Like herpes, BC water scare stories reappear

Like herpes, celebrity scare artist Erin Brockovich is back to plague Bossier City with her money-generating brand of alarmism for alarmism’s sake.

Seven years ago, Brockovich – who launched a career in environmentalist quackery when she helped to con a huge lawsuit settlement payout from a California utility using faulty scientific conclusions and reasoning that brought her a hit movie deal – drummed up negativity about Bossier City’s water system in the wake of the discovery that naegleria fowleri, popularly known as the brain-eating amoeba, had infiltrated a line outside the city system but connected to it. The city commenced with a lengthy chlorine flush to negate that, but in the interim Brockovich and a colleague moaned about the allegedly dangerousness and ineffectiveness of it all, even though scientific evidence said otherwise.

Now she’s back, griping again about chlorine flushes after somehow spotting word that city water customers were complaining about the smell. That odor is a byproduct of when pure chlorine, rather than its related chloramine, comes into contact with organic compounds and produced byproducts of trihalomethanes and haloacetic acids.

N.O. takes pass on chance to adopt sane policy

At the start of this week, Republican Treasurer John Fleming had no idea that his schedule would fill up so suddenly – only to watch it empty out quickly because New Orleans elected officials can’t face disempowerment caused by their past policy sins.

Fleming as treasurer sits on the somewhat-known State Bond Commission, as chairman. It meets regularly to approve of requests by state and local governments to authorize and sell bonds and to schedule ballot propositions. But it received an unusual request earlier this week.

New Orleans came to it asking to sell $125 million in short-term revenue bonds, in response to a “surprise” $160 million deficit. The SBC agreed to meet on the matter, but it became clear that its members weren’t at all jacked about the idea, pointing to lax fiscal administration by the city.

Emerson likely closes quality GOP Senate field

Likely the field of competitive candidates for the U.S. Senate, all Republicans, now is set with the entrance to the contest of GOP state Rep. Julie Emerson.

With Democrats flailing for finding an even remotely credible candidate, Emerson joins a field of potential winners Treas. John Fleming, state Sen. Blake Miguez, Public Service Commissioner Eric Skrmetta, and incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy. In fact, of the five Cassidy may have the longest shot of winning, as with the reborn party closed primary election for a nomination into the general election for 2026 in place Cassidy remains behind the eight ball for his questionable, to conservatives, policy votes early in his second term and hostility towards GOP Pres. Donald Trump by voting to impeach and convict him for no good reason.

But as Cassidy now claims to have over $10 million in his campaign kitty, any competitive candidate will have to raise at least a couple of million. Fleming (mostly his own) and Miguez (mostly from others) have done that, while Skrmetta, who entered the race in September, still hasn’t reported his campaign finances.

Disregard meaningless closed primary poll

Don’t believe the propaganda campaign designed to prevent greater conservative governance that will come in Louisiana and from its members of Congress through its modestly modified electoral system.

A special interest group representing leftist and Beltway Republicans commissioned a poll trying to discourage the institution of semi-closed primary elections. This kind of election nominates candidates to run in a general election, almost always with a runoff provision, by allowing only voters who affiliate with a major party or not with the other major party to participate in one major party’s primary. Currently for all offices, Louisiana uses a blanket primary system, which isn’t really a primary but a general election (with a runoff provision), as any voter regardless of affiliation may vote for a candidate of any or no party who all run together.

But last year the state changed the method for congressional, Public Service Commission, Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, and Supreme Court contests from blanket to semi-closed. This creates a purer expression of partisan will for general election candidates because it prevents the other major party affiliates from trying to influence which candidate members of a party prefer.

Grifters squawk, but Landry capture order sensible

You can tell the Republican Gov. Jeff Landry Administration has taken with the issue of carbon capture and sequestration is sensible because profiteering special interests are squawking about it.

Starting Aug. 1, the (renamed for the second time in fewer than two years) Department of Conservation and Energy launched an initiative culminating in an executive order earlier this month by Landry that has the effect of creating a chokepoint for entities that wish to engage in the CCS practice. It all began in the opening days of Landry’s term when the federal government awarded the state the ability to regulate the practice, in lieu of the federal government.

A law regulating it had been passed several years ago and another couple this year addressing the process, and DCE has issued a few regulations since outlining and facilitating the process. But the guidance has become much more explicit since Aug. 1, which with its updates set in motion several things. First, it stated it would give precedence to one project at the permit issuance stage followed by five others (there are over three dozen in various stages of the permitting process; this half-dozen is the farthest along). Second, it imposed additional requirements such as public engagement (translation: it must record citizen and local government reactions and whether they approve of a request) and adhering to pipeline regulations both current and future when issued by the federal government. Third, if any extant project made all but the most cosmetic change to its application, it would go to the back of the queue.

Session gives LA decent chance of new 2026 map

As the Louisiana Legislature enters a special session to adjust the election calendar to change potentially its congressional map, Democrat legislators responded with futile attempts to reduce the state’s chances at complying with the U.S. Constitution.

