Louisiana Voice

 Iran has a strait. The Trump administration doesn’t have a pair.

–The Wall Street Journal

Read Full Post »

It’s almost so surreal that the entire episode becomes hilarious.

Except it’s not funny at all.

If it wasn’t the leader of an entire nation and his whack-o U.S. attorney causing the scene, it might be funny, but it isn’t.

If the whole affair wasn’t a national embarrassment, it might be funny, but it wasn’t and it isn’t.

If this was a SNL skit or a John Oliver monologue (and it probably will be before long), it would be funny, but it isn’t.

If it wasn’t a total waste of some $16 million (against an initial cost estimate of $1.5 million to $2 million), it would be humorous, but it’s not.

If this had not attacked and damaged the reputation of a patriotic American, it might be funny, but there’s nothing—absolutely nothing—funny about a false arrest.

If some TV writer had written a sitcom pilot with a plot this absurd, it would have never made it to prime time; it’s that bad.

After holding a high-profile press conference in which she said with such conviction that the Reflecting Pool was damaged by David Hearn’s “forcefully and violently pulling at the pool’s liner and destroying it,” U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro ate a ton of crow that had to have a bitter taste when she abruptly dropped all charges against Hearn.

That, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, is the Trump administration in a nutshell.

To begin with, Pirro treated the entire event as if it were the Linberg kidnapping, the Brinks robbery, the JFK assassination and D.B. Cooper all rolled into one big crime spree. In her press conference, she had all the intensity and earnestness of Elliot Ness in hot pursuit of Al Capone.

And, of course, there was Trump insisting that some unpatriotic vandal had taken a box cutter and sliced a 350-foot gash in the liner. He neglected to explain how such a devious act went unseen despite 24-hour camera surveillance of the entire pool.

On Friday, typical of elected officials when there’s embarrassing news, opted for a Friday evening news dump—a time when most Capitol reporters have headed out of town for the weekend and there’s little actual coverage of non-catastrophic events, Pirro moved to dismiss the indictment against Hearn, admitting in the court filing that the damage to the sealant was caused by “flawed installation.”

She said her office had received information and evidence that “significantly undermine the evidentiary basis for the indictment.” That’s a far cry from her initial pronouncement that there was “no doubt” Hearn had single-handedly destroyed a national landmark with his fingers which, by no means, resemble a box cutter.

Trump, as is his wont, absolutely blew a gasket. He flew into a rage at Pirro, saying he disagreed “100 percent with Jeanine Pirro…I don’t know what she was thinking. To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM (El Trump-o loves banging out his messages on Truth Social in all caps).”

Pirro, however, stuck to her guns, blaming in typical Trumpian style, the Interior Department.

Hell, everybody in that group of crazies has to blame someone else. No blame for employing off half-cocked, looney-tune accusations with no supporting evidence in order to obtain a shamefully illegitimate indictment of an innocent person.

It goes all the way back to 1989 when he took on the so-called Central Park Five (now known as the Exonerated Five) who were wrongfully convicted of raping a woman jogging in New York City. Even though they were eventually exonerated, Trump never once admitted he was wrong about them; he even took out a full-page ad in four major New York newspapers in which he screamed in his usual all-caps, “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!”

Like everything else Trump does, that, too, was not funny.

What should transpire now is that Hearn should file a multi-million-dollar defamation lawsuit against Trump and Pirro and ask that the trial be held at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, adjacent to the Reflecting Pool.

Now that would be funny.

Read Full Post »

No sooner than we post a story about Louisiana’s ranking DEAD LAST OF ALL 50 STATES than up pops yet another survey that has us buried at the bottom of the pile.

That’s the way it is in good ol’ Loozeraner: we can just never get enough of a good thing.

We’re unable to offer a link to this story in The Washington Post because that publication has a paywall, but there’s a story in today’s edition that reports the results of a survey of the road systems in every state and the results should come as no surprise to anyone:

Louisiana ranks 46^th out of 50 state highway systems.

Who, pray tell, ranks lower? Well, Alaska ranks 50^th to hold down the dead-last anchor position but it’s a well-established fact that the best way to get around in Alaska is by airplane because so much of the state is impossible to navigate by automobile. So, no surprise there.

But New York at 47^th? might come as something of a surprise.

Washington State is 48^th but the biggest surprise might be that California is ranked next-to-last in 49^th place.

So, Louisiana can perhaps take pride in the knowledge that it beat out two of the highest-taxed states in the nation in at least one survey.

As a side note, I once attended a conference in New Orleans. Also in attendance was a person from Detroit. I asked her how she like dodging the street potholes in New Orleans and she replied that she would gladly swap Detroit streets for those in the Crescent City. To tell the truth, that shocked me; I didn’t think there were worse streets than New Orleans anywhere.

