Just remember to keep a list

The Bloomberg phenomenon is fascinating.  Rarely are we presented with such a perfect opportunity, not only to observe the depth and breadth of the moral rot within the professional political class, but also to see so many of the sellouts clearly identify themselves.  Many of your local professional Democrats are amoral grifters who don't give a shit about the problems of poor and working class people or whatever the Democrats still half-assedly claim their brand to be about. They're just in it to suck as much money as can be had out of the process.  And, sure, you know, "everyone's gotta eat." But maybe we can find a better meal ticket than the guy who literally doesn't want people to be able to eat.

Anyway, like I said, the "Bloomberg Effect" may sound at first like a reason to despair but it is actually an opportunity. Every dirtbag who takes his money is telling you something essential about who they are. Make sure you remember to take down their names.

The Bloomberg Louisiana team includes Richard Carbo, who just ran Gov. John Bel Edwards’ re-election campaign; Ryan Berni, a longtime aide to former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu; and Bill Rouselle, a long-time strategist who worked on campaigns for Edwards and New Orleans Mayor Latoya Cantrell, among others.

Bloomberg, 77, is a billionaire and former mayor of New York City. He's been running an aggressive, TV-driven campaign for the Democratic nomination.

Carbo will lead the campaign’s efforts in Louisiana as state director.

Bloomberg’s Louisiana operations will include 5 regional offices and more than 20 staffers.

"We are building the most robust presidential campaign operation in the state's history with a team that has a proven track record of helping Democrats win in Louisiana,” Berni said in a statement.

Other members of the team include: Telley Savalas Madina, Organizing Director; Kia Bickham, Political Director; Micah Cormier, Communications Director; Tyler Walker, Digital Director; Emilie Tenenbaum, Operations Director.

Hey! There's a new Hampshire

I suppose that since I made a guess at how Iowa would go I should do the same thing for New Hampshire.  Making guesses is always a bad idea, of course, because you almost never get it right. And then everyone else who is also an idiot who did not get it right can plainly see that you are an idiot who is not getting it right.

What I did not get right about Iowa was, although, like everyone else on the planet, I've been expecting Biden to crater, I didn't think he would do that right away. I've also been pretty clear that I don't believe there's any way in hell the Democrats are going to let Bernie Sanders be their nominee so I'm thoroughly expecting them to fuck him over in any way possible. However I also did not expect that to happen right away.  But both of those things happened and now here we are!

So it's all happening so fast.  Before now the name of the game has been, what happens to all the party insiders after the inevitable Biden collapse? But I think at this point the answer is obvious. They've all been pre-bought by Bloomberg.  Assuming that Sanders doesn't stumble too badly in the months ahead, and assuming the Democrats can't hop on any of the other horses in the race and make them happen, we're more than likely headed for a brokered convention where Bloomberg would theoretically have the greatest advantage.  Would the Democrats really nominate him, though?  Boy would that ever be a hoot.

Anyway, the way it sounds watching the cable news is that Bernie is having a harder time in New Hampshire than he was supposed to.  Let's assume it doesn't go too poorly for him, though. Here is a reasonable assumption


Bernie: 25
Pete: 22
Amy: 15
Liz: 12
Joe: 10

Could be an early end of the line for Biden there. Maybe after this, Bloomberg can hire the remaining 15 percent of professional Democrats he isn't paying already. 

He's running!

Last week the New York Times gave us one of those obligatory "Democratic Donor Class Is Panicked" articles that start coming out every quarter or so once we reach this stage of the Presidential pre-primary. Oh no are the candidates "too far to the left"?  Why haven't the piggies begun to rally around Amy Klobuchar's stern lectures about what they can't have yet?  Somebody has to do something about this. Who could we call on?

Would Hillary Clinton get in, the contributors wondered, and how about Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York mayor? One person even mused whether Michelle Obama would consider a late entry, according to two people who attended the event, which was hosted by the progressive group American Bridge.

