“Anyone who participated in this targeting of Americans for their political beliefs, anyone who knew about it, anyone who simply looked the other way, and anyone under whose watch this occurred needs to be fired,” CNN reports Jindal planned to say in a speech before Virginia Republicans on Saturday, according to his prepared remarks.

“But in this instance, it is the IRS, people in a position of public trust, who have violated the Constitution of the United States of America. You cannot take the freedom of law-abiding Americans, whether you disagree with them or not, and keep your own freedom. When you do that, you go to jail,” he continued.

Continue Reading...

In an interview on NBC, Jindal, a Republican, said: “Bottom line, at the end of the day, we want our kids to be exposed to the best facts. Let’s teach them about the big bang theory, let’s teach them about evolution - I’ve got no problem if a school board, a local school board, says we want to teach our kids about creationism, that people, some people, have these beliefs as well, let’s teach them about ‘intelligent design.’”

He added that students should be allowed to question “controversial issues” like climate change and global warming. “What are we scared of?”

Continue Reading...

“If I had to actually leave this place and go back to a house on dry land, I’d probably be dead in two years,” says Brown, 65 and retiring next year. “I guess you can say it’s a totally different life out here.”

But now that life, for Brown and 350 other residents in a neighborhood with “Crawfish Crossing” signs and roads named Gumbo, Jambalaya and Crawfish Stew Street, has been shattered by discovery of a 14-acre sinkhole that fractured the community’s calm and may bury its dreams.

Continue Reading...

The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports that Jindal announced that he will pull his plan in a speech opening this year's legislative session, telling state lawmakers that he will not "pout" or "take his ball and go home." From the Times-Picayune:

The speech is a major concession that Jindal's proposal, a complicated plan contained in a total of 11 bills, is unpopular both within and outside the Legislature. The proposal has come under increasingly heavy fire in recent weeks as business groups and advocates for the poor have assailed its effects and think tanks have questioned whether the math in the proposal adds up.

Jindal acknowledges the strong opposition to the proposal in his prepared remarks.

Continue Reading...

Presented, in no particular order, are 10 statements worthy, at least, of an eyeroll.

1. Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana: Torture is funny. A featured speaker on CPAC's main stage, Jindal chose to make light this way of the barrage of political rhetoric CPAC attendees signed up to subject themselves to:

If the choice was to hear 70 political speeches or to gowaterboarding, well, I’d have to think about that.

Continue Reading...

I don't watch the Sunday shows. Basically ever. I watch clips if something particularly stupid happened, but for the most part, you can get everything you need to know about what happens on these shows by reading the brilliant liveblog by the Huffington Post's Jason Linkins, America's foremost Sunday show interpreter. While no one should pay attention to these shows, as long as millions of Americans watch them under the mistaken impression that they're seeing serious discussions of our most pressing issues with our wisest media observers and most influential political leaders, they should probably be monitored.

Continue Reading...

The contrarian in me wanted to minimize Rubio’s sad grope for water. Just as my friend Michael Tomasky empathized with the president last week on the tough issue of drone policy, I empathized with Rubio: I’m always looking for ways to unobtrusively slip in a sip of water while speaking. So I wouldn’t cast the first stone at the Florida senator for his case of dry mouth.

Continue Reading...

Actually, the GOP is doing a pretty good job annihilating itself. As Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal put it, Republicans need to “stop being the stupid party.”

The GOP crackup was probably inevitable.  Inconsistencies and tensions within the GOP have been growing for years – ever since Ronald Reagan put together the coalition that became the modern Republican Party.

All President Obama has done is finally found ways to exploit these inconsistencies.

Republican libertarians have never got along with social conservatives, who want to impose their own morality on everyone else.

Shrink-the-government fanatics in the GOP have never seen eye-to-eye with deficit hawks, who don’t mind raising taxes as long as the extra revenues help reduce the size of the deficit.

The GOP’s big business and Wall Street wing has never been comfortable with the nativists and racists in the Party, who want to exclude immigrants and prevent minorities from getting ahead.

Continue Reading...

The man hailed by the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza for his readiness to “speak truth to GOP power” in a tedious speech to the Republican National Committee Thursday night is anything but a rebel or renegade. One night before his big 2016 star turn, Jindal was forced by national outrage to reverse himself on what is one of the ugliest GOP policy decisions in an ugly decade: cutting Medicaid funding for hospice care. His health secretary actually announced the decision Wednesday night as hospice backers gathered for a mournful candlelight vigil.

Continue Reading...

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal will deliver a forceful denunciation of his party’s Washington-centric focus in a speech to the Republican National Committee on Thursday evening, arguing that the GOP is fighting the wrong fight as it seeks to rebuild from losses at the ballot box last November.

