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Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Why did Mary not run this ad?

Instead, it appears as though her campaign... or some fellow traveler has just dumped the stuff out onto some bloggers and reporters hoping it gets picked up. Anyway, for what it's worth,
It appears (Cassidy) told the House Ethics Committee a lie. I don't know for sure but in order for him to accommodate the minimum amount of hours he needed to work for LSUHSC and make his $1,666/ a month, he may have had to lie about his work hours to Congress. It appears he either lied to LSU or to the House of Representatives Committee on Ethics in order to pull down that extra Louisiana taxpayers' cash...I hope he will explain this to the public.

What's more important to me is that even if he did lie to the House Ethics Committee it looks like LSU bent over backwards to accommodate him as an official staff member and pay him for doing....something on the internet...for 8 hours a week. WTF?

LSU even maintained his tenure in spite of the fact that he was working at a 20% "LOE" (level of effort). According to LSU's rules, Cassidy should have lost his tenure when he took on the job as a congressman. They either held their nose or, even worse, genuflected in order to keep "Dr. Bill" on staff and on payroll.
Not sure how huge a thing this really is.  But it isn't nothing.  And while you've got Cassidy running months of commercials about non-issues like Mary's travel budget and the goddamned  Advocate thinking enough of that to run editorial cartoons about it, then you'd think maybe the Landrieu campaign could have put some of this ammo to use at some point.  Why didn't they?

Update: Now Lamar adds this.
Despite what he had represented to the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, he never taught a class; the vast majority of the very little work he apparently did for LSU-HSC is listed as “clinic.” He also billed for his own continuing education hours.

Even more troubling, on at least 17 separate occasions, Cassidy’s time sheets indicate that he spent multiple hours in LSU-HSC’s clinics on the same days in which he also participated in committee meetings and roll call votes, which would have likely required him to bend the rules of space and time. On four other occasions, Cassidy billed multiple hours for “on the phone” consultation with LSU-HSC while at working from Washington, D.C.

But I have to ask again.  This complaint is not in any way new information.  But it's being flogged now in the final weeks of a Senate campaign. Clearly there is a reason it hadn't been brought up earlier during that campaign.  What is that reason? 

Is it because the Landrieu campaign doesn't think this is a winning point of attack?   Is it because there really isn't very much to it anyway?  It's one of those. Maybe both.

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