Library Chronicles

It doesn't seem like that long ago that both federal and BP people were telling us that they'd be here cleaning up long after the well was sealed. But this week the well was sealed and everybody on clean-up detail is ready to GTFO. The hole is plugged, the oil is "vanishing", and it doesn't seem like that comprehensive Gulf Coast restoration project President Obama was praised for slightly teasing at back in June* is going to be necessary after all. Or at least no one is talking about it anymore.

Meanwhile look who can't wait to get back out there.

Despite uncertainty about when the federal moratorium on deepwater oil exploration in the Gulf of Mexico may be lifted, drilling companies say they are readying to return to work, maintaining their full complement of rig workers at full pay, and making improvements in their rigs to meet new federal safety standards required by the Interior Department.

Imagine that. Despite the repeated howlings of Jindal, Vitter, Scalise, et al, these drilling operators haven't all decided to pick up and move to Brazil and Africa for 20 years because we hurt their feelings for a few months. Turns out they would still very much like to extract their oil from our seabed after all. And they're ready to get right back at it as soon as victory is declared, which might help explain the haste with which the feds and BP are making that declaration.

Meanwhile, Louisiana fishers would like to get back to work too but, despite the great victory, that prospect doesn't look quite as bright for some reason.

Commercial fishing reopened in areas east of the Mississippi River last week, but St. Bernard Parish shrimper Jerome Ronquille expects it'll be a long time before he ventures out again to trawl the marshes outside of Hopedale

"We've got the best seafood in the country, but I don't trust my own product right now," Ronquille said on a recent afternoon in Hopedale, just off a BP-paid shift patrolling for oil. "We don't want to make other people feel sick."

At the other end of Bayou la Loutre in Shell Beach, Darrell Pecar and George Barisich were preparing for their first day back on the water, but they're facing fundamental roadblocks: No one is making ice, and no dock in lower St. Bernard is buying shrimp.

From the same article we learn that many fishermen who have switched to doing contract clean-up for BP are pulling in $2,000 a day while that work still exists, hazardous as it may be. But given that everyone is in such a hurry to declare victory and leave, how much longer can they expect even that stop-gap work to continue? Maybe they should try moving to Brazil.



*Quick excerpt from Moseley's Lens column about Mabus the Savior.

In light of recent history, cynicism in South Louisiana is justified. It’s certainly the safe play for our fragile psyches. If we sit back and expect nothing, there’s no chance of high hopes getting dashed.

But, is this really the best time to adopt such a darkened, unhelpful posture? The national attention from the oil gusher allowed Obama an opportunity to fast-track coastal restoration before it becomes cost prohibitive – and he seems to be taking it! In short, the Obama administration – with its Road Map, its Oval Office promises, and its appointment of Mabus – offers Louisiana perhaps its last, best chance to begin the process of coastal restoration. So is now the moment to sit back with a cranky “prove me wrong, I’ll believe it when I see it” posture?

Or to put it another way, this is all our fault for our stupid lack of faith. We had no idea the darkened unhelpful posture of our individual fragile psyches so affected what happens in the halls of power. Sorry we ruined the coast by not believing. Having failed to show due flattering deference to the authority of the people lying to us we clearly have failed in our duty as citizens subjects. If we are asked to just hop the next shrimp boat to Brazil we'll completely understand.

Update: Just to be clear since BSJD asked, I'm teasing Moseley in fun there. Today's Lens column is far less sanguine about Mabus. Not that I really thought Moseley was a big Mabus fan in the first place. At least not as much a fan as he was of Ed Blakely at first anyway.

Upperdate: Uh oh time to pack up the plantation.
McClelland: BP Fires 10,000 Cleanup Workers

In Grand Isle, Louisiana, cleanup workers (none of whom can be named; you know this drill by now) say their coworkers were either told to go home for Tropical Storm Bonnie and then never called back or fired in a massive and sudden drug test.

"Friday, the day before Bonnie, they sent a bunch of people home until further notice, and a lot of people didn't get the further notice," one supervisor told me. "Then last week, they shut the whole [cleanup operation] down. It was 'Piss in a cup or throw your ID in the bucket.' This was a BP drug test, not a [subcontracting] company drug test. It's the first time BP tested us."

Do they even do drug testing in Brazil?

Labels: BP, coastal restoration, Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana, oil

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

The advantage of having an official government estimate of the total oil spilled is now they can base some impressively precise looking statistics upon that estimate.

About 75 percent of the oil has either been captured, been burned off, evaporated or broken down in the Gulf, according to a report to be released Wednesday by scientists with the Interior Department and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"It was captured. It was skimmed. It was burned. It was contained. Mother Nature did her part," White House energy adviser Carol Browner said on NBC's "Today" show.

