Found out who it was that viewed from Longville.

It was one of my mates from college. His DSL IP says he's in Longville, even though the computer is in Moss Bluff (15 minutes south).

Anyway, that's not what this entry is about.

Today, I got to shake the hand of someone famous.

"Who?", you ask? Why, none other than Aaron Broussard, Jefferson Parish president.

Politics break: Your social studies teacher may have gone over this in class: Louisiana is one of two states with no counties. (Alaska being the other.) Instead, Louisiana has parishes. While similar in name to a unit of the Diocese of a catholic church, Louisiana's parishes (the 65 civil ones) serve the same function as counties do in the rest of the nation. There are minor differences, like the "borrowed" use of Napoleonic Code, but they're effectively counties.

Some parishes are governed solely by a parish council or police jury. A few parishes (Orleans in particular) are co-boundaries with a city (e.g. New Orleans), and just have a mayor and city council to do the work of the parish police jury. There are also some parishes that mix the two: while not just one city, there is still a single executive-branch office elected, called a parish president.

That said, Aaron Broussard formally announced his campaign for re-election as parish president of Jefferson Parish.

And I was there, clapping.

The same Aaron Broussard that evacuated the pump station operators in front of Katrina, which caused neighborhoods to flood and ruined houses.

*sigh*

The way some people want to crucify him in the public arena, you'd think he personally took a fire hose to each of their homes. That he summoned the hurricane himself.

When the election comes, I'm going to vote for Aaron Broussard. I have three reasons why:

1. He's not as responsible for flooding homes as people make him out to be. Put yourself in his shoes: An apocalyptic storm is bearing down on your electorate, and you know full well that the infrastructure you inherited 2 years ago won't withstand the beating that storm will deliver. What is more important? The lives of 80 of the employees you hired or the property of 130,000 of the voters who elected you?
2. He's not just a talking head. Unlike some people on the other side of the parish line, I've seen stuff get done in Jefferson. That may not be a fair comparison, but I'm calling it as I see it.
3. My job may depend on it. When Phil Capitano was not re-elected as mayor of the city of Kenner last year, my office lost a good chunk of work during the change of administration. If we lose our JP contracts, "dire straits" just scratches the surface of my situation. One way to ensure the perpetuation of contracts is to perpetuate the administration that approved those contracts. (And do good work under those contracts, of course. It's not like we'd get paid for just showing up, y'know. That'd be akin to kickbacks.)

But this is the world I live in. And this is the way stuff gets done out here. Like Scott, one of the inspectors, says, "There's a saying at the highway department: 'Sometimes, you just have to build a road.'" (Meaning: excessive altruism accomplishes very little, if anything, in the real world.)

-KIE