Warren Riley! Stacy Head! In 3-D! On Ice!

Update: WDSU just caught up with Superindendent Riley and he appears to be meekly backing off. It makes his comments on the radio last week all the more slanderous.

Off-camera, Riley told WDSU that he doesn't believe the e-mail is a big deal, that he's never seen the message and he doesn't have proof that Head actually sent it.

Update II: Seriously, I cannot believe how pathetic this walk back is by Riley. Unbelievable. He should apologize to WBOK's listeners and to Councilwoman Head.

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Warren Riley leveled some pretty serious and racially charged allegations in an interview with WBOK last week. I really wish WBOK archived its broadcasts. Thankfully, the T-P's Brendan McCarthy was tuned in.

The allegations about Head's e-mail came up when a radio station caller, who went by the name Malcolm, mentioned the alleged message.

The caller said: "I hear some of our council members are sending e-mails out -- one in particular, Ms. Head, sent an e-mail saying she hopes you fail and let's not approve your budget. But anyway, she's the failure in all of this anyway.

Riley responded: "You forgot the N-word that was in that e-mail, from what I understand."

"Well, yeah, you heard about it," the caller responded. "She said 'Let's make this Negro, not Negro, but she used that other one."

The caller then lambasted the media for ignoring the message. "The news (media) did not, nobody else put that out, nobody else interviewed, nobody made a big story about that. And if it was somebody of color that sat on the City Council who had that kind of behavior, would have been asked to step down."

Those who know Stacy Head personally have been quick to insist that this allegation is baseless and that such behavior would be unimaginable. But considering Stacy Head's history of off-color and, in a general sense, prejudiced language, Riley's allegation must at least be considered plausible.

Saying something that reflects ignorance, prejudice, or bias is different from saying something indisputably racist with malicious intent. Riley's accusations, if true, would be far more condemning of Head's character than her casually offensive observations in the Walmart checkout aisle.

If Head indeed used that epithet toward anyone, she would have to resign. She should not and cannot represent a population for which she has such an expressed, visceral hatred. The public pressure would be intense and well-deserved.

Luckily, we don't have to live in a world of 'what ifs.' Warren Riley claims Councilwoman Head used that particular slur in an e-mail. He should immediately produce the email. Regardless, news organizations should submit a public-records request to Head to obtain it.

Head's colleagues should hold immediate hearings to demand Riley produce the email, to censure Head if he can come through, or to call for Riley's ouster if he cannot.

If this email does not exist, Riley would be guilty of an extraordinarily insidious, divisive and manipulative slander. He knew that the forum he chose to air this allegation, WBOK, would not challenge him. He knew he was speaking to an audience predisposed - because of Head's past intransigence and WBOK's listener base - to believe a plausible, even if baseless, allegation of racism about the councilwoman.

And maybe he thought Head would prefer to ignore the story and minimize its media echo amid a tough reelection fight instead of throwing down the gauntlet to make him prove his charge.

Stacy Head should not and cannot simply ignore this story. Merely asserting that the allegations are totally baseless and false, as she did to the Times-Picayune, is not enough. Because of her salty language in the past, there is a special burden on her to substantively prove her innocence to the extent that she is able. When the e-mail controversy first began, Head took it upon herself to release a large set of emails to the public by publishing them for download on her website. Those emails have since been taken down. She owes it to herself and her supporters to more substantively address her views on race, language, and the allegations being leveled by Warren Riley, perhaps first by reopening her email outbox to additional public scrutiny.

As someone who has interacted with Stacy Head and parsed all of her emails released to date, I personally, have an extraordinarily hard time believing Riley's accusations.

This is different than a blind caller on talk radio throwing out an accusation. This is the Police Superintendent, one of the most important and powerful people in the city.

For someone of that stature to level this kind of accusation without prepared evidence is irresponsible, dangerous, and wrong.

It's not just manipulative.

Mr. Riley seems... a bit... delusional, and here's what I mean:

Riley said the recent release of a poll - showing that only 33 percent of citizens are satisfied with the NOPD - was timed to dissuade him from entering politics. The poll was unveiled by business leaders shortly before the political qualifying period. Riley also alleged The Times-Picayune chose that week to release several negative stories about him.

"There's a revolution going on, and we are missing it," he said.

Riley also criticized the slate of mayoral candidates and promoted his tenure as police chief.

"You know, I listen to the mayoral candidates," he said. "I run a bigger organization, and have had bigger budgets than any of these individuals. And I'm not knocking any of them. I'm just saying, I have had the ultimate challenge. The only person ... there are two people who have bigger challenges than I. And that's Mayor Nagin and President Obama."

Riley appears to be saying that he was all set to enter the mayor's race until that poll, which showed faith in the police force at an all-time low, was released.

