Oh well that is who we are getting

 Biden's probable pick for the open Supreme Court seat. 

Childs’s experience is worth scrutinizing closely. As a lawyer, Childs served as an associate and then partner at Nexsen Pruet Jacobs & Pollard, from 1992 to 2000. At Nexsen Pruet, Childs worked primarily in labor and employment law, principally working on behalf of employers against allegations of racial discrimination, civil rights violations, and unionization drives.

Bloomberg Law has 25 cases registered in which Childs participated during her time at the firm; 23 of those involve alleged employment discrimination or other employment-related civil rights violations. Race and gender were common factors in such suits; seven such cases entailed race-based job discrimination, and another three involved sex-based job discrimination. In all but two registered instances, Childs was not representing the plaintiff but the defendant, meaning that she overwhelmingly represented employers accused of violating civil rights and gender discrimination laws in the workplace.

Not considered the "front runner" at the moment, but all the elements are there. Clyburn is pushing for her. Apparently, Lindsey Graham is on board so it's "bi-partisan."  Add to that the concept of a figure who checks all the indentitarian boxes while also upholding a conservative ideology and you've pretty much got the flavor of the moment in Democratic Party politics right now. Hard to imagine this isn't the direction they go in.

 

What did John Bel know and when did he know it?

And now the fun begins.

Louisiana House Speaker Clay Schexnayder, R-Gonzales, described a recent Associated Press report which revealed that Gov. John Bel Edwards knew about the violent, fatal arrest of a Black man by Louisiana State Police long before the details of the arrest went public “greatly disturbing.” 

Schexnayder said in a written statement that he had talked to Senate President Page Cortez, R-Lafayette, and Attorney General Jeff Landry over the weekend about the report on Edwards, though he didn’t say what the three Republicans might do in response.

Instead, he alluded to a possible legislative investigation or impeachment, saying the Legislature was fully prepared to use its authority to serve as “check and balance to other branches.”

“What happened to Ronald Greene is inexcusable and should never happen to anyone. His family and the citizens of this state deserve to know the truth,” Schexnayder said.

“It’s time to find out who knew what – and when – and hold them accountable,” he said.

Of course, Schexnayder, Cortez and Landry are all pandering hypocrites who have zero interest in preventing police violence or even, I would venture to say, justice for the Greene family.  But the interesting thing about this will be the response from the various Democrats and JBE allies around the state who, in rallying around the Governor, will find themselves on the side of our racist and murderous state police and, by extension, the racist and murderous criminal justice system overall.

Not that most of them will have much of a problem with that.  After all the general consensus among our elite politicos of either party is very much in favor of more unaccountable police violence and a more violent and brutal system of legal punishment overall.  It makes little difference whether that position is arrived at through white supremacy or through an individualist belief that poverty is a personal shame deserving of its consequences, or through fealty to the oligarch class interested in keeping workers disciplined.  It all leads everyone who is anyone in politics and media to just about the same place. 

And so if these Republicans end up going hard after John Bel, the battle lines on either side will be about partisanship rather than anything resembling a moral principle.  Either way, don't expect any of it to alter the regime of state violence most of us are subjected to in Louisiana. 

What did John Bel know and when did he know it?

 It's looking more and more like the Governor deliberately covered up this murder. 

What the governor knew, when he knew it and what he did have become questions in a federal civil rights investigation of the deadly encounter and whether police brass obstructed justice to protect the troopers who arrested Greene.

“The question is: When did he find out the truth?” said Sen. Cleo Fields, a Baton Rouge Democrat who is vice-chair of a legislative committee created last year to dig into complaints of excessive force by state police.

The FBI has questioned people in recent months about Edwards’ awareness of various aspects of the case, according to law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the probe. Investigators have focused in part on an influential lawmaker saying the governor downplayed the need for a legislative inquiry.

The governor’s spokesperson said he is not under investigation and neither is any member of his staff.

