Camp superstar

Back in our formative years of football understanding, we took it as a matter of course that every year there'd be a fourth string running back who looked like an all-pro vs the scrubs in late pre-season game action.  We also took it as a matter of course that that guy was actually garbage in real life regardless of how many Message Boards Guys got excited about him.

But then, during the Payton era, that matter of course has turned out not to be so much a... matter of course. Saints fans who endure the agony of fake football have watched Pierre Thomas, Chris Ivory, and Travaris Cadet grow from exhibition game oddities into regular season contributors and better.

Yeah, Cadet may be sliding back the other way now, but that's at least in part due to the fact that this year's camp hero is beating him out.

Undrafted rookie running back Khiry Robinson made the most of his third-team carries in the first two preseason games. He has 102 yards on 22 carries for a team-leading average of 4.6 yards. Meanwhile, his chief competition for a spot on the roster, Travaris Cadet, is struggling with the second team. He has 35 yards on 18 attempts, and he fumbled twice against the Raiders, losing possession once. Robinson in no way has locked up a spot behind running backs Mark Ingram, Darren Sproles and Pierre Thomas. But he has kept himself in consideration, and Cadet did not help his standing against Oakland.

Before the Payton years, we would have dismissed Robinson's pre-season performance as so much irrelevant nonsense.  Not so much anymore.

Mitch Landreiu's Aspen Ideas tour

Is Stephanie Grace the first local political pundit of any consequence to finally point out just how conservative the current city administration really is?

About halfway through the first of New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s annual “budgeting for outcomes” community meanings, I briefly wondered whether I should check in on whether he’d decided to switch parties.

Republicans routinely rail against all-powerful federal judges and unfunded mandates, but I can’t think of a time when I’ve heard a Democrat pile on the way Landrieu did Tuesday night.

What we would hope for most in difficult municipal budget situations, such as those that seem to exist here in perpetuity, are elected officials who do everything they can to protect the most vulnerable among us.  Instead, Mitch prefers to lecture us about tough choices and making sacrifices. 

As budget season approaches, his blunt message for his constituents is that it’s their problem too, one that they’re likely to see reflected in some unappetizing choices.

They’re already seeing the effect in higher sewer and water fees. Responding to an angry question about those costs, Landrieu again blamed Washington.

“The federal government and the EPA, just like with the Justice Department and the police, are coming down and saying, ‘we are mandating that you do a certain thing, and guess what, you have to pay for it,’“ he said.

“Budgeting is not for the faint of heart,” he warned. “For years and years and years we’ve kicked the can down the road. If it all comes due at the same time, it’s hard.”

So at the budget hearings, expect the Mayor to continue singing a sad and sober song. 

It's a particularly dissonant chord to strike while he's also singing a counterpoint about the booming economic miracle spawned in his tourism-and-technopreneurial wonderland.

Musically, it's difficult to reconcile one tune with the other. Maybe it just depends on who the audience is.
One imagines the Mayor's well placed friends get the happy dance. 

The cumulative message from the mayor to the majority of us, though, is he's doing a pretty fantastic job so if you're uncomfortable with the "sacrifices" you're asked to make well then there must be something wrong with you. If I'd been dropped down into this from 30 or 40 years ago, I might be wondering whether Mitch was a Republican too.  But today it's really not that surprising.

Anyway, the Budgetpalooza tour moves in to District A this week.  They'll be at Edward Hynes Charter School (990 Harrison Avenue) on Tuesday evening if you're looking to catch the performance. 

Saturday ICYMI links

I'd take some time to describe to you how busy I am today but that would just waste this one quick moment I've got to say anything at all.  Also, it would (mostly) be a lie. Everyone knows I'm not really busy. Just disorganized.

Here are some things I wanted to link to this week but couldn't get to.. for whatever reason.

• NOLA.com: In unusual catch, Gulf of Mexico researchers find Greenland shark near Deepwater Horizon
  
  

  TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- Florida State University researchers have made an unusual catch in the Gulf of Mexico: a cold-water shark typically found in Arctic waters.
  
  Dean Grubbs of Florida State's coastal and marine research laboratory says it's the first documented catch of a Greenland shark in the Gulf.

  Guess BP was right about the possibility of Gulf Walruses after all.



• CenLamar: Why Elbert Guillory’s “Free At Last” PAC Raises Serious Questions About the Louisiana GOP Guillory, who temporarily became a Democrat in order to gain his seat in the state legislature recently became a Republican (again) in order to gain some measure of celebrity which has been leveraged into a bit of what we might call a con job.
  

  Only two months after he switched back to the Republican Party, Elbert Guillory has become a spokesman (an “honorary chair”) of a political action committee called Free At Last PAC. And if you visit their website or watch their two online commercials, you’ll likely be under the impression (among other things) that Guillory himself launched this PAC in order to encourage African-Americans to run for office as Republicans. (I have some serious problems with what Guillory says in these online commercials, but I’ll get to that in a second). FoxNews, the Weekly Standard, the Christian Post, and others erroneously reported that Elbert Guillory was the principal of Free at Last PAC.
  
  The truth is, Free At Last PAC (which was obviously named after a famous Negro spiritual) appears to have been created and is now managed by a white conservative political activist and Louisiana Family Forum Vice Chairman, a guy named Derek Babcock. If you closely follow Louisiana politics, you may remember Mr. Babcock. He ran a stupidly mean-spirited (and losing) campaign for State Senate a couple of years ago, and fortunately, his website is still online
  
  Presumably, Mr. Guillory, as an honorary chair of this PAC and as an elected official, won’t ever be financially compensated for his voluntary involvement. But it remains unclear whether Mr. Babcock, as director, hopes to draw a salary. Either way, though, Babcock’s PAC seems like a sham.

  Also a sham, witch doctors.



• David Sirota: Elites’ deplorable double-standard on corruption
  
  Read this one carefully. It tracks very closely with the kind of "dragonslaying" movement that has swept the New Boss in in New Orleans to the very loud misguided cheers of the credulous.
  

  James was a working class ward politician whose Tammany Hall-style crimes were comparatively petty. That made him the type of public official that is regularly lampooned in the entertainment world and typically derided by elites as icons of what Time’s Joe Klein infamously called “the angry hot-house of inner-city” politics. That nasty code – “inner city” – also extends to James’ corruption. His crimes were portrayed as decidedly “inner city,” involving sums in the low thousands from mostly local cronies rather than national elite powerbrokers.
  
  By contrast, Booker has a different public image. With a suburban upbringing and Oxford pedigree, he has carefully crafted a political image that is pro-Wall Street, “new economy”-ish, proudly worshipful of wealth – and decidedly not “inner city.” Indeed, as one tech entrepreneur told the Times in explaining why Booker’s wealthy tech donors gave the Newark mayor a company, “It feels like he’s one of us.”
  
  The same goes for Booker’s money: it isn’t the much-denigrated Inner City Graft, it is the much-vaunted Mahogany Paneled Conference Room Graft from rich dudes in bucolic places like Silicon Valley.
  
  Such white-collar graft comes not in four-digit wads of cash, and doesn’t go to ward bosses like James. It instead tends to come in five, six or even seven digit checks and stock certificates to professional politicians who use anodyne terms like “public-private partnership.” Importantly, the money in the latter form of corruption doesn’t come from local parochial hundred-thousand-aires easily punished when things get a bit too embarrassing. It tends to come from mega millionaires and billionaires with the same pedigree and elite credentials as Booker – and those aristocrats rarely ever get punished, lambasted or humiliated with the “corruption” label because they own much of the media and most of the political system.
  
