Library Chronicles

Just to be clear, this is an event created to note the release of a friggin' video game.

When: Monday, from 11 a.m. to midnight.

Admission: All events are free.

Events: The official Madden Gras kickoff is at 11 a.m. at the Fulton Stage at the corner of Fulton and Lafayette streets.

Live music schedule: 11:30 a.m. to 12:15 p.m., Rebirth Brass Band; 12:30 to 2 p.m., Bucktown All-Stars; 2:30 to 4 p.m., Rockin' Dopsie Jr.; 4:45 to 6 p.m., The Radiators, all at the Fulton Stage.

Parade and festivities: The Madden Gras parade departs from Decatur Street at 7 p.m., continuing down Bourbon Street and arriving at 9:15 p.m. at the main stage in Jackson Square, where Galactic will perform. The first copy of "Madden NFL '11" will be sold on the stage at 11 p.m., followed by a performance by Cowboy Mouth.

The after-party: A "Madden Gras" after-hours party, featuring Big Boi, kicks off at midnight at House of Blues. Admittance will be on a first-come, first-served basis.

Labels: events, New Orleans, saints, sports

Just what we needed on a Wednesday afternoon. More randomly associated bullet points.

• Gambit's Matt Davis reports from the Mayor's budget hearing in New Orleans East Monday night.
  
  

  There was plenty of emotional testimony about the problems being faced, but the most newsworthy exchange came toward the end of the two-and-a-half hour meeting, when Mayor Mitch Landrieu directly addressed his race in the context of the city repossessing blighted properties from black property owners who have failed to return to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. “I want to talk about race,” said Landrieu, responding to the testimony at the end of the evening. “You start taking people’s homes, people start asking ‘why you trying to stop people coming home, Mr.Mitch, looking the way you do’ — do I need to say it?”
  
  The crowd murmured support for Landrieu.
  
  “The question is is this about race? Or is about the city?” Landrieu asked. “And when is the day when we start focusing on these properties? Is it now? Is it September? Is it November? Or yesterday?”
  
  The crowd cheered when he said “yesterday.”
  
  “I’m just asking, I just want to make sure I heard you,” said Landrieu. “Because I promise you as soon as I lay it down, somebody’s going to lay it down, and there’s going to be a march.”
  
  “We got your back, Mitch,” shouted several people in the crowd.
  
  The idea of repossessing vacant properties in New Orleans East and the Lower Ninth Ward has been increasingly on council’s radar over recent months. At a meeting of the council recovery meeting on June 30, consultant Greg Rigamer told council that of 52,800 New Orleans applicants to the state’s Road Home program, 34,921 applicants have closed on their homes and are moving forward, but about 14,000 are showing no sign of progress after having received the money.

  
  
  I'm not sure that this is a conversation about "race". The Mayor and the people attending the meeting all seem to want it to be a racial kumbaya moment but it sure reads to me like a room full of comfortable middle class homeowners all agreeing that they don't care if the poor people make it back or not.




• St. Bernard child, Pistolette writes about the places Dow'na Road after reading Bob Marshall's series about the fishing village of Delacroix in the Times Picayune.



• Here's another T-P series on soon-to-be-inducted NFL Hall of Famer Rickey Jackson who was, to put it plainly, the best football player I ever watched. Ever.

  Despite the fact he never wore thigh or knee pads -- that slowed him down -- and never taped his ankles, Jackson played in 195 games with the Saints, starting every one, and he started 30 of 32 games with the 49ers. He missed just two in his career when he fractured his right cheekbone in an automobile accident on Sept. 11, 1989. Initially, it was expected that Jackson would miss four to six weeks. On Oct. 1, 20 days after the accident, Jackson returned to the field, starting for the Saints against the Washington Redskins, who, try as they might, were powerless that day to slow Jackson, even though they often double-teamed him with an extra tight end or a pulling lineman.

  When the Saints finally made the Super Bowl this year, a lot was written about the bittersweetness of Buddy D not being there to see it or Archie Manning not being able to enjoy it. Not enough was said about how great it was that Rickey Jackson got to see it happen. During his career, Rickey embodied the collective passion and frustration of the fans more than most players. Having him named to the HOF the same year the championship happened was pretty special for everyone.



• Prop 8 overturned and there was much rejoicing. That is until some right wing something or other says something stupid in 4, 3, 2....



• Favre. Shut up. No, make it stop. Seriously.



• Nagin. Shut up.



• Here are 100 great (nobody can really pick the 100 greatest) GBV songs with notes on each one including this which pretty much sums up why Pollard is God.

  Let's face it: GBV is to beer as the Grateful Dead is to LSD




• And finally, there's this Forecasters: Hurricanes' effect on oil unclear Seriously, though, at this point we're more interested in oil's effect on hurricanes. It's high season and everything that appears out there keeps breaking up. Not that we're complaining or anything.

Labels: gays, GBV, Louisiana, New Orleans, race, Road Home, saints, sports

WVUE: Gulf seafood declared safe; fishermen not so sure

Some are turning up their noses at the smell tests - in which inspectors sniff seafood for chemical odors - and are demanding more thorough testing to reassure the buying public about the effects of the oil and the dispersants used to fight the slick.

