Mid- morning news spittoon

• Last week, Michele Krupa reporting on the newly "Institutionalized Recovery" wrote the following.

  Three days after Austin Penny was named a top director in Mayor Ray Nagin's next-generation recovery bureaucracy, a city spokesman confirmed Thursday that Penny is poised to leave city government, setting up another leadership transition in New Orleans' ongoing rebuilding effort.
  
  Meanwhile, Kenya Smith, a former top advisor to Nagin who quit last year to run for Congress, is returning to City Hall as a recovery manager and may replace Penny in the high-profile post, spokesman James Ross said.

  More like re-generation recovery bureaucracy, thought I. Today we see this process continues unabated.



• Meanwhile, la la la, MWI, pumps shmumps. Whatever. All this stuff is soooo 2007, right?

  A federal whistle-blower continues to claim that temporary hydraulic pumps in New Orleans outfall canals aren't properly tested and contain potentially fatal flaws that could cause them to fail catastrophically in a hurricane.
  
  Since late 2006, California resident Maria Garzino has repeatedly lodged these complaints against some of her Army Corps of Engineers co-workers, mostly in New Orleans, and the Florida company that manufactured the 40 pumps in question.

  
  



• RTA's new streetcar proposals are continuing to be "floated" Personally I think floating streetcars in New Orleans is a pretty damn good idea, especially given the questionable status of the pumps. Probably at least as good as levitating trains anyway. There are three proposed routes here. Typically, the proposal that makes the most sense to locals is the one with the least solid funding status.
  



• A contrarian's view of the Obama speech to schoolchildren non-issue:
  
  When I was in grammar school, my classmates and I were routinely subjected to various assemblies where a supposed role model... or often just the school principal... would belt all sorts of propaganda at us about the value of "study and hard work" and how we were all expected to "succeed" according to some ill-conceived definition of "success" or whatever.
  
  And then it was back to school where we were subjected to soul-crushing regimentation, absurd discipline, and the unspoken truth that "success" was really just a matter of keeping one's head down, causing no trouble, and muddling through.
  
  The day-to-day grind was fine, though. It was a fair approximation of real life and one could find ways to cope with that if one was creative or thick-skinned enough. But the assemblies and the celebrity speeches, those were the difficult times. Those were the times when the transparent falseness of the whole arrangement was most in evidence. If I were still in school and had to sit through the President's delivery of one of these Big Lies, I would never forgive the fucker. So it's a bit of a surprise to me to see his political opponents so up in arms over him being given an opportunity to lose a generation this way.
  
  
• The city's plan for redeveloping the Municipal Auditorium is...

  The administration's request for proposals, or RFP, says it wants proposals "for an alternate adaptive use of this historic structure" and its operation "as a long-term economic commercial business enterprise."
  
  The document says the city is interested in turning the still mold-infested building into "a world-class state-of-the-art multi use sound and video production facility for . . . the creative media industry and other traditional uses while creating an incubator for the next generation digital media entrepreneurs."
  
  It says the redevelopment plan "should incorporate a vibrant mix of uses that are sensitive to and fully integrated into the surrounding historic Armstrong Park and Treme community." The plan must also respect the building's architecture and "historical significance."

  Beyond, "well at least we aren't knocking it down" what the hell does this even mean? Does "incubator for the next generation digital media entrepreneurs" mean we're building a warehouse where we can lock these people away? Because, yeah that would actually be pretty awesome.