Hey you know that might work. Uncle Joe's exploding eyeballs may have embarrassed the hell out of everyone by yelling at Warren on stage last week.  But here is Hillary with her idea to yell at a completely different person instead.  Should they give that a go?   Maybe.

But hey, look who else appears in this article for some reason.

“I can see it, I can feel it, I can hear it,” Mitch Landrieu, the former New Orleans mayor, said of the unease within the party. He said he thinks Mr. Biden is best positioned to defeat Mr. Trump but called the former vice president’s fund-raising “a real concern.”

It's a "real concern," but like a lot of these establishment Democrats, Mitch is still a Bidenite. Or, at least, he is until he is given permission not to be anymore.  When Joe finally accedes to the concerns of his fundraisers and drops out of the race, all of the career supplicants backing him out of obligation will be free to adopt whatever the next company line might be.

The early odds may have had them all landing on Kamala. But, more recently, one could argue they may cynically gravitate toward Warren.  Right now that seems like a logical evolution of the evergreen strategy of co-opting and crowding out the left. See this excellent analysis by Matt Karp for more on that.

Yet while she is sometimes described as an “economic populist,” Warren’s chief function in the primary race against Bernie Sanders has been to take the populism out of progressive economics. While formally embracing much of Sanders’s 2016 platform, the Warren campaign distinguished itself not by underlining the necessity of popular struggle, but by advertising the comprehensive wonkery of her policy agenda: “She has a plan for that!” Warren’s planfulness is Democratic savior politics in the style of Obama or Hillary Clinton. It does not summon the will of the masses; it says, “Chill out, she’s got this.”

The emphasis here is on the reasonableness of the plans, not the boldness of the demands. Even Warren’s most daring stroke on this front, a 2 percent tax on fortunes over $50 million, elicits chants of “two cents, two cents!” — with the campaign and its supporters alike practically fetishizing the modest limits of the request.

When Warren does vow to challenge the power the wealthy, her rhetoric often works not to stoke the popular mind against America’s inequality but to naturalize it as a fact of national life: “In America, there are gonna be people who are richer and people who are not so rich. And the rich are gonna own more shoes, and they’re gonna own more cars, and they may even own more houses. But they shouldn’t own more of our democracy.”

This isn’t economic populism; it’s closer to a folksy progressive riff on “there is no alternative.” Nor does such a cabined understanding of “democracy” — a question of fair procedures, walled off from the world of material goods — open much room for questioning the tyranny of bosses under capitalism.

Speaking of never questioning the tyranny of bosses, the New Orleans Times-Picayune-Dot-Nola-Dot-Com-Georges-Advoco-Gambit tells us that Mitch Landrieu is back in town to "formally launch" the same foundation he already formally launched a year ago.

Landrieu will formally launch the E Pluribus Unum initiative on Friday, an effort with influential backers including former President Bill Clinton that seeks to reshape the country's conversation about race. The goal, he says, is to more effectively reach out and help people gain a better understanding of racism in modern America.

The message is geared mainly toward the white community.

Mitch has been running around the country meeting with Lauren Powell Jobs, with Bill Clinton, with scores of corporate donors to see how much money he can pile up in the name of talking to white people about racism. That can't possibly mean he's even remotely within the universe of potential emergency Presidential candidates Democratic donors are supposed to be casting about for at the moment. Right?  Well just to be sure let's ask.

With years of work ahead to make a go of his new foundation, Landrieu brushed away suggestions that he might be seeking a position in the administration of any of the presidential contenders, using similar language to the incalculable times he was asked whether he had aspirations for the Oval Office.

“I don’t have any expectations of being in the next president’s cabinet,” he said.

Pretty cryptic! Maybe he's still waiting on the right call.  On the other hand, if Karp is correct about corporate Democrats warming up to an accommodation with Warren, it would mean that the Biden-Harris-Hillary-Mitch mode of centrist campaigning is no longer the new hotness.  But old habits die hard. Let's see how they feel after the convention.

