Oh noes they put us on a list

The new package of taxes passed by the recent legislative session takes effect today. The Advocate marked the occasion with a front page headline broadcasting the opinion of a conservative think tank.

What happens when you rank last in something and you make it even worse?

Welcome to Louisiana’s sales tax system.

It ranked 50th among the 50 states, according to the Tax Foundation, a pro-business Washington, D.C.-based think tank whose tax and budget rankings are frequently cited by state legislators.

Louisiana ranked last before the state Legislature passed two measures during the just-completed special session that, everybody agrees, made the sales tax system even worse.

“They would rank us 70th if they could, maybe 80th,” said Rep. Julie Stokes, R-Kenner, probably the Legislature’s most knowledgeable member on tax issues.

Well, you know, we're dealing with a slight budget problem here. And we had to do some things we didn't want to do last month just to catch up.  The plan is to make things less onerous by looking at more equitable solutions that weren't available given the short time frame to close the current year shortfall but.. aw who cares about context. Somebody made a list!

It doesn't even really matter that the list comes from an organization with a myopic "anti-tax" agenda.  Sure that gets mentioned but it doesn't show up until like three quarters of the way through.

It should be noted that the Tax Foundation’s rankings are hardly the last word on taxes. The group lists South Dakota and Alaska as having the second and third best overall “business tax climate,” but both states are floundering in a sea of red ink following the drop in oil prices.

With an increasingly complicated tax system — and needing to raise more money — Louisiana legislators created a task force to study the tax and budget system and issue a report on Sept. 1.

Legislators are increasingly saying they believe they can use the task force’s recommendations as a basis to carry out some sort of tax reform, including the sales tax system.

“By next year, we need to straighten this out,” Stokes said.

"Tax reform" seems to be a hobby horse at the Advocate lately. The other day, they published a guest column on the very same topic from the always eager to helpfully self-promote former governor Buddy Roemer.

Roemer writes about a "growth gap" between Louisiana and some of its neighboring states. He focuses intently on Texas and Florida each of which is a strange comparison for Louisiana to measure against but no matter.  What Buddy wants to say... well, imply, rather than say... is that the key difference between Louisiana and Texas is the relative "business friendliness" of the tax code. Roemer doesn't explain what he means by that. He only tells us that 25 years ago he tried to pass, "the most progressive, business-people friendly tax reform in America." 

Of course, he doesn't say what that is.  In 1989, Roemer attempted to pass a package of reforms that, essentially, would have shifted a significant portion of the tax burden from business onto individuals reducing the homestead exemption by $50,000.  Roemer and his fans among the Yuppie Left (yes, he still has them) likes to describe this as a "progressive" reform but, in reality, it was a shell game designed to fund a corporate welfare state on the backs of middle class taxpayers. 

The plan had to go to a statewide ballot where it failed because people don't like trickle-down systems where they pay for corporate tax breaks that magically lead to "growth" and then.... phase three is profit but not for most of us. This isn't why Roemer thinks the plan failed.  Instead he thinks the problem was he just couldn't get those darn black voters to listen to him.

I tried tax reform 25 years ago. That proposal failed in large part because of a failure to convince the black community. I got the overwhelming majority of the white vote but failed miserably among the black vote.

Buddy's patronizing false contrition is almost as off-putting as his overall condescension. It's difficult to pick out which is his worst trait. 

Buddy's spiritual successor in Louisiana politics is the equally patronizing, equally phony State Treasurer John N Kennedy.  Kennedy, like Roemer, is an opportunistic self-promoter. Like Roemer, he switched parties from Democrat to Republican mid-career not out of any sense of principle besides self-interest. The two even speak with the same high pitched nasally Southern Baptist type accent. 

As recently as 2013, Kennedy was calling for a statewide referendum on proposed tax code changes. This was easy for him to say since the legislation (and political baggage that came with it) under discussion at the time was Bobby Jindal's and not his. Graciously, Kennedy allowed that some parts of Jindal's plan might be acceptable to some people.

Kennedy said he spoke Monday to a business group in Alexandria and received “a million questions” about the proposed state tax code changes.

“Just about every taxpayer will look at it and say, ‘There’s parts I like. There’s parts I don’t like,’ ” Kennedy said. “So let people vote.”

Since that time, the US Senate candidate has tightened his stance a bit, proclaiming recently that Louisiana does not, in fact, have a revenue problem.  Of all the opinions expressed about the state budget these past few months, this is by far the most laughable.

