Word: roemer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When bouncy Buddy Roemer, 45, took over as Governor of Louisiana last year, he struck the pose of a reformer determined to energize a state with the nation's highest unemployment and one of its worst educational systems. Now he is staggering, jolted by the defeat of his key reform: a tax plan that would have shifted some of the burden from business to the middle class...
Saying he was "disappointed" that 55% of the voters had rejected his plan, Roemer last week proposed laying off thousands of state employees and closing vocational schools and hospitals. That would shrink up to $720 million from a budget already shriveled by a decline in tax revenues from oil companies. It would still leave the legislature with an unhappy choice: extend the 3% sales tax that Roemer's new measures would have replaced or accept severe cutbacks in vital government services...
...have put more people to death since 1977 than Louisiana. Monroe was convicted of murdering Lenora Collins in her bed one steamy summer night in 1977. Despite a lack of physical evidence and a jailhouse suggestion by a man in Michigan that he committed the crime, Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer has not acted on the recommendation of his pardon board that the sentence be commuted to life in prison. Instead, Roemer will wait to see if the courts get him off the hook before he makes a final decision. It will be a final decision. With the death penalty, guilty...
Whatever his personal beliefs, Governor Roemer will make that decision in a political framework. Beyond grappling with the haunting question "Did he do it?," the Governor will, inescapably, weigh the political fallout either way he goes. Once again, a capital case and a person's fate will be determined by a politician with a partisan agenda. In 1984 North Carolina Governor James Hunt was waging a fierce battle for the U.S. Senate seat held by Jesse Helms. Meanwhile, another political battle was raging. Velma Barfield, a matronly grandmother convicted of murdering her fiance while under the influence of drugs...
...Roemer has had his own moments of embarrassment -- as when he was caught appointing the son of a key state senator custodian of notarial records in New Orleans, a part-time sinecure that paid its last beneficiary $105,000. Well, said the Governor when asked about this venture in old-fashioned patronage, he would move to do away with that cushy job. Ed Hardin, president of Louisiana's Common Cause, feels Roemer is much too autocratic and tends to act without enough research. Says Hardin: "He's assembled power that makes Huey Long look like a piker...