College funding plan needs more economy, boldness

Given parameters by Gov. Bobby Jindal, Louisiana’s higher education management boards have come up with partly-workable plan to address a potential looming funding crisis. It’s a start that will have to go through revision in order to be politically acceptable and to constitute best policy.

Part of the more than $220 million that would be raised by these changes, to offset predicted but undetermined revenue declines that could be higher in next year’s budget, would be taking advantage of permissible tuition increases of around $60 million. Another portion would come from extra fees totaling about $86.5 million. The remainder of around $75 million would come from abolishing the 12-hour tuition cap, which means that students who take more than 12 hours only pay for 12 hours per semester.

The last is a very needed change. Many students will select up to 18 hours (usually more than that needs administrative approval), then drop their two lowest-performing 3-hour classes with the generous drop dates (usually into the tenth week of the regular 15-week semester), wasting university resources. But in isolation this would cause, in essence, a tuition hike that would not be paid for by the Tuition Opportunity Program for Students for its recipients since it is capped at 12 hours. Since recent mandates have made most programs require 120 hours of credit – 15 hours per regular semester – TOPS awards should be raised to 15 hours, cutting away some of that roughly $75 million, to be fair in giving students a chance to graduate in four years (without summer school, not paid for by TOPS).

Cartoon bothers legislators as it may ridicule their views

A computer blunder by a staff member of the Louisiana Senate shows the degree of intolerance expressed by some members of that body when it comes to critically appraising the sophistication and veracity of their political worldviews.

A woman in the employ of the Senate sent via e-mail message a cartoon showing Democrat Pres. Barack Obama, whose racial ancestry is half white, half black but who identifies himself as black, with light skin, blue eyes and a different hairstyle and is captioned, “Do you like him any better now? No? Me neither ..... Then you're not a racist.” It apparently went to addresses of every state Capitol worker by mistake.

Of course it is a waste of taxpayer resources to send such material so unconnected to the actual business of government work using a state account, and some punishment should be meted out for that. But some legislators imply they want more than a routine reprimand, which was assured when the staffer was suspended without pay.

Yet most interesting was the reaction of some black Democrats in the Legislature when discovering the cartoon. “This is not funny at all and I think it should not have been sent over a public e-mail system,” wrote state Sen. Ed Murray. “This is NO where near funny!!! This is very offensive,” said state Rep. Regina Barrow. “Those of us who responded were not very pleased and were very disappointed that it was sent at all. It's not taken lightly, I can tell you that,” observed state Rep. Pat Smith, now head of the Louisiana Legislative Black Caucus.

Murray was correct on one matter, that it shouldn’t have been sent using state resources, but whether he felt that way because it was a waste of state resources he didn’t say. And, in a way, it’s understandable why he nor Barrow didn’t think it was funny, and Smith said responders weren’t pleased at it.

But to comprehend that, we have to get at why Barrow thought it was “offensive,” because in analyzing its message it had the potential to offend only a select, small group of individuals. The basis of humor is to illuminate a tension between what is generally asserted and an event that contradicts that perception of reality. A response such as laughter is the resolution of that tension by the ability of the receiver of the information to perceive the consistency that on the surface seems contradictory.

In this instance, the contradiction comes in that we know Obama is darker-skinned, brown-eyed, and has black hair, but is presented differently. We resolve the contradiction by understanding that the racial features of Obama, despite their unalterable nature in the physical world, are altered here as a larger metaphor for those narrow-minded people in the world that insist upon seeing racial motives, because they view everything through the lens of race, behind actions that none of extant evidence, logic, nor propriety would suggest have anything to do with prejudicial feelings about different ethnic groups.

In other words, the cartoon makes fun not of people of any particular race, but satirizes those who inappropriately use race as an excuse to form bigoted attitudes about the motivations of other people, in this case illuminating the feelings of those who claim that opposition to Obama and his policies is due to some kind of resentment about his race. The claim that a non-trivial proportion of Americans, presumably whites, mainly or solely oppose Obama because of his race, along with the fiction that he has trouble communicating ideas to the public, have emerged as persistent narratives among many liberals and Democrats with prodigious assistance from their media allies. In fact, as extensive exit polling from the midterm 2010 elections which are regarded as a rebuke to Obama and his agenda indicates, widespread opposition of him comes from the majority belief that his agenda is contrary to enhancing the life prospects of all Americans and is detrimental to the country as a whole.

