by his nervous instruction, in spite of it. Other cities do not suffer from this lack of self-confidence and neither should we. And maybe a man who exhibits such poor faith in the residents shouldn't be mayor.


*Fact check: Probably apocryphal.  I don't think there's actually a K-Mart in Bunkie.

Athletes are weird

Today's tabloid adventure:  Manti Te’o’s Dead Girlfriend, The Most Heartbreaking And Inspirational Story Of The College Football Season, Is A Hoax


Of course, it can always be worse: Drew Brees tweets from the Justin Bieber concert

Illegitimate governance

I don't recall ever voting for or against James Carville and Mary Matalin. Why do they get to tell me what to do?

Roger Goodell is more important than you

Daddy Mitch instructs the help to be on their best behavior when Massa Goodell comes over for dinner.

Still, Mayor Mitch Landrieu is urging New Orleanians to remember that Goodell has helped New Orleans in the past, and a good relationship with him means a shot at hosting another Super Bowl.

“It is really important for everybody in the city to do what we do and be gracious and wonderful hosts and show people the kind of hospitality that they deserve cause that’s what we do well and this extends to Roger Goodell too,” said Landrieu.

Y'all don't go and embarrass Daddy Mitch now.  His guests are more important than anything you care about.

Spending political capital

Seems like we've heard an awful lot about second term Presidents and their narrow window for getting anything done before lame duckitude sets in. Obama's in the middle of a pretty important fight over whether or not you will ever get to retire. And yet here we are watching him spend all of his chips early in 2013 on gun control. 

Of course we'll all probably benefit from stronger gun laws.  At the same time, I'm under no illusion that the President's proposal is going to end the recurring episodes of violence like the one that precipitated this discussion in the first place.  We'd be better off with it but maybe not at the political cost incurred by the effort to pass it.

Picking this fight now fires up the crazies  and rallies the opposition just in time for it to be extra ornery when the much more crucial debt ceiling debate. If second term Presidents really do have limited capital to spend, I'm not so sure Obama is using his wisely.

Keep giving them enough rope

The ever-expanding US Attorneys commenting affair is an excellent case for news organizations maintaining free and open comment sections. Of course people say horrid things in there. What we've learned recently is that the people saying the most awful things happen to be some of the most powerful people in town.

As an aside, I’d point to this absolutely fascinating comment thread about investigations into the shootings on Danziger Bridge. Notice the interaction between “painman11” and “legacyusa,” where they talk about the NOPD.

I find that to be quite helpfully instructive.  It would be a shame if newspapers decided to bend to the mounting pressure to censor of eliminate this feature of their websites merely to maintain the illusion that the politically or socially ascendent are somehow better people that the rest of us. 

Noted for future reference

Not accusing anyone of anything. Just saying that statements like this have a way of becoming hilariously ironic as time goes on.

"We have had an unprecedented level of cooperation between the executive branch and the legislative branch in the last three years," Landrieu said. New Orleans City Council vice president Jackie Clarkson added, with a laugh, "We pushed this through faster legally than anything we've ever done. A fine line there, but we did it."

Literally, "Fat Family"

In all the other Superbowl related build up, I didn't even think about the implications of Jefferson Parish pushing its "Family Gras" event on visitors. 

METAIRIE, La. - On Tuesday morning, Jefferson Parish leaders announced the talent lineup for their annual Family Gras celebration near Lakeside Mall in Metairie to be held on February 1 and 2.

This year's festival coincides with Super Bowl festivities and will be a two-day extravaganza of carnival and concerts. Family Gras will give visitors in town for the NFL's premier event a unique opportunity to experience Carnival parades since New Orleans parades are suspended for that weekend.

The line-up includes Amanda Shaw, who we've noticed will play anywhere anytime, along with several  acts I could have sworn had already died in one or another plane crash at some point.  So if you're in town to see the Superbowl halftime show, this event will set the tone quite well.

As always, though, our objection to the term "Family Gras" is the implication built into it that Carnival itself is somehow a non-"family" event which demands this artificial alternative. Anyone who has spent even five minutes near an Uptown parade route understands that "family" is central to the entire concept.











Local business and political leaders have spent a great deal of time emphasizing the unique opportunity this SuperBowl presents to showcase New Orleans to the world.

"The city is going to look spectacular," Landrieu says. "I know it's been inconvenient. ... (The Super Bowl) is a great opportunity to show what the city looks like (after) its resurrection, redemption, resilience — (and) it will not be the last one we get."

 Why would we want to include the negative stereotype that our signature annual event is somehow anti-family in that showcase?

