Conservative activists were secretly hoping for Peterson’s Obamacare bill to make it to the floor for a vote. This legislation is an opposition researcher’s dream and Republicans were looking forward to forcing the Senate Democrats to go on the record in support of Obamacare. It did not make it to a floor vote, but members of two Senate Committees were forced to go vote on the issue.

Committee votes are notoriously hard to track as few organizations score legislators on their votes in committee. The Louisiana Legislature also does not publish committee votes. The only way to track a committee vote is to watch it as it happens or spend the time watching the video archives available online. Thus, legislators often are not held responsible for their committee votes by their constituents or outside groups.

Lafleur voted against the legislation on Tuesday, but he previously voted in favor of the bill when it was before the Senate Insurance Committee last month. Lafleur was joined by the five other Democrats on the Insurance committee as the bill was reported favorably on a vote of 6-2. Apparently, the administration decided to cede control of the Insurance Committee to the Democrats as they outnumber Republicans 6-3 on the committee. Only Senators Ronnie Johns and Gerald Long opposed the bill in the Insurance Committee. Senate Insurance Chairman Republican Senator Blade Morrish abstained.

Three of the six Democrats who supported the bill in the Insurance Committee are likely to be targeted by Republicans in 2015. Gary Smith, Rick Ward and Eric LaFleur all campaigned as conservative Democrats and represent districts where Republicans can win. Yet, all three are now on the record in support of Obamacare.

As a member of the state house, Gary Smith considered himself a proud liberal Democrat.  Then in 2011, Smith attempted to remake himself as a conservative. In almost every campaign mail piece and commercial, Smith touted himself as a conservative and utilized pictures of himself with Governor Jindal. In spite of a horrendous voting record, he managed to convince the regional PAC board of LABI that he would be a better, more conservative legislator in the future and thus was able to earn the co-endorsement of the pro-business PAC. Still, the LAGOP and the Louisiana Coalition for a Republican Majority went after Smith with guns blazing and forced him to dig deep into his own pockets to beat back a little-known, underfunded challenger in Garrett Monti. According to several lobbyists, Smith is still seething after the state GOP and LCRM took him to task for his past liberal voting record, his family’s government contracts and his support of Obama’s election. Since being elected to the Senate, Smith often follows the lead of Senate President John Alario and the advice of his pollster and well-paid friend Bernie Pinsonat, but as the committee vote shows, when he is left to his own devices his true liberal colors emerge.

Smith will certainly be reminded of his vote in favor of Obamacare the next time his name is set to appear on the ballot.

Last fall, Republicans opted not to oppose Rick Ward, the son of a prominent, longtime District Attorney. Ward’s legislative record thus far has been a mixed bag. He has shown a willingness to buck the liberal establishment of his party. But votes such as the one supporting Obamacare will certainly give conservatives a reason and plenty of fodder to oppose his reelection.

Eric LaFleur was also targeted by Louisiana Republicans. Like Smith, LaFleur had a significant financial advantage over his opponent, Paul Miller, and was able to overcome the Republican onslaught to win. As the head of the Senate Democrat Caucus, LaFleur is a prime GOP target. His district is a traditional Democrat stronghold, but statewide Republican candidates now win regularly throughout his district. It is hardly surprising that LaFleur decided to do his best John Kerry impression and vote against the bill he once supported.

The Obamacare legislation had zero chance of becoming law this session. Still being a left-wing ideologue, Peterson willingly forced her Democrat colleagues to walk the plank and support the legislation. Louisiana Republicans can only hope Sen. Karen Carter Peterson is as effective at destroying the Democrat Party as party chairman as she has been as state senator.

Looks like one got done, though. The Jindal administration put out a release just now trumpeting an end to the legacy lawsuit controversy…

Governor Bobby Jindal’s point-person on legacy lawsuits – Department of Natural Resources Secretary Scott Angelle – has reached a compromise with landowners, oil and gas industry representatives and key legislators involved in solving the legacy lawsuit issue.

Secretary Angelle said this compromise accomplishes two goals, including accelerating environmental clean-up from exploration and production activities, and ensuring that the party responsible for environmental damage is actually held responsible for cleaning it up.

Secretary Angelle said, “Louisiana has a long and distinguished history of oil and gas production as well as being a unique slice of America that offers some of the best of the great outdoors. To reach a compromise, it was important that we came to a balance that enables us to continue to lead the country in energy production and also be good stewards of the environment. This compromise provides for transparency in the process, accelerates clean-up of the environment and protects innocent parties from punitive damages.

