Louisiana Voice

Every now and then I invoke personal privilege in order to get something—usually some insignificant something important only to me—off my chest. I can do this because I pay for this Web site and we all have our pet peeves and this is my way of airing mine. (Sometimes, I write these for me.)

My gripe is with the otherwise splendid team of LSU play-by-play announcer Chris Blair and analyst Doug Thompson. They add a whole new dimension to listening to LSU baseball with Blair’s professional and descriptive play-by-play and Thompson’s insightful running analysis of the many subtleties of the game (and make no mistake, baseball is many games within a game, all going on simultaneously and it takes a student of the game like Thompson to convey that).

Having said that, please understand that I have had a lifelong passion for baseball, going all the way back to when Ted Williams and Stan Musial were in the twilights of their careers.

I thought I would never live to see the Red Sox win a World Series after seeing them take the Cardinals (1967), the Reds (1975) and the Mets (1986) to the seventh game each time only to lose the deciding game. Then came 2004 when the Red Sox looked like they had a real chance.

When the hated Yankees won the first three games of the League Championship Series, I fell into despair only to see the Sox rally and tie the series at three games each. Great, I thought. They’ve come all the way back just so they can break my heart again by losing the seventh game. But they didn’t and they swept the Cardinals to win the World Series for the first time since 1918. They won again in 2007, sweeping the Rockies in four straight. Then they won a third time this century when they again dispatched the Cardinals, this time in six games in 2013. Life is good.

I also am a huge fan of LSU baseball and I attend every game I can and I listen whether I’m at the game or at home. (Yes, I’m one of those who watches the game live with a headset on so I can hear the radio broadcast to pick up statistics, sidebar stories, and scores of other games.)

I cherish all six LSU College World Series titles. Framed copies of commemorative Baton Rouge Advocate sports pages heralding the victories, including the one with the photo of pitcher Doug Thompson (yes, the current analyst on the radio broadcasts) after the last out is recorded in the LSU win over Alabama in the championship game, on my home office wall are testament of my devotion. The 1996 College World Series, however, was especially magical and anyone who has ever set foot in Alex Box Stadium on the LSU campus knows all about Warren Morris’s first-pitch, two-out, two-run, home run in the bottom of the ninth that converted a potential 8-7 loss into a 9-7 championship. (Has it really been almost 20 years?) An enlarged framed photo of Morris circling the bases at the old Rosenblatt Stadium as Miami Hurricanes shortstop Alex Cora lies face down in the infield grass also adorns the wall of my home office.

So you see, I love baseball. I always have, always will. To me, it’s the purest sport of them all. Ken Harrelson said it’s the only sport that when you’re on offense, the other team has the ball. It’s also one of only two sports I know (tennis is the other) when the ball hits the white line, it’s not out of bounds (except on serves in tennis). And it was either Joe Schultz or Jim Bouton who said, “It’s a round bat and a round ball and you gotta hit it square.”

But I have a real aversion to sports announcers who violate the most basic of the rules of English grammar. One of the most prevalent errors among sports announcers is the improper usage of the personal pronoun “I.” This is where my one and only complaint about Blair and Thompson comes into play. It seems that they are worse than most in the misuse of “I” in lieu of the correct pronoun “me.”

Just today (Sunday), it was Chris, I believe, who said Ben McDonald “tells Doug and I” that Mississippi State has a strong bullpen.

Only 18 games into the season, I have already lost count of the times I have heard one or the other say (and I’m paraphrasing all but the “I” part), someone “tweeted Chris and I,” or “they cooked up some good ribs for Doug and I,” or “tag Chris and I about your favorite memory” of the former player being featured during a particular game.

Any time one makes a personal pronoun the object of a verb or preposition, it requires the objective form. “I” is subjective; “me” is objective. If you’re confused, try dropping the first name and saying something like “He told I,” or, “If you ask I,” or “Tweet I,” it starts to sound pretty stupid, right? It should be “He told Chris and me,” or “Tweet Chris and me,” or “They cooked up some good ribs for Doug and me.” The same goes for sentences like, “She told Robert and he.” It should be, “She told Robert and him.”

There is a handy Web page that addresses nearly every conceivable question of proper language usage. It’s called Common Errors in English. http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/errors.html#p

For the proper use of “I” and “me,” you can go to this link: http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/myself.html

E-mails to LSU sports and LSU radio have been ignored, so I am using this medium to plead with Chris and Doug to address that bothersome little habit.

Yes, I know, in the overall scheme of things, this really isn’t very important.

Except it is.

