BC term limits edging closer to reality

The high-stakes game of poker goes on between citizens rebellious to the Bossier City political establishment and those insiders who will fight by any means necessary to suppress any threat to their power, which may include a tactical retreat on term limits that, once again, is consumed by lawfare?

That may be at issue after the latest meeting of the city’s Charter Review Commission, which over the past four months has plowed through proposed charter changes. Upon releasing a final product, the charter dictates that the City Council must accept it and schedule for an election. The earliest possible date for citizen approval would be for the Dec. 7 general election runoff, which means if approved changes would go into effect prior to 2025 city elections.

The whole rationale for commission formation came as a result of a near-miss for the establishment on the issue of term limits. A petition amending the charter to include a three-term retroactive limit for all elected officials gained enough signatures to land it on the ballot last year, but a City Council majority – comprised of Republicans David Montgomery and Jeff Free, Democrat Bubba Williams, and no party Jeff Darby, all of whom would have become ineligible to run, plus GOP rookie Vince Maggio – a few times voted to violate the Charter by not scheduling the vote of a certified petition, and then went to court to knock out the petition through a legal technicality about its format.

New standards boost LA education accountability

After years of tolerating a somewhat misleading evaluation system of individual schools and their districts, starting in academic year 2025 Louisiana will enjoy an improved version that provides better information for families and policy-makers.

The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education today promulgated new rules to determine accountability, which didn’t happen overnight. An attempt failed two years ago, made from a growing recognition that the scoring system under use aligned poorly with actual student proficiency, as measured by testing, as they progressed and received diplomas which had the effect of making some schools and districts appear to be doing a better job than they actually were.

This attempt replaces a more complicated computational exercise, and reverses emphasis on proficiency, or knowledge and skill gained, and growth, or how much students improve in achievement. Through the eighth grade, the growth factor is increased at the expense of proficiency.

LA should junk 2024 map, party like it's 2022

A recent Supreme Court ruling clarified why the Court allowed Louisiana fall congressional elections to continue under a map declared unconstitutional, and increased the chances this will be the only such election this decade that will have a two majority-minority district map.

In Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference, the Court ruled that a congressional map that otherwise didn’t violate traditional principles of reapportionment, such as compactness and contiguity of districts, did not have to have the proportion of M/M districts somewhat equivalent to the proportion of minority race (almost always black, but sometimes others) residents in the state if the legislature wished to draw districts to maximize partisan advantage even if incidentally related to racial division in voting. This launched panic among leftist and far left commentators because it signaled that in reapportionment disputes the Court no longer would permit the left’s and Democrats’ shadow agenda to remain in the shadows.

That is, those forces try to gain partisan advantage in reapportionment by equating maps that give them that as necessary to prevent racial discrimination, made possible because for the past half-century blacks typically have voted overwhelmingly for candidate of the left, almost always black candidates. This has been tolerated because courts for decades had made the presumption that racial prejudice against a minority group had to lay behind any reapportionment decision that did not draw district majorities roughly proportional to that group’s proportion in the population, and so to do this required satisfying certain criteria that didn’t include partisan advantage as a mitigating factor.

Spiked column exemplifies newspaper meltdown

If you had any questions about why the mainstream media is dying and it steadily is losing influence politically in Louisiana and elsewhere, look no further than the rumpus over a column by Republican Sen. John Kennedy the largest newspaper chain in the state recently accepted and then rejected.

Last month, Kennedy, whose opinion pieces the media frequently have published spanning more than a decade, initially had one published in the Shreveport Times and farmed out to the several other Gannett newspapers in the state. The piece exhorted Congress to prohibit natal males from competing as and against natal females in female-only competitions, citing sustained evidence about the physiological advantages those born male would have regardless of attempts, if any, to change physical sex.

After a few days, without making any announcement or informing Kennedy, the piece was removed from the sites that had published it. Later still, an explanation to the broken web link was infused, saying the content had been removed because it didn’t “meet our editorial standards.”