Speaker's job intrigue may portend switch to GOP

All the complex machinations going on for the Louisiana House of Representatives speaker’s position likely boil down to a simple case of maximizing Republican numbers by having a reliable conservative hold down the position.

In a contest, the dynamics of which obviously will remain somewhat unknown until elections have concluded this fall, where current Speaker Pro-Tem Joel Robideaux early seemed to have the clearest path to victory, that got shaken up with the proclamation by state Rep. Jim Fannin that he would throw his hat into the rotunda. Fannin, slightly senior to Robideaux, held down for the last term the chairmanship of the House Appropriations Committee, the most powerful panel in the House, and thus was a substantially more important policy-maker than Robideaux was in his largely-symbolic office.

At the very least, Fannin cuts out state Rep. Jeff Arnold as the preferred Democrat candidate as he can draw more crossover support from north Louisiana members than can Arnold from the New Orleans area.

Incumbent matchup loser may parlay that into Senate

Give Rep. Jeff Landry credit – he’s taking the lemons of reapportionment and turning them into lemonade of a possible extended political career, one way or the other.

The freshman Landry has by no means acted as a shrinking violet in the House of Representatives. During the recent period of extended debate leading to a temporary resolution of the debt issuance issue of the federal government, Landry emerged as a leader among new Republicans shaping their party’s negotiations, eventually voting against the measure that slowed the approach to but did not solve for the economic problems that will result from too much spending. In doing so, he exerted more influence in a few months in Congress than did his predecessor lobbyist. He also has become one of the more outspoken critics of Pres. Barack Obama in Congress, rejecting an invitation to meet with him over a debt deal over concerns Obama had no workable solutions to impart but instead wished to use the meeting with House Republicans as a vehicle for grandstanding.

Some observers speculate that Landry may publicize more his differences with his ideological opponents in Congress and the White House in order to draw a difference between himself and Rep. Charles Boustany, because in reapportionment Louisiana lost a House seat and these two found themselves odd men out after that drawing.

Adley seems set to continue disingenuous fulminations

State Sen. Robert Adley has a history of grandstanding, and his signature bill this session concerns (yet again) opening up records in state government. While it had its good and bad points and would bring some benefits but create some costs, it also lent itself to use of big-government advocates such as Adley as a potential weapons against smaller and more efficient government in Louisiana. And now, reformers may have to suffer four more years of similar behavior.

SB 57 would have removed from many executive branch agencies, and some of it from the governor, chief of staff, and executive counsel, protection from disclosure “any records having been used, being in use, possessed, or retained for use by the governor in the usual course of the duties and business of his office that relate to the deliberative process of the governor, intra-office communications of the governor and his internal staff, the governor's security and schedule, or communications with or the security and schedule of the governor's spouse or children.” It would have created perhaps the most transparency involving interactions between a governor and the rest of the executive branch of any state in the country.

In some ways, this approach comports more to the historical open-records philosophy in Louisiana, which was to assume everything was open to which exceptions existed based upon origins of the communication.

Fall matchups show benefit of diluted term limits

Like vampires, term-limited Louisiana legislators continue to attempt to exist as the undead, revealing perhaps a silver lining to the otherwise-flawed term limit regime enacted into the Constitution some 15 years ago.

When the Louisiana citizenry overwhelmingly voted for term limits for legislators, essentially three or fewer for a position in the House or Senate, this made the state unique, as it was the only one whose legislators proposed it on themselves without the presence of an initiative process that could have allowed citizens to bypass state government. But perhaps the price of that, not realized by many at the time, was their application only to the position held in their specific chambers.

This allowed, when limitation first applied in 2007, to have a number of those limited in the House to try for Senate seats, and a couple of Senate members to go for the House.

Misunderstanding poverty leads to bad lending policy

Yesterday’s post closed with the truism, “… until public policy recognizes it must alter the attitudes, thus behavior, of people to reduce poverty ….” As a recent opinion piece confirms, some Louisiana renders of opinion have a ways to go to reach this proper understanding.

The column argued for more regulation of “payday” lenders – establishments, many owned by large financial institutions, that charge high interest rates (sometimes in the hundreds of percentage points for an annual percentage rate) for small, short term loans. Predictably, the writer equates regulation of the industry to any less extent than terms that almost entirely discourage it as dereliction of the state’s duty and calls for this, as have some policy-makers (for example).

Such a view not only shows ignorance about the issue, but also betrays a lack of understanding of the nature of poverty.

Throwing money at problem causes more child poverty

The annual KidsCount survey came out showing the usual dismal place Louisiana has comparatively regarding child quality of life. This, even more unfortunately, brings out the usual responses whose only contribution to the public policy debate about this issue is they argue to repeat the same mistakes that have caused this situation in the first place.

