Posted in Ethics, Governor's Office, Notable Quotables, Transparency on November 19, 2012| 6 Comments »
“This guy came into office with all the promise of cleaning up the old way of doing business, with a chance to really do some good for this state and its people. Instead, all we’ve gotten are a few scattered crumbs brushed from the table.”
—Retired Louisiana Revenue Secretary Joe Traigle, commenting on the monumental failure of the Piyush Jindal administration.
Posted in Budget, Education, Governor's Office, Health Care, Higher Education, Judges, LSU, Prison, Privatization on November 18, 2012| 13 Comments »
This may come under the heading of beating a dead horse, but if Piyush Jindal, henceforth known as the Brahman Brutus of the Republican Party, truly has the job he wants as he has repeated ad nauseum, then why the hell doesn’t he stay in Baton Rouge and do the job he was twice elected to do?
If Piyush will satisfactorily address this one question, then we promise to leave him alone.
Lest anyone think we’re sticking our neck out by offering to lay off this pathetic excuse for a governor, fear not: there’s no way on earth he can reconcile his job to his constantly trotting off in every direction on the compass to address national issues and the problems of the Republican Party.
There’s just no way he can square up the two diametrically opposed activities.
To the remaining Piyush loyalists (and the numbers, believe it or not, are shrinking, Jeff Sadow notwithstanding), ask yourselves one question;
If Piyush truly has his sights set on being governor of Louisiana for the next three-plus years, why do you think he ignores state media and only gives interviews to national media like Fox News, the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Politico and The Huffington Post?
Again, why does he refuse all state media requests for interviews?
• Do you really think the New York Times gives a flying fig about Louisiana’s projected $1 billion budgetary shortfall projected for next fiscal year?
• Do you cling to the faintest notion that CNN worries about the fate of Louisiana’s poor who are facing the loss of medical care because of the closure of state hospitals?
• Do you entertain any shred of belief that the Washington Post is even remotely concerned about that expanding sinkhole in Assumption Parish that swallows up more land each day while threatening the area with potentially explosive gases?
• Do you feel that Politico even knows about the incredibly senseless loss of about $5 billion a year in state revenues because of ill-advised tax breaks, exemptions and credits given to corporations who provide pitifully few jobs to Louisiana residents?
• And why do you think The Huffington Post should be concerned about 1,000 state employees who have been kicked to the curb by this administration (with still more to follow with the completed privatization of the Office of Group Benefits, the anticipated attempt again to sell or, in the alternative, close state prisons?
• Do you actually expect Fox News to investigate the appointment of former legislators to six-figure state jobs to beef up their retirement—jobs for which they are plainly unqualified or to ask probing questions about the awarding of the glut of six-figure salaried jobs in the Department of Education (DOE) to people who are allowed to work part time and to work from their homes in such places as Los Angeles and Tallahassee, Florida? Or to inquire into the hiring by DOE of a former Kansas City school official who left that system under a cloud after the awarding of a $37 million contract to an insider who had worked as a consultant on the project?
In the most recent spate of interviews, Piyush the Pontificator has been quite generous in his criticism of the Republican Party in general and Mitt Romney in particular after having campaigned for Romney with all due enthusiasm during the recent presidential campaign.
So, just where was he with all his sage wisdom during the campaign itself?
You see, you Piyush proponents, he was, as he has consistently been with most issues he has confronted, blindly naïve in foresight an 20/20 vision in hindsight. But he recovers so nicely that he thinks he never leaves a trace of his rumbling, bumbling, stumbling agenda.
Perhaps Bob Mann said it best in his recent post on his web blog Something Like the Truth http://bobmannblog.com/ when he compared Jindal to a passenger on the Titanic who, seeing the iceberg, conveniently ignored the danger but later was critical of the ship’s captain for his performance at the helm.
But let’s examine the record.
The only part of Piyush’s sweeping state employee retirement program reform package that passed during this year’s legislative session was the so-called “cash balance” plan where by new hires would come in after July 1, 2013 under a 401 (k)-type pension program.
Unclear—because the Piyush administration, in its headlong rush to reform, neglected to obtain a ruling on the IRS and Social Security status of the cash balance plan.
