Libertarians join conservatives in LA GOP nominee madness

There's a budget still unresolved, a potential constitutional clash over school funding, and what am I writing about? The silliness that has overcome Louisiana Republicans, especially among its libertarian cohort, on display earlier today in Shreveport at the party's statewide convention.

During the nomination season for the state GOP, the popular vote in the primary phase gave a big victory to former Sen. Rick Santorum, and a smaller win to presumptive nominee (by party rules) former Gov. Mitt Romney. But party activists during the caucus phase gave a majority to Rep. Ron Paul. As noted, any whining by the conservatives in the party was unwarranted by the fact they had the chance to follow the rules as did the libertarians.

Yet with the shoe on the other foot, now it's the libertarians who complain about the rules of the process. Statements from their leaders moan about unfairness with rules promulgated only days before the convention was to meet by the Louisiana Republican State Central Committee that would allow the convention to meet with only a third present (Paul forces had 62 percent of the delegates), which is not unusual (I have served on bodies where that proportion served as a quorum) and others in order to maximize the chances that only genuinely-committed delegates for candidates other than Paul are selected for those candidates.

Bill deals with higher education inefficiency inadequately

The first was an error of commission with the failure to create greater efficiency in Louisiana higher education delivery through the merger of Southern University New Orleans with the University of New Orleans. The second would have been an error of commission by inducing more inefficiency into the system by forcing together Louisiana State University Shreveport and Louisiana Tech University. Perhaps the third time is the charm although the actions and rhetoric involved signals the lesson could use a lot of reinforcing.

SB 284 by state Sen. Page Cortez would merge several disparate technical school campuses into South Louisiana Community College, located in Lafayette. While the number of campuses that would be consolidated under SLCC appears impressive, seven, in fact they are all governed under one administrative superstructure anyway, Acadiana Technical College, located in Lafayette. The other six are in Abbeville, Crowley, New Iberia, Opelousas, St. Martinville, and Ville Platte – none more than 40 miles away from the main campus. The total number of students spread among these campuses this academic year was 3,852 (SLCC enrolled 3,910).

In fact, a major problem identified years ago in the system was the presence of too many campuses with too few students. Well over half then had fewer than 250 students, and while state data do not permit breaking this down by campus, at least a couple of ATC likely qualify on this account. This mirrors the larger problem of too many campuses in the state; Louisiana ranks among the top four in smallest enrollments per two-year schools, behind other states with populations about half its size or smaller. So it might appear this bill would help out to decrease system inefficiency of too many buildings and locations and not enough people.

Bills, debate show statist attitudes die hard in Legislature

Two bills, minor in and of themselves, when opened to debate the rhetoric concerning them that flows shows that, despite recent progress in extinguishing this attitude among public servants, the statist mentality still hampers Louisiana public policy-making.

SB 479 by state Sen. Mike Walsworth would allow the state to trade out as economic incentives surplus property. It would follow the current legal procedure of the Department of Natural Resources reviewing whether property is surplus and, if so, getting it appraised, but then instead of auctioning it, the Department of Economic Development with the approval of the Commissioner of Administration would get to use it as an incentive to attract a business and its concomitant economic boost as a result of successful recruitment.

The House Natural Resources and Environment Committee approved the bill but not before tacking on an amendment that would require any specific project utilizing this feature to return to it and its Senate counterpart for vetting. DED opposed it, arguing this could take agreements made with confidentiality out of the running by use of this tool.

With chicken hawks checked, real fiscal debate may start

The majority rules in our system of government, and with the governor and one chamber of the Louisiana Legislature cornering the other, the only overall question is whether how quickly and how much resistance will be encountered in dealing with both a current year budget deficit and production of one for the next fiscal year – and whether this resolution starts a meaningful conversation about the proper role and scope of government for the future.

On Memorial Day, the Senate by way of one of its committees restored much of the spending from the budget originally forwarded by Gov. Bobby Jindal to the House. This action signals to the House that it cannot pass its version, and must acquiesce or continue to drag out a process that only will discomfit those wedded to opposition. The panel did so in a manner designed to give the House majority maximum cover – because the argument all along has been symbolic, not substantive.

Had the argument been one of substance – what is the appropriate amount of revenue to be raised by state government and the appropriate things on which to spend it, with an equilibrium point established by the value of an incremental function of government being performed equaling or exceeding the injury done to the people by removing their property in order to pay for it – things would have turned out very differently than what occurred in the House. Instead of taking an artificial concept – “one-time money” – and making that the baseline on which to establish a spending figure in addition to official recurring revenue forecasts, followed by abdicating the responsibility to specify and justify areas of  low priority to eliminate to the executive branch with only vague, if not unrealistic, guidance on how to do so, the substantive approach would have been to collect all recurring monies, match them in accordance to functions by need by whatever legal means necessary, and then during debate explain what things previously funded were not going to be and why.

Memorial Day, 2012

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 Monday through Friday associated with the otherwise-usual publication on the previous day (unless it is 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, there are six of these: Memorial Day, Independence Day, Veterans' Day, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas, and New Year's Day.

With Monday, May 28 being Memorial Day, I invite you to explore the link above.

Newspaper cutback creates opportunity to help taxpayers

The decision by the New Orleans Times-Picayune to cease daily publication invites a review of the state’s corporate welfare laws benefitting large publishers at taxpayer expense. Unfortunately, that review is likely to track past efforts that put special interests over taxpayers.

The presumed problem stems from R.S. 43:141 et. seq., which mandates certain qualification for newspapers serving as “papers of record,” meaning it prints official government notices. Legislators from the area seemed convinced the law would have to be changed, and quickly, to allow the paper to continue as the paper of record for all things Orleans in the near future.