Riley apparently put out feelers for a mayor's race over the summer before explicitly announcing in August that he would not seek that office, saying that he had "absolutely no interest."

So Riley is essentially saying that just weeks before the qualifying deadline, with no money raised, and with no campaign team assembled, he was considering swooping into the mayor's race. That is, until, a poll was strategically released to demonstrate his department's almost cartoonishly low approval ratings. Riley is intoning that he had a really great shot at raising money and gaining popular traction had it not been for that poll.

Think about how crazy that is.

Objectively speaking, Riley has presided over one of the most dysfunctional police forces in the country, to say nothing of his own conduct during his career on the force. The feds are looming over the NOPD for its unjustifiable pattern of police brutality, missing evidence, and who knows what else. Hasn't Riley been one of the most unpopular figures in local politics for over two years? Would people argue that the poll released in early December said something they didn't already really know?

If Riley had assembled his record of sloppy, ineffective catch-and-release, fire-when-ready police work during a Presidential administration that put any effort into exercising the powers of the Clinton administration's COPS bill, the NOPD might currently be in the control of a federal receiver right now because systemically discriminatory pattern and practice.

He's not just delusional and silly. He's not just calculating and manipulative.

He's desperate.

Riley's plans, given that this conspiracy of unpopularity dissuaded him from seeking the Mayor's office?

"I'm looking at a public venture ... with a couple people here in the city that I think would be profound and lucrative," he said. "I also am looking at another position that I will absolutely not talk about. Regardless, I am going to do well no matter what. As I stated, my future is bright. If I don't work another day in my life I'll be OK. I'm not just a police chief."

David Duke Vitter

This is worst kind of politics. A sad legacy is revived as David Vitter's reelection strategy.



It takes one second to issue a press release condemning Keith Bardwell. We're still waiting on Senator Vitter.

Update: Vitter still unable to bring himself to call for the judge's resignation or to condemn his actions as racism.

Jumping in

I've been thinking through some things the last few days related to this discussion and the pursuit of justice for victims of unrepentant vigilantism during Hurricane Katrina.

After I suggested that some instances of abuse of power might be more easily prosecutable than others and wondered aloud whether or not some sort of truth commission deal might be appropriate for some of the cases, an anonymous commenter points out:

So the family of Emmett Everett, the black man killed by Doctors at Memorial hospital, only deserves an apology while the white cop who torched a black man deserves prison? The family of the black woman who died at the convention center because homeland security blocked ambulances deserves an apology while the police at Danzinger deserve jail?

This is moral relativism at its worse. If you killed someone under the color of law or in an official capacity as a medical care provider, you should pay the price.

We developed the Nurenberg acccords and International Court precisely to prevent people from using "special circumstances" as an excuse for murderous behavior.
Every human has an individual conscience and the history of human progress our of the ranks of primitive primates has been to get them to use it when mob mentality takes hold.

All true.

But earlier in the thread, the same (I think) Anonymous commenter points out:

Trust me, if these ever go to jury no white juror is going to hold the white defendants accountable. In their minds, blacks went wild and they share a collective guilt for the actions of a few, so the innocent ones deserve no sympathy.

So I guess I'm still not sure exactly what it is you do here.

If we have a moral standard for what justice should be in this case - i.e. appropriate criminal penalties for those that committed crimes during Katrina - but no practical means of enforcing the standard, how do you move forward?

Anon is right both about the plank you walk off when discussing moral relativism and about the low likelihood that a local jury would ever convict a DHS bureaucrat that blocked ambulances from the Convention Center or the Doctors at Memorial.

That's why I'm having a hard time resolving this.

Let's take the Memorial case.

I would applaud a criminal case being brought against Anna Pou. I think it is pretty damn clear that she killed Mr. Everett when he could have very easily made it through the evacuation.

But I highly doubt she'd be convicted. The trial would be highly polarizing, perhaps more so than the other cases, since I think people are naturally inclined to be sympathetic toward a medical professional and because of Ms. Pou's public exoneration tour.

So what kind of justice would be handed down from that kind of circus?

I'm curious to engage in a frank discussion about this. I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of my readers are in agreement that these cases should be pursued. But I wonder to what extent impediments to justice exist and whether those impediments limit the ability of our traditional system to actually deliver. Are there practicalities to consider?

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Moving sideways...

I'm at least comforted by the knowledge the Eric Holder is the Attorney General of the United States. The administration is serious about empowering the Civil Rights Division to do what it is supposed to do. It's not a coincidence that the feds are now actively investigating some of these post Katrina horror stories to see what they might be able to successfully prosecute.