  The result of the double standard is the oxymoron whereby the kind of cash-in-the-envelope corruption James embodied is routinely vilified, ridiculed and prosecuted, while the kind of stock-options-in-the-portfolio corruption Booker evinces is completely ignored, trumpeted as smart politics, and/or openly touted as an “asset.”
  
  In this new Gilded Age, this double standard between what is seen as acceptable and unacceptable corruption is hardly exclusive to New Jersey.

  
  As Cory Booker moves onto the national stage you're going to see him presented more and more as a "party spokesperson". He shows up on lists like this one (along with Mitch Landrieu) of technocratic "problem solvers" which is what the anti-democracy people like to call themselves these days.



• Speaking of public corruption, Aaron Bennett is still pretty much unpretentious blatant old school about it.  Which is one reason he's being held accountable.



• Jerry Romig's parting quote sounded familiar to me.
  

  The Saints did, for the man who helped lend generations of fans a singular narrative voice through the deepest lows and richest highs of the team he adores, the team he once feared would forever leave the city.
  
  “That’s it, that’s it,” he said as the clock wound to zero and he pressed down on the mike. “Final score: The Saints 28, Raiders 20.”
  
  Romig folded up his glasses and slid them in his pocket, then leaned into the mike one last time.
  
  “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s been fun. Good night. Love ya.”

  
  Where have we seen that before?
  
  

The real victims

Thank god they've got all this money for legal pushback because whoever would come to their aid otherwise?

BP Plc (BP/) sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over its suspension from new federal government contracts following the company’s guilty plea to a pollution charge over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

BP, based in London, said the U.S. government continued to buy fuel from and sell oil leases to the company “for more than two and a half years after the Deepwater Horizon accident on April 20, 2010,” according to a complaint filed today in federal court in Houston

Still think there's any chance in hell BP will pay anything close to whatever damages they might be held liable for at trial? 

Jeff Duncan needs to remember to cite his own work

Jeff Duncan just posted a NOLA.com story referencing this NFL fan loyalty index created by Emory University. The Saints do quite well, as you may expect. But the commentary is a little backhanded.

Professors Mike Lewis & Manish Tripathi measured team box office revenues relative to team on-field success, market population, stadium capacity, median income and other factors to rank the teams.

"The Saints are a more recent success story, but the team's new success combined with limited professional sports options in New Orleans has created a very strong fan base," the report said.

I'm assuming Lewis and Tripathi mean "recent success" in terms of performance both on the field and in the "strength of fan base" measurement they're writing about.

But Duncan could have used just a few more pixels to point out that this isn't the first attempt to measure NFL fan loyalty.

Back in the summer of 2005, before the Saints had experienced their "recent success" and when Tom Benson was agitating for a new stadium or a move out of town, the Times-Picayune published its own loyalty index.  It took a bit simpler approach dividing total attendance per win over the period of time the Saints were in existence. (1967-2004 at the time).

Based on statistics from 1967 through 2004, the Saints lead the NFL in average fans per win, a ranking that considers a team's on-field performance and its attendance history. The rankings do not include the expansion Houston Texans, whose three seasons are not enough to be statistically significant.

The Saints lead the NFL with an average of 76,088 fans per win, derived by dividing the team's all-time attendance of 17,880,875 by its 235 total wins. Cleveland is second at 75,721 fans per win. Detroit is third. None of those teams has ever reached a Super Bowl, but Cleveland and Detroit have played in conference championship games.

"The loyalty of Saints fans over the years is one of the great stories in sports," Arnold Fielkow, the Saints' executive vice president of administration, said in an April statement. He acknowledged the club's advertising campaign as the "the legacy of our great fans."

Saints officials declined to comment for this story.

Even before the "Golden Age of Saints Football" and before the team had ever advanced beyond the divisional round of the playoffs, New Orleans had "crated a very strong fan base."   It's a fact worth remembering.  You'd think Duncan would remember it.  He wrote the article. 
 

It's like a TV timeout

Or maybe one of those stoppages in play so we can get the crazy fans who stormed the field (Robert Adley, Garett Graves, Bobby Jindal)  rounded up.  Whatever it is, we're taking a breather.

The New Orleans levee authority on Thursday passed a resolution to consider placing a 45-day pause on its lawsuit against about 100 oil, gas and pipeline companies. The authority said the pause would let the group work further with the governor’s office and set up “a task force to examine and review all ramifications of the lawsuit.“

The levee authority also passed a resolution reaffirming its resolve to continue with the lawsuit, claiming that oil, gas and pipeline companies are contributing to land loss and erosion. If the levee authority is victorious, companies would be required to repair any wetland damage that increases the risk of hurricane storm surges overtopping local levees.

The "four hour closed door session" with Graves must have been exhausting.  Anybody would want to take a break after that. Still it's good to see they're all resolute in reaffirming their resolve to continue and all.

In my opinion, John Barry has been pretty careful and reasonable in his public statements since the suit was filed.  He also sounds like he knows he's played a strong card.

But Barry and other authority commissioners said they respect Jindal and his office’s work in coastal restoration issues and would prefer to move forward with Jindal’s office if it finds a better way to work with the oil and gas companies.

“If someone can prove that there is a better path, then I would withdraw the lawsuit without a second thought,” Barry said.

I'm a driver, I'm a winner

Is it really 2016 already?

Chris Christie said he wants to win things, unlike certain other Republicans, at the Republican National Committee meeting in Boston on Thursday. "See I’m in this business to win… I’m in it to win. I think we have some folks who believe that our job is to be college professors," Christie said. This was interpreted to be a shot at Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a likely rival for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination. "Now college professors are fine I guess. Being a college professor, they basically spout out ideas that nobody does anything about. For our ideas to matter we have to win. Because if we don’t win, we don’t govern. And if we don’t govern all we do is shout to the wind. And so I am going to do anything I need to do to win."
 
Christie first became nationally famous by being rude to people in town halls. (He still does it from time to time.) But Christie thinks you've got to pick and choose who you're rude to. "I'm not going to be one of these people who goes and calls our party stupid," Christie said on Thursday. This was interpreted to be a shot at Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who said the GOP needed to avoid being the "stupid party" after the 2012 election.

Where is this coming from?

A few of us have been asking for several months now about the source of the city's crackdown on go-cups.

I’m at Booty’s in the Bywater, drinking a frozen daiquiri. If I take it outside, I’ll be breaking the law.

The city has recently targeted the go-cup in this neighborhood, making its ban a condition for restaurants opening. More established joints aren’t immune, either – in March, as part of its punishment for music violations, the city stopped St. Roch Tavern from using go-cups.

So far all I've seen is shoulder shrugging. Whenever a city official is quoted, we get, "Go-cups have always been illegal" or some such Orwellian bullcrap. It's obviously a current point of emphasis. It must be someone's idea and that someone must have a reason.  I'd like to hear who and what that is. 

The man who will never be Governor

Rodney Alexander

"I wouldn't say no to anything," Alexander told The News-Star on Tuesday. "Everything is on the table."

"It's something I will look at, but it won't be anything I'll be talking about too soon," Alexander said, referring to the 2015 gubernatorial race. "I think there's a hunger for a candidate who will listen more than talk and who can relate to the needs of the people regardless of party."

That doesn't sound like what voters are usually hungry for, Rodney. Especially not in this state. But OK. Maybe "One of the stupidest politicians Louisiana has ever known" has a better grasp of this than the rest of us do.

