Monday Reads

Good Morning!!!

Hopefully, you had a great weekend!  The weather’s been nice here but we’re mostly focused on all that water coming down the Mississippi towards us.  The Bonnet Carrre Spill Way opened today at 8 am to release some of the river water in to Lake Pontchartrain.  The Corps has requested that the Morganza Spillway be opened too.  The last time it was opened was in 1973 when Nixon was still president. That’s more controversial because it will flood farms and land but will help maintain the levees in Baton Rouge and New Orleans.  We’ll have to see who wins that one.

If granted, the Corps plans to open the Morganza Thursday.  This could create water up to 25-feet deep in spots.

In Terrebonne Parish, low-lying areas in the Western end are vulnerable to flooding, up to five feet.  Parish president Michel Claudet tells FOX 8 he’s worried people don’t realize what could happen.  Claudet says there’s a plan to sink a giant barge in Bayou Chene.  Essentially, it would serve as a temporary dam to reduce the backflow of water into St. Mary and Terrebonne Parishes.  Bayous and creeks are already filling up and public works crews were out, looking for low areas to reinforce.

Opening the Morganza Spillway would require the evacuation of people and livestock in the Atchafalaya River Basin.  About 30 miles Northwest of Baton Rouge, West Feliciana Parish is bracing for the worst.  If the Morganza opens, the Corps projects possibly 25-feet of water in some areas.

“We’re going to do what we can you know,” said Brad Smith of St. Francisville.  He was rushing to his Cat Island hunting camp to shore it up, hoping he can get it higher than the water.  “I mean you have money invested in a camp, you know your heart’s there, and you want to save it,” said Smith.

Friday, residents in the Stephensville-Belle River area North of Morgan City built walls of sandbags around their properties.  Saturday, they were being urged to self-evacuate.

Governor Jindal believes that the flooding is certain anyway.

Land and structures in the Morganza Spillway will flood, even if the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers does not open the gates, Commissioner of Agriculture Mike Strain and Gov. Bobby Jindal said today.

“It is inevitable that Morganza will flood and the system will top, regardless of whether they open the system,” Strain said at a press conference at the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security.

Jindal said he has asked the Corps of Engineers to provide maps of areas that are anticipated to flood, with and without opening the gates. He said he wants people who would be affected to be able to prepare before the water starts rising.

“Even without opening the spillway, folks can expect flooding comparable to 1973,” the governor said. “If they decide to open the spillway, it will be more water.”

This will be historical either way.  I remember when they had to open the Bonnet Carre Spillway last spring because the river was so high.  I live a few blocks from the Mississippi.  The river was so high the boats were riding on the river at about the same level as the street.  It look like the oil tankers were traveling on the next road over.  I usually only see the very tops of these ships.  It’s a strange  feeling to think you’re sharing the road with huge ships.

So, since we’re talking about the Nixon years, I might as well offer up the Daily Mail’s first glimpse at the biography of Vanessa Redgrave. In part 2 of a three-part excerpt from the book, the Mail covers Redgrave’s political career.

Vanessa Redgrave as a Workers Revolutionary Party parliamentary candidate in 1974

The article’s interesting title is Vanessa Redgrave and the red sex slaves: How her bid to start Marxist revolution plunged her into bizarre scandal.

Never a shrinking violet, Vanessa Redgrave knew exactly what to do when she found a listening device in an electrical socket at her home. She called a Press conference.

It was common knowledge, she told the world in thrilling theatrical tones, that the internal security service MI5 had been bugging her conversations since she’d been a member of a Trotskyist organisation called the Workers Revolutionary Party.

Well, she wasn’t going to stand for it. So she was making a formal complaint to the European Commission, claiming that MI5 had violated her human rights.

Unfortunately, her grand gesture fell flat. Not only did the EU maintain that bugging radicals such as Vanessa Redgrave was ‘necessary in a democratic society’ — but it turned out that the bug had nothing to do with MI5 in the first place. It had been planted by a rival Left-wing faction.

Anyone else might have been utterly humiliated at making a fool of themselves, but not Vanessa. As her daughter Natasha once said, it never bothered her that she wasn’t liked — because being disliked gives her enormous freedom.

This is one celebrity biography that I can’t wait to read.

I first got the OBL kill news via CNN breaking news.  The NYT is trying to claim the credit for the story.  The truth is that it broke on twitter and was leaked by an aide of Donald Rumsfeld.  Here’s the tick tock according to Felix Salmon.

Brisbane is the NYT’s ombudsman, and today he describes the way that the paper broke the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death. Well, he can’t do that, because the NYT didn’t break the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death. But he ignores the people who did break the news, and just tells the story of how the official NYT machine worked. His story starts at 10:34 last Sunday night, when a source told NYT reporter Helene Cooper that Osama had been killed. By 10:40, an alert was up on nytimes.com. Then, by Brisbane’s account, Twitter got involved:

One minute after Ms. Cooper’s news alert was posted on the Web, Jeff Zeleny, The Times’s national political correspondent, posted on Twitter: “NYT’s Helene Cooper confirming that Osama Bin Laden has been killed. President to announce shortly from the White House.”

At virtually the same time, Jim Roberts, an assistant managing editor, sent a similar Twitter message. Next to come was an automated Twitter post generated by NYTimes.com, regurgitating the original news alert.

Those links are all Brisbane’s, by the way, including the rather hilarious link to the homepage of the very site his column is on. All of the links are internal; none are to the actual tweets in question. But here’s the first tweet that Brisbane mentions, from Zeleny. As Brisbane says, it was posted at 10:41pm.

For a very different look at how the Osama news broke check out SocialFlow’s exhaustive analysis of 14.8 million tweets on Sunday night. As far as Twitter is concerned, the news was broken by Keith Urbahn at 10:24pm. But it really got momentum from being retweeted at 10:25pm by NYT media reporter Brian Stelter, who added the crucial information that Urbahn is Donald Rumsfeld’s chief of staff. Urbahn, here, gets the goal, but Stelter absolutely gets the assist …

The first real interview of the president on the OBL operation was seen Sunday Night. If you want to see the 60 Minutes Interview with President Obama that covers the OBL kill operation you can see it here.

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