TRUTH NOT TRUTHINESS, GOVERNOR JINDAL

Yesterday's issue of the Daily Comet carries an opinion piece and Republican commercial by Governor Bobby Jindal sent out before he left for the Republican convention in Tampa Florida.  I assume that's where the governor is, although we never know for sure until he's left the state and landed wherever he's headed, because he doesn't tell. 

Jindal was passed over as Romney's choice for vice-president, and he is not the keynote speaker at the convention, although he will give a speech sometime during the gathering, thus he may not have been in the best mood when he wrote "A Peek Behind the Curtain".   He speaks of gaffes and spin by Obama and Biden, but Jindal has his own collection of gaffes and spins.  You can read the entire propaganda piece with its varying assortment of truth and truthiness, but I want to focus on the one untruth that is spreading wildly in Republican commercials and speeches.

Romney says it, Ryan says it, the commercials say it, and now Jindal says it.  Although it has been pointed out time and again that that Obama did not remove the work requirement from the welfare reform law, the Republicans continue to push the lie.  Apparently, Republicans care not at all about the truth.  What a surprise!  An article in the Los Angeles Times explains the waivers to various states well.  I thought I should answer Jindal's false statement with the truth, so I left the following comment to the article in the Daily Comet online site.

Governor Jindal says:

"Even with rising unemployment, the President has moved to dismantle the historic reform of 1996 that instituted work requirements for welfare. Despite the fact that the welfare caseload fell by half after those historic reforms, the President is telling states that his administration will waive established work requirements for welfare assistance."
  
Either Governor Jindal is ignorant about what the waivers to the 5 states that requested them do, or he is less than candid about what he knows.  Why not ask his fellow Republican governors in the States of Utah and Nevada why they requested the waivers and how the waivers work?  The waivers do not eliminate the work requirement.  Any state that fails to meet the 20% employment requirement loses the waiver.

Republicans call for more power to be returned to the states, but when the president does just that, they slam him.  Gov. Jindal suggests that the American people don't need spin from the president and vice-president, but the governor seems to have learned a bit about spin himself, as he's spinning like a top with his charges that the work requirement for welfare has been eliminated.

There you have it.  I also gave a contribution to the Obama campaign, my first and probably only contribution of this election season, because the thought of the Romney-Ryan team running the country scares me to death.

WEEKLY REMINDER

DON'T WORRY...I'M HAPPY

Gov. Bobby Jindal praised Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s running mate choice Saturday and dismissed speculation that he is angling for a cabinet post.

Jindal frequently joined Romney on the campaign trail and had emerged as a possible vice presidential candidate. The governor made appearances for Romney in Louisiana, Ohio, Utah, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Iowa and Colorado.
....

“Don’t mistake my motives here. I have been traveling all over the country and been campaigning for and with Gov. Romney because it is crucial that he wins, and that we make Barack Obama a one-term president. As for me — why would a guy with the best job in the world be looking for another one?” he said.

Why, indeed, Governor?  I have a question for you.  Why, if you have the best job in the world, do you spend so little time, you know, actually doing it?  Why are you absent from the state so often?  The governor's advisor, Timmy Teepell, says Jindal will be campaigning for Romney next week, because he believes Romney's election is vital to the interests of Louisiana.

“He loves being governor. He’s going to be governor until the very last day of his second term. None of that’s changed,” Teepell said.

Hmm.  What about the days in between?  Do they protest too much?

BOBBY, WE HARDLY KNOW YE

Governor Bobby Jindal joined the Republican governor rogues gallery in a debate at the Aspen Institute.  Michelle Millhollon reports on the gathering which was mainly a closed affair, but...

For a $15 admission price, the public could grab a seat on the Aspen Institute’s campus Wednesday night to listen to a panel discussion featuring Jindal, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. The talk was broadcast on Aspen’s public radio station and was streamed on the Internet.

Ha!  How about that lineup?

Jindal apologized several times for talking fast during the event, explaining that he wanted to fit in several points. Christie ribbed him for his bullet-point approach.

I've heard Jindal speak, and I vouch for the fact that he talks fast.  After a while, I stopped trying to keep up and switched off.

Jindal rapidly described the changes he successfully proposed for Louisiana’s public school system, racing from teacher tenure to the scholarships that use public dollars to send children to private or parochial schools.

“Basically vouchers,” Isaacson interjected to put a new name to the scholarships.

“We call it scholarships. The teacher unions call it four-letter words,” Jindal retorted.

Har-de-har-har.  Jindal made a funny.   And then is it back home to Louisiana for the governor?  Indeed not.  Jindal is off to Washington DC for meetings.  Bobby, we hardly know ye. 

FOR THEE, BUT NOT FOR ME

From the Advocate in Baton Rouge:

Gov. Bobby Jindal wants state employees to contribute more toward their future pension benefits.

But legislation Jindal is proposing exempts the governor and other elected officials who are members of the Louisiana State Employee Retirement System, called LASERS, from the 3 percent increase in the contribution rate sought in the legislation.

The 3 percent translates into a near 40 percent increase for rank-and-file members of LASERS. But not for the governor and other elected officials — their contribution rates would not increase.