Department of names that are probably made up

I notice these often enough that I've decided to start collecting them.  Every now and then a news story pops up where a principal's name seems suspiciously Dickensian.  A few examples:

Bobby Jindal's current Commissioner of Administration is a man called Paul Rainwater.  During the years following the Katrina flood, Rainwater worked for the Louisiana Recovery Authority in hazard mitigation.  So stories about homeowners dealing with flood issues frequently included a quote or two from Rainwater.

For many years the Louisiana State Police designated spokesperson in matters of alcohol and highway safety was Jim Champagne.

I recently discovered that LSU Ag Center employs an environmental scientist named Chris Green. 

And then there are the names that just sound made up such as former Assistant US Attorney Jan Mann or, names that actually probably are made up such as local artist Katrina Brees.

I'm sure I've got more of these.  Once you start to notice a couple, it's surprising how frequently they occur.  For example this week's Gambit cover story about the city's overblown preparations for the Superbowl includes comments from the NFL's point man for coordinating this event with the city.

When New Orleans hosted the big game in 2002, the city and NFL scrambled to come up with a plan following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, which postponed the event and pushed the game into the Carnival calendar. "This time we've had a few more years to perfect the plan, not just a few months. Super Bowl XVII is a lot bigger," says Frank Supovitz, NFL vice president of special events.

Less Messenging

Some months back, local website NewOrleans.com dropped all pretense of any news, sports, and opinion content leaving only its tourism marketing core. 

Today Oyster shares a letter from Jeff Crouere (NewOrleans.com's then-political editor) that the site's decision to butt out of the news business resulted at least in part from pressure coming from former Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard.

Remember this isn't the only incidence of Broussard and pals attempting to intimidate local media outlets.  But it is the only successful one we know of.

More Messenging

Uptown Messenger publisher Robert Morris has launched a second "hyper-local" New Orleans news site covering Mid City. 

Pro Bono Privato

Rex Organization donates half a million dollars to local efforts to privatize education, hosts a party for union-busting Teach For America members because.. well.. because they are Rex and that's the sort of thing they do.

In a related matter, here's a link to last week's Frontline on education reform con-artist Michelle Rhee in case you missed it.

One moment that stands out is this bit where Rhee makes a mockery of the practice of open government.

JOHN MERROW: With no time to waste, Rhee had been criss-crossing the district, talking about ways to improve the schools. But she kept her most controversial proposal under wraps, closing two dozen half-empty schools, schools that were draining the system of resources.

MICHELLE RHEE: It would have been extraordinarily unwise of me to have started this process by saying, “So I’m going to close some schools. What do you all think?” I would lose faith immediately in that person. You have to have a vision. You have to have a strategy. You have to have methodology, and then data. Then people can react to that once it’s laid out.

JOHN MERROW: But her proposal was leaked to The Washington Post. The next six weeks were all about damage control as Rhee tried to explain the proposed closures to angry parents.

MICHELLE RHEE: The bottom line is that we made the proposal, which was a proposal. We wanted to have a number of community forums during which we could hear people’s input.

A lot of the decisions that I’m going to be making, as long as I’m chancellor, are going to raise this kind of opposition. For me, it’s about the fact that if we make these decisions now, and we take on the people who are not in favor of it now, what it will result in is greater resources quicker for kids in classrooms. And that to me is way more important than how many nights I have to sit around getting yelled at.

Obviously Rhee doesn't actually value any of the "input" she's soliciting at the forums if she is withholding relevant information up front.  We see this sort of empty outreach PR exercise all the time.  Mayor Landrieu's community budget hearings are a good local example. We also see Rhee's arrogant style emulated in Louisiana Education Superintendent John White's use of "deliberative process privilege" exception to state open records law.

The proliferation of such arrogance depends, in part, on belief in a "Great Man/Woman" theory of government where one righteous sounding butt kicker enters into an arena full of incompetents and evildoers and "fixes" everything through force of will.

Despite the stereotypes and prejudices we've developed in recent years, front line employees are not overwhelmingly incompetent or evil.  But the "Great Person" who trades on those prejudices is almost always a grifter. Rhee's con revolves around using standardized test scores as a pretense to abuse as many bogeyman teachers as possible.  She may say it's all about "greater resources quicker for kids in classrooms" but that doesn't seem to be the overriding factor for her in measuring results.

The placing of these two states (Louisiana and Florida) at the top of the list is curious. StudentsFirst gave higher ratings to states that emphasized the use of charter schools and teacher evaluations based on high-stakes testing. But her organization ignored actual results. For example, it gave a “D” rating — the second-worst — to Massachusetts, which has some of the highest test scores on the  National Assessment of Educational Progress exam.

There is one thing that Florida and Louisiana have in common — they are among the worst states for teacher compensation. Florida in 2011 ranked 47th in the country for teacher salaries. Louisiana’s average teacher salary is 42nd in the country.

