Louisiana Voice

Well, there is bad news and there is worse news and thrown into the mix is an incredulous ethics ruling about lobbyists, hookers, and legislators in, of all places, North Carolina. We’ll get to that last one later but first, the bad news:

Gov. Bobby thinks he is qualified to run for President of the U.S. and continues to bob up anywhere there are Bible totin’, flag wavin’ patriotic crowds of more than three people—mainly in Iowa but more recently (as in just this past week) in Washington, D.C.

The worse news is that with each passing day, he appears as qualified as any of the other Ignoranuses (candidates who are both stupid and a–holes) seeking the Republican nomination.

The Washington Post offered up ignoranus as one of the winning entries from its annual Mensa Invitational in which readers are invited to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting or changing one letter to supply a new word and definition. Perhaps it was mere coincidence that the winners were announced around the same time as the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was being held in the nation’s capital.

But perhaps not. After all, several prominent Republican wannabe candidates made their cases at the event and came away looking not so much foolish as downright scary at the prospect one of them may be chosen to lead the free world in 2016.

The CPAC event gave us the opportunity to employ a few more of the Mensa Invitational entries:

Bozone (n.)—the substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The Bozone layer showed no signs of breaking down at CPAC.

Dopeler Effect (n.)—The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly (see any Gov. Bobby speech).

Glibido (n.)—All talk and no action.

Of course there were a couple applicable to the early odds-on favorite to be Louisiana’s next governor: Osteopornosis (a degenerate disease) and Foreploy (any misrepresentation about oneself for the purpose of getting laid).

But that’s another story for another day.

Let us return to the subject at hand which is to present some of the highlights (or lowlights, as the case may be) from the CPAC and a Saturday’s Club for Growth event in Palm Beach, Florida.

Just to get him out of the way early, we’ll take our own Gov. Bobby, who once again failed to even register in the straw poll following the CPAC meeting.

Gov. Bobby stood (on a chair, no less) and told the crowd that his dad came to this country 40 years ago “in search of freedom and an opportunity,” and then he told the whopper of all whoppers when he said his father told him and his brother to “get on your knees and thank God almighty that you were blessed to be born in the greatest country in the history of the world.”

The only problem with that little story, as our mystery cartoonist accurately noted in the strip below this story, is that Jindal’s dad (and his mother) are Hindu.

Writing for The Blaze, Mike Opelka said Gov. Bobby, who was speaking Wednesday night before the CPAC event actually got underway, “had a room filled with young conservatives cheering and applauding his brief presentation.” Opelka also described Gov. Bobby as “surrounded by cheering supporters.”

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/02/25/bobby-jindal-fires-up-young-conservatives-in-this-200-preview-of-his-upcoming-cpac-speech/

For sheer stupidity and audacity, though, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker probably eclipses the other candidates.

It was enough that he had no clue as to whether the Dodd-Frank financial reform law should be amended or repealed, but in giving his qualifications to deal with foreign policy, he was downright astonishing.

Walker said he was equipped to deal with complicated foreign policy issues because he once had breakfast with Henry Kissinger.

http://crooksandliars.com/2015/02/walker-performs-poorly-big-money-base?utm_source=Crooks+and+Liars+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=d022c9ad94-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d4904be7bc-d022c9ad94-330138269

We’re not joking. He actually said that. Well, I once caught a pass from Terry Bradshaw in a gym on a rainy day when there was no one else to throw to but that hardly makes me a threat to break Jerry Rice’s NFL pass reception records. (For the record, the pass was thrown behind me and I did make a spectacular one-handed catch that nearly dislocated my shoulder from the sheer force of Terry’s throw. Actually, the ball was thrown so hard it simply stuck to my palm and had to be peeled off.)

But if you think that comment was pretty amazing, consider what came next. Walker said he was thoroughly prepared to deal with ISIS and other radical Islamic terrorists because “If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world.”

