Louisiana Voice

The debate over what is and what is not a public meeting has been ramped up a notch by an email exchange between blogger Robert Burnes and Baton Rouge attorney Todd Gaudin.

It was Gaudin, whose law practice specialty is adoptions, who, when Burns insisted he was entitled to videotape proceedings of last Friday’s meeting of the Louisiana State Law Institute (LSLI) because it was a public meeting, said, “I don’t agree with your interpretation.”

Gaudin was in attendance because LSLI was meeting to act on House Concurrent Resolution 79 of the 2016 legislative session. HCR 79, introduced by State Rep. Rick Edmonds (R-Baton Rouge), directed LSLI to “study and make recommendations to the legislature regarding abuse of incentives in the adoption process.”

In an email exchange between Gaudin and Burns, Gaudin explained his position further:

“I was referring to the issue of whether our group is actually a public body,” he said. I assumed it was not because it is a group of professionals who volunteer and (who) are not appointed to improve our laws by discussing their merits.”

Actually, LSLI was chartered precisely to “improve our laws by discussing their merits,” but I’ll get to that point presently.

After reading his response to Burns, I sent him the following, lifted verbatim from the Louisiana statute (R.S. 42:13):

• “Public body” means village, town, and city governing authorities; parish governing authorities; school boards and boards of levee and port commissioners; boards of publicly operated utilities; planning, zoning, and airport commissions; and any other state, parish, municipal, or special district boards, commissions, or authorities, and those of any political subdivision thereof, where such body possesses policy making, advisory, or administrative functions, including any committee or subcommittee of any of these bodies enumerated in this paragraph. (emphasis mine.)

Clinging doggedly to his position, he replied an hour later:

“That may be your opinion whoever you are but I disagree. This committee does not meet any of those definitions. So, what is clear to you apparently is not so clear.”

Okay, it’s on now. I’m not an attorney but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, so I fired off this email to Gaudin:

“LSLI was created by the Louisiana Legislature to advise the legislature on drafting bills for law reform. The fact that members are volunteers makes not a whit of difference.”

This is from the LSLI home page:

• The Louisiana State Law Institute, originally authorized by the Board of Supervisors of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, with its domicile at the Law School of that University, was chartered, created and organized as an official law revision commission, law reform agency and legal research agency of the State of Louisiana, by Act 166 of the Legislature of 1938 (Chapter 4 of Title 24 of the Louisiana Revised Statutes of 1950).
• The Institute is sustained by legislative appropriation. (Again, this is from the LSLI home page on the web.)
• This organization originated in a movement, initiated here at L.S.U. in 1933, to establish an institute dedicated to law revision, law reform and legal research. Due to economic reasons that project was postponed until April, 1938, when the Board of Supervisors authorized its revival, under its present name. The Legislature, later in the year, chartered, created and organized it as ‘an official, advisory law revision commission, law reform agency and legal research agency of the State of Louisiana.’(Ditto.)

(All emphasis in the above paragraphs mine.)

And if that’s not sufficient, here is the first paragraph of the LSLI charter (also on its web page):

LOUISIANA REVISED STATUTES OF 1950
TITLE 24
CHAPTER 4. LOUISIANA STATE LAW INSTITUTE

R.S. 24:201. Creation and functions

The Louisiana State Law Institute, organized under authority of the Board of Supervisors of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, domiciled at the Law School of the Louisiana State University, is chartered, created and organized as an official advisory law revision commission, law reform agency and legal research agency of the state of Louisiana.

This definition extends to all reports generated by LSLI, to wit:

R.S. 24:205. Reports; advisory capacity; printing and distribution of reports

The Louisiana State Law Institute, in submitting reports to the legislature shall act solely in an advisory capacity. Its reports, studies, and recommended publications shall be public and available as provided by law. (As before, all emphasis mind.)

“Now I respectfully ask, what about this do you not comprehend? Everything about LSLI—even its very charter—screams public body.”

There has been no response from Gaudin to that last message.

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LouisianaVoice is about to embark on a special project that should be dear to all our hearts: the exposure of illicit, most likely, illegal adoptive services run by unscrupulous operators who profit from lax oversight of the industry by Louisiana regulatory agencies, including the attorney general’s office.

It’s a lucrative business, this process of forcing prospective adoptive parents into bidding wars against each other in efforts to adopt newborn babies.

