G-Bitch (whose site is back! Woohoo!!!!) tells us of a good lady who died recently, the promises by Bush himself to rebuild her home left unfulfilled, broken.

Varg takes a good look at why the recent brouhaha over violent crime is leaving him cold:

It goes back to the 2007 crime march and the belief that city government can somehow make the improvements needed. If the current administration were in a position to take the lead in the fight against crime, they would have done so after the march. Begging them to help now is fruitless. If the administration was involved, it would show. If they were going to improve, they would have by now. I haven’t seen the Mayor address the latest round and I haven’t heard much out of the Chief other than promises to improve.

And I think for them to discuss solutions will only lead them back to 2007.

In the 2007 march, Nagin primarily used the crime cameras as one of his remedies to our growing problems. Read the story here. For him or any of his administration to revisit the 2007 efforts would mean they would have to bring up the crime cameras again. Thus, talking openly and honestly about what they are doing, what is working and what isn’t in the fight against crime, is to potentially bring up the stunningly ineffective crime cameras and all that they entail. And they probably entail a lot of sins.

Oyster is convinced Dambala and IG Cerasoli are on to something regarding those crime cameras. Only time will tell. And disregard that content notice when you click on Dambala's link, folks. Looks like somebody complained to Blogger. Perhaps we oughta complain back that posting the Eels ain't all that offensive. Really.

Keep an eye out for further installments of Big Red Cotton's What Would A Good Mayor Do? series, in which she compares the actions of Hizzoner the Walking Id with those of mayors in other cities. Anybody game for starting a police chief comparison series?

And, in case you haven't seen it yet, check Taylor the Teacher's blog. Update your blogrolls accordingly. She calls Paul Vallas out on the fallacy that every high school student in the RSD has a laptop. And damn, man, she deserves waaay more than just a hug for all the other crap that is happening in her school, as does Ms Dorophoria. For every sunny article that is coming out on how things are improving in the public schools here, there is still another side to that equation:

Earlier this month, the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education held hearings to determine whether underperforming schools in East Baton Rouge and Caddo parishes would be taken over by the recovery school district.

"Well, welcome to my nightmare," Givens, a BESE member representing New Orleans, said at the time.

Some observers assumed that Givens was simply opposed to the fact that failing schools in Orleans Parish were being subsumed by the RSD after the failure of the federal levees flooded the city in 2005.

But Givens' comment had as much to do with the manner of the takeover as with the takeover itself.

"The schools were taken over without a hearing at a time when people weren't in New Orleans," Givens told me in an interview.

"That's what I meant when I said nobody came to our defense," she said.

Indeed the hearing about East Baton Rouge and Caddo Parish schools was remarkable merely for the fact that it occurred.

When New Orleans schools were taken over, no such hearings were held.

"Nobody sat down and looked at anything other than the fact that New Orleans was under water and here was a chance to take over these schools," she said.

"There have been no public hearings pre- or post-Katrina concerning school takeovers in Orleans. The manner in which takeovers around the state are being handled is completely different from what happened here," Givens said.

"While some of us were still on rooftops, the decisions were already being made to take schools over," Givens said.

Think about this folks: we are still under the emergency order that changed state law regarding the participation of parents and teachers in the restructuring of our public schools.:

After the storm, then-Governor Kathleen Blanco issued an Executive Order that waived, among others, a provision requiring two thirds of teachers, and a majority of parents to agree to the conversion of a public school to a charter school. That Executive Order remains in effect today, though the “emergency” it proclaimed has clearly passed.

Indeed, the parents and teachers in East Baton Rouge and Caddo Parish ought to thank their lucky stars the state didn't remember, in their case, that the damn law was still on the books.