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Archive for July, 2017

New low reached in attempts to smear former LSPC director to stymie lawsuit; but still no report on LSTA contributions

Posted in Campaign Contributions, Commissions, Corruption, Ethics, Finances, Lawsuits, State Police on July 17, 2017| 9 Comments »

There’s an ongoing hatchet job that is remarkable only in the clumsy, amateurish manner in which it is being carried out.

But the thing that is really notable, considering the stumbling, bumbling effort is that it apparently is being executed (if you can call it that) by either the Louisiana State Police Commission (LSPC) or the Louisiana State Troopers Association (LSTA)—or both.

Several weeks ago, LouisianaVoice received an anonymous letter critical of our coverage of the LSPC’s lack of credibility and integrity in the manner in which it punted on an investigation of illegal political contributions by LSTA.

First of all, there is nothing illegal per se in an association making political contributions except in this particular case, the decision was made to do so by officers of the association who are by virtue of their very membership in LSTA, state troopers. State troopers are, like their state civil service cousins, prohibited from political activity, including making campaign contributions.

To conceal their action, they simply had the LSTA Director David Young make the contributions through his personal checking account and he was then reimbursed for his “expenses.” Former LSPC member Lloyd Grafton of Ruston labeled that practice “money laundering.”

Then came the dust-up with LSPC Director Cathy Derbonne who, in performing her duties as she saw them, attempted to hold the commission members’ feet to the fire on commission regulations.

The commission, led by its president, Trooper T.J. Doss, mounted an effort to make Derbonne pay for her imagined insubordination. After all, no good deed goes unpunished. A majority of the commission quickly convened a kangaroo court to fire her but, told she didn’t have the votes to survive the coup, she resigned under duress.

She has since filed a lawsuit to be reinstated with back pay and damages but the LSPC simply turned up the heat first when two members of the commission paid a private detective to follow her in order to learn who she was talking to and meeting with. LouisianaVoice has been told that the private detective was paid for by the two commission members and not with state funds.

That anonymous letter to LouisianaVoice also accused Derbonne of having sexual relationships with a state trooper, a claim she has vehemently denied.

In some quarters, that would be called character assassination and it does tend to follow a pattern of behavior that has emerged over the past two years with certain commission members, the LSTA, and even the State Police command. Just in the past year, five commission members, the commission director, State Police Superintendent Mike Edmonson has resigned, his second in command reassigned and 18 members of LSTA were subpoenaed by the FBI.

Now, New Orleans TV investigative reporter Lee Zurik has apparently been contacted to drive the stake through Derbonne’s heart, i.e. completely discredit her in order to destroy her pending litigation.

Zurik was scheduled to air a piece at 10 p.m. today (Monday) that is speculated to include descriptions of Derbonne’s attempts to fix a ticket for commission member Calvin Braxton of Natchitoches, one of the remaining members friendly to Derbonne. From all accounts, Braxton is the thrust of Zurik’s story with Derbonne being collateral damage—convenient for Doss, et al.

We have no idea what Zurik’s story will say, but he requested—and received—a lengthy list of email correspondence between Derbonne and Braxton, the contents or which are not clear but which Zurik is expected to elaborate on tonight.

The odd thing about that is Derbonne’s successor, Jason Hannaman, told the commission during its meeting last Thursday that the commission server had crashed and that all emails and all other documents were lost permanently.

If that’s the case, how were Derbonne’s email exchanges with Braxton recovered so easily and quickly for Zurik?

As if all that were not enough to keep one’s mind reeling, there is also this:

When Natchitoches attorney Taylor Townsend was hired at a price of $75,000 to investigate the LSTA campaign contributions, his contract specifically required that he file a report on his findings. Instead, he came back with a verbal recommendation that “no action be taken.”

That might have been the end of the story had it not been for retired State Trooper Leon “Bucky” Millet of Lake Arthur who kept pounding the drum at each monthly meeting, insisting that Townsend was required to file a written report. Millet, moreover, was victorious in his assertion that all information, materials, and items produced by Townsend’s investigation were property of the state and must be submitted to the commission.