This is what I do at LouisianaVoice and it’s not easy. It costs me time from my family, wear and tear on my vehicle, an eight-year-old pickup truck, and it costs me money for gasoline, the cost of public records and, occasionally, the cost of litigation to obtain those public records.

I don’t get paid to do this. I don’t accept advertising (though I’m seeing pop-up ads beginning to appear on my posts without my authority and certainly without my receiving anything for them) and I don’t charge a subscription fee.

So, why do I do this? Quite simply, I love Louisiana but I don’t love what our politicians have allowed her to become: a national (sometimes international) laughingstock that ranks number one in only one statistic: the number of people incarcerated in our prisons. We rank at or near the bottom in health care, wage disparity, poverty, obesity, education, income, pollution, infrastructure, and any number of other areas.

And what have our politicians done to improve the quality of life for our citizens? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Oh, they take care of themselves, raking in campaign contributions which they manipulate to pad their own lifestyle.

The mission of LouisianaVoice is to burrow into these darkened corners of state government and to shine a little light on the mischief wrought by elected officials and their appointees. Call it my own special way to flip off the entrenched political establishment: Payback for what they’ve done to Louisiana’s citizens who deserve better.

To achieve this ambitious goal, I need your financial support. You won’t get a spiritual blessing like those promised by televangelists, but you will get a warm fuzzy feeling every time these ethics-bending, morally corrupt “public servants” are exposed for what for what they are.

Please help me do this lonely job—lonely because there are so few investigative reporters out there today. Look around you and see what the mainstream media has become. Once distinguished daily newspapers have been scooped up by corporations headquartered in the northeast who know little of our culture, politics, or history. Reporting staffs have been gutted and those who remain don’t have the time or energy to probe for the what, why, where, when and how.

Please click on the yellow “DONATE” button to the upper right on this page and contribute by credit card or mail your checks, large or small (they’re all appreciated) to:

LouisianaVoice

P.O. Box 922

Denham Springs, LA. 70727

As always, thanks for your help and keep reading.

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Spoiler alert:

It’s 9:30 p.m. Friday and I just returned from watching American Made, the Tom Cruise movie about Baton Rouge drug smuggler Barry Seal.

In brief: more plot holes than a meerkat colony.

If you want to catch the movie for yourself and don’t want to know in advance about the movie’s adherence to or deviation from the facts, stop here because I intend to go into more detail than you normally find in a movie review.

To cut to the chase, if you just want to be entertained, the story line is passable, if implausible. If you want historical facts, stay home and read retired FBI agent Del Hahn’s book Smuggler’s End. Hahn is the one who eventually nailed seal and yours truly edited the manuscript for his book, so I know a little about the story of Barry Seal and Del Hahn knows even more—a lot more.

After watching American Made, I now understand why they start the movie with the graphics “Based on a true story” instead of “True story.” I can state unequivocally that it’s not based on Hahn’s book.

The true parts of this movie are;

• The main character was indeed named Barry Seal.
• He was the youngest pilot in TWA history.
• He did smuggle drugs.
• He did live in Baton Rouge.
• He was, in fact, assassinated at the Baton Rouge Salvation Army headquarters.

The rest of the “true” part is pure garbage. Some examples:

