Story frames poorly Landry role in hirings

Mainstream journalism has evolved into often promoting an agenda through news stories employing implication and innuendo. A recent story about leadership at Louisiana State University provides an apex example.

This month, the LSU System gained a new president in former McNeese State University Pres. Wade Rousse, and a new LSU Baton Rouge chancellor in former University of Alabama Provost James Dalton. The LSU Board of Supervisors, a near-majority of whom have been appointed by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry along with its presiding officer, made the selections and in the process split the job from its previously combined status under William Tate IV, who left and took with him a few others to the Rutgers University system early in Landry’s term.

The Baton Rouge Advocate’s Tyler Bridges penned a story related to this, which also broadly looked at recent university head honcho appointments. Purporting to reveal the role Landry had in this, it slyly pushed a narrative that not only did Landry have a large influence over the process but also it was extensive to the point that it may be detrimental to academic accreditation by alleged politicization of the process.

Bridges ran this argument in two ways. One was by framing the process as deviant compared to past searches, especially with Tate. Landry was described as telling some supervisors that he thought Rousse would do well and said he didn’t go so far as did his predecessor Democrat former Gov. John Bel Edwards in Tate’s selection, pointing out that Edwards previously had hosted South Carolina officials including Tate and supervisors at the Governor’s Mansion and lauded Tate.

This assertion of Edwards favoritism Bridges attempted to torpedo with comments made by Edwards’ commissioner of administration Jay Dardenne, who had applied for the job, by Robert Dampf, an Edwards’ loyalist who was board chairman then and was replaced recently by Landry, and by Edwards himself, denying that. But the facts of the search paint a very different picture.

In an initial list of over two dozen including Dardenne, Tate wasn’t on the list. In a narrowed list of eight, he wasn’t there. But suddenly, lo and behold at the Supervisors meeting to vet the eight  Tate – who never had headed a university system much less a university system – was added to the list and interviewed on the spot, leading to him appearing on a semifinalist list that included then-University of Louisiana System head Jim Henderson Anybody experienced in academia will tell you this sequence of events is a hallmark of a forced selection; late in the process the headhunter firm was told to cull its files or contacts and find someone who fit a profile, in this case likely a minority with a background in administration or research involving diversity, inclusion, and equity issues, to match the governor’s agenda.

Surprise: days later, Tate gets it, with Dampf calling him a “great leader.” Of course, he and Edwards won’t admit publicly the latter’s role in the process – and, curiously, Bridges’ story was entirely incurious about these details which kicks the props out of its argument. By comparison, Landry’s role in Rousse’s hiring seems quite modest.

As it also seems with the hiring at the University of Louisiana Monroe of new president Louisiana native Carrie Castille. The story also alludes to Landry’s praising Castille to corral her over Louisiana Delta Community College’s one-time interim chancellor Chris Broadwater. But it neglects to mention Castille’s extensive higher education career while Broadwater had been in that business only a few years (currently a corporate lawyer for a business with an extensive history of state contracts), after resigning from the House of Representatives midway through Edwards’ first term as it had become clear his loyalty to Edwards was costing him influence among his fellow Republicans who controlled the chamber. Although the final vote is not public, it’s likely that Edwards appointees on the University of Louisiana Board of Supervisors got him in the race and almost pushed him past the finish line.

The other tack Bridges takes is to hint that Landry’s involvement was extensive enough to threaten accreditation of state colleges by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges for politicization, quoting Dardenne to back that up. However, that judgement is entirely validated when reviewing how SACSCOC investigated a charge that Florida Republican Gov. Rick DeSantis interfered with the hiring of The New College of Florida’s president, which on the surface indicates much more involvement by him than in the accusations against Landry. SACSCOC reaffirmed nothing untoward happened, but if Bridges bothered to gather that information in assessing the claim, inappropriately either he sat on it or his editors removed it.

Thus, the article tries to insinuate that Landry’s role in the hirings were problematic. That tells us more about the general mainstream media’s antipathy towards Landry than actually providing enlightenment on the incident.

Congress KO's bad policy LA legislators wouldn't

Buzzkill! What Louisiana legislators with feet of clay refused to do members of Congress had the fortitude to do to prevent soon people without a “medical” reason from getting high legally in the state.

One of the downplayed aspects of the tussle between Democrats and Republicans to pass at least a temporary continuing federal budget, accomplished this week, was that three appropriations bills would move forward to fund their areas for the entire fiscal year, one of these being the Department of Agriculture’s colloquially known as the “farm bill.” In it was a provision that starting the next fiscal year would ban sales of hemp-related products if each container has more than 0.4 milligrams of tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychoactive portion of cannabis that comes from the hemp plant..

