Fleming again fights unwise transformation of military

Not only from a logical standpoint is the idea of “atheist chaplains” entirely deficient, as Rep. John Fleming observed yesterday on the issue, but from a procedural standpoint as well, as anybody (like Fleming) who has been in the service knows. But that such an effort had to be inserted in writing shows the continuing effects of the social experiment the Pres. Barack Obama Administration has foisted upon the military.

Fleming successfully got amended H.R. 2397 to exclude this concept from the defense appropriation bill for the upcoming fiscal year. During debate, he pointed out the completely oxymoronic concept involved, as chaplains are there to provide to offer prayer, spiritual counseling, and religious instruction. But if a member of the armed services declares himself “nonreligious,” which assumes agnosticism or atheism, how can prayer happen, what spirit is there to counsel about, and where’s the instruction to be given?

Dredging up similar arguments as had been rejected in committee last month, supporters said this would give an outlet to such members for life counseling. But chaplains are presumed to counsel on the basis of some kind of religious faith in a divine presence, so that is irrelevant in these cases. For those with no religious life at all, a counselor who assistance would be based upon concepts of the secular world would be appropriate and are available.

Landrieu must change bill to secure election advantage

What you can do I can do better, the two major candidates for Senate in Louisiana have told each other over the past few months on the issue of offshore petroleum drilling and revenue distribution thereof to the states. But unless she moves in a direction new to her, Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu will lose bragging rights on this issue to her main competitor Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy.

For her three terms, Landrieu fairly consistently has supported measures not to restrict and to expand this activity. It is a crucial part of her strategy to make a conservative voting public in Louisiana think she is not as liberal as her record indicates. With a lifetime American Conservative Union score barely above 20 (through 2012, where 0 is an unblemished liberal record and hers is about half as high as the chamber average), her tactic always has been to highlight the few conservative issue preferences she articulates and bring the state more money while hoping the mass public ignores the rest of her record.

This issue has been one of the ones on which she can appear to be compatible with the satte’s majority, and so in March she signed on as a co-sponsor to Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s S. 630, which speeds up the timeline for coastal states already with offshore production to receive more in royalties from that, allows for a higher amount to be received, and would increase incentives for other states to enter into offshore production. Yesterday, hearings on the bill commenced with Pres. Barack Obama, with whom she has voted 97 percent of the time where he has issued a preference, administration officials providing a nice foil for her reelection efforts by testifying against the bill, saying it would detract funding going into research on alternative energy sources. She and supporters have argued that coastal states even after the increase begins in 2017 still don’t get their fair share of royalties and other related revenues; inland states have gotten 50 percent of funds going to the federal government from this for nearly a century.

Built on old paradigm, LSU report set to disappoint

If the effort to transform the Louisiana State University System into producing better higher education delivery has any chance of success, the strategy that looks to have been chosen rests on an outdated paradigm that will doom the effort.

On Friday, indications are that the group looking into system transition – almost all members having been connected with Louisiana State University Baton Rouge or the LSU System as graduates, employees, or benefactors and with the lead consultant also having graduated from and taught there – will issue a report stating that the new consolidated system will need … wait for it … more money! The consultant says $200 million worth, which could attract prominent academics and researchers, more graduate students, could expand undergraduate research, begin replacing the 200 faculty members lost in the past four years, and could give remaining faculty a pay increase.

New system/institution President F. King Alexander aims a bit lower, admitting that higher education dollars for state-supported institutions are scarce everywhere. He said he’d just like to see $40 million to get back what he said was 220 faculty members let go over the past four years. Regardless, it’s the same tune, just played more softly: more money will make the institution highly respected and thereby better.

LA can improve good pro-life standards even more

While pro-life legislation received maximal publicity in North Dakota and Texas, with the attendant lawsuits after successful passage, this year as in all others Louisiana’s received little  comment and no challenges other than complaints from miffed representatives of merchants of death. It is this protective atmosphere that should set the stage for greater vigilance of life in the future by the state.

Before the 2013 legislative session, the state was named the most pro-life of all on the basis of its laws, and the overwhelming majorities both laws and resolutions alike that protect life receive annually from legislators attest to the deep enculturation that reverence for life has in Louisiana. But more can be done, and the starting point to derive optimal policy in this area is to emulate the conceptualization behind smoking restrictions.

The two issue areas share many similarities. Both acts are considered threats to the life of those who engage in the practice and therefore deserve heavy regulation, yet with the presumption that the activity is legal under certain conditions. The extensive regulation extends not just to individual actions, but also to the those of the suppliers.

LA Democrats still in denial as switching continues

There is a reason Louisiana Democrats from Sen. Mary Landrieu on down seem determined to ensconce themselves as a permanent minority: their flight from reality born of self-denial anchored in faith in liberalism.

Yet again, in the wake of more recent switches of former Democrat elected officials – three at the state level, another at the local – to the GOP, others of the party have been left to muse about why the stream flows steadily away from them, carrying support, politicians and, most importantly, power. And, it seems, nothing changes as they continue to fail to understand at the most basic level what is happening to them.

As noted previously, a combination of societal and political changes have reset the parameters of political contests in Louisiana. Given the heavy infection of populism in the state’s political culture, for decades primarily a personalistic style that attempted to wed voters as dependents to politicians on the basis of charisma and resource distribution from them carried the day. But with more access to education and information to the mass public, in the past two decades these bonds have frayed and increasingly have become supplanted by appeals to issue preferences, summed into the attitudes of partisanship and ideology. As the capacity for ideological thinking among the mass public has increased, to their credit Republicans have with greater and greater success have sought to induce the public to think about elections in more issue-based, less personality-based terms. This unmasks the internal contradiction created when liberal politicians try to obscure the content of their policies to the conservative majority, and creates escalating rejection of those politicians.

