Politics vs Governing

Monday Governor Edwards presented a balanced state budget for next year which he is required to do by law.   TOPS along with other constituent favorites are being drastically cut because constitutional constraints protect other entities from fiscal cuts.

  

This latest draconian budget is a culmination of a systematic ploy by our Republican legislators to put politics over morality by attempting to make Edwards look as “bad” as possible so that they can win the governorship back at election time. 

Our esteemed Republican legislators, along with our past Republican governor, Bobby Jindal, were totally responsible for this fiscal mess and have had over seven months to permanently solve the fiscal boondoggle that our state faces.  Last session they enacted “kick the can down the road’ temporary taxes on businesses and citizens that balanced last year’s budget.  These all expire July 1^st.

For the entire past year our Republican legislators blamed these new taxes on the governor.  They seem to have forgotten the state constitution which specifies that any revenue generating measures must originate with the House legislators, who along with the Senate, formulate and pass such measures.  The governor’s office can propose whatever it desires, but it is both houses of the legislature which formulate the revenue bills and make them laws.  They can even pass such laws over the governor’s objection.

Last year the legislators agreed to raise the sales tax and business taxes hoping that not only would this plug the fiscal gap but have the additional benefit of associating our Democratic governor with the standard “stereotype” of a tax raising Democrat.

Apparently, their new plan is to propose no fiscal solutions and end up making the temporary taxes, permanent, which they will continue to attribute to Edwards in an attempt to further impugn the governor’s image.  All of this buffoonery is simply “blame game” politics, just like in our nation’s capital. It’s all about further polarizing and dividing our society.  It has nothing to do with finding realistic solutions to the problems at hand.

Our legislators simply don’t want to do anything that might make a Democrat governor “look good.”  God forbid they should work with our governor and produce an actual solution.

We are the ones who will suffer the most.   Remember all this the next time you go to the polls.

Who and What to Believe

I’ve been on this earth for 73 years and I never thought I’d live to see the day when we as Americans no longer know what is true news reporting and what is false.  Our president has successfully convinced most Americans that the major media outlets are not trustworthy sources of facts.  However, the president’s advocated source of the truth, his tweets, has been labeled as containing misinformation over 65% of the time.  Is that figure even factual?  Is it too high or too low?  Recently, Fox News, another source advocated by the president as truthful, was awarded the winner of the ‘Fake News Trophy’ in a poll.  Was this a factual poll or another source of misinformation?  The dilemma for deciphering factual information is out of control.  Should I become like some of my friends and just stick my head in the sand and ignore all media reporting?

The latest book, "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House" by Michael Wolff purporting to give Americans and the world a glimpse of the governing style of President Trump, has produced even more chaos regarding  the paradigm of fact vs. fiction.  Are all of these depictions true or are they all false? Are only some true?  Do some of Trump’s closest advisors really think he is  “child-like,“ “a pillar of wide ranging ignorance,” and “mentally unstable,” or is this all made up by the author simply to sell the book?    Is it worth the risk to simply dismiss all the book’s depictions as total fiction? 

Sadly this new book is the culmination of what I term Trumpism payback.  I categorize the book as simply one big tweet filled with the glaring animosity, name calling, personal attacks and unsubstantiated innuendos that closely mirror the same characteristics of President Trump’s tweets during his run for president and his one year in office.   It’s a monster he once masterfully controlled but now has run amuck and turned on him in the form of a best seller book. 

While most Americans seem perfectly content to continue to accept this continued aberrant behavior, think about the consequences this is having on the image of respect for the U.S. worldwide.   If we as Americans no longer know what to believe about our president, just think how confused other countries must be.    This new book will further erode the respect for President Trump as the Leader of the Free World, although many don’t wish to acknowledge this, or even give a damn.

One reaps what he sows, just stay tuned to see how this all plays out.