St. George petition timing involves tricky decision

There’s a lot of timing involved in politics, as illustrated in the decision by backers of creating a municipality in east and south East Baton Rouge Parish on when to launch a referendum to determine whether it will be born.

Organizers to found the city, St. George, assert they have already enough signatures as qualified under law to call such an election. As there is no time limit to gathering these, except that if the verification process, that could take as long as a month, finds them short then they have 60 days to try to hit the mark of one-quarter of registered voters in the area, there is discretion as to when to have the election, subject to the parameters of calling special elections.

As the goal is to assume that around one out of every eight signatures is not valid, the organizers wish to have at least 20,000 signatures on hand to turn in and start the verification process. Given their announced total is about 1,500 short, there’s no opportunity for the election to occur this year. The next available opportunity at present appears to be the first Saturday in April, Apr. 4, which is set aside for local elections. That would mean that, given the couple of weeks prior to that date the Secretary of State is to have a certified petition to put on a ballot, signatures would have to be turned in to the East Baton Rouge Registrar of Voters in the last week of February. To be very assured that the verification can get done, the end of January might be the optimal time.

Report shows proper way for LA to expand coverage

With little fanfare, earlier this month Louisiana released its plan to have health care insurance provided to all citizens. With even less fanfare, the state’s media ignored it because it did not fit their preferred narrative of bigger, more redistributive government.

The report only got mentioned as an aside this week in the New Orleans Times-Picayune – which until then never even acknowledged the existence of the law or the bill that became it despite its potential far-reaching impact because editorially the newspaper supports the alternative of Medicaid expansion under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) – in an article that in part continues that outlet’s campaign to expand Medicaid. The law required the Department of Health and Hospitals to issue a report about what policies had to be enacted at all levels of government in order to expand insurance to all citizens using market-based rather than government- and politically-based principles.

DHH already has issued two reports explicating why Medicaid expansion is inferior and undesirable policy. Rigorous methodology showed that, under four different scenarios with differing assumptions, within a decade the state would be paying hundreds of millions of dollars more annually for care under expansion than under the current uncompensated care system. In addition, but not covered by these reports, are the results from academic research known as the “Oregon Experiment” that demonstrated people eligible for Medicaid but without health insurance have no worse and even better health outcomes than those utilizing Medicaid, and follow-ups that noted even when the previously uninsured begin using Medicaid they continued to utilize emergency room services for their primary care at significantly higher rates than the population – disproving a key Obamacare selling point that primary care would be more efficiently delivered if more of the uninsured were insured by Medicaid or other form of provision.

Landrieu campaign acumen absent on travel issue

Perhaps the only reason some observers cling to the notion that Sen. Mary Landrieu has at least a toss-up chance of retaining her seat, despite polling numbers to her disadvantage, is that she has a reputation, by winning past close elections, of being a good campaigner. One must question that narrative given the way she has handled the burgeoning scandal of her using taxpayer dollars for campaign travel activities.

After the first questionable use of these funds, where a trip that qualifies under Senate rules as requiring at least partial campaign funding she paid for entirely out of taxpayer funding, came to light, she tried to fob it off as a billing error by the vendor, which as it turns out was not possible. When the second publicized incident broke, she then proclaimed a thorough investigation would be done of all past travel.

That’s the recommended strategy if you feel reasonably confident that these are few and far between, because then you know that independent, outside forces will find few, if any. Indeed, even the state Republican Party, politically motivated to scour public records as much as possibly available to find damaging incidents, could find fewer than double-digits worth. Instead, Landrieu and her staff entirely misdiagnosed – whether from sheer ignorance or that she had become so comfortable in violating regulations that any thought in her conscience that she was in the wrong – her level of risk on this, in finding 43 such events.

Landrieu billing antics feed her dishonest image

We now discover just how deep was Sen. Mary Landrieu’s hand into the cookie jar by her self-revelation that over two-fifths of all her air charter travel since 2002 had some portion illegally charged to taxpayers. What’s not new is the inadequacies in her trying to explain it away.

At the very end of the week’s news cycle, four days after Landrieu had said the information would be made public, lawyers contracted by her admitted 43 such erroneous billings had occurred. In each instance, regardless of whether any campaign-related activity had occurred, the entire amount had been billed to taxpayers, as if the staff had no idea of the operative Federal Election Commission and Senate rules. Landrieu shrugged off the incident by saying her campaign account had reimbursed the federal government some $33,000 for this, that it was only “sloppy bookkeeping,” and that procedures were to be changed to prevent this from happening in the future.

Left unaddressed were several embarrassing questions for her:

Glass-housed legislators posturing irresponsibly

If nothing else, emulating Pres. Barack Obama, you can count on Louisiana’s legislators to identify something as a “problem” that they created themselves, then disclaim any responsibility for it, as we see in the instance of needed changes to the benefits system of state employees and retirees (and some school board employees).

In his six years, repeatedly Obama has implemented policies that create or exacerbate a problem and proceeds to blame anybody who did not assist him in that problem’s creation for it. He raised taxes and wildly increased deficit spending to engineer the most simpering economic recovery on record; he made disability payments and unemployment compensation easier to get to bring the country’s workforce participation rate to the lowest in almost 40 years; his health care insurance policies have sent costs escalating without any positive impact on outcomes. And we have the Louisiana Legislature acting much the same as it looks to convene a gripe session over what it did to itself.

This concerns plans of the Office of Group Benefits to restructure benefits provisions for health insurance. While some clients will end up paying less overall, in the aggregate insured persons likely will face increased health care costs – even as their rates are about four percent lower than they were two years ago and their plans provide benefits much in excess of typical policies for rates significantly below that paid in then individual market and often better than in the group market as a whole.

