Nobody actually lives here

This is from Tuesday's Advocate. It's a blurb explaining the result of a visitor survey produced by UNO upon the commission of two of the state boards who spend public money doing market research for New Orleans hoteliers.

But the study goes beyond mere hotel occupancy in order to count tourists.

The results of the New Orleans Area Visitor Profile are obtained by using hotel occupancy figures, calls to a sampling of local residents to ask whether they had friends or relatives stay with them, and an estimate of the number of people who did not stay in hotels when they visited. The latter is generated by surveying visitors at Louis Armstrong International Airport, the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center and other destinations.

Notably, this week's Gambit refers to this same aspect of this same survey when introducing a series of personal vignettes on Airbnb.

City Council is currently considering a new regulatory framework that could permit short term rentals turning them into a more reliable source of tax revenue, yes, but also turning more of the housing stock over to the hotel business. Thus driving up the cost of housing for the few of us who manage to still actually live here.

From the point of view of the landlords pushing this policy change, tourism rentals are potentially more lucrative and less of a headache than regular tenants.  This is especially true for well-capitalized landlords who own multiple properties in New Orleans.   If the recent real estate listings are any indication, there is no shortage of this kind of speculative investment going on around town right now.

From the city's point of view, well maintained and revenue generating properties that nobody actually lives in are a win win.  Money is coming in. "Blight" is reduced. Plus there aren't as many actual residents hanging around complaining about how they need stuff like schools and police and public transit that doesn't just move conventioneers around downtown. The city is currently holding an adjudicated property sale you might have read about which figures to place more residential property in "historic neighborhoods" into the hands of vacation rental companies.

The Gambit articles are pretty terrible. Each in its own way looks to validate the triumph of the forced side-hustle desperation we have come to euphemize as the "sharing economy" by reducing the issue to irrelevant little anecdotes about how Gambit writers feel about things.

Anna Gaca lives next to a short-term rental. She sums up Gambit's know-nothing attitude toward it pretty well. 

Despite many reasons it could bother me, the constant stream of visitors doesn't. It's a little odd to have strangers around all the time, but I can relate to young travelers. Potential issues of regulation and tax evasion seem more like my neighbor's problem than mine. As New Orleans apartment hardships go, I prefer tourists to roaches, leaky ceilings and Cox installation.

Would I feel differently if I owned my home, rather than renting? Probably. And there are drawbacks, most obviously the impossibility of securing a shared backyard to which guests need 24-hour access. If I had allergies or small children, I wouldn't be so unfazed about opening my back door and seeing strangers playing with their dog. When visitors park cars stuffed with road trip gear on the street, I worry the block could become a easy target for theft.

Gambit is a schizophrenic publication.  Despite the fact that it's under constant pressure to be a glorified boutique ad sheet, it still does style itself an "alternative" newspaper with an interest in public affairs.  As such, maybe they should aspire to better than "not my problem!" Instead, we have a deliberate appeal to lifestyle sensibilities.  "I guess this might bug you if you were like, old or something," this reporter says, in essence. Besides, having tourists around all the time is fun. It's almost like living in a dorm room.  Better than Cox-roaches, anyway, amirite?  

Alex Woodward uses Airbnb when he goes to Brooklyn. To hear him tell it, Airbnb, is a great social leveler.

There's a certain kind of privilege in travel. It's the first thing you don't do when budgets are tight. If you can afford it, you want absolute control — over how much you spend and where. Hotels are one option, friends' couches are another and Airbnb opens a third. Airbnb believes itself to be the community-building, connection-making answer to the burgeoning sharing economy, in which we travel to meet new people, make and tell stories and connect on some vaguely humanitarian level. Airbnb "connects people to unique travel experiences," and, in bold capital letters, tells you to "BELONG ANYWHERE."

You could get cynical about that mantra — but then your eyes glaze over as you peruse the beautiful listings in faraway places on your to-do list. Airbnb's biggest selling point is that it's everywhere you want to be. Hilton Hotels advertised its properties as a familiar place in every vacationland you could imagine; Airbnb actually is that.

"You could be cynical" about a company valued at $10 billion   built on the subversion of consumer and labor protections through clever regulatory arbitrage selling itself as "community-building" humanitarianism.   But that would just be your "privilege" showing.  Better to let your eyes glaze over and be a more self-absorbed consumer. But, you know, in that smug "connection-making" way that people like now.

Jeanie Riess makes some connections she would probably rather not have. Although, something tells me the two New Orleans Airbnb rentals she samples were chosen specifically for their creep factor.

I make it inside and enter my bedroom through the kitchen. The bed is huge and has two polyester comforters and a set of thin, fake silk sheets that smell like Febreze.

I really do not want to sleep here. Everything around me tells me that I should not, from the dark and stormy night to the crusty spoon to the fact that I'm a single female sharing a house with an older man I don't know.

At least she was uncomfortable enough that she didn't have to be too embarrassed about "privilege."  On the other hand, it cost $140 per night so who even knows what that means anymore? I think in the post-modern usage employed for the benefit of Gambit readers, "privilege" is the original sin you didn't spend enough money buying the "authenticity" required to cover up.

Finally, Missy Wilkinson lets out her own home via Airbnb. She says it's easy money, this moonlighting in the (don't call it) tourism business that she does.

I live in Bywater a few blocks from the Mississippi River. The neighborhood is in demand among Airbnb travelers (always travelers, never tourists) — it's close enough to the French Quarter to be convenient, far away enough to be "authentic."

Like the Mississippi with its life-giving sediment, travelers flow through my home and leave it a little richer. There's the Dutch professor who gave me an impromptu art lesson. The Israeli graphic designer who gifted me with her art, which now hangs in the master bedroom.

The image of visitors travelers leaving "sediment" (perhaps in the bathtub) is difficult to shake. Maybe someday we can use it to replenish our wetlands. In any case, the impression of Airbnb conveyed from the isolated ant's eye level is simply that it's honest work. It pays the bills and "leaves the home a little richer" in a figurative sense as well.  And good for Missy that she's comfortable taking that on for the extra money.

I would suggest, though, that these entrepreneurial personal enrichment experiences aren't representative of what Airbnb's eventual impact is going to be in the aggregate. 

Although the company refuses to release numbers, a data analysis commissioned by The Chronicle found almost 5,000 San Francisco homes, apartments, and private or shared rooms for rent via Airbnb. Two-thirds were entire houses or apartments, showing how far Airbnb has come from its couch-surfer origins, and contradicting its portrayal as a service for people who rent out a spare room and interact with guests.

And 160 entire homes or apartments seem to be rented full time, giving weight to arguments that the service is allowing landlords to flout strict rental laws.

The real story here is about how 21st Century capitalism is enabling a speculative real estate industry, with the blessing of political leadership, to create boutique neighborhoods of part-time occupants where nobody actually lives.  Maybe Gambit will get around to telling that story eventually. But they have not done so this week.

Turf wars

Malachi Hull is suing. 

The former head of the New Orleans Taxicab Bureau has filed a federal lawsuit against the city of New Orleans, claiming he was wrongfully fired for expressing concerns about the "ride-sharing" transportation service Uber.

Thou shalt not take the name of Uber in vain.. or so goes the claim, I guess. I'm sure several people will yell at me over the next several weeks that Hull is a bad person and such. Maybe they're right. But consider this is a main part of the argument against him.

The city fired Hull in July 2014 after two Taxicab Bureau investigators under his supervision were charged with assault. After Hull was fired, Inspector General Ed Quatreveaux released a damning report on his tenure as director, accusing Hull of operating a rogue agency that allowed its employees to carry mace, handcuffs and act like a quasi-police force.

Note that one year after firing this "rogue" for creating a "quasi-police force,"  the city has gotten together with the hospitality industry (some aspects of which Hull's department once regulated) to create its own quasi-police force. 

Gondola to nowhere

Among the several things I do not understand about this is, according to the drawing, it is a smaller tower in the shape of and right next to the tower they are already bidding on renovating. Anyway I don't think this particular bid has much of a chance, so it's probably a moot point.

