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After three weeks and a dwindling viewership, the fairy tale appears to be over for former Gov. Edwin Edwards’ reality show. A&E announced Monday that “The Governor’s Wife” has aired in its entirety. The network yanked they show from its Sunday night time slot this weekend after the show lost tens of thousands of viewers. READ MORE

It’s one of those moments that just brings a smile to your face. A white supremacist who finds out that he is part black. Craig Cobb 62, who wanted to form a neo-Nazi town in North Dakota, had the surprise of his racist life when he received the results of his DNA test on The Trisha Goddard Show. Cobb learned that his genetic makeup is 14 percent Sub-Saharan African. Now, we’re not even talking single-digit percentages here, but double-digit. You can’t even dismiss that as a technicality. And yet, Cobb called the eye ening results “statistical noise.”  Rather, this is statistically significant, and begs the question, how many other Craig Cobbs are out there? And what does all of this tell us about race and its place in America? READ MORE

Following an unprecedented three-year wave of state legislative attacks on abortion and family planning services, a group of Democratic lawmakers in the House and Senate plan to go on the offensive Wednesday with a historic bill that would make it illegal for states to chip away at women's reproductive rights. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) will introduce the Women's Health Protection Act of 2013, joined by Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) and Reps. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), Judy Chu (D-Calif.) and Lois Frankel (D-Fla.). The bill would prohibit states from passing so-called Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP) laws, which impose strict and cost-prohibitive building standards on abortion clinics, require women seeking abortions to have ultrasounds, and create other barriers to abortion access. The Supreme Court decided in Roe v. Wade that states cannot block women's access to abortion before the fetus is viable outside the womb, which is estimated to occur between 22 and 24 weeks of pregnancy. But state legislators have found a number of ways to make it difficult logistically, financially and emotionally for women to have abortions before that point. "In states like Texas and Wisconsin, legislatures are passing bills with the false pretext of protecting health when their only objective is to obstruct and curtail access to safe and legal abortions and reproductive services. These laws are largely unconstitutional, and some measure of certainty and clarity is required to preempt these regulations and laws so women are not deterred in their very personal decisions based on their own values on how they want to use their constitutional rights," Blumenthal said. "The Women’s Health Protection Act will provide a clear and certain response to these regulations and laws that impose unnecessary tests, procedures and restrictions — including requirements for physical layout in clinics — on reproductive services." READ MORE


Recently, my husband and I, both in our 80s, drove down town to join the Buddy Walk for Down Syndrome. After the walk, we returned to our car and noticed immediately that something was different. Our Obama 2012 bumper sticker had been covered with a bumper sticker asking for the repeal of Obamacare Tax. This new sticker was sponsored by teapartypatriots.org.  This organization not only violated our personal property by placing an unwanted sticker on our car, it also violated our right to free speech by covering the sticker we had chosen to place there.  The members of the tea party claim to be patriots. Of what? Communism? Fascism? They are certainly not patriots of democracy.  Sarah Brabant, Ph.D. - Lafayette


In reference to the letter of Oct. 25 from James Bedore, who states: 1) that his freedom has been curtailed in an unspecified manner by the Affordable Care Act; and 2) that no one who supports the act has ever read it, including President Obama: I support the act. I have never read it. But I do know that because of the act, my 22-year-old son, a recent UL grad, is covered under my insurance. My California insurance just recently picked up my son’s $18,000 Lafayette General emergency room bill, which otherwise would have burdened the community, including, indirectly, Mr. Bedore. Now he is free of it. Mr. Bedore’s letter inspired me to look up the act. The language authorizing this can be found in Section 2714 of the act, which states: “(a) IN GENERAL. — A group health plan and a health insurance issuer offering group or individual health insurance coverage that provides dependent coverage of children shall continue to make such coverage available for an adult child until the child turns 26 years of age. Nothing in this section shall require a health plan or a health insurance issuer described in the preceding sentence to make coverage available for a child of a child receiving dependent coverage. Robin S. Tanner


Some Lafayette Parish School Board members said they have lost trust in board attorney Roger Hamilton and want to dissolve an arrangement with the district attorney’s office for legal representation. Board member Greg Awbrey said Hamilton, who was named board attorney in August, sent a letter to the state attorney general last month saying there was no basis for an investigation into Superintendent Pat Cooper. Awbrey said Hamilton did not send the letter to the board before sending it to the state. “To me, this is basically our general counsel sending a letter to a judge, essentially, telling that judge to rule against us,” Awbrey said. “I consider this sabotage. There has to be some other resolution. To consider with what we have is not acceptable, in my opinion. READ MORE

