http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/grace/index.ssf?/base/news-0/116089413652770.xml&coll=1&thispage=1

THIS is the kind of press our state needs right now:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/19/science/19rive.html?ex=1159329600&en=ef92bf2d17245d4c&ei=5070&emc=eta1

Early voting for the Sept. 30 statewide election begins tomorrow and ends at noon on Saturday. I am telling you this because there is an LSU game on Sept. 30, so it may be wise for y'all to travel to your respective registrar of voters office to cast your votes so you don't have to worry about missing out on tailgating (or voting).

No, the Sept. 30 ballot does NOT include the oh-so-important congressional election. HOWEVER, it does include some very influential and important elections and constitutional amendments.

1. Secretary of State (frontrunners are Jay Dardenne - R, Mike Francis - R and Francis Heitmeier - D)

2. Insurance Commissioner (frontrunners are James David Cain - R and Jim Donelon - R)

3. If you live in the city of Thibodaux, you can vote for mayor. Also, depending on where you live, you may be able to vote for School Board.

4. Constitutional Amendments -- go here for an explaination of these amendments: http://www.la-par.org/Publications/PDF/ConGuide2006B#search=%22Guide%20to%20the%20Constitutional%20Amendments%20September%2030%2C%202006%2C%20Ballot%22

It's SO important that the first few amendments pass to save our coast and protect our citizens from future hurricanes! PLEASE absentee vote if you think you're going to the game. Our state depends on it!

Now that THAT'S over, I'm looking toward next week. Does anyone have a student ticket and isn't planning on going to the game? Please please please if you think you're not going let me know. Mark took the day off and this may be the only game he can go to.

HAHAHAHAHAHAH! Y'all remember that post a little less than a year ago? Here's to the anniversary.


Police: Katrina had little effect on local crime

By Robert Morris

The Houma Courier

HOUMA - Despite locals’ fears of unchecked lawlessness coming to the streets of Terrebonne along with busloads of Katrina evacuees, a year without any increase in crime indicates what common sense perhaps could have: Most evacuees, exhausted from their ordeal, just wanted to go home.

Rumors abounded as the buses arrived from New Orleans. People called The Courier to report, among other falsehoods, that riots had broken out in a Lafourche shelter. As the gossip escalated, law-enforcement authorities struggled to combat the “friend-of-a-friend” stories called in, and even a year later recall rumor control as the most significant evacuee-related law-enforcement issue.

“People were saying evacuees were doing this, doing that, when in actuality, none of that was happening,” said Lt. Todd Duplantis, Houma Police spokesman.

“There were too many rumors,” said Terrebonne Sheriff Jerry J. Larpenter. “Too many people were talking who didn’t know what they were talking about. When you have a disaster, people panic and people start spreading rumors and lies. We had to squash a lot of false information.”

Officials from two parishes called a joint news conference Sept. 3, less than a week after Katrina left New Orleans all but unlivable. The rumors continued to be a problem more than a week later, even as authorities tried to assure residents that overall crime had actually dropped 40 percent in Terrebonne Parish and that violent crime in particular was all but nonexistent.

“We had to reassure the public that, ëIt isn’t going to happen here,’ ” First Assistant District Attorney Carlos Lazarus said of District Attorney Joe Waitz Jr.’s appearance at one such news conference. “And it didn’t.”

What often happened, in the absence of reliable information, was that someone heard about something that may have happened somewhere else - New Orleans, Baton Rouge - confused it with a local event and started spreading misinformation, said Houma Police Chief Pat Boudreaux.

“You tend to have people filling in the gaps with rumors, word of mouth, when the offical channels aren’t working,” Boudreaux said.

WITHIN THE SHELTER WALLS

The rumor-mongering might have brought out the worst in some Terrebonne residents, but the desire to help brought the best in many others.

Though the evacuees knew their new neighbors were talking about them, most people in shelters were more concerned with their own dramas of escape or drafting plans for their futures, said one woman whose family of nearly 15 spent a month sleeping on the floor at the Houma-Terrebonne Civic Center.

Speaking from her home in Marrero, Deidra Warmington, 42, said worrying about rumors took a distant second place to adjusting to life in the shelter - taking care of family members, including her sick, hospitalized sister.