By and large what we currently call a "reform" movement in education is funded by elites, executed by grifters, and aimed, not at improving this essential public service but at looting it.  Much of what's being looted is coming directly out of the pockets of teachers. Which is one reason you see so many of them trying to escape now.

Compare and contrast

Then gubernatorial candidate Foster Campbell's 2007 proposal to eliminate state income taxes:

As governor, Campbell would try to eliminate the state's individual and corporate income taxes and replace them with a fee on oil and gas processing and distribution in Louisiana, a proposal he drummed year after year in the Legislature.

Critics say Campbell is too quick to point to the proposal as a cure for all ills and that it would stifle one of Louisiana's staple economic sectors, send an antibusiness message to the rest of the nation and place too much reliance on a single source of revenue to support the state budget.

According to Campbell, the fee would generate $5.5 billion a year, more than half the amount of the current state general fund and well more than the $3 billion the plan would give up in income taxes. He says the new resources would pay for improvements in health care, education, roads and coastal restoration. He paints it as a fight against worldwide industrial giants on behalf of poor and middle-class people.

Current Governor Bobby Jindal's proposal to eliminate state income taxes:

Gov. Bobby Jindal's administration is considering the elimination of state taxes on oil and gas extraction as part of the governor's tax overhaul for the upcoming legislative session, according to the state Department of Revenue. No decision has been made on whether the final version of the plan will include the repeal of the so-called severance taxes but nearly all forms of taxes, with the exception of property taxes, are now on the table, department spokesman Doug Baker said Friday evening.

So what we're saying here is we're fine with eliminating the income tax so long as we don't ask oil and gas to pay for it for us. 

And then you'll feel better

As is our custom, we walked out and waved at the Phunny Phorty Phellows streetcar on St. Charles Avenue  last Sunday night. And, as you can see above, I took my customary blurry photo of said streetcar.

Here is last year's blurry photo. Here's another one from a few years ago. One year I even got about 15 seconds of dark and blurry video of the Phellows as they passed.  I'm sure there are more in a pile somewhere and I'm sure they're all just as crappy.  But I like these pictures.  I think they convey the brevity and the mystery of the Twelfth Night hint of Carnival quite nicely.. even if this happens entirely by accident.

So as Carnival 2013 begins, here are a few of the mysteries we are pondering.

1) For Sunday night's ride, RTA made special arrangements for the Phellows to travel through a section of track where cross tie replacement work is currently ongoing.  In order to accomplish this, the PPP had to pass us traveling downtown on the normally uptown-bound track.

According to RTA, all work along the route will halt in time for parade season.

Regardless of how it looks now, RTA officials say, the area will be cleared in time for the crowds that will gather for the Krewes of Oshun and Cleopatra, the first parades in Orleans Parish, on Jan. 25.

“The good news is the agency (RTA) was able to negotiate with its contractors a suspension of contract work,” RTA spokeswoman Patrice Mercadel. said

The contractor working on the project has promised to have the site ready for revelers by Jan. 20. Work to complete the project will resume on Ash Wednesday, Mercadel said.

All this talk of clearing the neutral ground in order to make it "ready for revelers" makes this as good a moment as any for us to renew our annual petition to city fathers that they finally enforce the ordinances against excessive use of tents, ladders, and other territorial obstructions which crowd the route in ever increasing magnitudes of obnoxiousness.

So far it looks as though the enforcement priority places the territorial visibility of official NFL sponsors above the comfort and enjoyment of boring old ordinary New Orleanians this season. Oh well. Maybe next year...

2) Mark Moseley's latest Lens column has me imagining all the various online commenters connected to the US Attorney's office hubub as participants in one big Carnival Ball Masque.  Many of them are socially and politically powerful individuals.  They all know each other but they're all anonymous.. sort of.  And, of course, each and every one of them looks utterly ridiculous.

Related:  I share Dambala's "pet peeve" about this business.  I can understand why most normal people will get the terminology wrong.. or not give a shit either way.  But the misuse Dambala is complaining about keeps coming from media professionals who should know better but get it wrong anyway.  Must be on purpose, right?

3) It's January 12 and I haven't had a single slice of king cake yet.  (In fact, we haven't even taken down the Christmas tree but that's beside the point.) However, on a recent trip to Rouses, I did have an opportunity to price this year's "king cake" flavored vodka offerings.


The original imported Lucky Player brand is selling for $28.99.  That's up two bucks from last year's $26.99 which, we thought was so ridiculous at the time that we just resorted to making our own by dropping slices of king cake into shots of Stoli.



Result: It was terrible, of course.  It's king cake vodka, what did you expect?

The new development this year is Taaka has added a king cake flavor to its brand of discount vodkas which you can also buy at Rouses for $5.99.  What could possibly make one king cake flavored vodka 13 whole dollars more horrendous than another king cake flavored vodka?  I hope I never find out.