Maybe just don't be in the club

As Jason reminds us, the Oklahoma story that is buzzing around this week is hardly an exception. He digs out an older post about a local "problem frat" as an example.

I originally wrote the post during the 2010 New Orleans mayoral election after candidate and now owner of the The Advocate, John Georges, had the chutzpah to declare himself "the black candidate" in the race while simultaneously touting his role as a former Tulane DKE president on his political resume.  My hope in making the post was that Georges would exorcise the demons of his past by denouncing the fraternity's actions and history of racism.  Instead, he simply ignored the entire issue. When opposing mayoral candidate Rob Couhig pressed him about the matter on a WWL-TV candidate forum, Georges wrote it off as simple fodder from blogs that can't be trusted.

I thought it prescient to repost this story today to remind folks that institutionalized racism is still alive and thriving behind the closed doors of collegiate fraternities throughout the South

But it goes beyond just "the closed doors of collegiate fraternities."  In fact, the drawing power of campus greek organizations rests in the assumption that they feed into the elite circles of post-graduate society.  And the fortunes of  those elite circles are based on a long history of white supremacy merged with an ongoing system of political and economic oligarchy.  

In other words the whole damn system is morally corrupt and always has been. It's the point I tried to make when the Steve Scalise story was in play. And it's the thing to pay attention to here. These aren't just dumb kids acting dumb. These are sons of the club following the path that club members always follow so that one day they can be in the club too. 

Don't be in the damn club.

“The human equivalent of pond scum”

James Carville is not a fan of Governor Grover Norquist.

James Carville, a Louisiana native and well-known political strategist and pundit, calls anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist “the human equivalent of pond scum” but also “the most powerful person in our state,” in a new letter to the editor of LSU’s student newspaper.

In the letter, which The Reveille posted online Wednesday, Carville takes Norquist and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal to task for the state’s budget woes.

“The news from the governor’s office and the state Legislature has attained a level of buffoonery and comedy before unseen in a state with a long history of both,” Carville writes. “Our beloved university is being systematically dismantled and as a result of our governor and a significant portion of our Legislature pledging allegiance to a Washington lobbyist with the long history of shady dealings.”

Also, James Carville used the word "buffoonery" to describe people other than himself. So that's fun.

The good news is, the buffoonery and comedy and the fact that everybody pretty much hates Bobby Jindal now promises to make for a chaotic legislative session.   This will undoubtedly result in some of those terrible painful cuts everyone has been dreading. But it could also allow you to do some interesting things if you play the strategy well enough.

A team of economists that has been studying the state’s taxing structure said Tuesday Louisiana legislators could raise $800 million immediately by raising the tax on cigarettes, partially rolling back inventory taxes, and stopping the practice of allowing taxpayers to write off their federal deductions on state returns.

But the authors of the Louisiana Tax Study were charged by the Legislature to come up with long-term structural solutions — not short-term fixes for the fiscal year that begins July 1. They gave a preview to their coming report to a joint meeting of the Louisiana House Ways & Means and state Senate Revenue & Fiscal Affairs committees.

“We have an outdated, broken tax structure,” House Speaker Chuck Kleckley, R-Lake Charles, said.

Tax credits, exemptions and other breaks for business have mushroomed over the past decade. A handful of the giveaway programs examined by The Advocate in a recent series found that their cost had shot up from just over $200 million to $1.1 billion during the past decade.

There are some truly awful.. talking Ancien Regime France awful... privileges for wealthy special interests written into the Louisiana tax code.  You might be able to root a few of those out while the buffoons are somewhat sympathetic.   

"Choice" is a perpetual hustle

The new normal in Orleans Parish public schools is constant upheaval. Schools close every year. Sometimes they close because they are "failing." Other times, as in the case of Lagniappe Academy, they close because the spirit of competition introduced by the charter system incentivizes them to cheat.

New charters are granted. Student bodies are disbanded entirely and parents have to scramble to fight their way through the enrollment process all over again.  So every year a lot of students are starting their lives all over again.   Look how fun that is.

And that's a built in feature. This is how it's supposed to work.

Life in "Cap Hell"

Just a few very quick things about the Jimmy Graham trade.

1) No, Jimmy is not a cap casualty. 

It’s also worth noting that this was not a cap move. Despite the Saints struggling to reel in their spending by Tuesday’s 3 p.m. deadline to get down to $143.8 million in salary, that task was accomplished and parting ways with Graham was not fueled solely by money. By trading him, the team only saves $2 million against the cap. This was about football. If it wasn’t, the team would have converted Graham’s $5 million roster bonus to a signing bonus to create additional space.

2) Everybody knows that the biggest problem with the team last year was the offensive line.  More so than cornerback, even, in my opinion... not that that wasn't a problem also, but Holder has it backwards here. 

At center, the Saints bring in a proven veteran with plenty of credentials. Unger will turn 29 in April and has Pro Bowl selections in 2012 and 2013 along with an All-Pro selection in 2012 on his resume. Coach Sean Payton said solidifying the middle of the offensive line was the team's No. 2 priority behind filling the void at cornerback opposite Keenan Lewis.

Unger only played six games in the regular season in 2014, dealing with ankle and knee injuries, but he returned to start in all three postseason games. His injury history must not be an issue, right? (See: Jairus Byrd).

I hesitate to say the Saints lacked confidence in Tim Lelito being able to handle the starting center duties, though. The futures of guards Jahri Evans and Ben Grubbs aren't concrete (is anyone's now?), so maybe the Saints have a plan up to shift Lelito to that spot. I'm not discounting anything.

Let's assume Unger is healthy. (Just as likely to be as Graham is anyway.  There's an outside chance this is one of those trades that gets voided when neither player passes a physical.)  Either Evans or Grubbs could very well be toast.  Lelito is probably ready to play at guard anyway. In any case, it all needs to be shaken up. 

3) Josh Hill is a pretty good tight end. Probably not gonna get 1200 yards out of him but the dude will make some plays. We've already seen that happen.

4) Maybe it's just because Graham is kind of a jerk.  Enjoy Seattle. They're looking forward to hanging out with you.

Cooperating

It's probably just some technical quirk but I don't quite get, if Ira Thomas is "cooperating with authorities," why would he plead not guilty?

The bill of information laid out the details of a sting operation carried out by federal authorities in which a confidential witness approached a School Board employee about the contract and then allegedly talked with that employee and Thomas about paying a kickback.

Polite’s office said the confidential witness ultimately delivered $5,000 to someone identified as “Private Citizen B,” who then split the money with Thomas.

Thomas faces charges of conspiracy to commit bribery and wire fraud, which could cost him up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that you could find a $5,000 kickback on at least 1 out of 3 of the semi-privatized charter school boards around town.... you know.. if they ever complied with open records laws.

I look forward to the US Attorney's in-depth investigation of that business.  Should I just wait here for that or what?

Disaster capitalism at the capitol

You really have to hand it to LABI for their chutzpah here. Every budget crisis is an opportunity for new tax cuts for their clients. The rest of us will have to make "sacrifices," of course.

Life in Cap Hell

Bye, Curtis.

The New Orleans Saints have released linebacker and defensive captain Curtis Lofton, who confirmed the news to NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune on Monday.

"Being released," Lofton said via text message.

He was reportedly on the trading block last week, but the Saints apparently found no takers.

Lofton would have counted $9.25 million against the cap in 2015 and had a $4.5 roster bonus due in a few days. The move will save the Saints $4.25 million in 2015 or $7.25 million if Lofton is designated as a post-June 1 release.

It was about this time last year that "Cap Hell" caused the Saints to release Roman Harper and Malcolm Jenkins and then everybody freaked out.  But then they turned around and signed Jairus Byrd and we all laughed hi five.  "Cap Hell" didn't exist.  What an absurd thing to have worried about.

And then Byrd played 2 games before getting hurt while Jenkins and Harper logged something like 500 pick-6es between them last season and the Saints finished 7-9.

Anyway, tomorrow the Saints will sign some dude and "Cap Hell" won't exist again.

