The dome on the Republican Party in Louisiana is showing a fissure as the tit-for-tat over budget priorities between Gov. Bobby Jindal and state Treasurer John Kennedy gains momentum.
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The spat got a head of steam earlier this week when Kennedy released an open letter to the Jindal administration accusing it of using scare tactics in an effort to bring pressure on lawmakers to restore nearly $270 million in cuts made to next fiscal year’s budget: “[P] please stop scaring our healthcare and higher education communities over the changes made to HB 1 by a majority vote of the Louisiana House of Representatives. It is not necessary to make the draconian reductions to the healthcare and higher education budgets you and your staff have suggested in order to achieve the fiscally responsible goals of the House.”
Kennedy’s letter ticked off a 10-point plan to reduce state spending through various means including cutting the state payroll, collecting outstanding debts, trimming consulting contracts and reorganizing departments.
Commissioner of Administration Paul Rainwater responded with an open letter of his own to Kennedy answering the treasurer’s plan point-by-point and jabbing at Kennedy in the preamble: “We appreciate your input, but with all due respect, the numbers that you continue to use to support your case are not based in reality and the ideas you continue to advocate for will not work.”
The bon mot wrapped in tongue-in-cheek irony came from Jindal flack Kyle Plotkin, who said in a statement, “John Kennedy has a long history of using numbers that don’t add up and proposing the same-old, same-old half-baked gimmicks. There’s nothing new here. These gimmicks haven’t worked before, and they aren’t going to work now. He’s just one confused politician.”
It’s that last sentence in Plotkin’s invective that is designed to sting Kennedy the most: The “one confused politician” was used repeatedly and to great effect against him in a series of political ads in 2008 when he ran against U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu. Kennedy’s spokesman during that 2004 U.S. Senate campaign was — you guessed it — Kyle Plotkin.
Read Kennedy’s open letter here.
For more on the spat including Rainwater’s response, click here.
MAY 24 Blogger Robert Mann posts this entry about the Baton Rouge Chamber's recent report on Louisiana's higher education system. It's critical to economic development, and yet our system is facing a "funding crisis" with no way to resolve it, the report says. The Chamber says control of tuition and fees must be returned to the higher ed governing boards.
MAY 24 Here's a NBC33 story about Tyrann Mathieu. He has signed with the Arizona Cardinals, inking a $3 million, four-year deal. He gets a signing bonus of $265K, but gets another, larger bonus if he doesn't get cut from the team for doing drugs. The deal reportedly includes mandatory tests and meetings for the player.
MAY 24 Jarvis DeBerry posts here about the redonkulus rhetoric that would have us believe NOLA is a safe city with a murder problem. Maybe the city's crime stats don't compare with its murder stats because you can't manipulate a murder, he says: a dead body's a dead body. It just doesn't make sense, he says, and his readers agree: a poll asks if they believe the city is safe, and more than 90 percent say no.
MAY 24 Jindal administration officials announced Thursday that the privatization of public health care is going to cost a lot more than they budgeted for, the Advocate reports here. "I'm so surprised," said no one. Anywhere. The cost they're projecting now is more than $1 billion - a lot more than the $626 million budgeted for it. And, it's more than it cost the state to operate those hospitals. So why are we doing this again?
MAY 24 Blogger CB Forgotston ridicules the recent PR campaign by the state GOP in the wake of a legislative auditor's request to both major parties. The GOP (apparently unaware that the Dems got the same request) started yammering about being targeted because it had "killed" a tax increase. CB finds that laughable, but it's also pretty funny that the GOP was comparing this episode to the IRS scandal (Because the President has so much to do with our state auditor. Right?).
MAY 24 Politico details some recent fund-raising efforts by Sen. David Vitter, which have raised the question of his future political plans. This time, it is a $5,000 per head "bayou weekend" that includes "Cajun cooking" and an all-caps "alligator hunt," the story reports. Funds raised go to a super PAC that can spend money to support Vitter in federal or state races, the story points out.
MAY 24 The pink building on Royal in the quarter was sold at a sheriff's sale Thursday, this Picayune story reports. An injunction that would have halted the sale wasn't enforced because the family failed to post a $150,000 bond, the story reports. So the owner of the mortgages on the building bought it, for nearly $7 million. Now the feuding family will have to negotiate with that company to get a lease on the building that has housed their business for close to 60 years.
MAY 23 This post in Louisiana Voice tells us about a bill by a Winnsboro lege that would require all public high school students to take at least one Course Choice online class in order to graduate. (What?) Blogger Tom Aswell says it's a monument to "waste and corruption," especially in light of the problems he's exposed with the program in recent weeks. Idaho had a similar program, but voters removed it by a 2-1 margin, Aswell says.
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