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| English: Baton Rouge, LA, September 3, 2008 -- President George W. Bush and Governor Bobby Jindal greeting EOC employees, during disaster recovery efforts for Hurricane Gustav. Jacinta Quesada/FEMA (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Louisiana is in a sorry shape. That sinks
Bobby Jindal. Hillary is casting a really long shadow. That sinks
Bobby Jindal.
Jeb Bush is a Bush, but also was Governor. He was not stellar, but he was not all that bad. And he leads in the polls. That makes it hard for Bobby. Bobby does not have a program for the future. I am sure he has. But nothing has come out to grab the imagination yet. Yet another laundry list of conservative principles like tax cuts and bigger defense budgets are not a program. They are a regurgitation. That sinks Bobby Jindal. Maybe term limits are not such a good idea! The guy can't run for another term in Louisiana, and he might have lost if he had had the chance. It looks like a political dead end for him.
But speaking just of political tactics, one glaring detail I note is, the guy is too politically inflexible. He probably stands for a constitutional amendment at the federal level for balanced budgets. If such a thing had been in place before the 2008 recession, America would have had a decade long Depression on its hands, and then some. Bobby's utter inflexibility on raising taxes are the main reason why he is in such a bad shape politically. Principles should guide you. They should not dictate and limit your actions. You can be smart and belong to the Don't Confuse Me With Facts school of thought. Bobby is proof.
A plummeting popularity in your home state is perhaps a non starter for a presidential campaign. Louisiana's "structural budget imbalance" is the weight around Bobby's neck.
The only silver lining is, if you become the nominee and then lose to Hillary, you can't run again. But if you never win a primary, you might have the option to run again some other time.
He needs to lose, and then get into
the US Senate. And he needs to become more of a sailor, less of a stopped clock. Heck, I am for tax cuts. But they need to make economic sense. I am for balanced budgets too. To me a smaller government is one that is too small to tell a woman what to do in her private life or with her private parts. There is a way to present conservative principles as a tool to create the industries of tomorrow. That presentation can be a winner.
One six year term in the US Senate would do him much good.
On social issues you have to be live and let live. This is America. This is a democracy, not a theocracy. This is not Iran.
Bobby Jindal Enters Presidential Race, Saying ‘It Is Time for a Doer’
Louisiana’s first nonwhite governor since Reconstruction but whose popularity plummeted as the state struggled with a $1.6 billion shortfall ..... He said that Louisiana cut the number of “government bureaucrats” by more than 30,000 positions, and that the state now had the highest population in its history, with more people moving to Louisiana than leaving it. ...... his approval numbers in the state have fallen sharply ...... poll found him sharing the bottom of a list of 16 candidates ...... “I don’t think anybody in Louisiana thinks he can win” ....... “What Jeb Bush is saying is that we need to hide our conservative ideals,” Mr. Jindal said. “But the truth is, if we go down that road again, we will lose again.” ..... he had a message and a path to victory, casting him as the youngest candidate with the longest résumé in a wide open Republican race. They said that in such a crowded field, all it takes to win Iowa, and alter the dynamics of the race, is 26,000 votes. ..... The state has the seventh-highest unemployment rate and the third-highest poverty rate in the country. In February, Moody’s Investors Service, the credit-rating agency, revised the state’s financial outlook from stable to negative, citing its structural budget imbalance. ....... he had the reputation of a kind of wonky boy genius. At age 24 in 1996, he was appointed secretary of the state Department of Health and Hospitals, the biggest department in state government, and he quickly went to work cutting jobs and slashing its budget. ...... attributed the budget shortfall, the state’s worst in decades, in part to the downturn in oil prices that hurt Louisiana and other energy-producing states and in part to the Jindal administration’s fiscal policies.
Bobby Jindal faces an uphill fight in the crowded 2016 field
Jindal is now polling toward the bottom of the field, registering at just 1% ..... Jindal's popularity in his own state has suffered -- a recent poll has his approval at 32% -- thanks to budget troubles and perhaps a preoccupation with playing to a national audience. His refusal to raise taxes to help balance the state's books has resulted in deep cuts to popular programs and areas of government spending such as health care and education. ...... "Half these people don't know who their own damn governor is, let alone the governor of Louisiana," Anderson said, referring to voters nationwide who aren't plugged into presidential politics as much as reporters and operatives. ....... Jindal was a political wunderkind when he first burst onto the scene helping shape health care policy. In 1996, at the age of just 24, Jindal was appointed as head of Louisiana's department of health policies.
