Louisiana Governor Jindal Rediscovers Federal Government- Asks For Aid As Oil Spill Reaches Coast

Huge Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico Now Making Landfall

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal Requests Aid From the Federal Government (After Lambasting It).

Where is Caribou Barbie? The "Drill Baby Drill" folks have been awfully quiet during this calamity.

"Every asshole who ever chanted 'Drill Baby Drill' should have to report to the Gulf Coast today for cleanup duty." -- Bill Maher


The current spill could rival or even surpass the Exxon Valdez disaster.

Read more

Bobby Jindal Wants the Nation to Be Like Louisiana:

So says Rude Pundit.

2/25/2009
Bobby Jindal Wants the Nation to Be Like Louisiana:

Last night, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal looked for all the world like the winner of the "Most Likely To Be Quickly Raped in Prison" award. That poor bastard would be some neo-Nazi's punk within an hour, and he'd be glad for the protection that accompanies all the sodomizing. What we witnessed was the end of Jindal's presidential ambitions and thus the end of the future of the Republican party. For while Barack Obama was busy at the Capital dancing on Ronald Reagan's grave, Jindal was desperately trying to hand job the Gipper's corpse to life. But those bones are dead, man, so very dead.

Seriously, if you're the governor of a state that has an income tax, a lottery, and a tax on food and clothes and your state is still at or near the bottom on nearly every way in which states are measured (except in those things where being at or near the top sucks balls, like "Most Polluted"), in child health care, overall health of its citizens, education, pollution, and more, you probably ought to realize that you've fucked up and need the federal government. Desperately.

Not only was Jindal seemingly talking about some fantasy speech that the GOP expected Obama to give - at times, Jindal criticized things that Obama had directly addressed, like openness in government, personal responsibility in education, etc.- but he was giving a response that could have been lifted from Peggy Noonan's crate of unused words (it's right next to her shrine to Reagan's diapers). Speaking about government needing to get out of the way of "the American people," Jindal was at his most out-of-touch. You just wanted to stare at his dead, doll-like eyes and say, "Um, who the fuck is gonna get us out of this if it ain't the government? And didn't we kinda try your way for the last 30 years? And didn't it end up fucking us over completely and totally like we were sad old gay man thinking that the hot young dude that just fucked us meant it when he said he just needed to borrow some money for a little while?"

Jindal's analysis of the meaning of Hurricane Katrina seems to be at odds with the fact that Republicans were running the country - the Presidency and the Congress - at the time. Crassly using that tragedy like Bush used 9/11, Jindal squeaked, "We're grateful for the support we've received from across the nation for our ongoing recovery efforts. This spirit got Louisiana through the hurricanes, and this spirit will get our nation through the storms we face today." Where the fuck does Jindal think all that money came from? And, sorry, wasn't it the lack of the federal government's agencies being funded properly that didn't allow them to their jobs, thus leading to the catastrophe? It's almost mind-boggling.

Of course, the most idiotic line of Jindal's speech was his pointing with pride to cutting taxes in Louisiana: "Since I became governor, we cut more than 250 earmarks from our state budget. To create jobs for our citizens, we cut taxes six times, including the largest income tax cut in the history of our state. We passed those tax cuts with bipartisan majorities." One wonders that if all that money wasn't cut, Louisiana might have risen to the mid-40s in state rankings.

While Barack Obama once again elucidated liberal ideas in a way that made them sound new and achievable, while he undercut arguments against his agenda in an incisive way that should have Republicans shitting themselves, Jindal simply said that the future is the past. "Americans can do anything" was the line he returned to, the title of his wee little speech.

He's right. The fact of the matter is that we did something already, back in November. Now we wanna see where it leads. Luckily, Jindal is such a small man in so many ways that he'll be easy to roll right over.


// posted by Rude One @ 11:54 AM

Jindal lays a big egg (and may have lied while doing it)

The best thing about President George W. Bush was that he was a pure red-blooded Republican. He is a conservative's conservative. He allowed the American people the opportunity to see what the Republican Party truly believed. He was Reagan on steroids. The problem wasn't just big government. It was government.

This brings me to the new darling of the Republican Party Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. Jindal has an impressive personal story. He went to college at Brown University and was accepted to Harvard medical school but instead went to Yale for law school. He then got a Masters degree in political science. In 1996 he was appointed Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals. From then through 2003 he was appointed to multiple different agencies at a state and national level. He lost a bid for governor in 2003. In 2004 he ran for Congress from Louisiana's first Congressional District. He won this election overwhelmingly. He ran for governor in 2007, again, and won. This brings us to the present.

The reason I mentioned President George W. Bush (in the first paragraph) was that Bobby Jindal's response (full text) was the typical conservative Republican response. He offered no new ideas (as I expected). He served up a smorgasbord of tax cuts, suggesting we "... create jobs by lowering income taxes for working families... cutting taxes for small businesses... strengthening incentives (tax credits) for businesses to invest in new equipment and hire new workers... and stabilizing homeowners by creating a new tax credit for homebuyers." Wasn't this the exact plan that George W. Bush proposed and passed in 2001 or was that his 2003 tax cut plan? This is more of the same.

The Republican hatred of government was on full display. The governor told us a story about Hurricane Katrina, the moral of which was that we don't need government to help us with anything. (This is kind of surprising since the governor's mother used to work for the government.) That was a lesson that he and other Republicans learned from Hurricane Katrina. They learned the government just can't function. I may be wrong but if you're running an agency in which disaster management expertise is called for from an agency and it is headed by a guy that has no experience in that field, it would seem to me that the agency may not function as well as it should. President Clinton and FEMA evacuated over a million people from Florida ahead of Hurricane Floyd. Now no one is comparing Hurricane Floyd to Hurricane Katrina. What I am saying is that the government can work if you put competent people in charge.

Watch the Republican response.

Finally, I was surprised at how poor the governor's presentation was. His gestures were wooden and his speech was halting. He never seemed to flow. I can get over the mechanical gestures if he only had something of substance to add to the discussion. Not one new idea. Not one new theme. Not even a direction where we can find an idea. He is simply the latest new, young face that the GOP has thrown in front of the American people.

Update: Could Governor Bobby Jindal have been mistaken about his touching story about the Louisiana Sheriff during Katrina? Did the Governor lie? Could it be that he wasn't in New Orleans until days after the Hurricane had passed? It sure seems like his story is very similar to President of Jefferson Parish Aaron Broussard's story that he told on Meet the Press. Then again, I might be mistaken. I'm sure that a Governor wouldn't go on national TV and make up facts. No way.

Update 2: America loved Obama's speech!!

The Republican Response to The President by Gov. Jindal

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Rude Pundit Asks: What fucking speech is Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal responding to? Because what he's saying has fuck-all to do with what Obama just said

LOL