Informally, LA gubernatorial jockeying begins

And, they’re off! With Republican Treas. John Schroder’s informal announcement that he’ll vie for the Governor’s Mansion next year, the highway to there has started to populate.

Schroder apparently sent to supporters notice that he will run, also saying a formal announcement would follow in the not-distant future. Up to last year, he had raised more money for a future campaign than most state politicians, and reports due out soon likely will show a noticeable acceleration there.

He joins others of the GOP, Atty. Gen. Jeff Landry and Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser, as notable fundraisers from last year, who like him also seem destined to rack up more impressive numbers for 2021. Almost certainly the pair will join him at some point.

Reject bill that misunderstands property rights

When a legislator fundamentally misunderstands the nature of property rights, he produces a bill like Republican state Rep. Paul Hollis’ HB 9.

The bill cued up for the 2022 Regular Session would negate large swaths of homeowner association rules, although no one can say for sure just how extensively because of its incredibly broad language. It would make null and void any provision of a community document which restricts a “constitutional right” of a lot owner or a person residing in a residential planned community.

He provided an explanation for its filing, calling it a response to HOAs selectively enforcing rules, essentially by getting rid of rules that don’t deal with matters such as entry, common areas, maintenance, security and the like subject to enforcement. He also said he planned on filing a bill that would allow for owner in the boundaries of an association to withdraw from it.

Bogus argument behind left's BESE gerrymander

For the political left, sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander. Rather, it’s heads they win, tails you lose when it comes to gerrymandering Louisiana election districts.

Groups allied with Louisiana Democrats have shown great willingness to manipulate rules to get their desired ends on this issue. They have delivered a steady drumbeat demanding, and threatening, how the state must draw two minority-majority districts for the U.S. House of Representatives for elections later this year, saying because with a state population just about one-third black thus blacks should have constituent majorities in those many districts of six.

Never mind that, because most of the state’s black population resides in large cities distant from one another and along the Mississippi River, to draw a second such district would produce such oddly-shaped boundaries among multiple districts connecting areas hundreds of miles apart with little in common other than race as to make any plan like this constitutionally suspect. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled race cannot be such a prominent factor in drawing lines as to render several other criteria essentially meaningless.

Blacks to dominate candidacies of LA Democrats

Developments in this year’s Louisiana U.S. Senate contest ensure that, barring extraordinary circumstances, Democrats won’t win a statewide election for years, perhaps even a generation.

In the past quarter-century, the party recognized it had a problem. The national party’s relentless march to the political left, the rollout of the Internet that began eroding mainstream media domination of the political communication universe, and rising educational attainment among the population encouraging greater knowledge of and use of critical thinking in evaluating politics, detached increasing numbers particularly of white voters from voting for the party’s candidates, as increasingly the electorate understood preferences identified with the party went against their own self-interests.

State Democrats responded by trying to control candidate entry, especially by discouraging black candidates from running statewide with the 1995 gubernatorial election as ground zero. There, black Democrat former Rep. Cleo Fields aced out white Democrat Treasurer Mary Landrieu from a runoff against new Republican state Sen. Mike Foster. When Foster crushed Fields in the runoff, this brought home fears that a black candidate – more easily perceived by the electorate, both black and white, as farther to the left thus turning off Louisiana’s center-right white majority – if making a runoff would set up Democrats to fail.

LA's 15th casino license looks set to sink

Bossier City and Louisiana soon will discover the limits of casino gambling as a source of economic development and government revenue with one of the state’s most venerable riverboat operations on the cusp of sinking and perhaps unsalvageable.

In May, 2020 the city’s DiamondJacks casino – the fourth-oldest continually-operating in the state and longest under the same license – announced it would shut its doors permanently, a victim of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic caused by having the most co-morbid condition of all 15 licensees. It regularly competed for the sickest man of Louisiana casinos with the small-market Amelia Belle and the Baton Rouge market’s version of the canary in coal mine warning of market saturation, the Belle of Baton Rouge.

As the Isle of Capri it started off strongly almost three decades ago, and as late as the end of the century ran up $123 million in revenues that year. But it went out with a whimper, having just a fifth of those revenues when fiscal year 2020 closed its books and the lowest revenue per admission.