Trickle-down recovery

The long and inevitably sad story of the city's "recovery" ultimately ends up being a restoration of sorts.  What we're looking at now, and what various magazines and boosters celebrate, is really just a return to prominence of the same cabal of hospitality and real estate developers who called the majority of the shots before the storm.

Perhaps you weren't living here then.  In a word, it was bad.  The police were corrupt. The schools were bifurcated into elite private and neglected public systems. The only economic activity to speak of was dominated by low wage, low benefit industries that used the more historic or "culturally significant" aspects of the city as amusements for wealthy vacationers. A state tax credit subsidized  fly-by-night film production.  The mayor was a bald "business-friendly innovator" who espoused a corporate-friendly pro-privatization ideology.  The land was sinking. The coast was eroding.  Nothing was done about it.

Now, things are very much the same. The key differences are slight demographic shifts which afford the elite class tighter grip on the system than they had before.  And so they're building the city they've always wanted; a city for themselves and their clients. 

Reinventing the Crescent (which enjoyed Nagin’s endorsement) aligns with that approach: taking Community Development Block grants from their intended application in low-income neighborhoods and instead pouring them into what Tulane geographer and author Richard Campanella calls ” ‘the white teapot’ … a relatively wealthy and well-educated majority area” along the river.

Maybe the project should be called Regilding the Teapot?

Direct all the money to the already wealthy and pretend they'll do their best to save the rest of us.  How many times do we have to run through this con before we stop buying into it?

Democracies and Republics

At last night's District C Community Budget-O-Rama Crazy Complaint-and-Condescension-Fest, the Mayor took a few opportunities to explain the importance of democracy.. or lack thereof... in the American system of government.

First, we learned that our founders created a republic. And that is different from direct democracy in that the voters elect representatives who then make decisions for them about how to spend their money.

Dotting the crowd Tuesday were the green t-shirts of a group called the New Orleans Coalition for Open Government, whose members complained that a large part of the real budget negotiations has already happened between the mayor and his department heads, and asked Landrieu to consider an idea called “participatory budgeting.” That’s when a city or state sets aside a portion of its budget and residents vote on how it should be spent.

Landrieu sounded dubious. He pointed out that participatory budgeting would take a change in the city’s charter and noted that the country’s founders decided to establish a republic, not a direct democracy.

Later, though, we learned that there are public expenditures which the mayor thinks should be handled through more democratic means.  Such as the question of whether to comply with a judge's order to guarantee citizens their basic constitutional protections vis-a-vis the criminal justice system. 

Referring to a court agreement between Sheriff Marlin Gusman and the U.S. Justice Department on reforming the city’s troubled jail complex, which is likely to cost the city millions of dollars, Landrieu again argued that a federal judge is making decisions about the city’s budget priorities that should be left to voters. 

 But for those stupid founders and their damn judicial system, I guess. 

"Bigger than Texas"

As expected, the legislative hearing on the SLPFA-East lawsuit was like a comedy sketch about just how thoroughly the oil and gas industry owns the state government.  I'm looking forward to seeing what the write-ups look like but the tweets and blurbs were amusing.

For example, this is from Bob Marshall's live-blogging of the hearing at The Lens's site.

Garret Graves, head of state's Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority and an opponent of the suit, is now up. 

He begins by pointing out that the law creating CPRA says it has oversight over levee districts and boards. He says the state had a growing delta until the 1920s, and had that been unimpeded we would have a state bigger than Texas.

Surely that can't be what he said.  Marshall must have condensed or mistyped it or something.   But it was so bizarre that  people were all like, WHAT?

Ok that was garbled. Did Garrett Graves really say that but for the crica 1920s levee system, Louisiana would be bigger than Texas?
— skooks (@skooks) August 14, 2013

But then others were all like, YUP.

@skooks Yup. That's what he said. It would be "not only better" but bigger.
— Lauren McGaughy (@lmcgaughy) August 14, 2013

Ok, then. 

Flood Protection Authority goes before the inquisition

Lens live-blog here.

Last week, John Barry laid out the levee board's case for their lawsuit in an op-ed published in the Times-Picayune.

Katrina Index 8

Download GNOCDC's report here from their website.

You can't find the report in the Advocate article that describes it because, apparently, their internet website "doesn't have a linking system" Another way John Geroges is bringing the print news expereicene back to New Orleans, I guess.

Anyway, there are different ways to read this report. But the things that jump out at me are the repeated cautions about unevenness of what we have come to call our "recovery" along racial and class lines.  

All of the progress the New Orleans metro makes in other arenas will not be enough to signal to the world the emergence of a qualitatively different place post-Katrina if large segments of the population continue to be left behind

Obviously there is still money pouring in to New Orleans. Unfortunately most of us perceive that investment in the form of higher prices for housing and services.  The city is being rebuilt.  It's just being rebuilt for and by the wealthy.

Announcing complete? Announce is complete? Announce incomplete? What?

Jerry Romig to retire as Saints public address announcer

NEW ORLEANS - Jerry Romig, the iconic voice of the New Orleans Saints for nearly all of the team’s history, as public address announcer inside the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, will retire from his post this week, his family confirmed.

His last game will be Friday’s preseason matchup against the Oakland Raiders, according to his daughter, Mary Beth, who has accompanied her father to his post in the broadcast booth for most of his 44 seasons in the position.

That's 44 years of saying into a microphone what is happening in football games. Kind of a strange thing to be known for. I'll never forget Jerry Romig's trademark sayings. "First down, Saints" "Stand Up And Get Crunk" "Wheee! Football!"  "Every day I want to cry" and so on.

My favorite Romig moment last season came late in the Bucs game. The Bucs were mounting a last minute drive in a despreate attempt to avoid being shut out by the worst defense in NFL history. During a break in action, the whole stadium could hear Romig saying, "Keep the shutout, guys," into a mic he didn't realize was live.  They did keep the shutout.  It was fun.

Earlier today we were speculating about possible replacements but apparently this is an inherited office. 

So Saints games will sound a little different now.   What will football even be like when fans in the building are able to audibly distinguish completed passes from the other kind?

And if I can tell the difference between "pass is complete" and "pass incomplete" then the new announcers fails Jerry Romig
— Black & Gold Review (@BnGreview) August 13, 2013

"White Noise"

The above is my humble suggestion for Bill Cassidy's campaign slogan.

Bill Cassidy Senate event in Metairie: Cassidy supporters have white noise apps to distort Pro-Landrieu camera/mikes pic.twitter.com/5OrAkgcUNM
— The Lens (@TheLensNOLA) August 13, 2013

"Character of sound"

The city's noise ordinance working group has hired a firm to develop what they're presenting as a "less anecdotal" study of the city's "sound environment."  The aim , they say, is to create a noise ordinance based on a set of objective enforceable data rather than continue to rely on the "complaint driven" system in place today.

Members of the music community have watched developments with an anxious eye since 2010, concerned that a curfew enforcement that forced street musicians including the To Be Continued Brass Band to stop playing would evolve into the start of an anti-live music trend.

Unrelated zoning and Alcohol Beverage Control Board actions involving popular live-music venues The Circle Bar, Siberia, Jimmy’s Music Club and St. Roch Tavern have fed this fear — a phenomenon the Oxford Acoustics report sees as a rationale for more a systematic approach to enforcement.

“Reactionary or complaint-driven enforcement causes others to perceive selective enforcement,” the report found.

Hannah Kreiger-Benson, spokesperson for the Music and Culture Coalition of New Orleans, a group of musicians and others worried about ordinance changes they fear could grow too restrictive, appreciates how the report makes the conversation more concrete.

