YatBazaar

About five years ago, my firstborn was conditionally selected to receive a NROTC scholarship to help pay for his education at the Georgia Institute of Technology. We got as far as signing the contract, committing him to service in the US Navy after graduation. (I had to sign the contract since he was still 17 at the time.) The only thing left was the physical exam. He passed all parts of the exam except for his eyes. They're pretty bad; he wears -8.5 contacts. His application for a waiver was rejected, and corrective surgery wasn't accepted for NROTC candidates at the time.

Now this same young man holds a B.S. in Nuclear and Radiological Engineering from one of the best schools in the country. He still wants to serve his country, if they'll have him in the Navy. So, upon getting back here in NOLA after commencement, he drove up to Baton Rouge to talk to the officer recruiter. It turns out that Lasik and RK surgery are now acceptable to the USN. Next step for firstborn was a trip to the eye doctor, to see if he is a decent candidate for the surgery. Most people have corrective eye surgery so they can get rid of glasses and/or contact lenses. The ophthalmologist told him that surgery would reduce how bad his eyes are, but he'll still have to wear contacts.

Firsborn scheduled the surgery for this morning, and paid for it himself.

He is going to undergo the Lasik procedure (that's the laser one) this morning. From the perspective of civilian employment, there's no reason for him to do this. With his current glasses/contacts, his eyes are corrected to 20/20. A civilian employer or other governmental agency would be OK with this. But, to join the Navy and serve, he needs to get down to -4 contacts from -8.5. And for that, he's willing to get his eyes cut.

Damn I'm proud of him.

In a horrid piece entitled, "James Perry's 'amazing journey' ends with request for donation," Michelle Krupa at Da Paper kicks a losing candidate while he's down for doing something every blessed candidate does after an election, win or lose.

Of course James asked for money. Campaigns aren't cheap, and all politicians need to retire the debt they incur.   Many make loans to themselves in the heat of an election, and hope they can solicit funds from friends and supporters afterwards to offset that and not wipe out their savings.

No doubt Ms. Krupa could have written a similar headline about Helena Moreno, since, as an incumbent, she'll immediately start re-election fund raising.

Instead, she chose to mock the loser for the same behavior.

Heckuvajob, boo.

One of the primary activities that Business Networking International (BNI) encourages among their members is the concept of holding "one on one" meetings with each other. The idea is to get to know other members in your BNI chapter well enough that you can refer them to people and businesses you know. Just an occasional one-hour chat every couple of months is all you need for most folks, maybe a bit more frequent for those in your "contact sphere," or the people most likely to refer business to you. Since I'm no longer a member of a BNI chapter (all my travel makes it difficult for me to meet the commitments required of BNI), I don't talk much business with people in the New Orleans area.

I mean to change that. I've set up an account at an interesting new site, TimeBridge.com. It allows you to share your schedule availability with others, and gives them the chance to propose possible meeting times. So, let's have coffee or lunch! Go to my page:

http://meetwith.me/edwardbranley

and let's set up a meeting.

Da Paper makes the acquittal of Dane DeLarge on charges of "cyberstalking" out to be an issue of the law, but the greater concern is what to do with men who threaten women with violence.

According to Da Paper, Mr. DeLarge didn't take breaking up with his girlfriend well:

DeLarge didn't testify, but his ex-girlfriend, Keshia Hutton, took the stand at Magistrate Court during the one-hour misdemeanor trial Thursday, saying that DeLarge made 100 phone calls to her cell phone between Aug. 11 and Aug. 13, 2009, after she had asked him to leave her alone.

Now, here's what I don't get. The District Attorney's office has a complaint about a guy who made a hundred calls to his ex in two days. From the article, it looks like the ex was able to secure a protection order against DeLarge, which he was then charged with violating. He was also charged with simple assault. DeLarge beat the violation charge--both of them being at a "downtown club" doesn't sound like that had much legs--and the simple assault charge (verbal threats) was tossed by the judge, who ordered a new trial.

The DA didn't think the hundred phone calls and the verbal threats would sell, so they took a different route: cyberstalking. According to the ex, DeLarge also texted threats to her:

Hutton said she reported the activity to police and showed 6th District police officer Yolanda Quincy a troubling text message.