I am hoping Holder will utilize the powers established under the Clinton administration for the Civil Rights Division to take over police departments characterized by rampant civil rights violations. Forces with a "pattern or practice" of civil rights abuse can be effectively taken over using consent decrees. Cities are threatened with civil rights lawsuits unless they agree to a federal police monitor to implement sweeping reforms. Holder came to oversee the Civil Rights Division as Deputy Attorney General just as it began pursuing consent decrees against police departments in Pittsburgh and Los Angeles.

New Orleans was once a candidate for a consent decree from the Department of Justice. This outside pressure played a role in Marc Morial's decision to hire Richard Pennington, who presided over a pretty damn successful reform of the NOPD. Some background here.

This is something that people should pressure our Mayoral candidates about. Would they sign a consent decree to bring in federal oversight of the NOPD or not and why?

Civil Discourse

I went to the OFA press conference in support of healthcare reform outside Mary Landrieu's office earlier today.

We were rudely received by a phalanx of tea-baggers from the 'Baton Rouge Tea Party,' who I guess represent Mary Landrieu's base now (and I'm only sort of kidding).

I have got to say, these people are out of their effing minds.

Even liberal-ole-me will concede that there are some occasionally reasonable conservatives out in the world (sometimes they'll leave comments on this blog) but the folks that came out to protest this press conference were for the most part, well, crazy.

There's nothing quite like having a middle-aged woman scream in your face that you're a socialist communist at ten in the morning.

"You guys don't care about freedom."

"Barack Obama is taking our way of life."

They shouted over speeches by OFA's Steven Walker and Rep. Karen Carter Peterson, which I guess is fair game.

But when they continued heckling a volunteer speaker who offered a personal story of breast cancer survival and the difficulty of obtaining insurance as a carrier of Crohn's disease, well, I was disgusted.

Then, of course, there was the middle-aged white woman who deemed it appropriate to inform a couple of African American volunteers from SEIU that they were "lucky to be here."

But my favorite teabagger comment came from a woman standing right behind me who said:

"My brother pays $1,000 a month for health insurance and he doesn't complain."

I've been chuckling at that one all day long.

I have to also admit that I was a little bit humbled by the conduct of the progressive press conference attendees who exhibited near excessive patience with some of the protesters, sticking around to answer their questions and to try to engage them in a reasonable discourse.

I certainly will not talk to anyone that screams in my face that I'm a communist socialist or a freedom-hater or whatever because I want universal healthcare.

One older African American woman was walking away from a heated discussion with one of these people and smiled at me.

"How can you not forgive them? They're crazy."

I laughed. That's probably the right attitude.

Local Racist Now A National Racist

Let me second Oyster's congratulations to Audra Shay with the following quote from an article called Do NOT elect a racist:

"The definition of insanity is repeating the same actions over and over again and expecting different results. What exactly do the Young Republicans expect to achieve by electing a 38-year-old woman who thinks racial epithets are acceptable? Also, did I mention that she’s 38? And she’s going to be the leader of an organization with the word “young” in the title? Is it so implausible that people in their 20s (or even early 30s) could join the Republican Party—or have we just completely given up on their vote? Are we expecting “young” people in the Republican Party to soon be entering their 40s?"

-- Meghan McCain.

Update: Is it just me or does it seem like an inordinate number of nationally-known racist politicians and political hacks come from the GNO area?

A Different Philadelphia

A big change in Mississippi.

A Bright Red (updated: The Case for Federal Intervention)

To what extent do White America's voting patterns in the Presidential election of 2008 inform us about racism in America?

To what extent is a local population's diminished support for Barack Obama in 2008 compared to the level of support for John Kerry in 2004 indicative of racism? What other factors might cause a population to be more enthusiastic for Kerry in '04 than Obama in '08?

538 has an interesting new map embedded in today's post about this subject.

This map, which was spread around the internet just after election day, compares how different counties voted in '08 compared to '04.



This map, however, subtracts African Americans to show how non-blacks voted by county in '08 compared to '04.


That's a much more nuanced depiction of voting pattern.

Look at the Old Confederacy in both maps.

Swish all this around in your mouth a little while as you think about where the most strident opposition to President Obama is coming from and as you consider New Orleans' position within the state of Louisiana and Gulf South region.


Late update:

Let me cut to the chase.

When I was thinking about these maps, and often when I consider the resources required to justly and equitably rebuild this city and make it sustainable over the medium long term, I have an internal debate about the extent that federal intervention will be required.

Not just in terms of money allocated, but in terms of direct imposition of policy on states where ultraconservative state leaders further isolate poor communities from critical resources in the name of false fiscal responsibility. Sort of like Louisiana right now...

I'd like to open that up to discussion.

Is the idea of federal receivership of Orleans Parish the most disgusting thing you've ever heard? Is it a necessary evil?