"If I put fish in a barrel of water and poured oil and Dove detergent over that, and mixed it up, would you eat that fish?" asked Rusty Graybill, an oysterman and shrimp and crab fisherman from Louisiana's St. Bernard Parish. "I wouldn't feed it to you or my family. I'm afraid someone's going to get sick."

Back in June when we pointed to this AP article describing the federal seafood taint-sniffing program we were struck by just how fly-by-night and, frankly, bullshitty the whole thing seemed. Here again is the key quote from that article.

The first line of defense began with closing a third of federal waters to fishing and hundreds more square-miles of state waters. Now comes the nose.

Mahan is an agricultural extension director with the University of Florida based in Apalachicola, where some of the world's most famous oysters are culled.

"We're being trained to detect different levels of taint, which in this case is oil," Mahan said last week. "We started out sniffing different samples of oil to sort of train our noses and minds to recognize it."

So what does an oily fish smell like?

"Well, it has an oil odor to it," Mahan said. "Everyone has a nose they bring to it ... Everybody's nose works differently. For me, the oysters are a little more challenging."

Novice inspectors being trained to execute a highly subjective test didn't inspire a great deal of confidence at the time. It was hoped, however, that this was a necessity born of desperate circumstances and that a more reliable testing process would be implemented by the time officials began to consider reopening fisheries. And so now that we've reached that point in time, let's look again at the much more sophisiticated scientific basis on which those decisions are being made.

In Mississippi on Monday, FDA Commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg said the government is "confident all appropriate steps have been taken to ensure that seafood harvested from the waters being opened today is safe and that Gulf seafood lovers everywhere can be confident eating and enjoying the fish and shrimp that will be coming out of this area."

Similarly, BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles said Sunday that authorities "wouldn't open these waters ... if it wasn't safe to eat the fish." He said he would eat Gulf seafood and "serve it to my family."

Experts say smell tests may sound silly but are a proven technique that saves time and money. Moreover, they are the only way to check fish for chemical dispersants, though FDA spokeswoman Meghan Scott said government scientists are developing a tissue test. It is not clear when it will be ready.

Wait a minute. The FDA commissioner is "confident", Doug Suttles says he and his family "would" eat Gulf seafood themselves. And yet, all they have to go on is a testing method that... well we know that it "saves time and money" at least. This is crazy, right? Some people still think so.

Kevin Kleinow, a professor of aquatic toxicology, said he is laying off Gulf seafood until the government releases more specifics about the testing it conducted, including exactly what species are being monitored and what levels of toxic substances are being found.

He said he is also concerned that a smell test won't sniff out dispersants. "Some of them - we've done work on a number of surfactants that are used in dispersants - have very little odor," he said.

In Sunday's post, we pointed out that Governor Jindal and Mayor Landrieu have already demonstrated a preference for comfortable lies that protect business interests close to them over factual information about public safety. The ridiculous photo of the Mayor featured in that post is the result of his gleeful participation in the latest of a seemingly endless string of for-profit cause-poseur vapid art schemes that continually infect post-Katrina New Orleans with the "positivity" at the expense of honesty vibe that Mitch and many others have latched onto.

I suppose by now we're all well accustomed to these. Outbreaks like this really are the herpes of social media. They are quickly passed among the pretty people, thrive on a culture of attention-desperate self-gratification, and often involve a fair amount of prostitution. I don't mean to spend too much time picking on Dear New Orleans. Suffice to say, someone has figured out a way to promote a photography business by exploiting the intersection of current events and the need certain types of people have to be seen taking themselves very seriously. I only bring it up to point out that the Mayor is certainly one of those types of person.

But like it or not, this kind of borrowing civic concern to package a commercial or institutional message via individual narcissism is becoming more and more of the norm in mass communications. Which is exactly why Pepsi is so proud of its "Refresh the Gulf" initiative since it hits every one of those sweet spots. And this is why, we aren't surprised to see Dear New Orleans among the applicants proposing to spend $5,000 of Pepsi money writing on and then photographing Louisiana fishermen for the purposes of... well I'm not sure. Anyway, I'm sorry to say I probably won't be voting for that one. At least not when the competition is this stiff.

SEAFOOD COOKING CLASSES FOR THE GULF


Goals

* To raise awareness about the Gulf effort through classes and PR.
* To attract 60 persons to each class.
* Raise funds for the Gulf effort.

Turns out, these classes will be "raising awareness" in Chicago which is nice because we know how much the folks up there love their Gulf Lobster. On the other hand, it may have been a better idea to actually conduct the sessions in the coastal communities themselves. We hear the home cooks there are doing wonderful things with Dove detergent these days. You can almost smell it now.

Labels: dispersants, douchebaggery, food, Gulf of Mexico, Mitch Landrieu, New Orleans, oil

It's this simple. If Playboy Magazine is describing you as

"… a church for down-and-outers and those who romanticize them, a rare place where high and low rub elbows—bums and poets, thieves and slumming celebrities. It’s a place that wears its history proudly. Why are dive bars shabby? Because outcasts generally have little to celebrate except celebration itself, and yesterday’s grime embodies those memories.”

It's a fancy yet unintentional way of saying, "Room full of pretentious poseur douchebags enamored with the idea of their own hip" An actual "dive bar"'s clientele isn't intentionally "slumming" for its own amusement.

God this city has gotten so fucking pretentious lately. I blame Treme, mostly, but that's just me.

