You just knew he couldn’t keep his nose out of this…

New Orleans expert gives advice on Haiti

Dr. Edward Blakely, former Executive Directory for Recovery Management for New Orleans, lectured on urban disaster recovery strategies and crisis leadership to about 20 people in a discussion hosted by the Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Blakely used examples from Hurricane Katrina to demonstrate how a society should recover from such disastrous occurrences, now including the Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti, if they want to be prepared for and alleviate future consequences.

Blakely first emphasized the importance of engineering. He said political figures often make promises of rebuilding without really understanding how the rebuilding process works.

“We need to delay building in the present in order to obtain long-term goals for the future,” he said. “Recovery is very different from emergency assistance.”

And if anyone knows about delaying building….

Blakely said the main goal should be to start with the future, not the past. He suggested that Haiti take its time coming up with a long-term plan, instead of just a quick fix that is likely to fail in the short term and cause future issues.

Why, Blakely, why? What did Haiti ever do to you? If you can’t help those poor people, can’t you just leave them alone?

It takes some doing to kerfuffle both the readers of the Daily Kos and, say, Michelle Malkin, but Audi managed to do it during last night’s Super Bowl with its “Green Police” commercial. Here it is:

In precis: Cheap Trick sing a version of their insanely catchy “Dream Police” retitled “Green Police,” in which Americans are busted for using incandescent lights, requesting plastic bags at the grocery store, not composting orange parings and a host of other infractions. At the end, an Audi driver sails past a Green Police checkpoint while a title card appears: “Green has never felt so right.”

The problem is that in our black-and-white, liberal-and-conservative, spell-it-all-out world, no one seems to know whether Audi was making fun of the eco-conscious, or cheering for the eco-conscious — and without that spelled out plainly in Big Capital Letters, those on both sides of the issue could agree on one thing: They didn’t like it. (For similar suspicious, puzzled reactions from polar opposite ends of the eco-spectrum, go here and here. Bonus points if you can count the number of people who say some sort of variation on “I’ve got as much of a sense of humor as anyone, but…)

So what was the intent of the commercial? To get people talking about Audi, of course. And by that standard, it was a success. Did it make me want to buy one? No, but it did make me want to get a copy of Cheap Trick’s greatest hits.

Edited to add: Now CBS News is weighing in on the puzzlement:

Environmentalists weren’t sure whether to celebrate or denigrate the spot. Grist magazine’s David Roberts writes that at first blush it seemed like an appeal “to angry white men with the same old stereotype of environmentalists as meddling do-gooders obsessed with picayune behavioral sins.”

“The more I’ve thought about it, though, the more [that] interpretation just doesn’t quite fit,” he goes on to say. “The thrill at the end, when they guy gets to accelerate away from the crowd, turns on satisfying the green police — not rejecting or circumventing them, but satisfying their strict standards. The authority of the green police is taken for granted, never questioned. If you’re looking to appeal to mooks who think the green police are full of it and have no authority, moral or otherwise, why would you make a commercial like that?”

Conservatives also seem to be split: While Newsbusters writes, seemingly approvingly, of the spot’s “futurist vision of environmentalism running amok,” Bob Ellis called it an “downright offensive” and “presented with too much seriousness to be taken any other way than as approval of such Gestapo tactics.”

And sometimes a car commercial is just a car commercial.

Take a minute away from your Who Dat preparations and check out this map, compiled by NolaStat’s Brian Denzer — it breaks down last night’s mayoral race precinct by precinct. Denzer writes:

The election of Mitch as mayor with 66% of the vote was a landslide. In the election map completed for NolaStat (3 MB PDF), it’s clear that Mitch won every precinct except for one near Lake Catherine where Georges picked up 12 votes to get the majority. The attached map clearly shows that Mitch won support from a broad base of voters, who sent a signal that we won’t allow our diversity to be turned against us as a weapon to destroy our dreams. We are stronger when we work together toward shared goals.

The map is a large download, and really comprehensive. Thanks to Brian and NolaStat for compiling it.

…with numbers larger than any pundits predicted. Official numbers soon.

We could tell you about our parade coverage (complete with pocket maps); about David Winkler-Schmit’s reporting about the Books for Prisoners program; about Clancy DuBos‘ memories of the political gadfly ‘Hippo’ Katz; about Noah Bonaparte Pais covering RJD2, Q&P Maritime Ball, Festival of the Rising Sun, Louis Moholo-Moholo, Screaming Females and the B-52’s; about Ian McNulty’s profile of the Vietnamese bakers putting their own spin on king cakes; or about our monthly health and wellness supplement, H+W.