School kids listen to the games. Chris and Doug are not only the voices of LSU baseball (and Chris, of course, will next move on to football and basketball with the retirement of Jim Hawthorne), they are, in a very real sense, the voice of higher education; and not just higher education, but Louisiana’s flagship university….and LSU is still an educational institute.

Unlike the massive budget deficit facing the legislature, this is a simple issue to correct.

So, a final word to Chris and Doug: Please try a little harder to sound as though you represent an institution of learning and quit embarrassing your high school English teachers.

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Note to The Hayride blog and its writer John Binder:

Make your links more easily visible and attribute what you post to the person or blog that you copied and pasted from.

Mr. Binder posted a story today (March 14) under the heading TROOPER-GATE: Board Members Tasked With Investigating State Troopers Money Funneling Scheme Also Funneled Money http://thehayride.com/2016/03/trooper-gate-board-members-tasked-with-investigating-state-troopers-money-funneling-scheme-also-funneled-money/

I accused Mr. Binder of failing to include links to our story. The fact is, he did have two links, but did not with the list of contributions. Instead, he simply copied and pasted without proper attribution.

Mr. Binder copied and pasted the list of campaign contributions that I had gone to the trouble of formatting to make them fit on our blogpost without losing their continuity. To do so, I had to squeeze the excel page by deleting several unnecessary columns that included addresses, home towns, and other data that added nothing to the content. https://louisianavoice.com/2016/03/10/state-police-commission-members-probing-lsta-appear-to-have-committed-similar-campaign-contribution-violations/

That, of course, may prompt the obvious question: how do I know Mr. Binder didn’t do his own formatting?

Good question. And there’s a simple answer.

In my listing of campaign contributions by State Police Commission member Freddie Pitcher, I deliberately left a blank line (between campaign recipients Edward James and Nicole Sheppard) with only “F102,” a special coding by the Ethics Commission, included in an otherwise blank space. FREDDIE PITCHER CONTRIBS

That was a deliberate trick I learned from John Hays, the late publisher of Ruston’s Morning Paper.

So while Mr. Binder apparently contacted the same source I had used for my story, he included links that were difficult to recognize and which were not obvious to the reader, he failed to provide links or credit for the list of contributions, which made it appear to his work. It wasn’t. We discussed that and agreed that it was a simple misunderstanding but one which should not have happened.

To his credit, he has edited his blog post to accurately reflect that we were the source of the list of campaign contributions and we appreciate his gesture.

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Ph.D., it seems really does stand for “piled higher and deeper” in some quarters.

And Jeff Sadow, Ph.D., proves it in spades.

After all, no self-respecting snake oil salesman would attempt to sell what Sadow was hawking in Sunday’s Baton Rouge Advocate.

Normally, we don’t take issue with other bloggers in this space because it is our firm conviction that everyone has the right to his own opinion.

But no one has the right to his own facts and that’s where Sadow has crossed the line with his latest attempt at political erudition of the masses—or at least that part of Louisiana’s masses who subscribe to The Advocate. (And no, that’s not a dig at The Advocate. The fact is, each major metropolitan area of the state has its own newspaper to the general exclusion of all the others, so that necessarily limits the sphere of influence of any given publication.)

There’s an old joke that says 87.3 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot and unfortunately, the Baton Rouge Advocate has provided him a forum to toss out any figures he can conjure up and feed them to us as facts.

Southeastern Louisiana University associate professor of political science Kurt Corbello recently took him to task in a LouisianaVoice guest column, exposing his LSU-Shreveport counterpart as more than a little off base with his data. https://louisianavoice.com/2016/03/01/slu-associate-professor-says-advocate-columnist-can-only-arrive-at-state-expenditure-numbers-by-making-them-up/

Sadow had published the absurd claim that Louisiana ranked “well above the national average in per capita spending when in fact, the state spent $6,365 per capita in spending, $352 below the state average nationwide.

“The only way to arrive at the columnist’s (Sadow’s) conclusion that Louisiana ranks “well above the national average in per capita spending” is to make it all up, Corbello wrote.

Only a week later, Sadow has gone completely off the reservation by blaming the recent Moody’s downgrade of the state’s credit rating on John Bel Edwards who has been governor less than two months.

http://theadvocate.com/features/recipes/15072709-63/jeff-sadow-markets-not-looking-kindly-on-louisiana

Jindal systematically wrecked the state’s economy for a full eight years. And Moody’s and Standard & Poor each put the state on its critical watch list last year. Where the hell was Sadow with his self-righteous indignation during those years?

