Curiously, some self-identified (whether all are registered as such is another matter) Republicans publicly have announced support for Democrat state Rep. Don Cazayoux in the May 3 special election for the U.S. Sixth District. They point to his beliefs “being pro-life, pro-gun and his ideas for national security” as the reason why. Therefore, one only can conclude they remain ignorant or deluded about his record in the state Legislature that does not support causes traditionally aligned with Republicans.
A review of the past three years of Cazayoux’s votes shows a legislator more than willing to raise taxes and fees to fund big government, to spend taxpayers’ dollars on wasteful projects, to neglect wise spending choices, to introduce greater government control over the economy, and to reduce citizens’ economic choices, among other things. Some of his more outrageous examples follow:
Regarding his views on government intervention into the economy, in 2005, he voted to put a floor on gasoline prices, artificially raising them, and in 2006 voted to increase them again potentially by mandating the use of alternative fuels at a certain point, for increasing the minimum wage which would have hurt business and the economy, and for allowing local government passing through revenue-raising on cable television bills and to restrict consumer choice in that area, and last year voted against the privatization of the state’s troubled insurer.
Concerning his record on taxing and spending, in 2005, he voted to increase taxes on health care providers, that enabled increased government spending, which would have been passed through to consumers, while last year he voted to authorize building of a palatial replacement for New Orleans’ charity hospital that would facilitate continuance of Louisiana’s present costly, inefficient indigent health car provision regime.
Reviewing the kinds of spending priorities he favors, in 2005 he voted to enable more money to be spent on the dubious “economic development” projects around the state, the building of reservoirs, in this case in Morehouse Parish, while in 2006 he did the same for the existing Poverty Point reservoir.
Last year, on several measures designed to reduce government spending that could have led to a tax cut, to cut the size of government through eliminating long-term vacant positions, and to prevent pay raises going to these “ghost” positions, he voted against all of them.
While a vocal of supporter of banning types of free tickets to legislators this year, in 2006 he voted against an almost-identical measure.
In 2006, he voted to extend government protections to practitioners of homosexuality, which would have embroiled government in needless litigation.
Finally, he practices enthusiastically what many are growing to dislike, earmarks, a practice that his Republican opponent Louis “Woody” Jenkins says he will stop.
What also should be causing severe cognitive dissonance for these Republicans is Cazayoux has had a fairly populist and liberal record overall in the Legislature. Over the past three years his scores on the voting scorecard produced in my Louisiana Legislature Log gives him numbers (where 0 is “perfectly” liberal/populist) of 44, 30, and 10. Either these Republicans are not very bright or are willfully ignorant if they cannot see Cazayoux does not believe in the ideas that Republicans typically do.
These wayward GOP identifiers are playing right into the hands of Cazayoux’s campaign which is trying to portray Cazayoux as more conservative than he actually is so he does not seem as out-of-touch which the district as much as he really is. Just because you cherry-pick a few conservative positions does not make you one, and if these Republicans themselves are conservatives they should know that.
Once again, Sadow nails it.
ReplyDeleteOr perhaps our dislike of Jenkins is greater than that of Cazayoux.
ReplyDeleteThere will be other candidates running in the general election, some of whom, if not all, who are more conservative than Cazayoux. If you don't like Jenkins and don't want to support Cazayoux's liberalism, you can vote for one of those others.
ReplyDeleteActually, there is a very good conservative choice and that choice is Ashley Casey. The Baton Rouge Business report in this weeks edition says, "...Ashley Casey is a serious challenger with some money..."
ReplyDeleteIts easy to read your comment and see how you try to weave a fact, i.e. the way Cazayoux has voted, into an inference that you believe. Logically, your attempts do not follow.
ReplyDeleteJust because Cazayoux voted to increase the minimum wage, it does not follow that it would "hurt businesses and the economy."
After all, there are numerous economists on both side of that issue alone which disagree about whether increasing the minimum wage injects demand into the economy or instead suppresses supply.
Clearly, you are trying to speak to an audience that already agrees with you and isn't going to look at the weak arguments you're writing. Which is exactly why your opinion is rendered non-objective and worthless.
There's only one question here. Will Cazayoux vote for Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House, or won't he?
ReplyDeleteFeel free to ask him the question, or alternatively just notice that she is fundraising for his campaign, this supposed "conservative Democrat."
A vote for Don Cazayoux is a vote for Nancy Pelosi, LITERALLY. So those of you making alternative arguments about this "conservative or moderate Democrat," go sell crazy somewhere else, we're full here.
>Just because Cazayoux voted to increase the minimum wage, it does not follow that it would "hurt businesses and the economy."
ReplyDeleteIt does indeed follow. Feel free to search the site where I post more in detail about this issue, or check other sites such as the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute where they explain it quite fully.
>After all, there are numerous economists on both side of that issue alone which disagree about whether increasing the minimum wage injects demand into the economy or instead suppresses supply.
Just because there is dispute about something does not mean that one understanding does not do significantly better than others in modelling reality and explaining it. In this case, looking objectively at such aspects such as human nature, data, and theory, it confirms the argument I made.
You sound like just the kind of person Cazayoux is banking on to put him over the top -- not willing to think critically and/or sufficiently, or in a comprehensively informed fashion, about issues or his preferences concerning them, ready to accept his assertions to make him appear as something he is not. If you like his support of hiking the minimum wage, feel free to vote for him. But don't fool yourself about it, or about the undesirable policy implications for most Americans and the country that it would have, among other comparable inferior policy preferences he has demonstrated support for in the past.
Of course, this is your site. And you are free to use it as a mouthpiece for your own views.
