To hear City Councilwoman Shelley Midura tell it, residents of New Orleans are about to get screwed — again — by Entergy. She makes a compelling case.

The council regulates utilities in New Orleans, and Midura chairs the council’s Utilities Committee. Her ire thus is no small matter.

Over the years, the council has taken Entergy New Orleans and its predecessors to court (or to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) many times, and often won. Still, the utility never seems to tire of trying to put the screws to its customers.

The latest example of Entergy’s disregard for local ratepayers, however, is one for the ages. Entergy New Orleans (ENO) is effectively sitting on its hands while two of its sister companies — Entergy Mississippi Inc. (EMI) and Entergy Arkansas Inc. (EAI) — move to pull out of a “system agreement” under which six Entergy subsidiaries agreed to share the costs and benefits of generating and transmitting electricity.

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Note to our blog readers:  I am very excited to post the following announcement, which will appear in next week’s edition of Gambit Weekly.  I add my personal congratulations to Kevin and join all my colleagues at the paper in welcoming him to our Gambit family. — Clancy DuBos

Veteran journalist, blogger, novelist and playwright Kevin Allman joins the staff of Gambit Weekly next week, taking the helm as editor. He replaces Clancy DuBos, who will remain on staff as the political editor. DuBos co-owns the paper with his wife, publisher and CEO Margo DuBos, and is chairman of Gambit Communications Inc.

“I’ve read Gambit Weekly since I came to town in 1993, and I’m really pleased and thankful to be offered the opportunity to join the paper’s editorial team,” Allman says. “New Orleans in 2008 is an exciting place and time to be a journalist. There’s great work being done at the city’s papers, on its TV news and on the local blogs, and they’re working together in interesting ways — some ways that are actually ahead of the rest of the nation in their hyper-local focus. I’m looking forward to suiting up and joining the fray.”

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The Democratic primary in the Second Congressional District is getting tighter, and that could be bad news for incumbent Bill Jefferson. The latest independent poll shows Jefferson falling slightly and all of his major African-American challengers creeping upward.

What’s really “new” about the latest poll is that the “undecided” vote is breaking solidly away from Dollar Bill, who also has seen his core base of support dwindle over the past six months.

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The thing I love most about Louisiana politics is its cast of unforgettable characters. For the last 30 years, one of the most colorful and lovable of those characters was my friend and mentor Joe Walker, a veteran pollster, political strategist and mentor to generations of politicos and students of government. Joe died suddenly last Thursday at age 74.

I met Joe in 1977 when I was an aspiring young political reporter for The Times-Picayune. “I want you to teach me about politics,” I said to him. “I love this stuff, but I have a lot to learn — and I can tell you know this game as well as anybody.”

I didn’t know at the time that Joe also had taught government and constitutional law for four years at Tulane and Loyola universities. It was my good fortune that I appealed to both his love of the game and his love of teaching. We became fast friends, and over the years he taught me just about everything I know or have figured out about politics.

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When New Orleans was under water right after Katrina, hundreds if not thousands of volunteers from Acadiana came to our city to help rescue our citizens during the worst days of the storm. Most of these brave and selfless rescuers were not sent in by the government; they just came out of a sense of duty to their fellow human beings. Now they need our help.

The need is especially great in nearby Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes. In the coastal community of Isle de Jean Charles, which is home to many members of the United Houma Nation, life as its residents know it ended when Gustav slammed ashore last Monday. Several local bloggers and volunteers have already gone there to assess the damage and to offer what help they can.

Now it’s up to the rest of us.

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Don’t unpack your suitcases yet, folks…  

UPDATE:  There’s a pretty decent weather blog on Weather Underground by a guy named Jeff Masters, who writes that there are two schools of thought on Ike’s path. Interestingly, neither school has it coming directly at New Orleans.  One has it going to Texas, the other to the Florida Panhandle — even within 50 miles of Tampa.  Often times the “official” track forecast merely “averages” the various tracking models and casts a wide “cone” hundreds of miles to the east and west, and that appears to be happening right now.  The thing to remember is that all of the models have a significant margin of error 3 days out, and a great deal of wiggle room 5 days out. Hence the “cone of uncertainty,”  a/k/a “cone of confusion.” Now that we’ve all learned  how to evacuate, let’s hope the mayor can figure out a better way to let us back in. Personally, I’d love to see us not have to practice so often.

Good luck, everybody.

We evacuated into the storm, leaving New Orleans Friday afternoon and heading to our camp on False River (a few miles up Island Road from Mike Gio). We had planned to spend Labor Day weekend on the river anyway, so the evac simply meant taking more “stuff” with us — including all the data processing hardware, servers, etc., from Gambit Weekly.

Things were fine until Monday, when, as the photos above show rather graphically, we narrowly escaped a 70-foot sycamore tree falling right on top of the room in which we were standing. We literally watched outside the back windows as the tree wobbled and then came crashing down — missing our place by a foot or two. Sadly, Mike Gio and his family were not so lucky. (Mike, I’ll lend you my rosary next time.)

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(This post is actually by Michael Tisserand, former Gambit Weekly editor and participant in Saturday’s (8/23) Rising Tide III conference, which was excellent. Michael and his family have recently returned to New Orleans, and I know of his strong interest in public education, so I asked him to submit something to our blog about the education panel discussion at RT3. Here it is — and thanks, Michael.)

Paul Tough’s recent New York Times Magazine cover story extolling the New Orleans charter school movement didn’t have many fans on the Rising Tide III education panel on Saturday. “Garbage,” said Christian Roselund, a writer, former United Teachers of New Orleans communications director and (of course) a blogger. Around him, heads nodded in agreement.

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That’s not the only word, but it is the best word I can think of to describe Rising Tide III, from which I have just returned. High fives to the organizers, panelists, and participants for putting together an awesome and altogether memorable experience. And a great big “thank you” to all the bloggers for welcoming Gambit Weekly and blogofneworleans into your growing fold. On a personal note, it was really fun to finally put faces and names to all the local bloggers I’ve started reading in the past year. I would name you all here, but I’m quite sure I’d leave someone out, so forgive me if I acknowledge you collectively. You guys rock.

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(From Levees.org and Sandy Rosenthal)

On the eve of the anniversary of the worst engineering failure in U.S. history, the grassroots group levees.org will release a new short film, The Katrina Myth:  The Truth about a Thoroughly Unnatural Disaster. The film, to be debuted on Thursday, Aug. 28, goes after the “destructive and unfair myths that are slowing the region’s recovery.”

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