Democrats start negative onslaught against Cassidy

Likely dispirited from a debate that did nothing to change the race’s dynamics, and with panic rising after more and intense polling confirmation that Sen. Mary Landrieu’s campaign was on the ropes, expect now that Louisiana Democrats will engage in the most terrific mudslinging ever seen in the state in order to stop Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy from poaching her current seat.

With several recent polls all showing Cassidy having a heads-up lead, some beyond a poll’s margin of error, Democrats prayerfully hoped Cassidy would make some extremely controversial utterance in the course of the first of two candidate debates, held previously this week. He didn’t, perhaps because of the mundane mien of the gastroenterologist that some find a liability.

Which, in the reduced state Democrats find themselves in, suddenly has become an attack line. According to (the only Louisiana) Democrat Rep. Cedric Richmond, who nobody ever could mistake for being a medical doctor or even reasonably intelligent when making remarks like this, Cassidy is “weird,” and lacking the ability to say anything of substance about Cassidy falls back to playing the race card in the inane accusation that Cassidy’s campaign is all about “a picture of a black man [Pres. Barack Obama] and a white woman [Landrieu] up there in Louisiana to stoke fear and all the worst feelings in people.”

Inconsequential debate makes Cassidy its "winner"

The public television 2014 Senate election debate for Louisiana has come and gone, which served to reinforce existing support for the two major and one mid-major candidates, and really contributed nothing else.

Let’s face it, on the whole “debates” (they aren’t really, more like forums where candidates try to answer as much as possible in the way the want to as much as possible regardless of the questions with little depth given to these) only cause any significant shifts in support that last any length of time when candidates say something controversial, if not stupid. Nothing of the sort happened; when the most outlandish thing said, by the Republican major candidate Rep. Bill Cassidy (a medical doctor) that he favored letting people hoot up for medical reasons while his mid-major GOP compatriot Rob Maness and the major Democrat involved incumbent Sen. Mary Landrieu refused to join him, you know the needle won’t move as a result of this.

Little in the way of new details emerged in terms of policy preferences. Cassidy and Maness differed on little, while Landrieu skittishly tried to sidestep articulating any specific position on most of these items by both spinning general platitudes and trying to meld answers into touting experience. When asked for specifics, she almost imperceptibly glided to broad generalities. For his part, Cassidy used these to draw contrasts with Landrieu along the lines of tying unpopular policies she supports and the slightly-more-popular-than-Ebola-incinerated-waste Pres. Barack Obama around her neck, while Maness played up what few differences he had with Cassidy while noting the more numerous of those with Landrieu.

Bad news possibly good news for McAllister reelection

In Louisiana’s Fifth Congressional District contest, a new poll shows it’s still a matter of pushmi-pullyu for Democrats relative to strategy, while for Republicans too many cooks threaten to spoil the broth – leaving the object of the bad news from this week perhaps better off as a result.

An Alabama-based group conducted this effort and in a sense confirmed the common wisdom that the only Democrat and black in the race in a district the registration of which is almost half Democrat and one-third black, Monroe Mayor Jamie Mayo, leads the way with 19 percent, and embattled incumbent Republican Rep. Vance McAllister comes in second at 17 percent, and would hold down runoff spots. Apparently moving up and into third with 13 percent is salesman Zach Dasher, related to the Duck Commander family which had supported McAllister in his initial special election bid for the office but who now declare the incumbent anathema, while leader of the previous independent poll Dr. Ralph Abraham seemingly has slumped into fourth at 11 percent.

Mayo’s singular status and McAllister’s incumbency would make sensible that they lead, but with nobody getting endorsement of even a fifth of the sample shows the contest remains wide open. Most notably, McAllister continues to fall, now down ten points from the first such poll, consistent with the idea that the later the campaign proceeds, the less advantageous his default incumbent status becomes as voters learn more about the other options. That other candidates in the contest have not cracked double-digits shows they likely are to be left in the dust, although with 21 percent of the sample still undecided it’s not impossible one could emerge.