Everybody hates Bobby

Good thing he's barely even trying to be Governor anymore.  Nobody likes that guy.

State Rep. Jay Morris, R-Monroe, recently sent an email out to his supporters criticizing Gov. Bobby Jindal's approach to closing Louisiana's projected $1.6 billion budget gap, accusing the governor of being too beholden to a national anti-tax group.

"I'm no psychologist or psychiatrist but in my opinion what is going on as we approach session is insane. The insanity has its roots in the Governor's pledge to the Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), the taxpayer advocacy group based in Washington, DC headed by its founder, Grover Norquist," wrote Morris in a mass email.

Too bad Grover Norquist gets to be Governor in the meantime, though.  Did you vote for him?

Heckuva job

Louisiana is over 7% unemployment while the rest of the country is at 5.5% according to the latest survey. (We're bucking the trend!)  The coming legislative session promises to be an exercise in desperation as lawmakers consider crippling cuts to the state's universities, hospitals, and public schools.

Bobby Jindal is pretty proud of his work, though. Our state makes a great prop in his pitch to be seen as the most hard-ass conservative in the Republican presidential primary. Thanks for giving him two terms to use us this way, guys.

Gentrification is a policy choice

The city of New Orleans has an affordable housing problem.  39 percent of children in New Orleans live in poverty and the rent continues to get too damn higher.

Meanwhile, the city has access to a considerable of vacant tax adjudicated housing stock.  You could do a lot of things with those circumstances.  The city has chosen to "put the properties back into commerce" by allowing speculators to try and flip them, though.

Eventually the poverty rate will have to go down because nobody will actually live here. Problem solved, right?

Or we could just put money directly into coastal restoration

Louisiana has a multi-billion dollar problem involving its sinking coastline.  You might have heard about this. 

As Brig. Gen Duke DeLuca wrapped up his 32-year career with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in August, he contemplated the key to Louisiana’s massive, 50-year, $50 billion effort to prevent the southeastern portion of the state from being swallowed by the Gulf of Mexico.

DeLuca, an expert on the many threats facing the coast, said: “It will take a moon-shot type of investment in the science.”

Unfortunately, we don't really do "moon-shot" level investing in any science that isn't primarily about blowing things up. (Recall the actual moon shot was, itself, about building rockets and beating the Soviets.)

Instead, when it comes to funding big projects with no obvious military purpose, we take bank-shots. So, instead of just putting money directly into coastal restoration, we see how much we can coax heavy industry to contribute to the cause.   How do we do that?  By selling them licenses to keep on throwing soot into the air in California.

Carbon credits, derived from the additional absorption of greenhouse gases from the air, can be put up for sale in two markets.

The first market is in California, where industrial facilities are required to make up for the amount of greenhouse gas they release by either finding ways to reduce those emissions or by buying carbon credits for reductions elsewhere. The second market is a voluntary market where companies look for ways to reduce their carbon footprint by purchasing carbon credits to offset greenhouse gases they release during the course of business.

The regulatory market usually results in a higher price for the credits, but both could provide a market for Louisiana wetlands building, as imagined over the next 50 years in the state coastal master plan.

See? Everybody wins!  Well, OK, not everybody, really. 

“I don’t see carbon fully funding a coastal restoration project, but I see it could help fund projects,” said Sarah Mack, one of the report’s authors and president and CEO of Tierra Resources. 

You know, it helps a little. But the polluters get to keep on polluting with a slightly clearer conscience. And that's really the point.  If it wasn't we'd just go ahead and force the industries that cause environmental damage to pay for repairs.  But we've already said we don't want to do that.  

Tourism matters

I like to think of this as the "New Orleans Will" campaign of Selma.

The billboard was erected by the friends of Forrest, Inc., a historical group that says it meant nothing racist by placing the billboard so close to this historic Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Spokeswoman Patricia Goodwin told the News, “That billboard was put there with positive intent to ask people who come to Selma to explore and enjoy our 19th century history. Does it say anything in the Constitution where a certain faction of people cannot be offended? I’m offended by all these people walking around with their pants hanging around their knees.”

What? All we're doing is promoting the tourist industry.  Wouldn't it be better, too, if the people walking around our historic attractions would behave in a less scary way?  That's all we're trying to do. Also, pull up your pants.

Un-Serpas Signal

Ronal Serpas is no longer the Chief of Police in New Orleans. But his legacy lives on.

NEW ORLEANS, LA,- The NOPD Traffic Division will conduct a sobriety checkpoint beginning at  9:00 p.m. on Thursday, March 5, 2015, to 5:00 a.m. on Friday, March 6, 2015.  Motorists will experience minimal delays and should have the proper documentation available if requested, i.e., proof of insurance, driver’s license, etc.

Drive carefully.

Quantity over quality

A writer writes, they say.

If this whole president thing doesn’t work out, Bobby Jindal should consider another career path: columnist.

Since becoming the governor of Louisiana in 2008, Jindal has amassed a clip file of guest editorials that would be the envy of any freelance opinion writer.

For the record, some of us began speculating about Jindal's punditry ambitions a year ago at the latest.  Have you read some of those clips, though?   They are not good. As in, they appear to be written by a 14 year old for a 10 year old. But with maybe more outright lying than you would expect.

But then hackery never demanded much in the way of talent, let alone honesty.

Indispensable man

Last month, Mickey Loomis told reporters that the Saints had "a plan" to deal with this season's edition of "Cap Hell" (which may or may not exist depending on which theology you are subscribed to.)  Loomis didn't give away too many details but he did say, ""I wouldn't call it easy."

He also hinted that it might entail some emotional difficulty.

Loomis said he would view the team critically without overreacting to last year's finish.

"Every year we've got to look at our team with a critical eye and try not to be swayed by the emotional investment we have in any given team," he said. "That's true whether you're 11-5 or 7-9. Obviously we've got a different feeling after 7-9 and not living up to expectations that I think we all had coming into last season.

For a while, the ordeal of coming to terms with disappointment was limited only to the Benson family.  This week, that is beginning to change.

Yesterday, we learned that the Saints are "shopping" their most productive defensive player as well as their (currently) most controversial one. And then this happened.

NEW ORLEANS - The Saints have released fan favorite and Super Bowl hero Pierre Thomas.

Thomas all but confirmed the move with a Tweet to fans of the team. The move was first Tweeted by Ian Rapoport of NFL.com.

"I want to thank the New Orleans Saints organization, all my coaches, my teammates and the Who Dat Nation for an amazing adventure," Thomas Tweeted from his official account. "I have so many wonderful memories I will never forget. I am thankful to have spent the past 8 years in the great city of New Orleans! As the saying goes, all good things must come to an end but I'm not done yet."

My my does the time fly or what.  For most fans it feels like only yesterday when Pierre was magically hatched from an egg to beat Antonio Pittman out of a roster spot during the 2007 pre-season. We took it as an auspicious sign that Sean Payton was the kind of coach who would allow a rookie free agent to render his 4th round draft pick irrelevant.  Looking back, it may have been the best decision of Payton's Saints tenure.

"Underrated." That's the first thing most fans will want you to know about Thomas.  Let them keep talking and they'll tell about his uncanny balance, or his vision, or the fact that he almost never fumbled.  Someone will talk about screen passes.  But everyone will want you to know about how underrated all of this was.

During a time when there are fewer running backs among the NFL's marquee superstars, Thomas was never a household name outside of New Orleans.  Having shared playing time with Deuce McAllister, Reggie Bush, Darren Sproles, Mark Ingram, and the legendary Jedidiah Collins, Pierre was never even the most famous back on the Saints' roster.  But an argument can be made that (other than the quarterback, of course) he was the most important player on the team.

Just take a look at what Reid has compiled, for example. You may have instinctively understood that Pierre Thomas was "underrated."  Did you realize, though, that he was essential?

