Dec 20
Due to anticipated technical difficulties, I will be taking a break from the blog for the next couple of weeks, though Drew may continue to post (and I will continue to Tweet when I can).
In the meantime, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Happy New Years.
Dec 18
Yesterday, the King Edward Hotel in Jackson, Mississippi reopened after 40 years and after a $90 million renovation, thanks in large part to former New Orleans Saint Deuce McAllister and the Louisiana-based HRI Properties. Congratulations to everyone involved.
I think the restoration and reopening of this historic property is great news for the people of Jackson, and not surprisingly, this news has generated a lot of personal testimonials about the King Edward.
Which got me to thinking about Alexandria’s own Hotel Bentley and then about Dave Matthews of the Dave Matthews Band.
A few years ago, back when the Bentley was still open and I was in college, my friends and I heard that Dave Matthews was in Alexandria during the holidays for a wedding and was staying at the Hotel Bentley. As ridiculous as it may make me look, I have to be honest: Immediately upon hearing that Dave Matthews was in town, we all hopped in a car and drove to the Hotel Bentley. We walked into a completely empty Mirror Room, except for a four-top across from the bar in which Dave Matthews was seated, his back against the stained glass windows.
My friends and I took the four-top directly across from his table, and by chance, I took the seat closest to our celebrity guest.
Without going into too many details, for a few minutes in the Hotel Bentley, Dave Matthews and I spoke about this song:
And about faith in God and the purpose of music.
Seriously.
Then, about fifteen minutes later, the Mirror Room suddenly became overwhelmed with people, armed with cameras, albums, and even guitars, and shortly thereafter, Mr. Matthews wisely retreated to his room.
Dec 17
Really, it’s about what it means to love New Orleans.
Yes, there is something happening in New Orleans, a strange and beautiful story not so much about a town that still needs distraction from a hurricane but about a professional sports team changing the nature of the relationship between franchise and fan. “It’s the entire city,” LeBlanc says as we drive. “Everybody feels it. It’s not because we’re selling it. Faith or fate, whatever you believe in, you cannot watch this football team and not have faith.”
….
The soul of the city is coming off the practice field and headed toward the showers. They are a motley group, undrafted guys and late-round fliers, players cast off from other teams. Brees landed in town after an injury convinced the Chargers that his best days were behind him. “When we came here,” he has said, “I was in the process of rebuilding, as well.”
Running back Mike Bell was out of football. So was cornerback Mike McKenzie, who watched the games from the stands with a mouthful of food before getting the call a few weeks ago. Darren Sharper arrived unwanted and has resurrected his career. Running back Pierre Thomas wasn’t drafted. Star wide receiver Marques Colston wasn’t drafted until the seventh round of the 2006 draft, and his college football program, Hofstra, just folded.
It goes on and on. This is a team of underdogs. “It’s a bunch of guys that feel like they have something to prove,” McKenzie says. “We have a lot of late draft picks and free agents that are now starting. It is a team full of guys who are probably viewed as overachievers.”
And this is too good:
When I drive into Dallas, I see a place sprawling and bland, loops and rings of interstate and, somewhere over the horizon, a stadium representing a just-gone era of bloat and decay … scoreboard so big it interferes with the game … $60 pizzas. It looks new but is dead inside. In contrast, there is the drive out of New Orleans, through a city still battered, past the exits for the Vieux Carre and Uptown, past the Huey Long, which runs narrow and high out to the leaning oyster and chicken shack. All told, this is a city with the opposite calculus of Dallas: It is decayed on the outside, but inside there is life. Here is a citizenry that believes in the power of the underdog. New Orleanians fell first and see something the rest of America is blind to right now: a way back into the light.
We’re running low on gas, and there’s not a station for miles, so I ease off the road at Manchac, the bayou town with the best catfish in the world, where my grandparents ate on their honeymoon. I drive toward the dive bars and seafood shacks, turn onto a private road and navigate the railroad tracks, pulling my truck up as close as it will get to the Fuel Dock. This is where the fishing boats gas up, but the owner will run the hose the length of the pier and fill a car up, too, if you’re truly in need.
We go inside to pay. A small crowd is gathered around the television. Boat captains and deck hands who tied up here to watch the fourth quarter. These aren’t the Uptown moneyed class or even the cool musicians. They work for a living, the oxygen in the culture of the city. The man closest to me can barely watch; the weekend before, he flipped his recliner over. Outside, the fog cuts visibility to nothing; he had to use radar and GPS to find the dock.
