Katrina case hangs over attorney general race Perhaps the best indicator of partisan fortunes in Louisiana state elections this year will come from a contest that typically does not generate a lot of excitement, that for attorney general. It also can tell much about how anti-incumbent sentiment there is out there that will tend to favor Republican candidates. There’s no doubt that the best Democrats can hope for in this cycle is to minimize losses. They may be able to prevent any losses in the state Senate but will lose some seats in the House. They also look highly likely to lose most statewide offices (that all but one major candidates running for governor was a Republican six months ago and the only long-time Democrat in the race was considered to be a second-tier choice and continues to lag the others in funding is telling). On primary election day, we will know whether the GOP is headed for big or minimal success, or somewhere in between by the end of the general election day next month, on the outcomes of the governor’s, agriculture commissioner’s, and attorney general’s races. For governor, Republican Rep. Bobby Jindal faces the “original” Democrat, a Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-Democrat, and a Republican-turned-independent as major foes. For agriculture commissioner, incumbent Democrat Bob Odom faces two major Republicans. For attorney general, incumbent Democrat Charles Foti faces Republican Royal Alexander and Democrat Buddy Caldwell. Minimal expectations will be met if Jindal is forced into a runoff, Odom makes a runoff, and Foti makes a runoff. They go higher if Jindal wins outright and Odom fails to make the runoff. Things will look really well for the GOP if in addition Foti fails to make the general election runoff. The attorney general’s race is the bellwether because Jindal is widely expected to win the governor’s contest while Odom, beset with strong challengers and plenty of controversy and bad publicity, is expected to have a tough time holding onto his position. But real Republican and reformist waves would be evident if Alexander and Caldwell make a runoff, with Alexander eventually winning. This is because each attorney general candidate has his strengths and flaws as candidates. Foti has the advantages of incumbency but has lost two high profile cases that he was advised by many professionals that he could not win, spending millions of taxpayers dollars in these futile efforts that look more and more like publicity stunts (despite the losses, he insists he was correct). Alexander has solid Republican and conservative credentials and a variety of experiences in and out of government and different levels, but has faced a lawsuit over his previous employment as a congressional staffer (whether the suit has any merit, which he says it doesn’t) and has had made public some statements that made it look like he was skirting campaign finance laws (even as all parties involved say he was not). Caldwell brings much experience …
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Rush Limbaugh, Democrats, and Phony Soldiers Democrats are retreating in trying to use a comment made by conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh to distract the American public from their poor, politicized judgment about the Iraq war. Unfortunately for Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, the realization this was a losing issue came too late for her and gave her the opportunity again to show her contempt for free speech and to remind the public of her mistaken policy prescriptions associated with the prosecution of that war. Recently, Limbaugh referred to the left’s penchant for producing people who claim the U.S. military regularly commits atrocities in Iraq but who are found never to have witnessed such things because they haven’t served there as “phony soldiers.” A hack front organization for liberal operatives connected to Democrat Sen. Hillary Clinton then tried to promote the idea that Limbaugh had referred to anyone in the military who opposed the war, which a review of the context of the remarks shows to be utterly mistaken and thereby driven by politics. The goal of this distraction was to try to establish an equivalency between these remarks and those made by an allied leftist pressure group that questioned in a newspaper ad the commander in Iraq Gen. David Petraeus’ honesty, competence, and patriotism that Democrats saw no problem with until public opinion turned decisively against them, in order to deflect criticism. But as public awareness of the vapidity of this attempt increased, most Senate Democrats embarrassed themselves by sending a letter to the head of Limbaugh’s network asking for a disavowal of his remarks (naturally declined, for there was nothing offensive about calling someone who lied about his service a “phony soldier”). While a few Democrat senators were sensible and could think with enough independence from their party not to sign it, Landrieu possessed neither the intelligence nor wisdom to do so indicated by her signing on to this foolishness. Certainly Landrieu has been looking for a way to turn the Louisiana public’s attention away from the series of bad choices she has made marching in lockstep with Democrats’ efforts to bring about American defeat in Iraq since victory dos not serve their political agenda. Only last month, after Petraeus reported the increase in U.S. force commitment and strategic alterations known as the “surge” were increasing stability and suppressing violence in Iraq, Landrieu acknowledged his testimony then flatly said his expert testimony did not change her closed mind. And would the fact that, as widely reported yesterday, since the surge’s implementation there has been a continual decrease in military and civilian deaths that continues to accelerate change her mind? As of today, there’s no indication that she has woken up on this issue. Signing the mistaken letter is consistent with Landrieu’s pro-censorship policy concerning political debate. And no doubt she hoped it also would get peoples’ minds off of her connections to disgraced …
