Louisiana Voice

McCarthyism is alive and well with five members of Louisiana’s congressional delegation.

That’s how many voted in favor of the objection to certification of Joe Biden’s election win in Arizona during the turbulent joint session yesterday and into the wee hours of this morning.

Sen. John “Foghorn Leghorn” Kennedy and Reps. Clay Higgins, Steve Scalise, Garret Graves and Mike Johnson voted yea on the objection.

Of the four House members, Graves’ vote was especially disappointing. We expected no better from the other three milquetoasts masquerading as honorable men but we expected more of Graves. He seemed to have a grasp on reality – or at least he seemed to before his vote to challenge Biden’s win that has already undergone recounts and unsuccessful court challenges.

Only Sen. Bill Cassidy and Rep. Cedric Richmond voted no.

Four people are dead as a result of that shameful act of sedition yesterday and the words and actions of Donald Trump and his supporters in Congress – like Kennedy, Scalise, Higgins, and Johnson – must share the blame for what happened.

Higgins, a-la old Joe McCarthy himself, claimed to possess “thousands of pages” of evidence of voter fraud on CNN’s JIM SCUITTO show but was unable to produce a single example when challenged.

His claim to be a trained investigator drew a quick response from his former employer, St. Landry Parish Sheriff Bobby Guidroz, for whom he once worked as a… public information officer.

“While employed at the St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s Department,” Guidroz wrote, “Higgins NEVER conducted any criminal investigation! He continues to boast about his experience as a seasoned ‘STREET COP’ as he calls himself………He was a used car salesman prior to (employment by the Opelousas Police Department). PLEASE don’t get me started with all his shenanigans.” (It should be mentioned that Higgins resigned from the OPD rather than serve a 160-hour suspension for an altercation with a citizen.)

Yesterday’s assault on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters should have repulsed even those with the strongest loyalty to Trump. It did with just-defeated Sen. Kelly Loeffler of Alabama, James Lankford of Oklahoma and Steve Daines of Montana. Even Lindsey Graham said in the Senate chambers after order was restored that “enough is enough.”

But not so for Kennedy, Rick Scott of Florida, Wyoming’s Cynthia Lummis, Mississippi’s Cindy Hyde-Smith, Roger Marshall of Kansas and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.

I don’t know much about Lummis or Marshall, but Kennedy, Scott, Hyde-Smith and Tuberville are four of a kind. TUBERVILLE and HYDE-SMITH have a combined IQ of 7. SCOTT, the former governor of Florida, is cut from the same mold as Bobby Jindal and Kennedy…Well, we know he just floats with the political breeze, with no moral compass or real political convictions other than self-survival.

Apparently, that’s sufficient for Louisiana’s voters.

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John Kennedy, I’m going to make this short and direct:

A person has died in the U.S. Capitol, and it’s on you.

Those who participated in the riot that resulted on a woman’s death are not representatives of Antifa. They aren’t Black Lives Matter proponents. They’re Trump’s thugs, his Proud Boys, rioting in the name of law and order. What a joke. Except it ain’t funny.

And It’s on you, it’s on Steve Scalise, it’s on Mike Johnson, and it’s on Clay Higgins. But most of all, it’s on you, John N. Kennedy.

And it’s certainly on your mentor, Donald John Trump, who has goaded his mindless followers into this insurrection, this invasion of what is supposed to be the pillar of democracy. Joe Biden called it “an assault on the citadel of liberty.”

He’s correct.

Mitt Romney said if you do not walk away from your challenge in light of today’s events, you are complicit in that anarchy, in that act of sedition.

He, too, is correct.

Let’s be clear and make no mistake about it. It’s on you, John N. Kennedy, Steve Scalise, Mike Johnson and Clay Higgins.

It’s on you for enabling him for the past four years and for your decision to support a tyrant over the principles of freedom and democracy in your ill-advised decision to join in the effort to challenge the results of a legal election in which absolutely no evidence of fraud has been presented.

You are fully complicit.

It’s on you.

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Sen. Bill Cassidy gets it.

John Kennedy, along with a dozen other senators and senators-elect, apparently does not.

Kennedy, who looks and acts as if he just stepped out of an old Pogo comic strip (or for the younger set, like Sen. Belfry of the Shoe comic strip), insists on bringing more and more embarrassment upon the state by joining with the others to CONTEST the electoral vote count during Wednesday’s joint session of Congress.

We can all vividly recall the Republicans bitching and moaning that Democrats were trying to nullify the results of the 2016 election with the impeachment of Donald Trump. They kept invoking the 63 million Americans who voted for Trump, conveniently ignoring the fact that 65.8 million did not.