The game comes down to the last tense moments, again, and when it is over, and the Saints are 13-0, there is a moment of joy inside the Fuel Dock, and right there amid the beer coolers and tackle displays, tough men hug each other. We can’t see the skyline of New Orleans, the silhouette of the Superdome out of view, but even out here on Lake Maurepas, we can feel it.
The soul of the city is alive. And it is everywhere.
Dec 14
The Baton Rouge Business Report says that Baton Rouge-based IEM will soon become North Carolina-based IEM.
IEM is a disaster management consulting firm with about 200 employees in Baton Rouge. According to the company, only about 50 of those are involved in headquarters operations, and the other 150 could remain in Baton Rouge but may opt to go to North Carolina. If they stay, it would soften the blow considerably, except for the other part of the announcement which says that IEM plans to hire 430 workers in North Carolina.
The announcement comes after what Baton Rouge Area Chamber President Adam Knapp calls the offer of “an unprecedented retention package” with financial incentives and plans to address workforce concerns. Let me repeat that: workforce concerns.
….
It’s probably true that Louisiana has too many four-year campuses. We probably have too much duplication. Yes, the five-board management system that emerged from the Constitutional Convention of 1973 is cumbersome. Yes, some money could be saved in the course of the upcoming legislative session.
But it was the presence of three major universities in the Research Triangle region that had IEM looking eastward. During my ten years in North Carolina, I never heard anyone say that the state spent too much on education. And as I look at performance measure after measure, as I look at the educational levels of our adult workforce, as I evaluate Louisiana’s knowledge resources, I find no evidence that we have too much of what we need most: knowledge.
All that is to say, that as the legislature and Governor turn their full attention to balancing the budget, I urge them to see education as something more important than a target for cost-cutting. And as they meet in Baton Rouge, I hope at least some of their attention will be directed to the educational needs of places like Central Louisiana. I hope that they will see that LSU-A must retain its four-year status and that Cenla must become home to a comprehensive community college in the very near future. Anything less would consign Cenla and its children to a choice between second-rate opportunities and relocating to a more opportunity- and knowledge-rich environment.
Dec 10
1:44 P.M. CET
THE PRESIDENT: Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, distinguished members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, citizens of America, and citizens of the world:
I receive this honor with deep gratitude and great humility. It is an award that speaks to our highest aspirations — that for all the cruelty and hardship of our world, we are not mere prisoners of fate. Our actions matter, and can bend history in the direction of justice.
And yet I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the considerable controversy that your generous decision has generated. (Laughter.) In part, this is because I am at the beginning, and not the end, of my labors on the world stage. Compared to some of the giants of history who’ve received this prize — Schweitzer and King; Marshall and Mandela — my accomplishments are slight. And then there are the men and women around the world who have been jailed and beaten in the pursuit of justice; those who toil in humanitarian organizations to relieve suffering; the unrecognized millions whose quiet acts of courage and compassion inspire even the most hardened cynics. I cannot argue with those who find these men and women — some known, some obscure to all but those they help — to be far more deserving of this honor than I.
But perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars. One of these wars is winding down. The other is a conflict that America did not seek; one in which we are joined by 42 other countries — including Norway — in an effort to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks.
Dec 7
Update:
In The Gambit‘s Blog of New Orleans.
New York Times
I believe, without a doubt, Mitch Landrieu has been the most effective Lt. Governor in the history of Louisiana. I won’t pretend to know the inside baseball of New Orleans politics, but I do know that Mr. Landrieu is one of Louisiana’s most passionate advocates and accomplished public servants. It doesn’t always make the news, but what Lt. Governor Landrieu has done with the Office of Culture, Recreation, and Tourism has been progressive, ground-breaking, and transformational.
Dec 6
“In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,” was composed by a band originating from Ruston, Louisiana.
You may disagree about my assessment, but here’s my plea:
Dear Jeff Mangum,
When and if you ever decide to come out of retirement, tour Louisiana first. All of Louisiana.
Sincerely,
Lamar
The entire album after the jump:
Dec 3
And just in time for Christmas.
The book was written by journalist Leo Honeycutt, who provides both the forward, written by the late former Governor Dave Treen, and a preface on the website www.edwinedwards.net
An excerpt from Governor Treen’s forward:
His (Edwards’s) wit was certainly unmatched and no one knows that better than I do. But I believe this ultimately made him a target. For whatever reason, Governor Edwards liked to poke fun and sometimes in frustration he said things people didn’t easily forget. Being in politics for 50 years, anyone is going to create enemies but Governor Edwards attracted controversy with his tongue. This is partly the reason I reconnected with him after the sentencing in his 2000 trial. I believe the federal government, and by that I mean Judge Frank
Polozola and U.S. attorney Jim Letten, doubled his sentence from the prescribed five years purely out of vindictiveness. They didn’t like him. That’s not a good reason to double someone’s sentence and is, I believe, a misuse of power.