But back to our latest survey, because there’s more to reveal.

Four states have more than 5 percent of rural interstate roads in poor conditions. Louisiana is not one of them, but it’s pretty darn close. Alaska, as expected, is worst with 10.86 percent of its rural interstate classified as in poor condition, followed by California (7.29 percent), Colorado (7.21 percent) and Arizona (5.1 percent). Louisiana is a solid 5^th place with 4.55 percent of it rural interstate system deemed to be in poor shape.

Four states also have more than 20 percent of urban arterial roads in poor condition. Again, Louisiana is not one of the four, but our state does make it in the bottom 10 percent. California is worst with 32 percent of urban arterial roads in crappy condition, followed by Nebraska (28 percent), Rhode Island (27 percent) and New York (25 percent). Louisiana comes in ninth worst with 17 percent of its urban arterial roads classified as in poor condition.

Where’s Alaska, you ask? Well, bear in mind Alaska has precious few urban arterial roads to begin with, so there’s that.

One thing the survey did find: high gas taxes don’t necessary correlate with good roads. California, for example, has the highest per-gallon gasoline tax in the country at 71 cents, followed by Washington State at 59 cents per gallon and both states rank near the bottom in the quality of their roads. Louisiana taxes motorists 21 cents per gallon for gasoline, seventh-lowest in the country. Alaska has the lowest per-gallon tax on gasoline at just 9 cents.

Of course, that statistic can be misleading because gasoline taxes and other user fees (like tolls) account for only about half of state and local road spending with the remainder coming from general revenue.

But, tax rates and highway conditions aside, here’s a statistic that will blow some away, particularly those of you who work in Baton Rouge and New Orleans but live in the suburbs: The time lost while commuting in peak-hour congestion.

The typical Louisiana driver loses three days per year sitting in commuter traffic. In Texas, drivers spend on average 4.6 days per year in traffic, thanks in large part to cities like Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Fort Worth. In California, drivers lose 6.2 days, primarily because of the impossible traffic of Los Angeles.

But that’s nothing compared to New Jersey where drivers lose a whopping 10.6 days per year in commuting. That’s a little north of two full work weeks.

But I’m not surprised. In my only trip to that neck of the woods, I tried to get from Jersey into New York City and ended up back at the same toll booth in Orange, N.J. (count ‘em) four times, paying a toll each time. After the fourth trip, the toll taker commented he knew me so well by then he was going to have to invite me to his home for dinner.

Paraphrasing W.C. Fields’s remark about Philadelphia, I spent a year in Jersey one day.

Read Full Post »

It isn’t exactly a chicken-or-egg puzzle, but a questions Americans should be asking is the Trump war is exacerbating the current inflationary trend brought on by skyrocketing gasoline prices, which have an unquestionable ripple effect on the entire economy, or are the big oil companies somehow taking full advantage of the situation in order to gouge consumers?

If the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz was truly the sole cause of the squeeze being felt by consumers, it would stand to reason to assume the oil companies would also be feeling the effects of a negatively-impacted international oil market. I mean, we’re all in this together, right?

Wrong.

ExxonMobil and Chevron on Friday REPORTED COMBINED $26.5 BILLION in profits during the second quarter of this year. Chevron’s earnings for the second quarter were $12 billion, a $2.4 billion increase over the same quarter a year ago—when there was no Iran war. It was Chevron’s biggest profit since 2020.

ExxonMobil’s earnings, also announced on Friday, were $14.5 billion, more than double what was reported by the company for the same quarter of a year ago. Shell also reported earnings that doubled its quarterly profits from a year ago.

The record earnings had such a bad look that The Washington Post had a headline that read, “As drivers get sticker shock, bit oil gets a windfall.”

Is it a coincidence that in 2024, candidate Trump ASKED BIG OIL TO CONTRIGUTE $1 BILLION to his campaign and he would roll back Biden environmental regulations, including tax credits for electric vehicles and would cut spending for the development of wind power, both of which could make a dent in Big Oil’s earnings if continued at the same rate?

When asked about the windfall profits reported by the oil companies, a White House spokesperson attempted not-so-deftly to divert attention from the firms to Iran with the by-now empty pledge that “oil and gas prices will plummet back to pre-conflict levels” when the U.S. disables Iran’s blockade to the flow of crude. Well, that little conflict was supposed to be over in a couple of weeks (anyone else notice it’s always “two weeks” with every single promise Trump makes). It’s now been five months with no resolution in sight.

Meanwhile, Big Oil continues to take full advantage of the situation by gouging Americans at the gas pump.

Read Full Post »