Labels: bars, douchebaggery, New Orleans

Funny thing about that 770,000 gallons of chemical dispersant BP shot into the Macondo gusher. It doesn't just disperse oil. It makes for a quicker dispersing of the clean up crew once the well is capped.

NEW ORLEANS --
In the nearly two weeks since a temporary cap stopped BP's gusher at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, not much oil has been showing up on the surface of the water.

Scientists caution that doesn't mean the crude is gone. There's still a lot of it in the Gulf, though no one is sure quite how much or exactly where it is.

"You know it didn't just disappear," said Ernst Peebles, a biological oceanographer at the University of South Florida. "We expect that is has been dispersed pretty far by now."

---

Thomas Bianchi, a geochemist and oceanographer at Texas A&M University, said that because the dispersants have pushed oil underwater, scientists may be past the point where they can track it from the air.

"Now it's time to look at the molecular and microbial food web," he said. "We may be beyond people in white suits and booms."

He added: "There's no way to clean up water at that level in a large basin like the Gulf or these estuaries. You have to live with nature's ability to clean it up."

In truth, it's a relief to learn that "we may be beyond people in white suits and booms" now since "Beyond Petroleum" was always been kind of beyond protective gear or proper booming anyway. In any event, they look about ready to call it day.

The amount of boats contracted by BP to skim oil, lay new boom, and replace the old ones soaked with crude will be seriously slashed, according to area leaders. The current group of about 300 vessels will be cut down to 40.

"Which is concerning for us because there has been no indication from BP they would scale back to this level," said Chris Roberts, Jefferson Parish councilman.

Roberts said he got wind of the reduction through contractors hired by BP. A spokesperson for the oil giant could neither confirm nor deny the news, but did admit to Eyewitness News there is a current scale back all along the coast.

Pointing to the well that's been capped now for over a week, BP says there's isn't enough oil in the water to warrant the same level of boats.

The downsizing could impact as many 1,000 workers, according to Roberts, and so fisherman forced into unemployment by the oil could be unemployed once more. While 76 percent of the Gulf's waters are now open to fishing, concerns remain over just what they'll find.

Providing cover for the hasty withdrawal is a sudden swell of "where-did-the-oil-go?" stories spilling out into the news continuum this week. Most notable among these is this Time Magazine story (featuring known BP flack Ivor Van Heerden) which prudently asks "Has the Damage Been Exaggerated?" at a time when the extent of that damage is still being measured and is, in all likelihood, still accruing.

As major news media began pushing this mysterious vanishing oil story, Mother Jones' Mac McClelland figured it was at least worth sending a few text messages for the sake of verification.

I sent one text message to Bloomberg's Lizzie O'Leary, who's standing on Grand Isle, Louisiana, right now, asking how the beach looks. "Lower part past the barrier untouched with globs of oil that washed up last night," she said. By "untouched," she means by cleanup crews, and that "barrier" she's talking about is the one the press isn't allowed past. I sent another text to Drew Wheelan, who's also in Southwestern Louisiana, doing bird surveys for the American Birding Association, asking him how big the biggest tar mat on Grand Terre—the scene of those now famous horrifying oiled-bird photos—is. "20 feet by 15," he said. "But bigger ones submerged slightly."

If I managed to find that much oil with my BlackBerry without getting dressed or leaving the house, let's hope Thad Allen, who is quoted in the article as saying, "What we're trying to figure out is where is all the oil at and what can we do about it," can locate some more with the staff and craft of the United States Coast Guard at his disposal.

Gambit's Alex Woodward notes that the stream of "vanishing oil" stories fly in the face of various instances of reported oil sightings.

Coastal parishes last week all reported oil on shore or close to shore, or both. On July 28, the National Resources Defense Council issued a report showing 2,000 beach closings, advisories and notices had been issued in the Gulf region so far this year — compared with 237 in all of 2009. Oil is also blowing through boom, landing along islands off the Mississippi and Louisiana coasts. More ominously, oil is billowing under the water’s surface in large patches — some stretching for miles and sinking rapidly, thanks to BP-applied dispersants.

Meanwhile Dambala has been sharing photos and video he shot while flying over the spill site as well as beaches and marshes in Louisiana and Mississippi. What he found there is pretty horrifying.

We landed at the Ocean Springs Airport and met with a local lawyer and conservationist who gave us a tour of the city and beach. I was in a state of disbelief when we drove past the beach area and saw kids on the beach and in the water. I wanted to run out and scream bloody murder, but I realized it was futile and that there were hundreds if not thousands of people out in that water from there to Panama City, FL. Man, if they could only have seen what I saw from the air. I don't know what the state of Mississippi is telling people, but I can absolutely, positively assure you that this spill is in the waters off their beaches.

In case you haven't been listening to local radio or watching cable news lately, here's what the State of Mississippi has been telling people.



Doubtless these ads and others like them are the fruit of BP's contribution to state tourism departments accross the Gulf coast. At the time these grants were announced, it seemed to some of us a gross misapplication of resources to devote so much money to image management in the middle of a crisis of public safety.

To some extent, such behavior is only to be expected from an oil giant like BP where propaganda is just part of the corporate playbook. And BP has implemented every page of that book. They've even been buying space to talk themselves up in places some people didn't even realize were for sale.

