You can find out a lot about people when they get angry and yell things out in the heat of the battle or argument. During a town meeting on Tuesday, Mayor James Levigne angrily told a person that he would not answer his question and said: "I hope the Ku Kluxers get you, too." Wow, just wow. I wonder what books he reads/ Here's what happened.

NOLA:

At the end of Tuesday's meeting of the Pearl River Board of Aldermen, Lavigne refused to allow Marshall to comment about an issue discussed during the meeting. When Marshall continued to try to ask a question about how long members of the fire board would serve, Lavigne told him he would not take questions and added, "I hope the Ku Kluxers get you, too."

It was not clear exactly what the mayor meant by the comment or why he referenced the Klan, and his Thursday statement shed no light on those issues. Numerous attempts to get Lavigne to speak about his comments, including phone calls to his home and office and visits to Pearl River's Town Hall, were unsuccessful.

For years, Marshall has had a tempestuous relationship with Lavigne and with the board of the fire district. Marshall has frequently criticized the fire board in person and on NOLA.com forums, accusing its officials of mismanagement and violations of state ethics codes.

In his statement, Lavigne referred to "disgruntled and paranoid persons expressing ... untruths on the computer."

During Tuesday night's meeting, Lavigne attempted to shut off debate several times. First, he tried to force aldermen to vote on a measure that would have had the town join him in an effort to remove Clay Harper, one of his opponents in the October election, from the ballot. Lavigne said Harper was not a resident of the town, though Harper produced documents at the meeting showing he was eligible for the position. Lavigne said he planned to have Town Attorney Ron Guth continue the effort on his behalf...read on

But racism is dead in the USA, isn't it? I remember Tony Snow (he's passed on now) telling us that much in 2003 when he defended his buddy Rush Limbaugh from racism charges.

Here's the unmentionable secret: Racism isn't that big a deal any more. No sensible person supports it. Nobody of importance preaches it. It's rapidly becoming an ugly memory. If you want proof, open a Philadelphia paper tomorrow. If Donovan McNabb has a bad game, he'll get ripped ruthlessly, just like any other signal-caller. Which means that Rush's observation, if anything, was dated -- and that the sports world has become sufficiently colorblind to judge players by their performance and not their skin color.

Tony is no longer with us, but if he was I wonder how he would defend Rush Limbaugh's ramped up racist behavior since Obama's been in office? Would he see a correlation with Rushbo's attack on McNabb that got him fired? And now we have a mayor throwing out a "KKK" bomb. Jesus.

Believe it or not, these incidents are almost commonplace. It's just that until the Deepwater Horizon incident, they went unnoticed.

In Michigan, nearly one million gallons of oil has been dumped into the Talmadge Creek, which flows into the Kalamazoo River.

Via mlive:

County officials said they began an emergency response at about 6 p.m. Monday after news spread that a 30-inch oil pipeline in Marshall sprung a leak and released oil into the Talmadge Creek, which feeds into the Kalamazoo River. Houston-based Enbridge Energy Partners said the pipeline has been shut down but that did not happen before more than 800,000 gallons flowed into the creek.

Kalamazoo County officials said Tuesday that local health officials are monitoring the oil spill and advised residents to avoid all contact with water from the Kalamazoo River “until further notice,” according to a news release issued just after 1:30 p.m. Tuesday.

“All surface water activities, including swimming, wading, fishing and boating/canoeing/kayaking, should cease,” officials said in the news release. “Additionally, due to the fumes associated with a crude oil spill, people are warned to avoid (spending) time in the immediate area around the river. This order will remain in effect until further investigation indicates that risk has been minimized.”

Said Matyas: “We’re throwing everything we have at it.”

Meanwhile, in the Gulf of Mexico...

A tow boat crashed into an abandoned oil well near Mud Lake, north of Barataria Bay.

NPR:

Mud Lake is part of a network of bayous and lakes north of Barataria Bay, an ecologically sensitive coastal estuary where authorities have been fighting waves of oil from the spill that started in the Gulf when the offshore oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded April 20.

