…or at least that’s the word on the street this afternoon.

Apparently, the crooked Edwin Edwards crony ex-Democrat from the Westbank will be the Senate President for Louisiana’s Republican governor who demanded a gold-standard ethics reform agenda upon his inauguration four years ago.

The other senate president candidates are being bought off with committee chairmanships.

While Saturday’s elections generally represented strong progress for conservatives, particularly where BESE was concerned and in statewide races, the Senate was a disaster. The Senate is, if anything, worse than it was.

Seeing this, the Jindal administration has chosen to get in bed with the hacks and seek to co-opt Alario rather than wall him off from the levers of power.

It’s a colossal mistake, and it invalidates virtually everything Jindal has sold himself as. He can’t consider himself an agent of change in this state if Alario is his legislative right-hand man. All he’s doing is surrendering his soul in an effort to get more cooperation in the Senate.

And that decision will come back to bite him, unless the people who re-elected Jindal over nine opponents by a 2-to-1 margin get engaged in an effort to put a stop to it.

In 2008, legislators thought they’d have no trouble voting themselves a pay raise. It passed, and it went to the governor’s desk. All was going well until the people of Louisiana got wind of it and let loose their fury on Jindal and leges alike – and by the time all was said and done there were state representatives and senators who had voted for the pay raise camped out at Jindal’s door begging him to save them from themselves.

Well, it’s three and a half years later – and those of you who manned the barricades then might want to join the fray again.

Because if the public stink of having an Edwards crony and old-time Louisiana political hack running the Senate after all the hard work done to remove that way of doing business doesn’t kill this deal, for the next four years we’ll see all the same backroom deals we’ve always seen – just with new folks handing out the goodies.

This might seem like an acceptable solution for Jindal. Except there will be scandals to come as a result, and those scandals will stick to him. They’ll ruin his legacy as governor.

Don’t believe me? Well, go ahead and read the FBI transcripts from 1995. They’ll give you an indication what you get when Alario runs one of the chambers in the Louisiana legislature. Sure, that can’t happen while Jindal is governor. Jindal, after all, can lie down with dogs and get no fleas.

If you believe that, you must think that somehow we’re not in Louisiana anymore and the old days are gone forever. I could respond with a trite line about a river in Egypt, but I’ll spare you that.

Somebody needs to save Jindal from himself. Selling out to Alario is one of the stupidest things he could do, and he’s doing it.

Call the governor, and call your state senator. Tell them no. If 20 senators will listen to their constituents and vote against this debacle, perhaps it won’t happen.