An adverse decision could force state employees—and the state—to contribute to both Social Security and Medicare, which would add to state employee and state costs.
The Louisiana State Employees Retirement System (LASERS) board voted last week to ask the legislature to delay the July 1 start of the new program because the administration has yet to request a clarification of the IRS and Social Security status.
State employees do not pay into Social Security and thus, unless they have sufficient quarters in the private sector, do not currently qualify for Social Security benefits or Medicare.
The IRS determination period does not begin until February, according to Maris LeBlanc, deputy director of LASERS. It is not clear how long it will take to obtain a determination and LeBlanc said to her knowledge, the Social Security equivalency letter, which is required from the administration, has not been submitted.
Division of Administration (DOA) spokesman Michael DiResto said DOA would submit the letter regarding that status to federal officials this week.
The Louisiana Retired State Employees Association (LRSEA) has filed a lawsuit challenging the legislation was approved without the legally-required two-thirds vote because there was a cost involved in implementing the new program.
House Speaker Chuck “the Genuflecting Gelding” Kleckley (R-Lake Charles), predictably parroting the Piyush position, maintains there was no extra cost in the implementation and that a simple majority vote was sufficient.
The legislature’s own actuary, however, differs with Kleckley and Piyush, making the determination that there was a cost.
So, who do you believe: the one who is paid to evaluate the cost of legislation or the one who desperately wants to cling to his political appointment as House Speaker?
Meanwhile, you can look for Piyush on any major network news program—because he has the job he loves.
Posted in Governor's Office, Notable Quotables on November 14, 2012| 7 Comments »
“We’ve got to make sure that we are not the party of big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes, big anything. We cannot be, we must not be, the party that simply protects the rich so they get to keep their toys.”
—Gov. Piyush Jindal, in a post-election interview with Politico Live as he launched his 2016 presidential campaign.
Posted in Governor's Office on November 14, 2012| 17 Comments »
As predicted, Gov. Piyush Jindal, who has been insisting all along that he has the job he wants, launched his 2016 presidential campaign on Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2012.
Mark that date. It’s the day after Mitt Romney lost to President Barrack Obama, thus allowing Piyush to accelerate his presidential aspirations by a full four years. Even though he campaigned for Romney, it’s hard to imagine that he was disappointed at the results. He’s not the type to stand on the sidelines for a full eight years.
If there were ever any doubts, they were erased on Tuesday of this week when Jindal offered unsolicited advice to the national Republican Party.
• Never mind that Louisiana has the second highest gender pay gap in the nation;
Piyush Jindal is giving advice to the rest of the country.
• Never mind that Louisiana is the seventh poorest state in the nation;
Piyush Jindal actually believes the national Republican Party should listen to him.
• Never mind that Louisiana has the fifth highest crime rate in the nation;
Piyush Jindal appears oblivious to the state’s problems while insisting he is the go-to man to address party woes on a national scale.
• Never mind that Louisiana has the third highest poverty rate in the nation;
Piyush Jindal apparently believes he can solve the Republican Party’s woes.
• Never mind that Piyush Jindal is closing down hospitals in areas where they are desperately needed by Louisiana’s poor who will have no access to needed health care;
Piyush Jindal is lecturing the Republican Party that it should not be perceived as the party of the elite.
• Never mind that Piyush has insisted on no new taxes on his corporate friends to help plug the budget gaps (he even vetoed the renewal of a cigarette tax in 2011, insisting that he considered it a new tax) while allowing struggling colleges and universities to raise tuition for Louisiana students in order to cover their own budget gaps.
Piyush Jindal considers himself qualified to address the problems of the Republican Party.
• Never mind that Piyush Jindal is consolidating power not only in the legislature that is supposed to be independent, but on the state’s public education board, the LSU Board of Supervisors, the LSU Health Care System, the Louisiana Supreme Court, environmental affairs, and in health care, worker’s compensation and even in state employee group benefits;
Piyush Jindal is lecturing his fellow Republicans that they should be more compassionate while blunting the perception that the GOP is a party of the rich, the privileged, the influential and to concentrate more on being a “party of ideas, details and intelligent solutions.”
This from the man who attempted with every fiber in his benevolent body earlier this year to gut state employee benefits. His proposals, if passed, would have resulted in a 30-year employee earning $52,000 a year having her retirement benefits slashed from $39,000 a year to $6,000—a loss of $33,000 a year.
