Notes From New Orleans' Bloggers

January 8, 2007 Edition.

Dangerblond.

I don’t have the solution for anyone except myself, and myself does not feel like leaving the compound right now. I do have one small suggestion for the chief and the mayor, however. Perhaps the most creative thing your officers can do right now is to pay more attention to areas where people are being gunned down and less attention to pretty girls driving 5 miles over the speed limit Uptown and legally parked cars in the Warehouse District.

From a Humid City.

Our very freedom is at risk by this kind of thinking, Mister Riley. Our very lives. Better you lose your job then another child loses a mother, another husband, his wife. Do your job, or let us find someone who can. We're not going to lockdown.

*NOTE: Mister Riley is NOLA's Chief of Police.

From Your Right Hand Thief. Serious snark & way inside Blogtopia. Yes, yes, it was invented by skippy, the damned bush kangaroo.

You heard me. I believe the media is exaggerating the crime problem in New Orleans because they dislike Mayor Ray Nagin, and because they're still bitter over his re-election victory this summer. The local media have some sinister obsession with making the mayor look bad. After the natural disaster that no one predicted, they have pointedly avoided doing any reporting on the newly painted schools, or other signs of recovery in New Orleans. They've just focused on the alleged "murder problem" in the city, and other negative stories.

In fact, I'm not even sure the local media is doing their own reporting. Today, on a noisy street I overheard two liberals talking about some T-P reporter named "Dank Fonze". So I checked the Times Picayune's staff database and... guess what? There's absolutely no record of a Dank Fonze anywhere!

Until the paper produces a Dank Fonze (or whomever goes by that name), we should assume that there really is no violent crime problem in New Orleans. We should trust our leaders before we trust the media. And our leaders have the right crime strategy, and they have enough police officers to do the job, and we are winning the war on violent crime. But, the media wants us to lose this Recovery, so they will stab us in the back by making up stories attributed to fictional reporters. We must resist their efforts. Our resolve must remain undiminished, our essential fluids must remain pure.

That's the biggest problem I see in New Orleans right now: the media.

From G-Bitch.

But this problem we have has been brewing for a very long time, ignored, brushed aside, devalued by our “leaders” because it didn’t affect them, didn’t lose them any votes, didn’t cause anyone to doubt their abilities as far as they knew or were concerned. Our economy has deteriorated in the past 30+ years into a banana republic (absent a colonizer) with a wide bottom of tourism-related, service and retail jobs and a thinner but impenetrable top crust of Haves. Housing patterns show the truth–that the have-nots are concentrated in areas that are starved of the resources needed to thrive. And though there may be no real trickle-down effect, there is a seepage of rot, one that affects every neighborhood and even the Haves eventually. The public schools have sucked for at least 40 years. (This hurts the have-nots and what middle class Orleans parish has been able to cling to and perpetuates a low-wage economy.)

That's all for today, folks.