Trump jokes about being behind Bush in New Hampshire poll
Bush earned 14% of the vote in the crowded GOP field, followed by Trump with 11%. ...... Trump, the billionaire with a penchant for bombastic rhetoric and unorthodox claims, is catching on with Republican voters early on in the cycle. ..... "I'm not thrilled, cause how could Bush be in first place?" Trump said. "This guy can't negotiate his way out of a paper bag!"
The Sophisticated Bigotry of Bobby Jindal
The Louisiana governor wants Christians to stand apart from secular society, but condemns Muslims who do the same. ....... he will likely campaign on two major themes. The first, which he outlined last February at the Reagan Library and last May at Liberty University, is that Christians are at war with a liberal elite that is trampling religious liberty and secularizing American culture. The second, which he laid out this month at London’s Henry Jackson Society, is that “non-assimilationist Muslims” are endangering America and Europe...... Unfortunately for Jindal, these two arguments contradict each other...... Jindal made little effort to define American or European culture except to associate it with “freedom.” So it’s hard to know exactly which aspects of it he believes Muslims refuse to embrace. But in his speeches last year on religion, Jindal discussed American culture at greater length. And his verdict was surprisingly harsh. “American culture,” he told students at Liberty University, “has in many ways become a secular culture.” Many churches, he declared, now espouse “views on sin [that] are in direct conflict with the culture.” In case students hadn’t gotten the message, Jindal repeated himself: “Our culture has taken a secular turn.” ........ People of faith, he argued, must recognize that they are fighting a “silent war” against the secular, liberal elite. And they must keep waging that war no matter how much of a cultural minority they become. “Our religious liberty,” he insisted, “must in no way ever be linked to the ever-changing opinions of the public. ...... let’s imagine a scenario. A devout Christian emigrates from Nigeria to a progressive American college town, where she takes up work as a pharmacist. She quickly finds herself at odds with the dominant culture around her. Co-workers mock her modest dress and her insistence on interrupting work to pray. When she calls homosexuality a sin, they denounce her as a bigot. Ultimately, her employer fires her for refusing to dispense contraception....... Based on his speeches at Liberty University and the Reagan Library, Jindal’s advice to this woman would be clear: Wage “silent war” against the culture that oppresses you, even if you’re a minority of one. If necessary, “establish a separate culture within” the dominant one so you can raise children who fear and obey God...... Now imagine that our devout Nigerian is a Muslim. Suddenly her resistance to the dominant culture makes her not a hero but a menace. ........ The only principle he's really defending is anti-Muslim bigotry. ........ At Liberty University, Jindal name-checked a broad array of believers, with one conspicuous absence: “For me, I am a Catholic Christian. My parents are Hindus. I am blessed to know Baptists, Jews, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and so many more in the rich tapestry of American faiths.” When he rehearsed the same litany at the Reagan Library, he left Muslims off the list again. Jindal has refused to retract his claim that certain European neighborhoods are “no-go” zones where non-Muslims are not allowed, even after Fox News apologized for propagating the same lie. And in his London speech, he asked “how many Muslims in this world agree with these radicals” who “do not believe in freedom or common decency?” Although “freedom” and “common decency” are vague terms, the vast majority of Muslims clearly oppose ISIS and Al Qaeda. But instead of citing such evidence, Jindal answered his question by declaring, “I have no idea.” Which is to say, he doesn’t want to have any idea because looking at the actual evidence might make it harder for him to smear Muslims as a whole......... In 2012, Herman Cain distinguished himself as the leading Islamophobe in the Republican presidential field. Jindal is now well-positioned to fill that role. The only difference is that Cain spoke like a pizza executive while Jindal speaks like a Rhodes Scholar. But strip away the fake sophistication and it’s bigotry just the same.