In 2009, Pierre Thomas cemented his legend as a Saint during the postseason. In the NFC Championship Game, Thomas scored on a long screen pass on the Saints' first drive to even the score at 7. Later in the game, he scored again. In overtime, in the game's most crucial moment, Sean Payton called on PT to return the kickoff. Thomas promptly returned the kick 40 yards, setting the stage for an historic overtime victory.

Not quite finished though, PT secured a critical first down on a fourth-and-1 leap to set up Garrett Hartley's game-winning field goal--a play in which a lesser guy would have fumbled, or been driven backwards, from the thunderous hit delivered by Vikings' linebacker Chad Greenway. 

Two weeks later in Super Bowl 44, Pierre Thomas scored one of the most iconic touchdowns in Saints' history on the most beautiful god damn screen pass you've ever screen. This was the finishing touch on Ambush, a sequence that catapulted the Saints to Super Bowl glory.

Lost in the shuffle is Pierre Thomas' 2011 playoff game against Detroit, one in which he quietly contributed 66 yards rushing and 55 yards receiving. Thomas' presence on the field, though, steadied a Saints' team that started slowly. His 59 first-half yards kept the Saints afloat while much of the team fumbled through a listless first half.

The next week in San Francisco, the Saints weren't so lucky. On the game's opening drive, Thomas, on the doorstep of the end zone, took a vicious hit and left the game with a concussion. The Saints then fell into a huge hole and never recovered that day, and one might argue that neither so have the Payton-era Saints.

With Pierre Thomas in the fold for that entire playoff game in San Francisco, one wonders how different Saints' history might look right now. 

That's what they call a "big game player." During the most crucial moments of the Saints' most glorious run, Pierre Thomas was the indispensable man. 

Even when it comes to our greatest heroes, we sports fans can be a critical lot.  Even the most famous contributors to this Golden Era of Saints football have drawn our ire.  Reggie Bush couldn't just put his head down and run forward. Roman Harper fell down all the time.  Mark Ingram was a general disappointment for a few years. Jeremy Shockey was a douchebag. Jimmy Graham is almost as much of one. Junior Galette thinks you are all "fake fans." Even Drew Brees is an annoying brand whore.

Nobody ever complained about Pierre Thomas for any reason unless it was to wonder why he wasn't getting the ball more.

There's a real short list of Saints, even from this era of smelling greatness, who are unconditionally loved by everybody. I tried getting people to name them on Twitter this afternoon. We came up with Steve Gleason, Deuce McAllister, Marques Colston, Scott Fujita, and Tracy Porter before we got into an area where people might dispute some names.

We all agree that Pierre Thomas is one of those guys, though.  When you lose those players, it hurts.  At least it does until they come out with their own brand of barbecue sauce two or three years later. So we've got that to look forward to, at least.


See also:  Here is a B&G Review post that went up just as I was finishing this.

Horticultural creationism

Another day, another Jindal budget feud.

During a discussion on programs and the governor’s proposed budget for the coming year, assistant superintendent Dave ‘Lefty’ Lefkowith noted deep cuts that the Jindal administration has recommended for the Education Department’s executive budget — heavily implying that the cuts are a response to the political battle between Jindal and Superintendent of Education John White.

“Let’s just be adults about this,” Lefkowith said.

 Stafford Palmieri, Jindal’s chief of staff, denied that the cuts are politically motivated.

“All of the departments are taking cuts like that this year,” she shot back. “That’s just the reality of a $1.6 billion shortfall.”

“I wish I could grow money on trees, but I can’t,” she added, drawing laughter in the room, which had grown quiet in the back-and-forth.

One would think, though, that given this Education Department's creative approach to science instruction, they might still figure out a way to do that.  As long as the money doesn't evolve from the tree, it should work out OK.

Great, when can we see it?

Newell is bogarting the good footage.

METAIRIE, La. – An agitated Jefferson Parish Sheriff Newell Normand lashed out at a teenager whose family filed suit against the department after he was punched by a deputy during an arrest – an incident that was captured on video and shared on YouTube.

Brady Becker suffered visible injuries from the punches and his case has been a cause célèbre in the news as Becker's family and his attorney held press conferences to denounce the physical arrest.

"I'm mystified by his asking for my deputy's job. He caused this. I expect an apology" from Becker, Normand said.

Wednesday, almost three weeks after the incident, Normand fired back, saying that Becker started the incident and is fully to blame for everything that occurred.

"We didn't start this, Becker did," the sheriff said.

Normand said a longer version of the video than the one that had been released to the public was shot and showed much more of the incident.

Also, "He started it!" is pretty funny, although WWL picked up on that too. 

Most people are not necessary

The work you do is probably more easily automated than you think it is.

Automated Insights, a company that provides language generation software to The Associated Press and other organizations, announced Wednesday the news cooperative will use the software to produce thousands of stories about collegiate sports.

The Associated Press will begin publishing automatically generated sports stories this spring, beginning with Division I baseball, according to a press release.

We could see these developments as an opportunity to de-couple the right to a decent living from the obligation to perform labor, however pointless.   Or we could continue to compete with one another in a stupid race to see who "deserves" more.  Which way do you think we'll take that?

Permanent omnidirectional war

I'm so old I can remember when a lot of people voted for this administration because they said they were tired of permanent omnidirectional wars.

Many Democrats feared Obama’s proposal was too broad, and that the lack of geographic limits along with the inclusion, beyond ISIL, of “associated forces” to the bill would write yet another blank check for war.

But the administration pushed back hard: “Our focus, and the focus of this authorization to use military force, is on ISIL,” said White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest on the day Obama unveiled his proposal.

This was decidedly not the approach the administration took today in a hearing held by the House Armed Services Committee. Obama’s undersecretary for defense policy, Christine Wormouth, explicitly affirmed to Republican Representative Richard Nugent that the proposed authorization is not limited to ISIL, and could be used all over the globe to fight a broad war against Islamic “extremism” generally.

 Oh well.

Punch the rich

If only Warren Buffet were correct about this.

He continued that while there are “plenty of other candidates” whose political style he doesn’t agree with, “I do think it’s — I think it’s a mistake to get angry with your, with people that disagree with you,” he said of her. “In the end we do have to work together… And it does not help when you demonize or get too violent with the people you’re talking to.”

As much as I'm enjoying the mental image of Elizabeth Warren running around punching billionaires in the face, I am sorry to say I don't think she's actually as threatening to them as Buffet imagines.  Warren's role is to provide disgruntled liberals with the illusion that someone in the Democratic party gets them so that they will at least remain engaged enough to hold their noses and vote for Hillary in 2016.

Unpopular lame duck governor might have trouble twisting arms

The good news for him is he probably doesn't care all that much.  Anyway, he's probably not going to be able to make these business groups agree to pay their taxes.

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) - Louisiana's business-lobbying groups are calling a centerpiece of Gov. Bobby Jindal's budget proposal a multimillion-dollar tax hike on business, pitting the governor against powerful industry leaders in the upcoming legislative session.

The Republican governor wants to lessen spending on refundable tax credits, in which the state pays out more than the taxes a person or business owes. He proposes to use the savings to pay for public colleges and health care services in the fiscal year that begins July 1, as he looks for ways to close a $1.6 billion budget gap.

Business organizations object to the most expensive tax break targeted: the inventory tax credit, which refunds businesses for paying local property taxes on their inventory. Jindal wants to limit the credit to only cover a business' state tax liability, which the administration estimates would save the state as much as $377 million annually.

Maybe someone else can.

State Sen. Ben Nevers and Rep. Harold Ritchie, both Democrats from Bogalusa, have introduced similar bills calling for a new tax on the oil and natural gas industry. The purpose of the legislation is to direct more money to higher education and health care services -- which are facing drastic cuts next year.

"We wanted to make sure the topic was discussed on both sides of the Legislature," Nevers said.

Nevers and Ritchie's measures call for at least $300 million from the proposed oil and gas tax to be spent on higher education, $250 million to go to health care services, $80 million to go to prekindergarten or early childhood programs, $250 million to go to state employee retirement benefits and $150 million to go to transportation needs.

Although probably not.