"The text said, 'Bitch, you're not going to see your first day of school,'" Quincy testified.

But it looks like showing the message to a NOPD officer wasn't good enough:

Hutton said she didn't photocopy the text message, and prosecutors said that her Sprint, her service provider, doesn't retain content of text messages. Gorrell wouldn't accept the Sprint cell-phone records as evidence because they lacked Hutton's name or address, but prosecutors pointed out the crush of cell-phone calls made from DeLarge's cell to Hutton's.

There wasn't enough of a cyber-trail to prove cyberstalking.

There was one aspect of the reporting that bothered me.  At the beginning of the article, reporter Gwen Filosa mentions where Mr. DeLarge attended high school:

Dane DeLarge, a college student and graduate of St. Augustine High School, was acquitted by Magistrate Commissioner Rudy Gorrell after Gorrell questioned the district attorney's office grasp of the state law that rarely makes the docket at Orleans Parish Criminal District Court.

My first reaction was that it was a cheap shot at the Catholic school, or an attempt to code-word relate that DeLarge was not just your basic thug. Apologies to Ms. Filosa for thinking these things, because the connection becomes clearer as the story developed:

Hutton said DeLarge threatened to "f--- me over" and bragged about his political connections.

"His cousin is a police officer and his father knows the judge," Hutton testified.

Quincy said that instead of calling DeLarge, she spoke with one of his relatives who works at the Police Department.

OK, so DeLarge is "connected." The reference to St. Augustine would tend to support that.

Mr. DeLarge is a 24-year old man, not a juvenile. Why would an NOPD officer go speak with one of his cop relatives? The man is being accused of some fairly serious crimes, and the local criminal justice system is fighting a very poor image when it comes to domestic abuse cases of late. What this man needed was to be treated like any other accused perpetrator. Officer Quincy's actions here should have been referred to the NOPD's Public Integrity Bureau, and the relative on the force should also be interviewed, to determine why said relative didn't instruct Quincy to follow through with the investigation.

What should victims advocates and women threated with abuse take away from this? Three things:

• Document phone calls. You can buy one of those little digital recorders for $50 at Office Depot. One wonders if this young man left any voicemails while he was making all those phone calls. I understand that a twentysomething young lady who feels a man is threatening her isn't very much in a state of mind where evidence-gathering is a priority, but clearly if she got a protective order taken out on DeLarge, she had others involved who could have advised her. Keep the text message on the phone, get a digital camera to record the screen, possibly even photocopy the phone display. Don't assume that just because text messages were retrieved to convict a mayor in Detroit they'll nail your old boyfriend.
• Follow-up on police actions. If Hutton called the cops on DeLarge for the text message, an incident report was written up and could be obtained by its "item number" from NOPD. On that report, the officer would have to write up the action taken to resolve the incident. "Talking to a relative" or some such should have raised a red flag with the victim and her advocates.
• Lean on politicians! If someone called me a hundred times in two days, I'd bloody well want to know why that in and of itself wasn't enough to take action against that person. Why did DA Cannizaro's office feel the need to push the envelope with the cyberstalking charge? It's got more teeth, but the text message in this case was a stretch.

This is the kind of case that scares you. Hopefully since this man is from a family who is supposedly "connected," someone will sit him down and keep him away from this ex-girlfriend, in the hopes that we won't see another "fall through the cracks" story about another beaten or worse woman.

Dr. Rand Paul, Republi-tarian candidate for KY-Sen and darling of the tea party movement has made some interesting pseudo-intellectual claims in defense of his "Libertarian" philosophies. It was just a matter of time before historians called bullshit on him. This article at Ph.D. Octopus deals with Paul's assertions about Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Specifically, Paul told Rachel @Maddow:

But William Lloyd Garrison was a champion and abolitionist who wrote about freeing the slaves back in the 1810s, ’20s and ’30s and labored in obscurity (ph) to do this. He was flagged, put in jails. He was with Frederick Douglass being thrown off trains.
But, you know, they desegregated transportation in Boston in 1840, and I think that was an impressive and amazing thing. But also points out the sadness that it took us 120 years to desegregate the South. And a lot of that was institutional racism was absolutely wrong and something that I absolutely oppose.

