Louisiana Voice

What have we become in this country?

That’s not a rhetorical question. It’s a serious inquiry about the conscience and soul of a country that would send masked agents to push a woman  FACE-DOWN ON THE PAVEMENT or to abandon a 13-year-old boy on a street corner.

I mean, is it really necessary to DESTROY PROPERTY by throwing mattresses and busted doors into dumpsters, scattering clothing and food all over apartments, zip-tying children? Is absolutely necessary that these federal thugs wear masks when they assault citizens (and many of their victims are indeed citizens)?

Was it really necessary to employ Black Hawk helicopters? The Department of Homeland Security, the agency ostensibly run by Kristi Noem but in reality, she takes her orders from Stephen Miller, the Naziest of Trump’s Nazis. And those ICE agents? Not one scintilla better than Hitler’s Sturmabteilung.

DHS says they were targeting the Tren de Aragua gang. No actual evidence has ever been provided that would indicate the veracity of that assertion. In other words, they lied through their masks.

Donald Trump says he has declared war on cities governed by Democrats. He called Portland, Oregon, a “war zone” but nothing could be further from the truth. He’s lying through his gold makeup-stained teeth.

Here’s a few examples of Trump’s “law and order”:

• Roderick Johnson, a 67-year-old U.S. citizen, said agents broke through his door and dragged him out in zip ties. Despite his assurances that he was a citizen, he was forced to wait for nearly three hours until they looked him up. His requests to see a search warrant or speak to a lawyer were ignored.
• One woman who was detained had a pending asylum case, meaning she is legally present in the U.S. When she returned to her apartment, it was boarded up, and all her possessions were missing.
• George Retes is a 25-year-old Army veteran. Still, he was detained as he was on his way to work as a security guard. He told the agents that he was an American citizen and that his wallet and identification were in his nearby car. Regardless, he was violently arrested and then held in a jail cell for three days and nights. While incarcerated, he was not allowed to make a phone call, see an attorney, appear before a judge, or take a shower to wash off pepper spray and tear gas that the agents had used. A damned fine way to treat a military veteran.
• Leo Garcia Venegas is an American citizen. That mattered little to Trump’s stormtroopers. He was laying a foundation at a private construction site when agents vaulted a fence and tackled him. When he showed them his Alabama-issued ID, agents dismissed it as fake (wonder where they got that word?). Venegas was handcuffed for an hour and released only after his social security number was verified. But that’s not where his story ended. A month later, Venegas, a construction worker, was working in a home when agents cornered him in the back bedroom and ordered him to leave the house. He again showed his ID and agents again dismissed it as fake. He was marched to the edge of the subdivision development and held for 20 minutes before his release. His detentions were the result of DHS conducting warrantless searches.
• Rafie Ollah Shouhed is a 79-year-old citizen who owns a car wash in the LA area. He was tackled and detained during an ICE raid. He was then detained for 12 hours and denied medical treatment for broken ribs, an injured elbow and post-concussive symptoms of a traumatic brain injury. He is filing suit. Agents claimed Shouhed was impeding a raid at his car was but he was never charged.

Those are only a few of the incidents in which overzealous ICE agents, with no training or qualifications, have attacked and brutalized American citizens. Those two words are worth repeating: American citizens.

ICE, as you may know, is actively recruiting more agents. There are no qualifications, no formal training, no P.O.S.T. (Police Officers Standards and Training) certification

These agents remind me of the types who would kick puppies (or in the case of Kristi Noem, shoot a puppy). They’re the types who would drown kittens just for sport. They’re the types we read about occasionally who get their jollies putting out cigarettes on the bare arms of children. In short, they are not the people one would desire for a next-door neighbor.

They would probably love to live vicariously through Donald Trump, Jr., who gets his thrills severing and displaying the tails of an elephant…

…or a leopard he and/or brother Eric killed:

This, to answer the question I posed in the opening sentence, is what we’ve become and I, for one, am not very proud of that.

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As in the previous two fundraisers, the one making the largest single contribution will win a first-edition copy of Huey Long’s autobiography, Every Man a King.

Long was assassinated in the State Capitol he built 90 years ago. While he achieved many of his goals for the state (better roads, free text books, etc.), he did so in a style somewhat reminiscent of Donald Trump. He ignored laws, he ran roughshod over political opponents and he enriched himself and his allies via his Win or Lose Oil Co. His subordinates were simply unable to hold his machine together with some of them actually going to prison.

But the good he did for the working people of Louisiana cannot be denied. That alone sets him apart from Trump who has done zero to improve the lives of working Americans.

Here are examples of how diligently other media are scrutinizing the Trump administration:

• Jeff Bezos is silencing Trump critics from the opinion section of The Washington Post.
• Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has terminated fact-checking on both Facebook and Instagram.
• CBS settled a lawsuit with Trump for $16 million – over the network’s editing process.
• ABC settled paid Trump $15 million in the settlement of another lawsuit it could have won.
• Google just settled a bogus lawsuit by paying Trump $25 billion. (The Washington Post capitulated and the other three companies each had applications pending before federal agencies, making their settlements little more than extortion payoffs.)
• Seven separate law firms have promised a combined $615 in free legal services to Trump in exchange for TACO Don’s not blacklisting them. That, my friends, is blackmail.