Now the shoe is on the other foot and the Repugnantcans are trying to nullify the wishes of 81.2 million who voted to Biden (as opposed to the 74.2 million who voted for Trump).

That’s a double standard by any measure but you’d never know that by listening to Sen. Kornpone, aka Foghorn Leghorn who, every time he opens his mouth, a banal bromide spews forth.

It obviously has never occurred to Kennedy that he took an oath to defend, not undermine, the U.S. Constitution.

It never occurred to him that he is in a unique position to help, not ignore, his constituents. People are hurting, yet he plunges ahead on this doomed mission of fealty to a demagogue.

It never occurred to him that his loyalty should be to his country, not some orange-haired tyrant.

It never occurred to him to let the rule of law, not the petulant whims of a spoiled tweet-master, guide him as his moral compass.

In short, John Neely Kennedy has forgotten where he came from.

He is a former Democrat-turned-Republican for one reason and one reason only. Political philosophy had little to do with his switch; political survival had everything to do with it. He merely shifted with the political winds because that was his meal ticket.

You can bet the farm if the state made a sudden hard turn leftward, he’d be back in the Democrat camp proclaiming that he’d rather drink weed killer than forsake his liberal core beliefs. That’s John N. Kennedy sincerity for you. We call those kinds of political hacks neither RINOs nor DINOs, but chameleons.

If trump peed down his back and told him it was raining, he’d break out his umbrella. But if you tried to reach out to him, you’d get a computer-generated canned response that was neither germane nor useful.

He belongs on the Mt. Rushmore of Goofy.

But today, it was announced that Sen. Dr. Bill Cassidy is among a bipartisan group of 10 senators who are fighting that quixotic effort to overturn the election that Trump lost by 7 million votes.

The 10, which include, besides Louisiana’s senior senator, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Mitt Romney, signed off in a statement that said:

“The 2020 election is over. All challenges through recounts and appeals have been exhausted. At this point, further attempts to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 Presidential election are contrary to the clearly expressed will of the American people and only serve to undermine Americans’ confidence in the already determined election results. The voters have spoken and Congress must now fulfill its responsibility to certify the election results. In two weeks, we will begin working with our colleagues and the new Administration on bipartisan, common sense solutions to the enormous challenges facing our country. It is time to move forward.”

Maybe Cassidy could take Foghorn to the woodshed for a little man-to-boy talk.

Oh, and while he’s at it, he should take that ass-clown Clay Higgins with him.

Bullet-Head Higgins showed up for an appearance on JIM SCUITTO’S CNN SHOW earlier today and came off looking exactly like the imbecile he is.

Higgins, boasting that he is an “investigator,” (he was the public information officer for the St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s Office before he was canned – we aren’t sure what he ever “investigated”), claimed to have “thousands of pages” of evidence of voter fraud but when pressed by Scuitto, was unable to cite a single example. No, not one. nada. zilch.

That’s not unusual for the one Louisiana elected official who has the capability of making John Kennedy look good by comparison.

It truly escapes me how this guy ever got elected. It’s not as if he had a lightweight as an opponent in his initial run for Congress four years ago. He defeated Scott Angelle rather handily. Angelle, a member of the Louisiana Public Service Commission, had finished a close third in a four-man race for governor in 2015, barely losing a runoff spot to retiring U.S. Sen. David Vitter and had led in the first primary in the congressional race a year later.

But by running on Trump’s coattails in much the same manner as Kennedy did for the Senate, Higgins, who would give a head of cabbage a good run in an IQ test, won by 12 percentage points in the runoff.

Higgins is a guy who went into the race about $100,000 in arrears on his child support payments and was recorded telling his ex-wife that once he got elected, there would be plenty of money laying around for him to get caught up on payments.

Only in Louisiana, folks. Only. In. Louisiana.

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If Sen. John “Foghorn Leghorn” Kennedy still insists on joining that cadre of fools bent on CHALLENGING THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION RESULTS on Wednesday, then the Louisiana Democratic Party needs to immediately launch and all-out effort to recruit a viable candidate to oppose the state’s junior senator in 2022.

If Trump’s Saturday telephone conversation with George Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger isn’t enough to change Kennedy’s mind, then it must be assumed that Kennedy is just as deranged and incompetent as President Tweet Thang.

You can listen to the full hour-long conversation HERE.

Former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein, who was instrumental in bringing down Richard Nixon nearly half-a-century ago, says the Trump phone call was “far worse” than Watergate. I don’t know about all that; I’m not qualified to judge, although I vividly remember the Watergate story as it unfolded. I was a reporter with the Baton Rouge State-Times during those turbulent days of Watergate.

