Veterans Day, 2021

This column publishes every Sunday through Thursday around noon U.S. Central Time (maybe even after sundown on busy days, or maybe before noon if things work out, or even sometimes on the weekend if there's big news) except whenever a significant national holiday falls on the Sunday through Thursday associated with the otherwise-usual publication on the previous day (unless it is Easter, Thanksgiving Day, Independence Day, Christmas, or New Year's Day when it is the day on which the holiday is observed by the U.S. government). In my opinion, in addition to these are also Memorial Day and Veterans' Day.

With Thursday, Nov. 11 being Veterans' Day, I invite you to explore the links connected to this page.

Reformers must keep stumping for second item

The small, but most significant in decades, fiscal reform on Louisiana’s ballot this weekend will falter or survive on the basis of differential turnout.

Amendment #2 would reduce income taxes for most individual filers, raising them only for the small number who benefit substantially from allowing deduction of federal income taxes. Likely every single lower-income filer who pays any income tax will see a reduction.

Yet that isn’t good enough for the political left that alleges to champion this demographic group. Leftist elites despair that the change would reduce slightly the amount of revenue absconded by state government and that it could make more difficult raising income taxes on the middle class and above in the future. As a result, they launched a campaign to prevent passage of #2.

Edwards displeases climate alarmists, realists

Bad enough that Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards continues to fabricate on the issue of climate change; worse, even doing so he can’t placate climate alarmists.

Edwards recently concluded his jet-setting to the United Nations’ climate freakout meeting in Scotland, where sufferers of Climate Derangement Syndrome could bloviate and hyperventilate to their hearts’ content about the alleged imminent disaster headed the world’s way, unless we turned back the clock a few hundred years through excising use of fossil fuels. He contributed to this group therapy session with some boiler plate fibs often heard from this crowd.

“We know that the frequency and severity of these severe weather events [storms and flooding] is increasing. And we know that it’s because of climate change,” he charged. Both statements are false.

What, when did Edwards know of LSP misconduct?

The increasingly uncomfortable question for Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards – magnified by revelations last week – remains: what did he know about the death of black motorist Ronald Greene, when did he know it, and what did he subsequently do about it?

Greene died at an intersection of highways in Union Parish for no reasonable cause while in custody of Louisiana State Police. Events that unfolded leave little doubt that of a coverup.

From the moment of the May 10, 2019 incident, a pattern was established. The LSP started by claiming Greene died from a crash running from them, although earwitnesses said they could hear Greene at the scene of the arrest begging not to be struck and his autopsy showed death by cardiac arrest with injuries inconsistent with a crash. Over the next two years the LSP at several points walked back elements of that story, driven by leaks of audio and video that supposedly didn’t exist, in the shadow of a federal investigation launched 15 months after his death.

Democrats' media subsidy to protect selves

It may not be a coincidence that Washington Democrats want to throw lifelines to the fourth estate/column as a means to protect their crumbling citadel of power, that Republican Rep. Steve Scalise is more than willing to challenge.

As newspaper revenues have gone into steep decline and with that employment, much handwringing has occurred among media elites. The vast changes in the infrastructure of news delivery have disempowered outlets dependent upon print and empowered electronic media, both of the old kind (radio and television) and of the new (Internet and direct dissemination such as by podcasting), because these delivery costs are much lower.

Yet that’s only part of the reason why newspapers have disappeared and outlets have shed coverage. If they delivered what customers wanted, they could fight this trend. But they don’t because of an agenda more and more skewed ideologically away from daily concerns and towards leftist talking points, leading to record levels of distrust. As the media as a whole has alienated consumers not on the political left, this has created a vicious cycle where many outlets print ever further to the left in coverage choices so as to capture the only segment of society with willingness to believe what the mainstream media deliver, liberals.