Bobby Jindal’s Science Problem
just about every challenge that America faces today has a scientific component, from revitalizing the economy to dealing with climate change to managing health care. ....... Leading candidates made it clear that they rejected climate science (Herman Cain and Rick Perry), thought that vaccines caused mental retardation (Michele Bachmann), and didn’t “believe” in evolution (a bunch of them, most prominently Rick Santorum). One candidate, John Huntsman, bravely tweeted, “I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.” To scientists, Huntsman’s candor was “right on!” To Republican primary voters, apparently he was crazy. ......... Jindal has an elite résumé. He was a biology major at my school, Brown University, and a Rhodes scholar. He knows the science, or at least he ought to. But in his rise to prominence in Louisiana, he made a bargain with the religious right and compromised science and science education for the children of his state. In fact, Jindal’s actions at one point persuaded leading scientific organizations, including the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, to cross New Orleans off their list of future meeting sites. ......... What did Jindal do to produce a hornet’s nest of “mad scientists,” as Times-Picayune writer James Gill described them? He signed into law, in Gill’s words, the “Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA), which is named for what it is designed to destroy.” The act allows “supplemental textbooks and other instructional materials” to be brought into classrooms to support the “open and objective discussion” of certain “scientific theories,” including, of course, evolution. As educators who have heard such coded language before quickly realized, the act was intended to promote creationism as science. In April, Kevin Carman, dean of the College of Science at Louisiana State University, testified before the Louisiana Senate’s Education Committee that two top scientists had rejected offers to come to LSU because of the LSEA, and the school may lose more scientists in the future. ....... And now Jindal is poised to spend millions of dollars of state money to support the teaching of creationism in private schools.
Bobby Jindal announces entry into 2016 presidential race
spending 45 percent of his days outside of Louisiana last year. And this year, some of Jindal's top state-government aides left to join his presidential "exploratory committee." ...... at this point, his chances of winning the GOP nomination seem extraordinarily low. ...... Just eight years ago, Jindal's future looked far brighter than it does now. ...... The former Rhodes Scholar and McKinsey consultant was elected governor at age 36, the first Indian American ever to govern a state. “The question is not whether he’ll be president,” Republican strategist Steve Schmidt said in 2008, “but when he’ll be president.” ...... a relentless focus on making government run faster, smarter and cleaner. ...... To address doubts among national conservatives, Jindal repeatedly embraced harder-line conservative positions -- both in terms of Louisiana's budget and in terms of social issues. But each time, he moved further away from the wonky, pragmatic persona that had made him famous in the first place. ......... By the end of this year's session, legislators were so unhappy with Jindal that they tried to stop paying for his security detail at presidential campaign events. ...... In his first year as governor, 77 percent of Louisianans thought he was doing a good job. By last month, the figure had fallen to 32 percent, an all-time low. ...... Aides think he’s an excellent retail politician, and that his up-from-the-bootstraps story will resonate in a contest with former Florida governor Jeb Bush, the heir to a presidential dynasty.
From Piyush to Bobby: How does Jindal feel about his family’s past?
When Bobby Jindal was elected the first Indian American governor in U.S. history, residents of his father’s village here set off firecrackers, passed out sweets and danced in the streets. Many had spent three days praying at a local temple for his victory........ “My dad was one of nine. He was the only one who got past fifth grade. Part of what drove his determination and success in life was his education. My parents put a strong emphasis on education, hard work, an unshakable faith. It doesn’t matter who you are or what your last name is. You can be anything in America.” ....... donors from Indian American groups fueled his first forays into politics. Yet many see him as a man who has spent a lifetime distancing himself from his Indian roots. ........ Bobby Jindal’s father, Amar .... Stairs led to the roof where Amar, a studious boy, built a small shed so he could study by lamplight, away from his boisterous family. ..... “Every time I saw him he was reading a book,” recalled a local Hindu priest, Sudama Ram Sharda, 84, who performed Amar’s marriage ceremony. “Either lying on the cot reading or in the shop.” ........ He walked five miles to school until fifth grade, when his father bought him a bike. Amar Jindal went on to become the only one of his siblings to attend college, according to his sister, Satya Bansal, 72, who still lives in the area. The other boys had some schooling, but the five sisters had none at all. “I wanted to go, but it was not my destiny,” Bansal said. ........ In Punjab’s capital city, Chandigarh, the aspiring engineer Amar fell in love with a classmate’s sister, Raj, a doctoral physics candidate. The two — both from the bania, or “trader” caste — married in 1969, a rare love marriage at a time when arranged unions were far more commonplace. ........ In 1971, they sold Raj’s wedding dowry and moved to the United States, where Raj had gotten a scholarship to Louisiana State University. About four months later, she gave birth to her first son. ........ Raj went to work for the state of Louisiana as a data processor while Amar worked as a civil engineer. ..... The Jindals were part of a small community of Indian families in Baton Rouge at the time, many who had come to Louisiana for university jobs. There was no temple then, and Bobby Jindal remembered that they gathered at someone’s home most Sundays for Hindu religious ceremonies known as pujas, with potluck curries afterward. ....... “My mom was fully committed to raising us as Americans,” Jindal said. “That was a conscious decision. We ate food that would be familiar to other families in south Louisiana. She wanted to raise us like other kids in the neighborhood.” ....... He hid his initial conversion from his devout Hindu parents, huddling in the closet to read the Bible by flashlight. ....... “At first they were angry about it,” Jindal recalled. “Then they wanted to understand: Was this a fad? Was it something I was serious about? Was I doing this for a girl? Why was I doing this? They questioned the motivation behind it. They asked me — and I thought it was reasonable — to read Indian books, Indian texts as well. It took time.” ........ When Jindal launched an ambitious campaign to become Louisiana’s governor in 2003, the Indian American community rallied behind him. ........... elected governor in 2007 and reelected in 2011 with two-thirds of the vote — in part by positioning himself as a buttoned-down bureaucrat who could clean up the state and by learning how to cultivate the “Bubbas for Bobby.” ...... He began wearing cowboy boots more often and got a hunting license. ..... As the years went by and Jindal’s political star rose, many in the Indian American community became disillusioned with their native son. ....... She said Indian dress was also discouraged for his 2008 inauguration. Jindal says that message did not come from his camp: “People were welcome to wear whatever they wanted.” ........ Discouraged by a lack of engagement, some of Jindal’s early donors have faded away, according to Sanjay Puri, chairman of the U.S. India Political Action Committee. Jindal’s top-contributors list now includes such recognizable names as cosmetics mogul Georgette Mosbacher........ Suresh C. Gupta, a Potomac, Md., doctor, gave a fundraiser for Jindal’s first gubernatorial bid. But he said Jindal has actively tried to disassociate himself from the Indian American community in recent years. ......... When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to the United States last September, a host of politicians attended his rally at Madison Square Garden. Jindal did not. When Jindal’s name was mentioned, he was booed by the crowd. ........ His parents remain proud of their heritage but still made the decision to raise their children as Americans, he said, and “there’s nothing contradictory about that.”
Why liberal racists are attacking Bobby Jindal
The reason Jindal has come in for such treatment is because he’s an eloquent advocate for integration and the promise of America. They’re not making fun of his background — they’re treating him like the Indian Clarence Thomas. ......... Jindal’s argument is clear: Your ethnic or religious heritage doesn’t make you any less fully American. You don’t need a qualifier just because your parents or grandparents were born elsewhere. This is America, after all. ...... race in America is far more complex than it once was. ....... Leftist school administrators will constantly remind kids with darker skin that they stand apart. ........ Even though Jindal was born in the United States, they won’t allow him to simply be “American.” They refuse to let him identify by his country of birth, instead forcing him to identify by the birth country of his parents. .... It’s bitter, and it’s bigoted, and it’s extraordinarily unseemly. But it’s also enlightening, telling us what leftists really think about the American melting pot: They don’t like it one bit.
Bobby Jindal, How Did You End Up Here?