Mitch 2020: Fuck Your Feelings

There's a lot we could pick on in this Politco piece. There's the "gee-wiz a white southerner isn't overtly racist" framing along with some other condescending observations about how a person can both say "y'all" and also be literate. ("OMG he quoted a thing JFK liked to quote from Tennyson!") Many other annoying things happen.  Mitch is buds with Obama. Mitch is buds with Michael Bloomberg.  He's gonna be on Oprah's podcast.  There is this sentence: "He doesn’t have consultants, other than a rickety breakfast-nook cabinet of Donna Brazile, James Carville and Mary Matalin."

But you don't have to read all that stuff. You can probably predict most of it anyway.  The true key to understanding what's the matter with a Mitch for President campaign is right here in this paragraph where the potential candidate tells us he doesn't know what everybody is so upset about.

“We are not in a place where the world is about to take us over, and we ought not be in a position of crouched fear and hunched-in and isolated. We ought to be feeling much better about ourselves. But here’s the thing: We’re not,” Landrieu says. “And so I’m not trying to diminish people’s feelings. I think the question is, why do we feel that way? Because there’s an answer there, and I don’t know what the answer is at the moment.”

Mitch doesn't know the answer. Why should he? This whole running for higher office gig is just one of several options available to him, anyway.  And, hey, good for him. Inherited wealth and status is pretty nice but there are some people who manage to screw up in spite of all that. Mitch made sure he didn't squander his many opportunities. This is why he's able to dazzle Politico with his adequately educated adult's level of reasonably expected erudition.  But for someone so concerned about why people feel the way they do, you'd think he'd be able to empathize maybe a little bit with the problems that real people face. Or at least exhibit a passing familiarity with those problems.

So why does a large subset of workers continue to feel left behind? We can find some clues in a new 296-page report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a club of advanced and advancing nations that has long been a top source for international economic data and research. Most of the figures are from 2016 or before, but they reflect underlying features of the economies analyzed that continue today.

In particular, the report shows the United States’s unemployed and at-risk workers are getting very little support from the government, and their employed peers are set back by a particularly weak collective-bargaining system.

Those factors have contributed to the United States having a higher level of income inequality and a larger share of low-income residents than almost any other advanced nation. Only Spain and Greece, whose economies have been ravaged by the euro-zone crisis, have more households earning less than half the nation’s median income — an indicator that unusually large numbers of people either are poor or close to being poor.

Mitch can't possibly guess why an immiserated American working class isn't "feeling much better" about itself.  He's fine. His friends are fine.  Why is everybody else so pissed off? It's a mystery.

It's not just Mitch, of course. He's only one product of a political system that rewards insular networking among a privileged class of donors, office holders, and complicit media rather than working class organizing and power building. The glad-handers who rise to the top in this system have no clue what people outside of the circle actually have to deal with.

Think again about LaToya Cantrell's reaction when we had to tell her not to put a guy who helped cover up the Danziger shootings in charge of Homeland Security.  Somehow she didn't see the "uptick" coming.  But even after a week of meetings with concerned parties, her conclusion was just that we were all too "traumatized" to make a sound judgement. LaToya never really got what the issue was there because people like she and Mitch aren't capable of ever getting it. The successful politicos can fake their way past it well enough but there is a fundamental disconnect between the self-serving careerist priorities of the professional administrative class and the life and death crises faced by the people who live with consequences of those ambitions.  This is why none of them can ever really be trusted. They can be made to act correctly given enough pressure, but at a basic level, they are incapable of actually giving a shit.  

Mitch Landrieu, Michael Bloomberg, Oprah Winfrey, and the Carvilles are not among the "unusually large number of people who are poor or close to being poor." They are very interested in who gets to rule those people, though, so maybe some homework is in order at some point. Otherwise the Landrieu 2020 campaign's message is just a dressed up version of "Fuck Your Feelings" and I thought the whole point of this was to offer an alternative to Trumpism. Is this really the best we can do?

Do not keep a handgun, just in case

Just in case John Kennedy, who famously told you you'd better keep one, decides stop and frisk, instead of love is actually the answer.

Update:  One more thing here.  What is Gambit's opinion on Stop and Frisk?  The way this is worded suggests they have issued a ruling.

