Louisiana Voice

“Five years after Jan. 6, 2021, we are still caught up in a struggle between forces who are willing to use authoritarian violence outside the Constitution to take and wield power and those who stand up nonviolently for our Constitution in the streets and in the polling places. Neither side can claim victory yet.”

— Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland)

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In pondering the news of the day, a couple of questions keep popping up in light of the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores and statements that the pair will be tried under U.S. law for crimes allegedly committed in their country.

In March 2023, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued ARREST WARRANTS for Bladimir Putin for the war crime of unlawful deportation and transfer of children during the Ruso-Ukrainian War. More simply stated, that’s child trafficking.

Last August, Putin met with our very own Mango Mussolini in ALASKA but was not arrested or detained.

Of course, the U.S. does not recognize the ICC but so what? Putin is a murderer and he was on U.S. soil and the Trump administration did nothing.

Yet, the leader of a country with which we are not at war and which has not invaded any other sovereign nation is TO BE TRIED in the Southern District of New York on charges of narco-terrorism conspiracy and cocaine importation conspiracy.

Not only is he to be tried in the U.S., but Trump actually boasted following Maduro’s capture that the U.S. is “GOING TO RUN” Venezuela.

That wouldn’t be because Venezuela has the world’s largest deposits of oil reserves, would it? Sounds strangely familiar to bogus claims of weapons of mass destruction in another oil-rich country by another Repugnantcan administration.

At this rate, Trump may be asked to forfeit his FIFA Peace Award.

There’s no questioning the fact that Maduro is a thug, a despot, a tyrant. But it seems a tad strange that he could be singled out for his crimes even though there was no indictment and he was captured only after the U.S. invaded Venezuela while Putin is allowed to come and go with impunity in this country and indeed, is treated like royalty.

Just sayin’…

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It’s official.

It’s always been suspected but SB46 by Sen. Michael “Big Mike” Fesi (R-Houma) formally certified a handful of legislators who co-sponsored Fesi’s bill and our governor who signed it into law as nut cases.

And when the final votes were tallied, you can include 34 other state senators and 46 additional representatives as candidates for residency in the Hotel Silly.

While virtually every list places Louisiana near the bottom nationally in income, education, obesity, child poverty, teen pregnancy, environment and overall quality of life, 15 morons of mediocrity jumped on the bandwagon last year to sponsor a bill requiring the Department of Environmental Quality to track reports of (gasp!) contrails.

Fesi and his bill’s co-sponsors preferred to call them “chemtrails” when in reality, they’re contrails, or water vapor.

But Fesi, following the lead of Tennessee and a few other hysterical state legislatures, was certain we were being sprayed with chemicals, a conspiracy theory that scientists debunked long ago and far away.

But never mind. Fesi managed to convince fellow Sens. Heather Cloud (R-Turkey Creek) and Valarie Hodges (R-Denham Springs) and 12 representatives: Beryl Amedee (R-Houma), Michael Bayham, Jr. (R-Chalmette), Marcus Bryant (D-New Iberia), Kimberly Coates (R-Ponchatoula), Raymond Crews (R-Bossier City), Kellee Hennessee Dickerson (R-Denham Springs), Kathy Edmonston (R-Gonzales), Peter Egan (R-Covington), Dodie Horton (R-Haughton), Danny McCormick (R-Oil City).

It’s Chicken Little screaming the sky is falling come to fruition.

In the annals of comical acts by the Louisiana Legislature, SB46 has to be one of the most absurd, most asinine pieces of legislation to pass muster and to actually be signed into law (Act 95) by a crackpot governor in the state’s storied history. The same governor and the same legislature, by the way that have blithely sold their souls to the petro-chemical industry that has bestowed upon that stretch along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans as Cancer Alley. Where the hell is the concern over chemical poisoning there?

Oh, I forgot, campaign dollars help to erase inconvenient reality by creating convenient distractions.

Other than those 100 or so plants along Cancer Alley, no one is poisoning us with chemicals from airplanes in the sky and they aren’t chemtrails, they’re CONTRAILS, which are created when airplanes fly in cold and humid atmospheric conditions and ice crystals form around the exhaust particles emitted from the plane’s engines.

But that explanation obviously wasn’t good enough for Fesi, et al. He just had to rush to introduce his bill to save humanity—or at least those living within the borders of the Bayou State.

Even more disheartening is the fact that the full House gave its FINAL APPROVAL by a 58-33 vote with 14 having the good sense to go fishing and not even participate in the vote. The SENATE VOTE was even more lopsided, passing by a 35-0 vote with four of its members choosing not to vote. Thirty-five to zip, folks. They’re speaking gooney-babble in the Louisiana Legislature.

One would think with all the problems facing this state, there would be little time to dawdle over some hairbrained theory about harmless contrails—and be assured, harmless they are..

And one can’t even blame this whacko conspiracy theory on Donald Trump, though on the surface, it sounds like something he would embrace in a late-night message on Truth Social. Instead, his administration has actually PUBLISHED A WEB PAGE debunking the chemtrail conspiracy theory and attempting to explain exactly what those long white clouds are.

Perhaps our squeaky-toy governor should’ve checked with Trump before signing SB 46 into law.

But then it would be completely out of character for our state elected officials to take a logical approach to a real problem–like industrial poisoning of our air and water.

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