Even for coast, LA processing tax unneeded, bad idea

The idea of a processing tax on energy production in Louisiana is not new. Nor is its endorsement by one who sees energy producers as piñatas waiting to be busted anything new. What’s new is when a usually-sensible tax-cutting advocate adds support to an inferior idea that will siphon out of Louisianans' wallets hundreds of millions of dollars for no good reason.

The leftist involved here is author John Barry, late of one of the state’s two regional flood protection authorities and prime instigator of a jackpot justice suit against nearly 100 companies that have produced petroleum over the decades around the state’s coast. He envisions billions of dollars sliced from them to be put towards coastal restoration.

On that matter he rightly is chastised by columnist Quin Hillyer, who lends the Baton Rouge Advocate his considerable writing and critical thinking talents, now housed at perhaps the country’s premier opinion journal National Review, on an episodic basis. But in an intellectual lapse, he joins Barry in promoting the processing tax idea, a revived Coastal Wetlands Environmental Levy that would tax each barrel of oil or cubic foot of gas that comes into Louisiana’s processing pipeline from the coastal area, whether extracted, transported, or imported.

Decrease budget guessing by requiring modified accrual

Regardless of the explanation of how it got there, the asserted budget surplus for Louisiana to close Fiscal Year 2014 becomes real only through a political process that would benefit from some less ambiguous legal specifications.

Last week, the Gov. Bobby Jindal Administration declared FY 2014 ended with a surplus of about $178.5 million. But apparently $319 million of that came from an accounting change that caught Treasurer John Kennedy by surprise, leading him to muse whether there was a $141.5 million deficit as computed under some theoretically previous standard.

He hypothesized that discovery of these surplus funds may have come because of a shift of basis of accounting from the modified accrual basis to a cash basis. In essence, that means that balances would be computed by cash inflows and outflows and what was physically on hand, not adjusted for some anticipated, with varying degrees of certainty, receipts and disbursements and disregarding others that would be off the books. That would be unusual for the state to head in that direction because of the 1999 pronouncement of the Government Accounting and Standards Board Statement #34 which said for most things governments should report using the modified accrual basis, so deviation from that in budgeting would complicate reporting, and also for complex organizations like state governments cash basis accounting provides more limited information for decision-making.

Priorities, not taxes or restructuring, to help LA roads

Did Louisiana Treasurer John Kennedy, a potential 2015 gubernatorial candidate, recently give a green light to tax increases for transportation? If so, he’s off the more solid ground he occupies in his lectures of the virtues of prioritization.

Kennedy, in speaking to the Transportation Funding Task Force, noted that the public was wary of any additional funding requests for roads building and maintenance unless it was convinced these were carried out in a fashion that reflected true needs of the state, citing other spending uses of capital funds on construction projects that very few would call an important priority. The group is to meet four times prior to next year’s legislative session to give recommendations on how enable the state to eat into a roughly $10 billion backlog of roads requests.

If Kennedy meant he was open to a tax increase to do this, he would be joining for him unusual company. Also on the panel is a former secretary of the Department of Transportation and Development, Kam Movassaghi, who made it a habit during his tenure than encompassed the last six years of the former Gov. Mike Foster Administration to call for tax increases. Even now, one recommendation he wants the group to forward would be to replace the existing regular gasoline tax, the main source of funding for roads, of 16 cents per gallon with an 8 percent levy, which at present oil prices would work out to be around a 50 percent increase, arguing that the tax has less than half of its purchasing power when it was enacted three decades ago.

Can keg stand disguise far left record of Landrieu?

What has allowed Sen. Mary Landrieu to hang on in the U.S. Senate swimming against a stronger and stronger current is exactly the same thing that most likely will end her elected political career this year.

Consider Landrieu’s predicament. In the ex-Confederate states (Virginia, with its northern population tied with an umbilical cord to the big government liberalism of Washington, D.C. excepted), only four Democrats survive in the Senate (with two running for reelection also this year and endangered like Landrieu). Of the six times they have run, none has won by less than Landrieu’s biggest win ever in 2008. And while undoubtedly the presidential ticket of Democrats that won 52 percent of Louisiana’s vote in 1996 helped her win by an official count of fewer than 6,000 votes, in subsequent presidential elections Republicans would take the state with 53, 57, 59, and 58 percent of the vote. In her last election, she remarkably ran ahead of her own ticket some 12 percent.