Though "stop-and-frisk" is controversial, it's not unconstitutional, though in 2013 a federal  judge ruled part of New York's implementation of the practice to be unconstitutional. An analysis of the New York Police Department's stop-and-frisk policy, conducted by the New York American Civil Liberties Union, found "innocent New Yorkers have been subjected to police stops and street interrogations more than 5 million times since 2002, and that black and Latino communities continue to be the overwhelming target of these tactics. Nearly nine out of 10 stopped-and-frisked New Yorkers have been completely innocent." The department has gradually stepped down the practice since 2011.

Not sure why that is written, "it's not unconstitutional" rather than the more accurate, "it has not technically been ruled unconstitutional."  The explanation is fine but also sort of incomplete.  In the New York case, the judge ruled that the NYPD police "as applied" was most certainly unconstitutional because 1) It violated Fourth Amendment protections against reasonable search and seizure and 2) The clear racial bias evident in the NYPD stop and frisk operations violated the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause.

The FactCheck.org bit Gambit cites allows that the judge did not technically rule all "stop and frisk" policies are inherently unconstitutional allowing for a standard established by precedent.

In fact, Judge Scheindlin pointedly wrote in her opinion that she was “not ordering an end to the practice of stop and frisk.” She said they could continue if the city complied with court-ordered remedies to make sure that the stops and frisks did not violate the Constitution. (Scheindlin called these “Terry stops,” referring to Terry v. Ohio, in which the U.S. Supreme Court in 1968 ruled that a police officer can stop and frisk individuals where there is a reasonable basis for suspicion.)

But the Terry standard is itself controversial. So much so, in fact, that it's difficult to see how it prevents the sort of abuse the judge ruled against in the New York case. Note Justice Douglas's dissent quoted here.

In theory, this (Terry) seems like a reasonable compromise. But applying the standard in practice is fraught with potential dangers. Chief Justice Warren warned that "in determining whether the officer acted reasonably in such circumstances, due weight must be given not to his inchoate and unparticularized suspicion or 'hunch.'" But it's hard to avoid the conclusion that vague hunches are in fact responsible for many stop-and-frisk searches. As Justice William O. Douglas warned in his dissent, without ongoing vigilance, it's easy for the stop-and-frisk regime to devolve into a norm where "the police can pick [someone] up whenever they do not like the cut of his jib."

It's easy to see how any stop and frisk policy quickly opens the door to casual everyday violations of civil liberties. The New York case happens to be one where the data made the story crystal clear.  This is different from the experience in other cities such as, say, New Orleans where, yes, in fact, Stop and Frisk has been in open operation already.  Unfortunately for us, our Inspector General was either unable or unwilling to make a strong case against its application. From 2013:

The purpose of the IG's report was to determine whether officers "were compliant with legal requirements to stop individuals only when there was reasonable suspicion" and whether "when conducting stops and frisks, NOPD appeared to apply the constitutional standard of reasonable suspicion equally to all persons, regardless of their age, gender or race."

But auditors were not able to do so, the report says, because of various holes in the data. Though officers are required to fill out field information cards for each stop, they often did not complete the forms in full, the report says, and they sometimes listed multiple subjects on a single form.

The cops aren't filling out the form so I guess... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (the pose one assumes when stopped for a search)

It's worth noting also that Kennedy specifically refers to the New York practice in his whining. In other words he is arguing for the very application of the policy that has definitely been ruled unconstitutional. His argument, like Michael Bloomberg's is, basically, "This works so STFU, everybody."

"Throughout the trial that just concluded, the judge made it clear she was not at all interested in the crime reductions here or how we achieved them. In fact, nowhere in her 195-page decision does she mention the historic cuts in crime or the number of lives that have been saved."

Leaving aside the validity of Bloomberg's assertion, it isn't the judge's task to weigh the effectiveness of a law against the fundamental civil rights if violates in order to achieve its effect. Does Mitch Landrieu's "mentor" not understand this or does he just not care?  In any case, it's probably not a good idea for Gambit to issue its own legal opinion. No reason to embolden these bad actors.