That would include a tape recording of an LSTA meeting in which it was allegedly admitted that the association had violated the law in making the contributions. Townsend has that recording and it should be among the materials submitted to the commission—provided the recording didn’t also “crash,” with its contents destroyed.

So, in summation, we have a sham of an investigation of the LSTA, the orchestrated ouster of the LSPC director who was the only one knowledgeable about commission members’ activities, the hiring of a private detective to follow her, an anonymous letter intended to tarnish her reputation with one of the only news outlets that would tell her story, the forced resignation of the State Police Commander, and now the recruitment of a New Orleans TV reporter to abet the commission in taking down Braxton and further smearing Derbonne.

What could be more Louisiana?

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A simple tactic to force members of Congress to listen to us

Posted in Uncategorized on July 17, 2017| 5 Comments »

In trying to illustrate why members of Congress become so inaccessible once they’re inside the Beltway, it would be to belabor the obvious to say that they appear to ignore the voters back home…

 

…even as they seem hyper-attentive when the special interests whisper in their ears.

It is certainly no exaggeration to say the playing field has definitely been tilted by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision…

 

 

…but by coming together as one voice, that imbalance can be overcome and we can be heard.

 

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John Kennedy, in addition to embarrassing Louisiana and himself, has hitched wagon to a falling star named Trump

Posted in Congress, House, Senate, Politicians, Senate on July 14, 2017| 29 Comments »

John Sachs, a good friend and an old—and I do mean old (flies leave fresh dog poop just to follow us around) Ruston High School classmate (Class of 1961) is something of a political activist.

He learned well at his father’s knee. Dr. Tony Sachs, longtime head of the Louisiana Tech University Department of English had something of a liberal bent at a time when it was extremely unfashionable in north Louisiana, a trait he passed down to son John and daughter Elizabeth.

The word liberal has been turned into something nasty over the years but all it really implies is that its adherents believe that the poor that are entitled to the same rights as the rich, that people of color are entitled to the same protection under the law as whites, that women deserve the same opportunities—and pay—as men, that gays are entitled to the same consideration as straights, that the religious beliefs (or non-beliefs) are personal and should not be infringed upon, and that no one—NO ONE—should be deprived of his or her rights under the law.

In short, the liberal is rock steady in his support of non-discrimination in all areas of society—a resolve difficult to find in so-called conservatism, particularly of the Republican stripe.

After all, it is a document called the Declaration of Independence that proclaims:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…”

That brings us to the point of all this:

What gives Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan or anyone else the right to deny a dying child critical health care?

All those Republican members of the House and Senate who pay lip service to our military men and women but want to scrap Obamacare without a viable replacement are little better than pathological liars.

Let me explain.

Have you ever been to the Vietnam War Memorial Wall where the names of 58,000 Americans killed are inscribed? Well, there would be a lot more names had it not been for the Hmong, an ethnic tribe of the Golden Triangle of Laos, Thailand and Myanmar (formerly Burma).

The Hmong were America’s secret weapon. They protected our radar stations in Southeast Asia and rescued and cared for downed pilots. Without their assistance, many more Americans would have died in that terrible war.

After the war, many Hmong settled in the U.S. One particularly intelligent Hmong girl, a teenager, fell ill with a rare illness that was extremely expensive to treat. She lives in Minnesota and Obamacare got her the medical care she so desperately needed. With the scrapping of Obamacare, she loses her insurance and with a pre-existing condition, it will be cost-prohibitive to get insurance—if she can get it at all.

Thanks Mitch, thanks Trump and thanks John Kennedy.

The reason I single Kennedy out when all of Louisiana’s congressional delegation but Rep. Cedric Richmond, a New Orleans Democrat, voted to kill Obamacare, is that John Sachs wrote Kennedy to plead with him to consider all the ramifications of repealing the Affordable Care Act.