The historians disagree:

Paul’s history is, well let’s say, a bit shaky here. His point, I guess, is that segregation ended in Boston because Garrison changed public opinion, rather than through government action. This is not accurate for reasons that are very relevant for the debate about libertarianism.

The bloggers go on to enumerate the errors, pointing out that segregation in Boston was quite alive well after the Civil War.

Then Paul's notions about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 are addressed. Paul believes that consumers can vote with their feet to stop segregation, arguing that public accommodations would be forced to desegregate when righteous people would stop patronizing the businesses who did not comply. Nice idea, but it didn't work the first time around:

The point, of course, is that moral suasion and consumer choices—Rand Paul’s solution to segregation—did not work. Let me repeat. Non-state consumer action did not desegregate all public facilities in Massachusetts. Abolitionist pressure did convince some theaters, a number of railroads, and other companies to let in African-Americans. But, by any standard, segregation, but de facto and de jure, remained a fact in Boston.

Consumer choice alone didn't work, hence the need for civil rights legislation. Paul saying now that such legislation was a bad idea is just dog whistling to those in Kentucky who support segregation, clearly a large segment of the tea party constituency.

Charter schools in post-K New Orleans were all the rage. The folks in Algiers got their schools back up and running at an incredible pace, and charter schools on the east bank have grown to the point where almost 70% of K-12 schools in Orleans Parish will be charters this fall. My main concern from the beginning with letting private entities (operating corporations and non-profit neighborhood boards) have so much free reign in the city was the danger this would present for special-needs families. Parents of special-ed kids are a vocal group who know their rights aren't shy about demanding them. It's no surprise, then, that NOLA parents have filed a complaint with the feds now that there's an administration in Washington that really won't leave their children behind:

The meetings come as the feds investigate a complaint filed last year, which alleges that a handful of New Orleans charter schools have discriminatory admissions. Specifically, the complaint alleges that the Orleans Parish School Board's admissions policy for charter schools discriminates against African-American students. The complaint encompasses all of the district's charter schools, even though they have very different admissions practices and demographics. So far the identity of the complainant has not been made public.

You'd think this would be easy, but it's an unbelievable can of worms, for two reasons. First, the storm opened the way for the massive expansion of charter schools. The Louisiana legislature was ready to take over schools run by the Orleans Parish School Board prior to the storm, but the utter destruction left in the wake of the Federal Flood made it even easier. Many saw this as a clean slate for public education in the city, a chance to get rid of the politicians, administrators, the teachers' union, and the teachers themselves. Privatize everything and only hire back those who were competent. It was a unique opportunity, because all forces who would oppose such a plan were in total disarray.

The second big contribution to the complexity of the situation is that the pre-storm governmental entity running education in the city, the OP School Board, effecitvely ceased to exist. With no revenue base (property tax collections dropped to near-zero after the storm), all funding had to come from outside the city. The state chose to form and fund the Recovery School District rather than OPSB, creating an entirely new administrative framework. Given how badly OPSB operated the schools, one would think this was a good idea, but a new entity means old deals go out the window:

Some parent advocates also asked whether a 1998 civil rights agreement with the Orleans Parish School Board was still in force. The agreement addressed allegations that the city's magnet schools discriminated against African-American applicants in their admissions policies. "In essence, Katrina washed that agreement away," [John] Stephens [regional compliance team leader for the Office for Civil Rights] said, because that agreement was with the district as it existed then.

Fortunately for parents of special-ed kids, they're dealing with the Obama administration, and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made that clear already this year:

"In the last decade, the Office for Civil Rights has not been as vigilant as it should have been in combatting gender and racial discrimination and protecting the rights of individuals with disabilities," Duncan said, adding "that's about to change."

Charter school operators should consider themselves on notice. Messing with special-ed parents is a really bad idea.

When Da Paper reported that Mayor Mitch said he might order a mandatory evacuation of the city for a Category 2 storm, there was a bit of a rumble on Da Twittah. The city's Post-K policy opened the bidding on mandatory evacuation at Cat 3. Comments about him being an overly cautious, fraidy-cat pol made me go back and actually read his remarks. Novel idea, that, reading what someone says, in context. This section sums it up:

"So that's why, at some point in time when we consider all of those things, if we say, 'Listen, this is a serious threat,' you might have to evacuate with a Category 2 storm that's coming with a different speed and with different wave (action).