Harry Shearer Gets It Wrong

I generally like Harry Shearer but his response to A. C. Thompson's article in the Nation profiling the racist killings on Algiers Point during Katrina is way off track.

It is not how I want to face the nation.

I actually had a number of concerns about A.C. Thompson's writing style and the lack of context too. I also lamented the lack of national progressive attention to issues like the closure of Charity Hospital.

But the facts were there for all to see. Maybe you've seen this despicable video by now:





Harry Shearer read that article and watched that video and started his response acknowledging that the actual crux of Thompson's article - the part about the supremacist white mobs hunting down unarmed black men during Katrina, bragging about it on tape, and the NOPD letting it slide - is solid journalism.

Then he proceeds to rip Thompson apart for "lies" related to basically off-topic factual infractions. For instance, Shearer complains that Thompson said Katrina "crashed" into New Orleans when it is technically true that it was the undermining of the poorly constructed Federal levee system that truly precipitated our tragedy. He implies that the article was written as part of some mainstream media refusal to investigate the levee failures.

Maybe so, but way way off-topic.

In downplaying the racial tensions that exist here, he suggests that Thompson's article - about the city ceding authority to a modern day lynch mob, their failing to investigate the murders they committed, and the free murderers basically confessing on tape that they went out and shot black people for sport, all chased down over 18 months - was published by the Nation because the publication had "contented itself with a crime story."

Certainly, Thompson's article included some unhelpful and inflammatory rhetorical embellishments. It also boasts some pretty gaping context gaps. But let's be real.

This disgusting event happened in our city. The tragedy of Katrina touched people of all backgrounds. But let's not pretend for one second that African Americans weren't treated "special." I'm not just talking about the indifference of Bush and Brownie because state and city officials also played their respective parts. So did some of our police and so did some of our citizens.

Shearer's pride in anecdotal "casual, easy, frequent interactions" with black neighbors just isn't evidence that this city doesn't have gravely serious racial tensions to work through. I'd point to statistics that discuss which community is disproportionately victimized by things like, I dunno, the criminal justice system, the public education system, neighborhood recovery policy, public health policy, post Katrina economic development policy, and affordable housing policy.

Progressive New Orleanians are working to form diverse coalitions around those actual policy matters. When African American victims of supremacist crimes cannot get the NOPD to investigate, there is a huge problem, one very indicative of the many forms of institutionalized racism that progressive New Orleanians must work to eradicate.

Shearer has worked hard as an advocate for New Orleans and for the need for a massive federal infrastructure intervention. His point has always been that America needs to step up and take responsibility for the 2005 flood.

And he's right.

But New Orleanians need to step up themselves and take responsibility for local institutionalized racism. Mr. Shearer could have made all the points that he did without totally brushing aside the matter at hand. Our African American neighbors are hurt by this. We shouldn't ignore that just because Thompson said 'race war' without offering a nuanced differentiation of liberal whites and the supremacist vigilante terrorists that appear in the video.

We can draw that contrast pretty sharply ourselves by condemning these acts and demanding a full criminal investigation.

Shearer should have used his national forum to do that first and foremost. His larger mission to hold the Federal government accountable would not be undermined, it would be that much more credible.

What Will We Do?

Anon calls out liberal whites in the comments section of this post:

So what will local "anti-racist whites" do? Should we be satisfied with leaving this issue to an outside, African American group, Color of Change? Did we leave Ray Nagin, Bill Jefferson, and Veronica White to some outside group? Will blacks have a point if they say that whites are quick to protest black officials but we wont take the lead in dealing with white racism in our own community?

Damn. In our face.

What do you think about that? What should we do and how should we do it?

In related news, I should point out that Rep. Conyers of Michigan is outraged about the revelations from Mr. Thompson's article. As Chair of the Judiciary Committee, he is actually positioned to do something about it, he can initiate a wide-ranging investigation. I've always liked John Conyers, don't know if I've ever mentioned that.

Meanwhile, Color of Change is pushing forward with requests to Buddy Caldwell and Bobby Jindal.

Katrina, the Left, and New Orleans Today

This article from the Nation is a painful read for a variety of reasons.

The investigation by A.C. Thompson details white vigilantism at Algiers Point during the immediate aftermath of Katrina. A group of white neighbors formed a militia to keep Algiers safe, which for them meant terrorizing African Americans, murdering them, shooting them in the back without any justification beyond what might be charitably described as a sick cowardly prejudice.

Thompson was able to interview some of the racist citizens who took up arms against victims of the floods. They express no remorse, instead glorifying themselves as protectors.

It makes your skin crawl.

Color of Change is pushing this petition, which calls on Governor Jindal, State Attorney General Caldwell, and the Justice Department to investigate racist vigilante shootings.

I have signed it and I recommend that you do too.

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Yet on another level, I hate how the piece was written and am disheartened by Color of Change's call.

