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Governor Bobby Jindal has been talking about the “gold standard” for ethics in LA. That’s tough talk.

Recently, it was revealed by the Heh, Heh, Heh, State Ethics Board that, while running for governor, Jindal failed to comply with the State Campaign Disclosure Law.

I’ve gone through some of Governor Jindal’s campaign material to see what he proposes as the “gold standard” of ethics for others and attempted to apply them to Jindal’s own transgression of the law.

The following in bold was excerpted from the governor’s website: http://bobbyjindal.com/issues/Jindal_Ethics_Pressrelease.pdf

1. Legislators will have to give full financial disclosure. There will be no exceptions and no loopholes.

According the Heh, Heh, Heh, Ethics Board, Governor Jindal failed to disclose over $100,000 in contributions.

Apparently leges must fully disclose, but governors don’t.

2. Do not do the crime if you cannot do the time. Breaking the rules will result in expulsion and criminal proceedings.

Strong words. Lucky for Jindal since currently there are no criminal penalties in the law.

3. Strong penalties should be automatically incurred in any instance of deceptive reporting. Increase penalties for fraudulent or incomplete reports and registrations.

Jindal says he will pay the maximum fine of $2,500 from his campaign fund which is where he failed to report the money. In other words, failing to report over $100,000 warrants a $2,500 fine.

Strong penalty??

Is it really a penalty if someone else pays one’s fine?

Jindal’s own advisory committee on ethics recommended that payment from one’s campaign fund not be allowed. Apparently, Jindal plans on paying the fine before he imposes that restriction on everyone else.

4. Make all ethics filings immediately available on the Internet. Citizens should be able to immediately access and search all information pertaining to an ethics filing or disclosure report upon its filing.

The expenditures occurred last June. The public learned of them this week. Perhaps “immediate” is a relative term.

5. Ensure that all state employees and officials understand that ignorance of the ethics code and its provisions is never a valid excuse for noncompliance.

“We are not trying to deny anything,” [William} Potter said. “It’s an error.” Baton Rouge Advocate, January 25, 2008.

Potter said the initial indication was that it was an independent expenditure by the party which only the party would be responsible for reporting. Ibid

Apparently ignorance of the law or the failure to follow the law is an appropriate defense for Jindal, but not for all other public servants.

6. I will have a high standard for performance and a zero-tolerance for ethical lapses by my administrative appointments.

Potter said Teepell, who was Jindal’s campaign chief, failed to notify those preparing the campaign finance report of the party expenditures for Jindal. (emphasis mine) Ibid.

So, what happens to Teepell?

High standards for all

I’m all for high ethical standards. What I don’t support is selective standards. If Governor Jindal is going to talk the talk, he needs to walk the walk, starting with his own office.

C.B.

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Weird stuff is going on in D.C. The Republican President along with both parties in Congress are suggesting tax cuts and rebates to stimulate the U.S. economy.

The tax cuts are for businesses and the rebates are to individual taxpayers. That’s getting pretty far out there economically speaking.

Thus far, I’ve heard no cries about how the President and Congress can afford to keep government going when they are actually returning money to the people from whom it was taken.

Maybe the media will awaken them.

A dumb idea

The quickest way to determine that this is a dumb idea is that none of the public officials in LA are suggesting anything similar. Just the opposite.

Governor Jindal is planning a special session to spend all the state’s extra revenues on growing state government. He’s implemented a “hiring freeze” that looks like a snowball in August.

Too bad Jindal is no longer in Congress.

No urgency

In LA there is no urgency to do anything about Louisiana’s economy. As Dr. Loren
Scott recently pointed out; if I economy had been doing well, it would only mean future
suffering when manufacturing jobs are lost.

LA has managed to avoid the suffering by not attracting the manufacturing jobs in the
first place by making sure that LA is over-taxed and over-regulated. We should be
grateful.

Fixing the U.S. economy

I’ll be happy to get my rebates and cuts, but frankly the United States will never match Louisiana when it comes to growing an economy.

For now, the best the U.S. can hope for is for Bobby Jindal’s current campaign to be mentioned as a Vice Presidential candidate will catch fire.

C.B.

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According to a story in today’s Baton Rouge newspaper, Governor Bobby Jindal is meeting with small groups of leges to discuss his plans for his upcoming special session for ethics. No specific legislation is being presented, but discussions of various details of impending legislation are being discussed.

The matters being discussed are not “internal” lege matters, but the passage of state laws which all in LA must live and abide.

The purpose of a lege session is to discuss and have public input into the law-making process. Or at least that is what the constitution says.

Which brings me to this point about these private meetings.

WHERE’S THE TRANSPARENCY????

Circumventing the law

Jindal is obviously meeting with less than a majority of each house of the lege in order to circumvent the Public Meetings Law.

Such meetings and circumvention of the law is nothing new. Previous governors have done so. They are the ones who Jindal alludes to as being in charge while the state suffered from an image, if not the reality, of corruption.

What is being said in those meetings that cannot be said in an open forum?

Transparent or invisible?

If things are going to be different under a “transparent” Jindal Administration, why do things appear to be the same old opaque method of operation used by all the previous administrations?

Seems like another case “transparency” being the same as “invisible.”

C.B.

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