Law of conservation of Ohio State guys

 How many more do the Saints have to draft now in order to make up for this?

Twelve years later for the 2021 season, safety Malcolm Jenkins remained the last vestige in New Orleans from that team after the retirement of Drew Brees and release of Thomas Morstead.

Jenkins' run as the last man standing came to a close Wednesday, as the two-time Super Bowl winner and three-time Pro Bowler announced his retirement from the NFL after 13 seasons in an interview with Ryan Clark and The Pivot Podcast.

Also this means they will go into next season with two new starting safeties.  Right now it looks like Saints fans are focused on the head coaching change and the... lack of changes... happening with most of the roster. But so far the biggest problem by far that I can identify is replacing Marcus Williams.  People want to draft a quarterback and all but really I'm going to have to look up who played safety for Ohio State this year because that's the most likely direction now. 

Bonus level

Sometimes in the middle of the game, Mario goes down a hidden tube and discovers a whole new secret challenge level he has to beat.  Congratulations to the legislature on sliding down their own tube here. 

Never before has the day of the veto session, which is dictated by the state Constitution and state law, fallen during another gathering of the Legislature. There is no legal framework to guide lawmakers. So, leadership would adjourn the current session, convene a short veto override session, which after the vote would adjourn and the current regular session would reconvene.

They're not all convinced this maneuver is constitutionally valid, strictly speaking, so there might be an extra-bonus secret level to this game that gets played out in the courts.  Also, once the bonus level begins, there may not be quite as many coins in the tube to pick up as there were before. 

Additionally, lobbyists are generally forbidden from the State Capitol during a redistricting special session.

Kind of a fun little glitch there. It would be more fun if they had to kick the lobbyists out of their hotel rooms for a few days and check them back in. That feature might come in the expansion pack.

Gettin' cancelled

In the summer of 2020, Americans took to the streets in droves to express their anger at a criminal legal system that makes perpetual victims of the poor and allows police to brutalize and murder people, especially black people, with total impunity.  In response to this massive national wave of protest, police everywhere took the streets and punched people until they went home. This resulted in mayors, councilmembers, congresspeople, and the President all demanding that those police be given more money.  

Somehow all of this gets filtered through our political media discourse to read as "The tyranny of Cancel Culture has come for our beloved cops and institutions!"  I thought Atrios, as is often the case, had a nice succinct way of explaining where that comes from.   

Lots of things can be said about the "cancel culture" nonsense from the most privileged people with giant microphone sinecures, but one simple way to see it is as a contest between those who think normal people having some freedom to engage in "punching up" is the important part of any concept of "free speech" (very broadly defined, not just 1A), and those who think that, ACTUALLY, it's punching down (by them) that's important.   

Journalists who think their role is to hold the powerful to account versus those who see their role as holding the public to account.

There's nothing I love more than journalists holding the public account when it "goes too far" in criticizing the powerful for doing things like, say, sending a bunch of cops into the streets to punch people. Or maybe I love it more when the courts do that.  

A ruling by the Louisiana Supreme Court on Friday adds to a string of developments following 2020’s George Floyd protests that threaten demonstrators with harsh penalties for the actions of others.

The court ruled that an advocate who helped organize a Black Lives Matter rally could be sued for events that took place during that rally, even though he was not involved. The case arose after a police officer was injured during a protest in Baton Rouge in 2016 and filed a lawsuit against DeRay Mckesson, a national advocate who had amplified and joined the demonstration. Mckesson rejected liability, saying his actions were protected by the First Amendment, but the court ruled against him in Friday’s 6-1 opinion. 

Of course it might be too early to decide which of these we love most. Probably need check back on this once we've been held accountable by vigilantes with the tacit approval of the state legislature. That's a whole new level. 

HB 101, filed by Republican Danny McCormick, would justify homicides committed by people under the guise of protecting property from being damaged “during a riot,” and critics stress that this is a term with a low threshold. “A riot is three people under Louisiana law,” Landry said. “That’s a wide open hole for someone to kill people, like teenagers and children who might be just trespassing or breaking into a car.” McCormick did not reply to a request for comment on the bill, which echoes laws passed in recent years that grant immunity to drivers who run over protesters who were blocking a public street.

So there's all sorts of new and exciting ways to get cancelled. We've really barely scratched the surface.