The ads they run every day all day on cable news channels feature one or another BP employee with personal ties to the Gulf Coast promising to "stay as long as it takes" to repair the horrible damage their company has done. And so it comes as little surprise that, since the well is nearly killed and the dramatic images of spillcam have been shut down, "as long as it takes" has suddenly become sooner than later. We don't expect BP to act in good faith with us. They're a self-interested, for profit, oil corporation. It's their job to lie themselves out of as much loss as they can. That the state and local governments whose people and coastlines have been victimized have themselves demonstrated the same enthusiasm for feel-good advertising is less defensible but perhaps explicable nonetheless.

Last Sunday, Times-Picayune outdoors editor, Bob Marshall panned Governor Jindal for making demagogic and scientifically unsound proclamations about the ongoing effort to protect the coast. While the preternaturally image conscious Jindal's hysterics are calculated to capitalize on rage at the various federal actors' performance they also serve to deflect blame from Jindal himself and an important constituency of his.

Since the oil began spewing, Jindal has been trying to convince people the reason our wetlands are being poisoned and people are out of work is those damn feds. It's a diversion. If he screams loud enough, maybe people will forget that he was a big supporter of risky deepwater drilling.

He is making villains of those responding to the disaster, not those responsible for it.
The fur coat comes from an old adage that applies to many people elected to public office: "Give a gorilla a fur coat, and he thinks he's King Kong." Jindal thinks "governor" is not an office but a title, one that comes with a crown that bestows divine enlightenment: He must know more than the scientists because he was elected. That's why he can ignore the experts.

Finally, we come to panic -- which is the enduring image the nation may be getting from the most visible Louisiana politicians during this crisis. They see men screaming at cameras, raging at the federal government about this oil disaster. The same men are screaming that we need to continue drilling more wells and ignoring their own scientists' advice on how to deal with the problems.

If we have a future on this coast, we will need the nation's help in the form of tens of billions of dollars for coastal projects. Politicians spewing distortions, ignoring experts and wasting tens of millions of dollars doesn't inspire investor confidence.

Marshall doesn't say it exactly like this but the takeaway here is that, while Jindal is the Governor of Louisiana, this doesn't mean that he represents All Of Louisiana against encroachment from the sea or even from the White House. Like any elected office holder, Jindal uses that office to protect the friends who placed him there. If that means "spewing distortions, ignoring experts and wasting tens of millions of dollars" then so be it.

Likewise, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu derives his priorities through observance of the needs of his closest friends and stakeholders. Most of those friends and stakeholders happen to slither about in the city's tourist industry in one way or another. Currently, more than a few of these folks are keenly interested in presenting the attractions of the Gulf Coast in as positive a light as possible. Which is why, even as scientists are identifying real threats to the local seafood supply from the combination of oil and dispersant, the Mayor is insisting on more money to combat this and other "negative" perceptions of local tourism, regardless of whether those concerns are based in fact.

For Mitch, as he often says, it is more important that everyone in the city learn to act as "one team" speaking with "one voice" than it is for them to freely air their policy concerns, access the records of important meetings, or, say, determine the safety of their own food supply.


Mayor Landrieu takes a page from Sarah Palin's book and writes his idiotic talking points on his hands.

When people like Mitch Landrieu talk about the importance of protecting reputations and brands, it should be immediately understood that they aren't really interested in the truth if they perceive the truth as being bad for business. The fact is, you can't really have that both ways. You're either on the side of working fishermen, the Louisiana wetlands, and the public safety or you're on the side of the people exploiting those things for profit.

Landrieu's and Jindal's behavior is especially pernicious in that they pretend they're advocating on your behalf when they're really covering up ugliness on behalf of their friends. It's not really any different from BP's attempt to hide the oil. Except that nobody really expects BP to act on anyone's behalf but its own. Maybe no one should expect their elected representatives to behave any differently. But at least they could grant us the courtesy letting us speak with our own voices on the matter.

Labels: Bobby Jindal, BP, dispersants, food, Mitch Landrieu, New Orleans, oil, tourism

Yesterday morning I drove from Uptown to Gentilly in less than 10 minutes. Without the Claiborne Expressway, this trip would have taken about twice the time. Not too long ago, my daily commute took me to New Orleans East each morning in about 20-30 minutes. Without the expressway? Good lord, I would have found a new job! I don't think anyone is going to argue that the construction of the interstate altered the Treme and 7th Ward neighborhoods it traverses in an aesthetically displeasing way. I strongly disagree, however, with those who blame it for the more complex combination of troubles that have come to plague those and other non-overpassed areas of the city since then. The more I watch the City's establishment line up in favor of demolishing the overpass, the more suspicious I become.

Tearing down the expressway now 1) Cannot, by itself, magically restore the neighborhood it, admittedly, had some hand in destroying so many years ago. 2) It almost certainly will isolate and destroy the eastern neighborhoods it helped to create. Fittingly, now, like then, the neighborhoods under threat are poorer and less powerful relative to the gentrifying tourist attraction they are being sacrificed to preserve. Which prompts me to ask, again, in whose interest is this project being pushed?

Labels: Claiborne Avenue, New Orleans

The Lens:

Though top city officials have convened a group to advise on a controversial proposed expansion of the Orleans Parish Prison, the group’s meetings are not open to the public because it is not a “formal working group,” Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s director of intergovernmental affairs told The Lens.

The Landrieu administration has “convened different stakeholders” to gather and share information, Director of Intergovernmental Affairs Michael Sherman said in an interview. He said the group will present findings to the mayor’s top staff and Deputy Mayor Andy Kopplin will “study the issue.”

