Stewart claim explained by his political needs

When Democrat First District Attorney James Stewart termed his request to have Republican First District Judge Chris Victory recused from hearing a trial against a sheriff’s deputy as not retaliatory in nature, he was correct. Rather, that move was entirely political relating to Stewart’s electoral career.

Earlier this summer, Victory acquitted four Shreveport police officers on negligent homicide and malfeasance in office charges related to the death of Tommie McGlothen in 2020. McGlothen, who had a history of mental health issues, was detained forcibly by the officers and left unattended for nearly an hour when he expired.

That occurred just before national hysteria erupted about an alleged white police war on blacks, but hardly drew national attention, for while McGlothen was black, so are three of the officers involved. Nothing to see here, special interests keen on promoting the narrative and their media allies decided, so it received little coverage.

Questionable sweetheart deal considered by BC

If you thought a recent plan for Bossier City to pay for directing traffic around schools was questionable and convoluted, wait until you hear about this one.

In the City Council’s first meeting of the month, it took the first step towards spending over $25,000 to give to the Bossier Parish School Board to give to the Bossier Parish Sheriff’s Office to pay for traffic control on Bossier City streets around schools despite there being a whole police department available to perform that function. Fortunately, at its most recent meeting without explanation it withdrew that item from its agenda.

Yet this two-step didn’t seem nearly as complicated as to what would follow. Reviving an issue that first surfaced early in the year, the Council took the first step towards hiring on a contractual basis former deputy police chief Dale Teutsch at salary equating to $55,000 a year, to serve as liaison from the city’s Legal Department to its Police Department on issues related to staffing and organization consequent to civil service law. The ordinance went onto the back burner when ethics concerns were raised about the fact that Teutsch is city Chief Administrative Officer Amanda Nottingham’s father.

Law settled, LA can do more to deter abortion

Last week, the Louisiana Supreme Court put an end to debate over the constitutionality of the state’s abortion statute. That doesn’t mean more can’t be done to protect the unborn.

The several parts of statute that address regulation of the practice, tied together in Act 545 of 2022, make abortion illegal unless to save the life of the mother or other unborn child or that the unborn child hasn’t or couldn’t survive. Criminal penalties exist for people who physically intervene to perform abortions declared illegal.

However, the law doesn’t affect people and entities domiciled in Louisiana from aiding and abetting the performance of abortions illegal under state law if not in Louisiana. For example, some companies say they will pay for pregnant employees to travel out of states that make illegal abortions under their circumstances to have these, and other organizations say they will broker clients in one state to abortuaries in others.

More work needed to prevent child predation

While the Louisiana Legislature sleeps, the grooming of sexualized children stealthily continues that demands action to counter, a void into which Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley must step to address.

Brumley has criticized the Democrat Pres. Joe Biden Administration for trying to change program rules that would cut out a school’s students from participating in nutritional programs unless it capitulated to demands like having students use the bathroom of their chosen gender identity or compete in sports programs corresponding with their gender identity. Louisiana law just changed to prohibit biological males from competing in scholastic sports designated for biological females.

However, the Legislature let slip away an opportunity to pass a law similar to that in Florida that prevents the gender-identity-on-demand movement from crossing the line into outright political advocacy using children as pawns or, worse, as a tool to induce children into claiming a sexual identity to fulfill desires of adults. That Sunshine State law prohibits classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through 3rd grade and prohibits instruction that is not age appropriate for students and requires school districts to adopt procedures for notifying parents if there is a change in services from the school regarding a child’s mental, emotional or physical health or well-being.

Boardwalk sale reminds of BC spending stupidity

If you want another reminder illustrating the futility of activist government pursuing a government-as-venture-capitalist model that robs taxpayer wealth, witness the recent sale of the Louisiana Boardwalk in Bossier City.

Last week it was announced that a buyer had closed on the property listed a few months ago, scooping up the 560,000-plus-sqaure foot outdoor mall for $30.5 million. Commencing operations in 2005, at that time Bossier City’s government hyped the opening, crowing about how if they built it, they would come from all over, pumping sales tax and property tax receipts into city coffers.

Even a cursory inspection of the facts casted doubt that the city’s development expenses to bring infrastructure to the builders – at a cost of $20 million, although part this went to the separate Bass Pro Shops that had opened a short time earlier – could produce subsequently tax revenues to justify it. The collection of mostly retailers with a few food service establishments and a theater would have to attract a lot of purchases that otherwise wouldn’t beggar other Bossier City retailers – principally the then quarter-century-old Pierre Bossier Mall – and kick off a spate of nearby development that did the same.