Thus, probably the real nature of the offense Barrow and her ilk see is that the cartoon makes fun of them if they believe that narrative because they believe it. It points out the hypocrisy of such a view: it is not race that matters to almost all opponents of Obama, yet it certainly does to those of his supporters who seek to define their opponents attitudinally with that very insistence of seeing everything, no matter how far that deviates from the real world, through the prism of race, and they seem to do so oblivious to their own prejudices.

Naturally, when you’re the butt of the joke, not only is it hard to see the humor in it, but also it probably does make you mad. And if that’s why at least some black Louisiana legislators see the cartoon as unfunny and offensive, neither of those are appropriate psychological responses to it as instead they should reflect upon their own attitudes that cause them to react that way.

Compromises make LA Medicaid plan even better

The compromise struck by Louisiana’s Department of Health and Hospitals Secretary Bruce Greenstein in reworking facets of Medicaid reforms in the state does the job in promoting efficiency in delivery of health care to indigent families with children as well as giving providers greater choice in how they want to participate in the system.

At the beginning of the month, Greenstein would have eliminated by the end of the month the CommunityCare program. It paid $3 per patient per month for doctors to coordinate care for Medicaid recipient children but wasn’t showing much in the way of positive outcomes, and thus was a logical candidate to discontinue in search of budgetary savings.

But after complaints about its removal from organizations of providers, Greenstein decided to mend rather than end. His new proposal is to cut the rate in half but then add incentive payments if outcome benchmarks were achieved that would raise the rate to a maximum of $4.50 a month. This solved the problem of providers pocketing the fees with little to show for them.

Richmond faces long tenure in minority with little power

To understand the aphorism “whistling past the graveyard,” one need only review comments made by the youngest member of the smallest freshman Democrat House of Representatives class in a century.

Not that these incoming nine, including Louisiana Second Congressional District’s state Rep. Cedric Richmond, should feel insecure. Including Richmond, five were elected from majority-black minority districts, one is an ethnic Asian from Hawai’i, and three others are whites from heavily Democrat districts. None of these districts since the last reapportionment has cast a majority of its votes for a Republican presidential candidate and only one had any long-term Republican House election success for decades (Delaware at-large, whose outgoing representative was perhaps the most liberal Republican in the House). By historical standards, none are considered “competitive” districts (where the winner receives less than 55 percent of the vote over an extended period of time).

What is humorous is the comments about what their elections mean for their party’s future. Richmond seems to think they have bright futures because in the party with so few of them and so many ahead of them wiped out in 2010, their less-contested seniority will allow them to move up rapidly. He also seems to predict this will happen soon with Democrats doing well in 2010.

This only goes to show that he is as clueless as some other, more professional cheerleaders of Democrats go such as David Bositis, long-time analyst for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies which is the oldest black-oriented political think tank. Bositis seems to think Democrats have a good chance at regaining the House in 2012, as, he notes, “there are only 10 Democratic seats in districts that McCain won, but 55 Republicans in districts that [Democrat Pres. Barack] Obama won, and the composition of the electorate (in 2012) is going to be totally different.”

What Bositis doesn’t say or recognize, however, is that 2008 was a very deviant election in that regard, with a large number of those 55 in districts that historically had favored Republican presidential candidates, certainly in recent years. Further, as Obama continues to drop like a stone in popularity, he has no chance to win most, perhaps all of those districts and if anything will negatively impact Democrats’ chances in them. Also, in this comment Bositis contradicts his own preliminary study of the 2010 midterm electorate, in which he observed black turnout was slightly higher than in the last 2006 midterm which produced radically different results, pointing to the real dynamic at play – in 2006 and 2008, prior to the unprecedented liberal onslaught of legislation that woke up the less-informed, more apathetic non-black registered voters, Obama and Democrats were seen much less malevolently as they are now.

Even if the share of the 2012 electorate that is black matches the 2008 level of 13 percent (compared to 10 percent this year), it’s not going to be enough to offset more losses, much less bring in gains. And, as any political scientist who studies election behavior can tell you, typically the midterm election composition does not vary much compared to a general election, and conveys little or no advantage to Democrats in terms of additional voters for the latter.

