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.

"ONE OF THE TWO THINGS IN LIFE THAT ARE CERTAIN"

From Bill in Portland, Maine at Daily Kos: Cheers and Jeers:

CHEERS and JEERS to one of the two things in life that are certain. (Hint: it ain't death!) On February 3, 1913, the 16th Amendment, establishing the beloved income tax, was ratified and became part of the U.S. Constitution. Here is our annual posting of the full text (in italics so it looks old and wrinkled and historic):

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

Further, Congress shall have the power to take all tax dollars collected and burn them, eat them, turn them into confetti, light cigars with them, or wad them up and shove them up their butts.

Congress shall also have the power to conspire with giant corporations to use tax dollars to build a war machine that can destroy every planet in the solar system many times over. We want guns. BIG guns! Tanks, planes, nukes, bunker busters, aircraft carriers and a few thousand bullets for every man, woman and child. And bazookas---we need lots of bazookas. Anything that proves to the rest of the world that we've got the biggest penis on the planet must be arsenalized. We are woefully short on lasers---let's fix that.

If the citizenry is paying a reasonable and fair share of taxes in order to allow vital and necessary services to be funded domestically, those taxes must be cut so that these services can be funded properly---with massive loans from China, India and Japan.

At various times, taxpayer-funded corporate bailouts may be necessary. These bailouts will be prioritized in the following order: white collar idiots, white collar dolts, white collar crooks, white collar morons, white collar charlatans, and white collar bloodsuckers.

Finally, Congress shall impose the strictest penalties on citizen scofflaws who fail to pay their income taxes on time and in full without exception. And by 'without exception' we mean except if you're rich and can afford really savvy CPAs and lawyers who can get you out of paying them. Or if you're really rich and you "forget" to pay them, in which case: tut tut.

Okay, that's our amendment. You may now begin stuffing hundred-dollar bills down our pants.

And from the comments to the post comes a cheer for the link to the video of my fellow New Orleanian, Fats Domino, singing "Blueberry Hill".

This was written by Vincent Rose, Al Lewis and Larry Stock for the 1940 Western "The Singing Hill" before they decided it was good enough to be released commercially. The song was used in the movie, where it was heard for the first time performed by Gene Autry.

First sung by Gene Autry in a Western? Dang!




I slow danced to Fats' song on many an evening. Those were the days.

From our friend who signs himself:

Cheers,

Paul (A.)