Let's see if they notice

Remember those old Foldgers Crystals commercials?  You know the ones where they go into some fancy dining type setting and surreptitiously replace the gourmet coffee with the instant product like they're doing a Candid Camera type prank to "see if anyone notices." We have a new version of that in New Orleans. See what happens is Assessor Erroll Williams continually replaces Foldgers's tax liability on his spreadsheet with some fake number he doesn't bother to explain.

But this week, Together New Orleans issued another memo claiming the assessor is still leaving out $1.6 million from Folgers’ bill. And, the group says, his undercount suggests a troubling internal practice that could be erroneously giving extra tax breaks to hundreds of millions of dollars of business property throughout the city. 

To make matters more confusing, the Assessor’s Office has since admitted that the $6.5 million figure it released last week was itself inaccurate, but not because of the reasons cited by Together New Orleans. 

Williams’ spokesman Devin Johnson would not tell The Lens why that number was inaccurate, only that “the preliminary estimates missed the mark” and that the office would release more accurate numbers once they were finalized.

“I wouldn’t read too much into the numbers on the spreadsheet,” he said. “The final numbers are going to be significantly different.”

Johnson also accused The Lens of trying to produce “clickbait that’s biased and factually inaccurate.”

“So nothing new there,” Johnson said.

This isn't the first time a city official has published incorrect data only to turn around and scold a reporter for correctly reading what was disseminated.  Last year the City Attorney's Office withheld information from The Lens about short term rental fees until after their story was published. The subsequent release of data forced a "correction" of sorts.  I'm starting to wonder if this a deliberate tactic. 

Anyway, regardless of what his spreadsheet says, Williams is clear enough about his priorities. 

Soon after that, the City Council formally called on the assessor to create a new written policy for reviewing exemptions granted through what has historically been the state’s largest tax subsidy program — the Industrial Tax Exemption Program, or ITEP.

But the request was passed in a non-binding resolution. Because the assessor is an independently elected official — not a part of city government — the council has no legal authority over his office. 

Williams explicitly told The Lens at the time that his office would not create a new policy. Instead, he would stick with the process he already had, even though, he admitted to The Lens, it was flawed and wasn’t adequate to catch the kind of mistake that Together New Orleans had discovered.

“The review process is not going to catch it,” Williams told The Lens in 2019. “It’s not the greatest priority for our office, obviously.”

Now, the office has once again undercounted Folgers’ tax bill. And, as was the case in 2019, the mistake raises the questions of what would have happened if Together New Orleans had not identified the error, as well as what other errors may be in the city’s tax rolls.

There's also some back and forth in the article between Williams and Together New Orleans over when or whether he is considering every appropriate factor in drawing up his assessments. Apparently the answer there is mostly "sometimes."  So, it still takes an exacting palate to tell the difference. 

Talk about inflation

The price of everything is going up up up.  I mean, look how much it costs the Orleans Parish Democratic Executive Committee to buy just one city court clerkship these days. 

Lisa Ray Diggs is, without question, the establishment candidate for this position. She’s the chair of the Orleans Parish Democratic Executive Committee and cites endorsements by Mayor LaToya Cantrell, every member of the City Council, U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, and numerous other local politicians, including Lombard, who she’s vying to replace.

She’s also raised fairly substantial funds for the election, according to campaign finance records, including more than $8,600 in contributions and a $20,000 interest-free loan she made to her own campaign. Those funds, her filings say, have helped pay for a $4,711.77 “billboard,” more than $6,000 worth of “signs & stakes,” and thousands of dollars more spent on vague campaign-related costs including “campaign management services” and “campaign consulting services” and “strategic campaign services.” The campaign paid $2,500 to an organization called Grassroots Solutions NOLA just for “campaign finance reporting,” according to those very campaign finance reports. That’s not a service we see many campaigns paying for, especially at that price.

All the candidates in that race look to be running on similar platforms. Although it also looks like they've mostly cribbed from Jordan Bridges's proposal to digitize records so you can make up your mind which candidate is most committed to that idea.  Anyway, City Court handles evictions. It's always helpful to have someone in charge there who actually cares about people who need housing.  Do any of these folks care about that?  Hard to say.

The police have never been more funded

There's an odd mirror universe that exists in the minds of openly racist commenters on Twitter and Nextdoor and, I guess, also in the minds of the elected leadership of most cities, that assumes we don't spend enough money on cops.  I don't know what can be done about that anymore. I mean you can plainly point out that they do, in fact, live in a mirror universe. But they aren't going to listen to you.  Police funding can only go up. If you are in politics that is the only way the crank turns. 