Tuesday night, Bill de Blasio became New York City’s 109^th mayor in a landslide victory, one achieved through a coalition of constituencies, and no group turned out more for de Blasio than black voters. He was elected by a margin of nearly 50 percent, according to exit polls, securing an estimated 752,604 votes Tuesday. It was a victory that swept across the city: every borough, age group, racial category and income level. But in an election where black voters were expected to comprise nearly 30 percent of the electorate, black voters anchored de Blasio’s win with 95 percent going for the Democrat — up nearly 20 points from 2009. Voters in large wanted a change, specifically a shift from Bloomberg’s Stop and Frisk policing program, and De Blasio promised to reconcile New York from a tale of two cities and end its legacy of racial profiling and division. On Election Day, voters issued a mandate to do just that. “Public safety is a prerequisite for the thriving neighborhoods that create opportunity in this city. And so is respect for civil liberties. The two are not mutually exclusive. In fact, we must have both,” de Blasio told a crowd in his victory speech from the Park Slope Armory in Brooklyn. “We must work to promote a real partnership between the best police force in the world and the communities they protect from danger, be it local or global. New Yorkers on both sides of the badge understand this. READ MORE


Without question, Louisiana and most of the American South have refused to adequately and honestly confront and acknowledge the legacy of slavery. We spend millions of dollars marketing our plantation homes as sleepy, nostalgic, and beautiful destinations for weddings and tour groups, and we spend millions more incentivizing renovations of these homes under the pretense of historic preservation. And maybe that would be okay and understandable, but at the same time, we’re scrubbing all vestiges of slavery from these plantations. With few exceptions, it is almost impossible to find a plantation in Louisiana that preserves its slave quarters with the same diligence and care as it does its main house. And again, with few exceptions, you’ll likely never hear anyone in the Louisiana tourism industry admit that plantations, for the most part, were actually concentration camps. That thousands of African-American families also lived, worked, and died in these places, that hundreds of African-Americans were brutally murdered in these places, that the majestic oak trees in the brochures were once used for lynchings, that right beyond the immaculately manicured gardens there are long-forgotten cemeteries.  READ MORE


BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Most of the nearly 388,000 households in Louisiana that receive food stamps will be hit with a drop in their aid Friday, when a temporary boost in the federal benefits disappears. The reduction is estimated to be anywhere from $11 to $43 or more each month, depending on how many people live in the household. That’s about a 5 percent reduction, according to the Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services. The federal stimulus bill passed by Congress in 2009 temporarily increased the maximum amount of food stamp aid that a household could receive. The increase falls away at the start of November.  DCFS spokesman Trey Williams didn’t have an exact figure of how many Louisiana food stamp recipients will get an aid cut, saying it would affect most recipients.

The reason advanced by the Jindal administration for privatizing Louisiana’s charity hospitals is that a private hospital — Lafayette General or Ochsner, for example — can manage a hospital more efficiently, and therefore cheaper, than the state. That’s why I was taken aback when the chairman of the private entity taking over the Shreveport state hospital testified before the Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget that the private contractor’s costs to run the Shreveport facility will be the same as the state’s. Where, then, will the Jindal administration’s promised annual savings of $150 million come from if not from achieving operational efficiencies? Dig deeper into the details, and it becomes apparent that the planned “savings” won’t result from lower costs but from getting more money from the federal government through an accounting change. This won’t make the charity hospitals or Louisiana’s Medicaid program, which pays for the hospitals, more efficient. It will just make them more expensive, fueled by additional federal (American taxpayer) money. READ MORE


A federal district court has ruled that one abortion restriction passed by the Texas state Legislature over the summer is unconstitutional and has partially blocked another. District Judge Lee Yeakel has blocked the state from enforcing a requirement that abortion-providing doctors obtain admitting privileges at local hospitals — a restriction that would have ended abortion services at one-third of the health centers currently providing them. He also blocked restrictions on the use of medication abortion. Both restrictions would have gone into effect on Tuesday. Planned Parenthood and more than a dozen other women’s health providers that filed the suit successfully demonstrated that the admitting privileges provision puts an “undue burden” on a woman seeking an abortion in Texas, as the provision creates a “substantial obstacle” to accessing such service, Yeakel wrote. The court concluded that admitting privileges provisions does not necessarily improve patient care or protect the life of a woman and her fetus, as the state had argued.