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Jndal and Boasso exchange jabs in Shreveport governor debate You can tell which Louisiana gubernatorial candidates are getting desperate when they resort to outright deception about an opponent's actions and statement, as occurred during the second “debate” at my home institution. Democrat State Sen. Walter Boasso lost his cool when, in the space of 30 seconds, first he lied about opponent Republican Bobby Jindal’s voting record, and then about the content of Jindal’s campaign commercials. Boasso first started going off the rails when he said Jindal had voted against the State Children’s Health Insurance Program and belittled him for that. In fact, Jindal was absent for the final vote and has said he would have voted for it. When Jindal interrupted with the moderator’s permission, no doubt to correct Boasso, Boasso then whined over him about resenting how Jindal had called him corrupt, probably referring to a campaign commercial where Jindal asks voters to put someone in office who is not part of the old “corrupt” crowd and not one of the “clowns” currently running the state. But Jindal never has said any of his opponents are corrupt, from his own mouth or in his commercials – so it’s interesting that Boasso would think it was him to which the commercials referred, but definitely inaccurate to impute Jindal called Boasso “corrupt.” Boasso said he referred to an earlier version of the legislation that Jindal had voted against. But especially given the fact the previous day Jindal had quite publicly stated he was for the SCHIP bill and would vote to overturn its veto, it was clear he was trying to distort and confuse the issue, just as he distorted the Jindal ad’s meaning. By contrast, Democrat Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell laughed off the “clown” remark in the ad, and independent businessman John Georges used the exchange to argue “partisan” bickering of this nature was at the heart of troubles in Louisiana governance. They clearly scored points at Boasso’s expense. Again, this paints Boasso as a candidate willing to say or do “whatever it takes,” apparently no matter how far removed it is from reality, to win, a promise he has previously made and confirmed by his partisan switch for political gain. As negative as some voters will see this, however, another perception problem looms for him. This incident was consistent with a combative, pugnacious approach concerning Jindal that Boasso has taken in both debates. Jindal is taking it for now and, with the exception of calling Boasso on the vote fib, has refrained from counter jabs, knowing he well can afford to desist with a good chance of winning outright in the primary, then unloading on whoever makes the general election runoff against him if it comes to that. This allows Georges and Campbell to engage in light criticism of Jindal and get a free ride off Boasso’s back as his …
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Student: web video a huge mistake To say the University of Louisiana at Monroe’s administration overreacted to a sophomoric prank would be an understatement. To say concerning the incident that ULM’s administration strayed from what an institution of higher learning should be about would be charitable. To say that the ULM’s administration’s response to the situation was an exercise geared more towards soothing itself and catering to its own attitudes rather than appropriately dealing with the situation would be accurate. Some time ago, a white ULM student on the spur of the moment with her white buddies decided to do an impromptu interpretation of the crime at the heart of the “Jena 6” case – where one black juvenile assisted by others is alleged to have beaten a white classmate. Some of them smeared themselves with mud (presumably as “blackface”) and then pantomimed pummeling and kicking one of them on the ground, amid mostly laughter and one racial epithet. (Supposedly there was also an exchange where one suggested putting a noose around the “victim” – which apparently did not happen in the real-life incident – but I couldn’t hear that.) The 1:12 video’s audio was bad, its cinematography was wanting, and if you knew nothing about the Jena 6 incident, you’d have no idea what it was about. Despite the poor artistic quality of it all, the female still thought it worthy enough of posting to a social networking site. Eventually, other students stumbled onto it and some were disturbed by it. This caused the woman to reevaluate her posting of it as apparently she did not mean to offend anybody with it, and she took it off the site with apologies. Yet, in the eyes of the ULM administration, the damage seemed to have been done when the “national” media made inquiries about it. My guess is, since I can’t find any other national media reference to it at the time of writing this, that it came from a Washington Post blogger – who asks the questions the ULM administration should have considered. Rather, ULM reacted as if it were time to suspend the university’s business of education in order to embark on a group therapy session, on short notice convening a gathering of students, estimated at 500 and most of who, for some reason, were participants in the school’s athletic teams and apparently hardly representative of the school’s overall student body. This is opposed to the proper response which should have been a short statement to the media reiterating that ULM respects the rights of all individuals, that the student’s free speech production did not represent that of the ULM community, and that ULM’s respect for free speech and the right of academic inquiry meant it could take no action other than publicly condemning the video, being it was private speech unrelated to any scholastic work at the university in any way. Instead, Vice Provost for Student Affairs …
