Tag Archives: republican

How Kansas Is Selling Sam Brownback’s Failed Trickle-Down Tax Cuts

by gjrrkjujp Posted on October 1, 2014

Mother Jones

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback’s reelection campaign is in serious trouble. The latest poll has the incumbent Republican losing to his Democratic opponent by 4 percentge points.

Read more about how Sam Brownback’s red-state experiment could turn Kansas purple.

As I explained in our November/December issue, Brownback’s woes can largely be traced back to the drastic tax cuts for the wealthy that he pushed through the state legislature. Kansas’ tax rate for top earners dropped from 6.45 to 4.9 percent, with further future cuts baked in. The cuts were even more generous for business owners, entirely wiping away their tax burden for pass-through income.

Brownback sold his tax cuts on supply-side promises of unbounded future growth, but the results have been less than stellar: While the state’s unemployment rate, like the national jobless rate, has dropped over the past few years, Kansas’ economic growth has lagged behind its neighbors’.

Despite these disappointing results, the state has settled on enticing out-of-state businesses with its low tax rate. Check out this full-page ad from the Kansas Department of Commerce, scanned from an issue of the US Small Business Administration’s magazine Small Business Resource by a reader:

Small Business Resource

That ad’s pitch—”one of the most pro-growth tax policies in the country” leads to “a perfect state”—lines up with the theories of free-market economist Arthur Laffer, the grand poobah of Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down economics. Brownback cited Laffer’s work to justify his cuts. During the thick of the legislative debate, he flew Laffer in for a three-day sales pitch, costing the state $75,000.

When I called Laffer in August, he excitedly proclaimed that Brownback’s cuts would prove a resounding success. “I’ll make you a very large bet that Kansas will improve its relative position to the US over, let’s say, eight years, hands down. I’ll bet you with great odds,” he told me. “I feel very confident that what Sam Brownback has done is and will be extraordinarily beneficial for the state of Kansas.”

As Laffer saw it, low tax rates would entice out-of-state residents and businesses to relocate. Laffer himself had moved to Tennessee sight unseen nine years ago, fleeing from California because of the Volunteer State’s lack of income tax. “In someplace like Kansas, I don’t think the income tax makes any sense whatsoever,” Laffer said. “That’s what we’re trying to move toward in Kansas. The income tax is a killer.”

Except that magical migration hasn’t developed yet. In August, the state added just 900 jobs, with a tepid growth rate of just half a percent for the full year. Maybe I should have made that bet with Laffer.

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How Kansas Is Selling Sam Brownback’s Failed Trickle-Down Tax Cuts

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This Is the GOP Campaign Ad Everyone Is Laughing About

by Travis6964 Posted on October 1, 2014

Mother Jones

On Wednesday, the College Republican National Committee released a slew of nominally “culturally relevant” campaign ads. Unsurprisingly, they are bad and the internet is having a lot of fun mocking them.

Here is the one they made for the gubernatorial race in Florida:

(They also released versions for races in Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, Arkansas, and Pennsylvania.)

The ads—parodies of “Say Yes To The Dress”—are being roundly mocked on social media. Deservedly so! They are objectively awful. To be honest though, if they were produced by Democrats a lot of liberals would be laughing with them instead of at them. And, look, on the one hand, c’est la vie. That’s the way it goes with campaign ads. But on the other hand, it’s probably worth keeping in mind because being aware of your own hypocrisy helps build character.

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This Is the GOP Campaign Ad Everyone Is Laughing About

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Social Conservatives Are Freaking Out Because the GOP Let 2 Gay People Into the Party

by DorthySilver Posted on October 1, 2014

Mother Jones

The Republican Party is slowly beginning to accept the existence of gay people among its ranks. As I wrote last month, there are two openly gay GOP candidates running for the US House this year—both with the support and financial backing of the national party (a third prominent openly gay candidate lost in a primary). But the social-conservative groups that have long held sway over the party aren’t taking the change lightly.

Late last week, three anti-gay-rights groups—the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), the Family Research Council (FRC), and CitizenLink—sent a letter to national Republican leaders declaring their intention to actively oppose openly gay Republican House candidates Carl DeMaio and Richard Tisei, as well as Oregon Senate candidate Monica Wehby, who has endorsed gay marriage. “This decision was reached,” the groups wrote, “only after having exhausted all attempts to convince the Republican leadership of the grave error it was making in advancing candidates who do not hold core Republican beliefs and, in fact, are working to actively alienate the Republican base.”