Turns out that Ferguson is in fact an Amercian city

If its police force is any indication, anyway.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Justice Department investigation will allege sweeping patterns of discrimination within the Ferguson, Missouri, police department and at the municipal jail and court, a law enforcement official familiar with the report said Tuesday.

The report, which could be released as soon as Wednesday, will charge that police disproportionately use excessive force against blacks and that black drivers are stopped and searched far more often than white motorists, even though they're less likely to be carrying contraband.

The Justice Department also found that blacks were 68 percent less likely than others to have their cases dismissed by a municipal court judge, and that from April to September of last year, 95 percent of people kept at the city jail for more than two days were black, according to the official. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak on the record before the report is made public.

So, it's pretty much what we thought. The police are aggressive, violent, and racist. If you live in the U.S. you will already be familiar with this.

So what are we doing about it?  Oh, what you might think.  We've come up with an expensive but techy-sounding solution that will allow some contractor to make a little money.  If you live in the U.S. you will already be familiar with that as well.

IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — Taser International, the stun-gun maker emerging as a leading supplier of body cameras for police, has cultivated financial ties to police chiefs whose departments have bought the recording devices, raising a host of conflict-of-interest questions.

A review of records and interviews by The Associated Press show Taser is covering airfare and hotel stays for police chiefs who speak at promotional conferences. It is also hiring recently retired chiefs as consultants, sometimes just months after their cities signed contracts with Taser.

 Just remember, Taser International is schmoozing police chiefs for your safety, citizen.

Can't reinflate the water balloon

20 years ago in Baton Rouge, a college roommate of mine came back from a geology class barely able to restrain his glee. 

"New Orleans is sinking!" he beamed.  "Y'all gonna have to move out of that shithole."

My roommate was a proud small town Cajun boy from Iota.  I don't think he actually disliked the city as much as he just enjoyed talking shit about it to me whenever he could. Anyway, today he was excited to have some new ammunition.

Having been raised in the sinking shithole, I was already aware of its peculiar and precarious geographic situation. The city was shaped like a bowl. Its land dipped below sea level. Its borders were ringed by levees and walls to keep out the water from the surrounding lakes and marshes. The lakes and marshes were, in turn, being eaten by the sea beyond them. Meanwhile the drained swamp inside the bowl was settling lower and lower each year. The problem was only going to get worse over time.

We knew all of this.  We learned about it in elementary school.  I remember a public awareness stunt that would happen at the beginning of hurricane season where some group went around town with a giant ruler that was supposed to represent the height of a storm surge in the worst case scenario.  It looked bad. But, ironically, the constant little reminders also made it seem sort of routine. The result of this public information campaign was not action so much as acceptance. Of course the city is sinking, we all thought.  Didn't you learn that in sixth grade? Geeze. Besides, I told my friend, in the meantime living there was a (sinking) ride worth taking.

You might think the experience of the Katrina flood would alter that attitude a bit.  But I'm not sure that it has.  Instead, what's happened in the 10 years since is, rather than take the actions necessary to make the city viable in the long term, we've once again simply accepted the reality of its vulnerability.  Katrina's floodline is our new giant ruler. We all know the city is doomed. Didn't you see what happened in 2005? Geeze.

It's important to keep this in mind when you read in the newspaper, perhaps for the first time this week, what many of us old timers have known for decades.  New Orleans's world class drainage system is a curse as much as it is a blessing.

Originally, the water table under New Orleans stayed high thanks to an almost annual soaking from Mississippi River floods. But when levees were raised to protect the city from those floods, the water table started dropping and the soils began to drain, dry and sink. That problem was magnified when development spread blankets of concrete and asphalt across the landscape, reducing the ability of rainfall to recharge the water table.

New Orleanians live in a city that gets an average of 60 inches of rain a year, yet they know the area’s rare droughts can cause expensive problems as well: sink holes develop in streets, houses begin to list like leaking ships, cracks spider across walls, and doors start sticking in their jambs as homes begin to move with the ground beneath them.

But for a population living in a bowl, fear of flooding from frequent torrential rains was always the greater concern, and higher priority. The result is a vast storm-water drainage system featuring some 1,300 miles of subsurface pipes leading water to a series of deep outfall canals linked to 23 pumping stations which rank among the largest in the world.

And they’re always working.

“Some of those lines just continuously drain water from the soils beneath the area and into the canals, even when there is no rain,” Waggoner said. “So there is this constant tapping into the water table.”

 What they are proposing as a remedy is a $9 billion plan they say might help stabilize the water table.

That acknowledgement began to turn into citizen action in 2013 with the release of the Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan, which was funded by state and federal grants.  Developed by Waggoner’s firm in collaboration with water management experts from the Netherlands and around the world, the plan presents a $9 billion vision of how the Crescent City can turn its age-old enemy into a friend by raising the water table to help reduce subsidence.

Letting water pool up in order to reduce flooding sounds counterintuitive. I suspect this is part of what makes it attractive.  It makes a great Upworthy style headline. How we stopped the flooding will surprise you!

But maybe they can do some of what they say.  I suspect, though, that in order to function as intended, such a system needs to be implemented in full rather than in the compromised piecemeal way things actually happen in the real world.  So I'm skeptical.

What they can't do, though, is reinflate the sunken city. They can't even halt the subsidence, really.  Certainly they will hire some consultants. Certainly they will make names for themselves in the urban planning community which  is really what it's all about.  Remember, this is a sinking city. Everyone knows that already. The smart people are the disaster capitalists who can figure out how to enjoy the ride and peel off the profits from that while they still can.

Everybody hates Bobby

Not sure why he would want to win CPAC but Bobby Jindal really wanted to win CPAC.  He didn't.

Bobby J finished 11 in the faux GOP primary. Jindal netted 0.9 percent of the vote. However, “undecided” edged out the Louisianan with 1 percent of the vote. The Governor did manage to beat Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Pataki, and John Bolton in the crowded field.

In case you missed CPAC over the weekend, here is a quick re-cap.

What a shame it is about Steve Scalise

Imagine if he hadn't had quite so many friends in the white supremacy business and you might could see how he'd have a shot at becoming Speaker of the House.

On the other hand, without those friends, it's hard to imagine his career happening at all. Funny how that works.  Or not funny, really.  One point we (meaning I, Lamar, and others) tried to make when this story first broke was that it's remarkable how far the local political and media power structure  will allow a person with ties to hate groups to rise until the pressure from outside finally spurs them to become more critical.

And pressure from outside doesn't necessarily have to stem from the purest of motives.  Scalise was golden right up until the point where he became a possible rival to Republican party leadership. Then, suddenly, this stuff mattered.

"Someone is gonna hire me. I’m Chris Rose"

In a way, what's happened to Chris Rose is overly harsh.

Rose’s collection of post-Katrina Picayune columns, 1 Dead In Attic (Simon and Schuster), became a New York Times bestseller in 2007. Since then, New Orleans’ news community has seemingly cast Rose aside. No journalism entity in town will hire him, he tells me, not even freelance. If they do answer his calls, they say he’s too much of a risk. And so for all of 2014, the 53-year-old Rose was waiting tables to pay rent and feed his three kids.

There's a litany of personal struggles there we wouldn't wish on anyone.  It's hard to see why this should become a permanent barrier to employment. "No journalism entity in town will hire him."  That sounds pretty sinister.   Your instinct is to react the way Harry Shearer does.

At Kingfish, Rose continued serving his fans—as well as his fellow New Orleans celebrities. “This waiter walks up and it took me probably way too long to realize, Oh my god, I know who you are. I was absolutely startled,” says Harry Shearer, comedic actor, voice of many Simpsons characters, and part-time New Orleanian. “To go from an essential voice to a forgotten voice in the relative blink of an eye is pretty shocking. For a city that reveres tradition and history, a city full of second chances, it seems very puritanical what seems to have happened to Chris.”

But you look again and you see the several examples of employers having been flexible and patient. FOX 8 flew him into town and put him up in a hotel several times, apparently.  And yet it keeps not working out somehow.   Except that actually it does work out. Rose is writing professionally again and "making four times the price that Gambit or Times-Picayune pays freelancers."

