Alan Gutierrez

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.

Ran across a Vietnamese website called Vietnam Bridge, which read like a newspaper with a bias, rather than a blunt instrument of the state. It got me to searching. North Korea has their own propaganda website out of Japan. It is written in Newspeak. Pictures of life in North Korea leak out through the Internet, however. A Discovery Channel program about North Korean children is up on YouTube, a website called the Chosen Journal has a mind-numbing slide show of human rights violations on their landing page. Cuba’s Granma has a steady diet of conspiracy theories, about assinations mainly. A ready niche for the Cuban state in the Americas?

How are lawyers going to continue to harrass us when we can publish thier horrible demands on the Internet?

Take the case of a letter to a family in an RIAA suit, saying that they’ll be given 60 days to grieve, before continuing a suit against the estate of a deceased file sharing culprit.

A legal threat can infringe on a person’s rights, if they cannot afford to meet that threat in court, due to limits of money or time. These sorts of legal shake downs are more difficult when people can make a story of a legal outrage, as in the case of The Shops at Willow Bend.

Is it in any way wrong to post a letter that is sent to you?

Something to keep in mind as we are all going to be facing people with a lot of money to spend on a lot of lawyers as we rebuild New Orleans.

In about an hour, and for the rest of the day, I’m going to be thinking about what it means to be indivisible.

A Times-Picayune article over the weekend, informed those New Orleanians still offline, that jailbird Clerk of Court Kimberly Williamson Butler was running for Mayor of Disneyland.

I write about this in the post Kimberly Williamson Butler. Wonkette picked up the story, but gives little context.

In response to the flap, Kimberly has now removed the trashcan.

That’s right, rather than replace the stock photograph of Disneyland, with a stock photo of the French Quarter, she had the trashcan photoshopped out.

Here’s a blog post that captured the original site. Thank you Jim Hill. Here’s the site now, all better.

She seems to think that people were offended by the trashcan. She removed the trashcan as it were a telltale sign, as if a resident of the city would not be unable to tell them apart.

There are no curved streets in the Quarter.

Okay, granted, Kimberly can’t tell the difference.

The fact is that Kimberly Williamson Butler cannot identify one of the most easily recognizable buroughs of the city she hopes to govern.

Kimberly Williamson Butler is not New Orleans politics as ususal, by the way. She’s not from around here. (Niether am I.) She’s an import and in a league of her own.