 

4) Krewe Du Vieux is just one freaking week from now!



We are not ready.  Our unreadiness isn't due so much to the the Super Bowl affected scheduling as it is to technical issues with Yellow Blogging Carnival World Headquarters.  Ordinarily at this time of year we'd be cleaning the place up, stocking up on beer, and getting ready to host parade visitors. But none of that can begin yet since for the last month we've had only intermittent experiences of 21st century indoor plumbing.

This has occasioned a series of visitations from various men purporting to have some knowledge of.. though more likely willingness to do some.. working with "the pipes." After much screaming and telephone messages to the landlord from us and our similarly affected neighbors, an actual professional plumber has been hired to direct the digging of a great hole in the earth.



At least that's what we are told is happening.  We're not entirely ruling out the possibility that we've got a vampire infestation... it is, after all one of the things I hate about this town.  But, for now, let's just assume the plumbers are being up front with us.  So it is hoped that the great hole will ultimately lead to a resolution of our predicament. It is greatly wished that this resolution happens before parades begin.

On the way out yesterday morning I found one of the building super's guys standing in the hole in the sidewalk with a shovel.  Apparently the plumber came out and told them he couldn't do the work because the hole wasn't deep enough. I asked, "So he's coming back out when the hole is deeper?"

"Maybe," says the guy with the shovel.

Re-vanished

BP wants a re-count

A court filing Friday by BP says the federal government overestimated the size of the spill because workers captured more than 34 million gallons of crude and either burned it or shipped it to shore.

The company asked U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier to rule that at least 810,000 barrels of oil, or around 34,130,000 gallons, were collected before entering the Gulf and can't be counted in calculating the company's Clean Water Act penalties.

And this doesn't even count the oil the "magic microbes" supposedly ate.  One way or another, they'll figure a way to whittle it down to vanished.

Worst Governor Ever

Honestly, it's almost too cartoonish how evil this is.

Gov. Bobby Jindal wants to take the dramatic step of abolishing the state income tax on individuals and corporations, offsetting the revenue loss by raising sales taxes by 3 percentage points. That would push the total tax rate in New Orleans to 12 percent, raising concerns that his plan will shift the tax burden from the wealthy to the poor. Low-income people pay a higher proportion of their incomes in sales taxes. “We’d merely be shuffling the way we pay taxes,” said James Richardson, a Louisiana State University professor. “Higher sales taxes would make the system more regressive.”

I realize Bobby Jindal is running for President. In fact he has been doing this for.. well.. his whole life but he's certainly put his term as Governor to use showcasing his ideological bona fides and buttering up politically useful cronies instead of, you know, governing Louisiana.

It's become so ridiculous, in fact, that I am beginning to entertain the idea that "Bobby Jindal" (already we know not his given name) isn't an actual person so much as a piece of performance art about the most evil, phony, and all around worst thing a politician could possibly be if he really committed to it. Just contemplating the totality of awfulness can be exhausting.  Luckily, a lot of the time, we can just let Lamar do the heavy lifting there.

You decide

Is the problem here that Latoya Cantrell railroaded Marlon Horton's business based on the racist innuendo of Uptown property owners?  Or (if you believe Horton's comment) is it that she had previously offered to support his business in exchange for a political favor? 

Or maybe the problem is that City Council continues in its zealous campaign to wipe any recreation that caters to poorer locals rather than to wealthy tourists?  I really can't figure out what the worst aspect of this is.

Serpas Signal

This is another instance of NOPD sending out the notice late in the evening the night before the checkpoint is scheduled to take place and then writing "tomorrow night" in the text of the message instead of a date so as to create confusion among people seeing it in their inboxes on the morning of the event.  It says.

Sobriety Checkpoint

New Orleans, LA - As required by the Louisiana Supreme Court, the New Orleans Police Department is issuing a public advisory regarding a sobriety checkpoint that will be conducted tomorrow night. 

The New Orleans Police Department’s Traffic Division will conduct a sobriety checkpoint in the Orleans Parish area beginning at approximately 9:00 P.M., and will conclude at approximately 5:00 A.M.  Motorists will experience minimal delays and should have the proper documentation available if requested, i.e., proof of insurance, driver’s license, etc.

Because this message was sent at 10:14 PM on Wednesday January 9, we must assume that "tomorrow night" refers to the evening of Thursday January 10 beginning at 9 PM although there is some doubt.  I'm sure that's intentional.

Anyway it hardly matters if you're downtown since the entire CBD and much of the French Quarter is one big roadblock right now due to the gilding of the streets so that they may please His Majesty Goodell when he arrives.

Meanwhile, in a related story, here's a report on arguments before the Supreme Court of the United States over whether or not Serpas has the authority to randomly bleed you without a warrant.