Bobby Jindal was never supposed to wind up here. In 2008, some people called him the GOP Obama. His minority status as an Indian American, his wonkiness — he graduated Brown at age 20, then became a Rhodes Scholar — evoked the kind of technocratic wunderkind bridge-building that Obama had sought to accomplish from the left........ And then it all went to hell. ...... So there he was, on Wednesday, semi-officially announcing his candidacy via creepy hidden camera footage of him telling his kids that he was running for president. ...... The knock on Jindal — the fact that you will see repeated until he slinks back to Baton Rouge and starts cold-calling conservative think tanks for the best seven-figure sinecure — is that he famously declared after Romney's 2012 loss that the GOP needed to stop being "the stupid party," and has been going balls-to-the-wall stupid ever since. And while that's true, it overshadows the fact that Jindal's always veered between weird and wrong, when he isn't both........ Jindal inherited over $800 million in budget surplus and immediately spent it while taking a machete to the tax code and creating $800 million in tax cuts, mistakenly thinking that the good times of recovery investment and post-Katrina federal money would last forever. (He railed against the Obama stimulus dollars, then took them as quietly as possible.) Jindal punted billions in tax subsidies to business, then spent nearly every year of his governorship rigging a "neutral" budget by raiding rainy day funds and savings accounts, selling public assets and treating one-time credits as annual revenues — then rearranging the smoke and mirrors again the next year. (It's OK, only the universities were put on the chopping block.) Then he tried to abolish the corporate and income taxes. Facing a chasm in the budget of his own creation, Jindal cynically railed against "corporate welfare" while trying to use a possible rollback of his state's corporate giveaways as blackmail to force out-of-state corporations like IBM to respect homophobic "conscience" exemptions he favored......... and teach absolutely bugfuck facts like: man and dinosaurs were contemporaries, dragons might have existed, slavery and the KKK were usually good, the Great Depression is just liberal propaganda and gay people have no more rights than child molesters......... standard GOP bromides of freedom values entrepreneurship tradition liberty competition....... He went to England and tried to claim that Muslims had created "no-go" zones in England, which came as a surprise to English people, who live there....... He has a 28 percent approval rating in his own home state......... Iowa is strongly conservative and evangelical, and in spite of Bobby spending 12 months talking about the scourge of Islam and Big Brother coming to take everyone's Bibles away, he's polling at 1 percent in the state. This is his audience — this is who he's been talking to for the last year — and nobody cares. Bobby Jindal probably fucked up and installed his Iowa analytics team in a basement so he can't even plausibly claim to be polling above ground........ Far more plausibly, he's about to write a dead-end blog for the Heritage Foundation.
Bobby Jindal was supposed to be ‘the next Ronald Reagan.’ Here’s what went wrong.
Barack Obama had just been elected president. America was still swooning. And Jindal, who had been in office for less than a year at that point, was riding nearly as high as his Democratic counterpart from Chicago. ...... Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich had recently referred to Jindal as “the most transformative young governor in America.” Radio host Rush Limbaugh had taken to calling him “the next Ronald Reagan.” GOP White House nominee John McCain had already eyed Jindal as a running mate, and earlier that month, Steve Schmidt, McCain’s chief strategist, had told the Washington Post that “the question is not whether he’ll be president, but when he’ll be president — because he will be elected someday.” ....... His timing couldn’t be worse. ..... To say that Jindal is “barely registering” in the latest 2016 polls would be an overstatement. According to RealClear Politics, he currently averages 0.8 percent support among Republican primary voters, placing him dead last among the 15 contenders ..... The most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal survey pegged Jindal’s support at zero percent. ...... In May, Jindal’s job-approval rating hit “an all-time low” of 31.8 percent ...... Even President Obama, who lost Louisiana by 17 percentage points in 2012, is more popular than Jindal in the Pelican State. As the Washington Post recently put it, “Bobby Jindal is at the nadir of his political career.” ...... Why hasn’t Jindal become the next Reagan — or, as my profile posited, “the GOP’s Obama”? ..... a story of real promise — promise that many in Louisiana say he has squandered.
Bobby Jindal wants to downplay his Indian heritage, but Twitter won't let him
Bobby Jindal said Wednesday that he was “done” with being seen as Indian-American...... He is a native-born American ...... Using the hashtags #Jindian and #BobbyJindalIsSoWhite, Twitter users, many from India, mocked Jindal’s words and his attempt to distance himself from his Indian heritage. Many found comedy fodder in the fact that while he goes by Bobby – a name he apparently took from the “The Brady Bunch” – his given name is Piyush, and that he converted from Hinduism to Christianity as a teenager. ...... highlighting the racial ironies of Jindal tweeting, “I’m tanned, rested, and ready for this fight.” ..... "The single most important moment in my life was the moment I found Jesus Christ – the moment Jesus Christ found me."
Bobby Jindal Really Pissed Off Indians And They Responded Perfectly On Twitter
'Not much Indian left' in Bobby Jindal: The Washington Post explores
The governor's office was unimpressed with the Post's many insinuations....... "For years, liberals have attacked Governor Jindal for not being brown or Indian enough for their liking," Jindal spokesman Kyle Plotkin told the Washington Examiner's media desk. "Liberals are fixated on race."......... "Governor Jindal is proud of his heritage. He believes we need to stop fixating on race and hyphenated Americans. We are all Americans," he said.
