Is it better to ask forgiveness than permission? LSU President F. King Alexander has pushed that saying to an extreme, unsettling a decades-old consensus on higher education policy.

Does John Bel Edwards deserve to be re-elected?

Tara Wicker cannot be more wrong. The Metro Council member says it is "a challenge just to keep the decorum ... just to keep (the meetings) from becoming almost comical." In truth, decorum left the council long ago. 

The Louisiana Republican Party is like a country club that lets in too many members.

If there is one thing that the law enforcement community agrees upon, across the country as well as in Baton Rouge, it is that too many folks with mental health problems are locked up in jails.

The innocent believe that the Louisiana State Capitol is a battleground of ideology. But the realists see it as the chessboard, or stock exchange, or lottery of the special interests.

As the internal politics of city hall in Baton Rouge have become more polarized, like most everywhere else, the Metro Council has become a significant barrier to getting mayoral initiatives before the voters.

With the fire-breathing Republican advocates of the Second Amendment in full cry at the State Bond Commission, did anyone notice who gave them a lecture about what being a conservative means?

Who is the most popular governor at the White House, at least with a D behind his name? Maybe the case can be made that it's John Bel Edwards.

Sick of the Legislature and politics and the State Capitol? Don't look now, but the jockeying for 2019 is well underway, and has been for months.

At one late-night shooting scene, all too familiar in Baton Rouge, the new chief of police got some encouragement: a young woman started to describe, not quietly, the getaway car and what she had seen of the driver and passengers.

With apologies to the president of the United States, the current titleholder, if we could combine Chauna Banks and John Schroder into a single public official, we'd get a Republocrat whiner of epic proportions.

Is a power play worthy of the U.S. Capitol the right way to approach the Metro Council in East Baton Rouge Parish? No, and it is that lack of proportion that has led four members of the council into a boycott that makes the Democratic members look petty.

A motto for the new city of St. George, should it come into being, would be appropriate from a historian of Britain's Conservative Party, the late Lord Blake: "It is the tendency of government expenditures to increase."

Throwing the bums out is unfortunately not entirely possible with this Legislature, in large part because term limits mean that a significant number will not face the voters again, at least not in the same districts.

An old story from the U.S. Capitol is that of a young representative who is flattered to be invited for drinks with the old bulls of the House Democratic leadership, talking legislative strategy. The green young man offers an idea about how to con…

Perhaps because he is a bit younger than the general run of legislators in the Great Silo of Statesmanship in downtown Baton Rouge, Ted James is catching on to the new lingo of state politics quicker than the rest of us.

It is a drearily familiar scene.

If you want to campaign on God, country and patriotism, the usual stuff, don’t run for secretary of state in Louisiana.

"A change of scenery," Gov. John Bel Edwards called it, to contemplate the "end of the road" for the Legislature that has refused to deal with the "fiscal cliff."

In 1950, Baton Rouge's consolidation of city and parish government was considered all the rage in progressive circles, a way to make public services more efficient and provide a broader tax base. Lafayette government made the same decision in 1996.

There's no inherent contradiction between being nice and being persistent, but the combination of the two words used most often to describe urban planner Elizabeth "Boo" Thomas understate the case.

Few politicians do not enjoy attention, and Mitch Landrieu has been getting a lot as he winds up eight years as mayor of New Orleans. It has been an era of turnaround for the city, flooded after Hurricane Katrina.

As leader of the state House Republicans, state Rep. Lance Harris of Alexandria is often at odds with Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, and even with Jay Dardenne, the Republican budget officer for the state.

For the economic analysts, the location of a giant new Formosa plant in St. James Parish, promising 1,200 permanent jobs, is a function of objective factors. There is the Mississippi River and Louisiana’s network of pipelines, the neighboring petr…

It’s all conservative all the time, with Gov. John Bel Edwards himself joining in the avid discussion of work requirements for Medicaid recipients, almost all of whom are elderly, disabled or children.

What do Republican legislative leaders want?

For the economic analysts, location of a giant new Formosa plant in St. James Parish, promising 1,200 permanent jobs, is a function of objective factors. There is the Mississippi River and Louisiana’s network of pipelines, the neighboring petroche…

Of the frauds making the rounds of the State Capitol, the notion of a fresh start on a new Louisiana Constitution is one of the most durable.

When the Pilgrims found dry land at Plymouth Rock, the outcasts had to start the political thing from scratch. After all, as Puritans, they were dissenters, the second-class citizens of Britain, ineligible for most offices and functions in society.

With the Louisiana Legislature tied in partisan knots over the budget, could things be worse?

With party divisions entangling the Legislature in the State Capitol, the body's approval ratings have to be in the single digits, and that is particularly annoying to state senators, who feel dragged down by the collisions over budget and taxes i…

Last week, Jay Dardenne’s long and distinguished career was one of those featured in a video for his induction into the Louisiana Political Hall of Fame, including his early activity as a Republican candidate and then officeholder.

The Daily State-Times of Baton Rouge bannered the news in 1909: “Five Million Dollar Company to Build Two Million Dollar Plant Here.”