Update: Checkpoint is indeed tonight (Thursday Jan 10 into Friday morning) Location is Carondelet and Calliope. Drive safely.

Is our workforces learning?

While I'm grateful that GNOCDC is around to share this data with us, I have bristle at the way they choose to present the problem of chronic adult illiteracy in New Orleans.

Today’s adult workers need a broader and stronger set of skills than they have in the past, and they must continually update their skills if they are to adapt to rapidly evolving technologies and industries. Literacy skills—including reading, writing, numeracy, and computer skills—are the foundational skills workers need to respond to this changing environment. And soft skills, including social skills and work habits, are becoming increasingly important as many jobs require direct interactions with consumers or teamwork to solve complex problems.

Two recent studies from the Brookings Institution found that there is a gap between the skills required by jobs (including job openings) in the New Orleans metro and the skills supplied by the metro labor pool. Improvement of K–12 education is essential in addressing this problem, but will take decades to fully take effect. For example, in New Orleans, even if there’s a significant in–migration of young professionals, fully two–thirds of the city’s 2025 labor pool will be adults who are already working–age New Orleanians—well past the reach of K–12 schools.

Literacy and education are essential public concerns because we all have an interest in promoting basic human dignity, let alone a functioning inclusive democracy.  Yet here we are asked to see this problem merely in terms of its value to employers.   These studies and an overwhelming number of the news outlets covering them write from a perspective that reduces humans to potential fodder for employers or investors and nothing more.

Reading this stuff leaves the impression the problem we're faced with isn't that citizens aren't being served by their public institutions, it's that the citizens themselves aren't adequate to the needs of the gentry and thus need to be improved or more likely replaced since that is often cheaper.  A similar rhetoric arises in discussions about affordable housing where "workforce" becomes conveniently interchangeable with "poor people" and their basic needs are expressed in terms of their value to industry.

But (Senator Mary) Landrieu said the need was unmet before the storm when about 6,000 low-income people were on a waiting list for the city's 7,000 public housing units. With rents up 45 percent since the storm, an estimated 12,000 homeless people in the city and low-wage service-industry workers struggling to find housing, Landrieu said the demand is as great as it has ever been.

"One of big pieces of our recovery is low- and moderate-income and workforce housing. It is a struggle for middle-class families to afford rents in the city and in the region," Landrieu said. "It gets down to Sen. Vitter and a few critics objecting to the one-to-one replacement."

Important to note Mary was the "good guy" in this particular case and even she couldn't help but talk about the problem in terms of maintaining a useful "workforce."

Note also Mary's attempt to guarantee "one to one" replacement of affordable housing in New Orleans ultimately failed.  But today we're still reading about what a low quality "workforce" the city is plagued with.  Maybe we should shift our policy aims toward actually helping people rather than running them out of town.

Street football

Although such things are popular along the parade route this time of year, we're pretty sure the Superbowl will not be played in the street.  Can't we just let people who live and work here drive where they need to go in the meantime?

Busy day

Back this evening with stuff. But, for now, get yourself ready for tonight's game.

Not so stupid Republican tricks

Congratulations, John Boehner. You broke it, you bought it, I guess.

Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) was successfully re-elected as Speaker of the House for another two-year term on Thursday, receiving 220 votes to Rep. Nancy Pelosi's (D-CA) 192 votes. Pelosi will continue on as House Minority Leader. Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) received 3 votes.

Also go fuck yourself.

The list of Representatives also receiving votes is an amusing read as well.  I'm assuming Paul Labrador (R-ID), Justin Amash (R-MI), Jim Jordan (R-OH), John Dingell (D-MI) and others all voted for themselves. Unless other members were just being nice to them. 

There was also a vote for Speaker "Present" who is never as popular as one would think. And then there are the head-scratcher votes for people who aren't even eligible. For example, former Florida Representative (and famously crazy person) Allen West received 2 votes.  Had he won, we could have called him Speaker "Absent."

But despite these protest votes, and some meaningless headfakery, the Republican caucus still voted for John Boehner to be Speaker in overwhelming numbers. The fact is, despite their made-for-TV protestations, the Republicans are just fine with Boehner as their figurehead.  After all, having Boehner at the helm worked pretty well for them strategically during the "Fiscal Cliff" negotiations. Why mess that up now?

Despite its presentation as a political win for the President, the cliff settlement actually represents a major victory for conservatives on tax policy. Timothy Noah runs through a concise explanation here in this New Republic post. 

As numerous commentators are pointing out, a lot of folks who’ve been told their taxes aren’t going up will be awfully surprised when they receive their first paychecks for 2013 and see that their taxes, ahem, actually did go up. For nearly half the country—the “47 percent” (actually, 46) Romney famously spoke of during the campaign—the payroll tax is the income tax. OASDI taxes the first dollar of income up to $113,700, and it’s regressive in two ways. Everybody earning between $1 per year and $113,700 is taxed at the same rate; and everybody earning more than $113,700 is taxed at a gradually-declining rate, because no income in excess of the $113,700 ceiling is subject to the tax. 