The 2018 farm bill legalized using industrial hemp, but failed to put adequate restrictions on the use of THC from it, defining usage by weight instead of total amount. The marketplace abhors a void and so it stepped in to create consumable products as high as 15 mg per unit. While these are smaller amounts relative to what may be sold legally as medical marijuana or illegally as lids on the street, take enough of them and you can cop a buzz.

Open electoral season has begun on Arceneaux

A year out from Shreveport’s 2026 mayoral election and a month removed from Republican Mayor Tom Arceneaux’s reelection campaign announcement, finally a Democrat opponent has emerged which tells more about the tone the contest will take than who will be an actual threat.

Arceneaux won in 2022 because of the negative impression his runoff opponent Democrat former state Sen. Greg Tarver had created among some activist Democrats and in the electorate who should have been natural supporters. This means Arceneaux had a target on his back from the moment he took office in the eyes of black Democrats, who feel a majority-black electorate never should have allowed a white Republican into the mayoralty.

Arceneaux has had his ups and downs given a tough situation, as a result of poor decisions by his Democrat predecessors over the previous quarter-century, exacerbated by a City Council gerrymandered to produce five Democrats of seven able to pass legislation over his head. This has produced a largely-cautious, almost technocratic approach to governing by the GOP mayor.

Veterans Day, 2025

This column publishes every Sunday through Thursday around noon U.S. Central Time (maybe even after sundown on busy days, or maybe before noon if things work out, or even sometimes on the weekend if there's big news) except whenever a significant national holiday falls on the Sunday through Thursday associated with the otherwise-usual publication on the previous day (unless it is Easter, Thanksgiving Day, Independence Day, Christmas, or New Year's Day when it is the day on which the holiday is observed by the U.S. government). In my opinion, in addition to these are also Memorial Day and Veterans' Day.

With Monday, Nov. 11 being Veterans' Day, I invite you to explore the links connected to this page.

Bad ruling doesn't slow LA LNG export growth

Even an activist rogue elected state judge won’t be able to slow the momentum liquified natural gas transport and export has established in Louisiana, reaping a windfall to Louisiana’s economy.

Last month, independent 38^th District Judge Penelope Richard ruled in favor of two of three claims made by three leftist environmentalist special interest groups. Richard previously had served as a public defender before election to the court as a Democrat, but more recently ran as an independent as Cameron Parish voter registrants signing up as Republicans began to become the district’s plurality.

In buying claims that the state (and by implication the federal government, which approved of the environmental impact statement earlier this year) ignored catastrophic anthropogenic global warming as a factor in issuing a permit, she wholly created new law using an absurdly expansionist view of the state Constitution that obligates the state to consider CAGW in permitting, and echoed that approach in alleging the state didn’t consider “environmental justice” as a factor – even though months earlier the Environmental Protection Agency repudiated the entire concept in its enforcement actions.

LA ratepayers must not pay for Meta CAGW fantasy

What can go wrong? It turns out that even as Meta boosts its data center investment in northeast Louisiana, for residents there may be higher electricity rates and fewer police officers around.

Almost a year ago, Meta announced land deals aimed at plunking down a center in Richland Parish. Since then, it has bought almost as much land again and raised its cost estimate for the project, known as Hyperion (in the original Greek, “he who watches over”), from $10 billion to $27 billion.

As part of the arrangement, Meta pledged to draw a significant portion of its power from renewable sources, perhaps eventually as much as five gigawatts from all sources after starting out needing about one GW. Five GW would power over a million homes.

CCS future, not past, relevant to LA Senate race

Republican Senate candidates trying to differentiate themselves in a field where daylight barely shines among them on issue preferences should stop playing “he said/she said” and instead concentrate on telling voters what they will do on the issue of carbon capture and sequestration.

In a battle largely played out in gatherings and on social media, Treas. John Fleming and state Sen. Blake Miguez supporters have taken to trading accusations about whether each is against CCS and when. Fleming indirectly started it when some months ago he began proclaiming that he was the only candidate not to have voted for expanding CCS at some point in his legislative career.

That hit both Miguez and, although perhaps not intended since she didn’t enter the race until recently, state Rep. Julie Emerson where they live. Since 2020, with both being members of the Legislature throughout, several matters have come through that regulate CCS in some fashion, sometimes expansionary, sometimes restrictive, that scarcely any legislator ever voted against. As late as 2024 both were voting in favor of bills expanding the scope of CCS.

While neither publicly have addressed the controversy, supporters of Miguez’s have been by trying to shoot the messenger. They claim, using a trail of web material, that not only did Fleming have a pro-expansion CCS vote while a member of the U.S. House of Representatives but also his opposition to CCS only became public when he began touting his line about CCS votes cast. They also assert that back when these votes were taken too little was known about CCS and its safety concerns and need to dislodge private property rights to hold legislators accountable for these in the present.