It is unclear how, beyond its freedom to ignore public meetings law, the group differs from a formal working group. Internal group correspondence includes references to the group as a “working group.”

Maybe, on furlough days, they all have a big kegger party.

Labels: New Orleans, prison

Sobriety Checkpoint

New Orleans LA,-As required by the Louisiana Supreme Court, the New Orleans Police Department is issuing a public advisory regarding sobriety checkpoints that will be conducted.

The NOPD’s Traffic Division will conduct sobriety checkpoints Wednesday July 28, 2010 in the Uptown area and Thursday July 29, 2010 in the Algiers area beginning at approximately 9:00 P.M., and will conclude at about 5:00 A.M. Motorists will experience minimal delays and should have the proper documentation, i.e., proof of insurance, driver’s license, etc., available if requested.

The NOPD would like to, as always, remind motorists to drink responsibly and use a designated driver.

Labels: New Orleans, police

I wouldn't go so far as to call it "America's Toilet Bowl" just yet but, in its own way, the neighborhood exhibits certain commonalities with the Gulf of Mexico from time to time. For example, a few years back we had a harrowing experience with a seemingly unstoppable gusher. And this summer, we've discovered a rapidly deteriorating hole in the ground that just gets scarier every time we look at it.

July 19


July 22


July 25


So far none of these episodes has caused any insensitive whining from beneath anyone's million dollar golden parachute* but we'll keep an eye out.

*Tony Hayward's £600,000 pension works out to $934,867.15 right now. Not quite a million bucks but you always have to account for those famous BP understated figures.

Labels: BP, Gulf of Mexico, New Orleans, streets, Tony Hayward

Say what you want about the Landrieu people, but unlike the previous administration they do at least try to go about things in a professional nature. They know, for example, to dump the bad news on Friday afternoon.

NEW ORLEANS – City employees will be placed on furloughs and Mayor Mitch Landrieu and his staff will take a 10 percent pay cut, as part of the administration’s effort to stave off a massive budget deficit, Landrieu announced Friday.

As The Lens has already pointed out, the move does put the City Council in an awkward position given that they went to the mat with Nagin over this very issue last year. It will be interesting to see how the Landrieu people handle that situation. Given what's gone on in a separate matter here, I'm guessing they'll try to keep the negotiation out of the public eye. It's what the pros do.

Labels: budget, Mitch Landrieu, New Orleans

We've been through this whole conversation once before but since it's on the front page again today we'll repeat ourselves.

Tearing down the Claiborne Expressway is not a magical means to reviving the neighborhoods it traverses. It won't bring back the dead and gone tree-lined North Claiborne of the mid 20th Century. More likely it will bring about something resembling the South Claiborne of today with its drive-thru fast food and strip malls of dollar stores on every corner.

Or maybe it will make a nice throughway for charter busloads of Jazzfest visitors taking their obligatory Treme Tour. (You laugh, but see it's already taking shape.) And, of course, making it harder to get across town can only further isolate the severely under-served neighborhoods to the east of the Industrial Canal but nobody cares about those people since they don't have near as many second line parades or famous artsy residents as we tend to get back in what the Hollywood fan boys have deemed "real New Orleans".

Planning nerds like to think they can solve fundamental social and economic problems by fiddling with the aesthetics of infrastructure. But all they're really doing is giving the political leadership an excuse to treat roads and buildings as a separate matter from the people those things are supposed to serve. And when that fails, the next step is removing those people since obviously they're what's making all these pretty places so unattractive to visitors. This doesn't take long to come up in the NOLA.com comments.

The Iberville Projects need tearing down, also. They are an eyesore too and they directly infect our biggest tourist attraction. Since tourism is our biggest industry, it makes no since to threaten it with the crime the projects produces.

What the commenter doesn't say is that the most likely pretty piece of infrastructure to replace Iberville is also known to produce an awful lot of crime. But maybe that will be less infectious since it will be located so much further away from a major highway by then.

Labels: city hall, Claiborne Avenue, New Orleans

Busy day. Busy time of year in general, really. Here are some more half-assed bulleted blurbs to fill the space in the meantime.

• This Digby post about the White House caving to cheap bullying idiots is all well and good but until we draw the logical conclusion that it means the failed White House occupant needs to be replaced with someone who will actually stand up to this shit then we're not going to learn anything constructive from it.



• Mayor: N.O. needs a new City Hall
  The Chevron building is still available, of course. I wonder if the City Council will agree to buy it for this mayor... and what the rationale will be.
  
  Meanwhile, this Mayor remains committed to his very critical priority of raising money to make commercials with.

  NEW ORLEANS -- New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu is continuing his pitch for millions from BP to promote tourism.
  
  The mayor appeared Sunday morning on CNN, talking about tourism and saying local and state leaders will continue to push the head of the compensation fund, Kenneth Feinberg, to make sure Louisiana business owners are made whole as quickly as possible.

  And you know he's got a point. It's expensive to lie pretty enough to make all these dead fish go away. Maybe BP can help them do that too.



• Speaking of dead fish, check out Bob Marshall's feature from the front of Wednesday's T-P: Louisiana blue crabs are tough, but Gulf oil spill might be tougher
  
  

  "Forty percent of the most productive stations are within the confines of the oil spill," said Vince Guillory, a biologist with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, which manages a fishery that produces about 30 percent of the nation's blue-claw crabs, a crop with a reported annual economic impact of $237 million.
  
