She is talking about keeping those cuts. It's a smaller state financially and population-wise for some time.

It seems like it's more technical pieces of reform. We are a long way from the end, and we've still got issues to address that this panel didn't address.

There is a feeling out there that people who didn't have flood insurance should have some penalty for not doing what they should have.

Now, there are so many eyes looking at Louisiana, we've got to do the right thing or we'll be left out. I'm not saying Congress or Washington is looking for excuses not to give us money, but we've got a lot of pressure on us to do the right thing right now, and in the long run that's probably a good thing.

I think in a lot of ways this is very typical of what happens in this type of session. It's just the nature of things that big, important pieces of legislation always go down to the wire, and there are several of those types of things in this session.

I'm not surprised by any of this. Those pots of money have been there for years, and when you have a budget that looks fat and happy on the surface, it's inevitable that we go back to that discussion.

Some bills really have a learning curve, and this is one of them.

Who is going to vote?

It doesn't mean that everybody's going to be happy with it.