• Seal was fired from TWA, he did not quit as the movie depicts it.
• Seal and his family never moved to Mena, Arkansas, as they did in the movie.
• Seal was never prosecuted by the Arkansas attorney general; he was prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney in Baton Rouge.
• It was not an Arkansas judge who sentenced Seal to 1,000 hours of community service—in Baton Rouge; it was a Baton Rouge federal judge who sentenced him to spend nights at the Baton Rouge Salvation Army headquarters. Even screenwriters should know an Arkansas state judge would not be able to cross jurisdictional lines to sentence someone to community service in another state.
• Following his fictional arrest by DEA, Arkansas state police, ATF, and sheriff’s deputies as all four agencies conducted improbable simultaneous raids on his Mena airport (in fact, he was never arrested in Arkansas), the Arkansas attorney general was ordered by “Governor Clinton” to let him go, another absurd only-in-Hollywood scenario of a state governor ordering the FBI to stand down.
• Seal never “owned” the Mena Airport and the adjoining several thousand acres. He only parked his planes there (I just don’t know how that was concocted by the script writers).
• Contras were not smuggled into Mena to train at a paramilitary base to return to Nicaragua to fight the Sandinistas. No such paramilitary base ever existed at or around Mena.
• Seal never had a brother-in-law who stole from him and was subsequently killed in a car bombing. It just didn’t happen—except in the movie. I call that filler material thrown in to lengthen the movie.
• He was never drafted to photograph the Medellin cartel unloading drugs for the Sandinista by the CIA, the DEA, The National Security Administration, or any other federal agency; he offered himself up to Vice President George H.W. Bush’s South Florida Drug Task Force in a plea bargain to stay out of jail after his indictment for smuggling barbiturates and that plan to photograph the cartel was the end result.
• That mission was part of the complex Iran-Contra drugs-for-arms deal hatched by Col. Oliver North. The movie barely mentions Iran-Contra and does so as a plot pitched after Seal was killed, which is chronologically skewed.
• He was not prosecuted in Baton Rouge for his part in the Iran-Contra drugs for arms deal; he was prosecuted in Baton Rouge because he resumed smuggling drugs into Louisiana and was caught.
• He was married to Debbie Seal, his third wife, at the time of his death, not “Lucy.”

I suppose 5 percent fact and 95 percent fiction can pass as “based on a true story” to suit the purposes of Hollywood screenwriters but I would much prefer at least a 50-50 balance before I would concede that it was, in fact, “based on a true story.”

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LouisianaVoice is still conducting its fall fundraiser and we need your help to keep these stories coming.

We know you get tired of organizations coming around with their hand out. It’s enough to induce fundraiser fatigue.

And we get just as tired of begging for contributions like some down and out preacher promising a blessing if you just open up your wallet.

We can’t—and won’t—promise a blessing. Chances are, if we are able to continue doing what we’ve done for the past six-plus years, we’ll make you mad at some point. Maybe it’ll be the legislature you get mad at. Or maybe it’ll be some scam artist conning the elderly who we reveal. It could even be the plight of some small town city council member who those in power are trying to shut up by suing him. We don’t know who will be the object of your anger, but if we don’t make you mad, we’re not doing our job.

Help us do our job to make you mad!

Contribute what you feel you can by clicking on the yellow “DONATE” button to the right and contribute by credit card or mail your contribution to:

LouisianaVoice

P.O. Box 922

Denham Springs, LA. 70727

As always, thank you for your support (with apologies to Bartles & Jaymes)

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It brings me no pleasure to chronicle topics like the two stories below this post.

But if I don’t do it, there is little indication that the mainstream media will do so on a consistent basis.

Oh, when a story pops up, they’ll jump on it and then quickly move on to the next hot button issue.

LouisianaVoice covered the less than ethical approach to management at Louisiana State Police for more than three years before the MSM jumped in at the last moment to claim credit for breaking the story about the ill-advised San Diego trip that led to the resignation of LSP Superintendent Mike Edmonson.

Likewise, the MSM jumped on board when we broke the story about Superintendent of Education John White’s agreeing to provide Rupert Murdoch and his companies with sensitive information about Louisiana public school students.

But for the large part, they have ignored our stories about efforts to sell water from Toledo Bend to Texas businessmen, the raping of the a 17-year-old girl in a Union Parish jail cell more than 17 months ago—an investigation of which the attorney general’s office still hasn’t managed to conclude, the comical but unsuccessful attempt by the Jindal administration to silence those with differing opinions by firing them or reassigning legislators to other committees, the influence of campaign contributions on legislative decisions, and the list goes on.

That’s why LouisianaVoice exists: to give you a peek at the ugly underbelly of politics so that you may know what your elected officials and their appointees are really up to.

But we cannot continue to do this without your support.

That’s the only reason we hold two fundraisers per year—one in the fall and one in the spring. We have to have income to underwrite our work. It doesn’t take much, but it does take money in addition to the time we invest on research tips, some of which lead to stories and many that turn out to be dead-ends. But even the dead-end stories sometimes are resurrected when additional information becomes known.

That’s why I am asking for your financial support, no matter how large or small. Every bit helps us keep the stories coming.

Please click on the yellow “DONATE” icon at the right and give what you feel you can by credit card or by sending a check to:

LouisianaVoice

P.O. Box 922

Denham Springs, Louisiana 70727

Thank you for your consideration.

Tom Aswell, publisher

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