“The act of bringing science into the discussion is so worthwhile,” she said.

Is it, though? If t"bringing science into the discussion" results in a more efficient and objective system for shutting down live music, then what's really being developed here is a rhetorical cover for an even more aggressive pursuit of an objectionable policy.

I'd also like to know more about what kind of "science" is being done here. Something about this seems a little less than purely objective. 

The ordinance needs to be revised, according to the new report, because “the law doesn’t fit the situation,” said Oxford Acoustics’ David Woolworth, who is also a member of the rock band The Kudzu Kings.

Technology has presented a whole range of sound frequencies that earlier versions of the ordinance didn’t have to account for. The report draws particular attention to the sonic footprint of the low, bass frequencies present in much dance music.

“They travel so far, and they travel into buildings,” he said. “I spoke with a gentleman in Treme who said, ‘We’ve always had these things going on.’ The activity level may be similar, but actual character of the sound has changed.”

See, the "character of the sound has changed." The kids today don't go for the same pretty sounds their grandparents used to enjoy.  They like "low bass frequencies" used in new and mysterious kinds of "dance music."    Previously proponents of stricter noise enforcement would say unsophisticated things about how young people play their ethnic music too loud.  Now they can encode that same message into some jargon about changing technology and suddenly the same complaint is all sciencey.

All they've really done is apply a new technocratic-sounding approach toward an old political objective.  The whole thing is textbook Landrieu-ism.

RTA voting on ferry fares this morning

The Lens has a live-blog up starting at 10:00 AM

Happy Budget Season

Last week, the city announced this year's slate of community budget meetings. Here they are.

District C
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
L.B. Landry High School 1200 L.B. Landry Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70114

District A
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
Edward Hynes Charter School 990 Harrison Avenue
 New Orleans, LA 70124

District E 
Thursday, August 22, 2013 Joe W. Brown Recreational Center 5601 Read Blvd.
New Orleans, LA 70127

District D
Monday, August 26, 2013 Lake Area New Tech Early College High School 6026 Paris Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70122

District B
Wednesday, August 28, 2013 KIPP Central City Academy 2514 Third Street
New Orleans, LA 70113

Last year there was some controversy over whether citizens on both sides of District C (which spans the river) were being properly served by only one meeting. Seems like the reduced ferry hours would make that an even bigger issue this time around. 

Mitch's meetings might be of questionable utility but they are not without a certain entertainment value.  Bruce Eggler put it well in the T-P last week.

The "budgeting for outcomes" process is intended to ensure improved government performance and accountability. It encourages agencies to prioritize their spending based on the overall end results the city decides each year that it wants to achieve.

In practice, however, the meetings often turn into general gripe and question-and-answer sessions about the city and its government, with little specific attention to budget priorities.

Last year's peak "general gripe" moment came in the opening District B session when local gadfly Sandra Hester was (unnecessarily, in my opinion) escorted out of the room by the police.  Ms. Hester (never one for poor timing) has waited until the day before this year's meetings kick off to file suit over last year's ejection. 

For what it's worth, I was on hand at the meeting where Ms. Hester was arrested. I wrote about the incident here.

What happened was the Uptown Ladies in the crowd started trying to shout Hester down the moment she began speaking. Instead of asking for patience, the Mayor basically egged the mob on and the situation deteriorated. Sandra Hester may be something of a buffoon. But she can be a useful person from time to time in spite of that. Mitch Landrieu is just a bully and that's about the worst thing a public official can be.

Anyway, check the program above and see if there's a show near you.  I am told The Lens is planning to live-blog each meeting for those who can't be there so look for that.  But, if you can, do try and make it to one. As free entertainment goes, it's usually worth what you pay.

Taking Leaving their tar balls and going home

BP is done paying for anything.

BP’s media attack
 
And yet, the oil giant has continued to say it didn’t agree to what’s being paid. Some prominent media voices have taken up the cause.

CNBC “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer interviewed BP chief executive Bob Dudley and asked, “Will some people just never be satisfied until you’re put out of business?”

Dudley then railed against the settlement paying “absurd” claims, “not at all in the spirit of the agreement.”

Dudley then took a shot at Juneau, the claims administrator BP appointed, saying his interpretation of the agreement had “hijacked” the claims process and “is leading to absurd payments to people not affected by this and, in many cases, far away from the Gulf.”

New York Times columnist Joe Nocera joined the anti-Juneau attack, calling him a "good-ol’-boy plaintiffs' lawyer" when he actually spent 48 years as a civil defense attorney. The Times later corrected the error.
And Bloomberg BusinessWeek featured an article saying BP was getting “screwed.” The cover blared: “BP is getting rolled in the Gulf.”

That didn’t earn any sympathy from commercial fisherman George Barasich.

“Have Mr. Bloomberg come see my boat and he'll see who's getting rolled,” said Barasich, an oysterman and shrimper whose boat is in drydock for lack of work. He says he and others got severely underpaid, not overpaid, in the settlement.

“The way this was orchestrated -- you know, we're seeing it now with the benefit of hindsight – (BP) played it out so that they would become the victim,” he added. “And I'll be goddamned, that's exactly what happened. 'Oh we're the victim. We’re getting screwed on the money. We’re paying way too much money.’ But you caused it! And you agreed to it! How could you be a victim?”

They could lose appeal after appeal (and they have) of their settlement. They could lose their soon to resume Clean Water Act case. It doesn't matter.  They're finished "making amends" and are focusing now on push-back.  And, as you can see above, they can count on getting plenty of help in that regard. 

Fake game notes

A "sellout" crowd gathers to absorb the electricity of NFL pre-season football.

It's Pre-Season. Capture the magic. Bradley Handwerger is feeling it.

Preseason football is a sham. It’s also highway robbery to make fans pay anything close to full price.
 
Teams play mostly base packages and use very vanilla offenses to get through the games.
While the Mercedes-Benz Superdome was said to be hosting 72,000-plus people for the game, I’m calling shenanigans. It was 70 percent full at best and those fine folks were mostly out of their seats by the fourth quarter.

And there’s still one more of these to go.

I know I’m not breaking any new ground here but four of these games wastes everyone’s time. The teams don’t need all four games to prepare for the season.

Their rosters are mostly filled already with each team having roughly 6-8 spots open.

There is nothing entertaining about watching a third-string running back run amok on a third-team defense.

I’d prefer to see maybe two of these games and 17 regular season games.

As excited as fans were for Friday night’s game because, you know, football was back, it wasn’t the real stuff.

How many days left until Sept. 8?

For what it's worth, I'd be okay with somewhere between zero and one exhibition games but I don't see any reason to expand the regular season at all. Football is dangerous. I don't know why anybody plays it at all. Besides the millions of dollars and worshipful adulation of tens of thousands of strangers, I mean.  Friday night's completely useless event may not have pulled in 70,000 but there were still far more in attendance there than the simulated game had a right to.  I know because I was there looking at them.

We all know how terrible fake football is.  But none of us can deny that it is, nonetheless, a thing that happens. And so, since we allowed ourselves to happen along with it last night, here is what you need to know about the Saints-Chiefs pre-season opener should you choose to know anything about it at all.

Pre-season is a time for gaffes:

There were several of those beginning as early as mid-afternoon when we spotted this very pre-season cake work at Rouses.



Some of the people I showed this to were confused about the colors. I'll grant that the "gold" icing is maybe a little too orange but my concern is that there is so so much of it. There's almost as much icing in just the "gold" portion of the strangely two-tone fleur-de-lis as one would expect to find inside all of Rob Ryan.  Also why is the design right justified? Was there supposed to be some text to the left? Or are we expected to merely infer "Who Dat?"