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Bush’s veto threat affects LaCHIP expansion Just about a hundred days to go now in the term of Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, and judging by the idiocy and divisive partisanship of recent remarks of hers, the day of her departure cannot come soon enough. In mean-spirited commenting about all the Republican U.S. House members who voted against a budget-busting State Children’s Health Insurance Program, the Democrat version of which brings a supposedly low-income health care program to children instead provides for universal, government-managed health care to families well into the middle class and to many young adults to age 21, Blanco made the following ignorant, asinine remarks:

Bordering on dementia was her blather that the Republicans voted against it “to protect the insurance companies. Obviously people can’t afford it (health insurance) or they would have gotten it.” What this dunderhead doesn’t seem to get is it’s a bad bill, so instead she has to go casting aspersions about principled objections based on the lack of soundness of the policy. And it would help if she got a clue on why some people don’t have health insurance for their children – some because they are too poor, but others because they’d rather spend money on flashy new cell phones, cars, televisions, shoes, and clothes, or on cigarettes and on booze or, most unfortunately, on drugs and on other illicit behaviors. The shortcomings of the federal reauthorization, which thereby provides the lion's share of money for Louisiana to fund its CHIP program, also includes discouraging private sector insuring initiatives and bypassing many modest-income families, besides including the non-poor and adults in it. Simply, this ever-expanding program if anything it will make health care provision worse for children. And Blanco truly is an ignoramus if she cannot understand this, …
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posted by Jeff Sadow, 1 year, 3 months, 5 days, 10 hours, 3 minutes ago

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Term limits aren't GOP bonanza Ever since qualifying for state elections ended last month, it’s been clear that Republican chances for taking control of the Louisiana Senate are slim, while the odds probably don’t favor a takeover of the House. As noted then, in a state where the Republican Party has come so far so fast it can be difficult recruiting quality candidates for whom experience in politics makes them more electable. Still, after it all goes down by the middle of November, while the GOP may not achieve goals as lofty as once hoped, conservatives probably will in electing a more conservative legislature. This is, as mentioned last week, the direct result of term limits which have the effect of producing candidates succeeding term-limited members, even if of the same party, that are closer to the median voter. And the median voter in Louisiana, by perhaps every electoral indicator except the Legislature’s partisan composition, is more conservative ideologically than this body. Even party leaders both Republican and Democrat affirm that the realized and likely successful new Democrats will be, on the whole, more conservative. Yet, “more conservative” is not the same as “conservative,” and besides the strengthening of the bench for the GOP which will occur relatively quickly over time, the biggest obstacle in front of the party in getting elected true conservatives, as opposed to those who are more liberal than conservative, is the state’s bizarre nonpartisan blanket primary system. By letting candidates regardless of party run together in a contest that can serve simultaneously as a general election, it does not penalize candidates or voters for aberrant behavior; i.e. calling yourselves one party label while behaving differently from it. Taking a closed primary (only party registrants can vote in its primary) as an example, the electoral system now to be used in the state for federal elections, the first effect after its institution would be party-switching favoring Republicans as conservative Democrats find they no longer could choose preferred candidates in a primary (for those who didn’t already do this in response to the federal office change). In turn, this would encourage conservative Democrat candidates to switch affiliations because they would have to compete with a more liberal base to get a primary nomination, increasing their chances of primary defeat. It also would raise the chances of more conservative Republicans getting elected because they have a higher likelihood of beating switchers in their primary, rather than, as now, facing them in front of the entire electorate, and also becoming more likely to defeat more moderate Republicans in the process. Of course, for all this to happen Louisiana law would have to change and that means the Democrats who still control the Legislature would have to hand the rope to Republicans, until the GOP can get majorities in both houses. But this process doesn’t have to be delayed necessarily. The change to closed primaries for federal offices occurred because of a …
