You’ve probably never heard of it, but there is a website run out of Gonzales called the Pelican Post. It’s confusing, because the site in question has no connection to the Pelican Institute, a conservative think tank which has also had a blog by that name.

And you really shouldn’t confuse the two. The Pelican Post in Ascension Parish isn’t conservative at all. It’s a site wholly devoted to the kind of petty, old-school political garbage which has led to Louisiana ranking at the bottom of all the major public policy metrics.

Its publisher is an old Democrat lawyer named Wade Petite, and apparently how things work is that Petite involves himself in various political shenanigans and then publicizes them. The best example of this was when he loaned some $1200 to A. Wayne Lawson, who was a candidate for Ascension Parish president, shortly before making secret recordings of then-parish president Kenny Matassa offering Lawson a bribe to get out of the race. Then Petite “broke” the story of the bribe. Matassa ended up being found not guilty on those bribery charges, though the incident did end his political career.

Which was what Petite and his friends wanted.

Without weighing in on Matassa one way or the other, this is the kind of sleazy status quo we’ve been railing against since the very beginning of this site. Politics has to involve principle; if it doesn’t, then it’s inevitably a steep and slippery slide into the kind of grubby, all-I-find-I-keep kleptocracy you see throughout the Third World.

And because people of principle in politics, particularly in Louisiana, are so hard to find, when we find them we tend to defend them ferociously.

Which is why we’ve always liked Kathy Edmonston, who is a member of the Louisiana Freedom Caucus and has a perfect voting record from a conservative standpoint. Kathy stands on principle. It’s the reason she got involved in politics; she’s a fighter against the sleazy operators of the old school.

It’s difficult to co-opt Kathy Edmonston. For example, a couple of years ago she suffered the embarrassment of getting arrested for DUI. As a state legislator, you’d figure that would have gotten handled up the chain at the state legislature. Nope – Kathy took the rap and even put out a press release confessing to the arrest and promising not to let it happen again.

We all make mistakes, but integrity is about owning up to them and being honest with people.

So when the status quo mob leaned on members of the Louisiana House of Representatives, including, for example, Jack McFarland, the chair of the Conservative Caucus, to peel them off a principled position of not busting the state’s constitutional spending caps this year, many of them sold out their principles and flipped their votes to sanction a bacchanal of spending – including a million dollars each in pork projects for every member, House and Senate, of the Legislative Black Caucus.

Only 19 House members refused to do so. Kathy Edmonston was one of them.

She’s governed by principle and she has integrity.

This is how the Pelican Post treats Kathy Edmonston…

The incumbent proudly boasts her charter membership in…

and has received the endorsement from the Political Action Committee sharing the moniker.  Located at a Prairieville mail drop, the PAC’s chairperson operates The Hayride and demands rigid adherence to its (in our opinion) far-right ideology.  Edmonston’s obsession with COVID vaccine policy (over half of the bills she authored in the most recent Regular Session addressed it, two years after it stopped being a thing as far as we could tell) fit snugly within the orthodoxy.

The incumbent is also the darling of something called Louisiana Citizens Advocacy Group (LACAG), the current hustle launched by Chris Alexander (Google “KIRAN: Baton Rouge attorney turns himself in on criminal charges”), and its PAC largely funded by Lane Grigsby.  Kathy Edmonston was the first member of LACAG digital Wall of Fame, and the last as far as we can tell, because:

• “She has spoken courageously in favor of medical privacy and against vaccine mandates and other coercive actions by our government…

• Edmonston has also strongly supported legislation to keep the poisonous doctrine of Critical Race Theory out of our public schools.”

That same article lambastes Edmonston for engaging in “culture war nonsense.”

Like what? Well, Kathy Edmonston is in opposition to gay porn in school libraries and the kids’ section of public libraries. Is that “nonsense?” Tell it to Sen. John Kennedy, who caused a great stir on Capitol Hill yesterday when he read quotes from a couple of the books in question of a highly pornographic nature. Kennedy was appalled enough by that content to take fire from practically everyone by exposing it. Does Wade Petite think he’s engaging in “culture war nonsense?”

Must be.

Petite is backing another old Democrat, Don Schexnaydre, who is running against Edmonston. All of Schexnaydre’s rhetoric screams status-quo Louisiana; he’s essentially said over and over again that he sees the job of a state legislator not to make policy but to sell himself out for swill from the Capitol trough.

As a result, here’s another entry from the Pelican Post…

In local government circles, parish and municipal officials not pleased by her lack of attention to local issues, there is an anybody but the incumbent vibe surrounding the District 88 Louisiana House of Representatives election.  Two candidates, Willie Robinson and Don Schexnaydre, are challenging Kathy Edmonston whose first legislative term was noteworthy for a lingering obsession with COVID vaccine policy to the exclusion of traditional concerns.  Behind the scenes discussion centers on all the dollars Edmonston failed to bring home to fund core infrastructure items like turn lanes, flood control and the like.

No sitting official has the gumption to say so publicly, tempering their frustrations because the incumbent has to be considered the frontrunner, but they want Kathy Edmonston gone (some are not all that happy with District 59 Representative Tony Bacala either, for similar reasons).  Edmonston is more concerned with propagating Louisiana Freedom Caucus kookery, translucently veiled in faux commitment to fiscal responsibility, than bringing home the bacon.

Got that? Principle is “kookery,” and what’s important is “bringing home the bacon.”

Meaning taking your tax dollars and funneling them to the State Capitol where the status quo mob can then dole them back out to the most obedient, and devoid of principle, hogs at the trough. Even if that means grooming kids for sex in schools and libraries, stoking racial hatred under the guise of education, instituting DEI throughout the public sector, selling out to China, whatever. Because state legislators should never see themselves as having a role in deciding what kind of society we live in. All that matters is keeping that government gravy train running on time.

That’s worked so well that even Mississippi now looks down on Louisiana.

Which is a reason we’ll happily look down on the Wade Petites of the world.

If you’re in House District 88, you should vote for Kathy Edmonston like Louisiana’s future depends on it. Because it does.