LOUISIANA

“Saints and Pelicans owner Tom Benson offered Monday (Dec. 14) to resign as trustee of a disputed family trust fund in Texas on the condition that his estranged daughter, Renee Benson, doesn’t take his place.” – NOLA.com

“U.S. Rep. Charles Boustany on Monday will take a leap from his secure House of Representatives seat into the 2016 Senate race abyss.” – Lafayette Advertiser

“Jindal made visits to Shreveport and Monroe last week highlighting his economic development achievements. Alford says there are some good and bad things associated with Jindal’s time in office and the governor will focus on the good in the last weeks of his term. But he questions whether the governor’s tour will sway the history books.” – KPEL

“New figures show Louisiana’s economy grew at a 2.4 percent annual rate from April through June, slower than the U.S. economy. Louisiana’s performance was an improvement from 2015’s first quarter, when the economy shrank 1.5 percent, and from 2014, when economic output grew by 1.5 percent.” – NOLA.com

“What’s normally a little-watched insider election could have a deeper impact for the Democratic Party in Louisiana this spring after a Democrat, Gov.-elect John Bel Edwards, defied most predictions and won the governor’s race. Louisiana Democrats will elect members of the Democratic State Central Committee on March 5. ” – Baton Rouge Advocate

“New Orleans Police have arrested the ninth suspect in the Nov 22, Bunny Friend Playground shooting that left 17 people hurt.” – Fox 8 Live

“The governing board for the University of Louisiana System has named a temporary system president until it finds a permanent successor for Sandra Woodley, who is stepping down from the job. Dan Reneau was named Thursday as interim system leader during the transition.” – Lake Charles American Press

“Whether Gov.-elect John Bel Edwards’ alliance with the state’s teacher unions means a push is brewing to undo the sweeping changes in public schools promoted by Gov. Bobby Jindal is a hot topic in the education community.” – Baton Rouge Advocate

“I wanted to change the stance on the Heisman (Trophy) from this (holding up one finger, meaning one LSU winner), to this (holding up two, signifying two Tigers winners),” Cannon said. “I guess I’ll have to change it to this (holding up his middle finger). I don’t know what else to do.” – Shreveport Times

“Had LSU just listened to a librarian – of all people – it may not have found itself in the financial predicament it did in trying to fire football coach Les Miles and hire Florida State coach Jimbo Fisher last month.” – WWL-TV

 

NATIONAL

“Chanukah is many things but it is not a safe holiday. It is a victory celebration in a guerrilla war. It is a reminder that Obama’s war on Jerusalem was preceded long before him by Antiochus’s war on Jerusalem. It is a brief light in a period of great darkness.” – Sultan Knish

“The Ted Cruz surge has officially arrived. Predictably, the same political class that previously didn’t give him any shot to win the nomination is now saying he’s ‘peaking too soon’ or the ‘flavor of the month.'” – Steve Deace/Conservative Review

“Donald Trump is all about winning. ‘If we win Iowa, we run the table,’ he told a Des Moines rally on Friday. ‘It will be over quickly; we win virtually every state in the union.’ But how will he handle defeat if the Superman of the Polls suddenly starts losing?” – John Fund/National Review

“Donald Trump, now 10 points below Cruz, was in a pique about not being the front-runner even before the Iowa Poll results were announced Saturday evening. He wasted no time in tearing into Cruz — and the poll — during an Iowa stop Friday night.” – Des Moines Register

“Ted Cruz and Donald Trump are the top two candidates Iowa Republican caucus-goers say are the most qualified to handle the top two issues facing the country — the economy and national security. That gives them front-runner status in a new Fox News poll of Iowa likely caucus-goers.” – Fox News

“With primaries a bit less than 50 days out, at this point, previously skeptical pundits have assumed not only that Trump is the front-runner in the GOP primary, but that there is no real contest. But while cable news is capitalizing off of kabuki theater, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has been backstage outplaying the entire GOP field.” – The Hill

“Cruz has largely built his program out of his Houston headquarters, where a team of statisticians and behavioral psychologists who subscribe to the ­burgeoning practice of ‘psycho­graphic targeting’ built their own version of a Myers-Briggs personality test. The test data is supplemented by recent issue surveys, and together they are used to categorize supporters, who then receive specially tailored messages, phone calls and visits. Micro-targeting of voters has been around for well over a decade, but the Cruz operation has deepened the intensity of the effort and the use of psychological data.” – Washington Post

“Bestselling author Mark Steyn was one of a number of ‘climate change’ critics invited to testify at a US Senate subcommittee chaired by Senator Ted Cruz on Tuesday.” – The Rebel

“Today on Good Morning America, John Cohen, a former acting under-secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and now a national security consultant for ABC News, dropped a bombshell: over the objections of security-minded DHS personnel, the Obama administration secretly barred DHS from looking at postings on social media by visa applicants like Tashfeen Malik.” – Power Line

“Race faker Rachel Dolezal has compared herself to Caitlyn Jenner and claims that race is not ‘coded in your DNA’ and should be viewed like gender or religion.” – UK Daily Mail