And here is Paul at Wizbang's amazing preelection analysis predicting it. No way I would have guessed that, no way. Hats off to Paul, the force be with him.
Nagin worked hard to bring in the votes from the NO diaspora. Lots of those folks will probably never return from Houston, Dallas, or Baton Rouge, but they did it for the home team. Still, his days are numbered.
The choice was between the guy who decompensated and Mary Landrieu's brother. Mitch Landrieu was a few years behind me at Jesuit. I saw him act in school plays (we had a good theatre department). Mitch was very talented. Although he seemed to want to break the family mold early in his political career, he's now ensconced in the Democratic Party. The choice was awful, but the voters are responsible for that.
But just keep in mind that any government capable of excelling under such circumstances is capable of pretty much anything they want to do, good or bad, under other circumstances.
New Orleans suffers from something like the "oil curse", where fortuitous positioning--at the mouth of the Mighty Mississippi--creates economic fundamentals outside any need for a modern civic structure. As such, the Gen Benjamin Butler Reconstruction template is still in play enough to've created the SuperDome psychodrama the world witnessed during Katrina.
Not so much within New Orleans itself. Most of the big industrial port facilities are in Plaquemines Parish and elsewhere in Louisiana. But your larger point is very true that these are facilities that handle massive volumes with very few people and while their terminal managers may be known to grain buyers all over the planet they may be unknown to people only a mile away. And their impacts on the local economy are insignificant - certainly not enough to lift them out of the morass. In that sense, the lower Mississippi is a piece of autonomous First World infrastructure stuck in the Third World, kind of like the Panama and Suez Canals.
Skook's and David's comments amplify one another most deftly. Butler's game during Reconstruction was to gather as many freedmen as he possibly could into the Ninth Ward and make them wards of Washington DC.
Many think the objective must've been the usual free-money graft, as the hidden crime committed against the future prospects of our most vulnerable new citizens is a century-and-a-half later more appalling than ever for the passage of frozen time.
10 comments:
Nagin worked hard to bring in the votes from the NO diaspora. Lots of those folks will probably never return from Houston, Dallas, or Baton Rouge, but they did it for the home team. Still, his days are numbered.
It does not sound like the voters had much of a choice really.
The choice was between the guy who decompensated and Mary Landrieu's brother. Mitch Landrieu was a few years behind me at Jesuit. I saw him act in school plays (we had a good theatre department). Mitch was very talented. Although he seemed to want to break the family mold early in his political career, he's now ensconced in the Democratic Party. The choice was awful, but the voters are responsible for that.
glenmore:
But just keep in mind that any government capable of excelling under such circumstances is capable of pretty much anything they want to do, good or bad, under other circumstances.
Well said.
Chalk one up for derived Clintonism--life in the Big Revival Therapy Tent.
"I know I've messed up bad, folks, but haven't we all? Aren't we all sinners on this journey we're on?"
Praise the Lord (whenever anyone's in earshot).
New Orleans suffers from something like the "oil curse", where fortuitous positioning--at the mouth of the Mighty Mississippi--creates economic fundamentals outside any need for a modern civic structure. As such, the Gen Benjamin Butler Reconstruction template is still in play enough to've created the SuperDome psychodrama the world witnessed during Katrina.
buddy:
Not so much within New Orleans itself. Most of the big industrial port facilities are in Plaquemines Parish and elsewhere in Louisiana. But your larger point is very true that these are facilities that handle massive volumes with very few people and while their terminal managers may be known to grain buyers all over the planet they may be unknown to people only a mile away. And their impacts on the local economy are insignificant - certainly not enough to lift them out of the morass. In that sense, the lower Mississippi is a piece of autonomous First World infrastructure stuck in the Third World, kind of like the Panama and Suez Canals.
Skook's and David's comments amplify one another most deftly. Butler's game during Reconstruction was to gather as many freedmen as he possibly could into the Ninth Ward and make them wards of Washington DC.
Many think the objective must've been the usual free-money graft, as the hidden crime committed against the future prospects of our most vulnerable new citizens is a century-and-a-half later more appalling than ever for the passage of frozen time.
Conservatism is a tool with which to build a life; Liberalism is a life with which to build a tool.
That's a good one Buddy.
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