by Glynn Wilson

Photo by Glynn Wilson

Photographer Spider Martin parties at the new Gennifer Flowers club at her first Mardi Gras in the French Quarter

Waking up on Fat Tuesday land-locked in Birmingham, Alabama, is just not the same as waking up on Mardi Gras Day in New Orleans.

Watching the television news coverage and scanning stories and pictures online is just not the same as being there.

It is easy to feel sorry for the people of Louisiana and envy them at the same time. In this prudish nation where the Christian Right rules, New Orleans represents an outpost of freedom and fun, even if the sin in Sin City is about as overblown as any Hollywood extravaganza.

While I have visited New Orleans for Mardi Gras and Jazzfest many times in my 48 years on planet earth, I managed to find my way out of Alabama to Georgia in 1996, the year the Olympics came to Atlanta. From there, I wound my way to the mountains of Tennessee and spent four years working on a Ph.D. But when I got the opportunity to make my way down the Mississippi River to the destination city of New Orleans in the summer of 2000 - before George W. Bush stole the election - I jumped at the chance to teach at Loyola University and live in an Uptown apartment and experience New Orleans as a resident.

I had not been there long before I got the opportunity to write for the Dallas Morning News from New Orleans.

On Sept. 11, 2001, the world seemed to go crazy not only in New York and Washington. I slept late that day and did not find out about the attacks on the World Trade Towers until late in the morning, because I had been up most of the night finishing the first draft of my dissertation.

As I watched the images in horror for about a week on TV, something in me changed, just as those events changed the lives of many Americans. I no longer wanted to teach journalism. I wanted back in the news game.

So I wrote a heartfelt letter to Howell Raines of Alabama, then the executive editor of the New York Times. By the summer of 2002, I was free-lancing from New Orleans for not only the Dallas paper, but the Christian Science Monitor, the New York Times and People magazine too.

It was a hell of a run that came to a screeching halt when little Jayson Blair was uncovered making stuff up in the New York Times. The world changed again.

So in December 2003, I packed up my belongings and left New Orleans, came back to Alabama and worked on an investigation of George W. Bush’s time in Alabama in 1972, and then moved to Washington, D.C. to see what kind of contribution I could make in the 2004 election coverage.

Photo by Dave Stueber

Southerner editor Glynn Wilson stands defiant in front of the statue of Jefferson Davis at the corner of Jeff Davis Boulevard and Canal Street before the first Mardi Gras parade of 2001

Bush won again, by hook or by crook, and for better or worse, I ended up back in my home state of Alabama.

After covering the Scrushy trial for the New York Times during the winter of 2005, I came up with the idea to start this Web site to continue an exploration in online publishing I first encountered in 1996.

For all the new readers of the LocustFork.Net news and blog who may be wondering about the creator behind it, here are a few stories that bring back some New Orleans memories for me.

This is not so much an ego trip as a way for the audience to get to know the man behind the mask.

In the last story I did for the Dallas Morning News and The Southerner.Net Web site before I left town, I reported that the voodoo was going to stop working one day and “The Big One” was going to come howling up the Mississippi River and drown New Orleans.

It was hard to watch from afar, just as today, it is hard to watch the city try to recover by masking its pain in Mardi Gras 2006.

If my good friend Spider Martin were alive today, chances are we would have taken off in a van and headed for New Orleans to be there in person on Fat Tuesday. But it is a different world today.

Memories: They Can’t Be Taken Away or Erased
Gennifer Flowers’ First Mardi Gras
Celebs, Competition Rein at Mardi Gras
New Orleans Voodoo Wards Off ‘The Big One’
The Sweet Sorrow of Parting
Global Warming Makes Saving Lousiana’s Wetlands Hard

ReadtheBill.Org called on the U.S. House of Representatives to approve by election day a resolution by Rep. Brian Baird (D-WA) to require that all proposed legislation be posted on the Internet for 72 hours before it comes up for floor debate.