For some reason that isn't good enough, though.  Somehow, despite every humbling experience, Rose maintains a distinct air of "Don't you know who I am!" about him.

Clean, sober, and again a free agent, Rose this time found himself deeply unemployed. Having been praised for understanding New Orleans in a special way, he suddenly, finally, also understood its smallness. “For seven months I was getting turned down. I kept thinking, ‘Someone is gonna hire me. I’m Chris Rose.’ It took a while for me to realize, all these unreturned phone calls … I’m not gonna get a job here. And I had no other marketable skills. For 30 years there’s never been any question of what I was gonna do.”

But who is he, really? Chris Rose is a significant specimen. He was the first bona-fide Katrina entrepreneur; the first in a long line of such people to try and monetize a personal brand he built on other people's tragedy.

I say, "other people's tragedy" carefully, of course.  The time of the flood affected everyone who lived through it.  It changed everyone's lives in radical ways.  It profoundly affected our sense of community and our politics.  It made physically manifest an existential threat of impending doom we might have sensed before but never directly confronted. It made people take stock of things and decide what was important to them.  I wouldn't want to belittle anyone's experience with that.

But what I just described there was pretty much the basic package. If your life was in New Orleans before Katrina, you got one of those. That's not nothing.  But it's possible to say that, if this is all you got, then what you got was not especially tragic.

Chris Rose was living in New Orleans at the time of the flood.  Personally, he came out of it pretty well. Or, at least he should have. As you can see from the CJR story, he's been through some personal trials but it's a stretch to relate those directly to the storm.  He didn't lose his home. He didn't lose his job.   In fact, the experience was a boon to him, professionally. He made certain to take advantage of it, anyway.

It's a little strange that Rose should end up such a pariah after all this time.  He's far from the only hyper-ego to go about feeling Katrina at you for money.  He actually presaged the kind of cynical exploitation that currently comprises a large (although perhaps over-exaggerated) portion of the local economy.*

Maybe, then, we might view Rose as a bit of a cautionary tale.  Is personal branding really the best way for us to go about making a living?  There were hundreds of thousands of New Orleanians who lived through the same Katrina flood that Rose did. His supposed skill.. "understanding New Orleans in a special way," as the CJR piece puts it, is really no skill at all.  Or, at least, there's nothing "special" about it.

Of course he is an OK writer and, at times, a clever wit but really so are most people. And that's a good thing.  Obviously not everyone is exactly the same, but within a reasonable spectrum, most ordinary people are pretty smart, or funny, or have something of value to say.   None of them is particularly "special" though. Why would you want to be? That sounds pretty lonely.

But the principles of the Perpetual NOLA.com Entrepreneur Week teach us that the secret to success is to always be bootstrappin' in a competitive creative class kind of way. And so we become a whole economy full of Chris Roses forced to sell our adequate but unexceptional selves as "brands" based mostly on the power of their own bullshit self-salesmanship.  What does it mean when we find out our individual brands aren't worth very much in a market flooded with many many more similar to ours?

Pretty soon we're all just working at Rouses. Maybe that's for the best.

*Interestingly Rose says all the royalties from his book belong to the Times-Picayune thanks to the copyright provisions of his employment with them. In that case, the packaging and profiteering off of the Rose brand is partially.. or even mostly.. the company's fault.  That's probably the worst aspect of any of this. Especially since NOLA.com has become the online Church of Entrepreneurship that it has in recent years.

Nobody actually lives here

All the money is going into vacant houses. This is, of course, the plan.

Team Fitbit

Always something.  Last year it was Crossfit.  This year it's electronic monitoring. If there's a fad, these guys will find a way to incorporate it.  Just wait and see what happens when they unveil that new Left Shark formation.

Snakes arriving early this year

Every spring, toward the end of the legislative session in Baton Rouge, the world's most predictable joke is made by just about everyone. This is from May of 2013:

There are always jokes this time of year about all the unsavory characters coming through the State Capitol, as legislators and lobbyists come together to wrangle over what bills will eventually become law. But this year, those same people are sharing space with snakes — real snakes, presumably water snakes migrating from nearby Capitol Lake.

The exact number of snakes found in the building hasn’t been pinned down. The official word from the people who run the building’s operations is that there have been four or five confirmed snake sightings dating back to late April.

But a quick survey of the people who guard the doors or the people who clean the floors and take out the garbage, and the problem appears to be much more widespread. They estimate there have been more than a dozen snakes found in the building going back to early spring.

It may still be a little chilly out but I think we can start with the snake talk a little early this year.   The petroleum industry will be paying a premium to bring them out.

“While many industries will be impacted by today’s budget proposal, the nature of the changes will completely kill the growing solar industry,” Jeff Cantin, the president of Louisiana’s trade association for solar and renewable energy, said in a prepared statement. He predicted the loss of at least 1,200 jobs if Jindal’s plan is adopted.

The solar industry has relatively few friends in the Legislature, however, while the business lobby — and in particular the petrochemical sector — is powerful. As such, it’s the proposed cut of the inventory tax refund that is likely to set off the most heated debate, observers say.

“Here’s the good news: It’s early; we’ve got a couple of months to work on this,” said Waguespack, who was a top Jindal aide before taking his LABI post. “I think most people look at this rebate as the wrong one to do away with. I’m optimistic that cooler heads will prevail.”

"Cooler heads" or , you know, colder blooded lobbyists. But the point is clear.  The biggest pot of revenue Jindal has found, the inventory tax refund, is also the pot most likely to be full of snakes.

Of course there's always the option of passing the whole problem onto the next Governor.

Procopio, of PAR, threw in another unappealing possibility: that the governor and the Legislature, as they’ve done in many recent years, will pass a budget that is balanced only by dint of rosy predictions that aren’t met, setting off a round of midyear cuts and leaving problems for the next governor to deal with.

Which is exactly the sort of thing Jindal might enjoy.  

What is the opposite of muckraking?

You hear a lot about how the professional media no longer exercises standards or decorum or whatever it is our supposedly anarchic, wisdom-deprived, gatekeeperless environment is missing now.  I think civility is another one.  We don't have that anymore either apparently.

Still somehow, we manage to keep a pretty good handle on which stories we are definitely not going to cover.

From the very beginning- the moment that public records surfaced revealing that Bill Cassidy claimed to be working in Baton Rouge on the same days he was voting in DC and that he failed to submit 75% of his time sheets (despite the explicit demand that he account for all of his work)- the Louisiana media has been absolutely, shamefully, epically derelict in its duties. They refused to ask the tough questions. They refused to hold him or LSU accountable. Two days ago, LSU released a report that it conducted itself; they called it an audit, and they implied it cleared Dr. Cassidy.

Crazy all the way to bank

The key to understanding CPAC.. and by extension the Republican Presidential primary... and, I guess, by extension our entire corrupt and broken political system... is you have to first know is that almost none of it has anything to do with public advocacy. Most of it is about making money.

The commerce of conservatism has never been more robust. And here at the right’s biggest trade show, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, just about everyone is selling something.

Political figures’ seeing financial incentives in keeping their names circulating as presidential hopefuls is nothing new. But the merging of political and profit motives has gotten to the point where many Republicans say they fear that their nominating process has begun to look like a machine for generating and heightening brand awareness.

“There are a lot of reasons for running for president,” said Stephen K. Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News. “And getting to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue often isn’t one of them.”

You might think it's fun to gawk at so much right wing crazy in one place but most of these people know exactly what they're doing. What kind of an idiot would actually want to be President, anyway? The smart.. or at least shrewd.. ones  are just building a brand they can parlay into something much easier and more lucrative.

Mike Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor, won the 2008 Iowa Republican caucuses in January of that year. Two months after winning the prominent early presidential derby test, he left the race. In September 2008, Huckabee became the host of an eponymous TV political commentary program on Fox News.