“A debate about which party can better manage the federal government is a very small and short-sighted debate,” Jindal will tell the RNC members gathered in Charlotte, N.C. for the organization’s winter meeting, according to a copy of the speech provided to The Fix. “If our vision is not bigger than that, we do not deserve to win.”

Continue Reading...

After the election, Jindal told Politico that the Republicans had to totally rebrand themselves to escape being known as "the party of big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes, big anything." And so Bobby Jindal's big new idea for Louisiana is ... eliminating all income taxes. And shifting the tax burden onto poor and working people.

NEW ORLEANS, Jan 10 (Reuters) - Republican Governor Bobby Jindal said on Thursday he wants to eliminate all Louisiana personal and corporate income taxes to simplify the state's tax code and make it more friendly to business.

Continue Reading...

For all the hand-wringing over the lack of diversity in the Obama Administration’s second term Cabinet, Democrats should really be more depressed about the fact that their potential 2016 field is a lot less diverse than the GOP’s. Take away Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic bench looks more like that picture in the New York Times than it does the picture of Obama’s 2012 voting coalition.

It’s true that if there’s anything you can say about the GOP’s likely field for 2016, it’s that it’s pretty diverse—for which the party deserves real credit.

Continue Reading...

Seizing on recommendations from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists that some hormonal birth control be available over the counter, the Louisiana governor and presumed presidential hopeful seeks to play them against the Affordable Care Act. He claims that Obama's big government is actually making it harder for women to access birth control, despite the fact that the ACOG recommendations would work best in tandem with the Affordable Care Act birth control provisions, not instead of them.

Making birth control more accessible in any way possible is generally a good idea. But in Jindal's haste to find "the end of birth control politics," he ignores some crucial benefits of the Affordable Care Act as well as the deep-seated opposition to many forms of birth control, not just insurance coverage of it, among his own allies.

Continue Reading...

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Jindal tried to put an anti-big-government spin on his position, while also moving away from the social conservative wing of the party and addressing a gender gap which hurt Mitt Romney and likely cost Republicans Senate seats in Indiana and Missouri.

Jindal wrote that Republicans have been "stupid to let the Democrats demagogue the contraceptives issue," while embracing the  American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists call for over-the-counter sales and seeking to push the issue out of the "political arena.

Continue Reading...

We just managed to get through a campaign in which the Republican candidate’s idea of innovation was to hold a convention themed around an out-of-context quote from his opponent. But we knew Mitt Romney was at his heart a manager, not a policy innovator. So maybe it will be better next time, with new candidates such as Bobby Jindal, Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan. Right?

Yeah, I didn’t think so.

Of course, there’s still plenty of time for innovative conservative ideas. Hey, don’t laugh. Ronald Reagan campaigned on a whole book full of policy options, and as recently as 2000, George W. Bush really did feature new ideas in his campaign.

But neither John McCain nor Mitt Romney had any interest in such things – and judging from the three proto-candidates who rolled out their “ideas” this week, it looks as if Republican politicians these days don’t even remember what actual policy ideas look like.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

I’m not talking about the illusion of an advantage that comes with winning consecutive elections. That might be the result of a streak in which the party is helped by favorable fundamentals, or it can be, as with Democratic majorities in the New Deal era, simply part of a national advantage. In either case, a party might win the same states every time, but -- as Republicans discovered in 1992 -- when those favorable conditions end, the apparent electoral “lock” disappears, too.

No, I’m talking about an Electoral College edge above and beyond the national vote. That’s not defined by which states went for which candidate; it’s found by looking at what would have happened in the Electoral College if an election had been tied in the national vote. To calculate it, assume uniform swing – that is, if swing state Ohio moves toward the Democrats, then liberal Vermont and conservative Utah will also move toward the Democrats by the same amount. In reality, the states don’t swing quite that equally, but they’re very close to it.

Continue Reading...

This reading of the ’08 results was reinforced by the first few years of Obama’s presidency, when his approval rating fell to under 50 percent and Republicans won a massive midterm victory.  That Obama was the second coming of Jimmy Carter became an article of faith on the right, and a GOP White House restoration in 2012 was taken as a given. Which is why their resounding defeat last week has been so traumatic for Republicans. And this loss seems to be having a different effect on the party: This time, it’s shifting the party away from the purity obsession and absolutist rejectionism that defined its conduct in Obama’s first term.

Continue Reading...

“That is absolutely wrong,” Jindal said at the Republican Governors Association meeting in Las Vegas. “Two points on that. One, we have got to stop dividing American voters. We need to go after 100 percent of the votes, not 53 percent — we need to go after every single vote. And second, we need to continue to show that our policies help every voter out there achieve the American dream, which is to be in the middle class, which is to be able to give their children the opportunity to get a great education, which is for their children to have even better-paying jobs than their parents.”

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...