What's particularly disappointing about the payroll tax bump is that it wasn't even part of the negotiation.   This regressive tax hike on the precise portion of the population who can least afford to bear it was considered fait-accompli. The only "tax increase" that was under such heated discussion all December was whether to allow the impending expiration of the Bush tax cuts to proceed as scheduled for people earning between $250,000 and $400,000. Obama ended up conceding on this point, a concession which, amazingly, was spun largely as a Republican cave-in. More on that in a minute.

But first I cannot stress enough just what a horrendous contractionary tax policy this inaction on the payroll tax is.  Despite the  headlines about Republican concessions on income taxes in the $400,000 and above stratosphere, we have come out of the cliff negotiation with a less progressive and more backwards overall system of taxation than we had going in.  Worse, in addition to being grossly unfair the backwards policy takes money out of the pockets of the people most likely to spend it while granting a break to an upper income level where the tendency goes more toward saving. In other words, it is an anti-stimulus enacted during a stagnant economy.  It is, in every respect, a major conservative policy victory.

But it's also a major conservative strategic political victory. This is because it almost certainly sets the stage for a second round of argument over the very cuts to Social Security and Medicare Obama's "cliff victory" was supposed to have averted. And the Republicans are likely to win in that confrontation, mainly because they've been so successful at pretending to have "lost" the last round.

According to The Hill, Speaker Boehner has told members of his caucus that he’s done negotiating with President Obama. From the perspective of Boehner and House Republicans this process has amounted to nothing more than Boehner and the members he represents being taken again and again to the cleaners.

This is actually pretty brilliant. But not at all surprising once you understand  the GOP governing imperative.

Because House districts are so badly gerrymandered, the Republican majority in the House of Representatives is basically an illegitimate governing caucus.

David Wasserman, undisputed popular votemeister, has just updated his national House popular vote number with the certification of final results from New York State. And the Democrats now has a non-trivial lead of 1.362 million votes. 49.15% to 48.03%.

Understand this and you begin to understand why they do not govern as consensus-seeking dealmakers in the sense one would expect from a democratically representative body. Instead, as the minority delegation of a narrow interest, their behavior pursues that interest with reckless indifference to all other concerns. Unconcerned with the consequences of policy for anyone other than the narrow wealthy interest they represent, the minority governing party is encumbered only by the massive unpopularity of its goals. So, even for an illegitimate minority governing party, enacting an unpopular agenda requires some finesse.

The House Republicans do this in two ways.  First, they govern by perpetual crisis.  Fiscal cliffs, debt ceilings, government shutdowns, none of these crisis points the House GOP intentionally steers us toward every few months is anything other than a manufactured crisis of choice. They come about simply because Republicans want them to happen.  Like a spoiled child holding his breath, the Republicans force a negotiation based on their own absurd and dangerous behavior.  Of course the appropriate adult response to such foolishness is not to reward and encourage it. But, as we're all well aware, there are no adults in Washington.

The second tactic Republicans use to enact their unpopular policy agenda is affected victimhood. Which is why they are so eager to tell this story about how they were "taken to the cleaners." Most working people just saw a 2% bump in the payroll tax. Republicans know this is going to be unpopular. What better way to explain an unpopular tax increase than as the result of Obama's arm twisting? Nevermind that the payroll tax wasn't even part of the Fiscal Cliff negotiation. Neither side made it a priority.  The Republican story now is taxes are up and this is because Obama "won" the last negotiation. And since so many of us will see less money in our paychecks this month, this story is bound to resonate with the public.

All of this sets up the next round where Republicans, suddenly finding their backbone, are going to insist that Obama gives them something in return for their trouble. And what he's going to give them will just happen to be various forms of cuts to Social Security and Medicare.  For the average American that means paying more in taxes for a reduced benefit.  That's bound to be an incredibly unpopular program. But it's precisely what the narrow interests represented by the illegitimate governing minority party have wanted all along.  So they are winning.  But here's what's so brilliant about how they are winning.

Not only are Republicans closing the door on more tax revenues than they already provided Obama. And not only are they demanding unpopular spending cuts as their price for raising the debt limit. If you read between the lines, they’re actually insisting that Democrats put together the spending cuts themselves.

Remarkable.  The Republicans have forced major concessions on tax policy, pretended those concessions were actually Obama victories, and will parlay that into even more concessions on social spending policy all while painting those cuts as a Democratic initiative. And this week we were supposed to believe that a party on such a strong winning streak was really getting set to depose John Boehner? Why would they do such a thing?