A little weird, I know, but let me try to explain.

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One of the things I thought the article lacked was a complete context. Dambala gets at some of this in his reaction to Mr. Thompson's work. There's something gratuitous about the use of the phrase 'race war' in reference to what happened on Algiers point. Maybe I'm the one overgeneralizing a little bit here but my sense is that only a certain "type" of white guy chooses not to evacuate during a huge hurricane threat but instead to stick around with a gun collection. "Choose" being an extremely operative word that provides a not so insignificant contrast to the majority of people with basic means that chose to evacuate and to the masses of poor black people without those basic means that had no choice but to stay.

But maybe it's parsing to get all bent out of shape over the use of that phrase. We're a little bit sensitive to it I think because 'war' implies a certain ubiquity, implies that everyone was involved and that everyone chose a side. It totally oversimplifies the issue of race, but particularly so for the city of New Orleans, which has a complex history of racial tribalism that is not as simple as black vs. white. I think that I would have gone with "Katrina's unrepentant supremacist terrorists" instead of "Katrina's hidden race war," but that's just me.

The much more consequential whiff, on Thompson's part, was the failure to contextualize these vigilante killings as a part of a chaotic whole. He pays only lip service to the reality that there were scores upon scores of murders and rumored murders on the East Bank during Katrina. He couches the NOPD's failure to keep records during the storm or to disclose public records to him as specific to his investigation of the shootings on Algiers Point.

We know that there were grizzly acts of violence committed throughout the city during that time, by citizens, by the NOPD, by black people, by white people, by Ray Nagin, by Kathleen Blanco, by Michael Brown, by the Army Corps of Engineers, and by President Bush. Thompson cherry-picks a specific incident and doesn't do nearly enough to place it into the context of what was a much larger event. He boils down the entire injustice that was Katrina and the Federal Flood AND decades of systematizing racism via the criminal justice system into a digestible 'nobody is investigating these rednecks!'

But I don't want to just blame A.C. Thompson.

Color of Change should consider its reaction to this story.

They call on us to get to force "Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell, and the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the racist shootings, and to demand accountability from Louisiana's dysfunctional criminal justice system."

Certainly, it's a noble thing to ask for, but at the same time, it's also short-sighted and maybe even a little bit selfish.

Even if Bobby Jindal were to call on an investigation and supposing that NOPD was able to piece together charges based on records they never kept and evidence they don't have, would it really be credible enough in a court of law to yield a conviction? What kind of healing would that bring for the victims? What about all the other horror stories from those days? Are we investigating all of them? Are criminal convictions possible for any of them?

What we need is an independent federal investigation into all of it: All of the vigilante killings, all of NOPD's desertions, all of Nagin's mistakes, all of Brownie's incompetence, all of Bush's neglect, and the Army Corps of Engineers for the failure of the federal levee systems. We need the truth and we need accountability, but what we really need is healing. Color of Change's call, even if it succeeds in precipitating an investigation into what happened in Algiers, is just as likely to salt our civic wounds as it is to sanitize them.

We needed it starting in late 2005 and we still need it today. Color of Change isn't going nearly far enough. They're flailing in Bobby Jindal's direction in reaction to the Thompson piece instead of actually putting forth a proposal that might help usher New Orleanians toward some sort of closure.

But again, I don't just want to call out Thompson and Color of Change. This instance is emblematic of the larger role that Katrina and New Orleans play in national political discourse.

For the nation, the federal response Katrina signalled a final deathblow to President Bush and conservative governing philosophy. Polls demonstrate that the public pretty much turned on the GOP for good as a result of the Katrina saga. The PR battle that took place between the parties was one in which the Right blamed Nagin and the natives for their lack of "personal responsibility," while the Left (and the vast vast majority of the country) blamed Bush and his henchmen for their inexplicable and inexcusable inability to respond to an entirely predictable catastrophe in a major American city.

Since then, national analysis of New Orleans is through these lenses, not just the lens of 'Katrina' but the lenses of were was the immediate partisan reactions to Katrina.

The Left, during Katrina, was justifiably incensed over the way that African Americans were labeled "looters" while whites just looking for food. That's why it is unsurprising to see the lions of the liberal netroots (HuffPo, Think Progress, Color of Change) seize upon this story - it scores points in that old front against racist right wing media portrayal.

Katrina is an eternally smoldering political fire, that actual people live here New Orleans is an abstraction that most don't, can't, and won't think about in the midst of the constant drone of the 24 hour news cycle. That the story of New Orleans continues, that it takes on new twists and turns, that its existence continues to be tenuously propped up on a three-legged stool of racism, corruption, and incompetence seems lost on much of the progressive netroots, on thinkers who I respect greatly and read every day.

