Welcome to Lafayette, French Ambassador François Delattre. Parle vu Anglais?
As you know, we're the French speaking portion of Louisiana where the collective music, food and joi de vivre of Cajuns and Creoles have sustained a unique 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 righthand 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 one crawled out from under a single-wide trailer to accept 199 students and the big bucks behind it, but 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, 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, it cut $2 million from the Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism. This in turn shorted Codofil $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 appetit, ambassador.
MAY 21 Gambit columnist Clancy DuBos writes about the Mother's Day shooting, and how the stages of shock and blame and healing mirror those traveled by the same city following Hurricane Katrina. The city will recover, just as it did following the storm, by reaching out to help the people injured most seriously by the event, DuBos writes. It's how we heal, he says.
MAY 21 Here's a post on the Advocate (but buried on a subpage, not on the front) that reports something Louisiana Voice reported some time ago: a top DOE official lives in Los Angeles and "commutes" to Baton Rouge. The positioning of the story caused a stir on Facebook Monday, with several posters asking if the Advocate was covering someone's hiney. Sentell's stories on DOE are notoriously soft, and this one is no different: don't expect any hard questions in here.
MAY 21 Here's another post from blogger Tom Aswell about the "course choice" program. He's already reported on kids being signed up without their consent or knowledge, and has more here: For example, he tells of a six-year-old who was signed up for high school Latin. He also digs a little deeper into the sister companies of the main one operating in Louisiana; all of them seem to have complaints against them. Stinky.
MAY 21 Given the 80 percent cut in higher ed funding since he's been in office, it's clear Gov. Jindal would rather give tax cuts to out of state companies than have a functioning system, blogger Dayne Sherman argues in this post. The cuts have been such a disaster, Sherman says, that it will take 30 years to fix what's been broken. He says he believes the aim is to shut down most of the schools before Jindal leaves in 2016.
MAY 21 Blogger CB Forgotston says there are too many elections in Louisiana, and they're costing us too much money. The proof is in the pudding: turnout for most of these nonsensical pollings gets worse and worse, CB opines, even as millions of dollars that could be spent on health care or higher ed go down the tubes. The legislature must take action to stem the tide of pointless elections, he says.
MAY 21 Here's an interesting investigative piece by WVUE on the retirement benefits of some Jefferson Parish public employees. According to the story, the taxpayers are paying 100 percent of the retirement contributions of employees who started work prior to a certain date in April 1986 -- and have done for more than 30 years. It costs the parish millions annually, and might not be legal, the story reports.
MAY 21 This post on Bayou Buzz provides insight from Louisiana's intrepid pollster, Bernie Pinsonat, on the winners and losers from this year's legislative session. But to hear Bernie tell it, there's almost nuttin but losers: Jindal, the Republican party, the Fiscal Hawks all get big goose eggs in his win column.
MAY 20 This post on The Lens takes a look at a huge (either $500K or $250K) bill that one NOLA charter now has for school lunches. The RSD says the charter group didn't fill out the proper paperwork for federal reimbursement, but the story details how the RSD didn't ensure the people running the charter had the proper training, despite requests from hapless charter employees trying to fill out forms. Either way, somebody's asleep at the wheel.
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