Of course, there was much wrong with the ACA but there are also weaknesses—glaring weaknesses—in our tax code, our sentencing guidelines for criminal acts, our campaign finance laws, and the laws enacted to protect American citizens from predatory Wall Street greed mongers, to name only a few. If there is a problem with a law, the duty of Congress is to address specific problem areas and pass bills to eliminate the flaws, not scrap the law in its entirety.

I have yet to see a single Republican member of the House or Senate rushing to tweak a tax code heavily weighted in favor of the wealthy, or advocating revamping the criminal code, or reining in Wall Street (to be completely fair, it was Obama’s own Attorney General Eric Holder who punted his responsibility to prosecute the criminal element that brought about the 2008 financial crash). And other than McCain-Feingold, there have been precious few attempts by either party to reform campaign finance laws.

After John Sachs sent his letter to Kennedy, this is the canned (but typical) response he received from Louisiana’s junior senator:

Thank you for contacting me in opposition to repealing the Affordable Care Act. I appreciate hearing from you.

Obamacare was sold as something that would provide millions of uninsured Americans with access to affordable healthcare.  Unfortunately, Obamacare failed on those promises.  Americans were promised lower health insurance premiums.  In reality, premiums will increase by an average of 25 percent this year for the millions of Americans in the exchanges.  Americans were promised “if you like your plan you can keep it.”  What really happened is that 4.7 million Americans were kicked off their health care plans by Obamacare.  Americans were also promised more choice when purchasing health insurance, but a large part of the country has only one insurer offering plans on the Obamacare exchanges.  That’s not choice. 

Americans deserve better.  I am focused on repealing Obamacare and replacing it with personalized, patient-centered health care that will be affordable.  Americans should not be forced to buy insurance they don’t like, don’t need, and cannot afford.  I’m working to make sure they won’t have to for much longer.

As you know, the House of Representatives passed the American Health Care Act on May 4.  Also, a draft Senate bill, the Better Care Reconciliation Act, was released on June 22.  I am carefully studying it in its entirety to see how it would impact Louisianans.  As I am reviewing, I will be sure to keep your concerns in mind.  Thanks again for writing.

If he is really that appreciative, why didn’t he conduct town hall meetings during a recent recess? Instead, he was nowhere to be found.

There’s no mistaking that Kennedy is in complete lockstep with Trump and that’s really strange. If you recall, Kennedy fought Bobby Jindal during Jindal’s entire eight-year reign of error, goading Jindal to cut contracts and repeating the mantra, “We don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem.” And now we have Crump who is Jindal 2.0 and Kennedy practically wets his pants trying to make Grump happy. Witness Kennedy’s fawning over Betsy DeVos and Jeff Sessions during their confirmation hearings. DeVos was a horrible person to put in charge of educating our children and Sessions is a throwback to Southern demagogues Strom Thurmond and George Wallace.

Kennedy invokes the Chump mantra of 4.7 million Americans being kicked off their health care plans by Obamacare, yet he conveniently ignores the fact that McConnell’s plan would strip 23 million Americans of their healthcare.

How can Kennedy reconcile those numbers and still call himself an advocate of Louisiana citizens? Is this his idea of compassion?

Is he an intimidated, frightened, cowering little man afraid to stand up to the bully or is his behavior an indication of blind, unquestioning loyalty to Frump in the belief that it will enhance his own political career?

If the latter is the case, I would strongly suggest that Kennedy has misread the tea leaves and hitched his wagon not to a falling star but a plummeting one.

 

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Mistaken email evokes temporary nightmares of Bobby Jindal return to office—on Public Service Commission

Posted in Uncategorized on July 11, 2017| 6 Comments »

My first thought was a spine chilling “He’s baaaaaack!”

Like Freddie Kruger in about a dozen Nightmare on Elm Street movies, Bobby Jindal just won’t go away, I thought

Jindal, the Nightmare of Louisiana, supposedly sent out an email blast announcing his candidacy for the Public Service Commission.