The most frustrating thing to me is that the progressive netroots really can be of great assistance in this city, without really sacrificing the opportunity to score those political points.

It's great that Color of Change is pushing Bobby Jindal to investigate these vigilante shootings and I'm sure they'd also support a real truth commission for Katrina, but neither option is particularly viable in the short, medium, or long terms unless we start changing course at the municipal level.

What we really could use at this moment is help forcing the reopening of Charity Hospital and help preventing the needless demolition the historic black neighborhood of Lower Mid City. That fight is right now. It has real tangible consequences for the African American community, it speaks to national progressive issues, and Bobby Jindal is an obstacle.

For Color of Change and other progressive/netroots orgs, it's a battle they ought to be itching to join.

Save Lower Mid City, Reopen Charity

It's real in our lives right now.

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*One of the biggest reasons national progressive advocacy organizations seem to be so ignorant as to the situation here is that local bloggers, myself very very much included, do a horrendous job of communicating to an audience that isn't totally ensconsed in the daily municipal minutia. We can definitely do a better job summarizing things more regularly for a national audience in a way that imparts the critical concepts without oversaturating names and locations. To that end, I'm crossposting this at Kos.

St. Tammany Parish Schools Barracading Themselves in 1920s

What a lovely state we live in.

This after a week of public assurances by officials that recent KKK activity in St. Tammany and Washington Parishes is indeed out of the ordinary. (Though interviews with locals yield a different perspective.)

Yeah, great comfort.

Further Nagin Notes

This aperitif nicely follows my latest "defense" of his administration.

First, make sure you've read Jarvis DeBerry's latest, one of his better columns in recent memory.

He brilliantly evokes the Daily Show's interview with the current Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, which I thought was the best Palin-related piece of journalism from the whole campaign cycle.

Note to New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and everybody in his administration: Don't return any calls placed by "The Daily Show." That shouldn't be hard. The mayor's staff rarely calls back real journalists. So blowing off fake ones shouldn't be difficult.

Even so, those in the administration should take exceeding care not to sit down with anybody from "The Daily Show" lest they get thrown a hardball question like, "What do you do?"

Such a question would surely stump them, for as best as residents can tell, many folks in Nagin's administration don't do much of anything except fend off requests for information and come up with hotheaded responses to criticisms that they're do-nothings.

The rest of the piece hits all the same notes we've been hitting out here in the wild, wild Internet. Essentially he argues that the Mayor's defensiveness in the face of chronic incompetence on his own staff has become, not just indicative of but also a reason for, the larger inability to get anything done. (I have no idea how to punctuate that sentence, my apologies)

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I'd also like to address some lingering thoughts from the "defense" post.

To highlight part of Cliff's comment:

"...not enough attention is given to the fact that he is really not doing anything that hasn't been done in city government since the beginning. This is the way New Orleans has always worked and the next mayor will be doing the same things unless there are some new ethics rules or a change in the city charter. This city was built on taking care of friends and allies. I think the support in the black community for ineffective leadership is overstated. I think the black community has given up on local government."

Yes, Nagin's popularity and legitimacy within the black community has always been overstated. He did not boast tremendous black support in 2002. But what is too rarely acknowledged or explained is why African Americans helped reelect him in 2006. I think it is too easy to say that they were won over by the chocolate city speech or some other nonsense. Rather, African Americans were willing, in general, to put Ray Nagin back over the top because of what was perceived as the alternative - a recovery ideology guided by the same green dot racists that had nearly planned their communities out of existence. Never mind for now that Mayor Nagin is now in bed with many of those same interests, he was the known evil and the "safe" choice during a time of trauma.

You can see evidence of this through an examination of Mayor Nagin's media strategy since that time, because it hasn't changed. His position is predicated on his own realization that he does not have credibility within the black community. What he understands and consistently attempts to take advantage of, is that some will begrudgingly prefer him to the unknown others he's been painting with such large strokes. He exploits fears of white/uptown/racism as a way of explaining himself. Clearly, it's not working very well even though it has bought him breathing room at times. It's a fairly common desperation tactic used by white and black politicians all over the country. (Though some of the fears have been pretty understandable, I should add.)

Obviously that oversimplifies and overgeneralizes some pretty complex interactions, but it's a helpful frame from which to examine the current political climate.

Cliff's larger point is that Nagin is just the latest in a long line of corrupt and ineffective mayors should also be noted. I know that I can sometimes get so caught up in the present that I lose sight of just how systemic this has always been. I was trying to think of that context when I used the phrase "aspired to adequacy" to describe the Mayor's first term. I wasn't trying to argue that he wasn't corrupt or didn't have terrible ideas, I think I was trying to get at the idea that Nagin's various first term foibles were not exactly exceptional when considering the historical context. Of course my larger point was that Mayor Nagin's second term has reached that transcendent level of ineffectually.

