Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Jefferson Has Very Devastating Ads Against Carter on the Issues

Rob Couhig also says that Carter has a great ad calling Jefferson a hypocrite. Rob Couhig had Joe Lavigne on his show this morning. On WRNO's web site, you can find the interview on the audio on demand link. Scroll down to:
Rob & Bo - 7a to 8a - 11/28/06
Former 2nd District candidate, Joe Lavigne, talks about the Congressional Runoff.

and click listen. The Lavigne interview and Couhig's comments start about 9 minutes in.

I listened to Couhig's talk show for the first time this morning, I'm glad that somebody's adjusted his thinking to post-Katrina realities. Your impression of the Lavigne interview might be different than mine, but I got the impressions that Couhig was trying to win over voters for Jefferson. Yeah, he allowed that Carter had a "great" personal attack ad, but Jefferson has a "devastating" ad attacking Carter on the issues. I had no idea that late term abortion and gay marriage were still such important issues in the post-Katrina world. Jefferson's also an "American success story, from sharecropper to Harvard." I won't call it an Adrastos-Oyster repeat until I see what BayouBias has to say about it, but I was suspicious. If there's a GOP effort to help Jefferson, Lavigne either isn't part of it, or he's playing his part too subtly. He did say that he was more impressed with Jefferson, whom he found knowledgeable, than Carter, whom he found robotic, but I got the impression that he might reluctantly vote for Carter. When Couhig suggested that it might be better to vote for Jefferson because we might get a new election in nine months, Lavigne disagreed, saying that you needed to vote for the best candidate now. Listen for yourself (from about the ninth to the sixteenth minute), but I thought that Couhig's recap of what Lavigne said gave a different impression than Lavigne's actual words. The quotes were accurate; the emphasis seemed different.

Before I say anything more about the show, I'm no Blanco fan. Depending on the opponent, I thought that I might vote for her next year, until I heard about $700M ICF contract. Without a good explanation, it will be almost impossible. Still, it's impossible to listen to local talk radio without answering some of the attacks. I don't think it's possible to listen for an hour without hearing a local Republican script: that Haley Barbour is handling Mississippi's recovery so much better than Blanco's handling ours. Sure enough, Republican state representative Danny Martini called in and the subject came up. Couhig opined that Mississippi trusted its people, while La. put in too many safeguards. It's questionable whether La. would have received the Road Home money without those safeguards. Anyway, nobody's arguing that La.s handling its recovery well, but it's inconceivable that both Martini and Couhig still think that Mississippi's recovery is going so well.

Couhig was at his most hypocritical when he discussed Blanco's meeting with French Quarter business owners. According to Couhig, if Blanco had ever run a business, she'd have a greater sense of urgency. She wouldn't be promising help two months from now, she'd be cutting checks now. Yeah right, if Blanco did that, Couhig would accuse her of overstepping her authority and trying to buy the election. Just listen to his conversation with Martini, it starts about twenty minutes into the show. At one point he says that we've progressed beyond spending a couple of million to win an election, now it's $7B. He even ended the show saying that state needs to be careful how it spends the surplus. I believe the exact words were, "let's not act like it's Christmas and try to buy an election."

Comments:
"I'm no Blanco fan. Depending on the opponent, I thought that I might vote for her next year, until I heard about $700M ICF contract. Without a good explanation, it will be almost impossible."

I feel exactly the same way. On a recent "Louisiana Newsmaker" tv show Clancy Dubos basically thought that people should be thrown in jail for such an expensive and shoddy deal, especially given the slow results.

Right now I'd vote for Jindal over Blanco with little hesitation (despite some of his wacky views). I doubt my position will change in coming months which is why I might want to start a "Draft John Kennedy" movement.
 
fucking sheep at the voting booth , black and white, repub and dem. are leading us to the goddamn slaughter house.

pray that we wake up as a city and a region.

i thought katrina would have shamed our city leaders into finally become public servants but it's been pretty obvious that that aint happening.


p.s.

see above comment i.e. john kennedy as to how someone in office became a public servant after katrina. i respect that man.
 
Ugh... can't vote for any of those jokers and feel good about it. When does EWE get out of jail? ;-)
 
Jeffrey, stop about EWE. Your recent defense of him (in response to my comment) was basically that he didn't have the courage of Buddy Roemer. For all his faults, Roemer did take on some of the polluters -- he lost. Or were you joking?

I'm mystified about the $700M to ICF. I assume that these things are usually done a perentage basis, but I would think there'd be a cap or the percentage would be much lower than 10% on a deal like that. I suspect that people were paid off in both Washington and Baton Rouge, but that wouldn't let Blanco off the hook.

I've got real problems with Jindal. Maybe my problem with most politicians is that you have to be cocky to be a poltician. Jindal's so lacking in self-criticism that he sold himself and then the state on the half-baked idea that if the feds start paying us what they owe us now, we'll be able to pay for things they should have paid for years ago. The idea was half-baked in its inception and the execution has been horrible. I don't know how a position that could have been useful for getting federally funded coastal restoration became the state's position, but it was Jindal's position from the start.
 
To be clear: I vote in all elections whether I feel "good" about the candidates or not. I believe a vote is still worthwhile even if it's only between a "bad" and an "awful" candidate.

Jindal has some alarmingly bad views and traits, but endorsing Blanco again (unless she pulls a rabbit out of a hat) would be an awful move in my view.

In fact, in coming weeks I'll be excioriating Jindal, butalizing him on his Iraq stance... not to mention the chance that he gets screwed by his GOP House buddies on oil royalties.
 
You said "The idea was half-baked in its inception and the execution has been horrible. I don't know how a position that could have been useful for getting federally funded coastal restoration became the state's position, but it was Jindal's position from the start."

Ok, first off, that position was never really designed to get any help from the feds or the rest of the country. It just pissed everyone else off!. (see also the post about Blanco's emails to spin blame to feds) Since corrupt politicians like have no evidence to support their claimed innocence, they resort to name calling, blaming and scapegoat-ing calculated to appeal to those who have been taken advantage of more than they have understood who did it to them and how. What sucks is that it works so well. When are we going to add some real transparency to this?

If you want to prevail in the market place of ideas without scapegoat-ing your problems, you have to offer concepts that make sense, support them with evidence, and demonstrate that you know what you're talking about. That whole strategy and the populations willingness to buy into it is going to haunt this State and City for a long time!
 
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