Well, I finally had to make the call to the school today. My daughter came home and said that she watched the first 10 minutes of An Inconvenient Truth today in honors science class, and that she would be watching the rest of the movie tomorrow, and writing a paper on the movie. I called the school and spoke to her science teacher, who had a “f*** you” attitude and said that the movie was educational and taught kids how to save the wetlands…and then she admitted that she had never actually seen the movie.

I then told her that I didn’t want my daughter watching the movie and that she was not going to write the required (indoctrination) paper about the movie. Nella and I will be enrolling her in a good private school at the end of this year. Below is the letter that she is carrying to school tomorrow to give to her teacher (not into having her name all over the Internet, so the name has been changed in the letter):

February 20, 2008

Dear Ms. Nick

Please excuse “A” from watching Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, and from writing a paper about this movie. This movie is overtly political, and it has been proven inaccurate and purposefully misleading by many climatologists and weather experts. In fact, this movie amounts to little more than liberal propaganda designed to scare people, and I expected more from a Meisler education. Outside of a political science class, this movie is entirely inappropriate for a twelve year old student. In the future, please contact me if you plan on requiring “A” to watch any film that is remotely political. Should you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me at (504) 555-5555.

Sincerely,

Michael W. Gahagan, Esq.

I don’t know if this will solve problems, but something needs to be done to address the sixty-day murders that plague the city.

Rep. Danny Martiny, chair of the House Criminal Justice Committee, is sponsor of a book-length bill that would create a new state board to take responsibility from the state’s local indigent defender offices, which are now overseen by 41 independent boards around the state.

Critics say the system is possibly unconstitutional, among the country’s worst, and suffers from a lack of oversight over public defenders and poor tracking of their caseloads. Prosecutors, defense lawyers, judges and public defenders themselves have long agreed that the system is broken, but they disagreed over how to fix it.

If you want a glimpse of crime in the Big Easy, check out NOLA-dishu, run by an engineer who plugs in crime stats for the city into Google maps. An indisposable resource.

Kudos to Ann Duplessis:

“We can’t keep hiding behind what we think is politically right to say,” said State Senator Ann Duplessis, who said that was why she took up what she referred to as a highly important, but highly controversial issue: to limit the development of new Section-8 housing units in Eastern New Orleans, something critics think is a way to keep poor, evacuated New Orleanians away from the city

Section 8 is a well known disaster, a vestige of LBJ’s war on poverty, which has done nothing but create a market for poverty. There should be a moratorium on public housing in NOLA until murders go down to, say, less than one every two days.

Hey guys, no time to properly chat about this, but an important retelling of the New Orleans story we all know too well by now .

The WSJ has a good summary of why it is so tough to deal with New Orleans. Guiliani fought crime without the luxury of rebuilding his city. Nagin’s faults are legion, but he is right when he says Manhatten still has a big hole in the ground five years after 9/11, and everyone expects New Orleans to be up and running.

If what Nagin says is true, that each time federal officials threaten to shut off housing subsidies for displaced New Orleans residents, a new wave of criminals turns up on the city’s streets. That is a sad proposition for the city. So, are all the citizens that do not have subsidized housing in other places and return to New Orleans criminals? If this is the case then just build a series of jails instead of projects, since the purpose is one and the same.

Piyush (Bobby) Jindal, please come help clean this mess up.

Posted at 09:47 pm by Johnny B

I’ve been getting a lot of e-mail lately (haven’t we all?), about Mayor Nagin’s remarks. His interest in getting re-elected aside, his proclamation about New Orleans being a chocolate city again doesn’t seem to bear out when you look at the facts.

Not to stress New Orleans too much, but this is an even better story:

Posted at 11:35 am by Johnny B

	Posted by BP @ 11/30/2005 06:15 PM PST
	This is great… “Charpentier said she is going out with five men. All five are New Orleanians she knew before the storm; only afterward did the friendships turn the corner into romances.” Great time to be a single woman in NO.

Interesting story in the New York Times.

Posted at 11:27 am by Johnny B

	Posted by BP @ 11/30/2005 06:28 PM PST
	This is quite huge…I find it hard to imagine Mardi Gras not happening in it’s full splendor, but it’s definitely important that they pretend REAL HARD that it is…or like the article said, people will get the message and NOT COME. A self fulfilling prophecy if you will.