“I want to personally thank Senator Allain, Senator Adley, Senator Long, Senator Alario, Representative Abramson, Speaker Kleckley and all the other stakeholders for their time, passion, and commitment on this issue.”

Key Points For Compromise:

1. In order to accelerate clean-up, the compromise will allow a party to admit responsibility for environmental damage according to a regulatory standard without having to admit liability for private damages.
2. Once a party admits responsibility, the Department of Natural Resources will be charged with structuring a feasible plan that will protect the environment, public health, safety and welfare of the state.
3. The compromise requires oversight of the feasible plan by the Secretary of the Department of Natural Resources, Secretary of the Department of Environmental Quality and the Commissioner of Agriculture.
4. Both the feasible plan and the comments of each agency are admissible in court.
5. During the design of the feasible plan – and to guarantee, transparency – no employee, contractor or representative of the state shall have any ex parte communication.
6. For any party that admits responsibility, they waive the right to enforce contractual rights to indemnification for punitive damages caused by the responsible party’s acts or omission.

Senate President John Alario said, “This is, and has been, a difficult issue to solve for many years. By working together over many months with all of the interested parties we have reached a compromise. I want to thank Sec. Angelle, these Senators, and all the stakeholders for their commitment to remain at the table until a deal could be reached.”

Speaker Chuck Kleckley said, “I want to thank Secretary Angelle, leaders in both chambers, and stakeholders for coming together and reaching a compromise. Now that we have an agreement we can move this legislation through the process.

Senator Robert Adley said, “This is an issue I’ve been personally involved with for many years and I’m thankful that we’ve reached a compromise that satisfies both the oil and gas industry, as well as Louisiana landowners. This is a needed step toward ensuring that companies who are willing to clean up anything they’re required to clean up.”

Senator Gerald Long said, “Today’s agreement is the result of months of hard work and negotiations. I was proud to be a part of this process and I’m more proud that we have come together in way that holds responsible parties accountable and ensures a pathway for us to clean-up our environment. Throughout this process, it has been my intention to find a solution that leaves all stakeholders satisfied. This agreement meets that goal. No one got everything they wanted, but everyone got something and that’s what compromise is all about.”

Louisiana Oil and Gas Association President Don Briggs said, “Over the course of the last twelve months, the Jindal Administration and stakeholders have worked to find a solution to curb the legacy lawsuit problem in Louisiana. Today, we reached an agreement on proposed legacy lawsuit reform legislation that we believe will ensure timely regulatory clean up of the land while protecting a landowner’s right to recover damages.”

President of Roy O. Martin Lumber Roy Martin said, “We thank the Governor’s Office, Senator Allain, Senator Long and our attorney Jimmy Faircloth for working to ensure the interest of landowners, industry, and independent producers are protected in this reasonable compromise. As we move forward, we are passionate in continuing to work with all parties to ensure clean-up is done in a practical manner which doesn’t unjustly enrich one party.”

Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association President Chris John said, “We’ve been working toward a compromise for many months and I want to especially thank Secretary Angelle for his continued commitment to reaching an agreement all parties can agree to. I want to also thank all of the stakeholders involved, including the members of our Association, for working together to send a clear message to the oil and gas industry that Louisiana is open for business.”

Farm Bureau representative Joe Mapes said, “Farm Bureau is pleased with the compromise, especially the oversight by the Commissioner of Agriculture. It is important that agriculture has a voice in this process.”

Louisiana Landowners Association Executive Director Paul Frey said, “The Louisiana Landowners Association appreciates that the Governor’s Office has helped to achieve this compromise. We add a special thanks to Senator Allain who is a key advocate for landowners. Without his leadership this would not have happened.”

But while Kennedy was jumping into the fray on the side of the state’s fiscal hawks, the actual soldiers in that battle – the conservatives in the House of Representatives who started the fight by amending the budget to remove the one-time money that was in it amid a donnybrook of a floor debate last week – held their fire yesterday.

Not today.

Eight of those House fiscal conservatives – Rep. Tony Ligi, Rep. Hunter Greene, Rep. John Schroder, Rep. Cameron Henry, Rep. Simone Champagne, Rep. Lance Harris, Rep. Ray Garofalo and Rep. Brett Geymann – put a release out in response to Rainwater today which echoes the gist of Kennedy’s message yesterday.