The groups sent the letter to John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and the leaders of the Senate and House election committees, claiming DeMaio, Tisei, and Wehby are “terrible role models for young people.” The organizations not only criticized the official Republican apparatus from supporting such candidates, but also vowed to launch a “concerted effort” to encourage people to vote against them.

Tisei is firing back. “I think that the majority of people at this point look at organizations like that as going backwards rather than forwards,” he said in an interview with Mother Jones. “I think DeMaio and myself represent the threat that we’re people who will be able to move the debate forward and help change the Republican Party. That scares a lot of those groups that are in existence primarily to hold people back.”

Tisei says that he hasn’t heard anything from the national groups regarding the letter from NOM and FRC, but isn’t concerned that the party would retract its support just because social-conservative groups are in a tizzy. “I think most party leaders recognize that the majority of younger Republicans have a different opinion and eventually the party needs to move in the right direction,” he says.

The Republican Party is still walking a narrow line when it comes to LGBT issues. The leaders of the party recognize that opposition to same-sex marriage is often a nonstarter among the young voters they need to win back, but the party still needs the religiously conservative voters that haven’t come around on marriage equality. Party leaders seem perfectly willing to accept a few gay candidates. But they won’t allow any meaningful consideration of ways the law could change to improve life for LGBT folks.

For a Republican running in a blue state like Tisei in Massachusetts, critiques from the far-right may prove more useful than detrimental; it gives him an opportunity to present himself as a middle-of-the-road, moderate candidate, attacked from all sides. “As a gay Republican, you’re under siege from both the left and the right, cause you’re a threat to both,” he says. “The left wants to keep things exactly the way they are for political reasons—they want their voting bloc to not be dissipating, they don’t want to have two parties who are good on the issue. Those on the far right don’t want to see the Republican Party change at all.”

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Social Conservatives Are Freaking Out Because the GOP Let 2 Gay People Into the Party

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RED 3: Mitt Romney May Be Retired, But Still Extremely Dangerous

by ReedHuittww Posted on September 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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Byron York says that Mitt Romney aspires to be the Harold Stassen of the 21st century:

Romney is talking with advisers, consulting with his family, keeping a close eye on the emerging ’16 Republican field, and carefully weighing the pluses and minuses of another run. That doesn’t mean he will decide to do it, but it does mean that Mitt 2016 is a real possibility.

….A significant number of Romney’s top financial supporters from 2012 have decided not to commit to any other 2016 candidate until they hear a definitive word from Romney. They believe they are doing it with the tacit approval of Romney himself.

….If Romney did run, one thing the loyalists expect is a change in his top strategists. Recently one veteran Republican operative who was not involved in the Romney campaign said, “All his people want him to run again because they made so much money off it the last time.” Now, Romney supporters say that if he mounts another campaign, they would demand that Romney not employ Stuart Stevens and Russ Schriefer, the Republican strategists who played key roles in the 2012 campaign. Who would take their place is an open question.

I know that Romney doesn’t want my advice, but here it is anyway: Just pay all these guys a bunch of money to go away and stop dreaming about a chance to light more of your money on fire. It will be cheaper in the long run, and your eventual job description will be the same too.

But as long as we’re supposedly taking this seriously, let’s put on our analytical hats and ask: could Romney beat Hillary Clinton if they both ran? On the plus side, Hillary’s not as good a campaigner as Barack Obama and 2016 is likely to be a Republican-friendly year after eight years of Democratic rule. On the minus side, Romney has already run twice, and the American public isn’t usually very kind to second chances in political life, let alone third chances. Plus—and this is the real killer—Romney still has all the problems he had in 2012. In the public eye, he remains the 47 percent guy who seems more like the Romneytron 3000 than a real human being.

Still, snark aside, if you put all this together I guess it means Romney really would have a shot at winning if he ran. We still live in a 50-50 nation, after all, and for the foreseeable future I suspect that pretty much every presidential election is going to be fairly close. And Romney certainly has a decent chance of winning the Republican nomination, since he’d be competing against pretty much the same clown show as last time.

So sure: Run, Mitt! I hear that Eric Cantor is available to be your vice president.

