Sunday - October 21, 2007
Republican Becomes Governor of Louisiana
To the left, it must be simply amazing that the people of Louisiana could elect a Republican governor of the state. The media and the left after Katrina had made Bush and the Republicans out to be racists who ignored the state before the hurricane and purposefully withheld aid to blacks in New Orleans.
Yet, the people, the same "people" who Frank Rich of the New York Times holds in contempt for sanctioning "American torture" of Islamic terrorists once again left the reservation of liberal thought and elected Republican Bobby Jindal governor.
It couldn't be that people in Louisiana, outside of New Orleans, were simply aghast of Ray Nagin's (Democratic mayor of New Orleans) sheer incompetence? It couldn't be that people outside of New Orleans were simply aghast of Kathleen Blanco's sheer incompetence? It couldn't be that the good people of Louisiana want results and good government rather corruption and the blaming of George Bush for the state's problems?
Hopefully Jindal takes a page from the reform movement of the early twentieth century, the real Progressive movement, and cleans up the political corruption and incompetence of Louisiana.
Changing Louisiana's reputation for corruption would do more than just make over its image, Gov.-elect Bobby Jindal said Sunday: It could help the state attract businesses and win federal aid for hurricane recovery.
The Republican congressman, a day after his historic win in an election that featured a dozen candidates for governor, pressed ahead with his campaign pledge, saying in an interview with The Associated Press that one of his first acts will be to call a special legislative session to reform ethics laws.
"I think we're setting the bar too low when we say, 'Look, isn't it great that we haven't had a statewide elected official go to jail recently?'" Jindal said.
"The reality is there are a lot of practices that are accepted ways of doing business in Baton Rouge that are considered unethical in other parts of the country, that are considered illegal in other parts of the country," Jindal said.
The son of immigrants on Saturday won more than 50 percent of the vote in a primary election to make him Louisiana's first non-white governor since Reconstruction and the nation's first Indian-American chief executive. That tally averted the need for a November runoff election.
His two predecessors, Democrat Kathleen Blanco and Republican Mike Foster, governed with no allegations of cronyism, but the state has a well-earned reputation for shady politics.
Four-term Democratic Gov. Edwin Edwards is serving prison time in a bribery and extortion case involving the awarding of riverboat casino licenses. In the past decade, Louisiana has had an insurance commissioner and elections commissioner serve time in jail, and a litany of corruption cases are pending in New Orleans.
Jindal wants legislators to create new state laws requiring themselves to disclose their sources of income and their assets - a bill that failed to pass in the most recent legislative session - and to bar their family members from doing business with the state. Louisiana's ethics laws lag too far behind other states' requirements, he said. Read more....
Author: The Machiavellian
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