How to win friends and influence people

Mitch Landrieu has a reputation for working well with others.

For all his accomplishments, though, Landrieu is wearing thin on political insiders. Since winning a resounding re-election in 2014, he has furthered his reputation for brooking little dissent or pushback, even from longtime friends and political allies, who privately say he will launch into tirades over the phone without even saying hello.

“If you’re not 100 percent with him on his agenda, then he’s 100 percent against you,” said Jeff Arnold, who represented Algiers in the state House for 14 years until 2015. “I call him a 100 percenter. I was probably with him on 95 percent of city matters. But I wasn’t with him on Algiers and on the firefighters, so I became his sworn enemy. My philosophy is that I didn’t burn bridges. Mitch is a burn-the-bridges guy.”

A range of black political leaders interviewed for this article said the mayor has lost their support because of his high-handed ways, but none would say this on the record.

In an interview two years ago, Landrieu invoked the cliché that you have to break eggs if you want to make an omelet. “There are entrenched political interests in this state that have strangled the progress of the state and city for a long time that I have now tangled with,” he said.

Landrieu acknowledged having sharp words with some of those who have disagreed with him. He blamed it on his “impatience” and “passion.”

The scenario where even the ostensible allies who exist within Mitch's tent call him an asshole ("productive" or othewise) is familiar by now.  I do hope that at some time in the future we turn our attentions to the question of for whom he has been productive.  Because the most prominent characteristic of his time as mayor has been the spike in inequality.  Circumstances for the most desperate have worsened even as great fortunes have been made among the few to truly benefit from the city’s "recovery."

Mitch's friends in the political/professional class (in New Orleans they are one and the same)  can only grumble under their breath,  though, because they are among the beneficiaries. If you produce for the folks who matter, you can be whatever kind of asshole you want. It's the sort of thing that has worked for Mitch's elitist mentors which is why they are the most proud of him.

Isaacson also said the mayor could have a place at the Aspen Institute — which brings experts together to try to solve complex policy questions — or with the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative announced two weeks ago, funded through a foundation created by Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor.

The $32 million effort “equips mayors and their senior leaders with cutting-edge tools and techniques to more effectively tackle pressing management challenges faced in their cities,” according to its website.

“Michael Bloomberg is one of Mayor Landrieu’s biggest fans, and so is everybody at that foundation,” Isaacson said. “Mitch Landrieu is the only mayor that Michael Bloomberg speaks about with awe and excitement.”

The good news is, we may be at a point here in the wake of the rise of Trump style corruption where we're starting to realize that we will need a better kind of politics than mere Clinton-Landrieu style corruption in order to fight it. We're not quite there yet, but maybe we'll get there.

In the meantime this story about Mitch's diminished options may illustrate the end of an era. But only in a small way. Certainly there's plenty of money waiting for him on the cot at Aspen or whatever new think tank the donor class slaps together to churn out neoliberal bullshit for the next four of eight years. (The Calvin Fayard Center For Urban Resilience?)  Then again maybe we're missing a trick. Where else might Mitch go next?

Behind the Bloomberg curve

With Bloomberg on the way out, Atrios thinks the opinion-makers in New York might not be quite so in thrall to the #AspenIdeas platform as they once were. 

I don't have a fully fleshed out thesis here, but I do think there's been a big change over the past few years in the tone from the New York chattering classes, as the bright (not so) young writers are beginning to recognize that shit is fucked up and bullshit for them, too, as their dreams of owning a place with a dishwasher in NYC recede and that house in the Hamptons that all of their senior colleagues own is a couple of lines below "unicorn pegasus" on the list of things they're likely to possess one day.

And, you know, maybe.  But I don't trust anyone who reaches adulthood with an inability to see the world for what it is beyond their own petty career interests to ever really come around.  Besides, there's always another crop of young climbers and more places where they can go and live the dream.