That message? Quit with the Chicken Little stuff.

FISCAL CONSERVATIVES RESPOND TO SCARE TACTICS BY DIVISION OF ADMINISTRATION

BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA—Fiscal responsibility should be more than a preached campaign promise – it should be put into practice. There is widespread misinformation on the efforts of legislators who seek fiscal responsibility on the part of state government. Fiscal conservatives in the House of Representatives worked together to pass a constitutionally mandated amendment to House Bill 1 (“the state’s annual budget”) in order to achieve that end.

In response to our attempt to do what we believe to be right by the taxpayers of Louisiana, the Division of Administration testified in a Senate committee about draconian cuts to higher education and health care in an apparent effort to pressure legislators into complying with the Administration’s budget proposals.

The conservative-sponsored amendment would remove non-recurring income (“one-time  money”) of $269 million from being spent on recurring expenses. Commissioner of  Administration Paul Rainwater testified that this would cause hundreds of millions in cuts,  primarily to higher education and health care. We seek to set the record straight.

Some of the important facts of the amendment are:

• Only allows reduction in staff through vacant positions and furloughs with respect to higher education.
• The total amount of vacant positions and furloughs at risk in higher education is $42 million, not the exaggerated amount put forth in Commissioner Rainwater’s testimony.
• The Department of Health and Hospitals gets a year over year increase of 1.4% in the budget even with the amendment.
• Gives the Division of Administration a list of eight options to eliminate the use of onetime money for recurring expenditures from the 2012-2013 Fiscal Year budget.
• Mandates that salary reductions come from the highest paid employees.

Our objective is to provide a budget that funds the state’s needs in a fiscally responsible manner within the constraints of the constitution – and with the available taxpayer revenue. We will  continue to work with the administration and the Senate to achieve this objective.

There’s a graph as well…

The administration is fairly likely to respond on this publicly, based on the aggressive response they threw back at Kennedy yesterday. Engaging in this debate is something they need to do, because clearly the case for using one-time money hasn’t been persuasively made yet. It certainly wasn’t made by House Appropriations Committee chairman Jim Fannin last week in a speech which combined threats and non-sequiturs in an effort to browbeat the fiscal hawks into obeisance, and Rainwater’s Senate testimony did little better.

And with Jindal’s name being consistently thrown around as a vice presidential pick, including in today’s POLITICO op-ed by Grover Norquist and Patrick Gleason of Americans for Tax Reform, this issue needs favorable resolution. After all, Norquist and Gleason included this as part of their endorsement of Jindal as Mitt Romney’s prospective veep…

If Romney wanted to provide voters with a clear choice on tax policy, he would be hard-pressed to do better than add Jindal, one of 13 governors committed to not raising taxes, to his ticket.

While the president’s budget entails historically high levels of spending and taxation, it’s also noteworthy because it never balances during any time window. Jindal has balanced a budget every year as governor and never resorted to higher taxes.

Yikes.

You really can’t make it stick that you’ve balanced the budget every year when you’re using one-time money and drawing down the rainy-day fund to do it while you’re crossing your fingers that revenues will eventually catch up to expenses. And now that Norquist and Gleason have said it, the claim of a balanced budget – which almost every state has to have based on its constitution and almost half of them have done even in this lean year without having to search under the seat cushions for spare change – is going to get some pretty unwelcome scrutiny if the fiscal hawks are still screeching when all this is over.

But as John Maginnis noted in his column this week, Jindal has the votes in the Senate to get the budget he wants out of that body, and unless the House conservatives are willing to wreck this session by voting the final budget down, which will put Jindal in the midst of a special legislative session on the budget at the precise moment his name starts being seriously considered for the VP job, he’s going to get to use that one-time money again.

The question is what the cost will be – to the state, to Jindal, to the Louisiana Republican Party, to the conservative movement.

Wolfe won enough votes in the March 24 primary election here in Louisiana to entitle him to delegates, which party bosses still refuse to hand over.

Less than half of Democrat primary voters in Arkansas say they will be pulling the lever for Obama in that state’s May 22 Democratic primary election.

According to new polls numbers, 45 percent support Obama with 38 percent supporting Wolfe and 17 percent undecided.

Those numbers are even worse for the president when you consider that Wolfe is running his campaign on a shoestring budget with no television or radio advertising in Arkansas, relying on mostly mail-outs and robocalls like he did in Louisiana.