And remember: career state employees do not receive social security or Medicare benefits. If a state employee worked in the private sector, he or she would qualify for social security but there would be a cut in social security benefits (called an offset) to compensate for the employee’s state retirement.
So much for compassion.
“We’ve got to make sure that we are not the party of big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts (see: Jindal bailout of the chicken plant in Union Parish), big corporate loopholes (see Jindal tax incentives, exemptions and rebates to businesses through the state Enterprise Zone program), big anything.”
Those words must have a horribly hollow ring on the ears of 111 employees of the Office of Group Benefits who will be losing their jobs right after Christmas. These were employees who had an enviable efficiency record in processing health insurance claims and who managed to turn a $60 million deficit into a $500 million surplus in five years. But that was not good enough for Jindal, who by browbeating compliant legislators into concurrence last week, managed to ram through a contract that will pay Blue Cross/Blue Shield up to $1.1 billion to administer the agency’s claims.
What was it again that Jindal said about not being a party that panders to big business?
If Piyush was trying to sound like President Eisenhower, who warned as he left office that America should guard against the influence of the military-industrial complex, he failed miserably.
But Piyush, should he fail in his bid for the presidency (as he most surely will), he still may have a promising career in stand up comedy. One of his stock lines in that future career could be the advice he gave his fellow Republicans when he urged that they “stop reducing everything to mindless slogans, tag lines.”
“Do more with less,” “Let the dollar follow the child,” and, of course, “I have the job I want” come immediately to mind.
Well, if absence does indeed make the heart grow fonder, then he certainly should love the job he has because he spends so little time doing it.
Jindal also addressed what he called “offensive, bizarre comments” by Republican candidates.
Without mentioning them by name, he was most probably referring to the rape comments by Republican senatorial candidates Richard Mourdock of Indiana who said if a woman becomes pregnant as a result of rape, it would be “God’s will,” and Todd Akin of Missouri who claimed it was impossible for a woman to become pregnant from rape because a woman’s reproductive system shuts down during such events.
He also could have been referencing Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comment.
Jindal characterized the gaffs by saying such stupid comments “can’t be tolerated within our party.”
Yeah, but we still have Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann (who during an Aug. 16, 2011, stop in South Carolina, prompted the crowd to give “a shout out to Elvis on his birthday!” Elvis was born on Jan. 8, 1935; Aug. 16, 1977, was the date of his death) and Piyush Jindal—each of whom must’ve gone to the Joe Biden School of Political Idiocy.
Posted in Campaign Contributions, Courts, Governor's Office, Judges, Louisiana Purchase, Politicians, Transparency on November 12, 2012| 7 Comments »
Things are not always as they seem.
Take those flag-waving, gun-loving, pro-traditional marriage, pro-life, pro-death penalty TV ads that helped propel one Jefferson Davis Hughes into the Dec. 8 runoff for the 5th District Louisiana State Supreme Court seat being vacated by the retirement of Chief Justice Kitty Kimball.
To see and hear those ads, one could reasonably come to the conclusion that Hughes is the epitome of American conservative values and that he personally was responsible for the patriotic revolution that freed the colonies from the British Crown.
One of the distasteful ads opens with the portentous voiceover saying in an appropriately ominous tone, “President Obama would never appoint Jeff Hughes to the Louisiana Supreme Court” as if that fact alone qualified him for the office—never mind the fact that Obama appoints none of the State Supreme Court justices.
That stunning opening statement is followed by the pronouncement, complete with all the patriotic fervor the unseen voice can muster that Hughes is pro-gun, pro-life, pro-traditional marriage. And while the ad doesn’t say so, Hughes announced at a recent forum held by the Baton Rouge League of Women Voters that he also supports the death penalty.
Thanks in large part to those slick, misty-eyed, lump-in-the-throat tributes to all that is good and holy, Hughes, with the obligatory “R” behind his name, will face Democrat Circuit Judge John Michael Guidry in next month’s runoff election.
Guidry, who chose to rely on a tactic unheard of in today’s age of electronic media and expensive political consultants/pollsters—public forums and face-to-face campaigning—had no TV ads and yet still managed to finish first in the field of eight candidates with 93,119 votes (27 percent) to 71,911 (21 percent) for Hughes.
