Alan Gutierrez

A summary of The Jena Six in the The Town Talk, Alexandria-Pineville, LA. Not only a nice resource, but a nice format; and FAQ with linked articles.

I’m writing my first guest blog entry for Drum Major Institute. The working title is Katrina Fatigue Fatigue, where I’ll write about my recent attempts to address the people who ask “Why rebuild a city below sea level?” In fact, I feel as though I ought to create a question of that sort at thinknola.com and just perpetually have that argument out and get very good at making it.

A Visio template for New Orleans: Crime Scenes with Shapes.

Refugee Cottages from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Temporary housing sans formaldehyde.

I feel good about this DailyKos thing.

My expectations for YearlyKos were middling. I had not read DailyKos. Not in a long time. When I did read DailyKos, it was only when a right wing blog pointed out something crazy in the comments. To me, DailyKos was part of the blue versus red realm of the blogosphere. I expected to wander about, listening to extreme views and smiling politely. Or else, I might be treated to endless introspection, “what does the blogosphere all mean?” variety.

There were two sorts at the YearlyKos. There were operators, people who work in politics, who have an agenda and can’t be bothered with small talk.

Then there was everyone else. I liked these people. They were very easy to speak with. They were concerned with the economy and the war.

The Ann Arbor Art Fair came and went recently. I heard tell of it in the Ann Arbor Bi Bim Bop mailing list. At the Ann Arbor Art Fair they have a block running from Huron to Division along Liberty where people can have booths for political organizations. They have the Washetenaw Democrats and the Washtenaw Republicans and the Huron Valley Humane Society. That’s about it for normal. Everything else is peace thorough better breathing, marxism, and male circumcision. Everything else was Ann Arbor getting it’s weird on.

It would be an annual highlight in a city that held little of interest for me. To nod appreciatively with a knit brow while someone unraveled their conspiracy theories.

That was my point of reference.

But, that is not YearlyKos. The focus was on heath care, education, job creation and trade, on the domestic front. On foreign policy, people talked about Iraq, Iran, China, and the transparent wedge issue of Mexican immigration.

If this is the left wing of the Democratic Party, then the entire party has drifted to the center.

From a recent thread in the New Orleans bloggers listserv called Historic Artifact, two known remaining references to Jim Crow in New Orleans. The door of a one time hardware store in the Quarter by Derick. Above a doorway on Commerce St by Bart. Is it so common to find in other Southern cities or is this because our paint likes to peel?

Read Hugh MacLeod’s post on The Pourous Membrane after Dave Coustan told me that he used the image in a presentation on corporate blogging. Read through the concept, then consider how it applies to Louisiana politics. We talk about transparency, a word that has become as meaningless as empowerment. What we need is permeability. In Louisiana, the membrane between the internal conversation and the external conversation is made of latex.