The effort to funnel federal COVID relief dollars toward law enforcement began less than a year after protests in 2020 in response to George Floyd’s murder made “defund the police” a national rallying cry. More than 20 cities took action to reduce police budgets on the heels of that movement, though many have failed to follow through on those cuts.

As the midterm elections approach, Republicans and Democrats now appear to be competing to see which party can be the most outspokenly pro-police. Republicans have blamed Democrats for recent increases in violent crime, which they say are a result of reduced police budgets—though, in reality, there appears to be no correlation between crime rates and law enforcement funding. Biden and leading Democrats have disputed claims that they want to “defund the police,” holding up the ARPA funds given to law enforcement as proof.

Amid the current political debate, “Republicans have easily, barely lifting a finger, pushed Democrats into an ‘anti-police’ corner,” Kay Whitlock, co-author of the new book “Carceral Con: The Deceptive Terrain of Criminal Justice Reform,” said in an interview with The Appeal. “The result is that denunciation of ‘defund the police’ as a strategy and slogan has taken root among mainstream Democratic Party politicians.”  

But Biden and top Democrats are now going beyond denouncing the “defund” slogan and are calling to substantially increase funding for law enforcement.

Of course none of that will mean anything come this fall when Republicans are sure to re-take Congress all the while hooting at the top of their lungs that Joe Biden, who just shifted $350 billion originally meant to protect people from the ravages of a pandemic over to newly aggressive efforts to lock them in jail, is somehow trying to "defund the police." 

Probably "The Left" is to blame. 

Where we are now

 Seems about right.

RACELAND, La. —

A fire that started from a pile of Hurricane Ida debris is burning faster than firefighters can control in Raceland, according to the Lafourche Parish President.

The fire is mainly affecting areas near Highway 190 and Highway 182. 

According to Archie Chaisson, the fire has been burning for more than a week and started in a state government dump. No homes or structures are being threatened, but smoke is causing a problem. 

Actually there is some better news on the disaster relief front.  Earlier this month it looked to all the world as though Louisiana would have to forego federal help in order that the US could send more bombs to the Ukraine war zone. That turns out not to be the case, exactly.  This week they found $1.7 billion in the couch cushions somewhere.

Hopes had been all but lost in the Lake Charles area for further long-term relief after Congress approved a massive federal spending package earlier this month without it.

But given the state’s stark needs, federal officials decided to grant additional money to Louisiana out of a previously approved amount set aside for disaster relief nationwide. Ida aid was expected to eventually come from that, but at a lower amount. Graves and Kennedy criticized the allocations as taking too long.

HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge noted that a primary goal of the funding was to help low- to moderate-income families recover and rebuild more resiliently.

Keep in mind this is mostly to deal with the still un-met needs resulting from Hurricanes Delta and Laura. The Governor says they're still looking for another $2.5 billion for Ida. Until then, keep the fire going, I guess.

 

Where we are now

Sometimes it just takes a couple of images

pic.twitter.com/ESSMgO4low

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) March 22, 2022

Wish I knew what to say anyone should do about it. If 2016-2020 taught us anything it's that if you are on "The Left" in this country you don't have any power to affect the decisions of our wise and serious leaders one way or another.  Oh also we learned that they will blame you no matter what happens. So, you know, buckle up....

Entergy's Company Town

We're finally doing something about the terrorists.  On Wednesday, March 23rd, your New Orleans City Council will begin an inquiry into an ongoing insurrection that threatens the security of our civic life.

NEW ORLEANS - The City Council's Utility, Cable, Telecommunications, and Technology Committee will be meeting next week with Entergy New Orleans to discuss animal-related outages at Entergy substations. The meeting comes after several reported outages caused by animals last week, including one which resulted in outages for over 10,000 customers in the downtown, CBD, and Mid-City areas.

Councilmember Morrell released the following statement in regards to the meeting: “Last week, over 10,000 New Orleans ratepayers lost power for hours because of a single bird, resulting in business closures. In light of the downtown outage and subsequent Lakeview power outages caused by a squirrel, I have requested for members of Entergy New Orleans to come before the Utility Committee to address the issue of animal-related system failures.

Incidents of power outages are unfortunately all too familiar to the residents of this city. These animal-related outages are not just mere inconveniences. They are hardships that grind our city to a halt.

