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 17 Here's a column from James Gill, this time in the Advocate. Gill, who has jumped ship from the Picayune, writes about the absurdity of dueling polls in this post. The numbers are so wildly different, it is obvious that both sides are "cooking the books," he writes. In particular, he looks at Sen. Mary Landrieu, and how her recent actions in DC have been received by those polled. Gill's acerbic, amusing prose is a welcome addition to a paper so conservative as to be occasionally lacking in personality.
MAY 17 Blogger Tom Aswell continues delivering bombshells about the state education department and Gov. Jindal's education "reform" efforts. In this post, he reports that students in the Shreveport area have been signed up for a charter school without their knowledge or consent. Most interesting to Aswell is how this Texas-based charter (with ties to GOP types) got the personal student information it has, if the students didn't give it.
MAY 17 This post by JR Ball in the Baton Rouge Business Report is an interesting tongue-in-cheek look at recent Baton Rouge economic development efforts. Among the items he examines is the idea that gaining a Costco makes BR a "world-class city." (Really? All you need is a different brand of Sam's? MK!) This effort, and other recent ones, are all built on the taxpayer's back, with tax zones, tax incentives and tax rebates, Ball writes.
MAY 17 Blogger CB Forgotston is critical of the legislature's reliance on a revenue-estimating committee's decision to include projected tax amnesty income in this year's forecast. That's a problem, CB posts, because the deadline for these people to pay their taxes is June 30, 2014. So when do you think these people who haven't paid taxes in years are going to pay their taxes? Surely not before June 30, and that means the money won't be there for this year's budget, he argues.
MAY 17 Here's an interesting blog out of California by a Hollywood writer, attorney and academic named Brian Alan Lane. He blogs about higher ed, and was a whistle-blower in a scandal over false credentials. In this post, he takes aim at LSU's new top dog, King Alexander. It's convoluted and a little confusing, but it sure makes Alexander a lot more interesting than he was yesterday.
MAY 17 Blogger Robert Mann writes about the LSU Board's refusal to allow Dr. Fred Cerise to testify before the legislature about Gov. Jindal's plan to close down all the state's charity hospitals and dump the poor on the private system. It's hard to imagine anyone more qualified than Cerise to testify about that, so why would anyone try to prevent him doing so? Mann thinks it is because the powers that be aren't interested in hearing any truth about the plan.
MAY 17 This post on the Louisiana Sinkhole Bugle, a blog that notes developments in the Bayou Corne and Jefferson Island salt domes, talks about a proposed expansion of the salt dome storage under Lake Peigneur in Iberia Parish. Residents are working against it for several reasons, including two biggies: the sinkhole disaster in Bayou Corne and the continuing, unexplained bubbling on the surface of the Lake.
MAY 17 NOLA police arrested more people Thursday accused of either being involved in the Mother's Day shooting or hiding the suspect afterward, this Gambit story reports. The NOLA police chief said he suspects the whole thing was gang-related and throws out a challenge to the gangs: he's got informants now, he says, and he knows a lot more than the gangs want him to know. The people who live in the neighborhoods terrorized by gangs are ready to talk, he says.
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