When the breeze is blowing good behind The Odeon constructing within the CBD, the aroma of roasted meat perfumes the air. It wafts from the smoker behind Satan Moon BBQ at 1188 Girod St. There, juicy briskets emerge darkish and crusty with simply the precise stability between chewiness and tenderness.
Louisiana-born chef Shannon Bingham is aware of his method round smoked meat, and he believes South Louisiana doesn’t get the credit score it deserves for its smoked meat traditions.
“Our meals tradition has smoked meat at its coronary heart,” says the chef, companion and pitmaster, who opened Satan Moon BBQ simply after Mardi Gras, and the adjoining Brewery Saint X on March 28.
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If house-made sausage, smoked over a hearth till the pores and skin crackles and snaps, isn’t barbecue, then Bingham doesn’t know what’s. “We simply don’t name it barbecue, like Texas and Tennessee do,” he says.
Creating a way of place for Louisiana’s smoky heritage is likely one of the overarching targets of each Satan Moon, the extra informal eatery, and Brewery Saint X, a sit-down restaurant that serves the identical low-and-slow-cooked barbecue together with house-made craft beers. There’s additionally a full bar with loads of whiskey and bourbon on the cabinets.
Satan Moon’s title was pulled from generations of blues songs, and the menu options many conventional gadgets, starting from barbecue plates to hefty variations of barbecue sandwich classics.
The pulled pork has an edgy chew, and as with all of the sandwiches, it’s served on a potato roll dressed with coleslaw, pickles and sauce. Sandwiches include a alternative of facet, similar to potato salad and coleslaw. Bingham additionally prepares a superb soiled rice, and pink beans and rice, collard greens and mac and cheese all ooze Louisiana taste.
Platters are constructed round brisket, provided lean or fatty, smoke-reddened pork ribs, house-made sausage and fancy-tasting smoked turkey. Platters include two sides. There are three barbecue sauces. The home sauce is flavored with root beer and cane syrup. Creole mustard informs the Carolina-style sauce, and the vinegar sauce has pickled apricots.
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Starters embody pimiento cheese with crackers and a smoked onion dip with chips. A $79 social gathering platter rounds up all of the meats and sides and feeds 4 to 6 folks. A current day by day particular was a smoked roast beef po-boy topped with gravy and horseradish cream.
Brewery Saint X is ideal for a carnivore’s date night time, with a menu that invitations sharing. New Orleans-based structure agency Bell Butler designed the intense and welcoming house, and the partitions are coated with classic pictures — black-and-white pictures of family-owned meat shops and native camp events.
Foremost dishes embody roasted Gulf fish with New Orleans-style barbecue sauce, confit beef cheeks with salsa verde and grilled pork collar with pickled mushrooms and mustard jus. There are also sandwiches, salads and snacks like beef fats fries and spicy fried inexperienced tomatoes.
The beer listing may have 16 alternatives, with many German- and British-style drafts. Past beer, friends can anticipate an array of creative house-made bottled cocktails, starting from the classics to artistic and regionally impressed riffs. There are also wines and a powerful choice of nonalcoholic choices.
The Neighborhood Restaurant Group, a hospitality firm based mostly in Washington, D.C., recognized for its beer, is behind each eating places. NRG was based by Baton Rouge native Michael Babin, so Satan Moon and Brewery Saint X mark a homecoming of types for him.
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Satan Moon signed up for this spring’s Hogs for the Trigger, an occasion that Bingham has supported going again to his days as a part of the opening crew for Blue Oak BBQ. “There’s an actual household tradition in barbecue,” he says.
State lawmakers advanced a bill Tuesday that intervenes in a land dispute and threatens to block construction of an interstate power line at the behest of a small group of north Louisiana landowners, including the wealthy owner of a large pharmaceutical company that made billions during the opioid crisis.
Paul Dickson Sr. is a principal owner and former board chairman of the Shreveport-based Morris & Dickson Co., one of the largest wholesale pharmaceutical distributors in the nation. It was the target of a federal investigation that revealed one of its own agents was secretly negotiating with the company to preserve its federal license.
Senate Bill 108, sponsored by Sen. Alan Seabaugh, R-Shreveport, stands to benefit Dickson in his dispute with a Texas power company. It cleared the House Committee on Civil Law and Procedure without objection and will head to the House floor for consideration.
The bill is tailored in ways that would effectively prohibit a single business from exercising its expropriation rights, which allow governments and certain companies to force the sale of private land for public use. It’s typically used for development of a project that serves a public need, such as a new highway or, as in this case, a power line. In exchange, the owner must be paid, at minimum, fair market value for their land.
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Proponents of Seabaugh’s measure tout it as a way to protect landowners from businesses and projects that don’t benefit the people of Louisiana.
“We’re here because of one project,” Seabaugh told the committee.
The project Seabaugh targets — Pattern Energy’s Southern Spirit Transmission line — would deliver electricity to the regional power grid that covers most of the state.
The Southern Spirit Transmission project is a 320-mile line that will begin at a power station in DeSoto Parish and deliver wind power from the Texas grid to a power station in Choctaw County, Mississippi, crossing through North Louisiana. Onshore wind has been the cheapest source of electricity for the past several years in the United States and around the world, according to a study by the financial firm Lazard.