When a bird topples key power sources for three years in a row, it’s time to take a deep dive into what is currently being done to prevent incidents like this, and which areas need improvement. If Entergy is going to request a rate increase, they should be able to explain how small animals repeatedly put thousands of customers in the dark.”

Reading that, one wonders if JP is really digging deep enough.  It's true the creatures have waged a campaign of sabotage against our infrastructure. But their terror activities extend beyond the scope of just three annual bird attacks. Channel 6 put together a cheeky little graphic on the fly last week to try and get the point across. 

Based off WDSU's records, there have been 5 incidents of animal-related power outages since 2013. There was also one non-animal related incident involving a balloon. Weather related outages are not included in this graphic. https://t.co/h2OObo3sJm pic.twitter.com/nizrMrFkRM

— wdsu (@wdsu) March 9, 2022

But that doesn't really capture the whole picture. We won't presume to provide a full catalog either. But just to give you an idea of what a few moments of casual googling and hazy memories will turn up, here are two outages allegedly caused by raccoons in 2008 and 2012.  Here is the squirrel JP's memo refers to. Here is another squirrel in 2016.  Here is one in Baton Rouge last year.  The WDSU graphic references the famous cat and the mylar balloons (2017, 2018, and 2021.) 

Technically a balloon is not an animal but we cannot rule out the possibility of them having been deployed through one or another creature's deliberate intervention. One hangs around here long enough and one begins to get the impression that the animals might be up to something.  The peacocks might vandalize your car. Feral hogs are undermining your levees. Alligators are up to all sorts of mischief in your streets, under your streets, in your dumpsters.  This weekend, our most prominent animal insurrectionist celebrated his seventh birthday to considerable internet fanfare. Clearly his growing cult of personality is emboldening others in his movement. 

With so much evidence of an organized animal uprising underway, you might think stewards of critical infrastructure like Entergy would invest more in countermeasures. But, as we've learned time and again, improved service is not the focus of Entergy's investment strategy. Profit hoarding is.  And, as we've also learned time and again, that isn't a model conducive to producing reliable public service.  

Entergy has aggressively resisted efforts by regulators, residents and advocates to improve its infrastructure. The company’s restoration of its equipment after major storms didn’t prioritize the grid modernization that industry experts say could limit the scope and duration of power outages. Instead of shifting toward renewable energy, Entergy doubled down on building plants that emit greenhouse gases — the same pollution that has made hurricanes more intense. 

ENO is uniquely positioned among American utilities to protect its interests because of how it’s regulated. The subsidiary is one of only two investor-owned utilities overseen by a city council; utilities typically are regulated by a state-level commission. That setup has often left the New Orleans City Council without sufficient resources and expertise to effectively regulate the monopoly electric utility, according to interviews with some residents, council members and former city officials.

How frustrating is it for City Council to regulate this monopoly? Earlier this month, we learned that they can't even hire a consulting firm to help with their analysis.  What's the matter? Don't these accountants want to work?  There's real beans to be counted here!

The New Orleans City Council is planning to rebid a contract to conduct a management audit of Entergy New Orleans, after its first attempt received zero responses from interested firms. The management audit was announced in September, in the wake of Hurricane Ida and the weeks-long power outages it caused in New Orleans and throughout Louisiana. 

“To be candid we’re nowhere,” said Councilman and utility committee chair JP Morrel in an interview. “We got zero responses.”

The lack of responsive companies is not isolated to this one contract. In recent months, the council has faced roadblocks finding companies to fill several contracts vital to its role as regulator of Entergy New Orleans.

Morrell called it “frustrating” and “jarring.”

These consulting contracts are typically the most lucrative the council can offer to anyone for anything. All last summer we kept hearing complaints from political and business elites that "free money from the government" was keeping too many people from going to work. But here we have the government with all this free money to give away to an auditing firm for, let's face it, not very much actual work, and there are no takers to be found.

The Lens asked JP Morrell why he thinks that is.  He can't say what is keeping national firms out of the running but he does have an interesting theory about what crowds out local bidders.

He said Entergy’s outsized influence in the region’s economy may have also played a role. He was clear that he had no evidence of actual active “economic intimidation” from Entergy, but said that companies that stand to work with Entergy may see the council contracts as a liability. 

“Someday you might want to do work with Entergy,” Morrell said. “There’s always going to be the idea both from law firms and accounting firms locally, that if you do work for the council on one of these pieces, you might conflict yourself out of any future work with Entergy.”