Jefferson Parish Councilman Chris Roberts said he was confident the leak and spill would be stopped quickly.

"This likely can be contained today," he said in an e-mail Tuesday.

Not one single Republican supports comprehensive energy legislation. Not one. Democrats and the President are taking the heat for scaling it down, but remember this: If one Republican had looked at these disasters and decided our planet mattered more than their re-election, we would be debating comprehensive reform.

Not one Republican could do that. Not one. And the oil gushes on.

A few years ago, A.C. Thompson wrote an amazing piece for The Nation describing how white militias formed in some of the more, um, blanched neighborhoods of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and were involved in some cases of outright murder supposedly in the defense of their neighborhoods.

I was especially struck at the time by this passage:

Some of the gunmen prowling Algiers Point were out to wage a race war, says one woman whose uncle and two cousins joined the cause. A former New Orleanian, this source spoke to me anonymously because she fears her relatives could be prosecuted for their crimes. "My uncle was very excited that it was a free-for-all--white against black--that he could participate in," says the woman. "For him, the opportunity to hunt black people was a joy."

"They didn't want any of the 'ghetto niggers' coming over" from the east side of the river, she says, adding that her relatives viewed African-Americans who wandered into Algiers Point as "fair game." One of her cousins, a young man in his 20s, sent an e-mail to her and several other family members describing his adventures with the militia. He had attached a photo in which he posed next to an African-American man who'd been fatally shot. The tone of the e-mail, she says, was "gleeful"--her cousin was happy that "they were shooting niggers."

It was, of course, classic white eliminationism, occurring as it often does in a time of great stress when said stress becomes an excuse for any kind of behavior, including wanton murder.

Well, now the hammer has finally come down:

A former New Orleans resident was charged Thursday with federal hate crimes for his alleged role in a racially motivated shooting of three black men in the days after Hurricane Katrina.

Roland J. Bourgeois Jr., 47, is accused of plotting to defend his Algiers Point neighborhood "from outsiders" including African-Americans, constructing barricades on public streets and using racial epithets to describe black people, according to the five-count indictment.

At one point, Bourgeois allegedly said, "Anything coming up this street darker than a paper bag is getting shot."

The indictment charges Bourgeois with doing just that when three black males walked through the neighborhood toward a makeshift Coast Guard evacuation center on Sept. 1. Bourgeois fired a shotgun at the trio, felling Donnell Herrington and wounding Herrington's two companions near the corner of Pelican Avenue and Vallette Street, according to the indictment.

Later, Bourgeois plucked Herrington's bloodied baseball cap from the ground and proudly displayed it to others, boasting that he "got one" and had shot a "looter, " according to a witness.

They say that revenge is a dish best served cold. The same cannot be said of justice -- but it must be said that it is better served cold than not at all.

Now we can wait for Fox News to declare this case another example of the Obama administration favoring blacks against whites, I suppose.

There are places where having someone armed and standing guard makes me feel at least a little secure. The guard at the bank, the airport, and the police patrol cars on the street are harbingers of safety.

However, church is not one of those places. At least, not for me. But evidently the good Republicans in Louisiana think differently, and so today Bobby Jindal signed the "gun-in-church" bill, authorizing people with concealed weapons permits to bring them to church.

NOLA.com:

Including the "gun-in-church" bill, House Bill 1272 by Rep. Henry Burns, R-Haughton, Jindal has signed into law 940 of the 1,067 bills the Legislature sent him, vetoed 12, and used his pen to line-item spending measures in four different budget bills.

Burns' bill would authorize persons who qualified to carry concealed weapons having passed the training and background checks to bring them to churches, mosques, synagogues or other houses of worship as part of a security force.

The pastor or head of the religious institution must announce verbally or in weekly newsletters or bulletins that there will be individuals armed on the property as members of he security force. Those chosen have to undergo eight hours of tactical training each year.

It sort of kills that whole "love one another" idea, doesn't it?