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Governor hopefuls eye surplus Interviews with the major Louisiana gubernatorial candidates about state fiscal policy, especially dealing with a projected $1 billion surplus, for the upcoming year more than anything it else make it seem like they’re all trying to say the same thing. Still, they managed to show enough of a varied response to reveal how well in touch with reality they appear to be, and thus who best may serve the state. Least realistic is Democratic Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell, and not just for his economy-killing oil processing tax which itself won’t work and for that reason is highly unlikely ever to pass the Legislature and to get a vote of the people for it to go into effect even if Campbell pulled off an unlikely win. Rather, it’s the statement by Campbell that he’s a “fiscal conservative.” His past record as a state senator shows no fiscal discipline at all, and even today, by way of example, he continues to support big government spending such as throwing money at an unnecessarily-large new charity hospital in New Orleans to prop up an inefficient, underperforming health care model. His would be dangerous hands in which to trust Louisiana’s economic policy. Businessman independent John Georges, who touts his background, seems out to lunch on the issue when he declared surpluses of the past couple of years were not part of hurricane disaster recovery money from the federal government. Months ago the figure was $60 billion having flowed to the state, and it shouldn’t take running a huge company to understand 4 percent sales tax here, income taxes of 2 to 6 percent there, and then payroll taxes on top of it, that the state has pulled in several billion bucks in revenues from it. If Georges cannot understand this, it’s hard to trust him to make good economic policy for the state. Democrat state Sen. Walter Boasso hits the rights themes – it’s just that you can’t really tell what he’s going to do. He speaks broadly – “put all of the tax breaks on the table and make sure taxpayers are truly benefiting from them,” “eliminate deadhead jobs and emphasize positions that directly serve the public,” etc. – without giving detailed approaches to accomplishing these goals, making him sound like all hat and no cattle. Republican Rep. Bobby Jindal seems to have the most accurate, comprehensive idea of what good fiscal policy would be. He and Boasso (and, to a lesser extent, Georges) sing together but Jindal puts his money where his mouth with specific ideas, for example, about business taxes, freezing salary increases for unfilled jobs (if not eliminating them entirely), and the like. Still, all the candidates must come to grips with the fact that any currently-projected surplus (to be officially declared in December) is one-time in nature and so only can address fiscal situations created by poor policy in the past, but this does nothing …
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Candidates for governor spar in first televised debate As I have noted elsewhere, and this has been particularly true since political campaigns became largely controllable by candidates through their electronic advertising and direct mail strategies, candidate “debates” are consumed by only a small portion of the electorate and, unless some tremendous blunder occurs, will influence few voters’ choices. (They aren’t really debates because there’s little give-and-take among candidates, and they are given impossibly short windows in which to provide anything more than the most simplistic or superficial answers.) The format of this encounter, arranged by the Louisiana Public Broadcasting network, did not deviate from this sound-bite extravaganza. Nonetheless, perhaps to make themselves seem more relevant to an election season, the media love to have them and so to perform my civic duty to readers I watched the first of the live television debates among the considered top candidates for Louisiana’s governorship. There’s no reason to give a summary of what was asked and how who answered, because that can be done elsewhere. Instead, I will neatly summarize the candidates’ gestalten: Democrat state Sen. Walter Boasso – Jindal bad, me good; other than that, I can speak in broad, unverifiable platitudes about what needs to be done in this state. Democrat Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell – clueless about how the world works and therefore in suggesting and implementing realistic public policy that could improve the state. Independent John Georges – a businessman is needed to solve the state problems, without the realization that government and business are very different things; it is the implementation of the right ideas, not the execution of government’s business in an improved way, which will improve things. Republican Rep. Bobby Jindal – cut taxes, change priorities in spending, attack corruption, and reemphasize school discipline that will get the state right back on track. The most interesting moment came when the Baton Rouge Advocate’s (which editorially despises Jindal) editor Carl Redman predictably asked Jindal about the role his faith would play in governance, particularly related to the issue of abortion and the teaching of intelligent design in schools. Intended to make Jindal look narrow-minded and dogmatic, Jindal turned the tables with his reply that faith informed his desire to serve others, that as governor he would uphold the law concerning abortion, and that the best-educated students came from teaching them about everything connected to science. The least interesting moments came courtesy of Campbell, who presented a caricature of an uninformed ideologue who misbegottenly blamed ills on outside, unseen forces and, frankly, made one feel sorry for him as an anachronism whom the world had left behind preventing him from contributing much of anything in the way of public policy, much less serve as governor. Other than Campbell appearing as a crank overly concerned with Louisiana relative to Mississippi and Arkansas, there were little the candidates said that would affect their …
