Weekend News Roundup

A few items from the local paper we didn't have time to comment on over a busy weekend:

• I really wanted to like Gordon Russell's front page feature on Mose Jefferson in yesterday's T-P. As it is, it's certainly a must-read for anyone who isn't already familiar with the Jefferson clan's background and their rise from small-town poverty and racism to big-time urban and national politics. One interesting fact I learned from the article was that Bill Jefferson authored a semi-fictionalized memoir called Dying is the Easy Part. I will have to locate a copy somewhere.
  
  Reading Russell's piece, I would have liked to learn more about the complicated reasons why urban political machines like the Jeffersons' in New Orleans and the Shaws' in Chicago were as successful as they were and why they seem to be fading now. It's a subject I'd like to see examined maybe from the point of view of the people who voted for the Jeffersons as much as just that of the people around them.
  
  I guess what I'd really like is a book-length treatment of this subject and I realize that a Sunday morning T-P feature probably isn't going to get all of the angles I'm looking for. But even so, the article seemed strangely unbalanced. What we read here is, Mose grows up poor - Mose moves to Chicago -Mose learns to steal -Mose turns that into a profession. It's one point of view... and not necessarily inaccurate but I found myself saying, "Yeah but we knew that already."
  
  And then there's this odd moment.

  Like Jefferson, the Shaws were Southern transplants -- they came from Hope, Ark. -- and they imparted their love for old-school politics: Shaw elections were won in the streets, with campaign workers and shoe leather, not TV ads. The brothers weren't above trickery, either: U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., a longtime foe and son of the civil rights leader, blamed the Shaws when a truck driver named Jesse L. Jackson took him on in 2002.
  
  Then there were the Shaws' ethical snafus. Bill Shaw was simultaneously an Illinois state senator -- serving alongside Barack Obama -- and mayor of the village of Dolton.

  Here's where an editor says, if the highlighted phrase is deleted, do we lose anything crucial to the story? Other than also being an Illinois state senator, what exactly does Barack Obama have to do with any of this? Is Russell throwing the President's name in there because he's afraid his readers are getting bored? Is it merely a fun fact? Should every story about Illinois politics include an Obama mention somehow? In the larger context of the right's constant attempts to imply Obama's Chicago-corruption-by-association, I question his superfluous inclusion in this story.



• In celebration of the beginning of the 2009 Hurricane Season, the Sunday paper ran a colorful insert full of standard "preparedness" type articles. Conspicuously absent from this story about the city's evacuation plan was any discussion of last year's re-entry fiasco.
  
  For those of us who have memories, the sights and sounds of Crazy Freak-Out 2008 are still fresh in our minds. After having absurdly exaggerated the size and strength of Hurricane Gustav in order to panic the populace into fleeing their homes at great personal expense, local officials arrogantly and condescendingly lied and fought to keep residents from returning to their homes well after the danger had passed. People were really upset about this and rightly so. NOLA.com's James O'Byrne wrote an op-ed titled "Next Time, We Won't Leave" which summed up everyone's feelings at that time.
  
  The fact is, the very concept of an entire city jumping up and running at the first (possibly exaggerated) sign of trouble is an untenable state of affairs to begin with. Those of us who choose to live under these circumstances do so with the (possibly misguided) faith that, in the future, we'll be better protected than we were on 8/29/2005. The treatment we received from our elected officials as we went through that exercise last year was unacceptable. It's sad that the paper chose not to address these concerns.



• Here is a re-print of a letter-to-the-editor I read Sunday.
  

  If Tulane wants in on Charity, close its hospital
  Sunday, May 31, 2009
  
  I am a Louisiana State University pulmonary/intensive care physician who has had the honor of providing medical care to the underserved for over 20 years at Charity Hospital. What made Charity Hospital world-class was not the facility itself, but the personnel who provided the absolute best care.
  
  While there is great debate about the new facility, there is one point upon which everyone agrees. In order for this facility to be economically viable and less dependent on state support, it must care for both the uninsured and the insured.
  
  Before coming to LSU, I was at the Johns Hopkins Hospital where this model worked well. LSU has publicly stated that we will admit our insured patients to the new facility. Tulane has not, and that is the critical point in this discussion. How can Tulane assume a central role in the financial operation of the new hospital when it operates a competing, for-profit facility only three blocks away?
  
  Perhaps the simple answer is for Tulane to withdraw from its competing hospital and join as a true partner with us as we build the new academic health science center that will once again identify New Orleans as the destination for state-of-the-art health care for all of our citizens.
  
  Steve Nelson, M.D.
  
  Dean
  
  LSU School of Medicine
  
  New Orleans

  
  
  Amen.
  



• Very sad to see Angus Lind go. Lind's column was a document of the home-grown eccentric New Orleans that still existed to some degree as I became a young adult. Chris Rose's column, which basically replaces it, is a document of the phony approximation of that New Orleans which continues to be sold to tourists and transplants in the post-modern era.
  



• And finally, "straight to DVD" is kind of an apt metaphor for Ray Nagin's shtick by now. The novelty is gone, the act is stale, and no one's paying any attention any more.