Observers who focus on Boehner's weak leadership style or his supposed inability to control the Tea Party caucus are missing the point.  There's value for conservatives in victimhood.  A supposed challenger like Eric Cantor, for example, doesn't actually want to be Speaker because he doesn't want to be the guy everyone holds accountable for failures (even if they are not, in fact, failures). But he does enjoy being a guy who everyone "knows" is really on the side of those good Conservative principles which.. according to script... are always being abused.  

At the same time, there's value for Boehner in appearing too weak to control conservative recklessness.  He doesn't have to be fully accountable for the hard line agenda he seemingly has no choice but to push. And since none of the hardliners actually wants to be the sacrificial stooge, his position is never under any real threat. 

Boehner may be an idiot, I don't know. But even if he is he's a useful idiot.  He's the perfect useful idiot to pull of the remarkable trick the Republicans are currently executing anyway. And that trick isn't nearly as stupid as all the acting and posturing may make it appear.  

Transocean settlement coming today

WSJ:

Offshore driller Transocean Ltd. RIGN.VX +10.61% and the Justice Department are expected to announce a settlement Thursday afternoon that would wrap up all of the company's civil and criminal issues relating to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon accident in the Gulf of Mexico, according to people familiar with the talks.

Transocean was the owner of the drilling rig that exploded in April 2010, killing 11 workers and leading to the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history. The company is expected to pay fines and penalties of about $1.4 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Spokesmen for Transocean and the Department of Justice didn't return calls seeking comment.

As always, the devil comes in the details of these settlements which is where we find out how much money will actually go toward much needed coastal restoration work in Louisiana as opposed to how much goes to building condos in Tuscaloosa or making commercials for seafood.  At the moment we do not have this information.   

Update: Mark Schleifstein and Richard Thompson fill in the details here.

The Rent Is Too Damn High

And now, so is your payroll tax.

How much is the payroll tax going up, and who will be impacted?

Workers’ share now returns to 6.2 percent. Just about all of the country's 160 million wage earners will be affected, according to Joseph Rosenberg, a researcher at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. The Wall Street Journal has a handy calculator that tells you exactly how much more you'll have to pay in payroll taxes.

Because the payroll tax is capped, it will affect wage earners at $113,000 and below only. This is a 2% tax hike on the people least able to afford it coming during a period of stagnant growth and generally shitty employment numbers.

Worse yet, the "fiscal cliff" aversion doesn't actually accomplish anything other than set the stage for another round of bickering a few months from now.  And once we get there, the President and the Republicans in Congress will both emphasize their desire to complete the European-style "austerity" package by, what they will no doubt term "offsetting" these tax increases with spending cuts.  Which means the very benefits you are now paying more for will be slashed. 

This is what the President calls "everyone having some skin in the game." But what it amounts to in practice is most Americans just plain getting skinned.

Happy New Year! And go fuck yourself.

Flooding the city

Word choice, people! Get it together.

New Orleans — New Orleans Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas said his department will be flooding the French Quarter, Central Business District, Treme and Marigny with officers this week to control crime as revelers stream into New Orleans for a variety of big events.

Please, if at all possible, let us not encourage anyone charged with maintaining the public safety not to do anything that can be described as "flooding the city."  Especially when we're working so hard to get these numbers down.

Serpas’ said preliminary crime statistics show a small decrease in the city’s homicides in 2012 compared to 2011. New Orleans has recorded 193 homicides so far in 2012 compared to 199 in 2011. However, this year’s figure includes two homicides that were reported within minutes of Serpas announcing the slight decrease in killings and a third from early on Monday morning.

Now we're talking "preliminary crime statistics" here which I guess means we're still trying to figure out how to count the "mostly dead" but still go ahead and pat yourself on the back if you didn't murder anybody in 2012. Nice going. 

Meanwhile

RTA says  Carnival activities will take place at their accustomed venues.

New Orleans — As Carnival parades prepare to roll down St. Charles Avenue in the coming days, one crew is making way for those other krewes.

Workers have spent the past several months on a preventative maintenance project to replace crossties, track supports that are hidden under the grass, on the St. Charles line.

That work has reached the neutral ground between Euterpe and Josephine streets, leaving it a muddy mess, with heavy machinery at various spots along the avenue and a place unsuitable for parade-goers.

Regardless of how it looks now, RTA officials say, the area will be cleared in time for the crowds that will gather for the Krewes of Oshun and Cleopatra, the first parades in Orleans Parish, on Jan. 25.

"How it looks now," is pretty messed up. On New Year's Eve, Menckles and I took a midnight stroll along the neutral ground. There is a pretty nice view of the downtown fireworks from between Jackson Avenue and just about Felicity Street. That also happens to be where everything is pretty well torn up. RTA says it will be back together in time for Phunny Phorty Phellows to ride the streetcar in just 4 days from now. From the looks of things that would be an accomplishment.