At least New Jersey gets the benefit of this kind of research before the real battle begins. It's already too late for the Gulf Coast:

The northern Atlantic Ocean, including the Jersey Shore, holds more economic value for activities such as commercial fishing and tourism than it does for oil extraction, according to a report released today by the New Jersey Sierra Club.

For every dollar an oil company would make from drilling off the North Atlantic coast, the more environmentally friendly pursuits of fishing and tourism would generate $12, making sustainable uses of the ocean more prudent than offshore drilling, the report said.

Long pushing for a moratorium on offshore oil drilling, several environmental groups gathered on the boardwalk in Asbury Park today to discuss the results of the report and announce a statewide event on June 26 calling for an end to offshore oil drilling.

"The report we’re releasing…shows that oil and gas is less profitable than sustainable activity," said Grace Sica, outreach coordinator for the Sierra Club. "Just two years of sustainable use of the North Atlantic Ocean almost exceeds whatever and all oil and natural gas resources are in the North Atlantic."

The report, authored by Michael Gravitz, oceans advocate for the Washington, D.C.-based Environment America Research and Policy Center, attempts to put into perspective the value of coastal business for each of the five oil-drilling regions of the United States compared to the value of oil and natural gas under their respective oceans.

The report said New Jersey was responsible for generating $11.5 billion of the estimated $61 billion generated by leisure and hospitality and recreational and commercial fishing among the seven states in the North Atlantic region. The suspected oil and natural gas in the region is estimated at $5.1 billion, according to the report.

Republicans have long touted their candidates' family values. Now, that goes double for the New York GOP. As Huffington Post among others noted this morning, Staten Island Republicans have nominated the disgraced Vito Fossella to run for his old House seat in 2010. Apparently, having a secret second family is no barrier to a second chance for today's Republican Party.

According to the Staten Island Advance, party leaders of the executive committee voted 23-4 to nominate Fossella just days after he claimed he would not seek his old seat. Party chairman Jim Friscia said of the two-family man, "It is my firm belief that [Fossella] is the strongest candidate we can field." For his part, former Fossella mentor Guy Molinari lamented:

"I think the status of the Republican Party on Staten Island has reached a new low tonight."

That's saying a lot.

After all, Fossella's 2008 DWI arrest led to the stunning admission that he had a second family in Virginia. As the New York Daily News reported two years ago:

He's the baby daddy!

Disgraced Staten Island Rep. Vito Fossella admitted Thursday he fathered a 3-year-old love child in an illicit affair with the woman who rescued him from a Virginia drunk tank...

New details about the congressman's double life have emerged. Fay's neighbors said he was a regular visitor to her townhouse - often taking strolls with his second family.

Fossella's resurrection couldn't come at a worse time for the national Republican Party. It not only comes just two days after the GOP's hand-picked candidates were drubbed in Pennsylvania and Kentucky, but the same week that Indiana Rep. Mark Souder resigned over his affair with a staffer.

Then again, the sin of adultery has proven to be just a minor bump in the road to national prominence for leading Republicans like Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, David Vitter, Mark Sanford and John Ensign.

Nevertheless, Fossella's dual lives weren't the only reasons some observers doubted a second run for office. The New York Observer noted that Fossella's district will likely be redrawn in 2012. And posing nearer term problems, as TPM suggested, a possible embezzlement scandal involving Fossella's campaign committee could yet derail his return to Capitol Hill.

Regardless, Vito Fossella has the backing of the values voters of the GOP.

(This piece also appears at Perrspectives.)

UPDATE: As TPM notes, "The full county committee still has to ratify the nomination and will meet next week."

As Susie noted earlier, Techcrunch is reporting that Pennsylvania Attorney General (and Republican candidate for Governor) Tom Corbett, in a classic "we respect the Constitution until we don't" Republican move, has summoned Twitter officials to testify before a Grand Jury about two members' accounts.

It appears that two members have been openly critical of the Attorney General on Twitter and on an anonymous blog created to "expose the hypocrisy of Tom Corbett."