Huckabee is not the only Republican on the national stage who later went under the TV lights – former Alaska governor and 2008 vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is a Fox News contributor. Any hopes for Huckabee, who left his show earlier this year to consider another run for the presidency, and for Palin that such regular national TV exposure could reboot their White House ambitions, have so far proved elusive at best.

The popular use of the town hall meeting political structure in New Hampshire, familiarly employed by Christie in New Jersey, works to Christie’s advantage, the source said. A strong showing in the “Live Free or Die” state’s primary could seal the deal for the birth of a lucrative post-politics media career for Christie, in the event that he does not reverse a polling trend that shows a thorny path to the presidency.

Life imitates art.. or vice/versa

This is a float from this year's Knights of Chaos parade. The brawling figures depicted are our friends Gayle Benson and Rita Benson Leblanc.



This is a story form today's Times-Picayune/NOLA.com thingy.

The pregame encounter occurred in front of dozens of friends and guests of the Bensons and quickly escalated after Rita Benson LeBlanc, whom sources described as the aggressor, approached Gayle Benson.

At one point, the two sources who witnessed the incident said, Rita Benson LeBlanc, then 37, grabbed Gayle Benson by both shoulders and shook the then-67-year-old repeatedly during a confrontation that lasted several minutes.

"She (Rita) was shaking her (Gayle) to emphasize her point and to be heard," said one of the sources who was in the suite and witnessed the incident. "It was pretty ugly.

"I remember the pyrotechnics going off in the stadium (during pregame player introductions) and thinking fireworks were also going off in the suite."

The problem

Everyone is worried about what "looks cool" as opposed to what works for people.

Vision Zero, a policy pitched by non-profit transportation advocacy groups Bike Easy and RIDE New Orleans, aims to educate the public and improve public infrastructure with a goal of eliminate traffic-related death. Vision Zero started in Sweden and has been adopted by American cities like New York, San Francisco and Houston.

Brossett said creating a safe infrastructure for all kinds of roadway users is important, especially with the population of the city expected to grow, but that government agencies can’t do it alone. “One life is too much to lose,” said Brossett. “…Whatever your mode of transportation is, it should be respected and the law should be abided by.”

At-large Councilman Jason Williams called the ordinance “a huge part in making our city what we want it to be.” Williams said New Orleans takes pride in how “cool” it is, but such committees are the basis of improving the city to making it “look the way we want it to look.”

Well, it should be noted also that Brossett is interested in making people "abide by the law" which roughly translates into, "Let's figure out more ways to fine bicyclists." This is different from just doing stuff that makes biking safer like paving streets and redesigning intersections and.. even.. sometimes.. if you're doing it correctly, bike lanes. 

But we don't do bike lanes correctly in New Orleans. We just paint stripes on roads where we think it might look cool to have them.

Now you don't have to go

Here are two entertaining links to kick off the weekend. Each involves a report from somewhere you, thankfully, will never have to visit.

First, here is Jeb Lund who went to CPAC this week so you don't have to.

I eventually leave the room and start heading to the other side of the Gaylord, where former UN Ambassador John Bolton, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton and Montana Representative Ryan Zinke answer the question: “When Should America Go to War?” And, folks, lemme tell you, it is all the dang time.

And, even more frightening, here is Matt Taibbi at the NFL scouting combine.

In the old days, the draft was an unknown event that took place in hotel banquet rooms, sometimes during the season. Old-timers like former Cowboys executive Gil Brandt tell stories about teams that used to “pick up a pay phone, call a school, and say, ‘Hey, we need a tackle; you got anybody good?’”

Screw that now: The new reality-show format subjects the draft entrants to a hilarious nine-week stretch of goofball obstacle courses and campy personality tests that collectively play out on TV like a cross between Battle of the Network Stars and the Miss America pageant, with a faint but troubling whiff of 1830s slave auction mixed in.

Because they said so

Another judge just goes along to get along with Mitch.

A judge sided Friday with Mayor Mitch Landrieu in his fight with city employees about the overhaul of municipal personnel rules, finding that city employees failed to prove they were entitled to sue.

Friday’s ruling against the Concerned Classified City Employees, an organization made up of active and retired city workers, is the Landrieu administration’s second major courtroom victory over employees seeking to overturn the new rules. Judge Robin Giarrusso’s ruling leaves intact Landrieu’s Great Place to Work Initiative, which was passed by the city’s Civil Service Commission in August.

In December, Civil District Court Judge Ethel Julien found that a lawsuit filed by the Fraternal Order of Police to block key parts of the initiative was premature.

Giarrusso did not explain her legal reasoning for the ruling, which was preceded by brief arguments from the plaintiffs’ attorney Arthur Smith, as well as lawyer Gilbert Buras for the commission and Greg Feeney for the city.

The good (and bad) news is Sean Payton is still Sean Payton

The coach who wrote a screenplay about improving football games through the use of an X-Box, is still talking about improving football games through the use of virtual reality.

BOSTON -- New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton has an idea. And now, for the first time in NFL history, it's a realistic possibility.

Imagine a young quarterback walking into a room at the Saints' practice facility. He straps on a headset, flips a switch and plays a virtual game against the Atlanta Falcons' defense. His vision is filled with current Falcons schemes and players, who move and react based on data compiled by the NFL's "Next Gen Stats" program.

"The challenge we have all the time is that it's the one position where there's only one of them in the game the entire time," Payton said Friday during an appearance at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. "The game ends, and how do you get those guys snaps, real-time snaps? Much like we develop pilots -- they do a lot of simulator work -- I think the opportunity exists [in football]. Especially when you're able to accurately show movement with chips, exactly how it unfolds with the defense."

Eventually we'll get to a place where all football happens in the virtual realm.  Although the brain damage may still be as severe as ever. 

Pain

Jindal's last minute LoomisMath today notwithstanding, the state budget wreck he's created is going to cause a great deal of pain.

The pain will be particularly bad for university students in the form of higher fees and university employees in the form of.. unemployment.

Also badly hurt will be approximately 57,000 uninsured patients who depend on New Orleans area community clinics.

The program is essentially a waiver of Medicaid eligibility for people who are age 19 to 64 and whose are at our below the federal poverty level, but who don't meet the current Medicaid eligibility requirements. Their incomes, for example, must be less than $11,496 per year for an individual or less than $23,556 for a family of four, for example.

"I know that these clinics provide valuable services," Nichols said during the budget hearing before the Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget in Baton Rouge. But Nichols said the state has provided the match over the past several years with the hope and expectation that the local government would find a way to support it.

This could be alleviated if the state were to accept the expanded Medicaid provision of Obamacare but... Bobby Jindal doesn't think free money from the feds makes fiscal sense. This helps explain why we're in this position in the first place. 

Public schools will also be badly hurt by Jindal's proposals.  Although, we can't help but notice that his pet voucher program makes out okay in the process.

The governor’s public schools budget includes a nine percent increase in state aid for vouchers, to $46.1 million.

Vouchers are state aid for some students to attend private schools if they meet income and other requirements.

The program, which used to be limited to New Orleans, was expanded to a statewide effort in 2012 as part of Jindal’s public school overhaul that year.

The additional funding would allow another 679 students to qualify for vouchers.

About 7,200 students are taking part this year.

There's much much more pain to be described, of course.  The papers do a good job of filling you in.  As you read through that, though, keep in mind that it can, and very likely will, get much worse once the Legislature begins to tug at it.

Jindal's proposal relies heavily on lawmakers' willingness to claw back $526 million in refundable tax credits. If you listen carefully you can hear the sound of business and industry lobbyists mobilizing now to save their special favors. 

On the other hand, it could open the door for discussion about reigning in the largest and dumbest tax giveaway in the state.

Morrell said in an interview last week that the overall goal was "comprehensive reform" of the current iteration of the film tax credit program, which in its current form works like this: a project becomes eligible for motion picture tax credits once its in-state budget exceeds $300,000 worth of expenditures. Once finished, the film receives a 30 percent tax credit for the purchase of eligible, in-state goods and services and a 35 percent credit on local labor. The credits are then refundable by the state at 85 percent or transferable.