And an extensive and fascinating passage from Mr. Honeycutt’s preface:
He liked being governor in a state that still thought in European terms of kings and kingdoms. Fleur-de-lis, Mardi Gras, Bourbon Street, Vieux Carre, and Lassez le bon temps roulet (Let the good times roll) were as foreign to the Beltway as France itself. Edwin Edwards was Louisiana through and through, up from the dirt as a sharecropper’s son born smack on the line between French Catholic South Louisiana and English Protestant North Louisiana in a house so divided. From the beginning, instilled in him was the art of negotiation.
All these things I discovered on the journey with him into his past as I strongly admonished him it would serve no purpose to sugarcoat anything, not now. He would look at me from his blue prison jumpsuit, brown eyes as cool as ice cubes, and say, “I’m too far from the womb and too close to the tomb for any of it to make any difference now.” Still, he protected himself, played his cards close to his vest, assessing to what extent he could trust me. I was no longer the young freckled redneck who tried to distill life into black and white. I soon discovered that in our three-hour sessions, overseen by the Bureau of Prisons, I had to chip away at his mask of cavalier insouciance to get to his heart, if he had one left. He did and eventually, after a year, he could answer in more than soundbites. Yet, Shakespeare was right. Edwards had played the role of governor so long, had so tied up his identity into the office for four terms, that he could scarcely remember anything else.
That was just as well. Knowing we faced an Everest of credibility issues, I ultimately scaled an Everest of research. Even his staunchest supporters peered at him askance, as I did, so I fell irrevocably back on my journalist instincts and dove into nearly two years of research in the basement of LSU’s Middleton Library and others. This included the dusty file room of The Concordia Sentinel under the watchful eye of Louisiana’s dean of political writers, Sam Hanna. I wanted to know for myself what the truth was about Edwin Edwards and went back to the public record where reporters had captured his tone and tenor decades before. I wanted to see Edwards evolve in real time. This meant reading yellowed pages and thousands of articles on microfilm flickering before me like a picket fence at 80 miles an hour.
The information was dizzying. There was little that happened in Louisiana for a quarter century without his imprint. So what did the analysis reveal? In this bottom-line society, we need easy answers quickly. That will not be found in these pages. Life is a moving target, people evolve, the public is mercurial. Ask the long line of football coaches at LSU. Facts, like victories, often get blurred as the public turns on their hero.
Therefore, precisely as a reporter and as objectively as I could be, I have stated facts in chronological order as seen through the eyes of those present at the time. I have found that as much maligned as today’s journalists are, America’s free press is still the best in the business and for the most part can be trusted. Since so much was written about Edwin Edwards, triangulating between various reporters usually placed me in the center of the truth.There will be a few, some rich, some powerful, some politically-connected, who will not like this book. I remind them that all information came entirely out of the public record,
previously published but forgotten. I also remind them that, for the finished book, I deleted two-thirds of my exhaustive data out of the original 1,800-page draft. I have a mountain of other information not in these pages. The original draft is safely in an undisclosed bank deposit box.
As for Edwin Edwards, he was man enough to face the inclusion of the most damning evidence against him in the 2000 trial. In fact, he balked at not a single unflattering exposure except when the information tarnished someone else’s reputation and was not material to this work. He only requested the retraction of two items about others.
So, was Edwin Edwards the Cajun Prince –another Huey Long? Was he a crook? Did he help or hurt Louisiana, his friends or himself? The answers are here but you’ll have to determine them for yourself. I can guarantee this: You’ll find out why Louisiana is the way it is and have a far better understanding of how American politics work and don’t work. This is not a game for the faint of heart. As moody as voters are, politics is as complicated as the enigma Edwin Edwards became.
Famed historian T. Harry Williams took fourteen years to research and write Huey Long, concluding of the assassinated Kingfish, “In striving to do good he was led on to grasp for more and more power, until finally he could not always distinguish between the method and the goal, the power and the good. His story is a reminder, if we need one, that a great politician may be a figure of tragedy.”
Perhaps this is also the story of Edwin Washington Edwards.
Dec 2
See the full press release here: http://tinyurl.com/ygpdqxb