Back in March, Wolfe won more than 15 percent of the vote in three of Louisiana’s seven congressional districts—enough to send three delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C. in September, according to party rules.

Roughly 20 percent of the vote in Louisiana’s 1st Congressional District, 17 percent in the 3rd Congressional District, and 22 percent in the 7th Congressional District chose Wolfe over Obama. All-in-all 17,804 Louisiana Democrats voted for Wolfe and subsequently were disenfranchised.

Wolfe said on May 2 that he would file a federal lawsuit against the party on May 4 to make it award his delegates.

May 4 came and went with no lawsuit being filed, with Wolfe telling me a few days later that campaign obligations in Arkansas and Texas, which will hold its primary election on May 29, forced him to put off the lawsuit for a little while.

As of the last time we spoke, he was still very adamant about the lawsuit.

Wolfe has been critical of Obama’s Wall Street ties and wants to overturn Obamacare. Recent reports show that he also doesn’t agree with the president’s support of gay marriage.

He hopes continuing to speak out on these issues will put him over the top in Arkansas and he has to be getting too close for comfort to doing that for Democratic party officials.  To lose his party’s nomination in a state would be a devastating blow for Obama that would reverberate into the November general election.

I wonder if Arkansas would be able to refuse Wolfe his delegates if he was to end up with more votes than Obama?

Whittle’s talking in general terms and about modern lefty ideology, naturally – there was a time not all that long ago when liberalism was actually a more muscular, “alpha male” philosophy. Nobody doubted that John F. Kennedy or LBJ were alpha males, or that Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Harry Truman or Teddy Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson were – those guys made Progressivism and the New Deal cool, because while they generally didn’t give a rat’s rear end about the rights of the individual, let’s say, or what they were doing to the American tradition of free enterprise and all that stuff, they sure did have some balls.

And if you got in their way, you were gonna get it. Which doesn’t exactly make these guys Gary Cooper. But at least nobody ran against them on the basis they were spineless or weak or lacked balls. FDR managed to get away with being in a wheelchair, and it wasn’t just that the media back them carried his water for him.

We haven’t had anybody on the left since Bobby Kennedy got whacked who’d qualify. Once George McGovern won their nomination they’ve had an entire class of Alan Alda wannabes. Just look at what’s on the roster now and see how many Alphas you can find…

Chuck Schumer
Dick Durbin
Harry Reid
John Kerry
Nancy Pelosi
Barney Frank
Rahm Emanuel (who thinks he’s an Alpha because he accosts naked men in the shower, but come on. Two words: ballet lessons. Nuff said)
Jerry Brown
Ed Markey
Henry Waxman
Jon Corzine
Gary Ackerman
Howard Dean
Joe Biden

Wait. We’re forgetting somebody. Let’s see, who are we leavin’ out?

Oh, yeah.

Obama.

What we have in the White House now is clearly the most beta-male president we’ve had since that fruity Buchanan guy who let the Civil War get started. This is a guy who wouldn’t even give a shout-out to the folks in Iran who wanted to get rid of the mullahs because they were gettin’ in the way of his attempt to have a sit-down with ‘em. This is a guy who invented the phrase “leading from behind” when he let Hillary and the French buffalo him into sticking it in Qaddafi so the local Al Qaeda affiliate could rout him out of Libya. This is a guy who told Putin’s poodle he’d have “more flexibility after the election” to give away the store on missile defense, after he’d already sold out our friends the Poles and the Czechs in return for diddly poo.

And this is a guy who knuckled under to a bunch of gay guys with money on supportin’ gay marriage, for nothing more than a stack of campaign checks. For that, he’s on the cover of Newsweek as the First Gay President.

This comes after a rash of stuff about the one chick anybody’s actually found who Obama used to make it with before his wife came on the scene who said she could find him hanging around his crib wearing a skirt. We already know the wife buffaloed him into agreeing to let his mother-in-law live with ‘em at the White House; can’t get anymore Beta Male than that.

And Obama’s fellow snivelers at the Washington Post did, what, exactly? Last week they came out with that 5,000-word piece splashed across the front page all about how Romney cut some hippie dude’s hair.

Yeah, yeah. Romney’s a bully and he was mean to gay dudes.

Know what that piece did show, though? Romney’s been an Alpha Male since Jump Street. Romney was the kid in school who was always playin’ pranks on people. Romney was the chief smart-ass who stirred the drink. Romney was the guy the whole social life of that school flowed through. And Romney was the guy who decided he was gonna regulate the longhair in the dorm hall, and he got the whole mob in the dorm to come with him on the project.