The session would give the state greater latitude to respond to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that could invalidate its current map. It’s unpredictable when the Court will rule, but last year cases heard in October on average took about four months for a decision to come out (least was about two weeks, most was almost five months), so that would place the decision in the middle of February.

Essentially, three bills to date have been introduced on this issue, two of which essentially duplicate each other in the different chambers. These push back the electoral calendar four weeks that would place the first deadline, for non-major party general election aspirants to turn in nomination petitions to secure a place on the ballot, in mid-January. If the Court hits that average, that would be the only deadline potentially altered, because if then a new map is drawn then the petitions might not have enough signatures matching a new district. Close would be qualifying by major party candidates, which would become mid-February.

Nungesser anti-closed primary arguments fail

As the Louisiana Legislature plans to double down on its use of semi-closed primaries in a special session to commence this week, Republican Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser managed to talk some nonsense about the electoral system.

Nungesser continues his long-standing opposition to this system with his preference being the blanket primary currently used to elect all local and legislative, single executive, and judicial except for the Supreme Court offices, under which he gained office. He alleged that closed primaries were a major force in divisive politics and would return the state to the blanket primary system for all contests.

(Note: the term “open” primary is carelessly used interchangeably by some, including Nungesser, with what actually is a “blanket” primary. Actually, an “open” primary has general election nominations decided by party primaries, where a voter regardless of affiliation picks one party’s primary in which to participate. A “blanket” primary is one where candidates run together regardless of affiliation where all voters regardless of affiliation may participate. A “closed” primary is one where only those affiliated with a party may participate only in that party’s primary. Louisiana’s semi-closed system for some offices allows voters not affiliated with either major party to participate in one major party’s primary along with that party’s affiliated voters.)

BC fiscal prudence in vogue with new councilors

This is the kind of governing that Bossier City should have had since the turn of the century, City Council 2026 budget deliberations show.

It wasn’t that in the first quarter of the 21^st century that Bossier City overspent and put itself in financial jeopardy. Rather, it budgeted conservatively for operating expenses while enjoying bounties first from gambling and then from shale oil. But what it did do is within those parameters blew money fast on all sorts of unneeded concrete: a white elephant arena, a parking garage for a private developer, a high-tech office building that failed to attract its intended client, alternative fuel station, and a $50 million-a-mile duplicative road. This waste cost in the neighbor of $200 million for things the city easily could have done without and should have left to the private sector to build and own.

This created a huge debt overhang contributing to, at its peak, putting the city on the hook for almost half a billion dollars, half of which was unrelated to its water provision. It has come down a little since then – consider that in 1997 (right before arena construction started) the total was just a tenth of that – but even today if it hadn’t wasted bucks on those capital items the city would have zero non-enterprise debt. Instead, today it still owes around $375 million with the non-enterprise interest payable of $63 million through 2044, after paying from 1998 through 2024 $173 million.

Regents can promote inquiry over indoctrination

Louisiana should try a different strategy for now to join the vanguard of states that demand that their institutions of higher learning cultivate critical thinking, not indoctrination.

Sensing incorrectly and severely overplaying its hand assuming that the voting public would accept its judgment that a majority of the mass public were systemically, if not irredeemably, racist and badly in need of corrective action emanating from it, much of higher education now has gone into full-scale retreat over woke “anti-racism” ideology it has peddled. More nakedly that ever it displayed this in classroom instruction in the first half of this decade.

Louisiana colleges weren’t exempt from this fusillade. By way of example, at one time my university suggested we incorporate various forms of this propaganda into out teaching were applicable; for example, recommending use of the deeply-flawed and historically inaccurate 1619 Project materials that noxiously hypothesize racism as a fundamental and inescapable part of American culture from its start. Courses at institutions across the state have been taught with this notion as foundational to their purposes.

New map rules from LA case to wash out peak woke

More than just potentially fundamentally reshaping reapportionment jurisprudence, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais may signal that, finally after five tortuous years, peak woke has been jettisoned sufficiently from public policy-making.

Understand that what oozed into larger society during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic had incubated for decades, even more than a century, in academia. What we now call “woke,” or coming to understand the faith that America is systemically and irredeemably racist to the point that, as one of its leading exponents phrased it, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination” – in other words, as allegedly subconscious racism against blacks was inevitable despite a stated conscious desire not to be prejudiced against blacks, thus policy had to favor deliberately blacks at the expense of the majority’ supposed oppressiveness, is nothing more than a mutilated Marxism where race replaces class, with both versions equally discredited by the data.

The pandemic allowed government to vastly expand its powers playing upon people’s fears and prejudices during the last year of Republican Pres. Donald Trump’s first term, effectively neutering his agenda as well as setting him up for defeat, then with Democrat former Pres. Joe Biden following in office and courtesy of his rapidly diminishing capacities letting the far left run amok in both policy-making and in pressuring society to follow it. Like an opportunistic disease neo-racism posing as anti-racism metastasized into the nation’s bloodstream.