Actually, under current law initially the change still would allow many units of Orleans government to continue using the paper, because for many jurisdictions the law does not specify any publishing frequency. However, R.S. 43:202 specifically requires judicial notices be published in a daily paper for Orleans. Further, to be eligible for any jurisdiction to award an annual contract, the paper in question must have published “at least weekly” during the previous five years. This means legislators must feel that the Times-Picayune, as some have suspected in the wake of the announcement, plans to cease publication of a print edition sometime in the future, if change is felt to be needed for all instances of government record publishing in Orleans.

Whether for sake of economics or politics, merger founders

If any lesson should emanate from the failed attempt arrange union between my employer Louisiana State University Shreveport and Louisiana Tech University, it’s that a merger on these terms will not fix whatever ails higher education delivery in the Shreveport-Bossier metropolitan area.

All along, advocates argued the primary reason for the combination was to accomplish this. They described the symptoms that purported to signal deficiency in this area: relatively low enrollment numbers, almost no growth, and apparent difficulty in supplying programs. But they really couldn’t, or would not, articulate the causes of this. Instead, by having LSUS subsumed into Tech, essentially they argued that in order to cure the unknown disease the patient had to be killed and then resurrected as a symbiont.

While the idea had a great many area supporters, none of whom ever had served as a tenured faculty member or administrator in higher education, in the political and business communities in the area, as well as interest groups who assert their missions encompass education delivery, the naïveté of the notion was stunning in that so many failed to grasp its fundamental shortcoming. They appeared ignorant of a central truism in academia (and government), that institutions as organizations first and foremost do not act with a larger environmental purpose in mind – that is, to maximize higher education delivery statewide – nor to serve peripheral, specific environments – to Tech, the Shreveport/Bossier metropolitan area.

Senate fails to provide even minimal civil liberties relief

Good things can take a lot of time to manifest, but this is getting ridiculous with the Louisiana Legislature’s continuing inaction, if not actual sabotage, of the ability of a significant proportion of its citizenry to exercise a simple civil liberty.

That liberty being the ability to travel around and patronize commercial establishments without going into respiratory distress. As medical advances improve quality of life for those with a disability that impairs breathing, from having asthma to suffering chronic obstructive pulmonary disease to using mechanical ventilation, who now comprise a tenth of the population that as a whole will continue to increase in proportion as it ages, the discrimination that occurs by giving preference to those who choose to smoke in some avenues of commerce in Louisiana makes this violation all the more egregious.

Currently, 25 states ban any smoking in public establishments of any kind, with extensions emanating outside from them as well. Louisiana and some other states ban some indoor smoking and in Louisiana in a radius 25 feet from passageways for certain buildings such as hospitals and educational facilities. Smokers decry the restriction of their behavior and certain industries feel they might lose business if smoking were not allowed, but in the conflict of civil liberties that results – one group that wants to engage in a voluntary activity not essential to sustaining their lives as an aside to interacting commercially versus another that involuntarily suffers an ability to sustain life when the first group engages in that activity while interacting in the same commerce, thereby negating its members’ ability to interact in that kind of commerce – the preponderance of evidence shows the second group’s claim as more compelling, to not to have to suffer through that environment, meriting government action to ensure they may exercise that more vital liberty.

"One-time" money defined wrongly, invites wrong debate

As the state’s next fiscal year budget hurtles to resolution, the central debate among Louisiana policy-makers has become over the use of “one-time” money. Unfortunately, it’s the wrong debate using the wrong terminology.

To take a typical definition one might run across in the popular media, and one seemingly accepted by many politicians, these dollars are those “that likely will only materialize once.” The problem is, for much of what gets designated as this, it’s simply not accurate.

Some of what gets lumped into this category honestly can be called that. For example, one portion of money that never will come as recurring revenue is the sale or lease of the New Orleans Adolescent Hospital, now shuttered for a few years. That $35 million indeed is a single shot,“one-time” (and, ironically or perhaps hypocritically, remains in the budget after self-proclaimed budget hawks squawked they had purged the budget of this kind of spending).

Roemer self-deception prepares him to suffer third strike

My first full-time teaching job out of graduate school (although technically still in it: I had just completed my exams and was working on my dissertation) was at the University of Southern Mississippi, where I had the fortune to run into some older students who recruited me for their intramural softball teams. One team played regular slow-pitch, where I pitched and played catcher (never mind I was six feet tall, 130 pounds, with glasses) and managed a high on-base percentage through walks (because I could see so well with the glasses). We made the quarterfinals before losing.

But the other team I was on went all the way to finals. This was the co-ed version, where sexes alternated between batters. Here, I was the pitcher, for a very simple reason: I could put the ball right over the plate almost all of the time, because in this league, you pitched to your own side at bat. The object was to toss as many fat pitches in there as possible. So I'd deliver them and our guys would mash them to the fences, even over them while our gals made contact and looped them over the infielders. The only game we lost was the championship where we got out-mashed and outhit by a bunch of greek guys and gals who these days probably all work for the people I graduated with from the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University.

I suspect in his past former Gov. Buddy Roemer must have been an excellent pitcher on this kind of co-ed team, given the number of softballs right over the plate he has tossed during his pseudo-campaign for the presidency. Plan A in regard to that was to get the Republican nomination. When that no longer suited his psychological needs because of its impossibility, he went to Plan B: obtaining the nomination from a quasi-political party called Americans Elect, which was supposed to offer a platform for a candidate that met the group’s funders’ conception of centrism chosen by the masses fed up with the two major parties.