This shutdown never made much sense to me in the first place. Democrats had incredibly poor leverage from the word, "go," and their ask was huge.

A fellow hounder once invited me to his south Alabama camp to let the dogs night-hunt. He said, "You're going to want to get yourself a pair of special chaps first." Curious, of course, I asked why, and he said, "Oh, the camp is lousy with water moccasins," and I was like oh hell no, lol.

By the by, if you have a southern friend and have never spent much time in the region--and if you want to see the look of abject fear and loathing on their face, ask them how they feel about cottonmouths. I've never met a southerner who doesn't rank cottonmouths 2nd only to satan for pure evil.

Believe that's a timber rattler, though I'm awful at snake id's. I was simply glad to have been in my car when I came across it and not on the trail.

I'm a little conflicted about Jones. On the one hand, state democrats need him. He's one of the only serious, big name democrats in the state who can win vites. But I also felt like he was nowhere to be seen when Reed retook the party. He worked with the DNC, I know. But he wasn't at party meetings.

The last slate of Democrats the party ran in 2022 were an appalling lot of unserious nobodies. Current leadership has no interest in building the party because it threatens their grip on it. Jones is that threat, which is why they hate him so much.

And we've got plenty of proof that Trump's brand of populist demagoguery is singular. How many Republican wannabes have tried it and failed? DeSantis, Rubio, Vivek, and boy the list just goes on and on.

If it did, you wouldn't have the leader of the GOP tariffing the world back into the Gilded Age, flirting with isolationism, making the feds a stakeholder in private firms, lighting the cornerstones of US military norms on fire, etc, etc., etc.

Once the populist demagogue is gone, it's rare for a successor candidate to capture that same lightning in the bottle. I suspect the GOP will be rudderless once Trump's gone, and turnout of the base? Good luck, I guess. But it doesn't have much of an ideology to run on anymore.

This is why southern politics tended to produce outrageous characters (it gets attention, and attention is coordination). It's also why you see dynasties like Talmadge, Long, etc.. (I suspect we're going to see people named Trump running for some time, probably successfully).

Then of course, there's the trouble down the road at the University of New Orleans (and lord knows where else). Rumors swirl about the process to reform that struggling school. Higher ed in Louisiana is in a very precarious situation right now, and one wonders how we will manage to right the ship.

There are still a lot of questions here at UL-Lafayette about how the university managed to get itself in such financial trouble, who was responsible for those missteps, who else knew about the trouble, when they became aware of it, and what they did with that information.

As many times as I've mocked the Senate's "greatest deliberative body in the world" nonsense, at least they show up. This is ridiculous.