Editorial

A close friend asked me what I and my administration have learned from the recently ended legislative pay raise fiasco. Well, quite a bit actually. Of course, as is the case with the human condition, these are all lessons that most of us learned early in life around the dinner table, so it is unfortunate to have to learn them again, this time in public.

In an election campaign in which not only young liberals, but also some people who are neither young nor liberals, seem absolutely mesmerized by the skilled rhetoric of Barack Obama, facts have receded even further into the background than usual.
As the hypnotic mantra of "change" is repeated endlessly, few people even raise the question of whether what few specifics we hear represent any real change, much less a change for the better.
Raising taxes, increasing government spending and demonizing business? That is straight out of the New Deal of the 1930s.

President Bush has exercised poor judgment but that is no excuse for not re-evaluating past mistakes and taking corrective action. Everyday there are news reports of more deaths.  I think President Clinton would have asked the following questions and taken corrective action.

Why are we still there?
We see images of death and destruction on TV every night. 
Why are we still there?
We took this land by force. We occupied it. It causes us nothing but trouble.
Why are we still there?
Many of our children go there but never come back.
Why are we still there?

I was watching the news Thursday morning and a segment about gas prices and the cost of travel changing some employee's work time. In the segment, they spoke of driving to and from work less, hence using less gas, by reducing the work week to four ten hour days. The companies that were interviewed stated that the work was still being completed and savings were seen not only by the employees, but also by the company.
In my profession it is rare that I don't already put in a ten hour day, but if I had that one extra day that I didn't have to travel to the office, I would be one happy camper.

Got my credit
Card to thank;
Financially,
I’m in the tank.
Telling big banks to stop chiseling their borrowers is like telling cats to stop chasing birds. They can’t. It’s what they do. They’re designed that way.
Put another way, the business of America, as we’ve long been told, is business. No, that doesn’t mean making goods or providing services. It means manipulating the finances of making goods and providing services. General Motors reaps more profit from making car loans than from making cars. In fact, it no longer reaps any profit at all from making cars.

Under both federal and Louisiana state law, prosecutors are given wide ranging immunity for their actions.  Louisiana in particular has been a domicile for some of the most troubling examples of blatant prosecutor misconduct.  Up until now, there was little recourse for an aggrieved defendant.  But all that might change in the coming weeks as the US Supreme Court considers the ramifications of a prosecutor who goes too far.