“It was hard for a while, but each day it got better - laying down there on the floor, asking people to give you blankets and pillows, socks for your feet,” Warmington said. “It was tough.”

Meanwhile, the Terrebonne residents that most evacuees encountered were generous volunteers, unified by a desire to help the displaced, Warmington said. One local woman took a particular interest in Warmington’s family, and still calls - even as recently as this past Sunday - to check on them.

Very little crime was reported at area shelters, officials said. A list of nearly 2,000 evacuees who went through the civic center shows only four were taken to jail, two evicted and one removed by Houma Police. The arrests at shelters were usually because of small, quantities of drugs found on a few evacuees, officials said.

“I think we had some minor stuff going on, but I don’t think it was anything serious,” said Duplantis, after a search of his own records for crime at shelters turned up nothing.

ëWORKING PEOPLE’

Like Warmington and her family, most of the Katrina evacuees staying in shelters - nearly 3,000 at the peak - eventually moved home or moved on, rather than staying in Terrebonne, officials have said. Population studies showing a surge in the number of people in Terrebonne immediately after the storm have since been revised. Overall, those who stayed have not been lawbreakers, authorities say, though the rumors continue.

“For the most part, people who have relocated to Terrebonne Parish are generally working people,” Boudreaux said. “It doesn’t seem like we’ve got a whole lot of the crime problems associated with New Orleans.”

Terrebonne has seen a handful of murders over the last year, and the first explanation whispered on the street is that “some of those New Orleans people” were the ones who pulled the trigger. That hasn’t yet proved to be the case.

One suspect still eluding police in a local murder, Freddy Lee Welch - named along with two Houma men, one in jail, one shot dead in Houston this past weekend, in the June 9 slaying of Kenneth Garner Jr. on Prince Collins Street - is from New Orleans, authorities say. However, whether Welch was an evacuee or simply visiting Houma at the time of the shooting is unclear. New Orleans residents have come south on the devil’s errands in the past - Jerrod Lewis, 23, of New Orleans, was recently sentenced to 65 years for an armed robbery from August 2004, more than a year before the storm.

All the other murder suspects in Houma-Terrebonne are either locals or from other places in the country – even the West Coast, in the case of a March shooting in Gibson.

“We’re mostly dealing with local problems,” Larpenter said.

NOT SETTING UP SHOP

Most types of violent crimes have actually decreased since the storm in the areas of Terrebonne Parish outside the city, according to statistics compiled by the sheriff comparing the first six months of 2006 to the same period in 2005. Aside from murders - one last year, compared to four from two double homicides this year - rape, assault, theft, burglary and robbery have all decreased between January and June, sometimes drastically, the numbers indicate.

Inside the city, the police chief said he is compiling a similar report. In general, Boudreaux said, his officers have been busy with more calls for help in traffic-related incidents since Katrina, but no major crimes have been committed by anyone fleeing the state’s flooded areas.

“It doesn’t like there has been any significant crime increase, even though we have a larger population,” Boudreaux said.

No significant spike in drug crime was reported by either agency. Narcotics agents said in early 2006 that they were handling more drug cases, but could not determine whether they were related to the storms or other factors. In March, a man believed to be a Katrina evacuee was picked up with $6,000 worth of crack cocaine in his pockets. In April, a man who fled Plaquemines Parish was arrested in a raid on a Houma house and identified as a “major player” in the local drug trade. Beyond those two arrests, authorities have not publicly linked any big busts to storm victims.

The only major effect on the court system was shutdowns and delays in trials around the time of the storms. Those cases clogged the trial dockets later, said the spokesman for the District Attorney’s Office, which prosecutes almost all arrests in the parish. Very few Katrina-related cases have come through the local system, Lazarus said.

In one court case, a mother-and-son pair of New Orleans evacuees were prosecuted for bringing their family to Houma in cars stolen from a West Bank auto agency. The two said they bought the cars from an acquaintance they barely knew in the chaos following the storm, but a Terrebonne jury convicted the mother and freed the teenage son.

Part of the reason for the low Katrina-related crime is that local judges tend to keep criminals in jail and off the streets much longer than in Orleans Parish, Lazarus said. Especially for crimes such as cocaine possession, suspects sometimes write letters of protest, saying that in New Orleans they could have simply pleaded guilty and gotten out much more quickly.