Outsiders, not locals, revitalized New Orleans. Rich or poor, long-term residents can’t see the diamonds in the rough. Hurricane Katrina washed out the parochial thinking that was killing Big Easy. Lessons for Detroit:

“After a tragedy is one of the few times you can be trying to reimagine a city rather than just trying to go back to what you were before,” said Scott Cowen, the president of Tulane University, who is writing a book examining the remaking of New Orleans after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. “What you really need is transformational change, not just incremental change to get back to where you were,” he said in an interview. “That’s been very important to resurgence of this city, and Detroit has to do the same thing.”

All of this is, of course, bullshit. What has "revitalized" New Orleans (if we must use that term) has been a massive influx of state and federal investment in rebuilding.

Rigamer said the city could be back to pre-Katrina levels by 2020.

“What’s going on in New Orleans is you started out with decreased base from Katrina and you are also seeing a lot of federal money pumped into the city,” Rigamer said. “There is a lot of recovery spending occurring right now. A lot of FEMA projects under way.”

Allison Plyer, a demographer with the nonprofit Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, said New Orleans continues to grow annually in large part to job opportunities.

“The number one reason people move to areas is because of the jobs. Some might choose to live in the city, others choose the suburbs. I think the amenities of New Orleans can be attractive,” Plyer said.

Plyer said there is no doubt the billions in recovery money being spent in New Orleans are a strong stimulus for the city.

Plyer also said post-Katrina housing in New Orleans, while lower in cost than major cities such as New York City and San Francisco, is more expensive now than in the past.

“It’s no longer inexpensive to live here. Between taxes, insurance and utilities, the cost of living is higher now,” Plyer said.

Now it's fair to say that the recovery stimulus has attracted many new people to the city to chase the opportunities it affords. The challenge for local leadership in such an environment should be ensuring the benefits of the boom accrue equitably so that, at the very least, the actual victims of the disaster participate in the rebirth. 

But that isn't what's happened.  Instead our leaders have preferred the Aspen strategy of fostering "public-private partnerships" and implementing an austere "zero sum" approach to budgeting  that sets the highest priority on "slaying sacred cows" such as pensions for firefighters.

So, for the time being, it's still possible to see New Orleans a success story provided you care only about the lives and lifestyles of the young entrepreneurs and associated hangers-on midway through the adventure of figuring out what's in it for them. Which is why Bloobergism may have run its course in New York City but, in New Orleans, it's really still kicking into gear.

The Cow Slaying Club

One way to understand Mitch Landrieu's "Aspen Ideas" brand of ideology is to keep an eye on his counterpart celeb-Mayors in other parts of the country. We've mentioned Cory Booker before but outgoing NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg is another one Mitch often seeks to emulate.

And then, of course, there's Rahm Emanuel. 

While media like to play the scary number game -- $20 billion in unfunded pension liabilities – this comes to about to about 0.5 percent of the city’s GDP over the next 30 years, the time period in which the shortfall would have to be made up. The city could of course raise this much revenue, but the current mayor Rahm Emanuel thinks it would be too inconvenient. And hey, these are just contracts with workers, not obligations to people who really matter.

Emanuel’s cavalier attitude toward contracts with the city’s workers apparently does not apply to its other contracts, for example its deal with Morgan Stanley to lease its parking meters for 75 years. The city arguably received less than half the market price for this long-term lease, but Emanuel apparently thinks the city can still afford to honor its contract with the huge Wall Street bank.

Contracts with Wall Street types always seem to draw more respect than contracts with workers. Folks may recall that when AIG was bankrupt and effectively a ward of the government, we were told by the Obama administration (where Emanuel was then chief of staff), that it had to pay out $165 million in bonuses to its senior staff. Many of the AIG employees, who had taken the company into bankruptcy, pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars from these bonuses.

Last month, Mitch referred to city obligations to its employees' pension funds as "sacred cows" he needs to "slay." 

Maybe they're still out to get cows in Chicago after all this time but you'd think in New Orleans we'd have a little more patience.  But Club Aspen is as post-regional as it is "post-partisan" which is one reason electoral politics in any of these cities is starting to feel less fun than it used to.