  "We are quite concerned that we will see significant mortality of larvae as they encounter oil or dispersants."

  
  
  Dad had a hard time finding fresh crabs this past weekend, but the boil came out nice and pretty anyway.
  
  



• Senate subcommittee OKs $35.6M for coastal restoration
  Uh oh. Hope they're not raiding Road Home for this too.



• James Gill on Senator Vitter's Birther pander
  
  

  Vitter was not about to confuse matters with the truth, and did not hesitate to play to the gallery. "I support conservative legal organizations and others who would bring that to court. I think that is the valid and most possibly effective grounds to do it," he said.The birthers could only see that as an endorsement, although anyone with a lick of sense knew Vitter was faking it. Whatever the voters want, Vitter will fake. As soon as it became obvious that a roomful of voters wanted stupid, Vitter obliged.




• The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center has published a new report intended to measure the potential job cost of the oil disaster along the coast. Here's a quick description of the report culled from GNOCDC's newsletter

  This data is meant to serve as a baseline against which the impact of the oil spill can eventually be measured.
  
  In addition, it provides much needed information on residential patterns along the coast, many months before the Census 2010 headcounts are to be released. This data can be useful for nonprofits and state agencies planning services for coastal populations.
  
  The brief also highlights some important findings about the economic importance of our coast. Specifically:
  
  * High concentrations of jobs appeared in many coastal areas prior to the oil disaster. In fact, the coastal periphery was second only to urban areas as employment nodes.
  
  * Plaquemines Parish was home to 11,687 jobs but only 6,950 resident workers in 2008, indicating that people in neighboring parishes rely on this especially vulnerable parish for their livelihood. Oil-related impacts on the economy of Plaquemines parish, therefore, could reverberate region-wide.
  
  * In Lafourche Parish, worker residences were more clustered in northern and central areas, while jobs tended to locate at the southern end—namely Port Fourchon, a key node in the regional petroleum and offshore economy.
  
  * Among southeast Louisiana parishes, Terrebonne had the highest absolute number (6,089) and percent (11.5) of jobs in the oil and gas industry, far more than even the urbanized New Orleans metro parishes with much-larger populations. These jobs were particularly concentrated in two Houma zip codes that together are home to over 5,500 such jobs—more than double the number of oil and gas jobs in downtown New Orleans.
  
  This brief is based on 2008 Census Bureau data from company payrolls. As such it does not capture the thousands of self-employed fishermen not included in company payroll data—indicating that coastal Louisiana is even more important to job creation than our numbers suggest.

  
  
  Stick that in your crab soup along with your 11,000 some odd job losses associated with the Avondale closure and suck it down.
  
  Meanwhile, Businessweek insists we're still bucking the trend (sort of)



• Finally, a few signs that summer is in full swing. First of all, it's hot. Damn hot. How hot? So hot the streets are melting. Here's a typical New Orleans summertime asphalt sinkhole I found on Carondelet street the other day.
  
  
  
  A few years ago, in nearly the same spot, one opened up that was big enough to swallow a car.
  
  The good news is it's almost time for Saints camp which brings all sorts of ridiculous distractions including new posts from the Ashley-nominated Moosedenied.
  
  The bad news is we're getting into the thicker part of storm season. And this has brought with it even thicker food metaphors.
  

  A tropical disturbance in the Gulf oil spill would act as a mixing agent for oil and water.
  
  --It's a process known as "emulsification."
  
  --It would create a mayonnaise-like mix of three or four parts water and one part oil.

  
  
  Mayonnaise. No remoulade?

Labels: Barack Obama, BP, coastal restoration, David Vitter, economy, food, freaking hot-ass weather, Hurricane Season, Mitch Landrieu, New Orleans, oil, politics, saints, sports

In South Louisiana we leverage our disaster funds to pay for our other disasters.

Now a supplemental appropriations bill that passed the House earlier this month would take $400 million from post-Katrina recovery programs like Road Home in order to fund other projects, including $304 million for Deepwater Horizon-related remediation and investigation. To some Louisiana residents, using any taxpayer money, much less hurricane-relief money, to clean up BP's oil just adds insult to injury. "Any provisions related to the spill should be paid for by the responsible party," says Monika Gerhart, director of policy and government relations for the Equity and Inclusion Campaign, a nonpartisan advocacy organization. "We're not yet recovered. So don't take our housing money."

It all works out because the number of incalculably expensive disasters always goes up.

Labels: BP, flood, New Orleans, oil

Jindal Vetoes City Aid

Gov. Bobby Jindal has vetoed a major piece of Mayor Mitch Landrieu's legislative success story — and cost the city of New Orleans another $3.6 million a year. House Bill 334, authored by state Rep. Walt Leger III, gave the city a permanent source of funding for the state's contractually obligated annual reimbursement for casino-related services provided by the city — a total of $3.6 million a year for police, fire, EMS and other services. The reimbursement is part of the casino support services contract, which is approved every year by lawmakers, but the money owed the city is not always forthcoming. Leger's bill would have removed the need for the city to beg lawmakers (and the governor) every year for money.