That’s a weak argument, akin to ignorance of the law being an excuse to break it, and could be applied as well to Fleming’s supposed 2015 vote on an omnibus energy bill where the section in question only in the absolutely vaguest sense could be read as an endorsement of CCS – it instructed the federal government that it could shovel more funds to CCS research if an evaluated project seemed promising. Keep in mind that there’s nothing wrong in conducting CCS research, or even in having CCS as long as it has adequate safety measures attached, buy in from local governments, and that government isn’t subsidizing it.

A recent executive order by GOP Gov. Jeff Landry touched many of these bases but could not address the single biggest failing attendant to CCS: federal government tax policy favoring, to taxpayer detriment, the highly uneconomical practice. Outside of enhanced oil recovery, there’s no use for captured and stored carbon at present that pays for itself.

It’s done in most cases only because of a lucrative tax credit known as Section 45Q. So, the relevant issue for the campaign is preference regarding the retention of that credit, regardless of when opposition really began or whether everybody was asleep at the wheel.

Fleming has publicly spoken about it, saying it should be repealed. We also reasonably can infer that the remaining major candidate, Republican Public Service Commissioner Eric Skrmetta, even if he has yet specifically to address publicly the issue, would be against it since he is on the record in a public forum, a year prior to launching his Senate bid, calling CCS part of  a “scam.”

So, let’s hear from Miguez and Emerson about 45Q credits. And if they pledge to try to dump them, then voters can take note that only GOP incumbent Bill Cassidy, to the chagrin of state voters, among quality candidates shows any genuine backing of CCS, giving them another reason to toss him out of office in favor of any of the Republican front runners.

LA case may moot recent Democrat election gains

Recent election results that cheered Democrats may prove short-lived, if not possibly reversed, when the U.S. Supreme Court rules on a Louisiana case that will affect its electoral maps on multiple levels.

The Bayou State now waits upon the Court’s decision in Callais v. Louisiana to determine whether race will be allowed to be used as a proxy for partisan goals. A decision to rein that in and to provide new, likely more restrictive, parameters for when racial categories can become relevant and legal in drawing district boundaries would give the state a chance to revert back from a map gerrymandered to produce two majority-minority districts almost guaranteeing two of six seats won by Democrats to one where only one such seat exists and Republicans likely would win five of six seats in a state where a third of voters are black.

The whole country watches for this, especially the handful of states where such a decision could lead to new reapportionment options. One such is California, which like Louisiana over the past few decades has had an electorate become increasingly skewed towards one party, but in the opposite direction.

LSU Board chooses wisely new governance, leaders

The Louisiana State University Board of Supervisors delivered a welcome surprise this week with the hiring of a new system president paired with a reorganization that stands to make the delivery of education by the system’s institutions more relevant and vital to improving the state’s quality of life.

The Board hired McNeese State University’s current president Wade Rousse to lead the system. But instead of also making him chancellor of the Baton Rouge campus additionally, it hired a late applicant, University of Alabama Provost James Dalton, to serve as LSUA&M’s leader, returning the governance structure to what it had been a dozen years ago.

Perhaps there was a plan beyond what appears to be a last-minute decision to spit the jobs had they once had been. It isn’t unusual for a search firm to solicit candidates, but apparently after the deadline had closed when Dalton wasn’t even initially a semi-finalist for the combined post is an atypical process. Regardless of the provenance, it’s a wise move.

BC to weigh new fee to stem white elephant red ink

If at first you don’t succeed, knock seven dollars off the price and call it something different to stem the red ink from the white elephant known now as the Brookshire Grocery Arena.

Just over three years ago, ASM Global, the management company decided it would institute a $12 parking fee at Bossier City’s arena, where $2 would go to the company handling the parking through a cashless system and the other $10 would be split evenly between ASM for operations and the city for capital expenditures. As if to highlight the city’s acceptance of the deal, at the next City Council meeting discussion about taking $350,000 out of the 2017 LCDA Bond Fund to buy a new generator for the facility focused on how the new bounty would offset such costs, particularly as the arena has lost money since its inception 25 years ago, over $10 million cumulatively.

That idea went over like a lead balloon. Almost as suddenly as it had appeared it quickly disappeared. But the problem remained. Despite barely making money for only the third time in its history in 2024, not only does the facility continue to hemorrhage funds generally, but also this is on top of capital improvements being made. The 2022 dip into the 2017 LCDA bond fund actually came as part of a one-time effort to perform capital improvements. Over the past several years, over $15 million has gone to that purpose, with a typical budget of $250,000 each year reserved out of the Hotel/Motel Taxes Fund from occupancy and related sales taxes for this purpose.