Dead Pelican Ethics Spin

There’s a delightfully deceitful bit of spin on the front page of the Dead Pelican currently. Its lead political story, which appears in the top left hand corner of the page, has the following headline:

“Groups tell Jindal to slow up on ethics provision”

Clearly, this is a reference to today’s call by the Council for a Better Louisiana, League of Women Voters, Louisiana Common Cause and the Public Affairs Research Council for Jindal to drop his demand that the state ethics board be stripped of its adjudicatory powers. The implication is that these widely respected government watchdogs are bad because they are trying to slow down ethics reform. The reality, however, is rather different.

When you click through to the AP story, the headline adopts a much more neutral stance:

“Watchdog groups oppose bill to change ethics board oversight”

Why are all these watchdogs calling for a slow down? Not because they oppose ethics reform, far from it. In fact, many of them led the call for ethics reform long before Bobby Jindal arrived on the scene.

They are calling for a slow down because the bill would turn over adjudication on ethics cases to administrative law judges, a secretive branch of the Governor’s office, who are all appointed by the Governor himself, i.e. Bobby Jindal.

Therefore, we could end up in the farcical situation of these administrative law judges, appointed by Jindal, ruling on Jindal’s own ethics violations. That’s why they are calling for a slowdown.