Louisiana has a revenue problem. The state pulls in too much of it from its poorest citizens and gives away too much of it to the wealthiest businesses operating within its borders. The situation may even necessitate a new round of sweeping tax reforms to be put before the voters. We'll wait and see what the legislature comes up with first.  When we do tax reform, though, let's try and focus on a target besides just impressing the people who publish the Tax Foundation listicle, ok?

It always was and always will be "Entrepreneur Week"

Jim Bob Moffett resigned as chairman of Freeport McMoran yesterday. You might remember Jim Bob from his heyday in the 1980s as a "reformer" in Louisiana politics.  Reformer, of course, can mean a lot of things. But conventional wisdom in the press then, very much like now, tends to apply the term to any recent arrival to the upper echelon of the city's business class. 

A native of Louisiana who grew up in Texas, he attended the University of Texas at Austin on a football scholarship and received a master of science degree in geology from Tulane in 1963.

After working as a private independent, he formed McMoRan Oil & Gas Co. with Ken McWilliams and B.M. Rankin, deriving the company name from the beginnings of each one’s last names.

Moffett parlayed the company into one of the most successful exploration operations in the country with a 70 percent success rate in wildcatting for oil and natural gas.

In 1981, he was the chief architect of the company’s merger with Freeport Minerals Co., a name well known in Louisiana, which had its headquarters in New York. Moffett, chairman and chief executive officer of the merged company, engineered a 1985 corporate move to New Orleans.

Successful entrepreneur brings cutting edge business and money to New Orleans and really shakes things up. That sort of thing.  But what really seems to drive the kids crazy is a hot new 'Trep with the "courage" to talk about how backwards we all are. They love that.

Here's a fantastic snapshot of New Orleans 1987 I found. It's an  Atlantic article by one time Times-Picayune reporter Nicholas Lemann.  I really must insist that you read that article. It's great, not only for the nostalgia, but also for the sense of "le plus ca change" one gets from reading about a New Orleans beset by fears about crime (both real and imagined), racial strife, and the sense that the tourism industry was eating away at the city's soul. 

There are non-aesthetic reasons to worry about New Orleans's increasing dependence on tourism. Tourism can enrich a small group of local entrepreneurs, including real-estate developers and concessionaires; some of these come from groups, like the black middle class, that were previously shut out of the business life of the city. New entry-level jobs in hotels are cold comfort for unemployed longshoremen, but they are a real help to poor blacks working as domestics or not working at all. Still, tourism is cyclical, and it's dominated by national chains whose profits go out town. And if New Orleans is primarily in the business of selling itself rather than its raw materials and its dock facilities, then being a city that satisfies its own requirements but not the outside world's might not work anymore.

 Anyway, it's amid this very familiar setting that Lemann describes Moffett to us.

It's a testament to Moffett's superior drive and to the flagging self-confidence of old-line New Orleans that he has been much more successful than any previous oilman at becoming a civic leader. In 1981 his independent exploration company merged with Freeport Minerals and in1985 moved its headquarters from New York to a new building across the street from the Louisiana Superdome, with its street number emblazoned in Roman numerals on its entablature. Then he, along with a group of other businessmen, founded an organization called the Business Council, modeled on civic oligarchies like the Citizens. Council, in Dallas, and the Vault, in Boston, to whip the city and the state into shape again, and the establishment stepped back to see what he could do. He got a hero's welcome in the press.

Nothing is more impressive to the conventional wisdom than when "civic oligarchies" get together with a mind to "whip" the rest of us into shape. Particularly when they dress their maneuverings in the trappings of "education reform." They get to collect all sorts of awards for that. Mostly this is because of how easy it is to say, "think of the children" in any situation and come off as a serious person to the lazy minded.  It's easy to say, as Moffett says in his interview, "You've got to educate the people. You have to believe in the American way of life, and it all starts with educating the masses." And have everyone praise your amazingly bold and original idea.

As it turned out, though, Moffett's truly bold idea was to see if he could get permission for his company to dump gypsum into the Mississippi River. This started to turn some of his fans against him.. at least among the number he couldn't buy. 

That he has suddenly become the pariah of the local media didn't come as that great a surprise, for Robinette has displayed a venal streak before. There he was as an anchor on WWL-TV news in the 1980s, railing righteously against Freeport McMoRan for threatening the public health with piles of radioactive gypsum along the Mississippi.