Here's the specific information Corbett wants (from the subpoena):

"Any and all subscriber information pertaining to the users of:

http://twitter.com/bfbarbie

http://twitter.com/CasablancaPA

This should include, but not limited to: name, address, contact information, creation date, creation Internet Protocol address and any and all log in Internet Protocol addresses."

The tweets which appear to be in question are ones like this:

Corbett is actively pursuing the prosecution of state employees alleged to have participated in a bonus program which used taxpayer dollars for campaigns. His results have been mixed: Two acquittals and three partial convictions.

Just a quick read through this article gives me the chills, especially when I came to the part where Corbett is under federal investigation for the very same charges.

Despite continued claims by the attorney general’s office that accusations, court motions and lawsuits against Corbett are baseless or “bogus,” it remains to be seen whether he can demonstrate to voters that he didn’t abuse his prosecutorial power in the semblance of cleaning up public corruption.

Additionally, a federal lawsuit filed against Corbett in 2008 alleges that thousands, perhaps millions, of public dollars were “illegally paid out to vendors.”

On March 11, Corbett was deposed in his office for six hours for a lawsuit filed against him and others in the office of the attorney general and Department of Revenue. The whistleblower case alleges that Thomas D. Kimmett, a former attorney with the AG’s office, and his assistant, Sherry E. Bellaman, were terminated because of Kimmett’s call for an independent investigation into the collection practices within the Attorney General’s Financial Enforcement Section.

The case alleges “pervasive wrongdoing” in the collection of accounts receivable amounting to upwards of $300 million to $500 million. It gives details of alleged fraudulent payouts to no-bid vendors and claims there was a “cover-up by Mr. Corbett and the other defendants.”

Back to Twitter for a minute. One of the most attractive features of the service is the rapid-fire message-in-140 one-to-many ability. It's easy, it's accessible via text message, the internet and just about any way one wants to access it, and so it enables free speech. True free speech. The kind that doesn't require millions of dollars and TV studio facilities to broadcast. It certainly facilitates the kind of free speech that Republicans extolled in their arguments for Citizens United.

What scares them most is their inability to control it like they do the airwaves and other venues. In my opinion, Corbett's efforts to expose anonymous Twitter identities is nothing more than a misguided slap at free speech and democracy.

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Remember how the crowds at the 2008 Republican National Convention all chanted "Drill Baby Drill," led by the likes of Michael Steele, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, and most of all by Sarah Palin? Here's what Palin said in her debate with Joe Biden:

The chant is "drill, baby, drill." And that's what we hear all across this country in our rallies because people are so hungry for those domestic sources of energy to be tapped into. They know that even in my own energy-producing state we have billions of barrels of oil and hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of clean, green natural gas. And we're building a nearly $40 billion natural gas pipeline which is North America's largest and most you expensive infrastructure project ever to flow those sources of energy into hungry markets.

Barack Obama and Senator O'Biden, you've said no to everything in trying to find a domestic solution to the energy crisis that we're in. You even called drilling -- safe, environmentally-friendly drilling offshore -- as raping the outer continental shelf.

There -- with new technology, with tiny footprints even on land, it is safe to drill and we need to do more of that.

Yeah, it sure is safe:

Coast Guard officials were investigating reports on Friday that crude oil leaking from a well beneath the Gulf of Mexico had washed ashore, threatening wildlife in fragile marshes and islands along the Gulf Coast.

As the vast and growing oil slick spread across the Gulf and approached shore, fishermen in coastal towns feared for their businesses and the White House stepped up its response to the worsening situation.

President Obama ordered a freeze on new offshore drilling leases until a review of the oil rig accident that caused the spill could be concluded, and new safeguards put in place.

“I continue to believe that domestic oil production is an important part of our overall strategy for energy security,” Mr. Obama said on Friday, addressing concerns about whether the administration would continue with its plan to increase drilling in the Gulf.

Even so, he said, “the local economies and livelihoods of the people of the Gulf Coast as well as the ecology of the region are at stake.”

Of course, for some people, that's a negligible concern:

Fund managers and analysts in the City said they were deeply worried about the financial cost to BP of the kind of legal action that could be taken in the US by those damaged by the accident.