Dissuading party switchers counterproductive, costly

Another day, another sitting Louisiana state legislator switches from Democrat to Republican. It’s not that rare; in the past half-century, as the state began its slow, delayed, and ultimately successful turn to conservatism, 37 of these have happened. But the speed of three in the past month has gotten some in the media to wonder whether that ought to be permitted.

Even with the relative commonality of switching in the state’s recent political history, it’s no big surprise that the three involved, state Rep. Jim Fannin and state Sens. Elbert Guillory and Rick Ward, made the move. While Ward has been around only two years and has averaged just under 50 on the Louisiana Legislative Log’s voting index, where a score of 100 reveals all votes on legislation as conservative or reformist and his was above the Democrat average but below the Republicans’, the other two’s showed they had voted more conservative/reform than almost all Democrats and above the GOP average during their times in office. Ward may have more another higher office in mind than reelection, however.

After Ward’s, which gave Republicans a two-thirds/supermajority advantage in the Senate, at least one media outlet asked vox populi about whether state legislators in office should have to have to win an election under their new label to stay in office. There is precedence for elected officials to resign voluntarily and run in a special election, but almost no state places any kind of restriction on the ability for officeholders to switch.

Decrease disabled services wait list with policy changes

Predictably, no veto override session will occur in 2013, confirmed at the end of last week. But that doesn’t mean that what emerged as the highest-profiled of the matters vetoed, more money to fund permanently expansion of the New Opportunity Waivers program, cannot be altered to serve more people and make better use of taxpayer dollars. And an important first step was taken last week to do this.

The Legislature this year passed a $4 million in line items to mandate new ongoing spending for 200 additional slots for this. Waiver programs let states use federal Medicaid dollars to give services to the developmentally disabled or elderly who would not otherwise qualify for the program on the basis of income or assets, as long as the average cost per client does not exceed what the state would spend on paying for them to live in nursing homes.

With a waiting list of approaching 11,000 for NOW, at least a small dent could have been made in that, where some on the list with severe disabilities have waited for eight or more years. But citing legislative directives that produced a health care budget $40 million in the red ordering the executive to make cuts, Gov. Bobby Jindal vetoed those line items.

Session vote signals recoupling of "hawks" to GOP

We’ll see how pledged gubernatorial candidate state Rep. John Bel Edwards does in that 2015 contest, but he’s likely to have to get along without being able to point to policy victories handed to him by a Republican Party divided in the House of Representatives.

In response to a query about getting minority House Democrats into a coalition with disgruntled chamber Republicans known as the “fiscal hawks,” Edwards opined that he thought the same grouping can be resurrected on issues beyond the specifics of the fiscal year 2014 budget that the pairing had major influence upon. This came after it was known there would be no unprecedented veto override session where some line item vetoes of that budget were by far the most publicized, because the typical patterns of voting had been followed.

That is, since Gov. Bobby Jindal became governor, every year most Democrats in the House have not returned their ballots to indicate that an override session should happen. This year, only two of the 38 returned ballots to indicate no session necessary came from Democrats, down from six the previous year. By contrast, each year a solid majority of Republicans have returned ballots; last year 45 did so, while this year 35 (about three-fifths) did.

History tells Caddo to reject more Elio funding

Ouachita Parish’s citizens once got fooled. Are Caddo Parish’s far behind?

Months ago, the concept automaker Elio Motors announced they would purchase and manufacture vehicles in Shreveport’s former General Motors facility. The car has only one wheel in the rear but projects a base price of only $6,800 for an predicted miles-per-gallon gasoline performance of 84. It claims it has gotten 13,000 preorders already, has interest from foreign countries in it, and that it would churn out as many as a quarter of a million of them a year.

However, the company has let it be known that it is having trouble raising money from private investors. Further, it cast its eyes to Shreveport because it was turned down by state and local governments in Michigan for funding. Already, Louisiana has promised it access to state tax incentives that could be worth as much as $150 million over a decade when its starts production, and Caddo Parish provided up front assistance of $1 million on ten times that in lending.

Non-performing NW LA state property needs selling off

When it comes to state-owned property with a public safety connection in northwest Louisiana, the theme best suiting taxpayers needs would be to get rid of it.

For one agency, it’s a matter of cutting losses while you can. The Municipal Police Employees Retirement System has become notorious in the last decade for its obviously foolish investments, the outstanding examples being Bossier Parish’s Olde Oaks and Stonebridge (in bankruptcy when purchased) golf courses, and their surrounding real estate, and $24 million in foreclosed lots in Texas. Concerning the courses, the latest audit shows, with improvements, they are worth about one-fifth of what was paid, for a loss for all of these of about $48 million (and financial shenanigans concerning the courses led to the former executive director going to prison).

Finally, the MPERS board, composed of active and retired sworn officers, recently has decided to try to sell the courses after years of rejecting the idea. Unfortunately, this is closing the barn door after the horse has gotten out and since taken a trip around the world, during which the consequences of it poor decision-making have become accelerated. From funded status of about 85 percent just a few years ago, it has dropped alarming so that the latest audit has it under 60 percent. As a result, last fiscal year taxpayers found they were footing a 31 percent of salary contribution rate, over 20 percent higher than it should be at the level that would match employee contributions were it close to being fully funded.