Edwards kept quiet about the Greene case through his reelection campaign in 2019 and through a summer of protests in 2020 over racial injustice in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. Even after Greene’s family filed a wrongful-death lawsuit that brought attention to the case in late 2020, Edwards declined to characterize the actions of the troopers and refused calls to release their body-camera video, citing his concern for not interfering with the federal investigation.

You may have noticed also that the city of New Orleans is the throes of yet another mass panic over crime stoked by the media and by political leaders who are thrilled as ever to ride the wave of pubic hysteria but have nothing but the same old counterproductive responses to offer.  This week at city council we saw politicians demand  more cops, tougher cops, cops who will stop and frisk you if your car looks a little dirty, cops who will put you in jail for marijuana possession.  The same politicians have also called for an end to consent decree and its requirements that police at least appear as though they mean to act in accordance with the constitution.  Or, failing that, they have called for more policing by entities not bound by that restriction. One councilmember even suggested calling in the National Guard.  The State Police are already here a lot of the time, of course.  

All of this can only increase the danger to New Orleanians.  But it's clear from the statements of the local leaders, and the actions of the Govenor, that none of them actually care about any of that.

Not a moment too soon

 TP: EPA to start surprise inspections of industrial polluters, add air monitors in Louisiana 

Focusing on environmental justice in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plans start unannounced inspections of industrial polluters, install more fenceline monitors at the plants and push state and local officials to step up their own enforcement.

“I asked my team to go further and faster than we’ve ever done before to elevate protection for people who have historically been left behind in underserved communities,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said Tuesday. “Those who are suffering disproportionately under the weight of the pandemic, who are on the frontlines of climate change, who suffer more from pollution, have been waiting long enough. And they are counting on us to get this right.”

I hope they bring the explosion detectors too. That's something we need to look out for, especially.  

Westlake, LA (KPLC) - Officials with Westlake Chemical have confirmed that there was an explosion at the Westlake chemical south plant.

Officials said a tank of Ethylene Dichloride exploded.

The plant is located near Pete Manena Road and PPG Drive.

We are currently reaching out to officials for more information.

Y'all we could have ended the pandemic

 When you see (or maybe just hear) a shooting star, that is your moment. You have to seize it. 

Meteor?

Maybe. We're checking with NASA to see if anything was reported. The National Weather Service doesn't track meteors.

"Meteors aren't weather," according to Mike Efferson, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Slidell.

Earlier this month, a loud boom was heard in part of Pennsylvania, and NASA said it was caused by a meteor exploding in the atmosphere, according to CNN.

NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office tracks meteors at its office at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. 

They run a Facebook page called NASA Meteor Watch that tracks fireballs across the country. It had not been updated as of Wednesday morning. We've reached out for more information.

But I get the feeling too many of y'all might have just wished for a ham sandwich instead. 

Congrats, Walt

I resolved to do more posts in 2022. I haven't done more posts yet.  Will do more posts soon. Seriously. Like I said before, I've got a a big backlog of notes and outlines of things I could have written months ago but never got around to.  I've also got some "draft" posts that are really just bookmarks of single items I read in the news but didn't want to forget. I've always tried to put things like that on the blog so I can find them later. Gonna try to get back in that habit as well soon. Anyway, if I end up posting some stuff that seems like old news this is why. This is going to be a very dark year, I am afraid, for a lot of reasons.  Not sure what to do about it other than just try to keep the notes straight as it happens. 

For example, in December, we learned that Walt Leger is finally getting his "fair share" of the spoils he earned guiding the legislation that the mayor called a Fair Share for the city but which actually just gave the Convention Center more control over its slush fund and made the privately operated but publicly funded New Orleans and Co. tourism promotion corporation even richer and less accountable to the public.  

As a reward, Walt will get to run the unaccountable private tourism promotion corporation. 

Stephen Perry, the outspoken longtime leader of New Orleans' tourism and marketing agency, will step down at the end of next year, he said Thursday.