Nothing could stop our great environmental crusader until Freeport boss Jim Bob Moffett up and offered him a job with a fat salary, and he dutifully metamorphosed overnight into an apologist for global pollution.

He was more or less a forgotten sell-out until he turned up as a talk show host on WWL radio just before Katrina, which had apparently changed him back into an environmentalist.

Robinette serves as a pretty good stand in for Moffett's media treatment in general.  The gypsum story knocked him off of his pedestal somewhat but not entirely.  Instead he became a figure of convenience depending on whoever else he might be at odds with at any given time. For the most part he, like Robinette's other good friend Fred Heebe, was able to purchase enough goodwill to stay out of trouble.

This could lead to some interesting fits of cognitive dissonance.  For example, Moffett appears in the Lemman article fresh off a clash with Edwin Edwards administration over his gypsum. 

Earlier this year a courageous state environmental bureaucrat denied Freeport a permit to dump gypsum into the Mississippi River. Moffett, who seemed to think he had a deal with the state (the governor's brother was once on the Freeport payroll as a lobbyist), blew his stack. He held a press conference in February at which he threatened to move his company away from New Orleans and called Louisiana a banana republic.

Just to be clear,  Moffett was unable to successfully bribe a public official and thus concluded he was living in a "banana republic."  Oddly, he ended up being praised as much as he was criticized for making this comment anyway. Because it turns out the press does enjoy a good narrative about how romantically backwards our state is no matter how absurd the circumstances of its assertion.

Which is why, in 1987, many in the media continued to refer to Civic Leader Moffett's falling out with the "corrupt" Edwards while championing reform candidate Buddy Roemer. That Roemer could capitalize on this "banana republic" image of the state while also promising to run a more "business friendly" administration could only be possible in the context of this stupid pretzel narrative presented by our establishment press fully encapsulated within the personal image of Jim Bob Moffett. 

The illogic of the thing became even more obvious later on, when Moffett inevitably clashed with Governor Roemer over the very same gypsum controversy.  Turns out the "business friendly" Roemer was even less friendly to Moffett's pollution business than the unfriendly Edwards had been. And when it came time for Roemer's ill-fated 1991 reelection campaign, Moffett would launch his own series of independently financed attack ads.  Oddly, during the campaign, Edwards and not Moffett bore the brunt of the press criticism over Moffett's own self-serving turncoat. But then that really shouldn't come as a shock.  Like we said, the establishment press loves them some business leaders. In 1991 Moffett was named Gambit's "New Orleanian Of The Year." 

Very much like today's 'treps regularly feted at NOLA.com, Moffett really was the quintessential "volunteer entrepreneur" of his day. Later in 1991, Moffett's oil and mining company partnered with (of course) Ron Forman to create something called, and we shit you not, The Freeport-McMoRan Audubon Species Survival Center and Wilderness Park at English Turn.  Naturally, Moffett decided to take an opportunity at the groundbreaking to complain about... those goddamned environmentalists. 

MOFFETT CRITICIZES ENVIRONMENTALISTS

Times-Picayune, The (New Orleans, LA) - November 23, 1991

• Author/Byline: BRUCE EGGLER Staff writer
• Section: METRO
• Page: B1

Considering that the ceremony was intended to celebrate a multimillion-dollar effort to save some of the world's endangered species, the last thing most of those present expected to hear was an attack on environmentalists.

But that's what they got.

James R. "Jim Bob" Moffett, chairman of Freeport-McMoRan Inc., used the groundbreaking ceremony Friday for the Freeport-McMoRanAudubon Species Survival Center and Wilderness Park to attack environmentalists who, he said, don't appreciate businesses' contributions to environmental protection.

"They need to stop kicking us in the fanny," said Moffett, whose company is often a target of environmentalists' criticism.

"We must have economic development in this world" and it "can and must be done in concert with the environment and survival of the species," he said.

Moffett said Louisiana businesses should "get the facts" on such problems as loss of the state's wetlands and the extinction of species, then "kick their (critics') butts and send them back home."

Moffett's company is donating half the $10 million cost of the 1,200-acre Species Survival Center and Wilderness Park, which the Audubon Institute will operate in the English Turn section of Algiers.

Asked later about Moffett's remarks, L. Ron Forman, president of the Audubon Institute, said he sees "a crying need for business and environmental groups to work together if we are truly going to solve problems. The constant bickering and name-calling should stop."

Sorry about the long pull quote there. But I had to get that bit in where Forman tells us the real problem is all the divisive "bickering name-calling" instead of, say, millionaire polluters and their ability to buy their way into respectability. Nothing ever changes. 

