Louisiana Voice

LouisianaVoice is now officially in the final days of the final week of its fall fundraiser and your support is still needed.

LouisianaVoice recently successfully defended a lawsuit but it cost money to defend. It’s fairly certain that others are going to try and silence me as I uncover more and more wrongdoing at all levels of government. That’s the risk one runs when shining a light on those who prefer the darkness.

But LouisianaVoice will not be silenced.

LouisianaVoice is not a major publication with a covey of corporate lawyers to represent it in efforts to obtain records or to provide a legal defense when some public official decides to retaliate.

You will find precisely one LouisianaVoice-sanctioned advertisement on this page. It’s for Cavalier House Books of Denham Springs. The owner built this web page for me and refused payment. I insisted that he place a free ad on our page. Any other ads that pop up on your screen when you log onto LouisianaVoice appear against my wishes and are certainly of no financial benefit to me or LouisianaVoice.

My objective when I started this service was to bring you, along with the occasional feature, investigative stories that other media are ignoring for reasons of their own. I never expected readers to agree with everything I post. That’s why there is a comment section: for you to voice your opinions on any of the topics I cover.

Whether you agree with me or not, I refuse to censor comments on LouisianaVoice because censorship is the one thing we all should fear most. It’s the first step toward dictatorship. The only time I will block a comment is if it contains objectionable language or racial slurs. I will not tolerate gutter rhetoric or attacks on one’s gender, ethnicity, or religious beliefs. Everything else is fair game. I encourage free discourse.

With that noble principle made abundantly clear, LouisianaVoice still needs your financial support. There are only three more days of this blubbering panhandling, so please click on the yellow “DONATE” button to the right side of this post and give what you can by credit card or send a check for more than you can afford to:

LouisianaVoice

P.O. Box 922

Denham Springs, LA. 70726

(Unlike the average televangelist, I will not purchase a Rolls-Royce, an airplane, or a vacation home in the mountains. Nor will I go shopping for a diamond pinkie ring or a Rolex watch. I’m strictly jeans, T-shirts, and pickup trucks, though I do own an old Bulova Accutron.)

Seriously, thank you all for your support.

Tom Aswell, publisher

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Retired attorney Fred Mulhearn of Ruston is also a part time cartoonist of considerable talent, not to mention a good friend. But please, don’t hold that against him.

Following his retirement, he and wife Roxanne pulled up stakes in Denham Springs (not long before the disastrous flood of August 2016—talk about timing!) and moved back to Ruston, which is also my hometown.

Fred peddles his cartoons to newspapers across the state and also will soon be coming out with his second book of cartoons chronicling life in Looziana.

You can purchase copies of both of his cartoon books by clicking on the blue “I support my local bookstore” icon to the right of this post. That will take you to Cavalier House Books in Denham Springs and they will ship the book to your door (did I mention I support local businesses over the big box stores?)

Fred will also be signing copies of both his books at the Louisiana Book Festival to be held on the State Capitol grounds in downtown Baton Rouge on Saturday Oct. 28. I’ll be there, but not signing books—just roaming around, trying to look intelligent and hobnobbing with real writers.

Anyway, Fred has graciously consented to allow LouisianaVoice to post some of his cartoons from time to time. The one below is especially timely.

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One week to go.

Stories like the two below this shameless request for financial contributions are what I do here at LouisianaVoice.

As Baton Rouge radio talk show host Jim Engster observed during one of my appearances on his show, the flood of August 2016 destroyed my home but it didn’t get my computer. LouisianaVoice continued its quest for stories other media ignore or don’t know about.

I’m not the greatest reporter to come down the pike. Far from it. I can think of several right here in Baton Rouge who are far better than I. But for the most part, they are constrained in what they can pursue by sheer economics as newspapers, suffering from the loss of ad revenue, are cutting back exactly where they shouldn’t: in the news room. This puts a strain on small staffs to cover all the news. Consequently, some deserving stories get what my grandmother described as “a lick and a promise.”

I am a retiree with nothing but time on my hands and a pickup truck and a computer at my disposal. I can dig deeper than a reporter on a deadline can. For me, it’s not a sprint to beat a deadline, it’s a marathon to reach the finish line with the full story.

But to do so, I need your help. As I said, I’m a retiree on a fixed income and this blog does incur expenses. Anything you can contribute, no matter how large or small, would be appreciated more than you could ever know. Your contribution helps us to defer expenses of paying for copies of records, gasoline, auto repair, computer maintenance, printer cartridges, etc. Everything you give goes to gathering and reporting news of corruption, graft, ethics violations, and general mismanagement of your tax dollars.

Please help by clicking on the yellow “DONATE” button at the right of this post and give by credit card or by mailing a check to:

LouisianaVoice

P.O. Box 922

Denham Springs, LA. 70726

And thanks so much!

Tom Aswell, publisher

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Corruption, abuse of public office, scams, Ponzi schemes, politicians shamelessly bought by campaign funds, lobbyists who drown out the voices of the people, salary inequities, fraud, Wall Street manipulation of our very lives, adverse audits of public agencies we trust with our funds and resources, poor quality of living, poor national rankings, education as a political football, State Police corruption, questionable activities at the Office of State Fire Marshal, lawsuits, adoption fraud that’s frighteningly close to human trafficking, profiteering at the expense of taxpayers…

These are samples of the stories LouisianaVoice covers on a daily basis—of advertisements or subscription fees.

That’s why we hold two fundraisers a year—to solicit your generous support of what we do.

It doesn’t take much, but it does require financial resources to keep our work going. Just so you know, I do not take a salary from LouisianaVoice. Zero.

The contributions you make are plowed right back into the work of investigating public corruption, fraud, and ethics violations.

We’re heading into our final week of our fall fundraiser. Time is running out for our final push of 2017.

Please do what you can. All contributions are appreciated. Click on the yellow “DONATE” icon at the right and give by credit card or mail your check to:

LouisianaVoice

P.O. Box 922

Denham Springs, LA. 70726

And thanks.

Tom Aswell, publisher

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Folks, please don’t forget that LouisianaVoice is presently conducting its fall fund drive and I desperately need your help in keeping the flow of fresh, thorough, investigative stories coming. I’m about to embark on a field I’ve never covered before but which has been brought to my attention: human trafficking of babies for adoption.

Adoption scams are about the worst type of criminal activity out there, with the exception of the trafficking of young girls for prostitution—another area not previously covered by LouisianaVoice but certainly not immune from our examination.

It doesn’t matter if you have ever adopted a child, know an adopted child, or ever intend to adopt. If there are people profiting from illegal activity in this field, you should want it exposed.

We live in a sick society, as evidenced by the proliferation of drugs, high crime rates, extreme poverty even as the 1 percent get wealthier, violence such as the Las Vegas shootings, lax enforcement of criminal violations by those with money and influence by authorities from the U.S. attorney general to the Louisiana attorney general and to local district attorneys, and, of course, human trafficking.

Not to be overly boastful, but LouisianaVoice the only medium that is working to expose wrongdoing on a consistent basis. Others do so sporadically but as soon as the next hot news story comes along, it’s forgotten, pushed to the bottom of the to-do list.

Please help me to continue doing this. Click on the yellow “DONATE” button to the right of this post and give what you can by credit card or send a check to:

LouisianaVoice

P.O. Box 922

Denham Springs, LA. 70727

As always, thanks for your support.

Tom Aswell, publisher

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