In Defense of Mayor Nagin (Part II)

I wrote part I over the summer.

Today I wrote another.

Let me preface it with a call for the immediate resignation or dismissal of Sanitation Director Veronica White.


Mayor C. Ray Nagin sure was dealt a tough hand when Katrina came. At the point the storm came 2005, he was well into the third year of his first term. His administration had earned a reputation for adequacy. Unfortunately, Mayor Nagin had not pressed for updated hurricane evacuation plans as aggressively as he should have. A strong municipal game plan became that much more necessary when President Bush left FEMA in the stead of political hacks. We were on our own without viable hurricane preparations and were finally facing the worst-case scenario storm that we’d always been told would come. As the federal rescue failed to materialize, while Michael Brown was eating steak dinners in Baton Rouge, Mayor Nagin was left on his own. Our government failed us and our Mayor was put in an impossible situation. Certainly, he had not done enough to revamp our evacuation procedures but the newly minted Department of Homeland Security was created to help coordinate that very effort, especially at the nation’s most vulnerable locales. The DHS failed New Orleans and it failed the nation. Instead of revamping our country’s disaster response mechanisms, President Bush had merely assembled a leach-like bureaucracy from which to reward political patrons with jobs and contracts. Our country was no more prepared for a catastrophic hurricane than it was for a terrorist attack, disease outbreak or earthquake. And Ray Nagin was left holding the bag.

It wasn’t fair. It was too much for one man. For New Orleans, Mayor Nagin was the town crier, the constable, and the bucket brigade. For the President, his henchman Karl Rove, and the rest of the right-wing machine, he was the fall guy.

I will never ever forgive those people for what they did to this city. I will never forgive George Bush or Karl Rove or the conservative court jesters that left this city to drown or advocated we abandon it forever when it didn’t.

But I forgave Ray Nagin.

I forgave him because even though he didn’t do enough, he was asked to do it all. I forgave him because he yelled and cursed and cried while Bush, Brown, and Chertoff patted each other on the back. I forgave him because I thought he would never forgive them. I forgave Ray Nagin because I thought he’d never forget what they did to our city and I thought he’d keep yelling and cursing and crying until they made it up to us. I respected C. Ray Nagin enough as a man to believe that if he didn’t have the decency to do right by us as a matter of service, we’d at least benefit from the revenge campaign.

But since then…

Since then, Mayor C. Ray Nagin has worked to earn my utmost contempt. His second term in office has been a disaster of epic proportions, a criminal enterprise, a human rights violation for which Ray Nagin can never earn forgiveness. Ever. Let alone respect.

And he has crafted a city in his own image:

A city incapable of delivering basic public services to its citizens, a city unwilling to expand economic opportunity for those most routinely left behind. Mayor Nagin squandered every last ounce of international goodwill and sympathy with a recovery agenda that favors every whim of big business and every impulse of his well-heeled friends.

Instead of working toward a compromise plan to rehabilitate our public housing stock, Ray Nagin laughed his way to the wrecking ball as his city burst at the seems with the same racist rhetoric of so many public service debates of years past. Instead of embracing the permanent supportive housing initiatives that prove to be the best means of reducing homelessness in cities all across the nation, Mayor Nagin and his police chief Warren Riley used entrapment tactics and insidious loitering laws to arrest them or herd them into camp-like barracks. That episode got so bad that the Bush administration had to send down representatives to talk Ray Nagin into a more humanitarian approach.

Instead of using this cities recovery funds, Katrina reparations belonging to victims of the Federal Flood, Mayor Nagin and his incompetent planning stooge Ed Blakely hatched ridiculous development schemes that don’t come close to addressing our emergency recovery priorities. Take our community block grant development funds: What could have gone toward needed infrastructure improvements at target zone sites around O.C. Haley Boulevard or St. Claude Avenue were instead allocated in huge sums toward a river redevelopment scheme being planned for the distant future. What could have been used to reopen Charity Hospital was instead allocated in vast amounts to demolishing a recovering Mid-City neighborhood for a new LSU/VA hospital that won’t materialize for years to come. When basic municipal functions like the police, the fire department, EMS, and the DA office are struggling to find enough support to staff their temporary offices, the Mayor heralds plans for golf courses, tennis courts, and condominiums. He touts the return of the tourists as the benchmark for which we are too judge our own quality of life.

His actions as Mayor, his policies, have squandered our national goodwill. New Orleans is seen as a money pit and Mayor Nagin is viewed as a laughingstock. While the media’s treatment of certain ill-conceived remarks has not helped, those do not constitute the substance of the Nagin administration’s well-deserved reputation. Rather, it is his reactionary ideas, his lack of vision, and above all, the lack of results.