That’s the kind of stuff Alpha Males do. You could call that leadership.

Do we want our leaders learning the trade by playin’ barber with beatniks? No. But 17-year olds are gonna make mistakes when they try to lead. Alexander the Great was probably the last 17-year old who didn’t screw the pooch more often than not in a leadership role. That’s one reason high school football teams won’t even put names on the backs of jerseys, fer instance.

But in Romney’s case, he didn’t make a habit of rippin’ on longhairs. He made the dog ride on the roof once, but that’s about it. Most people who’ve been around Romney say he’s a stand-up guy and pretty solid, and since he got into public life you can’t find a whole lot of examples of him makin’ abjectly stupid or abusive calls.

Democrat-types will say “oh-but-when-he-was-at-Bain-Capital-he-shut-down-this-company-and-laid-that-guy-off” and so on. Beta Male President Guy is out with an ad about it now. But that’s not a stupid mistake, that’s just business.

And Romney is bein’ hacked on as Don Draper. Y’know, Jon Hamm’s character from Mad Men? The guy who cheats on his wife and screws people over?

Except, like Whittle talks about, Don Draper is a POPULAR character. People like him, and that character has made Hamm a star even though Draper is generally a dick. Draper isn’t just good at his job, he’s awesome at his job and he knows it. And he’s ruthless about doing it. And his personal life sucks, because he’s a lot less serious about it than his work.

And for an ad guy, he has a lot less tolerance for BS than you’d think.

Romney’s more well-rounded than that. They try to make him Don Draper because he’s a white guy whose manner reminds folks of an Alpha Male from the 1950′s and 1960′s. Like Draper.

But the thing is, people will choose an Alpha Male over a Beta Male any time they see a clear choice between one and the other. And like Whittle says, lefty beta types aren’t all that good at preventing such a choice even when they try. That’s what the WaPo piece was about – trashing Romney as a homophobe at the same time Obama was comin’ out as the best buddy of all the gay people was the angle, but what people actually saw was (a) a chicken-poop hit job on Romney, (b) the fact that Romney actually was a leader before he even had a clue what to do with that leadership ability and (c) the fact that Obama gets told what to do by the enlightened limousine set.

Mike Ramirez nailed this perfectly…

That ain’t an Alpha Male.

This is an Alpha Male.

Romney does suck, some. But at least with this guy you don’t feel like he lacks cojones or that he’ll sell out stuff he really believes. You can gripe, reasonably, that he doesn’t really believe all the right stuff and he’s more than happy to sell out the stuff he doesn’t care about – but that doesn’t mean he’s not an Alpha Male. Don Draper doesn’t give a crap about his wife, at least not REALLY, so he cheats on her. And Romney isn’t REALLY a conservative, so he’ll probably cheat on us.

But we can hire Congress to follow him around and whip his ass if he tries to do that. What we don’t get the impression is that Romney would screw the country over as president, at least not deliberately.

With Obama? Hell, he’ll do it for all kinds of reasons – and not the least of which being that he’s weak.

And he wants to make us that way, too.

$4400 Pay Raise   – 2.5%  voted on June 27, 2007, Roll Call 580

Source: CNN/AP
House gives itself a raise
POSTED: 10:48 p.m. EDT, June 27, 2007
WASHINGTON (AP) — House lawmakers Wednesday voted to accept an approximately $4,400 pay raise that will increase their salaries to almost $170,000.

On a 244-181 vote Wednesday, Democrats and Republicans alike killed a bid by Reps. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, and Lee Terry, R-Nebraska, to get a direct vote to block the annual increase, which is automatically awarded unless lawmakers vote to block it.

POLITICO newspaper on the pay raise: http://www.politico.com/blogs/thecrypt/0607/Democrats_hand_GOP_a_campaign_issue_for_2008.html
USA TODAY on the pay raises:  http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-06-27-2853819648_x.htm
ACTUAL ROLL CALL VOTE: http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2007/roll580.xml

FINAL VOTE RESULTS FOR ROLL CALL 580
(Democrats in roman; Republicans in italic; Independents underlined)
H RES 517  YEA-AND-NAY  27-Jun-2007  8:20 PM
QUESTION:  On Ordering the Previous Question
BILL TITLE: Providing for consideration of H.R. 2829, Financial Services
Appropriations, FY 2008

Source: Charles Boustany’s Pay Raise Vote