Dear old roomies (including Kristy although you don't live at Commons anymore):

I miss you kids. I remember last year y'all were always looking to go layout by the pool with people. So if you ever want to do that, or just hang out in general, feel free to contact me. I have no pool, otherwise I'd invite y'all over to mine, too. Dammit. Anyway, yeah. Let's drink frozen drinks by the pool and tan tan tan.

Julie R. gave me the BEST GIFT EVER.

That's all I wanted to say.

ATTENTION AMY THIBODAUX (I hope you don't have an E in your name):

Did you know that there is a movie coming out called "The Notorious Bettie Page" about her life?

I thought you would freak if you knew.

So we pretty much had the best family vacation ever.

We left New Orleans at 4:30ish and by the time we got to Denver it was dark. We were picked up by the Colorado Mountain Express in a van and would have made it to Keystone in about an hour and 45 minutes but there was a wreck. So we were stopped in traffic on a mountain for a really long time. By the time we got to Keystone we were delirious, being tired and extremely hungry. We figured we'd just eat a ham sandwich at the condo when we got there, not factoring in traffic. So we were all grumpy and couldn't find the condo we were supposed to stay at and didn't have a key to get in. While waiting, I was reading the real estate magazine thing. I jokingly said, "Aw, we should have gotten the luxury penthouse suite with private elevator!" Finally, dad got it all figured out, and said, "Wait until y'all see it."

Apparently they switched us from our regular, run-of-the-mill condo to...yep...the luxury penthouse suit with private elevator! We didn't eat for at least another 45 minutes because we were running around, "Oh-my-god" -ing this and that. THREE washers and dryers. Mom and dad had two showers, a jacuzzi tub and two toilets in their ONE BATHROOM. And a TV in front of the tub. Rachelle and Tom had a shower, a jacuzzi tub and a TV in front of their toilet. Phones and TVs galore. State of the art kitchen. Floor-to-Ceiling windows overlooking the ski trails and a tiny, half-frozen creek. 5-minute walk to the gondola and lifts. It was nutso.

We befriended the owner of the condo (and half of Keystone) and his wife, and plan on going back next year.

I got a lot better at my skiing. I skiied a few blues with our instructors but stuck to greens when I skied with Rachelle and Mark and Tom and Robbie. Robbie, Tom and Mark went crazy on blues. Mark and Robbie accidently left me on the mountain and I skiied down and couldn't find them and cried because I thought either a) they left me because I wasn't good enough or b) they fell off the mountain. Then they finally called me and met me there with the fam.

We had PERFECT weather. The only complaint was that it hadn't snowed in awhile, so the snow on the mountain was pretty icy. But there was nothing but blue skies and warmth on the days we skied and it was wonderful. It snowed the morning that we left really hard, so it was cool to wake up to that and take pictures. Speaking of which, I will post pictures on facebook as soon as I get them back from Walgreens.

It was SO hard to get back into the swing of things. I was totally falling asleep in La. History today. After skiing in one of the most beautiful places in the country it is hard for me to go back to school and sit in classrooms all day. I'm slightly depressed, haha. It was so nice to be active, to be skiing down a freakin mountain, to be outdoors every day. Now I'm back to being a blob, eating pizza and chocolate to take away my sadness. Being there just makes you want to quit everything, get some stupid job at a restaurant there and ski all day on your days off. And get REALLY good at it. And then be a ski instructor and have fun every freakin day not sit in a windowless office, dammit.

I know you'll probably all laugh at me when I say this because I am the most exercise-phobic person in the world, but it felt REALLY good to get exercise. To really push myself and to make my muscles work even though they hurt like hell and give my lungs a workout. And feel realllllly good after a good run down the mountain. So I think now, while I'm still sort of living off that high, maybe I should start running or something. Keep my body in shape.

GOD everything is so booorrrriiing I want to go back and ski!!

Oh P.S. I did really well on Econ and I did pretty damn good on Poli Comm (I didn't think I did...it was a welcome surprise!) I'm waiting on La. History but I'm pretty sure I did well on that, too. Yay for me! I still want to quit school and move to Colorado, though.

WOW...

http://www.local10.com/video/6460091/detail.html?rss=mia&psp=news

I miss the Clinton years, haha. SIMBAAAA...