The Governors

Check out the photo. If you didn't know who these people were and I told you they were a post-punk Blondie rip-off planning a reunion show you'd totally believe that, wouldn't you? Sadly, it's nothing so exciting... or is it?

Former Louisiana governors' Kathleen Blanco, Edwin Edwards, Murphy "Mike" Foster and Buddy Roemer are slated to be on a panel discussing the last four decades of government. The LSU Public Administration Institute and the Public Administration Institute Student Association will host PAISA Day in The Rotunda of the Business Education Complex.

The governors will tackle the following topic: "The Evolution of State and Local Government: A discussion about the last 40 years."

So far as I understand, this is a one-off show.  Unless Jimmy's ever gets its permits in order and then we'll see. 

Note: This is the first time in years I've posted anything having to do with Kathleen Blanco. I thought it was strange that there was no established "Kathleen Blanco" tag for this blog.  But then I remembered they're all filed under "Meemaw".

Buddy Roemer to cease tweeting

If you'd like to read that same information expressed in about 500 more words, here's his official statement.

via NOLADef

Our national liberal commentators can be so indescribably stupid

If you fail to see through someone as transparently phony as Buddy Roemer, you really have no business even trying.

Pierce is, of course, correct about Americans Elect.  But if you even come close to exonerating Buddy Roemer, you lose all credit.

Definition of "centrist"

Billionaire "deficit hawk"

Americans Elect's problems were seeded with its founding by billionaire Peter Ackerman, a former top lieutenant to junk-bond king Michael Milliken, and a few of his well-heeled friends. They chose in 2010 to change their IRS status from that of a political organization to that of a social welfare organization, which does not have to identify its donors.

That also meant its leadership ostensibly couldn't indicate any preference for any candidate or type of candidate, even though it has been plain to observers that the debt-and-deficit hawk centrism of someone like (AE board member David) Walker is to their liking.

"It's true that Americans Elect doesn't show a preference for a candidate; it isn't able to under law, but he does align well with where Americans who feel betrayed by both parties would like a candidate to be," said Troiano, acknowledging that a candidate of "the vital center" like Walker is "the kind of candidate Americans Elect in theory was built to give a platform for."

But so far the effort to draft Walker has drawn fewer than 500 clicks.

"They have made it very clear that they have a certain kind of centrist in mind, that they don't' want who they consider extremist or people who are divisive," said Anderson, a candidate of what he might describe as the "vital left."

Markos Moulitsas commented on the Americans Elect debacle a few days ago.

Remember Americans Elect? Of course you don't. No one does. It's an operation by Fox News Democrat Doug Schoen, former George W. Bush media consultant Mark McKinnon, former Republican Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, political legacy and failed entrepreneur Nathan Daschle, and a bunch of other people who have decided that people aren't non-partisan-y enough—like them!

As far as I can tell, they believe that the Republican Party is being too Republican, while Democrats aren't being Republican enough. Therefore, they convinced themselves of the existence of some great American center that would then nominate their pals Michael Bloomberg or Olympia Snowe. Foolproof!

Apparently the Bloombergs and Snowes of the world weren't quite "non-partisan" enough.  Or maybe most Americans see this thing for the elitist joke that it is. 

By the way, the T-P article is about former Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer's failed attempt to glom his so-called Presidential campaign, which has been limited mostly to demagoguing against the evil influence of money in politics via Twitter, onto this billionaires' vehicle for exerting influence on politics. Which should pretty much tell you all you need to know about Buddy Roemer.

Depressing thought of the day

Some idiot on Twitter is under the impression that the near century-old term of art "bankster" was just coined by Buddy Roemer last night.

Fucking kill me.

Fun fact of the day

Buddy Roemer is still a fraud.

Those lurid flyers attacking Kira (Orange Jones)'s opponents are being produced by a PAC which boasts of having Buddy Roemer on its Steering Committee. This is our clownish former Governor who is now tramping round the country in pursuit of the Republcian nomination. His entire campaign is based on his steadfast opposition to PACs.

Question

Now that support of Occupy Wall Street is slipping in the polls, how long will it be before Buddy Roemer starts looking for a new bandwagon to jump on?

Negative Creep

Surprising immigration news from the New York Times. The US recession is so bad now that it's actually bucking the migration trend we're used to hearing Republican Presidential candidates tell us needs to be combated with electrified fences and "aviation assets" and really big magnets or something like that anyway.