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RED 3: Mitt Romney May Be Retired, But Still Extremely Dangerous

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What’s the Matter With Sam Brownback?

by RosemarMcConnan Posted on September 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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Illustration by Roberto Parada

One Wednesday afternoon in mid-August, Govs. Sam Brownback of Kansas and Chris Christie of New Jersey stopped for a photo op—and $54 worth of pork ribs and sausages—at Oklahoma Joe’s, a gas station barbecue joint on the outer fringe of Kansas City. Along with hickory smoke and diesel fumes, there was a mild aroma of desperation in the air. Brownback’s approval ratings hovered in the mid-30s, and one recent poll had his Democratic opponent, state House Minority Leader Paul Davis, beating him by 10 points. Now Christie, the chair of the Republican Governors Association, had parachuted in to lend some star power as Brownback made a fundraising swing through the wealthy suburbs outside of Kansas City. A day earlier, the RGA had announced a $600,000 ad buy in support of Brownback. “We believe in Sam,” Christie assured the scrum of reporters who’d accompanied the governors to Oklahoma Joe’s.

That the RGA had been forced to mobilize reinforcements in Kansas spoke to just how imperiled Brownback had become. After representing Kansas for nearly two decades in Congress, he had won the governorship in 2010 by a 30-point margin. Once in office, Brownback wasted no time implementing a radical agenda that blended his trademark social conservatism with the libertarian-tinged economic agenda favored by one of his most famous constituents, Charles Koch, whose family company is headquartered in Wichita and employs more than 3,500 people in the state. Other GOP governors elected in the tea party wave, such as Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, garnered more ink for their brash policy maneuvers, but in many ways Brownback had presided over the most sweeping transformation.

Early in his tenure, he said he wanted to turn Kansas into a “real, live experiment” for right-wing policies. In some cases relying on proposals promoted by the Kansas Policy Institute—a conservative think tank that belongs to the Koch-backed State Policy Network and is chaired by a former top aide to Charles Koch—Brownback led the charge to privatize Medicaid, curb the power of teachers’ unions, and cull thousands from the welfare rolls.

But his boldest move was a massive income tax cut. Brownback flew in Reagan tax cut guru Arthur Laffer to help sell the plan to lawmakers, with the state paying the father of supply-side economics $75,000 for three days of work. Brownback and his legislative allies ultimately wiped out the top rate of 6.45 percent, slashed the middle rate from 6.25 to 4.9 percent, and dropped the bottom tier from 3.5 to 3 percent. A subsequent bill set in motion future cuts, with the top rate declining to 3.9 percent by 2018 and falling incrementally from there. Brownback’s tax plan also absolved nearly 200,000 small business owners of their state income tax burdens. Among the “small” businesses that qualified were more than 20 Koch Industries LLCs. “Without question they’re the biggest beneficiaries of the tax cuts,” says University of Kansas political scientist Burdett Loomis.

Laffer told me that “what Sam Brownback has done is and will be extraordinarily beneficial for the state of Kansas,” but many Kansans beg to differ. Brownback had said that his tax cut plan would provide “a shot of adrenaline into the heart of the Kansas economy.” Instead, the state has gone into cardiac arrest. “The revenue projections were just horrendous once the tax cuts were put into place,” Loomis says. The state’s $700 million budget surplus is projected to dwindle into a $238 million deficit. Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s downgraded the state’s bond rating earlier this year as a result. “The state’s on a crisis course,” says H. Edward Flentje, a professor emeritus of political science at Wichita State University who served alongside Brownback in the cabinet of Kansas Gov. Mike Hayden in the 1980s. “He has literally put us in a ditch.”

Conservatives once celebrated Brownback’s grand tax experiment as a prototype worthy of replication in other states and lauded Brownback himself as a model conservative reformer (“phenomenal,” Grover Norquist has said). “My focus,” Brownback said in one 2013 interview, “is to create a red-state model that allows the Republican ticket to say, ‘See, we’ve got a different way, and it works.'” By this fall it was hard to imagine anyone touting the Brownback model, especially with the Kansas governor at risk of going down in defeat—in the Koch brothers’ backyard, no less—and dragging the entire state ticket down with him. The Wall Street Journal recently dubbed Brownback’s approach “more of a warning than a beacon.”