Labels: Bobby Jindal, budget, New Orleans

Headline reads: NOAA: Gulf seafood tested so far is safe to eat And yet midway through the text of the article we get,

Still, Don Kraemer, who is leading FDA's Gulf seafood safety efforts, said the government isn't relying on testing alone.

"We couldn't possibly have enough samples to make assurances that fish is safe. The reason we have confidence in the seafood is not because of the testing, it's because of the preventive measures that are in place," such as fishing closures, he said.

FDA issued guidance last month that encourages seafood processors to heighten precautions so they know the origin of their seafood.

The federal government plans surprise inspections at docks along the Gulf Coast, though Dr. Steve Murawski, NOAA's chief scientist, acknowledged they can't be everywhere.

Last month we pointed out that chief among the Feds' inspection techniques was having inexperienced inspectors sniff harvested shrimp and oysters for "taint". One supposes the results of these NOAA tests are more encouraging than they would be had they found lots and lots of poisoned shrimp, but, at the same time, is this really a moment to start preaching the gospel of safe seafood? I'm still eating it (especially Gulf oysters) wherever and whenever anyone will sell it to me. But I'm kind of stupid and emotional about this. I'm in no way convinced that every product is one hundred percent un-tainted. And I certainly don't begrudge consumers without sentimental ties to this area their trepidation.

The fact is, no one really knows how serious the threat to human health from massive amounts of oil and dispersant is. EPA flat-out admits that they haven't developed any reliable data beyond that which they've been fed by the producers of these products.

In an interview at EPA headquarters, Jackson, who grew up in New Orleans, acknowledged deficiencies in EPA's National Contingency Plan Product Schedule. It is supposed to list the effectiveness and toxicity of alternative dispersants authorized for use combating a spill.

But it is really just a compilation of industry-supplied data, and, in the view of Carys Mitchelmore, a leading toxicologist who teaches at the University of Maryland and has testified five times before Congress on dispersants in the past two months, a useless jumble with test results that simply don't parse.

"When I looked at that contingency table I just couldn't believe it. I thought I must be seeing things because surely they can't be posting this data," she said.

Jackson acknowledges that, "none of the testing that was done prior to this incident was what I'd call extensive and geared toward the long-term effects or effects in the sub-sea."

Instead of doing its job, EPA has largely been taking the industry's word about these products for years. How credible is any evidence they compile now under pressure to go back and do their homework decades past the due date?

We don't even know how much is still being put out there.

Daily doses of dispersant

Since a May 26 directive from the Environmental Protection Agency directing BP "to eliminate the surface application of dispersants," except in "rare cases," the Coast Guard has been routinely approving continued use, according to Richard Denison, a senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund. A check of Coast Guard records indicates that 40 requests to use dispersants by BP have been made to the Coast Guard since May 26 and that all were approved. It has allowed dispersants to be used virtually every day since the EPA directive, according to Denison. But he said that starting June 9, the Coast Guard began approving use of less dispersants than requested by BP, and also asked for use of small quantities for research to assess the effects and effectiveness of the chemicals -- designed to reduce the concentration of oil spreading through Gulf waters.

On the other hand, we are learning more about how a product like Corexit affects the toxicity of petroleum.

CNN, July 9. 2010: Rush Transcript Excerpt Susan Shaw, Marine Toxicologist:

The reason this is so toxic is because of these solvents [from dispersant] that penetrate the skin of anything that's going through the dispersed oil takes the oil into the cells -- takes the oil into the organs... and this stuff is toxic to every organ system in the body. ...

This stuff is so toxic combined... not the oil or dispersants alone. ...

Very, very toxic and goes right through skin.

We know that humans exposed to a similar combination of these chemicals twenty years ago haven't fared particularly well.

CNN is warning volunteers on the current Gulf Spill of this dire information. The fact that the workers from the 1989 Alaska spill have died, surely will give current workers something to think about.

CNN and numerous other groups including Salem-News.com, have revealed the fact that this is very unhealthy work. Exposure to contaminants is something humans are supposed to avoid, but in this case it is a draw card for work in a broken national economy.

The average life expectancy for an Exxon Valdez oil spill worker according to the CNN report, is 51 years.

We know that this stuff certainly is in the food chain out there.

Oil droplets have been found beneath the shells of tiny post-larval blue crabs drifting into Mississippi coastal marshes from offshore waters.

The finding represents one of the first examples of how oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill is moving into the Gulf of Mexico's food chain. The larval crabs are eaten by all kinds of fish, from speckled trout to whale sharks, as well as by shore birds.

Again, I'm not saying I'm not still eating this stuff. But I'm one of these people who doesn't see anything wrong with texting while driving drunk so who really cares what I'm doing. Others may not have the same kind of tolerance for risk that I do. But I'm not one to deny the risk is there. Part of the reason we're in this mess in the first place is powerful oil companies like BP and their enablers and friends in our political leadership decided that ignoring the catastrophic risks of their activities at everyone else's peril was A-OK.

Meanwhile some folks are plowing right ahead with that message anyway. For the past few weeks, local food writer Lorin Gaudin has been crusading against the "foul rumors" that Louisiana seafood (despite all of the above) could possibly be unsafe. And she's been doing so in a rather breathless and blustery tone with lots of all caps words and exclamation points and stuff.