Douglas S. Massey, co-director of the Mexican Migration Project at Princeton, an extensive, long-term survey centered in Mexican emigration hubs, said his research shows that interest in heading to the United States for the first time has fallen to its lowest level since at least the 1950s. “No one wants to hear it, but the flow has already stopped,” Mr. Massey said, referring to illegal traffic. “For the first time in 60 years, the net traffic has gone to zero and is probably a little bit negative.”

I happened upon this article because I read Mark Moseley's column where he references his own hit-or-miss "Superman series" of immigration policy satire. Personally, I've enjoyed the Superman columns although I can understand why some may feel that they were presented by a "dude who needs to learn to write for the internet".

Last Wednesday night Stephen Colbert, another satirist of some note, addressed the labor shortage caused by Alabama's new tough immigration law and its effect on this year's tomato crop. (Tomatoes, I should remind you, are a key ingredient in Beefy Mac.)

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What's important to note here is Colbert's "modest proposal" about replacing poorly treated and underpaid migrant workers with prisoners is more than just a joke. Captive labor is a very old and well-established means of doing business in Alabama and the whole of the American south for that matter. I highly recommend Douglas Blackmon's Slavery by Another Name which describes the system of labor that neatly replaced slavery in the south between Reconstruction and just the time of the Second World War.

In Alabama alone, hundreds of thousands of pages of public documents attest to the arrests, subsequent sale, and delivery of thousands of African Americans into mines, lumber camps, quarries, farms, and factories. More than thirty thousand pages related to debt slavery cases sit in the files of the Department of Justice at the National Archives. Altogether, millions of mostly obscure entries in the public record offer details of a forced labor system of monotonous enormity.

Instead of thousands of true thieves and thugs drawn into the system over decades, the records demonstrate the capture and imprisonment of thousands of random indigent citizens, almost always under the thinnest chimera of probable cause or judicial process. The total number of workers caught in this net had to have totaled more than a hundred thousand and perhaps more than twice that figure. Instead of evidence showing black crime waves, the original records of county jails indicated thousands of arrests for inconsequential charges or for violations of laws specifically written to intimidate blacks—changing employers without permission, vagrancy, riding freight cars without a ticket, engaging in sexual activity— or loud talk—with white women. Repeatedly, the timing and scale of surges in arrests appeared more attuned to rises and dips in the need for cheap labor than any demonstrable acts of crime. Hundreds of forced labor camps came to exist, scattered throughout the South—operated by state and county governments, large corporations, small-time entrepreneurs, and provincial farmers.

One of the worst lies conservative lawmakers tell when they propose "tough-on-immigration" legislation like Alabama's is that they're interested in protecting American jobs and living standards. Instead, they've been pushing in a very different direction. Remember ALEC? The conservative model legislation mill whose Summer meetings in New Orleans occasioned an embarrassingly stupid protest march? Prisons and prison labor have been at the front of their agenda for quite some time.

Although a wide variety of goods have long been produced by state and federal prisoners for the US government—license plates are the classic example, with more recent contracts including everything from guided missile parts to the solar panels powering government buildings—prison labor for the private sector was legally barred for years, to avoid unfair competition with private companies. But this has changed thanks to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), its Prison Industries Act, and a little-known federal program known as PIE (the Prison Industries Enhancement Certification Program). While much has been written about prison labor in the past several years, these forces, which have driven its expansion, remain largely unknown.

Somewhat more familiar is ALEC’s instrumental role in the explosion of the US prison population in the past few decades. ALEC helped pioneer some of the toughest sentencing laws on the books today, like mandatory minimums for non-violent drug offenders, “three strikes” laws, and “truth in sentencing” laws. In 1995 alone, ALEC’s Truth in Sentencing Act was signed into law in twenty-five states. (Then State Rep. Scott Walker was an ALEC member when he sponsored Wisconsin's truth-in-sentencing laws and, according to PR Watch, used its statistics to make the case for the law.) More recently, ALEC has proposed innovative “solutions” to the overcrowding it helped create, such as privatizing the parole process through “the proven success of the private bail bond industry,” as it recommended in 2007. (The American Bail Coalition is an executive member of ALEC’s Public Safety and Elections Task Force.) ALEC has also worked to pass state laws to create private for-profit prisons, a boon to two of its major corporate sponsors: Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections), the largest private prison firms in the country. An In These Times investigation last summer revealed that ALEC arranged secret meetings between Arizona’s state legislators and CCA to draft what became SB 1070, Arizona’s notorious immigration law, to keep CCA prisons flush with immigrant detainees. ALEC has proven expertly capable of devising endless ways to help private corporations benefit from the country’s massive prison population.