And then this happened.

Despite what Entergy's outage map may show, a replay of the Blackout Bowl is not expected tonight. According to the company's outage map, eight customers are out in the area near the Superdome, and a red line is skirting the Black and Gold sanctuary. But power is on at the stadium, where the Saints' preseason opener will be played on Friday night. Instead, it's the Entergy building that is without power.

When we left the stadium after the game, an Entergy crew was still working to restore power to Entergy. I haven't bothered to check on their progress today.  We'll check back in maybe a week or so.

The girl who sang the national anthem really nailed that line where it goes, "O'er the land of the land."

Non-gaffe related Dome issues:

True to their word, Superdome security was not letting the ladies bring their purses in. I also spoke with a few fans who were more aggressively patted down at the gate than they had been in the past.  Luckily for us when we arrived the rain was coming down pretty hard so we managed to get ourselves and our extra-large plastic flask rushed through with no problem.  I hope we can remain this fortunate as the year goes on.  Beer in the Superdome is still ridiculously expensive. We didn't buy any.

Probably the biggest news of the night was the conspicuous absence of the heretofore obligatory "Halftime: Stand Up And Get Crunk" by Ying Yang Twins from the Superdome sound system following a Saints touchdown. Fans had  grown weary of the once popular number and so greeted this development with cautious optimism.

Less popular were what we hope were mere filler choices to replace the song with bland stadium standards by Ozzy Osbourne and Metallica.   Today Gambit is running an online poll for fans' choice of replacement.  I'm not too keen on the options offered there either. On the other hand, Big Freedia as demonstrated here, has the greatest potential for baffling the visiting fans which is definitely something we would want to do.

We also noticed a new item at the concession stand in our section of the Terrace this year.  Superdome "seafood nachos" are the most disturbing delicacy to appear there since the "walking taco" a few years ago.

The lights stayed on the whole time.  Fans were very grateful for this during the first quarter and then only marginally so later on.

They kinda played some football:

We say "kinda" because we don't remember seeing anybody carted off the field which appears to be a requisite element of the game this year. 

In any case, I hate having to pretend the football we were treated to was particularly significant so I won't say much about it.  Here's what I noticed.

1) It was obvious to everyone the Saints wanted to take a good look at Kenny Stills. Mike Triplett thinks this means Stills is the team's favorite to play a lot this year as the number 3 receiver.  I'm not convinced. Partially because it's not like the Saints to simply pencil a guy in as a contributor based on his draft position.  But mostly because Payton is talking him up and I never believe a word that Payton says.

Although Stills didn't maximize his opportunity on Friday night, the Saints clearly showed how highly they think of the talented fifth-round draft pick from Oklahoma, giving him some prime-time looks with the first-string offense.

"We didn't just flip a coin or go rock-paper-scissors," Saints coach Sean Payton said of giving Stills the starting nod Friday while veteran Marques Colston sat out as a precaution with his foot injury still on the mend.

"He's been playing pretty well. He's smart, he's picked up things well. He runs well," Payton continued. "There's gonna be a number of good things for us to see, and things we need to correct from his play tonight. But we wanted to give him a look with us resting Colston. And he's gonna have to contribute.

Stills wasn't so great Friday night.  This doesn't mean any of the other guys who played will beat him out. I have an irrational dislike of Andy Tanner based mostly on his status as a "camp favorite." Nick Toon is a legacy hire. And I really liked Preston Parker in Waiting for Guffman but I'm not satisfied that helps his chances of making this Saints' roster.

Plus, the Saints picked up Steve Breaston at the Greyhound station last week and, today, they signed 49 year old Patrick Crayton. They're obviously not happy with most of their receivers at the moment.

2) Luke McCown looked terrible. I'm not even going to elaborate. He's terrible.  Ryan Griffin played some late in the game.  Couldn't tell much about him from what we saw.  He'll be on the practice squad anyway.

3) I'm not freaked out by the fact that the defense got rolled early.  I'm a little disappointed we didn't see evidence of that "attitude" they've been telling us they're working on.  Maybe next week.

4) Junior Galette didn't play. Vilma didn't play.   Kenny Vaccaro made a nice tackle on special teams but that was negated by a penalty. John Jenkins did a thing. That was nice.

Reid has more thorough notes on this stuff here. But this is about as far as I'm willing to go with a fake game.  Nobody got hurt.  Now we have to do this three more times.

Is there even any reason to go to the next game?

Well there's the chance to make another trial rum-run through security.  Also there's the pressing question, "What's Seneca Wallace like?" that might might deserve some sort of answer.  I doubt we'll see anything like this, though.

Sinking bubble

Over the weekend, The Advocate ran a long feature on the Wisner trust story Dambala has been all over these past several months. Do take a look.

We keep hearing about the bull market in local real estate. But it shouldn't be any surprise that land with a high value to oil and gas commerce should be at a premium as well. Note this throwaway from The Advocate's recent story about housing prices.

Blitch said real-estate agents are counting on the growing biomedical district and especially the introduction of the LSU Hospital in New Orleans to continue to push sales.

“That will bring a burst to the market,” Blitch said.

Other industries, such as oil and gas, which is getting a boost from hydraulic fracturing in Louisiana, and retail, which is growing at a fast pace in Elmwood and will soon include Costco in New Orleans, also will help to grow the housing market, Ragas said.

When Dambala began putting the Wisner stuff together, one of the first questions I had was how much is the whole shebang worth if they just sell it all off?  The "guesstimate" at that point was $600 - $800 million. Depending on whose numbers we believe, that could afford the city somewhere between eight and fourteen NOPD consent decrees.  Put that together with the rest of the FEMA money and maybe you've got NOPD and Gusman covered.

Something tells me Mitch will prefer to "public-private partner" it all away to Opryland or some such outfit. To that, Dambala adds an even darker thought.

If the City takes over the entire thing and Mitch is intent on selling it, who would realistically be able to buy it aside from the Port of Fourchon?

Hmmm....a massive oil company with interests in the Gulf could buy the land.  A massive oil company looking to buy the land in order to avoid a costly settlement for damage they may have caused from the largest oil spill in history could buy it....kind of like what happened with Cat Island in Mississippi.  That would explain a lot.

"Iconic Structure" Park. Brought to you by BP!  You can almost see it now. 

Kicking you off the internet

We're beginning to get a clearer picture of why Rodney Alexander retired from elected office.  Apparently there's too much democracy involved.

But also, in an interview with Zach Parker of the Ouachita Citizen, he spoke of the problem he had with social media (Facebook, etc) and non-traditional news outlets such as blogs.

Said Alexander, “The Facebook and all of that — people who are not necessarily in the news business — are driving what people do, and at times, that’s had a very negative impact on how the Congress operates.”

When they retire in exasperation over the lack of "civility" what they really mean is there is too much unapproved participation coming from  the unwashed. But they're working on fixing that.

Update: Jesus it's even worse than I thought. See Bob Mann.

Peak pre-season

I was just wondering when the revised hurricane forecast (the one that takes into account that there haven't really been very many hurricanes) would come out.  Hurricane season forecasting is a complicated season-long process of adjusting the predicted numbers in order to match the actual ones until, finally, at the end of year, you've got it exactly correct.

And now the latest is here.  It advises us to expect hurricanes.

The updated forecast calls for 13 to 19 named storms of which six to nine are to become hurricanes and three to five of those becoming major hurricanes of winds of 111 miles per hour or more, according to a NOAA press release.