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National education exam shows mixed progress The “Nation’s Report Card” is out, and Louisiana schools and students as a whole flunked yet again. The nationally-applied test covers reading and mathematics for 4th and 8th graders. Overall for each, the state finished no higher than 45th and as a whole only about 20 percent of students were graded as proficient or better, meaning about 80 percent of Louisiana’s 4th and 8th graders are non-proficient in reading and math. This is miserable, and the educational establishment and its defenders no doubt will offer a combination of excuses or “silver lining” statements to deflect from its failures. Typical of the latter is the comment of the former head of one of the bigger underperforming school districts in the state: Assistant Education Superintendent Ollie Tyler, a former Caddo schools superintendent, said Louisiana students have steadily led the nation in improvements on [the] NAEP [test]. Although that did not happen this year, the number of students excluded from NAEP testing “significantly dropped, and that makes these results a reliable base from which we can continue to improve.” Translation: the assumed progress of recent years was an artifact of an unrepresentative sample, and the no progress situation of the present most accurately describes how little education has progressed in Louisiana – but, hey, maybe it can get better. The excuses will be something on the order of Louisiana has more minority students (of whom blacks and Hispanics typically perform worse although Asians typically perform better than average), that it has more poor students (who also typically perform worse) and teachers’ salaries are too low to get better teaching. But an investigation of the report and a little ancillary material, and a comparison with a neighbor, shows these are all bogus as explanations. Very interestingly, in a relative sense, both minority students and poorer students (indicated by those on the free school lunch program) in Louisiana performed relatively better than the state’s students as a whole. In some categories of these, Louisiana actually was almost near the national average. If we excluded white students and “non-poor” students, Louisiana would rank much higher relatively (even as the proportions of those deemed at least proficient would go down somewhat.) But checking next door, we find that a state similar in ethnic composition, Texas, had students doing not only far better than Louisiana students, but were among the top in the nation in most categories (and thus in the aggregate) for both grades and both subjects. Their proportion of students achieving proficient status was about double that of Louisiana’s. And it’s not teachers’ salaries causing this: Texas’ average salary was only about $1,500 more than Louisiana’s last year, ranking only 9th among the Southern Regional Education Board states, well behind states which were well behind Texas in student achievement. The truth, long resisted by the Louisiana educational establishment, is that it is change in attitudes about education delivery that will …
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Mike Stagg has researched and written a great deal on LCRM - a group with similar DNA to that of Texas Citizens for a Republican Majority - the group which ultimately took down Tom Delay... Will LCRM have similar affect on David Vitter? Or is he already finished with the DC MADAM and Wendy Cortez? This week as promised, we bring you more information on LCRM – we started the conversation last week but this week Mike Stagg brings it into focus for us.

The Louisiana Committee for a Republican Majority (LCRM) is a very small, deeply-pocketed special interest group that was convened by Senator David Vitter and his wife Wendy in late 2005. The group's roots, means and methods position it to be a formidable and destructive force in the upcoming election. The declared objective of the group is to establish Republican rule in Louisiana, starting with control of the Legislature in this year's election. The leaders of the group committed themselves to raising $2.5 million to accomplish this goal. Until this summer's sex scandal involving Senator Vitter, the organization's core membership group of about 25 individuals and companies were on track to raise more than $2 million on their own. In the campaign finance report filed last week, it is apparent that the Vitter scandal has forced the LCRM to look outside of Louisiana for financial support. Still, the organization has $700,000 cash on hand. More ominously, the latest report indicates that the organization has endorsed no candidates for office, meaning it will be able to spend the money it has without regard to spending limits imposed on organizations that contribute funds to candidates' campaigns. Texas homebuilder Bob Perry's involvement in the group via a $100,000 contribution added to the fact that the LCRM has made no endorsements, makes it clear that the LCRM will use its money to wage war on Democrats. This is the preferred method of doing business for organizations to which Perry contributes — and he's contributed a lot of money to campaigns of this sort. Regardless of anyone's party affiliation, the LCRM's super partisan, attack-style politics should sound alarms. We've seen how it has distorted politics on the national level — politics at the federal level has become so poisoned that Congress can't even stop a war that 70 percent of the people oppose. We have experience in Louisiana with the impact of this narrowly focused, negative-only politics. It was in the 1991 governor's race when Jack Kent, owner of Marine Shale Processing, decided he wanted to settle a score with then-Governor Buddy Roemer who was running for re-election. Marine Shale Processing had been shut down by the Department of Environmental Quality and the Environmental Protection Agency, but Kent blamed Roemer. In that 1991 election cycle, Kent spent $500,000 of his own money on ads that blanketed the state attacking Roemer. Kent succeeded in preventing Roemer from making the run-off, so he was satisfied with the results. But, what about the rest of …
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posted by Stephen Handwerk, 1 year, 3 months, 1 week, 4 days, 16 hours, 45 minutes ago

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