Zuccotti Park or NOLA Bookfair

Hippies with crazy bikes, colorful hair, and mangy dogs milling about in the streets?

Check



Ratty homemade signage?

Check



Street musicians?

Check


General air of hipstery pseudo-intellectual everybody-look-at-how-literate-I-am-ism?

You betcha.

Oh wait. Here's what's different. I've been to quite a few NOLA Bookfairs and didn't notice anyone being beaten by police.

Otherwise, they're basically the same event. The only conclusion I can draw from this is Michael Bloomberg's NYPD are actually bigger dicks than NOPD's 5th District goons.

Michael Bloomberg rock opera

Shorter Bloomberg: "For people like me, there is no problem!"



Meanwhile, it's good to see the Paultards show up to plan this week's "Occupy NOLA" event. Between them and the "anarchists" (last seen in action here) what could possibly go wrong?

The actual Occupy New Orleans protest will begin on Thursday, Oct. 6 (the national Occupy Together movement's "Day of Solidarity") at noon in front of Orleans Parish Prison at Tulane and Broad.

Note: That location was determined by a series of votes after protracted and sometimes heated discussion. My read on it was that it could very well change, more than once, by Thursday, so check the Web sites listed above. Other, rejected-as-of-now sites included Lafayette Square, Lee Circle and City Hall.

Protesters will march from there to Lafayette Square to protest at the New Orleans branch of the Federal Reserve. They plan to set up a long-term occupation "base camp" in Duncan Plaza at New Orleans City Hall.

You know there are actually quite a few examples of inappropriate corporate usurpation of our public sphere in New Orleans worthy of "occupation." If the marchers go to John White's office, for example, they might draw more attention to the importance of these upcoming BESE elections as they relate to the privatization of our public schools. But then again, Ron Paul supporters don't even believe in public education in the first place so I guess that's out.

I also wouldn't mind seeing them take on any of the ongoing film productions around town which, funded through Louisiana tax incentives, appropriate city streets and public locations for the benefit of a particularly insulting kind of corporate profit taking not to mention create a major inconvenience for anyone who either lives near or travels through any of the city's more photogenic areas. But then I'm pretty sure there's enough overlap between the assembled protesters and people who like to pass around their head shots to keep that from happening.

Last week, I sort of tongue-in-cheekishly suggested the Superdome although some of that was "kidding on the square" as Buddy D used to say. It's at least more within the context than frowning at a statue somebody put up in Tivoli Circle a hundred years ago.

So, in the tried and true American spirit of incoherent compromise, the group has settled on starting at Tulane and Broad because.. you know police and stuff.. and then moving on to the Fed branch because.. GOLD STANDARD, BITCHES.. before settling down in Duncan Plaza which is where, you may remember, Ray Nagin once managed to ignore a whole encampment of homeless people for months. So the good news there is nobody should ask them to move or pay any attention them at all for quite a while. That is unless they take it into their minds to do any "aggressive panhandling" in which case the law requires Stacy Head to shoot them on sight.

We already know the Mayor of New Orleans hates Freedom of the Press

But why do so many Mayors of New York seem to hate democracy itself?

"Ideological Independence"

Is a very desirable thing which is, of course, best fostered by vast personal wealth.

The Big Baby End-Run Candidates

You know... the ones who won't play fair and accept the wisdom of our perfect-in-every-way two party system

Unity08 To Jump On Bloomberg Bandwagon?

A source familiar with the Bloomberg for president movement says the bipartisan Unity08 effort is poised to shut down its Web site, reconstitute as a Draft Bloomberg site and launch its own 50-state signature-gathering operation on behalf of the supposedly reluctant would-be independent presidential candidate.

(via Yglesias... via Atrios)

My question, though is this. Given the very very weak showing by Ron Paul in New Hampshire, is it time to give up on Paul running third party? Or is he a lock for the Libertarian ticket? Because without a significant extra candidate on the right.. Bloomberg really mucks things up for Hill-Obama.