Not long after taking office in 2011, Brownback called a meeting with members of the state Senate’s Republican caucus, whose tone was historically set by a core group of moderates. After a friendly introduction over tea and cookies on the veranda of the Capitol, the governor made clear that he would brook no dissent. “He said, ‘I’ll be glad to campaign for you coming up, but I want all of my guns pointed in the same direction,’ meaning there’s no room for difference of opinion,” recalls former GOP state Sen. Jean Schodorf, who was present that day. “From there on it was chilling.”

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What’s the Matter With Sam Brownback?

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Watch Jon Stewart Explain Science To the Climate Deniers In Congress

by SybilSpillman Posted on September 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in Slate and is republished here as part of our Climate Desk collaboration.

If you ever catch me in a moment of weakness about the weapons-grade dumbosity of global warming denial on the Republican side of the US House of Representatives, it might look a lot like what Jon Stewart did on The Daily Show on the Sept. 22, 2014, show:

It’s become a cliché that majority members of the House Science Committee know nothing at all about actual science (or they do, but choose to ignore it for ideological reasons)—but here on display for all to see is just how ridiculous the reality of it is. What you just saw are long, long debunked denial points being brought up like they are revealed wisdom, along with “gotcha”-style barbs that are transparently, bone-headedly wrong.

And isn’t presidential science adviser John Holdren a freaking ninja in those clips? He easily and smoothly shuts down the salvos of scientific ignorance tossed out by the committee members. For his part, I’m very glad Stewart pointed out the glaring hypocrisy of people like Rep. Larry Bucshon, R-Indiana, who accuses climatologists of faking the science for money, when Bucshon himself is funded quite well by fossil fuel interests.

Holy oiliness. It’s loathsome enough that Bucshon would choose to simply ignore the agreement of the vast majority of climatologists who know the Earth is warming and that it’s our fault … but to do so while happily taking the Koch brothers’ money is really galling.

If I seem upset about this, it’s because I am. It’s like we’re in some sort of alternate reality, a Hollywood spoof of what government is like. But it’s real, and these buffoons are holding up any real chance we have of making any progress about one of the (if not the single) largest problem we as a species face.

There’s an election coming up, folks. Vote. I know there’s essentially no chance that the GOP won’t lose the majority in the House, but it’s important to get out there and vote, and to get others to as well. If we don’t, then we’re just handing over our future to these people who have their minds firmly closed to reality.

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Watch Jon Stewart Explain Science To the Climate Deniers In Congress

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Gov. Susana Martinez’s Emails Have Mysteriously Disappeared

by RenatoRosenberg Posted on September 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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One of the central themes in my April cover story about New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, a rising star in the Republican Party touted as a potential vice presidential candidate, was the paranoia displayed by Martinez’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign. Here’s one of the juiciest nuggets illustrating this behavior:

Martinez’s 2010 crew saw enemies everywhere. A former staffer recalls the campaign on multiple occasions sending the license plate numbers of cars believed to be used by opposition trackers to an investigator in Martinez’s DA office who had access to law enforcement databases. In one instance, a campaign aide took a photo of a license plate on a car with an anti-Martinez bumper sticker and emailed it to the investigator. “Cool I will see who it belongs to!!” the investigator replied.

After my story went live and the Santa Fe Reporter published its own report on the license plate controversy, the Democratic Party of New Mexico filed an open-records request with the state’s Third Judicial District Attorney’s Office, which Martinez ran as DA before becoming governor in 2011. The Democrats asked for emails spanning August to December 2010 written by Martinez; Amy Orlando, a close friend who was Martinez’s chief deputy DA and then briefly succeeded her as DA; and a senior investigator in the DA’s office. The Democrats also asked for all correspondence to and from employees of Martinez’s DA office relating to her 2010 gubernatorial campaign, and any correspondence from August to December 2010 mentioning the words “Diane Denish,” “Denish,” and “license plate.” (Diane Denish was Martinez’s 2010 Democratic opponent.)

On Tuesday, Mark D’Antonio, the current DA in New Mexico’s Third Judicial District, released the findings of an internal investigation that concluded that large amounts of emails—potentially including those sought by the Democrats—had been “deleted and/or removed” during the period when the office was briefly run by Orlando, Martinez’s onetime deputy. Two of the four hard drives used by Orlando’s administration—hard drives that might have contained the requested emails—were missing. And investigators noted that all emails in the DA’s office were supposed to be backed up by a “special tape drive” in the office, but the back-up tapes were “blank and appear to have been erased.”

