Matching wits with Edwin W. Edwards was like gambling against the house. I always lost.
With a long face and somewhat lugubrious expression in repose, generations of LSU students probably thought they were meeting, on the first day of Jim Wharton’s chemistry classes, the undertaker of their grade-point averages.
Defense wins championships, a rule for incumbent politicians as well as coaches.
If academics are famous for anything, it is talking. There are committees upon committees, reports and papers; talking is the product, abstraction an outcome.
The members of the new Legislature that was supposed to be meeting right now should get some sympathy, too, during this trying epidemic episode.
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“There is no such thing as society.”
The phrase “helicopter drop” was coined by the late economist Milton Friedman and picked up by a student of the Great Depression named Ben Bernanke, whose vast interventions of the Federal Reserve’s cash helped to bail the economy out of the 2007-…
Lanny Keller: Handling coronavirus might be different disaster management challenge for Gov. Edwards
Disasters can be good for you, if you’re governor of Louisiana.
With another muddy political compromise, the state Board of Regents allowed F. King Alexander to get away with overturning two decades of admissions policies at LSU.
If you want to talk tone-deaf, there’s tons of evidence of it in the failed and politically unwise impeachment saga.
You’ve got to worry about poor Mitt Romney. He probably isn’t getting any sleep over the possibility of the Louisiana Republican Party condemning him.
Since we’re all still in the happy glow of that wonderful little gem of a football game when LSU won the national championship, just about no one is immune from sports analogies.
There were more than a few people who were definite — absolutely definite — about the intraparty struggle in the Louisiana House of Representatives.
The warm ovation given to President Donald Trump and the first lady in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome on Monday night had one timely political lesson: In Louisiana, and probably a lot of other places, impeachment is stupid.
Lock him up? For that?
It is a season of loss, particularly for Baton Rouge, as some of the icons of public and community service have recently passed on.
The wave of dismay and horror about impeachment covered endlessly in the national press is hardly a ripple in deep-red Louisiana.
Even before the November runoff election, it had been a big year for state Education Superintendent John White, now the longest-serving person in his position in the nation.
The large class of new legislators were at the State Capitol this week to learn the facts of life.
Congratulations to Gov. John Bel Edwards, father of an independent Louisiana Legislature.
All too often in an election year, we hear that government should be run like a business.
The operating assumption of both Ralph Abraham and Eddie Rispone in this year’s election was that John Bel Edwards won in 2015 because of — shall we say, unusual? — circumstances like the sex scandal that troubled his runoff opponent David Vitter.…
In the last days before a close runoff election, Louisiana's gubernatorial candidates have better things to do than think — like shaking hands and kissing babies; giving statements to sway whatever undecided voters are left, if any; and milking co…
John Bel Edwards is mostly right, and his critics mostly wrong, on the state of Louisiana’s economy. So why is a generally popular governor in relatively good economic times having a hard time being re-elected? It’s the D behind his name, when Rs …
Mocking tweets from Donald Trump’s White House is shooting clay pigeons on the ground.
The staid precincts of Louisiana Public Broadcasting took on a Jerry Springer air with the debate in a governor’s race that spread more heat than light.
Even before the scandal of Lane Grigsby’s attempt to fix the Senate District 16 runoff, “Governor Grigsby” was an ironic phrase among politicos, if a trifle disparaging to his friend Eddie Rispone, the nominal Republican candidate for governor.
It’s hard to think of a serious candidate for governor who has as little official experience as Eddie Rispone, the Baton Rouge tycoon whose millions invested in ads pushed him into second place in the primary election.
If a runoff were the certain outcome of Saturday's primary election, would the president of the United States be in Lake Charles on Friday?
In what other city or state in the nation could Cleo Fields manage a political comeback? After appearing on an FBI surveillance videotape taking large amounts of cash from arch-crook Edwin W. Edwards in 1997, Fields passed off the event as innocen…
If you’re a Republican voter who doesn’t know much about U.S. Rep. Ralph Abraham, maybe you’ll believe that he is a Nancy Pelosi camp follower who voted with the liberal speaker of the U.S. House more than 300 times.
Ralph Abraham, a backbench member of Congress and now a GOP candidate for governor, has multiple college degrees and a pilot’s license, suggesting he's pretty smart — not anywhere close to the flake-and-nut brigades often attracted to the movement…
It was probably inevitable that the two major Republican candidates for governor would fall out as the Oct. 12 primary nears. After all, their mutual goal is to force Gov. John Bel Edwards into a runoff, but the overriding goal of the two GOP camp…
Louisiana is no longer alone in having an all-comers election, commonly called the open primary. Other states, most notably California, also have some variants of our system.
Based on the votes cast in recent elections, you can make two political arguments about the boundaries of the proposed St. George “city” movement.
Whatever one might say about Edwin W. Edwards and the late Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, they were always good Democrats.
We now have a quantifiable level for Louisiana Republicans’ fear of Donald Trump — at least $30 million, or maybe $40 million.
Maybe it’s difficult, after literally decades of John Noland’s wrestling with the tough problem of affordable housing in Baton Rouge, to pick just one of his pithy — and sometimes grumpy — observations. But this one was perfect, as he talked about…
Even the president of the United States is now tweeting out conspiracy theories. In some quarters, the conspiracy theory close to home is the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, pulling strings from its aerie on the top floor of the IBM building in downtown.
When Ralph Abraham and Eddie Rispone signed up Tuesday as Republican challengers, they learned within a day just how much the advantage of incumbency gives to John Bel Edwards.
“Now, in our country under our free enterprise system, we have seen medicine reach the greatest heights that it has in any country in the world,” we hear. “Today, the relationship between patient and doctor in this country is something to be envie…
If radio host Jim Engster is a friend of yours, tell him that friends don’t do to friends what he did to yours truly.
The name "Middleton" has probably been most in the news lately because of seemingly endless reports of flooding and other damages to the library at the center of LSU’s campus.
If there’s a bipartisan winner in Congress this year, it’s health care.
You’ve never had it so good, from the GOP perspective, and John N. Kennedy, lifelong politician and officeholder, probably makes as sound a pitch for Trumpism as can be made.
Maybe the population numbers are not that big, and that’s one of the problems, but there is a crisis in small-town Louisiana.
Political scientists seem to agree that Americans are the world’s leaders in voluntarily paying their taxes every year.
Ask just about anybody at the State Capitol, and they’ll tell you Taylor Barras is one of the nicest guys in the Legislature.
It’s too crass for politicians to acknowledge it openly, even in the age of frankness ushered in by Donald Trump, but legislators know it is one of the fundamentals of political physics: If you give somebody a benefit, you’ll never get it back.