That’s very similar to the pre-season forecast released in May which called for 13 to 20 named storms, seven to 11 of which would become hurricanes and three to six of those becoming major hurricanes.

It's not likely that the change from "13 to 20 named storms" to "13 to 19"  will make much difference to you or me. Unless that 20th storm was a real doozie, of course, which is something that is beyond NOAA's capacity to know until it's too late anyway.   So ,really, this announcement is here just so somebody can go out into the news and say, "Hey guys, don't forget about hurricanes!"   Ok.

But this is a time for adjusting expectations anyway.  Saints fans may know a thing or two about that. As hurricane season transitions out of its pre-season, the NFL's is just kicking in.  Friday night, the Saints will play their first fake game. There will be four of them in total.  None will be very exciting for the fans to view. None will matter a lick in the season's final statistics.  All will be very dangerous events for the players' limbs and muscles and brains, though. Football, even fake football, is like that.

And so, it turns out, is football practice. Even without having completed one full weekend of purposeless pre-season violence, pro football has lost approximately 75% of its regular cast for this season to attrition. And the Saints figure prominently among those affected.

They lost linebacker Victor Butler in minicamp when Mark Ingram collided with him for no apparent reason other than a desire to be "sudden." Ingram continued to bring unnecessary harm upon his teammates until the point where they actually began wearing protective gear to practice and... you know.. hitting back, I guess.

Which is when overzealous rookie safety Kenny Vaccaro took over the job of stupidly hurting people.  Some were alarmed, but it turns out all this focus on idiotic machismo obscures the fact that Vaccaro "understands football" which, we are told, is the main thing.

One of the young players he has especially been impressed with so far is rookie safety Kenny Vaccaro, who has certainly caught the attention of his coaches and teammates with his play in camp. Leonhard believes the Saints' first-round pick out of the University of Texas has limitless talent.

"Kenny has a lot of talent and I think he's going to be a great player," he said. "Kenny understands football, and that's the main thing.

Cut ahead to mid-season.  The Saints have just embarrassed the New York Jets at home when Vaccaro creates a late game turnover by launching himself butt-first into Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez who is still their starter for some reason. At the post-game press conference, Rex Ryan, deflated by having just lost to his brother, sighs into the microphone, "Well I guess they just understood football a little more thoroughly than we did."

In addition to his understanding of football,  Vaccaro also has fans and press excited  in the expectation that he will help Rex Ryan's brother bring one more thing to the defense this year. 

But even more than scheme, Saints inside linebacker Curtis Lofton insisted the most important change will come in the defense's "attitude."

"We gotta have this sense that no matter who we are going against, no matter who it is, we have to stop the run. And as a man, you measure yourself against the run," Lofton said. "I don't really feel like we did a good job of that last year. And this year with a new system and new scheme, we gotta improve our attitude."

You can see why this makes sense. With so few functioning bodies left to work with,  "attitude" seems like the only sensible point of emphasis.  In fact it's not too unlike what we tell cancer patients so at least there's science behind it.. or pseudo-science anyway. Look for the Saints and their "attitude" to totally own Breast Cancer Awareness Month this year.

But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves.  Despite the ridiculous absurdity of the circumstances, and of course, the inherent danger of the situation, the Saints are about to take the field for some reason Friday night. Let's not waste this opportunity to get our practice licks in in the meantime.

For example, we've got nicknames to finalize.

While we're on the subject of dicks, Junior Galette sure has been swinging his around lately. And by most accounts, not the least of which being Rob Ryan's, it's been glorious. This guy… this is my kinda guy.

We here at moosedenied have been trying to come up with the obligatory clever nickname for him, because Message Board Guy ain't getting the job done with bland shit like "Beast" and any number of intentional misspellings of "Junior" and other such nonsense. And with all due respect to the man himself, "NuLa C.E.O." doesn't exactly tickle the ole ball sack either.

Personally, I've grown quite fond of "Beard Al Gankabitch" but I'm not quite fool enough to think that'll actually stick. Unfortunately. Because it's goddamned awesome.

In a word, no.  That's definitely not what we're going with.  Not saying that I've got anything better in mind.  The best I've come up with so far is a play on my growing annoyance with the obsessive discussion over who gets to play the "Jack" linebacker position in the new defense.

It's one thing to appreciate the composition of the 3-4 "under" alignment. But it's a little tiring to see everyone flaunt the word "Jack" like an Uptown Lady with a fashionable new accessory.

And there are only so many times one can quietly snicker at all the enthused speculation over who gets to line up in the Jack Backer position and... you know.. take the quarterback down from behind... and... right well I said it was getting tiresome, right? Anyway all this is to say that the best nickname I have so far for Galette and his fuzzy beard is Jack Scratcher which is, of course, also terrible.

The point is we've all got a lot of work to do and we need to get after it quickly since, and this is no surprise, the key question may already be moot.

METAIRIE, La. —  Running back Pierre Thomas and outside linebacker Junior Galette both would be deemed questionable if this were a game week after sitting out both practice sessions Thursday, coach Sean Payton said.

Payton wouldn’t give specifics on either of their injuries, saying only, “We’ll see where they’re at.”

We'll see where they're at.  And then we'll adjust our forecast accordingly. 

Sinking feelings

National headlines this morning:

Front page of today's USA Today:

In the past eight decades, Louisiana has lost 1,880 square miles of coastal marshes, or an area about the size of Manhattan every year. With another hurricane season upon us, it is land that Louisiana and the nation can ill afford to lose. The same threat of lost barrier islands and wetlands stalks more than half of the coastal properties of the continental United States, extending from Maine to Texas. But here in southeastern Louisiana, it's at its worst.

The sub-head adds insult to injury by throwing in a gratuitous line about "climate change-spiced gumbo." Try not to think about that.

Also here's a Mother Jones feature on Bayou Corne:

Bayou Corne is the biggest ongoing industrial disaster in the United States you haven't heard of. In addition to creating a massive sinkhole, it has unearthed an uncomfortable truth: Modern mining and drilling techniques are disturbing the geological order in ways that scientists still don't fully understand. Humans have been extracting natural resources from the earth since the dawn of mankind, but never before at the rate and magnitude of today's petrochemical industry. And the side effects are becoming clear.

And finally there's this local headline:

New Orleans Saints lose receiver Joe Morgan, defensive lineman Kenyon Coleman for season

Yeah kinda.. or maybe it's just because of August

Been feeling lately an awful lot like Doogie in this video... which, incidentally, should be receiving more local attention than a stupid Direct TV commercial featuring other cities' quarterbacks.

Doomed

BP is digging in.

Monday's motion was filed with Barbier, who is overseeing the settlement and other federal lawsuits against BP stemming from the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster. Barbier in mid-July had dismissed a similar BP motion to halt the payments, after saying the company had failed to provide evidence of wrongdoing.
BP has been critical of the business economic claims, and said in a recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing that the company believes its claims liability has grown to $9.6 billion, from an original estimate of $7.8 billion, and could grow higher if the rules aren't changed. The company said that as of the end of the second quarter, it had booked charges of $42.4 billion related to the spill, and had nearly used up all of a $20 billion trust fund set aside to cover claims.

They're already reaching to take money back off the table from the claims process.  There had been hope that the ongoing litigation over Clean Water Act damages represented a last best chance for funding the state's $50 billion coastal restoration plan.

Yeah. Right.

As far as BP is concerned they've pretty much committed all the money they're going to throw at us.  From here on out they'll be clawing back whatever they can. Hope you enjoyed all those seafood commercials.