He was referring, of course, to those ever-dangerous public employee unions who protested to his successful right to work legislation. Quite a stretch there, Scotty, boy. It’s hardly a valid comparison to lump public employees in with the likes of ISIS but hey, when you’re trying to appeal to rabid, shallow thinking conservatism, anything goes, right? http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/cpac-speech-scott-walker-isis/story?id=29257020

Even The Donald was on hand to tout his pseudo-candidacy by calling for boots on the ground for an all-out war on everything Islamic.

http://crooksandliars.com/2015/02/donald-trump-my-superior-negotiating?utm_source=Crooks+and+Liars+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=d022c9ad94-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d4904be7bc-d022c9ad94-330138269

Sen. Ted Cruz didn’t perform like the others at CPAC but he did send out a tweet about the recently “Net Neutrality” regulations passed by the FCC, a move interpreted by everyone but Cruz as being good for the consumer and bad news for internet providers who wanted to charge premium prices for fast broadband internet. He subsequently got his come-uppance from a barrage of comments to his tweet.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/11/13/1344716/-After-nonsensical-comments-on-Net-Neutrality-conservatives-rage-against-Ted-Cruz?detail=email

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky won the CPAC straw poll for the third year in a row but may have some problems surviving an earlier interview with Rachel Maddow.

Maddow attempted to interview a dodging, bobbing and weaving Rand Paul on his views about civil rights and businesses’ right to discriminate.

http://crooksandliars.com/nicole-belle/rachel-maddow-corners-rand-paul-his-e

And, as if the comedy of the absurd at CPAC was not sufficiently nonsensical, along comes Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty fame to pour just a bit more humiliation over the State of Louisiana.

That’s right. The guy who quit the Louisiana Tech football team because Bradshaw was going to get his starting job actually shared his vast knowledge of the world with the good folks at CPAC, telling them that hippies were responsible for 110 million Americans having sexually transmitted diseases (STD). http://deadline.com/2015/02/duck-dynasty-phil-robertson-video-cpac-speech-hippies-stds-1201383630/

“Sex, drugs and rock& roll have come back to haunt us!” he said. Just where all this fits into the scheme of things for the Republican Party is uncertain. The hippies have been gone from the scene for a few decades now and the ones I knew back in the day were peaceful kids who wanted us out of an ill-advised war that cost the lives of 58,000 Americans as well as millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians—all to no discernable purpose.

And just what were Phil Robertson’s qualifications to speak of the other topics he touched upon—Nazis, Shintoists, communists, ISIS, President Obama, the EPA, the IRS, the Department of Education?

We’re glad you asked. He was on hand to accept the 2015 Andrew Breitbart Defender of the First Amendment Award, named for a conservative writer who died in 2012.

And after all that, we’ve saved the best until last.

Apparently, in North Carolina at least, consensual sexual relationships have no monetary value and thus are not reportable as gifts or “reportable expenditures made for lobbying” for purposes of the state’s lobbying law’s expenditure reporting provisions. TAR HEEL HOOKERS

In other words, politicians don’t have to report the services of a hooker provided by a lobbyist. But the downside, for lobbyists, at least, is that they cannot claim the cost of a hooker for the politician as a legitimate business expense. http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/02/27/gifts-for-politicians/

Can it possibly get any weirder?

Well, yes. The North Carolina Ethics Commission, in an opinion described as “almost romantic,” said that fostering sexual relationships with a government official does not qualify as a form of “goodwill lobbying,” which the Raleigh News & Observer described as “an indirect attempt to influence legislation or executive action, such as the building of relationships.”

So what we have here is hookers having relationships with politicians with lobbyists serving as the pimps—and the taxpayers getting screwed.

Some things never change.

(Note: an earlier version incorrectly identified The Blaze writer Mike Opelka as a member of Gov. Bobby’s staff. That Opelka is Frank Opelka who serves as an advisor to Gov. Bobby on health care policy. He is the son of Dr. Frank Opelka, who spearheaded the giveaway of the state’s charity hospital system and is not relation to the writer.)