Suddenly Libraries are an Issue!

Although not much of one. During last night's debate, John Snell actually asked Mitch and Ray for their thoughts on the recovery of the city's badly damaged library system. Neither provided much of an answer beyond meaningless cliches along the lines of "we need to re-think libraries" or "libraries need to become community centers" and so forth. Nagin's ineffectual answer contained too many dangerous privitization code words for my liking while Mitch spent his trying to take credit for "standing up" the state library after Katrina whatever that might mean. Neither said anything particularly encouraging.. or even vaguely reflective of reality. Oh well.

As for the debate itself.. these things are becoming increasingly dull as we approach election day. I'm still hoping to see something explode in the next show but I'm not optimistic. David of Bayou St. John has some questions regarding Nagin's unchallenged assertion that city sales tax revenues for March were 85% of March 2005. It seemed a little far-fetched to me as well. Nagin is also very Tom Benson-like regarding the city's finances; pooh poohing the notion of a need for an independant audit. David scores it thusly:

The statement about sales tax receipts bears closer examination. It demands closer examination. It cries out for closer examination. Has anyone even asked for documentation? I suspect that either an accounting error or some deliberate change in accounting procedure is involved. That does make one wonder about Nagin's insistence that there's no need for a city audit.

I forgot, Nagin's honest and he's CPA and a turn-around expert himself. Unfortunately, I don't think that Landrieu scored the points that he could have because he seems to still be waiting for other candidates to atack Nagin or to be directly attacked himself so that he can counterpunch. I thought that Landrieu could have scored more points off of Nagin's statement to the effect that he doesn't really need to get along with the mayor Baton Rouge, but maybe he was correct to handle it with a light touch. It certainly seems to me that it would be very easy to point out that Nagin has two basic campaign themes: "Trust me" and "It's not my fault." I guess that's another similarity between Nagin and Bush.

Go read the whole post on Moldy City.