Although the line would end in Mississippi, it would feed electricity into Louisiana by way of the regional Midcontinent Independent System Operator grid. The MISO grid covers most of Louisiana, and Mississippi and spans into a large swath of the Midwest and into Manitoba, Canada.
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Dickson told the committee Seabaugh’s bill won’t kill Pattern Energy’s project but will merely give the landowners a better advantage in their negotiations.
“It needs to be negotiated in the private sector,” Dickson said. “It will get done well… Right now, the landowner’s hands are tied behind his back. Senate Bill 108 gives the landowner the ability to negotiate by removing the threat of expropriation.”
Pattern Energy has claimed the project will bring economic development to towns and parishes in North Louisiana, but Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell, D-Bossier City, said he hasn’t heard from any of those local officials. Campbell is against the Pattern transmission project but has not taken a position on Seabaugh’s bill.
“I’m troubled by the way they do business,” Campbell said in a phone interview, referring to Pattern Energy. He said it has been difficult to get straight answers from the company.
Seabaugh told the committee the power line would not deliver “one watt of electricity” to Louisiana and that the company would claim lucrative state tax incentives such as the Industrial Tax Exemption Program (ITEP). When it was his turn to testify, Pattern Energy executive Adam Renz failed to give concise answers in response to Seabaugh’s accusations, neither of which were accurate.
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Instead, Renz gave lengthy, detailed explanations on the concepts of inter-regional interconnection, the history of the Southern Spirit project and the geography of the MISO grid. His long discourse continued even after lawmakers specifically pointed it out, asking for shorter answers.
Louisiana legislation could jeopardize flow of power from Texas
When Renz finally did say electricity would indeed flow to Louisiana and that “we’re not using ITEP — you have my word,” half of the committee members had long ago left the room.
Pattern Energy land director Shannon Gwen and attorney Scott Keaty were more concise in their testimony. Gwen explained how the company has nearly acquired 60% of the land needed for the project and that it begins land negotiations with offers of at least 120% of market value. Keaty said he had deals worked out with the two landowners until Seabaugh filed his bill.
“We have not taken anybody’s property,” Keaty said. “We have not initiated any expropriation proceedings.”
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The company has rerouted the transmission project 11 times at the request of one landowner who is still not satisfied, he said.
Even if Pattern Energy were to initiate expropriation proceedings for the land, it would have to do so through lawsuits filed in the landowner’s parish and would have to show the judge why the project is in the best interest of the public. Gwen said the company also includes value for any timber on the land and even pays the landowner’s legal fees if they hire an attorney to negotiate.
Many others testified against Seabaugh’s bill, including Public Service Commissioners Mike Francis, R-Crowley, and Davanté Lewis, D-Baton Rouge.
Lewis said the bill is a big solution for what is a small contested issue. He said it will have “significant ramifications” for improving Louisiana’s grid and signal to other companies that Louisiana will change the rules on them at the finish line.
The Louisiana-based utility Southwestern Electric Power Cooperative (SWEPCO) currently imports cheap electricity from wind turbines in Oklahoma — in the same way Louisiana would benefit from the Southern Spirit line — through the MISO grid, Lewis said.
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“If Oklahoma passed this same law, it would undoubtedly raise the rates for people in Louisiana,” Lewis said.
At the end of Tuesday’s hearing, the committee members who had left the room finally returned, having missed testimony given in support of the project. Even those lawmakers who stayed and voiced some sympathy to Pattern Energy’s position were confronted with one final question from Speaker Pro Tempore Rep. Mike Johnson, R-Pineville, who had returned to his chair just before the bill’s fate was decided.
“Sen. Seabaugh, I have just one question, and I don’t think I heard it in your testimony earlier: Do you know if the governor supports or opposes your bill?” Johnson said.
Seabaugh replied that Gov. Jeff Landry “quietly supports it” but admitted he doesn’t “quite know what that means.”
“If he opposed it, he wouldn’t likely be quiet, would he?” Johnson asked.
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“I think that’s probably correct,” Seabaugh said.
When committee chairman Rep. Nicholas Muscarello, R-Hammond, asked if anyone objected to moving the bill favorably to the floor, the lawmakers remained silent.
Dangerous drugs and DEA negotiations
Paul Dickson Sr., who testified at Tuesday’s committee hearing, is a principal owner and former board chairman of the Shreveport-based Morris & Dickson Co., one of the largest wholesale pharmaceutical distributors in the nation and, according to Dickson, the second oldest company in Louisiana.
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“I ran a company that currently does $5.5 billion a year in sales,” Dickson told lawmakers. “That’s bigger than Pattern [Energy]. I know who makes decisions in companies, and the people who will decide whether or not this power line goes through Louisiana after this bill is passed will make an economic business decision.”
Dickson was president of Morris & Dickson when it mishandled more than 12,000 suspicious large orders of the highly addictive drugs oxycodone and hydrocodone during the height of the nation’s opioid crisis, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.