Finally, this sentiment does not take into account the major redistricting advantage the GOP will have before the next congressional election cycle. It won’t be much, maybe as few as a half dozen seats, but it still impedes any Democrat takeover possibility where look like they’ll have a 243-192 disadvantage come January.

About the only thing correct in Richmond’s comments is he’s likely to be there for awhile. That has been the history of the various permutations of the Second District where a Democrat candidate for reelection has not lost since 1930, and then after serving three terms. But he’s likely to be a member of the minority party, with little power, for the foreseeable future.

LA politicians lead against EPA dystopian power grab

It’s good to see that in defending against the war the Environmental Protection Agency has declared on private enterprise that several Louisiana federal officeholders are providing leadership crucial to turning back the assault on rationality.

Reps. Steve Scalise, John Fleming, Bill Cassidy, and Charles Boustany, all Republicans and all but Scalise physicians, joined other House members in adding their voices to those of several senators three months ago, including fellow Louisianans David Vitter and Mary Landrieu, in protesting new EPA ozone attainment standards. The letter transmitted complained about how the move to change standards subverts the Clean Air Act which by law is to be reviewed no sooner than every five years. That was last done in 2008 and new standards proposed.

But not all of the review was implemented because activists who wanted an even lower standard, which was supposed to have gone from 84 to 75 parts per billion, wanting a level according to studies done commissioned by the EPA which asked for a standard of 70 or lower even though questionable science was involved in coming up with that number and the assumptions from it have strayed even further from reality since. As such, they claim they can introduce new standards now because of non-implementation, even though the law does not consider non-implementation as a failure to follow the revision timetable.

Thus, if any final rules are issued, they would be illegal and immediately challenged in court. This explains in part why the EPA has missed two dates announced as to the issuance of the final rules, because as a politicized agency it pays close attention to the political environment which is becoming increasingly unfavorable for this plan as the 2010 midterm elections demonstrated.

EPA’s increased politicization has led to its recent unprecedented amount of regulatory activity as the Pres. Barack Obama Administration tries to do by fiat what it could not do through representative democratic processes. Unneeded regulation fits the strategy of bringing more under the control of government and allowing those who desire to exercise power and to obtain privilege through it, such as those in the environmental movement who rely upon the questionable data to assert the newest standards are needed for health reason, to achieve them.

Louisiana has been a leader in fighting against these attempts utilizing the EPA, about a year ago joining other states in trying to block related, unconstitutional measures. As well it should – at almost a million jobs, the unnecessary new standards would make Louisiana the third-largest loser of them of all the states and the largest per capita.

Both state and federal policy-makers in Louisiana have shown great responsibility in opposing this road to serfdom, and are to be commended as such. Let’s hope the efforts of theirs and others pay off with the EPA backing down or being forced by Congress to move away from its dystopian vision.

Thanksgiving Day, 2010

This column publishes usually every Sunday through Thursday after noon (sometimes even before; maybe even after sundown on busy days) U.S. Central Time except whenever a significant national holiday falls on the Monday through Friday associated with the otherwise-usual publication on the previous day (unless it is Independence Day or Christmas or New Year's when it is the day on which the holiday is observed by the U.S. government). In my opinion, there are six of these: New Year's Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Veterans' Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Christmas.

With Thursday, Nov. 25 being Thanksgiving Day, I invite you to explore the link above.

Special election calls to reveal redistricting strategies

Right after the disastrous national and statewide results came in for Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections, state Rep. Walker Hines became the first of them to jump ship as he angled for future political ambitions outside as well as security for his reelection. Next, state Sen. John Alario said he was almost certain to join the GOP, without revealing it was for future Senate ambitions. Hines’ leap gave the Republicans a plurality in the House, while if Alario follows through he’ll cause the Democrats’ majority to fall to four seats.

That may become three in short order. The Senate’s only independent, who himself was a Democrat a year ago, Troy Hebert, is set to become the commissioner of the state’s Alcohol and Tobacco Control Board. Hebert, who in his initial run for the Senate in 2007 fought off a very spirited challenge from Republican soon-to-be Rep. Jeff Landry, announced his retirement after this term at the end of the last session. His 22^nd District has been trending more conservatively and redistricting to take place within months could make it more so for the fall elections.

