Jeff LeJeune did such a good job running the site last week that I imagine a lot of our readers didn’t even notice I was gone, but I was. I took last week off from The Hayride, RVIVR and The American Spectator to work on a new Mike Holman novel.

This one is called The Necessary Men. It games out, using the Mike Holman-Pierce Polk universe, what a “friendly invasion” of Cuba might look like.

As I’ve said on social media, Cuban communists won’t like it. American communists really won’t like it. Everybody else will get a big kick out of it. It’s a very funny book – I’m writing it in a style similar to the first three Mike Holman novels, but this one leans a lot more heavily toward the Carl Hiassen/Dave Barry/Elmore Leonard sardonic style that I think fits political satire so well.

And it’s set not just in the modern day but this year, amid the current headlines. So it’ll feel like the events of the book are actually happening.

It’s going to serialize at The American Spectator next month, but with a twist – this thing is also going to be a video novel, with cinematic video clips providing the illustration. The book version which will be available at Amazon and the forthcoming MikeHolman.com website will have the little line drawing illustrations and scene markers the previous books had, and the ones I’ve produced so far are pretty entertaining in their own right.

Anyway, on July 3, when I started the “vacation” I’ve been on, I had just finished Chapter 2. Last night I finished Chapter 12. So in nine days I managed to kill 10 chapters of this thing, and that’s about as fast as I’ve ever written a book.

It helps when you do a lot of prep work. I’ve been researching Cuba pretty intensely for several weeks, which Grok and Claude are amazingly helpful in doing, and then deciding how much of that voluminous AI-assisted research I want to use and how much creative license I want to take in order to make an entertaining book.

It’s contributed to a more efficient writing process than I’ve ever had. And a lot smoother production, too. I think this is going to be the best of the Mike Holman books.

Jeff Landry, Liz Murrill And New Orleans

While I was out, it certainly appears the world kept turning. Particularly with respect to that rolling idiocy going on in the Big Easy.

You would have thought, with the Louisiana Supreme Court slapping down the indictment and arrest order for the state’s attorney general for the “crime” of writing letters to the mayor, DA and City Council in New Orleans advising them that no, you can’t call a special election to replace the duly elected Clerk of Court while she’s still on the job and that’s an illegal thing to do, that this would all go away. Functionally, it would appear that it has. After all, the judges in New Orleans’ criminal court system have all recused themselves from the case. I don’t know where it goes from here.

Other than the recriminations, that is.

I said two weeks ago when this moronic saga first came to a head that the leaders in that city would be awfully dissatisfied with the results of kicking over this anthill, especially given the lack of leverage New Orleans has over the rest of the state. Especially considering they’re looking for a $100 million-plus bailout from the state which is almost certainly going to result in the city going under fiscal administration. New Orleans’ mayor Helena Moreno pulled that bailout request and she’s now saying they’re going to do big mid-year budget cuts to close the hole.

But far-left Democrats forced to do budget cuts don’t do them responsibly. We know this. What’s going to happen is draconian cuts to basic services while they protect the garbage the city shouldn’t be spending money on. And it’ll get worse until, finally, they’ll go back to the state bond commission looking for that bailout, at which time the city is going to go under fiscal administration by the state.

Which is probably the best possible thing that could happen to New Orleans. It’s a city run by stupid communists, and everything the city government in New Orleans does is stupid and communistic. A fiscal conquest of New Orleans might do what the Katrina recovery could not.

Landry and his allies in the state legislature, who are probably going to end up in a special election to set the terms of that fiscal administration – wait until you see that show at the Capitol – need to be thinking about what structural changes can be brought in New Orleans.

One I would consider is to break the city up into smaller units. Incorporate Lakeview, Carrollton, Algiers and New Orleans East, for example, into separate cities which are part of Orleans Parish. Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser has talked about turning the French Quarter into a state park, which would potentially put the 6,000 people who live in the Quarter in a position to govern themselves as a separate entity which deals with the Office of State Parks rather than the New Orleans City Council and mayor.

There are lots of ideas out there. It’s time to consider them. The status quo in New Orleans is untenable and the current political leadership in that  city cannot fix it.

The Fourth-Worst State In America… In A Survey Which Says Tennessee Is The Worst?

CNBC isn’t generally regarded as a stupid network. If you’re looking for financial news it’s… decent.

But all of the corporate media entities out there are producing these surveys that are designed to get attention, draw clicks and fill airtime, and CNBC’s surveys are some of the absolute dumbest.

A perfect example is this new thing they’ve produced which says Louisiana is the fourth-worst state in America to live in.

OK, we’ve seen those surveys before. Being in the bottom five of those is really nothing new for the Bayou State. We all live here for reasons these surveys don’t generally quantify.

