by KenI realize that this post comes a day late. I'm sure you're thinking that if only you'd known, and if you'd been in the D.C. area and had a hankering for some Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen fried chicken, you could have whipped out your checkbook and for a mere $1000 and enjoyed not just your chicken and sides (and your biscuit, and maybe some of that iced tea or lemonade) but also the company of both of Louisiana's U.S.
Thanks to the exposure of his neo-Nazi group's relationship with Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA), David Duke is enjoying a moment of national quasi-relevance again-- long after most people thought the expatriate Austrian resident would never be heard from again. Duke joined the KKK when he was 17 and formed his first neo-Nazi group, the White Youth Alliance, when he was a college student in Baton Rouge in 1970.
It isn't difficult to do a post mortem on Mary Landrieu's idiotically-doomed Senate race. Saturday's runoff saw the 3-term Louisiana Senator struggle to reach beyond 40%. In 2008 she beat Republican John Kennedy 988,298 (52%) to 867,177 (46%), the same percentage she got in her 2002 reelection. Saturday's results were Cassidy 712,330 (55.94%), Landieu 561,099 (44.06%). She won 15 of the state's 64 parishes.She never had a chance.
With right-wing congressman Bill Cassidy running for Mary Landrieu's Senate seat, his Baton Rouge-based House district looks very attractive to an awful lot of candidates. It's a grotesquely gerrymandered (i.e., ethnically-cleansed) deep red district with a PVI of R+21. Obama won 31% there against McCain and 32% against Romney. In 2012 the Democrats didn't even bother putting up a candidate against Cassidy.
Last February we looked at the possibility-- which seemed remote-- that former Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards would run for Congress. And here we are, 5 months later, and he's in the middle of a free-for-all contesting the open seat-- incumbent Bill Cassidy is running against Mary Landrieu for Senate-- in LA-06 (a blatantly ethnically-cleansed Baton Rouge plus Thibodaux).
Like a spear thrusting into the Gulf of Mexico’s gut, the Isle de Jean Charles is turbulent with ruinous daily oil and gas accidents, rising sea levels, and tropical storms. Homes on the Isle de Jean Charles perch on delicate wooden stilts thirteen feet high, their paint peeling in the sun. A solitary road snakes down the spine of the shrinking island. Stained American flags billow slowly in the Gulf breeze, affixed to porches where one can catch the nasal tones of plaid-clad men bantering in Cajun French.
The one above is the debut of James Cameron's must-see series on Climate Change, Years of Living Dangerously. It's an hour that, if you watch it, will have been well-spent. Cameron's video is-- God willing-- part of the solution to an existential threat to humanity. Below is a short, brutish political commercial. It's ugly and it will persuade many Democrats to hold their nose and just stay home rather than vote for Mary Landrieu.
Maybe he should have joined another conservative felon, coke dealer and former South Carolina Treasurer Tom Ravenel, on his new BRAVO reality show, Southern Charm but, fresh out of prison, like Ravenel, ex-Governor Edwin Edwards-- who had his own reality show, The Governor's Wife, already anyway-- announced he's running for the open House seat that Bill Cassidy is giving up to run for the Senate seat Mary Landrieu holds.
The Republican Party, particularly the congressional wing, has one issue they're gearing up for the midterms: Obamacare. After doing everything in their power to sabotage it, from inception to roll out, the, Republicans want to focus all their attention on howling about what a failure it is. But are people buying their message?
People pay less attention to politics in one-party states. And with the decline of the Louisiana Democratic Party following the 1964 Civil Rights bill, that state has become more and more of a right-wing Republican bastion. African Americans dominate one (of 6) congressional districts, LA-02, basically New Orleans and the black neighborhoods on the north side of Baton Rouge, 80 miles away. That shockingly gerrymandered district attempts to pack as many African-Americans (and Democrats) into one district as possible and it is 63% African American (the state is 32% African American).