Meanwhile, the GOP is extremely unlikely to pick up any more advantage with the departure of state Rep. Cedric Richmond at the beginning of the year from his office so that the Democrat can take a seat like Landry in the U.S. House of Representatives. But politics may play a role in how quickly this seat gets filled and connect it to Hebert’s.

The normal earliest election dates by calendar happenstance in 2011 are both in April. However, any special session for redistricting or anything else would be at least a couple of months earlier, so, in Richmond’s case, the presiding officer of his body, Republican Speaker Jim Tucker, could call for one before those dates. A practical reason not to would be to save the state money and hassle in conducting an election on an unscheduled date in only a handful of precincts but requiring state elections officials to be on duty.

Tucker may see an advantage to hold off, depriving Democrats of a vote during the redistricting session. However, Republicans and black Democrats will have a community of interests in redistricting to set aside as many districts with majorities of Republicans or blacks as possible, so having another black Democrat vote (as almost certainly Richmond’s successor will be) might be something Tucker wants.

Simultaneously, and it depends upon how quickly Hebert wants to start his new job (he may take his position immediately through interim appointment since the Senate which needs to confirm him will not be in session, although it would have to confirm him by the end of the 2011 regular session), Democrat state Sen. Pres. Joel Chaisson has the call on filling Hebert’s slot and he may not be as eager to do so prior to the regular election date, if Hebert resigns fairly quickly, because it could well end up putting a Republican in that place. This would further endanger the electability of white Democrats in the Senate, as five of six term-limited senators are white Democrats all from more conservative areas of the state, and the results of the redistricting process could make the task of Democrats holding on to the Senate even more difficult. Chaisson could see Hebert’s successor as an important piece in creating the conditions to produce a Republican majority in the special session.

Matters might get very interesting if Tucker feels like trying to link the two. With the only real disincentive for him to call an unscheduled election being saving the state money, by doing so he may pressure Chaisson into joining him by arguing why wait on giving District 22 voters representation when there’s already another election going on? After all, state election officials will already have to be on hand and adding a Senate race will probably only cost maybe $20,000 more. He further could turn up the heat by rallying his black Democrat colleagues in the House to get their Senate co-partisan co-ethnics to lean on Chaisson as part of a deal to have the special House election.

Thus, the scheduling of these elections will provide clues to observers about the internal political dynamics at play in this very interesting upcoming year of legislative electoral politics.

If Oregon can, why not privatize LSU Baton Rouge?

Maybe it’s not possible, but the option should be considered: if the University of Oregon can do try to do it, why can’t Louisiana State University Baton Rouge?

That is essentially privatizing its operating functions. UO’s president Richard Lariviere has proposed to state government that it only continue to fund capital improvements to the Eugene campus for 30 years, and that tuition and endowments would cover other expenses. Eventually, with projected growth rates, all expenses could be covered without any state subsidy although the state still would govern the institution.

This is Lariviere’s attempt to smooth the cyclical nature that Oregon, like Louisiana, faces in its higher education funding, where some times things are flush, and other times lean. It’s bold reform that stands in stark contrast to the tinkering at the margins for which Louisiana’s elected officials and higher education administrators have settled.

Blue Dogs out because they voted as fiscal liberals

One of the consequences of the 2010 midterm elections was the shattering of the “Blue Dog” myth – unless you’re one of the champions of this fictitious cause who will maintain that these House Democrats are significantly different than the liberal leadership of House Democrats that pulled the party to follow Pres. Barack Obama into electoral disaster.

These presumed “moderate” Democrats, many but not all from the South, above all were supposed to be fiscal conservatives. Elected from conservative-leaning districts, they claimed they would have a moderating effect on Democrats, justifying their elections to represent their districts – a narrative many in the media swallowed uncritically (as the linked article above shows).

In fact, as more prescient observers have noted, the Blue Dogs in reality were lap dogs to the House liberals. When in the minority, they did vote more fiscally conservatively than did the rest of their party. But since then, on all of the major budget-busting issues of the past four years of Democrat control of the House, majorities, mostly large, of Blue Dogs voted for increased spending. You name it, they went for it – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bailouts, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the spending package early in Obama’s term, cash-for-clunkers, Obama's debt-tripling 2010 budget, the auto bailout, and for the federal takeover of health care.