“... this Act shall not apply to an elected official during the term of office he is serving on July 1, 2012. The contribution rate for such a member shall remain what it was on July 1, 2012, for the duration of his term of office,” according to Senate Bill 52 and House Bill 56, two pension revamp measures backed by Jindal.

The law will not apply to the present administration and legislators, but why should not the pain be shared by all state employees?  The exemption is an outrage!  Jindal refuses all requests for interviews.

The legislature has the opportunity to tinker with Jindal's proposals, but they have so very often shown themselves to be sheep-like in following the governor's directions.

If you read the entire article, you will note that Jindal is zealous in providing for the portion of his own retirement that will be paid out of state coffers.

WHAT GOVERNOR JINDAL AND HIS HELPERS DID FOR LOUISIANA

From the Editor's Column in the summer issue of Louisiana Cultural Vistas:

Inventing America and Destroying Louisiana

It was Washington's generation that had to invent America and all its institutions and envision what a great nation ought to be. It was Washington and his contemporaries, foremost among them Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, who understood that a national government had to secure revenue for its institutions, and was obligated not only to provide for the national defense and the delivery of mail, but also to found libraries and universities, and to promote exploration, learning, and a civil society.

So how bitter it is for us to descend to the present political movement in Louisiana, of an infantile populism that imagines it can have a democracy and not and not have taxes adequate to provide for the commonwealth, that would savage by a loss of $300 million a year to a higher education system that had just barely gained the ranks of respectability, that incarcerates its own citizens at the highest rate in the free world, that has a high school graduation rate of of 59 percent, that slashes its arts programs 60 percent in a single year and completely eliminates funding for humanities? It is a barbarism we are imposing on ourselves, a dark that descends from the head of the stairs.

To put it in more colloquial terms, imagine that Louisiana was a football team in a 50-team league and finished perennially, year after year, in 49th or 50th place. Would we not be firing its coaches and running them out of town rather than even contemplating re-appointing them? Would the citizens really care that the tickets cost only a nickel and clamor to see such a team play? And yet politically, that is the low bar we have set for ourselves: in education, in health care, in literacy, in the humanities and culture. And it is not being imposed by Washington or people from New Jersey; we have done it to ourselves.

The complete loss of the state appropriation for the humanities, just recently at $2 million annually, will cost the state $14 million annually in economic impact, increase our illiteracy...and diminish the quality of life incalculably. I could delineate this in detail but I will suffice to illustrate the result as Laurence Sterne might have in his prescient post-modern novel "Tristram Shandy":

as a black hole.

Martin Sartisky, Ph. D.
Editor-in-Chief

There you have it. We have done it to ourselves. And Bobby Jindal is very likely to be reelected on his platform of no new taxes and ridding ourselves of the old taxes. Governance by slash and burn. Unfortunately, if I said, "Only in Louisiana!" I would not speak truth. We are surely at the extreme of the spectrum, but the same sort of madness is spread throughout the land.

LOUISIANA'S GOV. JINDAL IS SLIPPING IN THE POLLS

From Arjun Jaikumar at Daily Kos:

Polls for the Louisiana Governor's race slated for fall 2011 have been rare so far, with conventional wisdom dictating that incumbent Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal is the runaway favorite in this red state.

A new poll is out, however, from Republican pollster Market Research Insight (though it appears to have been conducted for "a group of business people", and not the Jindal campaign).

The poll shows decent but unspectacular numbers for Jindal:

Market Research Insight (R) for "a consortium of business interests". 1/10-14. Registered voters. MoE 4%.

Reelect Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) 49
Prefer someone else 40
....

So this poll isn't wholly surprising...unless you compare it to Jindal's once-stratospheric approval ratings. While pollsters once had Jindal's approval in the mid-70s, his current numbers indicate he's slid back to being a generic Republican.

Which, in Louisiana, isn't a bad place to be. It's just not completely safe, and it might be a touch early for Jindal to start burnishing his credentials for his expected 2016 presidential run. Rather, he might want to prevent his home-state approval from falling any more than it already has.

A good many folks who strongly supported the governor in the last election became quite disenchanted with our peripatetic chief executive for being absent from the state, raising money for Republican candidates in the 2010 election, when we faced a budget crisis here in the state where Jindal was elected to govern.

Some of us hoped that Jindal might be appointed to head the RNC to replace Michael Steele, thus moving him permanently out of the governor's office, but - alas - it did not happen. Now Jindal travels around the state and the country to raise money for his war chest, which already holds $7 million, for the next gubernatorial election.

Meanwhile, the state budget deficit is projected to be $1.6 billion. The governor needs to focus on finding rational solutions to the budget crisis, but he won't. Since Jindal will not entertain the idea of raising taxes, the budget must be balanced by deeper and more painful cuts than have already been put in place. As is usually the case, I fear the least amongst us will bear the brunt of the cuts.

Jindal seems to enjoy running for office and raising money for campaigns, his own and other politicians' campaigns, but he does not seem to savor doing the job he was elected to do. Yet, he will probably be reelected without much of a struggle, because Louisiana becomes more Republican with every day that goes by.