Though African Americans no longer constitute the overwhelming majority of the city’s population, it can be safely said that the African American community has been most victimized by Mayor Nagin’s wrongheaded recovery policy. This is what is so disconcerting about his most recent invocation of race in defense of his administrations incompetence, and really his repeated use of this defense mechanism throughout his term. What happened this week at City Council is clear. Our city’s sanitation department is dysfunctional on a number of counts. Sanitation Director Veronica White has locked us into some exploitative trash service contracts with the Mayor’s closest political friends and donors at a time where every saved penny is needed for other public service emergencies. Her stewardship over demolition contracts have made her an integral cog in the broken machine that is this city’s blight removal program. Instead of leaning on delinquent slumlords, the city has improperly subjected scores of salvageable homes to the wrecking ball. The city now stands to lose millions more in lawsuits from wronged property owners. But when Stacy Head has the audacity to question Veronica White about her job, all of a sudden she’s being inappropriately racial and profane.

It is like the time last year that Council called hearings into the ‘unlimited bulky waste’ provision that was retroactively stripped from the sanitation contracts. Instead of correcting the mistake and saving the city millions of dollars, Mayor Nagin encouraged his administration to defend the contractors on racial grounds. When it was discovered that the quasi-governmental nonprofit had essentially embezzled millions of dollars in CDBG money, Mayor Nagin maliciously attacked the citizens that had brought the issue to light as enemies of the recovery. He purposely lumps liberal bloggers with the unfiltered anonymous conservative and racist talk radio leftovers on Nola.com as the new Ku Klux Klan. Now he accuses Stacy Head of race-baiting because she dared to suggest that Veronica White was wasting millions more of the citizens’ dollars.

It is patterned behavior. The Mayor categorizes all of his critics, be they from the right or the left, as racially motivated. It is a mechanism he has employed time and again to avoid providing justification for his administration’s policies or avoids holding his underlings accountable for their failings. Critics are not looking for criminal activity to throw people in jail and claim victory. We just need our government to do better for us. When watchdogs discover waste, when they call attention to instances of incompetence, it is because they want you to correct them and move on. Instead, the Mayor refuses to acknowledge that problems exist, erects a smoke and mirrors campaign to obscure the information available, or accuses detractors of racism. Instead of embracing efforts to improve the function of government, the Mayor’s defensive posturing only magnifies the appearance of criminal impropriety.

In a sense, I understand where it comes from. African Americans fought too long and hard to earn their fair share of power in this historically racist city. That African Americans sometimes feel defensive about criticisms lobbed at high profile black officials is understandable given historical context and more recent efforts to use planning to eradicate communities deemed inviable and invaluable. When African American leaders use race as a political bludgeon, it effectively evokes not just the dark chapters of the past but also the sinister efforts of parts of the white establishment in the present-day.

The ‘chocolate city’ speech resounded in this city because African American communities were truly fighting to stay on the map. Now, C. Ray Nagin can no longer credibly sound that alarm because he has switched teams. Instead of fighting for the greater African American community he promised to represent, he has embraced the plan B agenda of the very same interests that originally sought to avoid rebuilding poor neighborhoods all together. We’ve become all too familiar with what that Plan B looks like. In it, Mayor Nagin clings desperately to the loyalty of political patronage while the people of this city, and African Americans disproportionately, are deprived of basic public services, intermediate opportunity, and advanced vision for this city's ultimate revenge: A full, just, and equitable recovery.

Eff these Effigies

Beware the disturbing photograph attached to this post. I normally shy from displaying such images but people need to be confronted with this kind of garbage.

This morning, Andrew Sullivan passed along a disturbing email forwarded from a University of Kentucky staffer:

Dear Colleagues,

It is with profound sadness that I must report to you that an effigy of Obama was found hanging from a tree on campus this morning. It was taken down immediately, but the damage and hurt will linger for a long time. I literally feel sick to my stomach. There will be a statement from the President shortly, and we are also considering other expressions of outrage. In the meantime, please alert your staff and be prepared to counsel students, staff, and faculty of color, in particular, as needed.

But don't think that this disgusting behavior is limited to the whatever stereotypical conception of Kentucky race relations you might hold. A friend of an old travel buddy of mine from my days wandering Mediterranean Turkey went walking his dog this morning in Redondo Beach, California and encountered this stomach-turning scene, posting it to Flickr:

(I removed the picture from here because I couldn't stand to see it anymore, but you can click the flickr link to see it if you want.)

VOTE ON TUESDAY!

Update:

There have also been a lot of press for a Palin-doll hanging in the LA area, which prompted a Secret Service visit to that person's home. While the Palin effigy hanging is also grossly offensive, there is absolutely no comparison and to argue otherwise completely ignores history.