In all, the Lap Dogs voted 80 percent of the time with liberal Democrats on fiscal issues. This does not include the 86 percent of the time they supported suspensions of what they crowed as their biggest achievement in pulling their party closer to the center, “pay-as-you-go” rules that mandated whenever spending was increased in one area, it had to be offset with a cut in another, making the whole enterprise a sham.

So when Louisiana’s outgoing Democrat Rep. Charlie Melancon laments about the pasting Lap Dogs took in the midterm elections, losing over half their members (he being one of them, the only one not to lose reelection but because he opted to tilt spectacularly unsuccessfully for Sen. David Vitter’s seat), asserting they somehow kept his party’s leadership honest, it’s just another con job in an attempt to revise history. Melancon, once a leader of the coalition, is a poster child of the scam: his National Taxpayer Union grades in his five rated years in office were 3 D’s and 2 F’s.

Their record shows the whole movement became a tactic to try to fool voters into thinking they were electing representatives who were one thing on the campaign trail then when in office they were another. The story that some try to circulate that the Lap Dogs got crucified on the campaign trail for the sins of the liberal party leadership doesn’t jive with what their constituents understood: they were not the fiscal conservatives they proclaimed themselves to be, their votes were crucial to passing a lot of bad legislation, and they deserved punishment for selling out those they represented. Let the Blue Dog myth die its overdue, deserved death to which voters will break out in song.

Any legislative revolt needs constructive purpose

Does it appear that the Louisiana Legislature is growing a spine? That’s probably is not the best interpretation of the recent Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget’s mini-revolt against the Gov. Bobby Jindal on the question of the spending of educational dollars from the federal government.

Three months ago, the Democrat-controlled federal government decided to spend some more money the country didn’t have on the states in a last-ditch bid to buy and activate support from some traditional constituencies, including teachers’ unions as almost half of the appropriations went an Education Jobs Fund to which states could apply to retain educators’ jobs. Louisiana applied and got $147 million.

After an interval during which local school districts were led to believe the money would arrive for them this fiscal year, the Jindal Administration decided to save the money for higher education for next year, by a complex shuffling of money from fund to fund. Because of the previous acceptance of federal funds for higher education, which apparently will not be available for this upcoming fiscal year, $68 million had to be there for higher education to fulfill requirements for use of the money already spent or intended to be spent. The remainder the Jindal Administration hoped to spend on higher education next year.

But for the fund shunting to occur and the money added to this year’s budget, this appropriations change had to be approved, as the entire Legislature is not in session, by its Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget, a panel composed of members of each chamber’s money committees plus the chairmen of another important committee from each, which routinely accepts these changes. Composed as such, currently it is split almost evenly between Democrats and Republicans, given the chambers’ partisan balances.

So it wouldn’t take much for frustrated Democrats on the committee to relish a chance to stick it to Jindal. Several openly loath his attempts (with partial success) to hold down spending that contradicts their big government impulses, and especially resent his curtailing one of their main sources of electoral leverage, members’ amendments, with his line item veto power and its threatened use. Combine them with a few Republican members friendly with the traditional special interests that run elementary and secondary education in the state (some with backgrounds in it), and there were more than enough votes there to use only the $68 million for higher education next year, and to pump the other $79 million into state schools now.

However, likely this is not a novel assertion of legislative power; rather, it’s a one-off episode. This was a very narrowly-defined issue with plenty of time to investigate the public policy ramifications, among themselves and in public. The coming situation where thousands of line items and so many unknowns about hundreds of revenues and expenditure sources get dumped like a waterfall on legislators over just a few weeks always brings the advantage to the governor who has the staff to understand much better options and implications, as well as the veto power on which the Legislature never has used its override ability on any appropriation.

Yet the incident might convolute the process negatively. Jindal cannot act petulantly by using the incident as an excuse not to provide the leadership only available from his office in this time of budgeting stress in order to put the onus on the Legislature. For their part, legislators cannot see this as an encouragement to sabotage for political purposes only leadership emanating from Jindal, especially tempting as this is an election year; opposition should come only when it is constructive and assists in hammering out a budget without bad consequences in a period of declining revenue. Failure to operate in the proper spirit is going to make for a bad situation all around.