He will be replaced as CEO of New Orleans & Co., the private, publicly-funded nonprofit, by former state legislator Walter “Walt” Leger III, an attorney and former Speaker Pro Tempore of the Louisiana House of Representatives. Leger is currently executive vice president and general counsel at New Orleans & Co.

"Bolt from the blue"

I know Gill's columns have been even less coherent lately than in years past. But even when he appears to be "on" it has never been easy to know when he is being intentionally ironic.  In any case, I'm only sharing this to say that it's neat how they all never seem to have an "inkling at the time," about stuff like this.  Even in cases like below, when the circumstantial evidence Gill cites having witnessed appears, something inhibits professional political observers from getting the inkling.

It came as a bolt from the blue when Thomas pleaded guilty, and resigned as an at-large member of the council in 2007, because his vast popularity across racial lines had made him a hot favorite to succeed Ray Nagin as mayor in 2010.

Although I had no inkling at the time that he was another crooked politician, I was always mildly surprised, whenever I made a modest wager at the Fair Grounds and looked across at the big plungers of the $50 window, to see Thomas standing there at a time when his council salary was $43,000. He later blamed his downfall on gambling.

At least not, "at the time."  It's only after the fact that these inklings appear in print. Wonder why that is. Is it that difficult for the professional local politics observers to conclude that a local politician might be corrupt?  Maybe if it weren't such an off -the-wall concept it would take less time to figure out.

Louisiana's dominant political party maintains its grift

The state Republican Party re-elected Louis Gurvich as its chair after yet another year of squabbling between his faction and a group more closely in the orbit of Eddie Rispone. This time the opposition is accusing Gurvich of verbally abusing a staffer, which is probably true, but also not the real reason they're opposed to his chairmanship. 

Gurvich denied the allegations against him. In a speech Saturday, he said the party’s financial problems preceded his election as chairman in 2018 and that Republicans had robust fundraising over the past two months.

He did not directly address the allegations that he had mistreated a former party employee, though in his remarks Saturday, he compared himself with Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative who was outraged when he found himself being accused of sexual assault after being nominated to the country’s top court.

Several top Republicans in the state have been upset with Gurvich’s leadership. Eddie Rispone, a former gubernatorial candidate and a Republican mega-donor, has openly criticized the party’s leadership on several occasions.

“No one wants to contribute to the party because it’s not run properly,” Rispone said Saturday.

Is the party being "run properly?" Well that depends on a lot of subjective criteria. They do hold both houses of the legislature, both US Senate seats, all but one of Louisiana's US House seats, and every statewide elected office other than Governor.  On the other hand, they haven't yet figured out how to divvy up the spoils of all that plunder without being jerks about it. 

And that's what these chair elections are all about.  See a few years ago, these same factions had it out over whether or not Republican candidates should hire former chairman Roger Villere's consulting firm and how much they should pay him.  This year they are at it again, likely over the same sort of territorial grudge, regardless of how they want to explain it. 

Taking a stab at Rispone, Gurvich said he wouldn't let a "wealthy businessman wrest control" of the state party and downplayed Bayham's GOP bona fides, saying he consulted for Jay Dardenne, a Republican who serves as Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards' chief budget architect.

Oh yeah you really wouldn't a "wealthy businessman" getting control of the party.  That's definitely why you need Louis Gurvich around.  

Gurvich’s desire to be the LAGOP’s top leader might seem an unusual move from his weekday responsibilities as president of the Uptown-based New Orleans Private Patrol, but the private security business is in Gurvich’s blood. A third- generation entrepreneur, Gurvich’s family came to Louisiana in the late 1920’s when J. Edgar Hoover, the young director of the Bureau of Intelligence — later known as the FBI — personally transferred Gurvich’s paternal grandfather to the city. Gurvich received multiple degrees in business and law from UNO, Tulane University and Loyola Law School and entered the 87-year-old family business in 1991.