But we all know what’s consuming us this weekend. “Glory Bound.” Do it, Aaron and Theresa:

At the final televised mayoral primary debate Feb. 4 on WWL-TV, all six candidates had the chance to take their last shots at their opponents. Frontrunner Mitch Landrieu was the big target, but John Georges, Troy Henry and Rob Couhig all came in for some drive-by criticism from other candidates.

Early in the debate, in a question about community policing, Landrieu made a reference to NOPD officers in communities meeting citizens, “not just as a Gestapo.” The Georges campaign jumped on the choice of words; within an hour of the debate’s end, they had issued a press release blast headlined “LANDRIEU: NOPD IS A GESTAPO” and calling on the candidate to apologize.

But it was Couhig who seized the opportunity to bring up the issue that had been hot gossip in local political circles for nearly a week: the discovery of a 1980 photograph from a party at Tulane’s Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE) fraternity, in which several members posed for photographs in blackface. John Georges was a member of the frat at the time, and would become its president in 1981.

In answering a question about how the next mayor would heal the racial divisions in New Orleans, Georges stressed the diverse makeup of his company, Imperial Trading, noting his employees were “50 percent African American, 50 percent female and the leadership of my company is African American.” That left an opening for Couhig to parry, “There’s a bigger issue out here, and it has to do with Mr. Georges. I was so disappointed today when I was presented with evidence that an organization he ran had people in blackface parading around. How can you be mayor if you condone that in an organization you were the president of?”

Georges, seated directly to Couhig’s left, replied, “You know, you don’t respond to blogs. It’s not true. Those are all misrepresentations. I never condone anything such [sic], and it’s just last-minute political tactics.”

The blog in question, American Zombie (theamericanzombie.blogspot.com), had on Feb. 2 published several photographs from Tulane yearbooks featuring the Dekes in various party-animal shots, some of which included members dressed in blackface at a yearly event called the Debutramp Ball. While the blog’s author, Jason Berry (no relation to the local Catholic Church sex-scandal historian of the same name) did not claim Georges was one of the men in blackface, the photos did establish that the fraternity had worn blackface in 1980, when Georges was a member. He became president of DKE the following year, and the Debutramp Balls continued through the 1980s before DKE had its charter permanently revoked by Tulane University in 1987 after a blackface march near campus.

Reached the day after the debate for comment, Georges spokesperson Helena Moreno said, “John made a public statement on the issue last night during the debate that he won. On the contrary, we are waiting for Mitch Landrieu to explain himself to the men and women of the New Orleans Police Department after calling them the Gestapo.”

Erik Proseus, the clever weatherman at MemphisWeather.net, worked up this forecast for the weekend:

NOAA – 01 Feb 2010 1035 EST

Outlook for the Atlantic, Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico

Hurricane Whodat is predicted to make landfall on the South Florida coast in the vicinity of Miami on 7 Feb 2010 at approximately 2200Z (5:00 PM EST). This extremely powerful hurricane is expected to produce damaging Shockey waves and Category 5 Brees. Reports from shipping indicate that this unstoppable storm has blown a huge flock of Cardinals all the way to Arizona, and that it has sunk a replica Viking longboat, the Brettigfǻvren. Livestock, in particular young horses, will be in severe danger of being decimated….

It goes on from there. Read it all.

Photo by Chris Romero

Over on the Mid-City mailing list (always a hotbed of intrigue and entertainment), Orleans Avenue-adjacent resident Chris Romero reports that people are already staking out their spots on the Endymion parade route.

The parade is nine days away. NINE DAYS.

Wrote Chris:

I’m as eager as the next guy to celebrate the roll of Endymion, but this has escalated into a problem of mass proportions. The practice of parking cube vans in the area, filled with kegs and ice, has increased exponentially. These vans are often used as makeshift port-a-potties once empty. You don’t even want to know what that’s like. There are fights, there is property damage, there is urination on houses and in alleys. In a surprising twist last year, this element added a new level of public indecency: couples having sex both on the neutral ground on the night before and in the surrounding blocks the day of. I kid you not. This has not just gotten out of control. It’s a plague. If it’s not enough to just be pushed out of sitting on the parade route, this litany of offenses has mounted to unprecedented levels. Imagine Bourbon St without all the pesky laws and controls….

In the past decade, where has it gone? To spraypaint and caution tape. Today, I was shocked to find three spaces marked off in the first block off Carrollton. That’s a full 9 days before the parade.

We’ve got an email out to Chris to talk about this, but in the meantime: What do you think of the practice of staking out parade spaces days in advance? And has it gotten worse in recent years? (Feel free to kvetch about Ladder Etiquette as well.)