Monday Morning News and Views

Good Morning Conflucians! And congratulations to the New Orleans Saints, their fans, and the City of New Orleans! The Saints are the winners of Super Bowl XLIV!

From the New Orleans Times-Picayune: The New Orleans Saints win the Super Bowl

They beat the Indianapolis Colts 31-17 here at Sun Life Stadium in South Florida.

Saints quarterback Drew Brees was 32-of-39 for 288 yards and two touchdowns.

But it was the big 75-yard interception return for a touchdown by cornerback Tracy Porter that sealed the deal.

“I studied and knew their tendencies,” Porter said. “I just jumped around and the ball went right into my hands.”

Porter grew up in Louisiana and graduated from Indiana University. Too bad the Colts didn’t grab him.

“I have been watching him since my time in Indiana,” Porter said of Manning. “I watched him put up points on the scoreboard. To come back home to Louisiana and bring a trophy back home, nothing is better.”

Porter, in his second season, is as responsible for the Saints’ Super Bowl triumph as any other Saint. He was one of the Saints’ heroes in the NFC Championship Game, when he intercepted a Brett Favre pass across the middle with 19 seconds left in regulation to stop the Vikings with the score tied at 28 before the Saints won in overtime on a field goal.

Yesterday, Porter intercepted one of the smartest quarterbacks in the history of the game. And he did it by studying just as hard as Manning does before games.

Maybe Dakinikat can tell us what the celebration was like on the ground in New Orleans.

New Orleans also elected a new mayor over the weekend.

NEW ORLEANS — In an event-packed weekend here that included the New Orleans Saints’ first-ever trip to the Super Bowl and seven Mardi Gras parades, Mitch Landrieu, the state’s lieutenant governor and scion of a well-known Louisiana political family, captured enough attention to become the city’s 61st mayor.
Landrieu received 66% of votes at the polls Saturday, avoiding a runoff. His landslide victory over 10 opponents brings to a close the tumultuous eight years of Ray Nagin, who has been the public face of New Orleans since the floods following Hurricane Katrina devastated the city in 2005. Nagin had served the maximum number of terms allowed by law.

In more sobering news, at least for us in New England, a massive explosion at the Kleen Energy power plant in Middletown, Connecticut (a suburb of Hartford) destroyed the largest building at a giant power plant, which would have been the largest in the region. Five workers are confirmed dead, and twelve are known to be injured, but officials are not yet releasing names.

Workers were running tests yesterday in anticipation of the gas powered plant going on-line soon. No one knows for sure yet what caused the explosion except that a gas line somehow ignited. At a news conference yesterday, Middletown Mayor Sebastian N. Giuliano said that up to 300 workers could have been at the plant, but probably only around 50 were in or near the building that exploded and then burned intensely for about an hour before firefighters could put out the blaze. This morning Governor M. Jodi Rell said that there were probably 100 people at the plant yesterday and most are accounted for. It’s hard to know what to believe, because news accounts are still very vague. The only thing I know for sure is that some workers are still missing.

Hartford Courant: Middletown Power Plant Explosion: Workers Unaccounted For, Search Called Off

MIDDLETOWN — – UPDATE (7:18 a.m.): Crews are returning to the Kleen Energy plant this morning to determine when rescuers can resume their search through the rubble for workers who remain unaccounted for.

The search was suspended at about 2:30 a.m. because the debris is unstable, said Middletown Deputy Fire Marshal Al Santostefano.

Lights were brought in and dogs were assisting rescuers, he said. But all were called out when it was determined that the rubble may be dangerous.

He said experts will determine when, and under what circumstances, the search can resume.

Middletown Power Plant Was To Be Among Biggest In Region

The Kleen Energy Systems power plant that was rocked by a deadly explosion Sunday sits on a moonscape of rock and cliff at a former feldspar mine overlooking the Connecticut River.

Proposed in 2001, and funded by hundreds of millions of dollars from one of the largest private energy investment firms in the country, the plant was to be among the biggest new electricity projects in New England, costing nearly $1 billion.

Construction workers had to move 1.6 million yards of rock and earth to claw out a 137-acre site for the plant on land owned by Middletown trash czar Phil Armetta. Armetta is a former partner in the project who withdrew after he was convicted in a federal crackdown on the trash industry.

William Corvo, a former Middletown councilman who is a principal partner in the project, said from the chaotic scene Sunday that the plant was 96 percent complete.

Just about a year ago, there was another power plant explosion in Connecticut–at the Yale’s Central Power Plant:

…Connecticut was suffering through some of the chilliest weather in recent memory, with overnight lows reaching into the single digits. As part of an agreement with Southern Connecticut Gas, the power plant — which runs on natural gas — switches to backup fuel to relieve the strain on SCG’s gas network when it is at high capacity, such as in the case of especially cold temperatures.

As a result, the plant switched off its natural gas lines two weeks ago and began powering its three massive turbines using reserves of diesel fuel held in tanks at the plant, according to power plant officials.

