Mandeville mayor Says He Does Not Have A Drinking Problem

This idiot, who was stopped more than once driving drunk, does not believe he has a drinking problem. DENIAL, DENIAL, DENIAL OR JUST PLAIN STUPIDITY

Price said he does not plan to give up the keys to his city car and that the kind words he has received from his supporters outweigh the sometimes nasty invectives from citizens who say he should resign.

Since the Causeway incident, he has rarely had a drink outside of his own home, he said, and he vows not to get behind the wheel again after even a single drink.

Causeway Police Chief Resigns

He first wanted to just take action against the officers involved, now his integrity has been called into play:

Causeway Police Chief Felix Loicano resigned Tuesday after an independent investigation concluded that his "judgment will always be questioned" in the wake of Mandeville Mayor Eddie Price's April 22 collision with a tollbooth barricade.

Loicano was hired in March 2000 to reform the Police Department after a series of scandals, including one in which a former officer alleged he was fired because he gave a speeding ticket to the son of the Causeway commission chairman.

Get Those FEMA Trailers Out Of Jefferson Parish

If you don't have a place to say Jefferson Parish says tough nooky---your FEMA trailers are no longer welcome:

In a weekly drumbeat since mid-April, the parish has filed batches of trailer suits. The most recent group of 27 lawsuits was filed on Tuesday and brought the total to 200.

Administrator D.J. Mumphrey, who supervises the parish's trailer removal campaign, said the almost weekly rounds of fresh lawsuits are over. The parish is considering suing in 58 remaining cases, but those cases involve uncertainties about who legally owns properties and could take more time to resolve.

Sazerac Becomes New Orleans Drink Of Choice

Can you say New Orleans?

The Louisiana House of Representatives made a historic decision Monday: In a 62-33 vote, legislators proclaimed the Sazerac — the famed mix of rye whiskey, bitters and absinthe that originated in the bayou — New Orleans' official cocktail.

No Death Penalty For Child Rapist

How cruel to execute a child rapist who has caused permanent damage to his victims:


Executing child rapists is cruel and unusual punishment, a divided U.S. Supreme Court decided Wednesday in overturning a Jefferson Parish death sentence and declaring as unconstitutional Louisiana's 1995 aggravated rape statute that allows the death penalty when victims are under age 13.

The 5-4 decision also invalidates similar laws in five other states and prohibits the death penalty in crimes in which the victim does not die. The court left intact the death penalty for crimes against the state, such as espionage and terrorism.

When Will It End?

The families of the victims need closure:

Orleans Parish Criminal District Court Judge Frank Marullo has granted more time for Rogers LaCaze and Juan Smith,two convicted killers awaiting death by lethal injection for separate triple murders that both occurred in eastern New Orleans 13 years ago.

LaCaze was convicted in the shooting deaths of police officer Ronald Williams and restaurant workers Cuong Vu and Ha Vu at the Kim Anh restaurant. Within a matter of months in 1995, LaCaze and Frank went from prime suspects to convicted death row inmates.

Smith was convicted in the shooting deaths of Andre White and Tangie Thompson at their home on Morrison Avenue. Thompson's 3 -- year-old son was also found shot to death, face down beneath his mother's body.

Mose Jefferson Tries To Pull A Fast One

Mose Jefferson, the corrupt brother of corrupt William Jefferson, appears to have been trying to influence his sister who pleaded guilty in her part to the corrupt family's schemes:

Mose Jefferson called his sister, Brenda Foster, in hopes of arranging a meeting after learning that she had agreed to possibly testify against him and other relatives accused of ripping off three charities they founded, prosecutors said during an arraignment hearing Friday.

Though Mose Jefferson's call to his sister earlier in the week clearly displeased prosecutors, he did nothing wrong in making the call, provided he did not try to intimidate Foster, said Dane Ciolino, a professor at Loyola Law School.

National Guard Duty In New Orleans

Lack of police manpower forces guards to stay:

National Guard troops will remain in New Orleans until the end of the year to help police officers patrol the less populated areas of the city, Gov. Bobby Jindal announced Thursday.

Sometimes You Have To Read Carefully

When I first noticed the following story, I said--oh no gangster pamp and his thug crew are at it again. Upon further reading, I was able to determine that the convicted burglar, gangster pamp, was not involved:

The body of a 26-year-old Seattle man who was in New Orleans for a recording conference washed up near a wharf eight days after he jumped into the Mississippi River from a ferry.

John Gagliano, chief investigator for the New Orleans coroner's office, says the body of Mark Mercer IV was spotted by a longshoreman at 2:30 a.m. today. Gagliano ruled the cause of death was drowning.