“It’s time to stop passing bills in the dead of night that nobody has read,” said Rafael DeGennaro, Founder and President of ReadtheBill.org. “We want sunshine at the Capitol by November. Any member of Congress who opposes this 72 online reform is part of the problem in Washington, D.C.”

For more info, hit the group’s Web site: ReadtheBill.Org.

To the editor:

Once again, Governor Bob Riley has decided to spend much-needed and scarce Alabama dollars to send Alabama prisoners to a private for-profit prison in Louisiana.

He did this with women prisoners shortly after he was elected, and now is sending them men just as he is raising money for his reelection campaign. After the women were returned to Alabama, we were forced to continue to pay for the empty cells in Louisiana, since Riley had leased them for an extended time.

The lobbyists for the corporate prison system give hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Republican party and its candidates. Could this be the reason that Riley has reinvented the horror of the convict lease system of the years of segregation?

Under the convict lease system during segregation, the Alabama prison system leased convicts to corporations to use as forced labor. Getting the forced prison labor for almost nothing, the corporations made millions. When forced labor was desired by the corporations, the police just arrested more black people and the courts convicted them.

Now during campaign season, Riley is again leasing prisoners to a private corporation. I cannot believe that this is to relieve overcrowding, as he claims. It is just another form of convict lease and comes at a time that cannot avoid being seen as lining the pockets of Republican campaign chests, starting with his own.

The Rev. Jack Zylman
Southside, Birmingham

After Jack Abramoff?

Such a story may have meant nothing B.J. (Before Jack), but in a post-Abramoff era we were struck by this item in yesterday’s Birmingham News about how Alabama Gov. Bob Riley is spending part of his time at this week’s National Governor’s Association confab in DC.

Rileys Sleeps Over at White House

Yup, the former three-term House member is being feted by his old House pals Hastert, Boehner and Blunt. Also check out who from K Street is putting on the event.

Now perhaps even post-Jack, a Rep-turned-Gov. up for re-election having a member and lobbyist-laden funder at a DC trade association may not merit a mention, but Riley has some, well, Abramoff issues.

Abramoff partner-in-crime Michael Scanlon was Riley’s congressional press secretary in the ’90s. Later, Scanlon’s outfit, Capitol Campaign Strategies, gave $500,000 to the RGA in October of 2002, which in turn transferred nearly $2.5 million to a soft-money arm of the RNC designed to aid state elections. That same month Riley received $600,000 from the committee and the Alabama GOP took another $600,000.

It was during this same time period, of course, that Scanlon and Abramoff were raking in cash from tribes.

Riley, who does not accept gambling money, maintains that he did not know the source of the RGA money. But the fact remains that the ‘02 race between Riley and then-Gov. Don Siegelman was fought in large measure over whether Alabama would join its neighbors in Georgia and Tennessee in instituting a state lottery. Siegelman was for it, Riley against.

And joining Riley in opposing an lottery were the Mississippi-based Choctaws and their man in Washington, DC - Mike Scanlon. The tribe feared a loss of business in their two casinos just outside of Philadelphia, Miss., - about 30 miles from the Alabama state line.

Guilt by association? Perhaps.

But Riley and the Alabama GOP - whose chair just recently resigned from the Mississippi-based lobbying firm that now represents the Choctaws - must not be sweating Roy Moore (R), Lt. Gov. Lucy Baxley (D), or Siegleman if they are having this kinda event.

Or perhaps they are - tickets go for $1K a pop. Per individual or PAC, that is.

Originall published in the National Journal’s HotLine Blog

Why We Can No Longer Afford George W. Bush

We have before us in the White House a thief who steals the country’s good name and reputation for his private interest and personal use; a liar who seeks to instill in the American people a state of fear; a televangelist who engages the United States in a never-ending crusade against all the world’s evil, a wastrel who squanders a vast sum of the nation’s wealth on what turns out to be a recruiting drive certain to multiply the host of our enemies, writes Lewis H. Lapham in the March issue of Harper’s magazine.

Read the online excerpt here.