Last year, the Associated Press reported on secretive negotiations between Dickson and top DEA officials. The DEA was investigating Morris & Dickson’s distribution of opioids and filed formal charges against the company in 2018 for violating the Controlled Substances Act.
Dickson had met with a DEA official, Louis Milione, on at least two occasions beginning in 2016 to negotiate a way for the company to stave off punishment and keep its distributor’s license. That following year, Milione left the DEA and received a $3 million consulting contract from Morris & Dickson.
Dickson’s company continued operating under its license for over four years after a judge recommended it be revoked in 2019. The DEA’s decision to stall on the judge’s ruling was highly unusual, according to officials quoted in the AP story.
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DEA Administrator Anne Milgram, a Biden appointee, rehired that same agent in 2021 as her top deputy and continued to stall on the judge’s ruling until the situation made national headlines last year. Milgram revoked the company’s license in May 2023 right after the AP reached out to her for comment on the matter.
The company didn’t stay in trouble for long. In February, the DEA announced it had negotiated a settlement with Morris & Dickson in which the company admitted all wrongdoing, promised not to break the law again and paid a $19 million penalty. In return, Morris & Dickson got its DEA license back.
Dickson also owns Sports South, one of the region’s largest firearm distributors. He is also a major Republican donor, giving $24,999 to Seabaugh and more than $40,000 to Gov. Jeff Landry over the past several years. Landry’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment on this story.
Dickson has also donated smaller amounts totaling $2,000, to Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell, D-Bossier City, who opposes the Pattern Energy transmission line project Dickson wants to stop, but he hasn’t taken a position on Seabaugh’s bill.
BATON ROUGE (WVUE) – A bill moving through the legislature would prevent non-Louisiana residents from requesting public records in the state.
Senate Bill 423 by Monroe Republican Senator Jay Morris, as it is written, would shield all records in Louisiana from being requested by non-residents.
An out-of-state resident who said she struggled to get a copy of her police report had a warning for Louisiana residents: be aware of what’s happening at the state capitol.
“It was pretty awful,” said Samantha Brennan of her experience dealing with records in Louisiana.
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Brennan was a student at LSU who worked part-time in the football recruiting office.
She said one of the star players on the team took a partially nude photo of her without consent and shared it around the team.
She filed a report with campus police, and later moved out of state. Brennan said, after reading allegations from other women against the same individual, she decided to come forward, but had difficulty accessing her report.
“I called, spoke with [the woman]. She asked me for my name, my birthday and my social security card and said, ‘I’m having trouble finding it,’” Brennan said. “Then I knew I had a problem. This is a red flag.”
LSU didn’t budge on releasing the report.
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“We had to sue for my police report,” Brennan said.
After a lawsuit was filed, and Brennan spoke in front of the legislature, the university released the report to her and apologized.
“Without that police report, I don’t really have any for sure credibility behind what I was trying to bring to the table,” Brennan said.
Gov. Landry questions taxpayer’s right to know how government decisions are made
Out-of-state public records experts weigh in on a Louisiana bill that is drawing lots of criticism
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Attorney: Bill would ‘decimate’ public records law in Louisiana, watchdog agrees
First Amendment attorney Scott Sternberg said it is vital to allow out-of-state residents to view and receive public records from Louisiana in some circumstances.
“I think it would really be an injustice if those folks out of state couldn’t access those vital records, and I know that’s going to get fixed,” Sternberg said.
Sternberg said he’s confident Morris’ bill will be amended prior to final passage.
Morris, appearing in a Senate committee on Wednesday, defended moving the bill forward with the same rationale used by Governor Jeff Landry to defend other public records bills.
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“Agencies are often harassed with multiple requests. My understanding is often they are even automatically generated,” he told senators. “Public records requests have become an industry.”
Morris, and Landry, are referring to out-of-state actors who may submit requests as a tactic to create a heavier workload.
“No matter what anybody says on the radio or on television, the bad actors here are not the reporters,” Sternberg said. “They’re people who are loading them up with public records requests, they’re usually PACs, political operations.”
Morris’ bill was reported favorably out of the committee, but with a draft amendment to allow out-of-state requesters access to “readily available” records.
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NEW ORLEANS, La. (KNOE) – A Louisiana State Supreme Court justice who earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Louisiana Monroe in 1982 was appointed to the Council of the Louisiana State Law Institute (LSLI) by his fellow justices.
Justice Jay McCallum graduated from ULM when it was still Northeast Louisiana University. Now, he serves in the highest court of Louisiana.
LSLI was formed in 1938 for the promotion and encouragement of clarification and simplification of Louisiana law. The organization also works to adapt to social needs, secure the better administration of justice and continue scholarly, legal research and scientific legal work.
McCallum got his juris doctorate from Louisiana State University in 1985. From there, he worked as a general practice lawyer at the offices of Rabun and McCallum in Union Parish. McCallum also served as an assistant district attorney, in the Louisiana House of Representatives from 1992-2002, as third judicial district court judge from 2002-2018, and in the Second Circuit Court of Appeal in 2018.
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In 2020, McCallum was elected to the Louisiana Supreme Court for District 4.