Family and friends say Mercer was a musician and producer who was in New Orleans to attend the Pot Luck Audio Conference, a series of panels and workshops about the recording industry.

New Orleans' Hurricane Risk

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Despite a massive effort to repair and upgrade flood defenses since Hurricane Katrina, storm surge could pour over levees in New Orleans if a strong Category 2 or higher hurricane strikes the city, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Monday.

While the forecast uses what officials say is the most accurate and complete picture yet of the region's levee heights, they said they weren't surprised by findings that reaffirm the area surrounding New Orleans is among the nation's most hurricane-vulnerable. The forecast released Monday represents the first time the yearly storm surge predictions have used levee heights based on global positioning system technology.

A team led by Roy Dokka, the director of the Center for Geoinformatics at Louisiana State University, traveled 1,000 miles of levees, flood walls and other coastal features since Katrina with GPS technology mounted on vehicles to obtain the new measurements.

"They are more correct than they have ever been before," Wilson Shaffer, a hurricane modeling expert with NOAA's National Weather Service, said of the levee-height measurements.

To predict how strong a storm would be to overpower a levee, researchers factor in variables including topography and a storm's wind speeds, size and intensity. The projections on storm surge are used by emergency planners, builders, residents and the Army Corps of Engineers.

The Corps of Engineers is determining how high to build levees under a congressional mandate to complete by 2011 a hurricane protection system capable of handling a storm likely to hit over the next century. A strong Category 2 likely would fall under that definition.

On Monday, the corps was unable to provide a breakdown on how much has been spent so far on work to repel storm surge. Since Katrina, Congress has given the corps about $7.1 billion to work with and it is considering giving the corps $5.7 billion more.

Betty & Mose Jefferson Indicted

Another Jefferson indicted come as no surprise. Eventually a federal correctional facility will have to be built in order to house the Jefferson clan.

U.S. Attorney Jim Letten announced this afternoon that 4th District Assessor Betty Jefferson, an elder sister of U.S. Rep. William Jefferson, has been indicted on a host of fraud-related charges by a federal grand jury. Also indicted were Jefferson's daughter, Angela Coleman, and her brother, the previously indicted Mose Jefferson.

New Business Can Be Good Business For Ailing City

Panorama Public Relations plans to open a New Orleans office located in Kenner, between Metairie and Baton Rouge.

The Birmingham-based company said the location will allow Panorama to service the New Orleans metropolitan area and be more accessible to clients there.

Client service associate and New Orleans native Genevieve Douglass will partner with Vice President of Business Development Pam Thompson to serve clients out of the New Orleans branch.

Panorama has clients in the architecture, engineering, construction, health care, human resources, energy, real estate, legal, manufacturing, retail and leisure industries.

Indicted lawyer Makes Serious Allegations Against Adams & Reese

The detailed allegations that an indicted lawyer has made against the law firm Adams & Reese should not be ignored.

In a sensational legal filing, a former partner at Adams and Reese who is awaiting trial on charges that he stole $30 million from the firm claims that the firm has had a hand in scandals ranging from the WorldCom stock fraud to the abuse of Louisiana film tax credits.

The lawsuit also claims the New Orleans firm has made a practice of hiring former public officials, including former Jefferson Parish President Tim Coulon and former New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial, and improperly using them to land clients with whom they had dealt as public officials. Coulon and Morial deny the claim.

It would be criminal if a thorough investigation of these allegations were not undertaken. The people of New Orleans would lose faith in the justice system if every effort was not made to uncover the truth.

Shared Blame

Admit mistakes:

A series of mechanical breakdowns and a critical error by the bridge operator led to New Orleans police officer Tommie Felix's fatal plunge off an improperly opened Claiborne Avenue drawbridge, according to a preliminary investigation by the state transportation department.

But this is scary:

Two other bridges in Louisiana, both in the New Orleans area, also were found in the past week to have broken secondary barriers, state officials acknowledged at a Tuesday briefing detailing the state's findings. The state plans to repair those barricades at the Chef Pass bridge on U.S. 90 and the Judge Perez Bridge over the Intracoastal Waterway in Belle Chasse.

Poor, Poor, Dollar Bill Jefferson

Another blow to Dollar Bill Jefferson defense stall tactics--what will he do next?

A federal judge has rejected arguments by attorneys for Rep. William Jefferson seeking dismissal of charges that the New Orleans Democrat solicited and received bribes to promote business projects in Western Africa.

Jefferson's lawyers had argued that the government did not allege that Jefferson had performed any "official acts" related to the alleged bribes -- making the accusations null and void.

But U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis III said that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that bribery charges can be brought even if the acts don't fit into the "responsibilities explicitly assigned by law."