Why, nobody could have predicted this, right? Even though BP was fined a record $87 million last September for safety violations in Texas.

Well at least Newt Gingrich has remained consistent:

In 2008, Newt Gingrich began American Solutions for Winning the Future (ASWF), the casino-funded 527 that used the slogan “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less” to promote the false idea that new offshore drilling could lower gas prices. On its website, Gingrich’s ASWF is continuing its petition while reporting on the inevitable consequences of dependence on dirty oil.

And, as Brad Johnson at the Wonk Room reports, this is shaping up to be a worse environmental disaster than the Exxon Valdez disaster.

We sure eager to hear what the "Drill Baby Drill" crowd will say now. No doubt they'll find a way to blame Obama for the mess.

UPDATE: Sure enough. Limbaugh: Oil spill is "Obama's Katrina". I understand this was the talking point this morning on "liberal" MSNBC's Morning Joe.

UPDATE II: Josh Nelson notes that Palin has tweeted her compassion:

Isn't that special? Gotta love the heartfelt compassion there. That and three bucks will get you a double-tall latte at Starbucks.

I was taking a look at Gov. Chris Christie's budget today and then I saw this. Will New Jersey follow in California's footsteps and start governing by mood ring?

A state appeals court today ruled New Jersey’s secretary of state must accept a petition a citizens group filed to recall U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez, but left open the question of whether the removal effort itself is constitutional.

The three-judge panel stayed its ruling to give Menendez (D-N.J.) the opportunity to appeal to the state Supreme Court.. The senator has 45 days to file an appeal but did not say today whether he would. He called the recall effort a "political stunt" that won’t distract him from doing his job.

"This an organization trying to undemocratically and unconstitutionally overturn an election in which more than 2 million New Jerseyans voted," said Menendez, whose term expires in 2012. "My focus continues to be on job creation legislation and delivering a successful extension of my local property tax relief bill."

The court found existing New Jersey law and the state’s constitution both allow U.S. senators to be recalled. For that reason, the appeals court said, the removal effort can proceed. But noting the absence of case law and precedent, it left the ultimate question of the constitutionality of the state’s recall law and amendment to a higher court.

"There are a host of genuine arguments and counterarguments that can be articulated and debated about whether or not the Federal Constitution would permit a United States Senator to be recalled by the voters under state law," the appellate judges said.

"I’m pleased," said Dan Silberstein, attorney for the Committee to Recall Senator Menendez, which is backed by the New Jersey chapter of the conservative Tea Party movement. "I think the appellate court made the right decision on where the case is procedurally."

Menendez’s attorney disagreed.

"The U.S. Constitution is clear that a senator’s term is six years and is not subject to recall," said Marc E. Elias. "The state attorney general correctly argued before the court that a recall is unconstitutional and a clear disservice to voters who take part in a petition process that is invalid. We are pleased the court stayed this opinion until the appeals process is completed."

Disgusting. Remind me the next time I commit a crime to make sure at least one of my co-conspirators is the son of a U.S. Attorney:

The U.S. attorney's office in New Orleans has another month to decide what, if any, charges to bring against the four men arrested at the end of January in Sen. Mary Landrieu's New Orleans office, including conservative activist James O'Keefe.

Louis Moore, the magistrate judge for the federal district court in New Orleans, agreed Wednesday to motions on behalf of the four to extend the time by which the U.S. attorney's office for the Eastern District must seek a felony indictment, press misdemeanor charges or drop the case.

Moore said the extension, which was unopposed by prosecutors, would offer the parties "additional time to conduct informal discussions and discovery and avoid or lessen additional proceedings," suggesting the possibility of a plea deal that would likely spare the four from facing felony charges.

At the time of their arrest Jan. 25, O'Keefe, 25, Joseph Basel, 24, Stan Dai, 24, and Robert Flanagan, 24, were charged with entering federal property under false pretenses for the purposes of committing a felony, a crime that carries a maximum term of 10 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

Isn't that special. How nice that the judicial system is always willing to give another chance to conservative white boys!