Landrieu debate hypocrisy reveals untrustworthiness

It’s interesting how six years and a comparatively inferior electoral position can change the tune of Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu as she finds out what life’s like being the underdog.

As the electoral environment for Landrieu continues to deteriorate with the clock ticking towards the day of reckoning for her reelection attempt, depressing her chances to succeed in that quest, incumbent Landrieu has gotten increasingly strident in demanding that the race leader, Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy, engage her in debates. These “debates” aren’t really that, but question-and-answer forums that provide little opportunity for detailed answers but many chances to commit gaffes.

For that reason, front-running candidates minimize their participation in these because they have the most to lose by making a mistake, the exact same reason those behind want more of them. Not surprisingly, Cassidy has committed to just a pair, one to be in Shreveport and broadcast over public television stations, and the other in Baton Rouge to be broadcast over a consortium of commercial television stations. He has turned down other attempted empanels, including one in New Orleans.

Democrats may resort to strategic voting in CD 5

This space recently conjectured whether a Republican other than Rep. Vance McAllister could make a runoff for Louisiana’s Fifth Congressional District, and if the entrance of Public Service Commissioner Clyde Holloway as a Republican into the contest diminished those chances. A new poll gives us some data on which to assess these observations.

Done by the same firm which released the only previous independent and public poll on the race, which had showed McAllister leading the field but with a dismal 27 percent and the only Democrat in it Monroe Mayor Jamie Mayo next at 21 percent, revealed the previously highest-placed challenger Republican to McAllister, physician Ralph Abraham, now topped the group at 22 percent. McAllister had slumped to 20 percent and Mayo was down just a point fewer than he had to 15 percent. Holloway debuted with 9 percent of the vote, in fifth place, behind businessman Harris Brown at 11 percent, who nearly doubled his previous total. Losing as much as McAllister was the previously fourth-place holder, salesman Zach Dasher, who fell to sixth place at 7 percent.


(There are some methodological quibbles with this poll and its predecessor, such as it fails to rotate answers throughout, meaning there’s a slight bias towards earlier-listed names and away from those nearer the end of the alphabet. But in terms of changes in candidate totals between polls that shouldn’t matter for analysis.)

Maness goes useful idiot with lame apology request

While she’s getting a Maness-churian candidate assist on the subject, the very nature of the issue’s dynamics is not going to turn a remark made by Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy into any appreciable fodder to help the deteriorating candidacy for reelection of Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu.

That remark was one where Cassidy compared the Senate leadership of the chamber political head, Democrat Sen. Harry Reid, as overseeing a plantation – orders are given, and the party out of power has no input into any of them, which does violate the collegial norms of the Senate. It’s not a new or even controversial assessment, as political historians have noted that Reid runs the Senate in one of the most closed, iron-fisted fashions ever.

And the idea, proffered by both Reid himself and minor Republican Senate candidate Rob Maness that there’s something objectionable about the terminology Cassidy used – presumably because plantations in America historically used blacks first as slaves and then until only a few decades ago as virtually indentured servants – seems hardly credible. Former Sen. Hillary Clinton used just such an analogy to describe House of Representative’s Republican leadership in 2006 to an almost-exclusively black audience and was asked to apologize by GOP leaders.

Thompson leaving earlier improves district's prospects

With state Rep. Jeff Thompson’s election as a 26^th District judge, the process of picking his successor, depending how it’s done, creates conditions that could leave district residents better or worse off.

At the end of qualifying, no one but Thompson signed up to run for the District B slot to succeed Ford Stinson, automatically putting him in line to be sworn in early next year. To do so, he must resign his current office before then. State law says that when the presiding officer of the chamber, in this instance Speaker of the House Chuck Kleckley, receives notice of a resignation when more than six months of a member’s term remains (Thompson’s expires in early 2016) without a regularly scheduled election prior to a session’s start, he may designate a qualification period and election date.

Historically, in these kinds of situations where a November election produces a legislative vacancy, presiding officers have scheduled a special election anywhere from the end of January to early March. Thompson plans on this as he has expressed intent to resign at the end of the year. He may not be alone: over a half dozen other legislators (including state Rep. Patrick Williams for Shreveport mayor) are running for various posts with them not as lucky as he by being an earlier winner. If any win, some may do so on Nov. 4 and others on Dec. 6. The idea, then, would be that by the latter date all who will need to resign will know, these will happen, and the replacement elections will be held together statewide early in 2015.

Landrieu scam on voters works against U.S. interests

If Sen. Mary Landrieu wants to create the perception that she’s identified with Louisiana rather than with Washington, D.C., standing athwart of foreign policy that helps U.S. interests just to make that point isn’t the way to do it.

For weeks all that has stood in between the U.S. being able to levy certain sanctions against Venezuelan individuals involved in crackdowns directed at protests against that country’s authoritarian leaders, which would involve revoking the visas and freezing the assets of a handful of people, has been Landrieu’s insistence that the matter not be taken up in the Senate. Under the rules for this kind of measure that require unanimity, she has become the only objector, claiming that these would cost Louisianans jobs with her rationale being that these could affect operations at a CITGO refinery in Lake Charles, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Venezuela’s government-owned Petroleos de Venezuela S.A..

How intellectually she can come to such a conclusion is known only to her. The bill as drafted, assuming that you can conflate Venezuela’s leaders as “owning” CITGO, does not prevent its operation in anyway – confirmed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffers involved with the bill. But Landrieu’s office admitted they agreed with Venezuelan officials – working through the struggling Patton Boggs lobby firm recently acquired by Squire Sanders but retaining as its co-lead lobbyist the guy who showed her the ropes when she got to Washington, former Sen. John Breaux – that CITGO might conceivably someday be considered a legal person despite the committee staffers’ reassurance.