Except it was apparently one of those fake news stories Donald Trump keeps tweeting about.

Jindal, the personification of political disaster, appeared to have made his announcement via email Monday (July 10) at 5:09 p.m. that he will be a candidate for the PUBLIC SERVICE COMMISSION (PSC) District 2 seat formerly held by Scott Angelle, who was APPOINTED by Donald Trump to head up the Federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement which regulates offshore drilling.

Here’s a copy of the original email received by LouisianaVoice:

From: Bobby Jindal [mailto:info@americanxt.org]
Sent: Monday, July 10, 2017 4:45 PM
To:
Subject: I’m in

I wanted to make sure your heard—I’m running to represent you on the Public Service Commission!

I’m running because I want to do everything possible to help create jobs and get Louisianians (sic) back to work.

We need leaders fighting for Louisiana’s small businesses. That’s how we’ll get more and better jobs for our state. It’s not going to happen through more government regulations or spending.

I’m a small businessman myself, and I know how important it is to grow our economy. It’s going to take rolling up my sleeves and being willing to get to work, and that’s exactly what I will do.

It’s going to be incredibly important to have your help getting the word about this important race out to your friends and neighbors. I’m asking for your help.

Only it wasn’t really from Jindal.

Someone named Tim Saler followed what we thought was an email from Jindal with a correction at 6:18 p.m. “Due to a technical error, an email from Baton Rouge orthopaedic surgeon Craig Greene was sent to recipients with an incorrect sender’s name. Craig’s campaign is renting multiple lists, and unfortunately one of these lists was inadvertently labeled with a previous sender’s name.”

Imagine our disappointment, even though he did sound a lot like Jindal—and about 10,000 other politicians. For example, he wants us to believe the PSC creates jobs; he’s against regulations of such things as price gouging, illegal dumping of toxic waste, unsafe gas lines and motor carriers. As an orthopaedic surgeon, he somehow considers himself a “small business,” and of course he wants to roll up his sleeves (for a campaign photo-op, no doubt).

One of our sharp-eyed readers informed us that it was worth noting that Greene may be using Jindal’s America Next super PAC and that SALER “is a Jindal-Teepell teammate.” Timmy put him on the ground to work races while he (Timmy) handled television and other media via his ONMESSAGE web page.

Saler is not listed as an Onmessage operative per se, but he was listed as one of Jindal’s 2016 presidential KEY STAFFERS. Our source said the word is that Jindal and Teepell are grooming Greene to run for governor.

Gov. John Bel Edwards appointed former State Rep. DAMON J. BALDONE to complete Angelle’s unexpired term until a special election can be held. While Edwards has yet to call the election, it will most likely be Oct. 14. Baldone, a Houma attorney, has indicated he will seek the office on a permanent basis.

PSC DISTRICT 2 is comprised of the parishes of Lafourche, Terrebonne, St. Mary, St. Martin, Lafayette, West Baton Rouge Pointe Coupee, West and East Feliciana, and parts of East Baton Rouge, Livingston, and Iberville.

Despite the correction sent out by Saler, the very idea of Jindal as a candidate for PSC got me to reminiscing about his eight years of misrule as Louisiana’s absentee governor.

You do remember, Bobby Jindal, right? He’s the guy who thought he would make a good presidential candidate. Remember that hilarious video of him announcing his intentions to his kids? Remember their rousing indifference? Much like the voters’ reactions in Iowa. He would have probably received the same accolades in New Hampshire had his campaign made it that far.

Remember, too, his relegation to the Republican Party’s kiddie table in the debates? That was classic.

Of course, once Donald Trump was the official Republican nominee, Jindal gave his whorehearted wholehearted endorsement and Trump responded in kind with a puzzled “Bobby who?”