It's time for him to take his punishment like a man and stop trying to weasel out of things.

Two Officers Suspended In Causeway Incident

Only two take the fall. I know it is hard to believe who had the nerve not to face responsibility. Read on:

One of the officers who stopped Mandeville Mayor Eddie Price last month on the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway has been demoted and faces a three-day suspension for failing to test Price for alcohol after he crashed through a toll booth barrier and continued to drive with no headlights.

Sgt. Chris Dupont, a 10-year veteran with the Causeway Police Department, will drop one rank to corporal and his pay will be reduced accordingly, Loicano announced Friday afternoon. His suspension includes the temporay loss of his take-home vehicle and the ability to work overtime or paid details during that pay period.

Raymond Burkart, Dupont's attorney, said he does not feel the punishment fits the crime, calling Loicano's decision "an egregious abuse of disciplinary discretion." He said he plans to ask Loicano to reconsider his decision and would like another law enforcement agency to conduct a separate investigation into the matter.

"If, in fact, the powers that be choose to call in the State Police to assist in truly investigating independently the matter, we can only hope that any wrongdoing by any party is dealt with swiftly and appropriately," Burkart said.

Officer Chad Dorsett, who worked the stop with Dupont, will be suspended for one day and lose his take-home car privilege as well as the ability to work overtime or paid details during that pay period. Loicano also chose to extend Dorsett's probationary period by an additional six months, as Dorsett has been with the department for only a few months.

The suspensions begin June 1, Loicano said.

Loicano's decision in the matter comes one day after the men participated in an administrative hearing to determine whether the officers had neglected their duty as police officers when they stopped Price just after midnight in April 23.

The officers stopped Price at the first crossover, about three miles from Mandeville, and the mayor admitted he had been drinking. Price also said he couldn't remember hitting the toll booth barrier, but the officers declined to ticket him or administer a field sobriety test, as required by the department's policy manual. The officers then allowed Price to call someone to drive him home.

Two weeks later, the agency cited Price with careless driving, and Price said afterward that he would pay the ticket and for the damage to the gate.

Based upon the totality of the facts, Loicano said the officers should have subjected Price to a field sobriety test. By failing to do so, the officers violated departmental procedure with regard to investigating suspected intoxicated drivers.

Dupont, the supervisor on duty that night, neglected his duty by failing to supervise a thorough and complete investigation into the incident, while Dorsett did so by failing to conduct a complete and thorough investigation.

Loicano initiated an internal investigation into the matter after receiving a call May 1 from Rafael Goyeneche, president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission. Goyeneche has said he called Loicano because he had heard about the accident and wondered whether the investigation had been as thorough as possible.

Destination: New Orleans

Good news for the Big Easy:

Bob Sharak, marketing and membership coordinator for the Cruise Lines International Association, said he's confident in New Orleans' future as cruise destination given the number of new ships scheduled to come online in the next four years and despite competition with other U.S. ports for Western Caribbean cruises and with European ports for the newly popular Mediterranean cruises.

Jindal Gets National Attention

Bobby Jindal is gaining national attention these days surrounding his upcoming meeting with a presidential candidate:

Gov. Bobby Jindal and his wife, Supriya, are scheduled to fly to Arizona Friday for a meeting with presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain, fueling speculation that Jindal is among a small group being considered as running mate for McCain.

Jindal, 36, has downplayed suggestions that he is getting serious consideration as McCain's running mate, and, while saying he loved his job as governor, has refused to say he would turn down the chance to run for the nation's No. 2 job.

New Orleans' Saints Defensive Indicted

AP:

New Orleans Saints defensive end Charles Grant has been indicted on a charge of involuntary manslaughter stemming from a February altercation at a nightclub.

Grant, who was stabbed in the neck during the fracas, was charged by an Early County grand jury that also charged Laquient Macklin with felony murder and feticide in the shooting death of Korynda Reed, 23. Reed died after being taken to the Southeast Alabama Medical Center in Dothan, after the fight early Feb. 3.

Some Type Of Headline

Does Gwendolyn thinks she will earn brownie points for that little disclosure?

Federal investigators asked a convicted bond broker to wear a surveillance wire last year as they built their case against state Sen. Derrick Shepherd, who knew he was a target of the probe as early as September, according to statements made during a preliminary court hearing Friday.

Gwendolyn Moyo, who is accused of money laundering and other federal charges, said while representing herself in the hearing that an FBI agent tried to get her to "wire up" in July. She disclosed the detail of the investigation while trying to persuade U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier to reverse a detention order that has kept her locked up since October.

Are we suppose to be be shocked and disgusted because she was asked to wear a wire? I guess her answer was no. What does she think she gained by that disclosure?