Welcome to Lafayette, French Ambassador François Delattre. Parlez-vous Anglais?
As you know, we're the French speaking portion of Louisiana where the collective music, food and joie de vivre of Cajuns and Creoles have sustained a unique aspect of American culture and built a tourism industry second to none. So far, anyway.
We're also the home of the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana that, until a couple of weeks ago, had a program with your universities to immerse American teachers in French so they could return and keep the language and culture alive with the French Immersion program.
Alas, things have changed under Gov. Bobby Jindal. You see, he's got plans. Big plans. And they have nothing to do with Louisiana.
Jindal went to Utah last weekend to show his brethren he's got what it takes to be the right-hand man of Mitt Romney, who looks to represent the Republican Party in the November election.
The boy who would be VP arrived there with an impressive resume steeped in austere-like measures and policies; the kind that would make German Chancellor Angela Merkel proud and no doubt curl her toes curl with anticipation in the hopes that Jindal himself would want to give her a massage.
Closer to home, Jindal has already given a shout-out to the Santorum crowd with his contempt for higher education with his cuts to higher education. That ought to show those elitist wannabes who want to improve their lot with a college diploma.
In his zeal to undermine anything remotely supported by state and fed monies, Jindal has no problem putting an end to programs and institutions and turn the public's money over to the unregulated hand of the private sector.
Take his bush league approach to dismantle public education. Jindal made a deal with the devil as witnessed by some of the ill-prepared Christian schools in line for his voucher program.
The latest Sunday school crawled out from under a single-wide trailer to accept 199 students and the big bucks that come with it, but it also failed a state fire inspection. Again. Which just goes to show that we need to get the government out of the fire inspecting business.
There seems to be a pattern in Jindal's handiwork, and you can find it in the GOP playbook. From budget cuts to his Louisiana Scholarship Program, a sweeping overhaul of teacher tenure and compensation rules, the recent veto, and who can forget the Louisiana Academic Freedom Act, Jindal's actions seem overly scripted, yet at the same time covertly schemed.
It’s no secret that in the GOP agenda coming from the hard right, there is a movement to dismantle public education, break public and private unions and blur the line between church and state (see Louisiana Academic Freedom Act).
But about the CODOFIL ordeal. In his veto a couple of weeks ago to smite a critic, he cut $2 million from the Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism. This in turn shorted CODIFIL $100,000 for next year and has the potential to stall what has become a crucial element of the indisputable economic engine of Acadiana: Francophone tourism.
The common, if not go-to, answer for Jindal's antics that we appear to settle for is politics. And while it is what it is — politics — it also has all the appearance of yet another opportunity for Jindal to enhance his street cred with another fanatical segment of the far right.
You know, the English-only crowd.
Bon bon appétit, ambassador.
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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