Update: Maybe the NFL can chip in for whatever costs RTA may have incurred scheduling this work stoppage. It wouldn't be the first time somebody asked. 

Some parading organizations say the change comes at a big cost.  "There's a major impact on the Mardi Gras clubs, in my estimation, anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000," said Sam Scandaliato, captain of the Krewe of Pontchartrain.

Scandaliato's krewe is set to roll on January 26.  And he said having to roll so soon after the holidays has some out-of-town float riders skipping this year. He said participation this year is down about 10 percent.

"I think the clubs on that first weekend should be compensated in some degree by the NFL," said Scandaliato.

How soon will Goodell let us fire Spags?

In Monday's T-P Mike Triplett wrote a column in which he argued that Roger Goodell should reinstate Saints coach Sean Payton now rather than wait until the Superbowl is finished so that the organization can start to emerge from the limbo it has wallowed in for much of 2012.

When asked for an explanation why the Super Bowl was chosen as the end date for Payton's suspension instead of the Saints' final game, league spokesman Greg Aiello responded simply, "That was the decision that was made - for the 2012 NFL season."

And when asked if the league is considering an earlier reinstatement, Aiello said, "We are focused on the playoffs right now. We are not going to comment on Sean Payton's status. It will be addressed at the appropriate time."

Well, the appropriate time should be today.

Every decision the Saints make now will directly affect their ability to compete in 2013. And some of those decisions are bigger than others.

Should they consider replacing defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo after their defensive struggles this year? Or should they consider something even more drastic, like a switch to a 3-4 alignment that might suit their personnel better, especially if they plan to part ways with veteran end Will Smith in the offseason?

Triplett is right, of course.  Whether you believe the punishment the league meted out on the Saints and their fans was just, certainly we can all agree that their sentence shouldn't bleed over into a second season.

This morning, as if to drive the point home, we find this in regard to the Spagnuolo question.

One Saints player, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said a "resounding" yes when asked if he thought Spagnuolo should be fired after just one season in New Orleans as the Saints broke the single-season record for most yards allowed.

"Trust me all the guys were being politically correct this season when answering questions," the player said. "It's bad."

The player added: "To give up what we gave up can't be all talent. Look at where his units (have) been ranked before. I think one top 10?"

The Saints finished last in the NFL in total defense, last in run defense, 31st in pass defense, 31st in points allowed and tied for 29th in sacks.

"Players have no say in anything," the player said. "It was (a) complete opposite from before where it was a simple D that players had lot of control and say. We couldn't suggest (expletive)...Nothing ever changed. It was his way only.

"Don't even get me started on lack (of) ability to adjust during games. Bad, bad, bad."

So that certainly doesn't sound good, good, good.  Before today, most observers would have said Spagnuolo should be back. As historically bad as the defense's statistics ended up being, the performance did appear to improve steadily as the year went on.  This was also a team who won two games  by virtue of goal line stands and recorded a shutout.  It can't be all bad, right?  Maybe "bad, bad, bad," but not bad, bad, bad, bad... or something like that anyway.

Still if this anonymous player's comments are accurate, and if they reflect a consensus view of the players, then I would lean toward letting Spags go.  In pro football players, especially veterans, are more partners than they are subordinates.  If Spagnuolo doesn't treat them as such, they're not going to respond well to him.  But until Sean Payton puts down the axe and picks up the clipboard, nobody who can make a decision one way or the other is around to do that.  This thing could linger and fester for another month or it could be fixed in a couple of days.  Unfortunately, once again, that's left up to Roger Goodell.

Update: Hastily forgot to put this in. The anonymous player's comments have been corroborated to some degree already by former Saints fullback Mike Karney. Karney also played under Spagnuolo when he was head coach of the Rams.

@karney44 Do you think Spags is a poor coach, or poor at relating to his players? Or both?
— Reid G. (@ReidG75) January 2, 2013

@reidg75 both.. The article is dead on..

— Mike Karney (@Karney44) January 2, 2013

Further proof nobody knows how the hell NOLA.com works

Feds seeking information on 11 additional NOLA.com commenters

The aliases that the federal government wants to know more about are as follows: "FormerNOPDman," "mardigraswizard," "lawdawg1963," "nolacat60," "FSU1982," "alafbi," thewizard," "copperhead504," "isthisthingon?," "Andjusticeforall," and "uckzerto."

The Times-Picayune could find no evidence that "nolacat60" has ever been a username on the site. Two of the handles -- "thewizard" and "isthisthingon" -- exist on the site, but neither one has posted any comments, according to a search of NOLA.com.

Cliff diving

All you really need on this today is this Digby post.