And you must remember Jindal’s landmark LSU Hospital deal that LouisianaVoice said all along was illegal because of the contract with the new operator of the hospitals in Monroe and Shreveport contained 50 BLANK PAGES. Remember how we speculated that the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) would reject the plan?

Of course, Bobby didn’t really care because he knew he would be long gone by the time the chickens came home to roost.

And come home they did, demanding that the state repay $190 million CMS said the state owed on the fraudulent deal.

State Rep. John Bel Edwards was against the hospital deal from the get-go and as governor, it fell to him to resolve the problem Bobby created.

And while Edwards has precious little credit, he has managed to talk CMS down from $190 million to $5 million through extended NEGOTIATIONS.

Thanks, Bobby.

And of course, Bobby’s first experiment with privatization was with the Office of Risk Management, a privatization deal that was supposed to save the state tens of millions of dollars.

Except it hasn’t. In fact, the company that was paid to take it over, came back within just a few months asking that its contract be increased by 10 percent, which it was—and then the contract was sold to another company without the prior approval of the Division of Administration as was required by the original transfer. Now, LouisianaVoice is hearing rumors of internal complaining because the private operator isn’t pulling its weight and the few remaining state employees are having to carry the bulk of the workload.

Thanks, Bobby.

Remember how Bobby gave us eight consecutive years of budgetary shortfalls followed by draconian cuts to services and higher education? Remember how the cost of tuition at Louisiana colleges and universities skyrocketed under eight years of Jindal?

Thanks, Bobby.

And remember how Bobby squelched that lawsuit against those 97 oil companies that had inflicted so much carnage on the state’s coastal marshes?

Next time a category 4 or 5 hurricane slams into Morgan City, New Orleans or anywhere else along what’s left of our coastline, be sure to thank Bobby for there being no barrier islands to slow the progress of that hurricane.

And of course, there’s that disastrous BP Deepwater-Horizon-oil-spill-of-2010 that killed 11 men and spilled 4.9 million barrels of oil over an area estimated as high as 68,000 square miles.

Remember Bobby’s solution? Build berms! Against the advice of all the expert engineers, Bobby insisted he was a genius and could mitigate the damage by spending $220 million to construct sand berms to stem the flow of oil to Louisiana’s shore.

Well, guess what? The berms, along with the bulldozers and cranes brought in for the project were washed away in a matter of hours. Gone. Much like his credibility.

The Oil Spill Commission staff described Jindal’s SAND PILE as “underwhelmingly effective and overwhelmingly expensive.”

Much like Jindal’s eight years in office.

Thanks, Bobby.

Still, after all that, the image of Jindal sitting on the PSC wouldn’t go away. Utility rate increases? Why not? It’s private enterprise; they have a right to make a profit. Transportation costs? Go ahead, fellas, charge whatever the market will bear and don’t worry about regulation.

But best of all was my visual of a showdown between Jindal and sitting PSC member Foster Campbell, everyone’s favorite populist.

Jindal’s staccato rhetoric, empty of any real substance, versus Campbell’s bombastic oratory. It would be like a debate between Tweety Bird and Foghorn Leghorn:

“Slow, Ah say, slow down, boy. You sound like a 331/3 rpm record bein’ played on 78. (That boy talks like he has to be somewhere—like th’ restroom.)”

 

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Tom Schedler and Clay Higgins offer clear illustration of the abyss that separates class behavior from crass boorishness

Posted in Congress, Ethics, Politicians, Uncategorized on July 6, 2017| 17 Comments »

Two Louisiana elected officials, both Republicans, have demonstrated starkly contrasting examples of responsible leadership this week.

First, the good news about an elected official doing the right thing.

Louisiana Secretary of State Tom Schedler staunchly refused a request from the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to provide it with highly personal information about Louisiana voters, including social security numbers, birth dates, and certain family history.

The commission was formed by President Frump in investigate what he claims was fraud in the presidential elections last November. Could anything have been so inappropriately named? It’s like calling the KKK a commission on human dignity and equal rights.