Then something went wrong. At about 2:15 a.m., a violent explosion ripped through the second of the plant’s three turbines, apparently the result of a fuel leak. The explosion was so intense that it blew out several of the doors on the turbine’s metal enclosure, witnesses said.

If any workers had been in the vicinity at the time, they likely would have been seriously injured, if not worse, Starr said.

Luckily no one was hurt in that explosion, but it has to make you wonder about these natural gas plants.

Interestingly, the Kleen Energy plant that exploded yesterday was “underwritten by Goldman Sachs” and was named the “The Deal of the Year” in 2008 by ProjectFinance magazine. The deal was for a “fixed price certain contract,” meaning that, according to this seemingly knowledgeable dailykos commenter, if the focus of investors was on short-term profits, shortcuts could have been taken in order to stay within the fixed cost estimate.

See, here’s the thing I’ve seen in the world of contracts: the people who run a rather large percentage of these companies look only at the short-term profits from the deal, and not the long-term structural needs of the underlying project. They make a bid based on a bunch of BS markups on the fungible labor costs, with a token amount tossed in to make it look like the underlying item will be tested and maintained, usually based on a near-best-case scenario, then outsource as much of the labor as possible to the lowest bidding sub-contractor, pocketing the remainder as profits.

In other news:

President Obama is asking Republicans to join him in another “summit meeting” about health care.

President Barack Obama, seeking to give new momentum to his languishing health-care legislation, said he would sit down with Republican and Democratic lawmakers to exchange ideas on an issue that has deeply divided the parties.

With the GOP united against the Democratic bill, Mr. Obama said Sunday he would ask Republicans “to put their ideas on the table.” The half-day meeting will be Feb. 25 and broadcast live, the White House said.

“I want to come back and have a large meeting, Republicans and Democrats, to go through systematically all the best ideas that are out there and move it forward,” the president told CBS in an interview broadcast Sunday.

{Sigh…} This obsession Obama has with bipartisan agreement on everything is starting to look like it could be a sign of a serious psychological disorder. What is his problem? Democrats are asking him to take a leadership role and just say straight out what he wants, but he simply refuses to do that–or maybe he just doesn’t know what he wants.

President Barack Obama has left Democrats as confused as ever about how the White House plans to deliver a health care reform bill this year, after two weeks of inconsistent statements, negligible hands-on involvement and a sudden shift to a jobs-first message.

Democrats on Capitol Hill and beyond say they have no clear understanding of the White House strategy — or even whether there is one — and are growing impatient with Obama’s reluctance to guide them toward a legislative solution.

At a White House meeting Thursday with Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi expressed frustration with the slow pace of the negotiations and the president’s decision not to weigh in publicly on a path forward, according to a Democratic source familiar with the meeting.

And some Democrats feel that every time they look to White House for clarity, they hear something different, as though the strategy is whatever the president or his top advisers said that day.

Gee, what a surprise. But no one could have seen this coming, right? Except a few bitter knitters like us.

Obama is also trying to pretend that things are getting better because the unemployment rate dropped in January–even though total jobs lost increased.

The trouble with understanding the U.S. labor situation is that these two key economic indicators are compiled using multiple sources. “Total jobs lost” comes from surveys of businesses that pay payroll taxes and are required to report their monthly personnel gains and losses. The unemployment rate, by contrast, comes from door-to-door surveys of American households where people self-report their employment situation. On average, about 50,000 households are surveyed a month.

Both are imprecise measures, and as evidenced today, jobs lost numbers are frequently revised as new data comes in.

Many experts dismissed the improving numbers as statistical illusions. “There was an inexplicable decline in unemployment in January,” said economist Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute, a non-profit Washington-based think tank. While the lower unemployment number is a welcome sign, the drop is “largely attributed to the higher volatility of the … household survey,” she said.

Marc Lieberman dismissed the improved unemployment rate outright. “In a situation like we have now, where the job market actually worsened, the unemployment rate is going down because people are giving up looking for work.” Lieberman, Clinical Professor of Economics at NYU, and an expert in labor economics, also noted that the number of people who want a job, but have not looked in the last 12 months, is rising, a fact unaccounted for in the unemployment numbers.

And from Politico: Jobs Bill Gets Snowed Under

Senate Democrats will miss their self-imposed deadline for bringing a jobs bill to the floor Monday, and they’re hoping that the weekend’s epic snowstorm will give them some cover.

Senate votes scheduled for Monday evening have been pushed back to Tuesday on account of the storm, but it seems unlikely that Democrats would have been ready to proceed Monday, anyway.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said last week that he believed “very emphatically” that the Senate would hold a vote on the first of a series of jobs bills Monday.

But there was no agreement on a bill late Sunday afternoon, and aides to senators involved in the discussions cautioned against expecting much progress by Monday.

That’s it for me. What are you reading this morning?

HAVE A MARVELOUS MONDAY!!!!

I’m just posting this because I really like it. I love trains, and I’ve always wanted to take the train to New Orleans. Willie’s version first and then Arlo’s

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