ReplyDeleteBut blatant subjectivity parading as objectivity is not only transparent but its pathetic. Especially for a professor.
You very well know that studies "proving" a minimum wage for working men and women destroys the economy published by the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation--well, they carry about as much weight as a study by R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris disproving cigarettes cause cancer.
You very well know it would be easy to pull studies from other interested institutions to contradict your "critical" "sufficient" and "comprehensive" opinions.
Attempting to smear my views will get you no where. I have no dog in this fight. But the lack of objectivity in your arguments sickens me.
Do you indoctrinate your students the way you indoctrinate your readers? Competing views be damned.
>blatant subjectivity parading as objectivity is not only transparent but its [sic] pathetic.
ReplyDeleteProve that what I wrote about the minimum wage, or Heritage, or Cato, is not objective. In all cases, we take data, we subject it to some sort of analysis (theirs and other attempts much more sophisticated than mine), and draw conclusions. How is that not objective? Please, be my guest, criticize the work on its merits, show its presumed shortcomings, instead of relying on prejudicial attitudes about organizations that make them automatically suspect to you.
In these analyses, we must make basic assumptions about human being and their behaviors. The ones I make are, through a thorough study of the human condition, the most compelling. Just because you may disagree with them does not invalidate that fact.
This is the approach the ideal instructor should pursue -- present all the evidence, then let students sort out it and critically think their through it. An approach, it appears from your invective, that runs counter to your indoctrination and fear at your ideas being challenged.
"In these analyses, we must make basic assumptions about human being [sic] and their behaviors. The ones I make are, through a thorough study of the human condition, the most compelling. Just because you may disagree with them does not invalidate that fact."
ReplyDeleteThey are not "facts" in the sense that they are proven. You have treated them as such, but you very well know they are merely half of a larger debate.
If anything, my ideas are for a balanced approach to what is at issue. Your views are to endorse a side that makes more logical sense to you, and you alone, and to present it as fact.
What contra evidence is there presented in this post? Your approach is most certainly not to "present all the evidence," rather it appears to be to present only the evidence favorable to your view, and to thereafter declare fact.
I fail to find how this approach is objectively anything but indoctrination.
Poor Republicans. They may have picked the only goofball Republican anywhere near Baton Rouge that can't beat a Democrat.
ReplyDeleteYou use a phrase like "practitioners of homosexuality?" And you earned your PhD in New Orleans? Did gays in the Marigny try to recruit you and force the gay agenda down your throat or something?
ReplyDeleteActually, a vote for Don Cazayoux is just that- a vote for Don Cazayoux. If you want to try to bring Pelosi into the equation, save that for the fall. This is a special election, and the winner will stand for election to the 111th Congress... the next time an election for speaker is held.
ReplyDeleteOne of the more tiresome, illogical ideas foisted into discussions of public policy is this notion that because there is debate on an issue that there cannot be discovered truth about it. It stems from the entirely mistaken notion that fact and truth in the world are contigent. Not all at: truth of matters stand universally and independently, in no way dependent upon our abilities to discern it. Thus, if something looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck, and just because you create disagreemnent by saying it's a pig does not invalidate that fact.
ReplyDeleteAgain, sticking with the minimum wage argument as an example, reference those sources I suggested, and then show me where an alternative conceptualization provides a superior understanding. You may think you can, but I'll bet if I then review the base assumptions you use, I'll find, that through my own study of the matter, those are less representative of reality than the others you may criticize. In this fashion, the truth is attained.
Since we seek the truth on matters, we must accept the most plausible explanation where our investigatory tools cannot yield unambiguous certainty in and of themselves (unlike in the hard sciences). That does not mean all explanations are equally as valid, as liberals typically try to assert, or that there are many truths. There are not, and comprehensive, objective study applying great rigor and logic leads one in the direction on this issue the truth: that the minimum wage hurts almost everybody involved, and more generally confirms the intellectual and evidential superiority of conservatism in explaining how the world works.
(Which is why such efforts are made in academia to impose a liberal orthodoxy -- those who do so fear the competition of ideas because, deep down, they fear, if not actually know, they will lose. That's why conservatives like me don't fear giving all sides of the debate -- we know as long as minds are open, conservatism will be convincing. By the way, unlike in the classroom, opinion columns can promote one conceptualization over another, so get over that.)
I wrote the above not only to educate you, but because it ties in with the Cazayoux effort. He can go around all he wants cherrypicking a few issues here and there to assert he is not a liberal, but on many occasions he talks like a liberal and he votes like a liberal, so, guess what, he is a liberal. That's the truth, whether he wants to admit it to anyone. Liberalism as an ideology is long on rhetoric and emotion and short on fact and reason, so it is perfectly consistent that he tries to distract from fact and reason to keep people from knowing who he really is.
>practitoners of homosexuality
ReplyDeleteI use that phrasing to emphasize that, among the "victim" categories the left loves to assign on the basis of people's assumed characteristics, only sexual preference is defined not by an immutable biological quality like race, but by behavior. You are a homosexual only if you practice homosexual acts; there's no biology driving this (remember, there's no such things as a "gay" gene that forces you to engage in homsexuality, or a "sex" gene that forces you to commit sexual acts, for that matter). You are a heterosexual if you engage in heterosexual acts, and you aren't anything at all if you swear off sexual activity.
As Pope John Paul II instructed us in Evangelium Vitae in terms of abortion, we must call things by their proper names.
P.S. I lived in the French Quarter my years in New Orleans, so sufficed to say I saw a good bit of all of these behaviors.