The report also noted that, under Orlando, the DA’s office misled a reporter who’d made his own request for similar records. The DA’s office told the reporter that the records he wanted didn’t exist because the office’s server “is routinely cleaned.” But after interviewing IT staffers, investigators concluded this statement “was inaccurate because IT personnel stated that servers were not routinely ‘cleaned’ and that the data should exist on a server.”

Orlando, who is now general counsel at the New Mexico Department of Public Safety, did not respond to a request for comment. She told the Albuquerque Journal that the report was an “amateurish political stunt on the eve of an election” filled with “baseless innuendos.” Martinez’s office did not respond to a request for comment. The investigative report was not a criminal investigation, and none of its claims constitute criminal wrongdoing.

The report also turned up evidence of troubling behavior by Orlando. Of the few emails dug up by investigators, one exchange showed Orlando trying to thwart D’Antonio, who replaced her as DA starting in 2013, from applying for and receiving several hundred thousand dollars in grant funding for DA operations. “Don’t leave ANY notes about how to do it!! Please,” Orlando wrote to a colleague in the DA’s office. Investigators call this “a conspiracy to actively deny Dona Ana County and related law enforcement agencies with much needed grant money.”

In a September 2010 email, Orlando asked the tech staff in the DA’s office to change the access level to her calendar and to obfuscate the reason why. “I need the people that have access to my calendar changed. But I need it done quietly. Please get with senior investigator Kip Scarborough and he will explain. And we will need to say that a virus or something happened.”

In an August 2010 email addressed to Orlando, a staffer in the DA’s office appears to admit to forging then-DA Martinez’s name on an affidavit relating to a hotel bill. “I had to fill out an affidavit that SM had to sign (forgery), and fax to the Hyatt to get her hotel bill.”

And in a November 2010 email, Orlando makes a snide remark about the planning for Martinez’s upcoming inaugural ball (she was then the governor-elect). Apparently relaying Martinez’s wishes about the theme of the ball, Orlando wrote to a party planner (whose name is redacted): “She wants it blk and white w a hint of Susan Komen color pink!”

Orlando added: “No mexican affair!!”

Read the full report:

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Gov. Susana Martinez’s Emails Have Mysteriously Disappeared

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Kris Kobach Wants Immigrants to Self-Deport. Now Voters May Send Him Packing.

by KaiGerowspeox Posted on September 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Republican Kris Kobach has managed to established an outsized persona for only being a one-term secretary of state in Kansas. Kobach became a national liberal scourge after he won office in 2010. He loaned out his services to help governors in Arizona, Alabama, and Georgia craft anti-immigration legislation, pioneering the idea of self-deportation that Mitt Romney touted in his presidential campaign. In Kansas, he imposed harsh voter ID laws to keep Democrat-inclined voters away from the ballot; just last week, he went to court against Chad Taylor—a Dem who wanted to drop his Senate campaign—in order to keep Taylor’s name on the ballot and improve the Republican candidate’s odds (the state Supreme Court ruled against Kobach last week).

Yet after becoming a hero to the right, Kobach is now struggling to hold onto office, trailing or tied in recent polls. And he can thank Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback for his troubles, since Brownback’s decisions to alienate moderate Republicans ended up driving Kobach’s opponent out of the party and made her determined to take Kobach down.

“We have a secretary of state who has been AWOL from Kansas,” Jean Schodorf, the Democrat challenging Kobach, told me last month. “He would rather be representing Arizona. Because he has been gone and had a personal agenda, the secretary of state’s office is falling apart.”

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Kris Kobach Wants Immigrants to Self-Deport. Now Voters May Send Him Packing.

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The Great “Out-0f-Network” Scam Is Eating Patients Alive. And It’s Supposed To.

by BrandonWWN Posted on September 22, 2014

Mother Jones

Over the weekend, Elizabeth Rosenthal gave us the latest installment in her series of rage-inducing stories about the American health care system. Like all the others in the series, it was all but ignored by the rest of the world. I guess everyone was too busy panicking over the White House fence jumper or figuring out ways to one-up each other in their withering scorn for Roger Goodell.