"Mired in politics"

Stephanie Grace: Levee lawsuit already mired in politics

In theory, the levee authority, the product of a post-Katrina reform drive to replace the parishwide levee boards of yore, is supposed to operate on a separate plane, to sidestep power struggles and focus exclusively on flood protection. Unlike in the old days, some of the new authority’s members are required to have actual expertise in things such as engineering and water management, and all are supposed to be free of political ties and conflicts of interest. The board is also set up to make independent decisions on things like, well, filing lawsuits — or so its members insist.

In practice, it turns out, it’s nearly impossible to stay above the fray. In its brief existence, the authority’s members have gotten into fights over funding and control over land behind homes that back up to its floodwalls.

But there’s never been a blow-up like this.

By filing the stealth suit, the levee authority has picked a major fight with defenders of the industry’s prerogatives and critics of “frivolous lawsuits” that carry the possibility of huge payouts for lawyers — two categories with considerable overlap.

Indeed.  Notice also the "payouts for lawyers" canard is currently being put to use by BP with great effect.

But that's not what we're focusing on right now.  Instead, there's this.

Mark Moseley: Political machinations stain selection for a job that’s meant to be above politics

It’s always assumed that politics factors into the U.S. Attorney selection “process,” but the key decisions are made in private. It’s a farce, and a disservice to the public as well as to potential nominees like Polite. The political nature of the appointment makes everything suspect.

For example, when the Bush administration directed then interim U.S. Attorney Jim Letten to “make urban areas safer,” were we to interpret that as code? Or, when Polite says he intends to focus the office on violent crime — is that his own preference — or Holder’s or Jackson’s?

Here’s my proposal on how to reform the system: U.S. Attorney candidates should come from outside the district and be chosen by lot. I envision each region compiling short lists of peer-approved candidates from each party. When a vacancy opens in another region, a lottery selects a candidate from all the lists to determine which “outsider” candidate fills the vacancy. It’s not a perfect solution. There are drawbacks — lack of familiarity with a new region being the most obvious. And even a random process wouldn’t eliminate all the politics, but it would be a step in the right direction — certainly an improvement over the current charade.

Can't say I'm too excited about Moseley's suggested remedy. I do agree the "process" by which US Attorneys are selected is severely lacking in transparency, though. I'm just not convinced there's much value to ensuring the candidates are always "outsiders." I would have thought the fashion for ass kicking "outsiders" would have gone the way of the Dodo.. or at least the Skyline Crane but some dreams die hard, I guess.

Anyway back to this lawsuit thingy.


Bob Marshall: Flood Authority, suit against oil companies safe from political meddling — for now

Marshall's article is right to laud the post-Katrina reforms for raising the professional standards of the flood protection authority and for granting it a certain degree of insulation from political interference.  But it's foolhardy to presume that politics won't (or even that it shouldn't) come into play in public affairs as is likely to happen eventually. 

When Gov. Jindal and Garret Graves, head of the state’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, loudly condemned the suit and promised to sink it, Louisiana’s tradition of pervasive political meddling might have led many to assume the board would soon be stocked with oil company executives.

The good news for reformers: That kind of political power play looks impossible to achieve this year because of the protections against hanky-panky built into the amendment and legislation that created the flood authority.

The bad news: The Legislature could rescind that protection during its next session.

“The amendment changed the constitution to allow the establishment of regional levee authorities, and laid out certain ways how that could be done, and those things can only be changed by another amendment,” Robert Scott, president of the Public Affairs Research Council, told The Lens.

In the public arena, no matter how smart you are or how important you think the work you're doing is, that work is always going to be subjected to the scrutiny of the public. As long as we're still doing democracy that means it will always be "mired in politics."  Maybe the smart people should try to work on winning the political arguments rather than running and hiding from them.

I'm guessing this time it was pigeon poo

And hey maybe that's explosive. But I'm not sure how suspicious it is. Are we done with these yet?

Off into that big money pile in the sky

Which one of these 20 firms has a job waiting for Congressman Alexander when he retires after this term? Winning answer gets a free work visa.. but no health care, obviously.

Update: Answer is None of The Above. Apparently Jindal gave him a job

Jindaled

Just about the entire Jindal universe wrapped up in this.

The Biomedical Research Foundation of Northwest Louisiana, or BRF, has more limited resources to pump into hospital operations and no background in hospital management. But on Oct. 1, the research foundation - led by a Jindal campaign donor and member of the LSU System governing board - will take over one of the state's largest university-run hospitals.

Doomed

If you're still waiting on the second half of the trial to learn whether BP will ever be made to pay for repairing the Louisiana coast, we can save you some time.  They're pretty much finished paying for anything at this point.

BP on Monday renewed its request for a federal judge to temporarily halt the payment of millions of dollars of economic claims stemming from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, charging it has found new evidence of improper payment of claims by an employee at a Mobile, Ala., claims office and of apparent conflicts of interest involving attorneys handling appeals in the payment process.

Not saying it's not a good idea to keep after them.  Just that they seem to have the upper hand and all the important people are their friends.

Kicking you off the internet

I've been saying this forever now but the time is fast approaching when our legal and corporate infrastructure will have figured out how to compensate for the once-leveling power of the internet and reassert the principle that free speech only belongs to those with the money to back it up. 

As the U.S. Senate continues to debate a national law to protect journalists from protecting their sources, two Senators believe unpaid bloggers and websites like WikiLeaks shouldn’t get extended First Amendment protections.

First Amendment in the Bill Of Rights

The Senate Free Flow of Information Act of 2013 would establish a national “shield law” that would give journalists protection from testifying in situations when investigators want the sources of confidential information used in media reports.

However, in today’s world, the definition of the word “journalist” means different things to different people, and two powerful Senators, Dianne Feinstein and Richard Durbin, say journalists only should enjoy extended First Amendment protection if they work for traditional media outlets on a paid basis.

The state decides who is legitimate media. And legitimate media happens to be defined as employees of establishment organizations with traditional revenue streams.  What could possibly be wrong with that?

The First Amendment was written, in part, to eliminate the kind of official press that parrots only the King’s sanctioned views. But with its revised “News Media Policies,” DOJ gets us closer to having just that, an official press.

That’s because all the changes laid out in the new policy (some of which are good, some of which are obviously flawed) apply only to “members of the news media.” They repeat over and over and over and over, “news media.” I’m not sure they once utter the word “journalist” or “reporter.” And according to DOJ’s Domestic Investigation and Operations Guide, a whole slew of journalists are not included in their definition of “news media.”

Oh well, at least the conversation will stay nice and "civil" the way John Georges likes it. No more "dangerous people" to worry about.
 
But nobody gives a shit about this stuff anymore. Somewhere along the way we decided the internet was mostly going to be for streaming movies.  Which is why the matter is lost... just like it was always going to be.

Is Terrence Copper available?

The Saints are kind of desperate for journeyman receivers right now.  Apparently any idiot will do.

Apart from having a running back who breaks all of your players in practice, that is

Drew Magary's "Why Your Team Sucks" series at Deadspin is always a preseason must-read. Today, the Saints are the victim. 

In case you aren't familiar with this schtick, Magary previews each team in a sort of celeb roast style. It's insulting because it's supposed to be.  I have to explain this here because last year, this column touched off a major local shitstorm among the irony-challenged.  And also as a preference to this quote which is both hilarious and also kind of spot-on.

New Orleans is the birthplace of so many awful things: goth culture, actors trying to get extra "realness" cred, Dan Aykroyd's music career, writers who co-opt the city's poorest residents for their own moral grandstanding, an economy based solely on tit beads, and natives who earn a living off of tourism but make every effort to let tourists know they don't "get" their shithole of a town and never will.  