With a little more than a month remaining until the 40th annual Bayou Classic is played in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, organizers are scrambling to move beyond Grambling State University’s recent public relations nightmare involving a walkout by members of its winless football team and a recent lawsuit filed by a Southwestern Athletic Conference rival that says GSU’s failure to show up on Oct. 19 ruined its homecoming weekend. Grambling’s players staged the boycott two weeks ago because of many issues with university leaders, including the school’s rundown facilities, long bus trips to road games and coaching changes. The players were also reportedly not happy about the termination of former GSU quarterback and Super Bowl MVP Doug Williams. The GSU Tigers, who have not won a game this season, are 0-8 and have lost 18 straight games. Williams was fired after just two games this season and replaced by George Ragsdale, who was reassigned within the athletic department on Thursday and replaced by Dennis “Dirt” Winston. After grabbing national headlines and being the topic of discussion and debate on talk radio and major sports networks like ESPN, GSU’s gridiron athletes returned to the practice field last week. READ MORE


Democrats have got to love Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, almost as much as members of the Tea Party, the GOP fringe group that hoisted him into national office. In office just ten months, Cruz has slashed and burned his way to the front ranks of would-be candidates for the Republican Party's 2016 presidential nomination. He's gotten more national news media exposure during his short time on Capitol Hill than many senators get during a full six-year term. Cruz's swashbuckling political moves during the partisan fight over funding the federal government's operations and paying the nation's bills turned him into a rock star for Republican radicals. Cruz was, by far, the most outspoken leader of GOP resistance to any compromise with Democrats. Even when Senate Republican and Democratic leaders were arriving at a last-minute compromise, Cruz met secretly with a group of Tea Party members in the House -- presumably to help them plot a strategy to defeat the deal and defy their Republican leaders. Despite his efforts, the compromise was first passed by the Senate with the backing of more than half of its GOP members and easily won approval in the House, where a third of the Republicans voted for it. READ MORE.

Acadiana People: Embargo changed Lafayette forever. Pain at the gas pump was offset by newly created wealth here. Bill Decker - The Daily Advertiser Oct. 20, 2013
Aaron Walker of Lafayette was just out of school in 1979. He was looking for work in the oilfield. He was in the right place at the right time.“Some went to work as roustabouts,” said Walker, who still works in the energy industry as a Chevron operations specialist. “Those people would go to work and make $10 or $12 an hour, and that was big time back then.” That $10 or $12, adjusted for the Southern Urban Consumer Price Index, would be worth $22 to $26 now. The decade that started in the early 1970s brought big-time wealth to the whole state, especially to Lafayette. This month marks the 40th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War and the oil embargo imposed by Arab states in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries against nations that supported Israel against Egypt and Syria. The embargo lasted less than six months, but its effects echoed throughout the 1970s. It launched Lafayette’s economy on a 20-year roller coaster ride. Read More

The 14th Amendment, when combined with the War on Crime, has paradoxically disenfranchised vast swaths of the population  and given the rural, white areas surrounding the prisons unforeseen political power. Read More

DES MOINES, Iowa -- DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — From county chairmen to national party luminaries, veteran Republicans across the country are accusing tea party lawmakers of staining the GOP with their refusal to bend in the budget impasse in Washington. The Republican establishment also is signaling a willingness to strike back at the tea party in next fall's elections.

Federal regulations are loosening to offer more benefits to same-sex married couples around the nation, but not so in Louisiana, where Gov. Bobby Jindal’s administration is complicating how couples can get those federal benefits. Leaders in the Jindal administration made two decisions last month that are at odds with federal policies and, in one instance, put legally married gay couples out of compliance with state law:
• The state revenue department said it won’t recognize same-sex marriages for tax filings, despite a new IRS rule that allows legally married gay couples to file joint federal tax returns and a Louisiana law requiring taxpayers to use the same filing status on state and federal tax forms.
• The Louisiana National Guard said it won’t process requests from same-sex couples seeking benefits, despite a Pentagon directive to do so. National Guard personnel have to instead seek to file benefit requests with federal military installations around the state for processing.
The leaders of both agencies were appointed by Jindal, a gay marriage opponent. In both instances, the agencies cited Louisiana’s constitutional ban on gay marriage. READ MORE

Gov. Bobby Jindal, along with his hand-picked superintendent of education, John White, and Republican leaders across the nation, have sold the American people a false bill of goods. On Aug. 23, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a memorandum in a desegregation case involving Louisiana. Jindal, White and national Republican leaders would have us believe the feds came and stood in the doorways of private and religious voucher schools, preventing entry to poor, minority students.
But this is far from the truth. Superintendent White drew the ire of DOJ by refusing to provide data on more than 1,300 Louisiana students receiving vouchers, after he had already failed to ask for court permission for changes in student assignments in districts under active desegregation court orders, something districts under desegregation orders are required to do. READ MORE

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