"We will try to be very clear about this," Landrieu said. "My message to that people is anything above a Category 1 -- that is a Category 2, 3, 4 or 5 -- laid on top with heavy wind, heavy wave action, could require us to call an evacuation, and we won't do that unless we think that you're at risk."

All of a sudden, Mayor Mitch is making more sense than the nola-twitterati seemed to be giving him. I can't remember the storm's name, but there was one back in the 1990s that sat off of Tampa Bay and just savaged Tampa/St. Pete for several days with wind and rain. It wasn't a powerful storm on the Saffer-Simpson scale, but the overall volume of rain it dropped on the area really screwed things up.

Go read the rest of the article, though. It's a very solid assessment of the city's danger points. The mayor, his deputy, and even Councilwoman Blue Light did well.

Most importantly, they kicked off hurricane season with a public voice and an increased level of awareness. Here's to hoping that continues throughout the summer and fall.

In what appears to be an attempt to boost his national profile to the levels it reached in the immediate aftermath of the storm, WWL radio host Garland Robinette has been ranting about British Petroleum and the Deepwater Horizon environmental catastrophe. While an initial listen to Robinette's rant generates a rousing chorus of "yeah you rite," closer examination offers some disturbing revelations about Robinette himself.

Appended to WWL's article on Robinette's rant are "14 Scary Truths about the BP Oil Leak," and that's where the trouble lies.

For openers, Mr. Robinette seems to have forgotten that ELEVEN MEN DIED ON DEEPWATER HORIZON. The primary "scary truth" of this entire incident is that people were killed. Deepwater Horizon, the BP corporate offices, as well as those of Transocean, Halliburton, other BP sub-contractors, and the Department of the Interior's Minerals Management Service (MMS) should be treated as homicide crime scenes. Funny, no mention of the lives of men who put their trust in these oil-industry corporations that they'd come home to their families at the conclusion of their offshore shifts.

I'm glad you like the Louisiana oysters at Drago's, Mr. Robinette, and I'm sure Tommy appreciates the plug, but there are eleven men who won't ever eat oysters at Drago's again, and it's a pity that you didn't even take a moment to recognize those men and their families before you started in on New York restaurant menus. But that would mean you'd have to stop for a moment in your loathing of Democrats and point the finger at big business.

Now, as far as the fourteen things that Mr. Robinette does think are important. His very first point is to make a comparison between the broken promises of George W. Bush and the statements made in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon blowout by Barack H. Obama. Before discussing his precious oysters or recognizing the deaths of eleven men, Robinette's primary objective is to reduce President Obama to the level of ineptitude of his predecessor.

Scary Truth #2 alludes to the testing BP/Halliburton/Transocean should have done. Rather than point out that these tests might have saved eleven lives, Robinette wants to take a swipe at MMS:

2. BP may have purposely chosen not to do a final test that might have averted this catastrophe. (Minerals Management Service would’ve protected us from that, right?)

"MMS would've protected us" - this from the guy who's spent weeks prior to the Deepwater Horizon crime carrying on and on and on about how offshore drilling should be expanded. This is typical Republi-tarian bullshit. Robinette spends a lot of time decrying government regulation and interference. When his precious oil industry creates a fuck-up of epic proportions, he runs to the government and wants to know where his protection is. This is akin to the guy who kills his parents then begs for mercy because he's an orphan.

Robinette's third and fourth points are that Halliburton cut corners that the tests which BP did not do in his second "truth" might have revealed. Again, however, this is the fault of MMS. Robinette totally glosses over the fact that this corner-cutting by two corporations killed people; he's mad that the government he usually thinks does too much didn't do enough.

His fifth "truth" makes me scratch my head:

5. BP said they are liable, but increasingly you can hear them now point responsibility to the contractor and rig owners. (But, MMS knows the truth, right?)

For starters, BP's line is that they will pay all legitimate claims. They are going to spend the next three decades arguing that no claims are legitimate, of course. I'm curious to know how MMS knew the truth here, as he puts it. If MMS is the keeper of secrets here, where was Mr. Robinette when it was revealed that, under the Cheney-Bush administration, MMS employees were easily bribed by oil/gas industry representatives, even to the point of snorting cocaine with them? All of a sudden, MMS is at the top of the pantheon that was supposed to protect the world (and his Drago's char-broiled oysters) from devastation. Funny how we never heard such concerns from him on this prior to the blowout. If he attached such significance to MMS' role in the preservation of the Southern Louisiana way of life, why didn't he shout this from his very-large microphone on a daily basis?