Also inconvenienced, people

The devastating effect reduced Algiers Ferry hours are having on these businesses is certainly worth talking about. But for whatever reason we seem to think it makes a more compelling argument than simply saying affordable and efficient public transit is good for the people who use it. Not sure why that is.

Today at 5 there will be a public hearing on RTA's ridiculous proposal to hike fares up to a point that makes daily use a serious hardship for most commuters. The Lens will "live-blog" the meeting here.

Reputational activitities

A short couple years ago BP hired this Pentagon PR flack to be its new.. PR flack.

Back in April 2010, when BP's Deepwater Horizon well was gushing crude oil all over the Gulf of Mexico, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell was coy about a possible military response. "You want to work, I believe, hand in glove with industry here because in some cases they're going to have...better assets than we would," he told reporters.

A year and a half later, Morrell is enjoying those better assets firsthand: He has joined BP America as its new spokesman. Morrell "will oversee external and internal communications for BP in the United States," according to an internal memo from company honchos quoted in The Hill. The memo added: "He will be responsible for leading our communications efforts in the US, as well as playing a critical role with our broader global communications and reputational activities."

Here's AZ with an update on how to follow those "reputational activities" to see how they are working out.

Inflammable material

Question everything you're told
Just take a look around you
At the bitterness and spite
Why can't we take over and try to put it right



There's also this from a 2004 Gambit article on Greg's inclusion in a book about subversive cartoonists.

Peters' craft is fueled by his punk rock-influenced DIY personality and educational background in literary criticism, Marxism, post-structuralism, and Buddhism -- all meeting the surreal arena of Louisiana politics. 

And here's Gambit's obit posted by Kevin Allman.

And more after a whiskey or two.

My relationship with Greg was of an increasingly common type these days.  We saw each other every now and again at parties and had several closer friends in common. But thanks to the ubiquity of online correspondence, we knew each other more intimately than we otherwise would have. We traded jokes and arguments on a near daily basis over a now dormant listserv and then later over Twitter. I was a regular reader of his blog and, for a time anyway, I know he paid some attention to this one. We were Facebook "friends" for a while. And then we weren't. And then we were again.

To me, he always seemed like some sort of wizard.   He was intelligent and soft spoken and,  despite the withering sarcasm evident in his prose, a sweet and gentle man. But at the same time there was a power and a darkness in his aspect that always inspired a kind of awe.  There was never a time during our interaction that I didn't suspect he was maybe a little bit mad at me.

I don't know who owns his cartoon archive or whether or not he kept his old blog anywhere after he took it down but I'd like to think those words and images still exist somewhere.

This is the part where Greg should cut in with some kind of angry or dirty but oddly literary joke in order to finish the post.  But I don't have one of those at the moment. All I can say is Greg Peters was an extraordinarily talented person. I'm glad to have known him a little. And we're all a little more impoverished by his absence.

Update: Greg's life touched many others.

Here is more from Levees Not War

And from Mark Folse.

And from Leigh Checkman

And here's a particularly touching remembrance from another mostly online friend of Greg's from a completely different circle.

 Upperdate: I'll keep collecting these as I find them.  Here's Ian McGibboney's cartoon homage.

Uppestdate: And here Allman collects some of his favorite Suspect Device cartoons. 

Of those I'd say this is probably my favorite.

And this one is a close runner-up.

Uppesterdate:

Mark Moseley remembers Greg Peters in his column at The Lens.

Uppesterestdate: 

Here's Ray Shea. Can't believe I missed this one.  

A different lie

This is a Romenesko blurb about John Georges admitting to lying about a meeting he apparently didn't have with the Newhouses. But then, in the comments, Georges pops in to say that the thing he said before about a thing he said not being true is also not true.  Neat.

I'm just glad that this is all happening in a Facebook comment forum since  Georges' own paper assures us those are the most believable sort of comments and less likely to "reflect poorly on the state."

These microbes are decidedly un-magical

Thanks again, BP

Dr. Cova Arias, professor of Aquatic Microbiology at Auburn University, and two of her lab members had rather disturbing results published in the journal EcoHealth last December, 2011, on their discovery of high concentrations of Vibrio vulnificus, also known as a type of flesh-eating bacteria, in tarballs.

What is surprising is that Arias’ findings haven’t received more attention from public health officials, given the implications of the research. Findings involving V. vulnificus should be a concern for public health authorities in coastal areas, given that in addition to causing severe wound infections, this bacteria is the leading cause of seafood-borne fatalities nationwide.

While many media stories have focused on either bashing beach clean-up efforts in the aftermath of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, or hushing up the story completely, Arias’ group has clear data from tarballs and other forms of weathered oil on beaches in Mississippi and Alabama that could be valuable information for public health and future health research efforts. Especially in the aftermath of several reported cases of flesh-eating bacterial infections contracted from beaches and water in the Gulf of Mexico this summer, and warnings from the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals about flesh-eating bacteria found in Gulf waters, Arias’ findings are relevant and concerning.

Real fun is no one's monopoly*

I posted a version of this travel guide to the "new" downtown New Orleans amusement area on a parallel internet earlier this week.  Figured it might look better with some links and photos and whatnot. 


When visiting NOLA Disney, begin your day in Bensonville. (Brought to you by Mercedes-Benz) Have a $9 domestic lager and toast the totally generic and absolutely not a Falcon punter statue as you make your way over to Champions Square (Brought to you by Mercedes-Benz). For maximum enjoyment, please observe the code of conduct.



The Square and its surrounding blocks are state-financed facilities dedicated to celebrating and supporting the wealth of sports entertainment billionaire Tom Benson. 

Four years ago, he negotiated one of the most complex — and lucrative — stadium lease agreements in the NFL, adding to his fortune as his team was bringing in estimated yearly profits of $31 million. Over 15 years, the term of the lease, the state will pay Benson at least $198 million in increased revenue from the Superdome, $142 million in rental payments on property Benson owns, $10 million in bonuses for bringing the Super Bowl to New Orleans and $2.6 million in tax breaks. Benson will get another $40 million from private rent payments to a tower he bought as part of the deal.

Benson Tower looms over Bensonville... well, the part that isn't loomed over by the Mercedes-Benz Superdome (brought to you by Mercedes-Benz!) anyway.  Tours are currently not available.



Continue on into Opryland (brought to you by Opryland) where you might stop in at any of several Jazz History (coming soon! maybe) and/or Nearly Naked Breast themed restaurants for a quick lunch. If plans go well, we're hoping to offer accommodations at the "Old French Opry House Hotel" on the site of the soon to be decommissioned City Hall.

Next, catch a ride on our newest public transit investment; a streetcar connecting these touristed areas to the Convention Center. (Hang on! You're moving at the speed of leisure!)



Out the window to your right, you may be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the Landrieuville Parking Plantation where one of the city's most prominent families has been growing money for decades!



After your meetings, join the other conventioneers for a short monorail trip to Iconic Structure Park and see a "Mini Mardi Gras Parade" (There's one every night!) Be sure and have you picture taken with one of our trademarked costumed characters. (Also available for birthday parties and store openings!)  From there you can finish the day by viewing the sunset over the Mississippi River comfortably seated along its banks where no ferries will ever depart from ever again.

Fun? Consider living with us here.. for at least part of the year anyway. More and more valuable timeshare properties are becoming available in picturesque historic districts every day! Consult your realtor... or maybe Joel Kotkin who we've come to understand is in town.

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