C’EST BON
Just when you think Gov. Bobby Jindal is on the ropes, he floats like a butterfly. Jindal further solidified deity status in north Louisiana (on the heels of the chicken plant deal) when he announced last week that V-Vehicle Company has chosen Monroe as the site for its assembly plant. The San Diego-based start-up will manufacture environmentally friendly compact cars in the former Ouachita Parish facility of Guide Corp. VVC is being bankrolled in part by tycoon-turned-green giant T. Boone Pickens and an investment group that saw enough in pre-IPO Google to pump some cash in the search engine. The state is ponying up about $67 million in incentives. The deal, according to the state Department of Economic Development, will employ more than 1,400 rednecks.
PAS BON
Just when you think Jindal is off the dope, he stings like a bee. The state arts community is again reeling from an upper cut in the form of a threatened veto that would clamp the financial tap for Decentralized Arts Funding, effectively shutting off 85 percent of the state funding to DAF, which helps underwrite such trivial pursuits as festivals and fairs, symphony orchestras, programming for children in public libraries and rec centers and the like. Early in the session lawmakers used amendments to restore the cuts in Jindal’s executive budget. The veto would put arts/culture funding back in line with Jindal’s budget, and back in line with a wrinkled old conservative talking point: Art is for sissies!
COUILLON
The boxing metaphor is down for the count, and so apparently is the couillon committee that vowed and then un-vowed to raise $60 million to convince Jindal to seek the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. The Jindal for President Draft Council was incorporated last month, headed by former Legislative Auditor Dan Kyle, and included an uncle of Jindal’s on the committee. In announcing its push to draft the first-term gov for a White House bid, the group admitted 60 mill is chump change in presidential politics; it was just a little seed money. Now the group says it doesn’t want to distract Jindal from doing his job as governor. Hey Couillon committee, don’t you know our governor has no plans to run for president? He’s too busy making out-of-state fundraising junkets and giving speeches in primary states and ... o, wait.
Is it a crime for citizens to photograph, video, or take notes of a police officer in the line of duty, or a right protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution? Locally, such activity, as witnessed recently, will at the very least result in a night spent behind bars.
David Calhoun and Elizabeth “EB” Brooks are the first two employees of Lafayette Central Park Inc., the nonprofit charged with turning Lafayette Consolidated Government’s 100-acre Johnston Street Horse Farm property into a passive public park. Calhoun was named executive director, and Brooks is director of planning and design.
At Thursday's State of the Economy luncheon, LEDA President and CEO Gregg Gothreaux said PXP has already quietly hired 180 people for its Broussard expansion.
Episcopal School of Acadiana’s Dr. Joshua Caffery, chair of the school’s English Department, is headed to Washington, D.C., and the Library of Congress as the latest winner of the Alan Lomax Fellowship in Folklife Studies.
This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
An effort to restore a shuttered dancehall and document other vacant or razed honky-tonks could serve as a model for saving an endangered species of entertainment.
Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.
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