Lafayette Parish School Boards Legal Woes + Planned Parenthood Affiliates Get Obamacare Funding – Wingin’ It Wednesday

This week on "Wingin' It Wednesday", panelist Mike Stagg, former Congressman Jeff Landry, in for Warren Caudle, and Carol Ross joined "Mornings with Ken and Bernie" to discuss problems at the Lafayette Parish School Board as well as news of Planned Parenthood affiliates receiving funds to educate people about Obamacare.

Here's what the panel had to say:

1. What do you think of the ongoing turmoil between the Lafayette Parish School Board and Supt. Pat Cooper concerning the District Attorney's office as it's legal counsel?

Carol Ross started us off:

This school board is doing nothing to inspire confidence in the tax payers. 
Near as I can figure, we're spending about 15k per student.
The school board the majority of the property taxes to serve 30,000 students, the city, which serves about 110,000 students gets a fraction of that.
Without the bonus points, Lafayette Parish would have been a 'C' district and not a 'B’ district, and they want more money from us? They need to get their act together.

Mike Stagg added:

Part of the consulting with the attorney has to do with the infamous Act 1, and all school boards are having this problem. $96,000 for an attorney is not that big of a deal. I will say this though, Superintendent Cooper really hurt his standing in this community when he told the BESE Board, that when people in Lafayette disagree with you, they will just lie and make up facts. He applied this to people that supported him in the past. He’s done grievous damage to his own standing in the community.
I think this is a bit of a diversion. The real problem now is that there are some legal issues that need to be resolved here.

Jeff Landry Concluded:

When it comes to legal issues over the attorneys, let’s understand exactly what the law is. Louisiana law requires that each school board district is represented by the district attorneys office. Now, there’s a special part in the statute that allows for the school boards to hire their own attorneys if they don’t want the attorney appointed to them by the DA. I don’t know why they keep throwing the attorneys into this mix, but the DA is required by law to appoint an attorney to represent the school board.

2. According to the Wall Street Journal, last week the Obama administration revealed that three Planned Parenthood affiliates would be among the groups receiving federal dollars to educate Americans about the Affordable Care Act. Do you think that tax money should be funneled to public organizations to educate Americans about a government program?

Mike stated:

This is about health care, and Planned Parenthood is involved with health care. In three states they got these grants. It requires the active involvement with people on a face-to-face basis. A lot of people don’t have access to the website, even though they can get healthcare.gov to work. This has been part of the strategy all along.
There’s a little bit of bipolar activity happening on the other side. The good news is the Affordable Care Act has ample mental health care, so there is hope.

 

Jeff added:

This issue kind of folds into the debt ceiling because it goes to show how out of control our government has become. Here in the state, I commend the legislators and the governor for doing something about these non government organizations. It’s payoffs for politicians. That’s what it is. These NGOs should be able to stand on their own.
To think we’ve got to pay people to go out there and sell a government program, in and of itself, is insanity. If the government believed it was that good, it should be selling itself, but unfortunately it’s not. At the end of the day this thing is wrecking the health care industry.

Carol stated:

Getting back to the topic of the slush fund, these aren’t grants, it’s a slush fund. Let’s call it what it is. These are slush funds to pad the budgets of these left wing advocacy groups because we have an election coming up in 2014. Now we’ve got this money going “legitimately" from this slush fund to these left wing groups.
It’s all about the midterm election. He’s got to have these last two years come hell or high water.

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Now it’s your turn to tell us what you think about today’s Wingin’ It Wednesday topics. Who got it right, who got it wrong, and who was way off? Let us know in the comment section.