In Truth #6, Robinette throws the Environmental Protection Agency under the bus. Funny how he respected the EPA enough when it was run by Republicans to accept an award from them in 2008.

To sum this up: Republican-run government=good. Democratic-run government=bad. I think we can now dismiss any attempts Mr. Robinette wants to make on non-partisanship.

on Truths #7 and #8, Robinette continues to flog the "government should have protected us" log. You'd think that Robinette was a hard-line, pro-regulatory liberal, listening to this crap. Maybe he thinks it's just the oil industry that needs draconian government regulation, because he thinks government interference in HIS industry, broadcasting, is "socialist."

In #9, Robinette continues to be critical of estimates of the volume of oil dumped into the gulf. It's hard to discern whether or not Robinette's outrage is genuine, given that he once ran a corporate public relations department whose job was to minimize environmental impact estimates.

Numbers 10, 11, and 12 all rant about how government should "have our backs" and such. But if government protected us in these ways, wouldn't that mean we'd have to have "socialism," Mr. Robinette? You know, that over-regulatory "socialism" that would put the Fairness Doctrine back into place?

In 13, Robinette delves into the issue of mineral royalties. He refers to this issue as "reserves," but it's not the actual oil/gas, but rather the royalties from leasing blocks of the Gulf of Mexico to oil/gas companies. (Don't you have a producer to do fact-checking, Mr. Robinette? At the least, doesn't wwl.com have editors?) His mash-up of blame starts with Congress and bounces to the President, to the point where none of this makes much sense.

Of course, Robinette's saved his most outrageous statements for #14, his last "truth."

14. Governor Jindal (a Republican’t) who’s worked so hard throughout this oil crisis, is reduced to begging President Obama (the Demodon’t) to please allow us to dredge sand barriers to avoid more destruction of our wetlands. We want to use our own sand…OUR sand… did you get that, Washington? We can’t even use OUR sand? Oh, that’s right! the Army Corp of Engineers is here to protect us. They’ve just been “thinking” about it for WEEKS…as black crude lands on our shores and eats up our wetlands. (That whole Demodon’t/Republican’t thing – how’s that working for ya now? Are your parties coming through, when we need them most?!?)

Gotta love this one, the hard-working Republican (Jindal) is begging. Who is he begging? Why, a shiftless negro, who don't do nothing, of course. Funny, if Jindal is working so hard, where was he on the various safety issues related to deep water drilling prior to this incident? The State of Louisiana has a Department of Environmental Quality, and Jindal has been in charge of that department since 2007. While Robinette is quick to blame his former buddies at EPA for not watching out for us, notice his silence on Jindal's people.

Mr. Robinette, you have become one of Ashley Morris' "Fucking Fucks." Heckuva job, Garland!

Jefferson Parish's Interim Prez, Steve Theriot, has dropped his defamation lawsuit against NOLA.com commenters:

Jefferson Parish President Steve Theriot dropped a parish lawsuit Monday that sought the identities behind 11 anonymous user names on www.NOLA.com who made critical comments online about his administration and former parish officials, court records show.

And here's the real story, a few paragraphs down:

Had the parish pursued the legal action, it likely would have turned into an uphill battle. James O'Byrne, director of content for NOLA.com, has said the website would not release any information regarding the accounts of private users. NOLA.com is the web site affiliated with The Times-Picayune. Neither the website nor the newspaper were defendants in the case.

Da Paper and its online affiliate, NOLA.com, weren't going quietly into the good night on this. SLAPP lawsuits rarely succeed because the press fights them tooth and nail. In this case, Phelps Dunbar legal time at $225/hour was going to run up pretty quickly on the Parish's dime.

And that's really the bottom line, Theriot ostensibly wanted to punish those making comments that hurt his feelings, but the money was being spent by the parish and Da Paper.

I really, really, really wish someone would ask Theriot what he's got against Da Paper and NOLA.com that he was going to make them run up legal bills.