Someday you might want to do work with Entergy.  It's true, the revolving door between local government and the utility giant has been in operation for as long as we can remember. Just a few examples would include the following:

Former Entergy CEO Charles Rice who resigned in 2018 following a series of scandalous events including the "paid actors" incident, a contentious rate case negotiation, and at least the appearance of insider trading activity. Rice has been in and out of local government, most notably as City Attorney and Chief Administrative Officer under Ray Nagin.  Probably Rice's most famous exploit from that time was his purchase of the supposedly "bomb-proof" trash cans. In this story, we see Nagin trying to distance himself from the controversy. 

In a recent interview, Nagin said he was never a fan of the squatty cans, bought with a no-bid contract at the direction of former Chief Administrative Officer Charles Rice. Rice left city government in 2005, a few months before Hurricane Katrina.

"Those little munchkin trash cans? We got rid of those," Nagin said, referring to the trash can deal as "a Charles Rice special."

The mayor's chief beef, apparently, was that the receptacles, known as "Jazzy Cans," were too small.

"I said to Charles, 'Where'd you find these trash cans?'¤" Nagin recounted. "They're about this tall," he added, holding his hand at the level of a table top. "I had to bend over to put stuff in ¤'em."

Told of the mayor's comments, Rice fired back.

"This was discussed with Ray Nagin one-on-one and in a staff meeting in his office," said Rice, who is practicing law. "Ultimately, any decision involving the city of New Orleans rests with the mayor. He approved the purchase of the trash cans, and at the end of the day, Ray Nagin makes the decision and bears the ultimate responsibility."

The trash cans were controversial when they were installed, though the controversy had nothing to do with their size. The problem was that the company that supplied them, Niche Marketing USA, acknowledged a business relationship with Terrence Rice, Charles Rice's brother -- though the Rices have denied the link.

While Charles Rice is no longer the CEO at Entergy, he is still there in the legal department. His wife also works for Entergy as a systems analyst while maintaining a quasi public service role as chair of the public library board. 

When Ken Polite left the US Attorney's office for Louisiana's Eastern District, he was briefly rumored to become a mayoral candidate. Instead he landed at Entergy. Here was his job description. 

Entergy, based in New Orleans, confirmed the hire in a statement Tuesday (April 18), adding Polite will serve as the company's chief compliance officer overseeing legal and regulatory matters, including its compliance with Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rules. Polite, 41, joined the company Tuesday and will assume full leadership of the department over the summer.

In the statement, Marcus Brown, executive vice president and general counsel at Entergy Corp., praised Polite's "superior legal acumen, experience leading people and his personal commitment to local communities."

"He is well suited to upholding and enhancing Entergy's high standards for ethical behavior and our serious commitment to complying with laws and regulations -- and doing what's right even when there's no rule to follow," Brown said.

Having received ethical instruction from Polite, Entergy would go on to unnecessarily shut down power during a severe freeze in New Orleans, struggle with restoring power and being transparent with the public after Hurricane Ida, back out of its commitment to funding a new substation for Sewerage and Water Board, and, of course, continue inventing new ways to nickel and dime its ratepayers.  

Of course, Polite would also remain closely involved in government.  In 2020 his firm was hired (secretly and outside of regular procurement procedures) by the city to perform one of the several simultaneous and conflicting investigations into causes of the Hard Rock Hotel collapse. Last year, President Biden appointed Polite to head the US Justice Department's Criminal Division where he will be in charge of investigating, among many other things, public corruption.

And then there are the firms the city council is (supposedly) attempting to replace through this bidding process. Here is a Lens feature from a couple years ago on the Dentons lawfirm and Legend Consulting Group. The story provides one of the best looks at the interlocking relationships between the City Council, the consulting firms, and Entergy itself.  There's so much going on there, it wouldn't do the article justice to just quote a few paragraphs.  But here are a few paragraphs. 

It’s neither illegal nor uncommon in Louisiana for government contractors to make campaign contributions to the politicians that hire them. And prior to the April 2007 resolution, members of the utility committee received a steady stream of campaign contributions from utility advisors, adding up to tens of thousands of dollars. Even after 2007, several council members received campaign contributions from utility consultants.

Thomas’ campaign finance records from his time on the council show thousands of dollars in contributions from several utility advisers, dating from at least 2002 to early 2007. The Lens identified one small contribution of $250 to Head from Bruno and Tervalon — the utility committee’s accounting contractor — in 2015. We could not identify any such contributions to Midura, who said in 2007 that she did not accept campaign money from contractors involved in regulating Entergy, according to an article in The Times-Picayune.

