Word: louisiana
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Despite his aloof style, Roemer tried hard to deal with Louisiana's problems. He started to clean up the environment, raised teachers' salaries, created trust funds for transportation and wetlands and sought to revise the tax structure. He managed to improve the state's bond rating and pushed through new campaign-finance laws that have drastically curbed the multimillion-dollar electoral extravaganzas of the past. Elected as a Democrat, he was a prize convert to the Republican Party when he defected last March. But Roemer may have moved too fast and too abruptly for his state...
...third cluster of eight states with 51 electoral votes where Bush's popular vote did not exceed 53%. If Cuomo won all those electoral votes, he would be just 10 shy of the 270 needed for victory. Two other states won by Bush could provide the difference: Louisiana, where a third-party presidential race by David Duke could deflect enough Bush support to tip 10 ; electoral votes to Cuomo, and Michigan (20 votes), where the automobile-based economy is so depressed that a coalition between labor and minorities could doom Bush's prospects...
Jean Richard, 79, a retired watchmaker from nearby Rayne ("Frog Capital of the World"), recalls an earlier time, when almost everybody in southwest Louisiana played an instrument. "My daddy could play harmonica, crow like a rooster and bark like a dog all at the same time." He shakes his head sadly. "That trait is gone today -- nobody practices that anymore...
...Cajun -- also share an amazing dedication to the pursuit of good times. It is a tradition that goes back to the state's original patron, Philippe, Duke of Orleans, the notorious carouser, drinker and libertine who ruled France as regent from 1715 to 1723 and gave his name to Louisiana's major city. For the duke, writes a French historian, "pleasure was the goal and festivity the means of expression...
...Louisiana pleasures range from the simple to the sophisticated: food, music, gambling and sex top the list in the Latin-Catholic south; hunting, fishing and sex (remember Jimmy Swaggart?) tend to predominate in the Protestant north. Former Governor Earl K. Long managed to touch most of those bases: he loved nothing better than boar hunting and horse racing, and he ended his life in a steamy affair with a New Orleans stripper named Blaze Starr. Ex-Governor Edwin Edwards, who revels in his image as a womanizer and gambler, once boasted that the only thing that could lose...