About 26 percent of the oil remains in the sea in the form of light surface sheen or tar balls, or has washed ashore, according to the report.

Yes, I know. It adds up to "about" 101 percent. Nevermind that. What is interesting is that they feel like they have a good handle on the amount of oil left out there even after it all vanished last week. About what percentage has been buried under the beaches?

Update: Interestingly enough, that passage in the AP story I quoted has already been edited to read

Nearly three-quarters of the oil - more than 152 million gallons - has been collected at the well by a temporary containment cap, been cleaned up or chemically dispersed, or naturally deteriorated, evaporated or dissolved, according to a report by the Interior Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"It was captured. It was skimmed. It was burned. It was contained. Mother Nature did her part," White House energy adviser Carol Browner said on NBC's "Today" show.

That leaves nearly 53 million gallons in the Gulf. The amount remaining - or washed up on the shore - is still nearly five times the size of the 11 million-gallon Exxon Valdez spill, which wreaked environmental havoc in Alaska in 1989.

I'm not a fan of AP re-writing their stuff post-publication like this. I suppose taking the percentages out leaves a less exact sounding estimate. But they're still pretty confident that they can tell us how much oil is out there even while they're telling us it all either disappeared or is dispersed out of sight. Strange

Upperdate: Regarding the Valdez comparisons, Cliff observes

I bet you the people in Alaska are really pissed off right now. The Exxon Valdez spill happened in 1989 and they are still cleaning up 21 years later. The Deepwater Horizon spill leaked for months and was supposed to be even bigger than the Exxon Valdez and yet magically the oil on the Gulf Coast appears to be disappearing in record time.

Maybe we should come back in 20 years and ask these oystermen if they still feel like they won the race.

Uppestdate: Good follow-up from WVUE where they really are on the ball these days. Thanks, Tom Benson!

Nichols State environmentalist Kerry St. Pe says there's no way to tell for sure how much oil came out of the well.

"It's an attempt to give the public credible information. So I think it should be viewed as an estimate. There are so many things that can happen," said St. Pe.

The federal scientist’s estimate 4.9 million barrels spilled into the Gulf but they admit that amount could fluctuate 10 percent in either direction.

St. Pe says under the circumstances the estimates are as good as it gets.

"There's no flow meter on that oil coming up so they have to estimate based on their observations," said St. Pe.

Labels: BP, oil

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

Some unnamed person says Brett Favre says something... yeah, sorry. As you were.

Labels: sports

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

This is the hot-off-the-press official estimate of how much gooey, chocolaty, and now apparently vanishing oil has leaked into the Gulf this summer.

Remember when you're doing your calculations that 1 barrel = 42 gallons. We're working on a reliable coefficient for determining just how understated these official totals are but we won't have that data until all the plumes are accounted for.

Labels: BP, oil

If the relief well is just days away from completion, why are they messing around with this "static kill" business at all?

Labels: BP, oil

This morning's winner: A frozen margarita from Superior Grill. Spent most of the morning trying to clean the goo off of the books as best as we could. At the bottom of the bin, we found the lime.

Labels: bookdrop, library

Just to spell it out, The White House appointed a dude to shield BP from lawsuits

Labels: Barack Obama, BP, Ken Feinberg, oil

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

Kevin Drum sums it up

You know, if I'd wanted Dick Cheney as president I would have just voted for him.

Labels: Barack Obama, surveillance

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

Les Miles is to LSU as Mike Ditka once was to the Saints The absurd stupidity almost makes the incompetence worth the trip. Almost.

Labels: les miles, sports

The truth, as I understand it anyway, is that this sort of thing actually happens all the time but after Macono we've acquired a heightened sensitivity to it.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The Coast Guard says a towing vessel hit an oil well early Tuesday in a waterway north of Barataria Bay in south Louisiana and there are reports of oil spewing from the damaged wellhead.

Not to say that this is improper. Louisianians live in proximity to an impressive amount of oil and gas production infrastructure and have little idea of its scope or its hazards and the frequency with which they are exposed to them.

Labels: Louisiana, oil

As in, each prisoner is a vessel of opportunity for BP to control its costs and liabilities.

Hiring prison labor is more than a way for BP to save money while cleaning up the biggest oil spill in history. By tapping into the inmate workforce, the company and its subcontractors get workers who are not only cheap but easily silenced—and they get lucrative tax write-offs in the process.

Edit: Douglas Blackmon's Slavery By Another Name traces the rise of the system of prison labor which built much of the industrial South after the Civil War. It's difficult to read stories like the one above and not see parallels.