Needless new spending to dig budgetary hole

We were warned – repeatedly over the last couple of years – and now it looks to come to pass: because of unwise new spending commitments, a string of general fund budget deficits are poised to head Louisiana’s way over the next three years.

This week, the Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget met to make its usual budget adjustments and to collect information on current and projected revenues and costs, and the picture wasn’t pretty. For fiscal years 2024-26, at this point the general fund is predicted short nearly $2 billion.

Some of the gap comes from one-time measures. For FY 2024, $553 million must go to storm-related expenditures for state matches for relief from and hardening against future flooding, but that still leaves $255 million in uncovered ongoing expenses. That would have been covered except for the termination of $286 million extra in in regular Medicaid matching from the federal government as a result of pandemic emergency spending.

Govts shouldn't fund attempt to get, stay lit

While a number of people in and around New Orleans, and especially many visitors there, often take on a mission to get lit and stay lit, government should reject funding an unrelated effort that goes by that name.

“Get Lit, Stay Lit” is nonprofit initiative that pointedly doesn’t follow the philosophy usually espoused by those terms. Much more helpfully, the group Feed the Second Line has begun to create solar collection grids attached to city restaurants, with the purpose of giving these  establishments a source of power when it’s lost as a result of a storm or other event.

Inspiration for this came after Hurricane Ida last year, where power – except for a limited backup peaker gas plant otherwise needed importation into the city – didn’t come back on in some areas for over a week. Many restaurants lost refrigeration and had to ditch otherwise palatable food.

Gubernatorial decision looms for LA Democrats

On the heels of a somewhat-flawed media report about next year’s Louisiana governor’s race, it’s helpful to see where things stand less than a year from qualification.

Earlier this week, the Louisiana Radio Network reported that the 2023 contest to succeed the term-limited Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards was “unusually muddy.” Drawing largely on statements made by University of Louisiana at Monroe political scientist Joshua Stockley, the story described entry by Republicans Atty. Gen. Jeff Landry, Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser, and Treas. John Schroder as contingent on U.S. Senate outcomes in this fall’s elections, principally whether Louisiana GOP Sens. Bill Cassidy and John Kennedy, the latter running for reelection this fall, will become part of the body’s majority.

LRN should have checked their clips; Schroder told supporters months ago he was in, which triggered eventually the announced entrance of Republican state Rep. Scott McKnight to replace him. That doesn’t mean he will stay in, saying he would make a formal announcement later in the year and perhaps something he will reconsider if polling results continue to be discouraging, but desisting seems unlikely.

Most LA colleges stuck on stupid with passports

Insofar as vaccine passports go, Louisiana higher education remains largely stuck on stupid entering the new academic year, although with interesting and telling exceptions.

Despite the lack of efficacy behind the strategy to have all employees and on-campus attendees vaccinated against the Wuhan coronavirus as a means to curtail its impact, the University of Louisiana System and the Southern University System again will mandate this, while the Louisiana Community and Technical College System appears to do the same. However, the Louisiana State University System has given its campuses discretion whether to do so, and the main Baton Rouge campus, its health sciences campuses in New Orleans and Shreveport, and LSU Alexandria won’t.

Nothing has changed in the past year to add any scientific rationale to this required vaccination mandate; if anything, the extremely weak case has eroded further. Consider the flawed formal reasoning why to do so: vaccinations cut down on spread to reduce suffering, if not to save lives.

Bossier traffic deal exercise in opaqueness

Accountability never has been a long suit for Bossier Parish’s governments, and while that has begun to improve a recent issue shows there it’s still a work very much in progress, potentially to the detriment of taxpayers.

That issue concerns school safety concerns raised in the wake of shooting incidents, particularly earlier this summer. Bossier Parish School District schools have resource officers from the Bossier Parish Sheriff’s Office on all campuses, and in the case of a few they also direct traffic before and after the school day consequent to the dropping off and picking up of children. For the upcoming academic year, the District wants to keep the SROs on campus during these periods, necessitating the provision of additional law enforcement personnel on the streets around four schools in the parish and two in Bossier City.

Streets are the province of law enforcement agencies; anywhere in the parish the BPSO although in a municipality concurrently with its law enforcement agency if one exists, in this case Bossier City’s Police Department. Therefore, the simplest and most parsimonious solution has the BPSO assign deputies to the four schools and BCPD assign officers to the two schools as part of their normal policing activities. It seems extraordinarily unlikely that personnel are so stretched in either LEA that extra shifts and overtime would ensue to fulfill this simple and brief task.