A new push for better early childhood education is long overdue.
Robert Penn Warren will always be known in Louisiana for his time at LSU between 1933 and 1942, where he saw the rise and fall of Huey Long and fictionalized the Kingfish in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “All the King’s Men.”
Last December, when The Wall Street Journal asked former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu and other well-known figures to discuss their favorite books of the year, Landrieu mentioned “Our Towns.” It’s written by the husband-and-wife team of James …
Editor’s note: This editorial, with slight variations, has been published on previous Valentine’s Days in The Advocate.
Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan’s recent mention of the late Louisiana lawmaker Hale Boggs was an occasion to remember a man who did a great deal for the state and the nation at large. Noonan recalled Boggs in telling a story about the …
In recent years, many law enforcement agencies have begun requiring officers to wear body cameras on duty, a policy aimed at bringing transparency to the important work of protecting the public.
Resources
The port of New Orleans was the reason that Thomas Jefferson wanted Louisiana a couple of centuries ago, and since the famous land deal of the early 19th-century America has benefited enormously.
A political fight over industrial tax breaks in Baton Rouge drew national attention in The New York Times, but for Louisiana, the questions about local decisions on the exemptions require more thought.
When a peace officer dies in the line of duty, the news reverberates far beyond the boundaries of the community he or she had served. Police officers, sheriff’s deputies, U.S. marshals, port and harbor police and on and on — there is a wider frate…
With both Republicans and Democrats, and President Donald Trump, looking for paths toward agreement, we urge the national leadership to find common ground on rebuilding America’s roads, bridges, rails and power grid.
It’s a question rooted in some harsh realities: What’s the point of letting prisoners out of jail, if they’re going to come right back to the prison door in no time?
That Louisiana has a lot of poor people is no secret, but a new report lends some sobering detail to a problem that’s plagued the state for generations.
Even as Gov. John Bel Edwards started his re-election campaign with a boast that state college funding has stabilized after years of harsh budget cuts, he’s willing to add right away that not enough has been done.
With tensions on trade and visas rising between the United States and China, Louisiana leaders have been right to reach out to assure our Asian friends that our state welcomes them — as students at our universities, or investors in our economy, or…
In south Louisiana, where even funeral processions are sometimes set to playful music, we have a long tradition of wearing grief lightly.
No community wants, in about a week’s time, to hear about more than 800 layoffs of good-paying manufacturing jobs, such as the loss suffered recently in the Zachary-Port Hudson area of Baton Rouge.
In a few weeks, Catholics in south Louisiana will join with Christian communities across the world in observing Lent, a season of somber self-appraisal and reflection on the church calendar.
After hapless officiating at a playoff game between the New Orleans Saints and Los Angeles Rams on Jan. 20 quite possibly cost the Saints a spot in this weekend’s Super Bowl, local fans wondered how league officials could have been so oblivious in…
Who is the single largest taxpayer in East Baton Rouge Parish? It’s not a trick question, but an insight into what’s important in an overheated and unfortunate debate about tax breaks and economic development.
At the State Capitol these days, there’s an “outward and visible sign,” as the old Baltimore catechism used to put it, of a much deeper problem.
As everyone invested in mutual funds or stocks — about half of U.S. households — can tell you, the world is a different and somewhat forbidding place in 2019, and that has repercussions in Louisiana as everywhere else.
This weekend, America begins what’s usually the most talkative week of the year for professional sports. This winter, as in so many others, legions of media commentators, along with athletes, coaches and fans, will spend the next seven days discus…
From the beginning, President Donald Trump did not have an end game for his government shutdown. Now, his plan is a shambles and his compliments to government workers who showed up without getting paychecks appear vapid and insincere.
A small city in central Louisiana decided it was time for a change at the last election, turning to its former mayor who had held the job for years. What’s unusual? Last fall, the state’s voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment f…
There’s an old superstition that what you do on New Year’s Day pretty much shapes what you do the rest of the year. That’s proven eerily true so far in Washington, D.C., where leaders started 2019 with a partial shutdown of the federal government …
Russell Baker, the former New York Times columnist who died this week at 93, will be remembered for many things, including his columns and his two acclaimed memoirs, “Growing Up” and “The Good Times.”