Labels: BP, labor, Louisiana, oil

All this has the look of attempting to close the blowout preventer after the oil has already exploded out of the well.

Officials have also discovered a new problem with the strategy aimed at protecting those marshes. Boom that surrounded marshes in some areas were pushed into the wetlands by the rising water, becoming bludgeons that smashed the delicate plant life they once protected.

"Just the mechanical action of the boom being dragged over the marshes is not desirable," he said. "That may cause more damage to the marsh than the oil would if it was there."

Lehmann later referred to the issue by noting that the boom are "terrific technology that has become a liability."

With evidence that the boom that was laid around hundreds of miles of coast may now be a threat, officials are considering a much more scaled-back deployment in the future. Rather than string boom around the coast, the floating barriers will be kept ready for deployment and laid out in areas only when it appears oil will shortly become a threat.

"We'll be more surgical about where we put boom," Zukunft said.

Would have been nice if they had surigically deployed their "terrific technology" the right way the first time around but we can't have everything, you know.

Labels: BP, Gulf of Mexico, oil

Check out these two AZ posts. Ken Feinberg, the man Obama tapped to administer BP's $20 billion victims' relief account, is not exactly the kind of guy you might want doing that for various reasons. And we're still wondering if someone will tell the T-P that.

Labels: Barack Obama, BP, Ken Feinberg

Says BP doesn't want to win now.

Labels: BP, Tony Hayward

Here's an excerpt from a must-read piece by Salon's Glenn Greenwald on the hazzards of internet anonymity:

At least anonymous bloggers are very clear and truthful about what they are: often citizens whose jobs or other interests prevent them from attaching their names to their political expression. By stark contrast, all of these establishment media outlets perpetrate a total fraud on the public by pretending that they have standards for when anonymity will be used even though, as these examples from the last 24 hours alone prove, they routinely violate those alleged standards for absolutely no reason. It just never ceases to amaze how much establishment journalists like Roberts and Phillips love to rail against the Evils of Internet Anonymity when reckless, cowardly anonymity -- for purposes ranging from catty, trivial gossip to pernicious propaganda and everything in between -- is a central tool of their "profession" and of the political class they cover.

As always with this stuff, none of it is about "journalistic integrity" as much as it is about an entitled class of professional communicators and the businesses who own them who presume that they hold some sort of copyright on the truth. And by "truth" we mean whatever sounds most acceptable to the majority of the entitled class regardless of actual fact.

I know it's going on nearly a decade since these hypocritical elites began whining the way they do but I don't think that's any reason to stop paying attention. Sooner or later they're going to find some way to reestablish control over what it's acceptable to say and who's allowed to say it. Money has a funny way of establishing prerogatives.

Labels: free speech, journalism

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

Maybe not the most frightening storm ever but she sure has good aim, doesn't she.

Labels: Bonnie, Hurricane Season

Today, the organizers of the Rising Tide conference (Saturday, August 28 at Howling Wolf) announced that this year's keynote speaker will be Mother Jones Magazine's Human Rights reporter Mac McClelland. McClelland has been reporting, blogging, and tweeting from the Louisiana Gulf Coast since early May on the BP oil disaster and its effect on the communities there. So she should have a lot of fascinating stuff to talk about at the conference. That is, she will if she can stay out of jail until then.

McClelland spoke recently with Gambit's Alex Woodward about the difficulties of working around the Coast Guard's infamous "65 foot rule"

These safety zones — will it affect the way you report, or has it? Will it limit your coverage?

The day they announced that I was on my way to Florida for a couple days, and I’ll tell you what, the difference between Florida and Louisiana is staggering. They’ll let you do whatever the f—k you want in Florida. The beaches are open because they don’t want to discourage tourism, so anybody has total run of anything they want — you can take pictures, talk to cleanup workers, there’s no cops, it’s not like here where there’s a creepy police state feel. The only thing I reported on site in Florida was they apparently don’t care. I haven’t experienced it yet, but I bet I will soon. In the next couple days I’ll be back in Louisiana. To be honest I haven’t decided what my strategy is yet, it seems to be kind of stupid to say I’m just not going to follow that. How could they arrest me? Could they really? Are they really going to arrest anybody? Part of me wants to be a jerk and kind of call their bluff.

I was thinking the same thing —

Go try and get arrested? And hope to God you can raise enough donations over the Internet to pay your $40,000 fine?

So if you're planning to register for this year's Rising Tide, you may think about kicking in a few extra crabs as a donation to a McClelland legal defense fund. Looks like they'll need about $40,000.

Labels: BP, Gulf of Mexico, Mac McClelland, oil, Rising Tide

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