Clint Vince’s law firm, Dentons, also gave $25,000 to the Louisiana Democratic Party’s political action committee between 2013 and 2018, according to state campaign finance records. State Sen. Karen Carter Peterson, the chair of the Louisiana Democratic Party since 2012, was hired by Dentons in 2014.

“Dentons does not have a relationship with the Louisiana Democratic Party,” Peterson said in an email to The Lens. “Separate and apart from my role with Dentons, I serve as chair of the Louisiana Democratic Party.”

There also appears to be a longtime relationship between the utility consultants and the Black Organization for Leadership Development (BOLD), a local political organization based in Central City. That relationship can be traced back at least to 1987, when the council hired a firm run by Sidney Cates IV and then-Tax Assessor Kenneth Carter. Carter, a co-founder of BOLD and the father of Karen Carter Peterson, was a close friend of then-Councilman Jim Singleton, another BOLD co-founder.

Long story short, the very small circle of people in the New Orleans political elite class (and we are talking multiple generations of the same families) tend to ping pong in and out of government  as they take lucrative jobs with the contractors those offices hire and the utilities and businesses they regulate. One more classic example of this occurred in January when we learned that Judge Regina Bartholomew-Woods, who is married to Jimmie Woods, the owner of one of the city's two major trash hauling contractors, was resigning her judgeship so she could take a position with, yep, Entergy.

All of which is to say, it's little wonder an unusually combative City Council can find any takers for these consulting contracts that may already be tacitly spoken for.  And that's a shame because JP makes it sound like they are so very close to getting to the bottom of this animal conspiracy. But it's tough when you can't get anyone to take the case. Nobody wants to work in this town anymore, it seems. That is unless they're working for Entergy.

How we are buying the bombs

Joe Biden announced today that the US will contribute the following to the growing pit of death and destruction in Ukraine.

The new $800M package includes:
- 800 anti-aircraft systems
- 9,000 anti-armor systems
- 7,000 small arms
- 20 Million rounds
- Unmanned aerial systems
And more.

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 16, 2022

It surprises no one to learn that this expenditure did not immediately elicit a chorus of "BUT HOW WILL WE PAY FOR IT" howls from the psychopaths who dominate American media and politics.  They do love to yell that. But only when it refers to expenditures on things like food or medicine for poor people.  It's fine when we spend the money on murder. That's what our enlightened rulers enjoy most. 

So, anyway, how will we pay for it?

Next week, the White House says it will start to wind down a COVID-19 program that pays to test, treat and vaccinate people who don't have health insurance.

It's one of several immediate impacts after Congress declined to add $22.5 billion in funding to a broad government spending bill passed last week. President Biden signed the bill into law on Tuesday, hailing it as a bipartisan achievement without mentioning the lack of COVID-19 funding.

The COVID-19 funding request met with political pushback from Republicans and concern among some lawmakers that the White House has not fully explained how trillions in COVID money has been spent so far and what funding remains. Republicans in particular have been unwilling to agree to new spending.

Ah okay we've given up even pretending to care about COVID and kicking millions of Americans off of Medicaid. That's plenty money right there. What else, though? 

The bill also does not include further Hurricane Ida aid, but time likely remains to appropriate more dollars for that storm, which hit in August and affected a range of states, including New York, whose congressional delegation holds strong sway.

Rep. Garret Graves, R-Baton Rouge, sought an amendment to include $3 billion for 2020 and 2021 disasters, but the proposal was rejected. He said that while he supported the billions appropriated for Ukraine, and noted aid being sent to Haiti and elsewhere, needs here should be taken care of as well.

“How do you do that and not provide aid for our own citizens, for people that are in need?” he said. “You’re treating people of other countries better than we're treating our own. I want to be clear: I'm not necessarily saying that with Ukraine. We're not under missile attack right now. But for some of these other countries, that’s exactly what's happening.”

Garret Graves isn't "necessarily saying that with Ukraine" but I will.  It is unconscionable to let people suffer the effects of multiple major hurricanes in order to send even more instruments of death into a war zone. Despite what the hunky Ukranian guy everybody loves says, the US can still choose to do some actual good things for people instead of helping him start Word War III.  But in American politics it's always easier to kill a million people in Europe than it is to figure out how to feed and clothe them here.