However, the state does not currently budget for this credit, so how much cash the state is on the hook for it can vary from year to year. 

Last year this program cost the state at least $250 million.  So if you're looking for change under cushions, that sounds like a good place to start digging.  Tom Benson probably has the rest but that money is all tied up in legal wrangling right now. He's trying to free it up, though.  The sooner the better. Otherwise the lawyers eat it all.

How do you get to be the sole trustee of a dissolved trust?

Neat.

It makes me wonder if Mitch is deluded or simply unaware of the reality.  It seems like he thinks he owns everything, including Port Fourchon, and he thinks he's going to do whatever he wants with it.  What he wants, as I suggested back at the beginning of this battle, is to sell the land while he's still in office using the proceeds however he sees fit.  And by the looks of many of the donation recipients he sees fit to pay off his peeps and lucrative voting blocs (I have more coming on that issue soon).

How much for all the land? When Jason first started writing about this, Mitch selling the whole thing off at once seemed like the most likely outcome to me.   Starting to look more likely.  And, hey, maybe it's the right thing to do.  It's all gonna melt into the sea, anyway, right?

LSU finds that LSU acted appropriately

Well.. okay, then.

Nobody actually lives here

This is a new report from The Data Center (formerly the New Orleans Community Data Center... they re-branded to higher ambitions.. or something).  It tells us that 39% of children in New Orleans are living in poverty.  

The child poverty rate in New Orleans is fully 17 percentage points higher than the national average. Moreover, it is higher than in many comparable U.S. cities. Among the 39 cities with populations between 275,000 and 600,000, New Orleans has the 9th highest child poverty rate. This is particularly concerning given that many of the cities with higher child poverty rates, such as Cleveland, are not experiencing an economic renaissance as in New Orleans.

An "economic renaissance" with 39% child poverty.  How does that work?  According to this report, if you actually live here, things are as shitty as they've ever been. 

Given that 82 percent of New Orleans families with children have at least one working parent, how could it be that 39 percent of all New Orleans children live in poverty? The answer may lie partially in the large number of low-wage jobs offered in the New Orleans area. A larger share—12 percent—of full-time, year-round workers in the New Orleans metro earn less than $17,500 per year, as compared to only 8 percent nationally. And female workers who live in the city of New Orleans itself are more likely than male workers to earn low wages. According to 2013 Census data, more than 64,000 working women in New Orleans earned less than $17,500 in the prior 12 months through either full-time or part-time work.

There is one key difference, though.  If the overall population of children is any indication, it turns out, significantly fewer people actually live here.

Roughly 78,000 children under 18 years of age live in New Orleans as of 2013. This is a sizable drop from 2000 when over 129,000 children lived in New Orleans.ⁱ While the number of children in New Orleans is significantly smaller than pre-Katrina, the poverty rate unfortunately is not. The child poverty rate in New Orleans dropped in 2007 but has since increased to the same level it was pre-Katrina. Today, 39 percent of New Orleans children live in poverty.

The city's post-Katrina strategy has had nothing to do with alleviating poverty and everything to do with removing the poors. And it's working. It works especially well for the people who actually matter, anyway.  Developers and realtors are doing great.

The cost of buying a home in the New Orleans area climbed for the third year in a row in 2014. And it was not just the city, but the suburbs as well, that saw gains.

Meanwhile, in the city proper, the latest figures showed that the market has gotten so hot in more desirable neighborhoods that buyers have started scooping up even the more run-down properties. The price of homes in poor or fair condition last year spiked in certain ZIP codes.

Across the region, sales of single-family homes in average or better condition climbed 3.1 percent, to $114 per square foot, last year, compared with $110 in 2013. Those figures compare with an average price of $102 per square foot before Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Considered another way, a 2,000-square-foot home now sells for an average of $228,000 in the metro area. It would have sold for an average of $220,000 last year and $204,000 before the storm.

Nobody lives here.  Or at least the shrinking number of people who do live here can't make ends meet.. particularly the few people who are still trying to raise families here. But demand for housing has never been stronger. What is happening?

New Orleans is becoming a smaller, more expensive playground for the wealthy.  This is not an accident of history or the will of the invisible hand of the free market. It is happening because that is what our political leadership wishes to happen. All they're interested in is more and more nice things for rich people who don't live here.

NEW ORLEANS -- The long-vacant Rault Center building at 1111 Gravier St. recently sold for $5.5 million.

The developer plans to turn the building into a 185-room boutique hotel.

The old New Orleans Public Service Incorporated building at Union and Baronne sold last month for $11.6 million.

It is also expected to be transformed into a hotel.

New Orleans City Council member LaToya Cantrell says momentum is growing across the CBD.

"Across the board, what I envision is a real tipping point that's happening," said Cantrell. "It's prime real estate in the heart of the city of New Orleans and it gives me great, great confidence that we're moving in the right direction."

I don't think LaToya is dumb. So I have to assume she is fully aware of the sort of lie she is telling when she asks us to conclude that downtown development is primarily about creating a "neighborhood."

"Basically, what we're see happening there is the development of a brand new downtown neighborhood which is what we're about, we're about creating a collection of great neighborhoods downtown," said Weigle.

"We do have more people moving to the CBD," said Cantrell. "They're moving into a mixed-use community. So, you can live, work, play and also worship."

There is now hope the stars aligned for the long dormant Plaza Towers at Howard Avenue and Loyola Avenue will make a comeback.

New Orleans developer Joe Jaeger recently purchased the 45 story skyscaper.
It's former owners spent $11 million removing asbestos and mold from the building.

"We've seen the growth occur along Loyola Avenue, as it relates to the Hyatt, of course," said Cantrell. "Now we have Dave and Busters coming on line there. The redevelopment in terms of the streetcar line. Plaza Tower is the only development in my mind that holding it back and now we have someone who's going to be responsive and responsible for bring it back, back into commerce."

Hotels, pied-a-terres, short term rentals, and..... Dave & Buster's, I guess.  But not many families with children, of course. Those kind of people can't afford what we're building.   But, hey, it makes money.  And it generates tax revenue. It's a shame that nobody actually lives here but that's part of the deal. 

Eventually they will kick you off the internet anyway

Just not today.

The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday, in a 3-2 vote, approved the reclassification of the Internet under Title II of the Communications Act.

Though expected, the vote was greeted with cheers—applauded as "the biggest win for the public interest in the FCC’s history"— from supporters of net neutrality, the concept that says online traffic should be relegated to fast or slow lanes determined by the large telecom companies who control much of the nation's digital networks.

All it takes is for a future administration to reverse this hiccup. And that is inevitable. 

Vampire Squids

They sucked out all the money.

“The health of the financial system might matter less for the real economy than it once did,” writes J.W. Mason, an assistant professor of economics at John Jay College who wrote the paper, "because finance is no longer an instrument for getting money into productive businesses, but for getting money out of them."

If it holds up, that has some pretty serious implications for how the Federal Reserve should go about tending the "real economy" in the future.

Here’s the data at the center of the report: In the 1960s, 40 percent of earnings and borrowing used to go into investment. In the 1980s, that figure fell to less than 10 percent, and hasn’t risen since. Instead of investment, borrowing is now closely correlated with shareholder payouts, which have nearly doubled as a share of corporate assets since the 1980s.

In other words, finance has been a drag on rather than a booster of wealth in the real economy since before someone my age would have even opened his first bank account.  Still, for whatever reason, we're supposed to keep playing the game.  Why?

Probably pink salt

Every state house has at least one witch-doctor nowadays.

Nevada state Assemblywoman Michele Fiore (R) plans to introduce a bill she said would provide more options for cancer patients — but actually relies on what medical experts call a myth, Think Progress reported.

“If you have cancer, which I believe is a fungus, and we can put a pic line into your body and we’re flushing with, say, salt water, sodium cardonate through that line and flushing out the fungus,” Fiore said on her radio show over the weekend. “These are some procedures that are not FDA-approved in America that are very inexpensive, cost-effective.”

On the other hand it's no worse than buying pink yogurt cans in October.