Or, like me, they’ve just given up even hoping that anyone will ever do anything about it. Saturday’s installment was about a medical practice that infuriates me more than almost any other: the routine practice of creating artificial and insanely high “list prices” for procedures that bear no relation to reality and exist for only one reason: to occasionally take advantage of the people who are most vulnerable to abusive pricing. That includes the uninsured, who can least afford it, and those who are already on the gurney going into surgery, who are barely in any condition to fight back.

Rosenthal’s latest piece is about the increasingly common practice of calling in “assistants” during surgical procedures who aren’t covered by the patient’s insurance and are therefore not subject to rates negotiated with the insurance company. This allows them to charge as much as they feel like, and then to harass patients with bill collectors forever unless they pay up. Here’s a graphic that accompanied the article:

The stomach-turning part of this is that it’s so obvious what’s going on. Clearly, the muscle and skin graft in the first example can be done for about $2,000, which produces a decent income for the doctor. So what’s the reason for list price topping $150,000? There isn’t one. It’s solely so doctors can scam the occasional patient and make a fast buck. As long as it’s not a Medicare or Medicaid procedure, and it’s out-of-network, there are no rules. So why not?

Are these assistants pals of the primary surgeon who get called in occasionally as a wink-wink-nudge-nudge buck-raking favor for a friend? Does it happen more randomly than that? Who knows. But there’s a limit to what patients can do. They’re in prep for surgery, there are tubes in their arms, and they get handed a bunch of papers to sign. Who knows what they say? Are they going to check? Are they going to read all the fine print? No and no, even if they’re aware that this kind of stuff can happen. Which most patients aren’t. A few weeks later they get the bill and their jaw drops to the floor. It’s the same thing that happens to uninsured patients who don’t have the benefit of insurer-negotiated rates when they land in the ER.

And there’s virtually no way to negotiate anyway. Have you ever tried to mark up a consent form? Have you ever tried to get a hospital to agree to an out-of-pocket max before an operation? Are you laughing hard enough yet? Insurance companies can do this, but ordinary schlubs like you and me can’t.

This is a scam, plain and simple. So why does it continue? Let’s allow James J. Donelon, the Republican insurance commissioner of Louisiana, to explain:

This has gotten really bad, and it’s wrong. But when you try to address it as a policy maker, you run into a hornet’s nest of financial interests.

And there you have it. It’s a great racket that allows doctors to extort loads of money from those in the most pain and with the least ability to fight back. None of them want the gravy train to end, and that’s your “financial interests” right there. It’s shameless and venal and there’s no excuse for it. And that’s America’s health care system.

In good conscience, I’m not even sure I can recommend that you read the whole piece. It will probably send your blood pressure skyrocketing and possibly send you to the ER, where you’ll be pauperized by the very practice the article is about. You have been warned.

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The Great “Out-0f-Network” Scam Is Eating Patients Alive. And It’s Supposed To.

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Will it Take a Keg Stand for Mary Landrieu to Get Reelected?

by SimaMajorh Posted on September 21, 2014

Mother Jones

It’s game day in Baton Rouge, and the bro in the purple shirt wants Mary Landrieu’s help doing a keg stand.

Landrieu, elected three times by the narrowest of margins, is once again locked in a tight re-election campaign, this time against GOP Rep. Bill Cassidy. With six weeks until Election Day, every moment counts. She spent her Saturday morning at a beach near Lake Charles, in the state’s southwest corner, taking part in a cleanup effort co-sponsored by Citgo, the Venezuelan oil company, pegged to the anniversary of Hurricane Rita. As a member of the President’s party in a state where the President is deeply unpopular, this event neatly encapsulates Landrieu’s strategy: keep it local. She’ll fight for coastal restoration, but she’ll also fight for the oil and gas industry, and with her seniority and connections, she’ll cut deals to help out both.

The other part of her pitch is that she is an independent-minded daughter of Louisiana who is in touch with the needs and traditions of her constituents. Over the last month or so, that part of her messaging has taken a hit. First, the Washington Post reported that Landrieu listed her primary residence as her parents’ New Orleans home but spent most of her time in Washington, D.C. Seeing an opportunity, a one-time Republican challenger filed a lawsuit to have her taken off the ballot (that suit was thrown out). Thus, here we are on the edge of the LSU’s quad, four hours before the Tigers kick off against the Mississippi State Bulldogs, contemplating keg stands.

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Will it Take a Keg Stand for Mary Landrieu to Get Reelected?

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