But I do know Trump’s attempt to coerce Raffensperger was nothing short of outright Mafia-style politics – an outrage that surpasses even that call to the Ukraine president in its sheer audacity and naked intimidation attempt. It was an extension of a coup attempt that has been underway since Joe Biden’s victory.

Kennedy’s fealty to Trump over the past four years was sickening enough without Saturday’s revelation that he planned to join with 10 other senators and senators-elect to oppose the results of the election that Trump lost by more than 7 million votes.

Kennedy, in his four years in office, has done damn little to address the real problems of the country in general and Louisiana in particular. All that was asked of him was that he do his job but he has been a miserable failure at that because of his loyalty to Trump which he obviously considers to be a higher priority than joblessness, housing, health, economic and educational problems facing this state.

Hell, he won’t even provide a direct response if you should be so foolish as to attempt to contact him on an issue – any issue. Instead, you get a canned response generated by a computer, not a person, which as often as not does nothing to address your concerns. How’s that for representation?

And is anyone aware of any town hall meetings he’s held in his four years in office?

He has chosen to turn his back on the state so that he can do his part in propping up a would-be dictator and that, my friends, borders on abject betrayal. To take matters a step further in challenging a democratic election that 50 court decisions (so far) have upheld, is even more serious; it’s sedition – and treasonous.

This country for more than two centuries has been the model of democratic principles. Kennedy’s decision to undermine that process is a threat to that very pillar of freedom of which we have been so justifiably proud – until now.

Kennedy has shown himself to be the shameless sycophant that he is rather than the leader he holds himself out to be. He is little more than a two-bit drugstore philosopher rather than the sage he would have us believe him to be.

Rather than evoking images of Thomas Jefferson, he elicits memories of the political wisdom of Archie Bunker – without the charm.

Instead of standing for freedom and justice for all in the manner of say, Martin Luther King, he is more reminiscent of the politics of a Willie Rainach, Leander Perez or Stephen Miller.

John Kennedy is not a man who represents the true interests of Louisiana. I don’t know who the Democrats might choose to run against him in two years or which independent, if any, might try to unseat him, but I can think of several imminently more-qualified candidates.

Larry the Cable Guy comes to mind immediately.

Too bad he’s not a Louisiana citizen.

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In a follow-up to our story of Dec. 24 about that $450,000 judgment against the St. Tammany Parish School Board in the case of the 2007 RAPE of an 11-year-old boy by a custodian at Abney Elementary School in Slidell, LouisianaVoice has learned more disturbing details about how the school board handled the matter.

Apparently, it wasn’t enough that the board offered a paltry settlement that wouldn’t have even cover the medical expenses of the victim, and apparently it wasn’t enough that the board had the insensitivity and the brass to appeal the judgement (which was upheld on appeal), but now we learned that the board:

• Did not follow up with appropriate action (firing) when the background check on Dino Schwertz came back showing that he had lied on his job application when he checked “No” to the question of “Have you ever pleaded guilty or no contest to or been convicted of a criminal offense?”
• Fid not inform his principal when that background check revealed that Schwertz was still on probation for a bank fraud conviction and for violation of a protective order.
• Inexplicably transferred him to a permanent job at Northshore High School.

The vice-principal at Northshore at that time was Frank Jabbia.

He was PROMOTED to St. Tammany Parish School Superintendent last October.

His father, Peter Jabbia, was Deputy Superintendent when Schwertz was first hired at Abney and in June 2020, was appointed interim superintendent until his son was appointed superintendent four months later. He also served as a member of both the Louisiana Association of School Executives and American Association of School Administrators.

Kathleen Katorchis, who was principal at Abney at the time of Schwertz’s hiring, testified in a sworn deposition in the lawsuit cited above that Schwertz’s lying on the employment application would have prompted her to recommend firing him but she was not informed of the background check’s contents. He was eventually fired – months later and only after school officials learned he was being investigated by Slidell police.

So, why didn’t Katorchis know about the results of the background check?

Well, that would be because Deputy Superintendent Peter Jabbia didn’t inform her of the results and the information in the background report was never checked against his application.

The lawsuit by Schwertz’s victim said no one in the school system checked Schwertz’s references or called his current employer for a reference. Attorneys for the school system even argued that none of the information it had about Schwertz (in the background check) would have raised any red flags as to the possibility that he might harm children (and thus, apparently, would not disqualify him from employment).

Would not have raised any red flags? Seriously?

So, why have the question on the application at all, then?

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