"Putting aside the merit of the amendments..."

The above is the key phrase in this AZ post about Nadine Ramsey which raises all sorts of questions about who she does favors for as well as how obscenely dishonest she is apparently willing to be about it.

In the Robinette show at the 26:45 mark Garland presses her on who wanted the amendments pushed through, she answers that it was the Louisiana Restaurant Association. The caller on the line then asks her about the "liquor lobbyist" (Chris Young) and she responds "I'm not aware of....the person I worked with being a liquor lobbyist....I don't know who the liquor lobbyist is."

She doesn't know that Young is a liquor lobbyist? How is that even possible? It's not possible...she knows exactly who he is.

There's obfuscation and then there's just damn....^^^that.

So here it looks like we have a councilmember pretty much acting as an agent for the usually pretty despicable Louisiana Restaurant Association and ignoring the objections of neighborhood groups in the process.  That's bad. I want to be clear about that.

But in this particular case, it may not be such a tragedy since the issue at hand is those neighborhood groups and their outsized prudishness over liquor laws. 

Opponents of Ramsey's amendment – including Councilwoman Stacy Head, French Quarter Citizens, Vieux Carre Property Owners Residents and Associates, and the Preservation Resource Center, among others – said that the current language provides protection against restaurants closing their kitchens at 5 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays and operating as bars for the rest of the night.

"It scares the hell out of us," said French Quarter resident Albin Guillot. "Even though 99 percent of our family restaurants in our neighborhoods are good there's always going to be the guy who's going to do his hamburgers and then he's going to turn into a disco every night in the middle of a family area."

The majority of the opponents to Ramsey's amendment asked for the issue to be deferred so they could work out a compromise with business owners, though Calvin Lopez was more direct. He said that "under no circumstances" should restaurants be allowed to sell alcohol without a "legitimate meal."

These guys are just going to have to get over their irrational fear of having bars in neighborhoods. Bars aren't what's causing the "quality of life" problem in New Orleans right now.  The skyrocketing rents, on the other hand are.  Hilariously, though, Stacy Head told us this week that she doesn't think the city can take decisive action against the short term rental plague exacerbating rents because that would be  "like prohibition."   Apparently Head's commitment to actual prohibition remains as steadfast as ever.

Getting back to Jason's post about Ramsey, though, it's worth taking the dynamics into account regardless of the specific issue at hand this time.

Putting aside the merit of the amendments, it's become painfully clear Councilperson Ramsey is catering to monied interests at all cost. The question...what is that cost? District C neighborhoods are by far the most volatile and threatened in "New New Orleans", it doesn't appear they have a sympathetic ear with their current councilperson who was willing to circumvent public discussion and the democratic process in order to jam power brokers' agendas, like Chris Young's, down our throats.

Not good.