Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Written by The Independent Staff
C’EST BON
Gov. Bobby Jindal has certainly taken to heart the Obama administration’s mantra: “Never allow a crisis to go to waste. ... They are opportunities to do big things.” Quipped by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel 10 days after Barack Obama was elected president, the phrase was most recently echoed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Brussels, in reference to climate change policy. Jindal’s crisis is the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and in order to better protect Louisiana’s wetlands from the floating oil, he has been championing filling gaps in the barrier island chains between Terrebonne Parish and the Chandeleur Islands in St. Bernard Parish. While the dredge and fill approach has long been advocated as a way to help protect the mainland from storm surges, Jindal’s opportunity is to open guilty party BP’s deep pockets to foot the bill. Artful of you, Bobby.
 PAS BON
How did New Orleans Saints first-round draft pick Patrick Robinson do in the team’s rookie mini-camp? How about the one many football writers are calling the steal of the 2010 draft, tight end Jimmy Graham? Hard to say. Media attention to the mini-camp, or at least the print reporting that made it this far west, was pretty well sacked by what we may as well call Vicodin-gate. The case has dominated three weeks of Saints news. The team’s former director of security, Geoffrey Santini, alleged in a civil suit that Saints coaches were abusing the powerful painkiller Vicodin, accusing one of stealing the drug from the team’s locked medicine cabinet. Fortunately, the team exercised a clause in Santini’s contract and forced the case out of the court system and into arbitration, so this very ugly and early hangover for what should still be a Super Bowl buzz has moved behind closed doors.
 COUILLON
After U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, an unapologetic booster for the oil and gas industry, claimed on MSNBC’s The Ed Show that Louisiana doesn’t get “a single penny” from offshore drilling royalties, the Pulitzer-winning Web site PolitiFact investigated the claim. The site gave Louisiana’s senior senator a red-lined “False” on its trademarked “Truth-O-Meter,” pointing out that while the state currently receives no royalties for drilling in federal waters six miles and farther from the coast — this will change dramatically in a few years when Landrieu-authored legislation kicks in — it does receive upwards of hundreds of millions of dollars in annual royalties from drilling in state waters and in a three-mile-wide zone between state and federal waters. According to PolitiFact, Landrieu’s office didn’t dispute its debunking of her claim. As the relationship between Louisianans and the industry grows more ambiguous with each barrel leaked into the gulf, our senator’s hyperbole is doing little to assuage suspicion of an industry whose survival is critical to Louisiana’s future.
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