Anyway, now that Gurvich is back, what's next for the state GOP power brokers besides trying to hide all the money from each other? 

Acknowledging his narrow victory, Gurvich, who will lead the party through the next election for governor, said the stakes are too great to let to party devolve into infighting. 

"We are here to save a country, nothing less, make no mistake. Our enemies are powerful, they are a driven by a Marxists ideology," Gurvich said. "My promise is that I'm here for every one of you."

LOL, your "enemies" are almost entirely out of power in this state and they are driven by a neoliberal ideology of privatization and patronage not too different from your own. But keep that grift up. It's going well for you.

Mild

 No, the virus is not getting "milder."

Before omicron came along, SARS-CoV-2 was actually evolving to be more severe, says Bhattacharyya, of Harvard Medical School. "We're looking at a virus that's gotten progressively more severe over time," he says.

A study from the U.K. found that alpha was about 40% more likely to kill a person than the original virus. And delta was about two times more likely to put you in the hospital than the alpha variant.

"Omicron may be a small step back in severity. But it's probably more severe on its own than the original version of the virus," Bhattacharyya says. Becoming "more mild" hasn't been the trend or evolutionary trajectory, he says.

In addition, omicron didn't evolve directly from delta. It evolved from an earlier version of the virus circulating in 2020. And so omicron could actually be more severe than its ancestral virus, and it could be progressing toward higher severity, Bhattacharyya says.

And thus, there's no guarantee that the next variant to emerge will be milder. It could be the most severe yet.

"I think we don't really know what direction this virus is taking," says evolutionary biologist Stephen Goldstein at the University of Utah. "We've learned that trying to predict the evolutionary trajectory of this virus is very, very difficult. If not impossible."

How did the "mildness" of Omicron evolve?  Well, America's bosses decided it was time to force people back to work regardless of the health hazard. America's political leaders, by and large, agreed with that. And America's news editors, by and large being of the same socio-economic class as America's bosses and political leaders decided they, too, were tired of being inconvenienced by worker safety concerns and that it was time to stop worrying so much about COVID.  So they started putting the word "mild" in headlines and the thing just mutated from there into conventional wisdom.

Can't go back now. Even if the next variant really is more severe, they've all figured out whose lives do and do not matter by this point.

Let's hope it's a good one

We begin 2022 in the middle of a great experiment. Policymaking deciders at all levels of government are attempting to find out what would happen if they just caved completely to the demands of the hooting death cult coalition of capitalist bosses and anti-vaxers who have been yelling at them this whole time to just let the virus do what it wants.

And, well, we're finding out.

"Omicron is truly everywhere," Dr. Megan Ranney, a professor of emergency medicine at Brown University's School of Public Health, told CNN on Friday night. "What I am so worried about over the next month or so is that our economy is going to shut down, not because of policies from the federal government or from the state governments, but rather because so many of us are ill."

The political calculus is obvious. Turns out there is a high tolerance for economic disruption, overloaded hospitals, and even people dying, as long as the politicians can say it isn't because of a thing they tried to do. In fact, every policy choice up to this point can be described as elected leaders desperately trying to get this bullshit off of their desk where it is someone else's problem. This stage of total inaction is only the latest, um, variant of that pathology to emerge. 

Schools are about to open next week. In New Orleans, where the response thus far has been to misreport case counts, and blame students and teachers who get sick for their individual "irresponsible" behavior, the plan now is apparently just to see how much more they can take.  

With the virus spreading, some staff and experts are expressing concern about what school reopenings could mean.

"There will be pediatric hospitalizations," Hotez said. "And what's going to be the other tough piece in the next weeks, keeping the schools open, because of this high transmissibility -- especially if you start seeing absences of school teachers, bus drivers, cafeteria staff."

Whatever happens, rest assured it will never be the fault of anyone in  charge. Their only real job has been to keep the workers from getting too uppity in their demands that their safety and well being be protected. And so far they've done that job perfectly.