While it seems utterly ludicrous to me, apparently there are those who BELIEVE that Louisiana seafood is tainted or unsafe to eat!! Unreal. It's time to dispell those foul rumors. In converstion (not really conversing, more like heated debate about restaurant lawsuits against BP) with brilliant, Beard Award winning Jennifer English of The Food and Wine Radio network, I learned there are LOTS and LOTS of people who think Louisiana seafood might not be safe. Now really, can the world possibly think that we Louisianans would eat tainted seafood and more important, that restaurants and chefs, our world famous and fabulous restaurants and chefs, would serve tainted seafood??? Come on people, think.

Yeah, come on, people. Think!! Under what circumstances has any "world famous" purveyor of foodstuffs ever served customers a tainted product?? What a foul ludicrous rumor!! Could anyone believe it?? Apparently some do.

To some degree, I understand what Gaudin is trying to do. Anyone connected to the Louisiana seafood industry has already had their life turned upside down by BP's destruction of Gulf fisheries. In light of this combined with memories of the absurd hostility hurled at everyone in this region following the Federal Flood, it's difficult not to take every factually murky reaction from afar as an insult. But sometimes people are really just worried about what they're eating. And sometimes those concerns are legitimate. There can be a fine line between defending local businesses and downplaying the extent of the damage BP is responsible for. And when it comes to something as crucial as food safety, I'd rather not do any of BP's lifting for them if I can avoid it.

Not at all worried about doing BP's heavy lifting for them is Ivor Van Heerden. Here, Van Heerden participates in a BP propaganda video where he really ought to be ashamed of himself for neglecting to include the obligatory reference to "iced tea".

"The public gets the perception that this is the black, heavy, tarry stuff that is in ship's bunkers and it covers everything and smothers it and just kills it, but that's not the kind of oil we're dealing with," Van Heerden says in a video on the BP website, dated July 1. "It's a very, very light oil. It's almost like diesel, and it breaks down very, very rapidly, especially here in Louisiana where it's very hot during the day and the water has suspended sediment in it so it may actually get hotter, and all of those combine with the fact that we have naturally in our system, the organisms, the microbes that break down the oil."

Ivor goes on to say in this video featured on a BP website that "Most of the heavily oiled areas are sandy beaches" which we know because those are the places that are easiest to photograph (well, outside of 65 feet anyway).Ivor also says that those beaches "obviously are a lot easier to clean up than the marshes." Or it may be easier to just dump new sand on top of the oil there. Although it's not always easy to tell exactly what's happening from 65 feet away while being hounded by privately hired policemen.

Meanwhile, (via Dambala) here's some video footage of Ivor's "very very light oil" coating and killing these oysters. Or at least I think that's what's happened. Better have an FDA guy come sniff them first just to be sure.

Labels: BP, dispersants, food, Gulf of Mexico, Ivor Van Heerden, Louisiana, New Orleans, oil

Mitch says privatizing it will solve these problems but no one can explain to me how that's supposed to work. In the meantime, I'm looking forward to picking up a Gambit tomorrow.

Labels: Mitch Landrieu, New Orleans, NORD

The Landrieu people are officially ditching Ed Blakely's target recovery zones. Although there isn't much evidence the zones had a whole lot to do with how recovery projects were planned by the Nagin administration in the first place.

When Nagin first came in there was a goofy controversy over the cost of removing Marc Morial's name from all the garbage cans in town. At least those were tangible objects. This is more of a conceptual revision, I guess. I wonder if they'll start taking those "Recovery In Progress" signs down next. Or do they have to change the names on those too?

Labels: Ed Blakely, Mitch Landrieu, Nagin, New Orleans, recovery funds

Hyatt Regency New Orleans will reopen in the fall of 2011

Okay this is a story about the Hyatt project that's long been stalled due to financing issues. We remember that. So let's see. Well it says that Hyatt announced that they still want to do it and that it'll be done by 2011 and it'll have lots of renovated rooms and coffee bars and and other assorted hotlery. And so we read all the way to the bottom where it says....

In 2008, the State Bond Commission approved the use of $225 million in Gulf Opportunity Zone bonds to finance the overhaul. But finding a market for the bonds was difficult because of the economic meltdown that froze credit markets. It was not clear Thursday if the group had sold all of the bonds.

So I don't get it. What about this story is new since the previous installment? Maybe they think making announcements in the paper will help them raise money?

Labels: Hyatt, New Orleans

Hundreds Of Fishermen Missing Checks From BP

Labels: BP, New Orleans

MOJO: Love Boat Lobby Fights BP Victims

Well, turns out the Love Boat lobby has indeed stepped up to do BP's dirty work in fighting the SPILL Act. Late Tuesday, the Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA) sent a letter to members of the Florida congressional delegation "strongly" opposing the bill because it would allow cruise ship victims to sue the companies for noneconomic damages. That would open the industry up to real liability for all the crime and other bad stuff that happens to hapless passengers. CLIA says the bill would expose it to lawsuits that could prove to be extremely unpredictable, the same line Exxon took in its many appeals of the Valdez lawsuit. CLIA is joined in its campaign by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which naturally is opposed to any law that might make it easier for the little people to sue big corporations that kill them.

Didn't I just read some exultant article somewhere about how the expanding cruise ship business was a good sign for the local economy? How soon before Bobby Jindal starts crying that the Spill Act will amount to a moratorium on luxury vacationing and thereby puts people out of work?

Labels: Bobby Jindal, BP, economy, New Orleans, oil, tourism