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?

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

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.”

[This is a longer version of my Gambit column, which will appear in print on Sunday, Feb. 7 — the day the Saints win their first of several Super Bowl titles.]

Back in 1985, when then-Mayor Dutch Morial was making one last effort to change the City Charter so that he could run for “Just 3” terms as mayor, I introduced visiting NBC correspondent Ken Bode to one of Morial’s confidants, a rotund political operative named Maurice “Hippo” Katz.

“So tell me, Hippo,” Bode asked, “what job will you be getting in the third Morial Administration if this thing passes?”

Hippo, who stood all of about 5 feet 8 inches, drew himself up and said, without missing beat, “Mr. Bode, I don’t want a job … I want a position.”

The response was vintage Hippo — and vintage New Orleans politics. Bode still tells that anecdote whenever the subject of New Orleans comes up. When I called him last week to tell him that Hippo Katz had died at his home the night before, we shared a bittersweet chuckle at that and other Hippo stories. He was one of a kind.

A Runyonesque character who never forgot that the essence of politics is people, Hippo had a heart as big as himself. He liked everybody, and everybody liked him. He had a great laugh, and he laughed often — a high-pitched, almost childishly giddy, “Hee-hee-hee-hee!” As much as he enjoyed the game, Hippo took politics seriously. He had a great mind for it, not just for numbers and analysis, but also for people.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Photograph by Greg Rhoades

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There are lowlifes and there are lowlife scum-of-the-earth piss buckets that don’t give a second thought to stealing a man’s instrument. And not just any man, mind you, or any instrument. Uncle Lionel Batiste, among the eldest of the elder statesmen of New Orleans jazz musicians, had his bass drum stolen (this, one and only hand-made bass drum) after marching with the Treme Brass Band in Krewe de Vieux.

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The man is 79 years old. He made the drum himself and used it not only to preserve the New Orleans sound of music, but to teach and mentor countless musicians under him. Unc is a city treasure and his drum is an artifact. Whoever stole that drum is either very ignorant or very hateful, but either way, they must be found, caught and made to pay.

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You do not steal a man’s drum. Especially if he’s still alive and beating it. Anyone who sees it - on the street, on eBay or wherever - that drum is stolen goods. Let’s get it back into the right hands and back into the groove.

The City of New Orleans has withdrawn its request to FEMA for funds to move City Hall to the Chevron Building, according to a source in the New Orleans City Council. FEMA officials were scheduled to hold a meeting this Monday to begin reviewing the city’s plan, but it has been cancelled.

In a letter sent to the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness in Nov., Martin Altman, an administration official, requested the state approve the purchase as an “improved project” because the amount of work deemed eligible by FEMA for storm-damage repairs was not enough “to restore City Hall to its former functional status.” The state office has been serving as an intermediary between FEMA and local municipalities for disaster funds.

The city council had voted against Mayor Nagin’s proposed City Hall relocation in July of last year, and the FEMA request was seen by some council members as a way to make the move without council approval. As reported in a Gambit Scuttlebutt last month (“Ray Nagin’s Chevron Building Dream”), an ordinance had been introduced that would have required council consent on the $8.2 million purchase even if FEMA had approved the project.

The United Kingdom’s premier medical journal The Lancet has retracted a 1998 paper that linked the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism. Ever since it was published, the study, which was led by Dr. Andrew Wakefield, has caused widespread panic over whether or not parents should have their children vaccinated. Great Britain does not require compulsory immunizations, and when the percentage of kids receiving measles vaccinations dropped, the number of measles cases soared.

In Wakefield’s paper, a team of researchers studied 12 children and suggested the MMR vaccine could have contributed to the development of autism in 8 of the 12 kids. The results of Wakefield’s study have never been replicated.

Charmaine Allesandro, director of The Greater New Orleans Immunization Network, hopes the retraction will finally put the immunization controversy to rest.

“This is good news,” Allesandro says in a statement released to Gambit “Hopefully, parents who have not vaccinated their children will realize that there is no scientific proof linking autism and immunizations, get their children immunized and make the community safer.”

If the myriad forums and our rather extensive coverage for this year’s local elections still leave you yearning for more information about the candidates, you can get all of the facts about the mayoral and city council races on your iPhone. PolicyPitch.com creator and Gambit 40 Under 40 alum Zach Kupperman (along with Neel Sus) launched Election Hub, a free iPhone application that provides candidate biographies, news, platforms and financial information, at the beginning of the year.

The below video shows how it works. Among the excuses for not voting this year — inability to vote due to age or other factors, coma or paralysis due to extreme Super Bowl anticipation — being uninformed is certainly not one of them.

James O’Keefe, who was charged along with three others with entering federal property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony, has issued a statement saying “no one tried to wiretap or bug Senator Landrieu’s office. Nor did we try to cut or shut down her phone lines. Reports to this effect over the past 48 hours are inaccurate and false.”

The self-identified “investigative journalist” says he could have used a different approach when he and the others posed as telephone company repair people to enter Landrieu’s office, but his intent was to find out whether or not Sen. Landrieu was avoiding constituents’ phone calls.

Read it for yourself.

From the Failing Up Dept.: Seems that Michael “Brownie” Brown has been given his own three-hour evening talk show on KOA radio in Denver, which seems to be the Mile-High City’s version of WWL-AM minus some of the Hebert-Deke-DelGiornoisms.

But why Brownie? Let’s ask Clear Channel honcho Kris Olinger:

Regarding the notoriety Brown earned from his Katrina actions, Olinger says, “I think it’s a definite positive. He has great insight into what happened in New Orleans and how government works. He takes responsibility where he needs to, but he’s also pretty candid about other things that went wrong. I think people get the inside story from him.”

And here’s Brownie showing how he takes responsibility later in the same story:

“People get beaten up and thrown under the bus all the time,” he notes. “You’ve got the choice of letting the bus run over you three times, and wallowing in that, or getting up and moving. And my choice was to get up and keep moving.”

If your radio doesn’t pick up signals from Denver, you’ll have to wait until June, when Brownie’s book Deadly Indifference: Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, Disease Pandemics and the Failed Politics of Disasters hits bookshelves. And if you’re shaking your head that Michael “FEMA” Brown would actually have the temerity or boneheadedness to write a Katrina book called Deadly Indifference, you don’t know Brownie.