President Grump seems to think that widespread voter fraud prevented him from winning the popular vote. That claim seems a tad far-fetched, given the fact he lost the popular vote by about three million. Next thing you know, the Trumper will be trying to convince us that pro wrestling is real.

About two dozen states have refused outright to provide such information and another 20 or so have either not made a decision or only partially complied with the request.

Mark Ballard, writing in the Baton Rouge ADVOCATE, quoted Schedler as saying, “The President’s Commission has quickly politicized its work by asking states for an incredible amount of voter data that I have, time and time again, refused to release. My response to the Commission is, you’re not going to play politics with Louisiana’s voter data, and if you are, then you can purchase the limited public information available by law, to any candidate running for office. That’s it.”

Louisiana’s public voter list, Ballard wrote, includes only names, addresses, party affiliation and voter history. Voter history only indicates whether or not people participated in previous elections but not how they voted.

Schedler deserves credit for making the decision to comply with state law instead of trying to see if he could circumvent the law and cater to the wishes of a president who seems to have taken a ride on the Disoriented Express and checked into the Hotel Silly.

Too bad the same can’t be said of U.S. Rep. Clay (Barney Fife) Higgins, that rootin’-tootin’, gun-wavin’ former deputy (as in public information officer) sheriff who once threatened to single-handedly take out all the drug lords of St. Landry Parish only to wind up being forced to resign by an embarrassed sheriff.

Higgins somehow managed to get himself elected as something of a wannabe Trumpette and now the good folks of the Third District are saddled with him for the next 18 months. Surely, common sense will prevail and he will be denied a second term—unless, of course, they feel sorry for him and want to keep him in office until his $200,000 in delinquent child support payments are caught up.

In the meantime, he has advocated murdering all radical Islamics, radical being a relative term most likely applicable to all Islamics in Higgins’ demented mindset.

And now, this ignorant ass-clown has tried to turn a visit to the AUSCHWITZ MEMORIAL into some kind of personal political statement in violation of posted plaques that requested respectful “mournful” silence inside the most infamous concentration camp where more than a million Jews were gassed by Nazis during World War II.

Higgins posted a video on YouTube in which he walks through different areas of the Poland camp, explaining that it took only about 20 minutes to kill the Jews inside the gas chambers. “This is why Homeland Security must be squared away, why our military must be invincible,” he said on the video.

“The world’s a smaller place now than it was in World War II,” Higgins said. “The United States is more accessible to terror like this, horror like this. It’s hard to walk away from gas chambers, ovens without a very sober feeling of commitment, unwavering commitment, to make damn sure that the United States of America is protected from the evils of the world.”

The Auschwitz Memorial tweeted, “Everyone has the right to personal reflections. However, inside a former gas chamber, there should be mournful silence. It’s not a stage.”

Well, the folks at the Auschwitz Memorial need to quit wasting their time with tweets about Higgins’ lack of decorum. They have to realize that this is the country that gave the world Donald Trump and Louisiana is the state that gave the U.S. Congress Clay Higgins.

Dignity and decorum are passe to these two. You could throw both into a sack, shake it up and the only way you could tell the difference between the two when you poured them out would be the orange hair and a money clip.

Trump is an insufferable egomaniac and we may as well accept that fact. Higgins is an insufferable buffoon and we may as well accept that fact.

Higgins has been in office just a tad more than six months and he’s already making transcontinental junkets.

A mere six months in office seems a little soon for him to be taking one of those “fact-finding” trips for which members of Congress are famous.

So what I’d really like to know is this:

  • What was he doing in Poland?
  • Was he on official business?
  • If so, what was the nature of that business?
  • Or was part of the official support group for the Tweeter in Chief’s Poland trip?
  • Did U.S. taxpayers pay for that trip or did he receive a free trip from some campaign supporter or lobbyist?

Or perhaps he was just hot on the trail of a St. Landry Parish drug lord.

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