Pretty sure this means Map 1 is predetermined

Council is actually meeting about this right now so it may even be post-determined as I type this. Anyway, the "final" redistricting options were interesting. 

The New Orleans City Council has released a second round of proposed changes to its map of council districts, and with a final vote just days away, most of the new maps add a major change to district borders that didn't appear in any earlier proposals.

The Lower 9th Ward is shifted out of District E and into District C in three of the four newly drawn maps, which all aim to redistribute the city's residents among the five council districts based on new population data from the 2020 census.

Moving the Lower Nine out of District E would be a huge practical and symbolic shift.  It's no surprise that nobody the T-P could find to comment on it seems to like the idea. That includes current District E councilman Oliver Thomas who says he is "vehemently" opposed. Thomas correctly points out that a lot of New Orleans East residents of the current generation have family roots or ties to the Lower Nine. The two neighborhoods have also been geographically severed from the rest of the city by the Industrial Canal for over a century now and face similar challenges. It's hard to imagine them not sharing representation. (That is in any scenario that doesn't involve expanding the council, which is definitely something they should do but won't consider this time around.) 

Anyway, what I'm thinking here is they wrote this controversial shift into three out of the four maps being considered in order to ensure that the one map that doesn't do that is the one that will pass.  We'll see. Should know soon. 

Update: Seems like this was sort of correct. Here is what happened. 

On Monday, the consultants presented the council with four new draft maps based on those public comments. Controversially, three out of four of the maps moved the Lower 9th Ward from District E — which includes eastern New Orleans — to District C — which includes the French Quarter, Marigny, Bywater and Algiers. 

Based on feedback — in particular pushback from Lower 9th Ward residents who wanted to remain in District E — the consultants created two new maps that were presented for the first time today. The council ended up choosing one of those two maps.

Some residents complained that because the final maps were only released roughly two hours before the council voted, the public never got the chance to meaningfully comment on it.

“I don’t see us included anywhere in this process,” Morgan Clevenger said on Wednesday. “It’s very, very discouraging.”

They didn't shove the Lower Nine into District C. But they also ended up springing two whole new maps on everyone at the meeting. This was after people complained the four maps that came out on Monday were themselves published too late for the public to respond. In short, nobody is happy with the timeline.  I think the reason it went down this way was because the city's new fall election cycle created too many conflicts to get the process started before the new council was installed in January which is way too late. 

JP Morrell says he wants to fix this. And it looks like he's going to offer another intriguing fix to an issue we mentioned earlier. 

Morrell said currently, the charter only has a deadline, but no mandated start date. He said that his charter amendment would force the council to start the redistricting process as soon as the decennial census is finalized.

Other residents have expressed frustration that the process didn’t allow the council to consider expanding the council by shrinking the existing districts and adding new ones. The current council is made up of five district council members, who are elected by the residents in that district, and two at-large members, who are elected through a city-wide vote.

Some similarly sized American cities have much larger councils. Cleveland, which has roughly the same population, has 17 council members representing distinct geographical areas of the city. But the number of council districts in New Orleans is set in the city charter, meaning the council can’t change it through regular legislation. Charter changes require voter approval through a local election.

Morrell said the second thing his charter amendment would do is give the council flexibility to change the number of districts.

Ideally we get them to expand to enough councilmembers that they are forced to move City Hall into the Superdome. But we'll have time to figure that out later. 

Here comes another risk shift

A Krewe of Muses float parodies Entergy with a pun on the Powerball lottery drawing. "Powerless" is a good way to describe the position of Entergy ratepayers faced with yet another rate hike.

 

Shame on all of y'all for causing Hurricane Ida just to make all these unexpected costs happen to Entergy.  That was rude. I hope you learn your lesson when they make you pay to clean it all up.  

Entergy New Orleans said Wednesday that it will ask the New Orleans City Council for a green light to issue $150 million in bonds to cover past and future storm costs, effectively passing on the expense to ratepayers.

The move, if approved, would mean that Entergy New Orleans' customers would see a surcharge on their monthly bills that would run for the 15-year life of the bonds.

The surcharge before interest costs works out at about $4 a month, on average, for each of Entergy New Orleans' 209,000 customers.

If City Council approves this request it will be the second time in as many months they will have agreed to bail out Entergy and its shareholders either by passing the costs onto ratepayers or though an outright public subsidy. Because the one thing we can never do is threaten the company's multi-billion dollar profits.  Actually we just finished explaining all of this.