Dodging a bullet

Hopefully we did, as the hurricane forecast today has Ernesto heading almost straight north, over Florida [Graphic from the National Hurricane Center].

From Bogalusa to Roanoke

Joe was living in Bogalusa, Louisiana where Katrina caused tornadoes.

Read the whole thing.

Dishonest or dumb?

There are a number of Bogalusa-area high schoolers that are commuting to Franklinton these days. It has been suggested to yours truly that Franklinton High School is better than BHS, with better test scores, and that's the reason parents send their kids 20-something miles to school.

Is FHS better?

At the Louisiana Department of Education site, here are the GEE scores for spring 2006 (percentages):

Bogalusa High School:

• Advanced = 1
• Mastery = 13
• Basic = 39
• Approaching Basic = 31
• Unsatisfactory = 16

Franklinton High School:

• Advanced = 0
• Mastery = 7
• Basic = 43
• Approaching Basic = 28
• Unsatisfactory = 22

Bogalusa High School clearly has the lead in Advanced and Mastery: a combined 14% versus Franklinton's 7%. In the Basic and Approaching Basic categories, BHS 70%, FHS 71%.

Unsatisfactory is in Bogalusa's favor by six percentage points.

The GEE scores for Pine, Varnado and Mr. Hermon aren't much different than Franklinton's. The numbers don't seem to bear out Franklinton High School being better than Bogalusa High School - the opposite, in fact.

I suspect this has more to do with White Flight than parents worried about the education of their children. It's the only explanation that makes sense. Why else send your kid on a half-hour bus ride to a school in another town that isn't any better than the one down the street?

Earmarks =

where your tax dollars are prolly gonna go.

Read all about it here.

UPDATE: Be sure to check out Porkbusters too.

Weather. Wow.

I asked; I received :-).

Rained cats and dogs at the hacienda yesterday. Scads of lightning and thunder, too.

Weather

Tropical Storm Chris fizzled. Can't say I'm sorry, except that more rain would've been nice.

Every afternoon the humidity climbs until the air's like microwaved cotton. The sky clouds up. And usually, we get no rain.

I'm too busy to sift through the reams of data at the National Weather Service and try to figure out if we're still in a drought condition, or if we made up enough rainfall to be back to normal.

But it feels drier than usual to me, for what that's worth. Spots on my property which were often boggy last year, are not. And I'm still watering the landscaping.

Anybody out there know a rain dance?

Bogalusa audit, continued

Another article in The Daily News about the city audit.

Accusaions are being flung - "It's just political!"

Well duh. Of course it's political. We want to know the facts before the election, and we deserve to.

It's difficult for me to imagine the Mayor being able to redeem himself with the completion of the audit. Will it somehow magically show that he didn't award illegal cost-plus contracts? Or that he did not try to get the city council to pass resolutions allowing contracts after the fact?

According to the latest in the News:

In early June, the council asked for a four-month extension of the audit deadline, which would push both responses back until after the municipal election.

Since then, Seal said he has uncovered additional findings, which may or may not prove to be problems. No additional information was given.

This is a bit alarming, wouldn't you say?

The article claims that one of the reasons the audit is taking so long is because they're awaiting paperwork from FEMA. Why? Either money came in, or it didn't; was spent, or not. Did some dufus at City Hall lose receipts and bank statements?

With the four-month extension, it may not be finished before the September election. Coincidence? Or something more sinister?

Previous:
Handcuffs to fit a McGehee, please
More on McGehee
Will there be indictments?
Officials pay themselves overtime

New blog

Posted about over at the Hard Copy board [link at left] - the Washington Parish blog!

Looks like it's going to be a collaborative effort, with articles submitted by anyone to a blog owner/moderator for consideration.

Maybe it will replace The Daily News. There's a lot of real fact-finding and reporting going on in the blogosphere, giving Mainstream Media a run for its money.

More shady Katrina contracts

Hurricane Katrina brought out the best in some people, and the worst in others. Or maybe some people were always bad guys, waiting for their opportunity. The Times Picayune has a good article on yet another fiasco in the wake of the storm, this time in New Orleans. Excerpt:

Behind a Largo, Fla., strip mall -- where shops ply lingerie, DVDs and drug paraphernalia -- sits a truck and trailer marked with the logo Biodefense America, one of the few traces of a company granted a windfall $8 million deal by former New Orleans Criminal District Court Clerk Kimberly Williamson Butler.

The company listed the Largo, Fla., strip mall and another address, actually a house, as the headquarters of what it contends is a "global leader in decontamination."

Butler hired Biodefense America to clean up the evidence room of the city's flooded criminal courthouse in a deal being investigated by the state attorney general.

Months after Biodefense America abandoned the job in the face of FEMA's refusal to pay for the work, the "in the news" section of the company's six-page Web site still brags about winning the top-dollar post-Katrina deal.

Biodefense America seems to have little other news to offer, save for a vague one-line mention of "numerous first responder contracts for the Health Industry in Broward county."

The company collected $200,000 from Butler as it abandoned the job. In choosing Biodefense, Butler spurned another bidder, Munters, which proposed to do the work for $3 million less than the Florida firm. Link to printer version

Ms. Butler has had a bad year. Here's a google on her, and Wikipedia's synopsis.

I look forward to the day when all these ripoff artists are doing hard time.

"almost like a native son"

The Daily News is still distinguishing between those born here and those who moved here:

Although Whit Gallaspy was born in Lake Charles, he's about as close to a Bogalusa native son as one can find. link

Doesn't anybody have anything better to do than keep track of who was born here, and who wasn't?