Her last name does help; would anybody have paid attention to some 23-year-old sorority chick running for the Legislature without a famous last name in the world of state politics, much less have elected her? But the name only paid the entry fee to country club membership; as things transpired, she turned out more than capable of keeping up with the annual dues.

Fix sessions & blight, no on other LA amendments

If you like dealing with constitutional amendments, then you’ll love the Nov. 4 ballot with 14 of them. As a public service for Louisianans faced with making rational decisions on this, here we go with whirlwind recommendations:

#1 – no. This not only would lock in nursing home Medicaid reimbursement rates and put pressure on cutting rates for home- and community-based care, but have them automatically increase – even as legally the state must move people out of institutional care. The lack of budget flexibility introduced almost assuredly would lead to higher taxes, legal difficulties, and reduced funding for the only other significant area that would not be protected, higher education (more information is here).

#2 – no. This allows hospitals to increase prices to sock away in a special protected fund. Similar to #1, it also reduces budgetary flexibility, encouraging tax increases in addition to the indirect “sick tax” and cuts elsewhere (more information is here).

If not solid, Greenstein perjury case may cost LA

So former Secretary of the Department of Health and Hospitals Bruce Greenstein has joined an illustrious list of major state officeholders in Louisiana in garnering an indictment for activities related to his office. As the saga unfolds, the risk the state takes financially in pursuing this course of action is far greater than the chances of any wider malfeasance being uncovered.

Forced out of office last year, Greenstein did a low-key perpetrator walk last week upon being charged formally with nine counts of lying to both the Louisiana Senate and a parish grand jury while under oath. These charges stemmed from his testimony about relations with a past successful bidder for a state Medicaid claims processing contract to Client Network Services Inc., where it is alleged he covered up communications designed to help the firm win this, to which he pled not guilty. After the federal government started an investigation, then joined by the state, leading to Greenstein departure, the state cancelled the contract, which has led to the firm suing the state for breach.

While no specifics have been made public, thousands of messages in text and telephonic form were exchanged between Greenstein and the company in time period encompassed in the awarding process. The charges allege the content of these were instrumental in giving a competitive advantage to CNSI. After awarding to it but before cancellation, already CNSI requests for changes and extra money were fueling the credibility of complaints from competitors that CNSI had lowballed to win, even after promising it would ask for no such adjustments.

Angelle entry for top spot hurts Dardenne, helps Kennedy

With Public Service Commissioner Scott Angelle declaring his candidacy for governor of Louisiana in 2015, this disproportionately detracts from the chances of one existing announced candidate and should embolden another heretofore unannounced to dive right in.

Perhaps the lazy way to consider the move is to see this as part of the match for state supremacy between current Gov. Bobby Jindal and Sen. David Vitter, the latter already having taken the plunge to replace the former. Jindal cannot run for a third consecutive term, so to stay on top of things he must resort to a surrogate, the thinking goes, and with Angelle having been a Jindal cabinet appointee, temporary lieutenant governor, and legislative go-between for the governor he fits the bill.

Assuredly that’s part of it, but Angelle put himself out there primarily because he thinks he can win without being (overall) a rigidly principled conservative like Jindal. It’s tempting, but ultimately reductionist, to write off Angelle as a Jindal clone. Recognize that Angelle came to politics in the state from an insider’s family, and as a Democrat, whose outward conservatism one senses doesn’t quite match Jindal’s all-his-life unshakeable fervency but more opportunistically as in the mode of several ex-Democrat legislators who as soon as Republicans came within sniffing distance of a legislative majority jumped ship. His actions on the PSC seem to confirm that, where he’s demonstrated he will defect strategically from a pure free-market, anti-crony capitalist, right-sized government agenda.