But look at the places CNBC says are even worse than Louisiana, and, well…

Tennessee ranked last among all 50 states for “quality of life” in CNBC’s annual America’s Top States for Business study for 2026.

The business news channel said this year’s study had an increased emphasis on “quality of life,” saying this year’s methodology has this category making up 11.6% of the state’s overall score. That’s up from about 10% last year.

To get a state’s quality of life score, CNBC said it used data on factors such as crime rates, air quality and health care in addition to availability of childcare, inclusiveness of state laws and reproductive rights.

So, wait – you get dinged in this survey for banning pediatric sex changes and forbidding mothers from killing their unborn children? Oh, OK.

After collecting data on all 50 states, CNBC named America’s 10 worst states to live in based on their “quality of life” scores and listed Tennessee in the No. 1 spot.

The study put Tennessee’s quality of life score at 64 out of 100, scoring a grade of F. It said the Volunteer State’s strength was air quality and weaknesses were crime, inclusiveness and worker protections.

And here’s the list of the 10 worst states to live in…

1. Tennessee
2. Texas
3. Indiana
4. Louisiana
5. Georgia
6. Utah
7. Missouri
8. Alabama
9. Oklahoma
10. Arkansas

They think Tennessee and Texas are the two worst states to live in. Not New Jersey, California, Minnesota, New York or Illinois, where people are streaming past the state lines in an effort to escape the malaise tyrannical idiots who govern those places have imposed. Tennessee and Texas.

And all of the top 10 are solidly red states.

Uhhhh, OK.

This was a CNBC survey. It might as well have been a survey by Democratic Underground.

Oh, and CNBC also ranked Tennessee #9 in the survey CNBC did for Top 10 Best States for Business. In that survey, Texas was #4, Georgia was #7 and Indiana was #10. So apparently, CNBC, which is a business channel, hates business.

And you wonder why corporate media is dying.

LSU Baseball Might Be Coming Back With A Vengeance

About the best thing you can say about the college sports year that ended last month, if you’re an LSU fan, is that it’s over. Women’s basketball, gymnastics and softball had pretty good seasons, but the three big hitters on the campus are football, men’s basketball and baseball, and all three of those were absolute disasters.

Baseball, coming off a national championship in 2025, was the biggest disappointment of all. A 9-21 SEC record and 30-28 overall, no postseason and a general sense of collapse around the program despite some of the preseason rankings putting Jay Johnson’s Tigers in the top 3 or even #1, was a mind-blowing fall from grace.

These things will happen in the age of NIL and the transfer portal, though, and if you look at what’s happened to previous national champions, the hangover effect is real. It is very, VERY hard to maintain a level of excellence in baseball now where you’ll compete for a national title every year.

Johnson has freely admitted he made that worse by whiffing on a bunch of transfer portal additions last year who weren’t good enough to win in the SEC. During the season he addressed that as best he could by playing freshmen, and as a result he found some pieces he can build around.

But he nailed down some much higher-profile transfer additions in this year’s class, including a whole new outfield in Bino Watters, Jason Wachs and Angel Laya who were all recruited by everyone in college baseball, and an All-American pitcher in Landon Hood. These are kids the Major League scouts think are future big-leaguers and they’re very much on the draft lists in 2027 and 2028. It’s worth noting that left-handed relief pitcher Santiago Garcia, who went in the 12th round, was the only transfer addition to the 2026 team who was drafted.

Then Johnson got some good news when Stephen Milam decided to come back for another year.

And then he absolutely hit the jackpot over the weekend when his high school signing class, which is loaded with kids who look like future major leaguers, emerged from the Major League Draft… not completely unscathed but shockingly intact.

Johnson signed 15 recruits rated among the top 200 major league draft prospects, which is generally thought to be the standard for a player you’re likely to lose to the pro ranks. And LSU managed to keep eight of those, including a pair of players in Malachi Washington and Dominic Santarelli who were drafted on Sunday but publicly announced they were coming to LSU anyway. This after several other players who were considered as possible high draft picks publicly pulled out of the draft before it started.

Freshmen can play key roles in a national championship run. We saw that in 2025 when Derek Curiel and Casan Evans did it for LSU. The new crop – including some super-impressive pitchers like Cooper Sides, Kolby Stringer, Lucas Nawrocki, Coleton Brady and Braxton Beaty, plus Washington, Santarelli and Nate Davis among the position players – is loaded with guys who have that kind of potential.

And the interesting part is that Johnson isn’t really going to be counting on any of the freshmen. If they’re going to play, it’ll be because they forced their way in.

Nothing is guaranteed. Most people thought LSU was loaded this past year and that team utterly flopped. It’s possible that could happen again, but the 2027 baseball Tigers are going to have a roster loaded with players that everybody wants. Johnson has a track record that when he has good players, he wins. He’ll have good players next year, including some guys who are much better than they showed this past year and ought to be angry about that.