That mass incarceration would create a huge captive workforce was anticipated long before the US prison population reached its peak—and at a time when the concept of “rehabilitation” was still considered part of the mission of prisons. First created by Congress in 1979, the PIE program was designed “to encourage states and units of local government to establish employment opportunities for prisoners that approximate private sector work opportunities,” according to PRIDE’s website. The benefits to big corporations were clear—a “readily available workforce” for the private sector and “a cost-effective way to occupy a portion of the ever-growing offender/inmate population” for prison officials—yet from its founding until the mid-1990s, few states participated in the program.

It's interesting to me that both Colbert and Moseley have taken a recent shine to fraudulent Republican Presidential candidate Buddy Roemer. Phony as ever, Roemer is currently attempting to glom his campaign onto whatever momentum the Occupy Wall Street Protests could potentially generate. Buddy could probably get himself elected President of Twitter right now. But when one's memory extends to whatever was contained in the most recent 140 character outburst, one tends to forget that during the 1990s push to expand prison labor, Buddy was at the head of the movement. Here's an ad from Buddy's 1987 campaign for Governor where he promises to "put the prisoners to work"



Our modern day version of Roemer, Governor Bobby Jindal, has supported not only the practice of leasing prisoners but actually selling the prisons themselves to private management firms which could then sell forced labor for profit.

If the numbers in that Times article are correct and the flood of cheap illegal migrant labor into the US market has slowed to a negative creep, then the confused rhetoric Republican Presidential candidates have been blurting about the need to fence it out is even more absurd than first thought. Maybe it's time to pay closer attention to their plans to fence it in.

The single most ridiculous thing I have ever read in my entire life

What a shameless fucking fraud that man is. But then, who isn't these days?

Roemermania rolls on

Roemer 2012 campaign slogan unveiled

"Just tap it, Grandpa"

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Buddy Roemer Pt. 2
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#Roemerhasit*

Big time announcement today. Brace for game-changing, super nutso crazytime... zzzzzz

* I'm sorry but I totally Jim Browned that title. I just couldn't stand the thought of it languishing in the depths of Twitter "chit-chat" land, though. Far better to call it up into the realm of officialdom, right?

Get ready for Roemermania

Also don't blink while it's happening.

Roemer has announced he will make a "major announcement" Thursday.

A Boston Globe report said Roemer plans to live in New Hampshire for the next several months.

Several months sounds like a long time but, trust us, it will be all over with before you can snap a rubber band against your wrist.

"Inspiring orator"?

Having heard this term applied to the halting, murmuring, Dukakis-like Barack Obama and now seeing it used to describe the weenie Baptist church rector stylings of Buddy Roemer, I am certain that I have a very different concept of what that phrase actually means than many people do.

Harry Lee released from prison

Wait... that's not Harry Lee?

Update: Certainly the news of EWE's release will spawn all manner of fun regarding the "Now More Than Ever" campaign to return Louisiana to the era of "competent corruption." But, if you're seriously considering this, which I know you aren't, but if you are, allow the Louisiana Constitution to provide you with this moment of pause.

(B) Disqualification. The following persons shall not be permitted to qualify as a candidate for elective public office or take public elective office or appointment of honor, trust, or profit in this state:

(1) A person who has been convicted within this state of a felony and who has exhausted all legal remedies, or who has been convicted under the laws of any other state or of the United States or of any foreign government or country of a crime which, if committed in this state, would be a felony and who has exhausted all legal remedies and has not afterwards been pardoned either by the governor of this state or by the officer of the state, nation, government or country having such authority to pardon in the place where the person was convicted and sentenced.

Now if you're thinking that perhaps the President could be prevailed upon to issue a pardon just to see if it raises a little hell, then hey plus one to you for not letting go of your fun so quickly. EWE would be proud.

Also, because Edwards was convicted under federal jurisdiction, I doubt that Governor Jindal has any authority to issue a pardon himself. But if by some quirk he does have that power, he might be well advised to consider it. Given the potential rocky road ahead for the Governor and just about any Louisiana incumbent during this year's budget crunch, creating a potential EWE campaign might be an attractive option for Jindal.

Also, also, I guess it's all-around old timer's week in Louisiana. One good delusion deserves another.