The Hughes ads led to the question of propriety on his part because, as Baton Rouge Advocate writer Bill Lodge correctly pointed out, part of Canon 7 of the Louisiana Code of Judicial Conduct stipulates that neither a judge nor a judicial candidate shall make “any statement that would reasonably be expected to affect the outcome or impair the fairness of a mater pending in any Louisiana state court.”
And while gay marriage and gun bans have not yet made it into the Louisiana legal system, there is nothing to say they won’t. Abortion and the death penalty, however, certainly have been raised in the state’s court system.
The question then becomes, did Hughes cross the line in expressing his personal beliefs and prejudices when a judge—at any level, from city court to State Supreme Court—is charged with enforcing the law in total disregard of his own political philosophy?
In our opinion, he stepped far over that line. We feel it is entirely inappropriate for a judge to campaign like a typical political candidate—because he is not. Judges are held, necessarily, to a much higher standard—and they should be. Politicians by their nature are expected to pander to the electorate; judges, on the other hand, are supposed to be fair and impartial in administering the laws—with heavy emphasis on fair and impartial. To express a political stand so charged with controversy and legal interpretation during a campaign taints the entire judiciary.
Of course, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a typical 5-4 split, has ruled otherwise. The Minnesota Supreme Court’s canon of judicial conduct likewise prohibited judicial candidates from advancing their views during campaigns for office but the nation’s high court said that violates the First Amendment right to free speech.
But remember, too, that the U.S. Supreme Court also gave us the Citizens United decision that says corporations are people and are thus free to make unlimited and unreported campaign contributions to secretive super PACs on behalf of favored political candidates.
The Citizens United decision only served to intensify the growing tsunami of secretive campaign contributions funneled through political action committees so we, the citizenry, have no idea who the financial power brokers are behind the candidate(s) seeking our votes.
Campaign finance has evolved into such insanity that when we make a paltry $100 contribution to our favored candidate’s campaign, we may eventually find ourselves pitted against the interests of a corporation that plowed $100,000 into that same candidate’ campaign through some super PAC. When that issue—us against say, banks or credit card companies or environmental polluters—comes to a committee or floor vote, which way do you think our “favored candidate” will vote?
All this brings us back to those cheesy ads that could just be a smokescreen to conceal more sinister underlying issues.
Hughes received only about $44,000 in campaign contributions and $10,200 of that was money he transferred from funds remaining from a prior campaign. He also loaned his campaign $250,000 but even that was not nearly enough to cover the glut of television spots and the widespread mail-outs.
So who paid for that advertising?
One report said that the Citizens for Clean Water and Land http://www.cleanwaterandland.com/ ponied up the money.
It’s an innocuous sounding name and seems to express a goal to which we all aspire but even such noble-appearing endeavors as clean water and land can have underpinnings of greed and objectives of enrichment through political proximity.
Citizens for Clean Water and Land was established by John Carmouche and other plaintiff attorneys for the apparent purpose of influencing the outcome of the Supreme Court race and for paving the way for a favorable ruling by that court at some time in the future.
During the legislative session earlier this year, Carmouche was front and center in the battle to resist reforms in the handling of Louisiana’s so-called legacy lawsuits, http://www.vcstar.com/news/2012/may/31/legacy-lawsuit-compromise-sent-to-governors-desk/ an issue that now appears headed for the courts. Carmouche and other plaintiff attorneys were opposed to the reform legislation because it made it more difficult to recover damages against oil companies.
Legacy lawsuits deal with the extent of cleanup of environmental damage caused by the practices of oil producers in the state decades ago.
The reform effort was initiated in part as a result of a $72 million judgment against Shell Oil for its failure to clean up property owned by the family of Lake Charles attorney Michael Veron.
In short, no matter what your position may be on the issue of oilfield cleanup, do we really need a State Supreme Court justice whose campaign is bankrolled by special interests (read: plaintiff attorneys) who feel the need to grease the skids in the hope that their case will eventually make its way before that same Louisiana Supreme Court?
The hidden agenda in this race then would appear to come down to three words:
Influence for sale.
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