When New Orleans Saints kicker Tom Dempsey broke the NFL record for the longest field goal in 1970, the president of the Dallas Cowboys suggested that the record book should be marked with an asterisk. Dempsey, born without toes on his right foot,…
You can’t take politics out of politics, as the old saying goes, but when politicians decide that everything in government is political, facts be damned, then Louisiana is farther down a bad road.
Fans of the New Orleans Saints were famously noisy on Sunday as the team squared off at Mercedes-Benz Superdome in the NFC championship against the Los Angeles Rams for a chance to compete in this year’s Super Bowl.
Online culture being what it is, public mistakes never really go away these days. They’re repeated endlessly on social media, then archived for the ages on YouTube and other instantly available internet platforms.
Just in time for today’s holiday honoring the birth of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., Baton Rouge’s Capitol Park Museum has put on display the hearse that carried King through Memphis after he was killed.
A big story these days involves the prospect that more and more jobs will be replaced by automation. But Louisiana’s hospitality industry, a huge driver of its economy, might not be so vulnerable to the rise of the robots.
A couple of weeks ago, Saints coach Sean Payton hauled in the Lombardi trophy and a big stack of greenbacks to show his team what was at stake in the NFL playoffs. The coach is known for his inspirational flourishes, and nothing says success like …
“Healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country can have.” That was not the governor of Louisiana, as John Bel Edwards is hardly known for Churchillian eloquence. The quotation is, in fact, from British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1943.
If it’s fashionable in higher education to dismiss the value of college admissions tests, Louisiana – courtesy of a rash move by LSU – has just provided more evidence that a test-based standard works.
Mention the U.S. Coast Guard in Louisiana, and many of us instantly remember Hurricane Katrina, when Coast Guard choppers dropped rescue lines to one rooftop after another, saving thousands of New Orleans area residents from oblivion.
Capital Area United Way fights for the health, education, income stability and basic needs of every person in a 10-pParish community. This fight wouldn’t be possible without our donors, volunteers, local non-profits and corporate partners who have…
Hurricane season starts June 1, and we hope the partial government shutdown is resolved long before then.
We congratulate Shaun Ferguson on his new appointment as superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department.
Last year, when state lawmakers wasted hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on pointless special sessions to discuss budget issues they could have resolved much earlier, we suggested that they shouldn’t collect their paychecks for the special…
When President Donald Trump visits the Crescent City today to address a Farm Bureau convention, he’ll land at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, where neither the air traffic controllers nor the staff of the Transportation Security…
In 1979, the year Drew Brees was born, the New Orleans Saints had their first nonlosing season, finishing at 8-8, which was considered real progress at the time.
The rapid passage of a bill through House and Senate, authorizing back pay for federal employees once the needless government shutdown ends, shows how quickly things can happen when politicians get embarrassed about their actions.
In 2016, when he visited flood-ravaged neighborhoods in Baton Rouge, candidate Donald Trump promised he would not forget what he saw. “To the people of Louisiana: We are with you and we will always be with you,” he pledged at the time.
On Jan. 7, 2018, we published an editorial urging Louisiana judges not to drag their feet in a court case involving the possible destruction of key records in a legal proceeding.
Now that New Orleans Police Department Superintendent Michael Harrison is leaving his job to lead the police department in Baltimore, Mayor LaToya Cantrell could be making the most important decision of her administration as she selects Harrison’s…
Good politicians often get applause when they speak, but East Baton Rouge Parish Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome got an ovation before she uttered a word of her annual state-of-the-city address to the Rotary Club of Baton Rouge on Wednesday.
When Donald Trump entered the White House, he had a portrait of Andrew Jackson hung in the Oval Office, a way for one populist to pay homage to another one. The gesture was no doubt welcomed by many of Trump’s supporters in Louisiana, where Jackso…
The forecasts for 2019 by 14 business and community leaders gathered by The Advocate suggest a lot of good news to come for south Louisiana.
Thank you for your editorial on former President George Herbert Walker Bush’s call for volunteerism and the impact of collective action to improve and strengthen our communities. In that spirit, Parkway Partners was founded in 1982 in New Orleans …
Just when you thought politics couldn’t get any nastier, there’s this. Supporters of one of the Democratic Party’s fastest-rising stars, New York U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have attacked House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, a Louisiana Repu…