That’s the conclusion one draws when an opinion writer sought out, for a Louisiana angle, words of idiocy on this subject from state Rep. Regina Barrow. The Democrat asserts that “We haven’t addressed poverty in a consistent manner” and then proceeds to offer the solution that is consistent: throw more money at the problem, which in fact has constituted the most consistent approach over the past several decades – and a failed approach at that.

This is because those of Barrow’s ilk have no clue as to what poverty is and from where it comes.

BR smarter than Holden on "smart" growth snake oil

When referring to former Mayor Tom Murphy of Pittsburgh and his proffering advice about how to create an urban renaissance, the operative word is “rich” – not in the sense meaning following his tactics would produce much wealth, but in it being used as a simile for “laughable.” That’s because if Baton Rouge and other Louisiana central cities followed his course of actions, like Pittsburgh they also would become economic basket cases.

Murphy, who prior to entering elected office had a job similar to that of the nation’s 44^th president, was in town to speak at the Louisiana 2011 Smart Growth Summit in Baton Rouge. Having served as mayor from 1994-2006, he oversaw a period of in Pittsburgh where the city’s economic landscape made a transition away from heavy industry. As a result, more service sector jobs, many concentrated in higher-end industries such as higher education and health care, developed.

The strategy Murphy followed involved heavy government infrastructure spending, tearing down and clearing areas, building sports facilities, and pumping money into downtown.

Politics, not facts, lie behind opposing plan privatization

Never walk into an ambush, which Gov. Bobby Jindal astutely avoided yesterday when a biased political organization convened a kangaroo court to convict the Jindal Administration’s potential plan to privatize all state employee health insurance operations. Predictably, the session was short on truth and bereft of reasoned analysis, and all about politics.

Clearly, the sponsoring organization, the League of Women Voters of Baton Rouge – a group that long ago followed its national office in abandoning any pretense of nonpartisanship and since has sung vigorously in the left’s choir – meant to embarrass Jindal in any way possible. It invited a panel so full of their own interests against the idea – a state senator so partisan that if Jindal said 2+2=4 he would insist the equation really equaled 5, an ex-state worker with an axe to grind as Jindal fired him for protecting his power and privilege as opposed to serving employees, retires, and taxpayers, the head of an organization of state retirees that tries to scare them into thinking any move to get the state out of the business resembles the apocalypse, and the head of a state teachers’ union who opposes any government privatization of functions – that it was clear that a Jindal Administration representative simply would serve as a propaganda device to try to legitimize this dog-and-pony show and be ganged up on by the others. There wasn’t even any pretense of fairness, as the head of the sponsor herself had written critically of the idea, and showed entire lack of seriousness by the goofy move of setting an empty space for Jindal Administration representation and the engaging in dramatics to call attention to the fact of its absence.

Denied a hostage to beat, these bullies turned to spouting hot air instead of cold, hard facts.

Fear, lack of vision hold back LA online education

Louisiana, typically dragging its feet in innovation, needs not to let vested interests and limited vision retard utilization of new institutional arrangements and technology not just to educate better its children, but also to offer better service to adult learners at the tertiary level.

This week sees the opening of the state’s first online, virtual charter school, the Louisiana Connections Academy. Interest in it has gone through the ceiling, inviting the usual pushback from the education establishment threatened by any success it may achieve.

As an educator who for over a decade has taught courses online, and who for the past several years has taught the majority of his classes online comprising an entire university major, I can assure you that if done correctly and with students having the right attitude about online learning this method can be very effective.

Bossier City again tries, fails to justify wasted spending

It snowed this spring in Bossier City when its officials addressed the $21 million the city shelled out for a parking garage that could have been paid by the developer of the Louisiana Boardwalk. Good for the developer who is going into receivership as the garage cost would have made the project even less financially feasible for it; bad for the Bossier City taxpayer because what was obvious to everybody except the financial half-wits in elected city office, that the money could have been used in a more productive way on behalf of the citizenry, was worse than thought.

Still, not being the sharpest tools in the shed on these matters, even after making the people pay the wages of their policy sins exemplified through the city’s budget collapse of two years past, Bossier City policy-makers don’t seem to realize their continued defense of this and other poor decisions aren’t convincing to observers who actually can run two brain cells together. Their latest attempt comes through an assertion that, by 2015, the property will have “paid off” the costs associated with it.

At a figure quoted at $43.5 million, roughly half of that figure represented legitimate expenses appropriate for government to pay, such as infrastructure. It also managed to get the bankrupt owner to pay for some as well as the Red River Waterway Commission (which gets its money also from taxpayers). But the simplistic method it uses to claim a payback fools nobody who has any financial sense.