• Several universities have caved to Trump’s demands to alter the way courses are taught, including changing history and science.

Please help LouisianaVoice in its efforts to keep bringing you the stories the mainstream media continue to ignore. We have no applications pending before anyone and I’m not beholden to anyone for a job. We are small, but we won’t back down or be anyone’s lap dog.

Please go HERE and scroll down to the YELLOW DONATE BUTTON to make a one-time contribution via credit card.

Your support is both needed and appreciated.

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LouisianaVoice may well be a small voice in the wilderness compared to ProPublica, The Guardian and several other major sources. But a chorus of small voices can contribute to a groundswell of public opinion when they all do what the mainstream media will not do in presenting the facts to readers thirsty for knowledge about what their government is up to.

Like the story below this post, the chichanery of your public officials often go unreported with the usual perfunctory explanations and comments that say and reveal little of the real story – unless there is someone like LouisianaVoice to give you some of the background information.

As one of our readers recently said, quite accurately, I might add: “We need in this country today, the kinds of massive protests we had during the Vietnam era. These large, sustained demonstrations received national attention and gained broad public support. Silent acquiescence, like we have today, only allows the MAGA regime to achieve its diabolical aims far too quickly. We are at a turning point.”

A large, sustained demonstration is precisely what this country is now begging for. That’s the only way those in Congress – especially six Repugnantcans from Louisiana – will ever get the message that what they are allowing by their timid silence is detrimental to their constituents and those constituents are simply not going to accept that sort of representation any longer.

That is what we’re about at LouisianaVoice. We’re small. But so were most revolutions when they first started. To continue our effort with the intensity that is necessary, we need your support now more than ever.

Please go to HERE and scroll down to the YELLOW DONATE BUTTON to make a one-time contribution via credit card.

As always, your generosity is greatly and sincerely appreciated.

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Picture this:

Two football teams are playing an important game. Suddenly, the coach of Team A takes it upon himself to pull the quarterback, the star running back and the top receiver for Team B.

Wait. What? How can the coach of Team A pull players for Team B off the field?

Or, say LSU baseball coach Jay Johnson is headed into an important series with another team for a super-regional championship when suddenly, the other team’s coach says LSU’s best pitcher and its best hitter cannot play.

Sounds crazy. But that’s exactly what has happened between two Louisiana officials, Secretary of State Nancy Landry and Attorney General Liz Murrill.

Murrill, you see, has, in effect, PULLED THE STARTERS for Landry’s team who were all set to square away on a high-stakes legal battle by firing all of Landry’s outside legal counsel which pretty much upends the betting odds on this game’s outcome.

The game is an ongoing effort by the state (with Murrill acting on behalf of the state) to throw out a key section of the Voting Rights Act, a provision once supported but now opposed by Murrill and her puppet master, Jeff Landry. Murrill’s legal counsel, State Solicitor General Benjamin Aguinaga, is set to argue LOUISIANA v CALLAIS before the U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 15.

Should Murrill prevail, the Louisiana Legislature would redraw Louisiana’s congressional districts – again.

If that happens, yet another redistricting could result in the loss of one – or both – black seats currently held by Troy Carter (2^nd District) and Cleo Fields (6^th District) – gerrymandering the way Trump intended, in other words.

Landry, meanwhile, has submitted her own brief in which she says she has always opposed the Legislature’s 2024 decision – that’s the one that had the full support of Landry/Murrill – to create a second black-majority congressional seat that Fields subsequently won.

Murrill now says that Landry challenged her (Murrill’s) authority prior to the scheduled U.S. Supreme Court hearing to invalidate Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act signed by Lyndon Johnson.

Murrill obviously didn’t like her chances, being opposed by Landry and all. And it’s fair certain the Supreme Court justices might wonder why the state’s attorney general was being opposed from within her own administration – and party.

So, the obvious thing to do was to fire Landry’s attorneys. What better way to enhance your own legal position?

As a point of clarity, the hiring of outside legal counsel by state agencies is normally done with the concurrence of the attorney general’s office. Up to now, that’s been pretty much routine, kind of like kicking an extra point or throwing an 0-2 pitch in the dirt to see of the batter will chase it. In fact, in my 20 years at the Office of Risk Management, where we hired attorneys or appointed AG attorneys literally on a daily basis, I cannot recall a single instance in which the AG failed or refused to concur on an attorney appointment. Nor can I remember in those 20 years a single time when an attorney was fired – though I could name quite a few attorneys whom I considered inept who should’ve been canned.

But the rules have changed since the hordes of Repugnantcans seized the reins of power and began putting Project 2025 into play on a widescale basis, from Washington to the state houses. And it’s especially true when they see that the position they’ve staked out might be challenged – whether by a news agency, a public official, a university or a late-night talk show comedian.

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