Remember, Jeff, Louisiana had a Republican governor and Republican majorities (big majorities, we might add) in both the House and Senate during those eight years. Remember also, Jeff, Jindal & Co. managed to incur budgetary shortfalls every single year he was in office even as he kept up the drumbeat to “do more with less.” He cut higher education more than any other state in the nation.

He cut services to the developmentally disadvantaged (but he managed to give $4.7 million of their money to one of the richest families in Louisiana for their Indy racetrack in Avondale. That family, the Chouest family, we should add, was a generous donor to the Jindal campaigns, pour in more than $130,000 to his state campaigns and a cool $1 million to his Believe Again super PAC.

He gutted funding for the Department of Children and Family Services to such an extent that the agency cannot even repair its state vehicles and the overworked staff finds it impossible to properly work its caseloads to protect the state’s foster children.

He did make sure that nursing homes received adequate per bed funding but when you peel back the layers, you see that the industry contributed generously to his campaigns.

A recipient of megabucks from the oil and gas industry, he made sure to kill the lawsuit against 97 oil and gas and pipeline companies for destroying the state’s marshlands.

He vetoed bills passed unanimously in both the House and Senate to ensure transparency in public records, including those of the governor’s office.

He likewise vetoed unanimous legislation that would have made the Louisiana Department of Economic Development justify those billions of dollars of tax breaks, exemption, credits and incentives awarded to businesses and industries who in turn, created only minimum wage, or worse, no new jobs.

Yes, the oil patch dried up virtually with no warning—much like it did in the early 1980s, creating an additional strain on the state budget.

And yet, Jeff, you see all this as the fault of one John Bel Edwards, governor of the State of Louisiana for a full two months?

And you place none of the fault with Jindal? Or the legislature?

Jeff, you’re an educated man, with a Ph.D. on your wall to prove it.

Well, Jeff, I have a degree, too. I have a B.S. degree from Louisiana Tech. You probably graduated with honors while I graduated Magna Cum Barely. But Jeff, I live out here in the real world. I get out and talk to people. You obviously do neither.

If you can convince anyone that Edwards, with two months under his belt, is responsible for all of Louisiana’s ills after eight years of Jindal’s reign of error, then you have truly missed your calling.

You should have been a stage hypnotist or better yet, a televangelist. If you can sell what you’re peddling, you could make a linebacker cluck like a chicken or a heathen throw away his crutches.

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He may be gone but he’s certainly not forgotten.

Bobby Jindal, who did his dead level best to destroy the Office of Group Benefits, is now doing his best to take advantage of the agency for his health insurance.

Meanwhile, LouisianaVoice has learned that OGB Director Susan West went a little ballistic over our post of Thursday (March 3), even saying we didn’t know what we were talking about. But…but, Susan, we were only quoting from the letter that was sent out with your office’s letterhead on it (admittedly, your name, conveniently, was nowhere in the letter).

The person who contacted initially and a second person who contacted us on Friday (March 4) each said that West directed OGB’s fiscal office to ignore the “pay flags” which indicate non-payment of premiums. (In our story, we called them “stop flags,” but we’re told the correct term is “pay flags.)

Now, of course, OGB is scrambling to recoup all the money (at least $10,511 in a single case we have verified) it paid out in claims for employees and retirees who have either switched to other plans or for whatever reason, ceased paying premiums.

LouisianaVoice has learned that Jindal and family had an HMO plan but that he wanted to change to OGB coverage under COBRA, specifically, a health savings account (HSA). Changing a plan is strictly forbidden except during open enrollment which is in October. But the rules, you see, don’t apply to Jindal; they never have. (Perhaps he learned that trick from State Police Superintendent Mike Edmonson who almost got away with getting the legislature to approve an amendment to an obscure bill on the final day of the 2014 session that would’ve given him an illegal $55,000 bump in his retirement pay.)

And let’s not forget that Jindal, after attempting and failing to dismantle LASERS, the retirement system for state employees, quietly purchased time from the system to enhance his own retirement. (Never let it be said that he is lacking in duplicity and cunning.)

No matter. OGB management obligingly approved the switch to the HSA which features low premiums and higher deductibles—basically a major medical-type policy that most people can’t afford. Our source described it as “the Bill Cassidy answer to ObamaCare—sock away a minimum of $10,000 in an HSA and use that for regular medical expenses, except most people don’t have $10,000 to put away and tie up for healthcare alone.”

Not only did Jindal and OGB management skirt the law in changing Jindal’s plan mid-stream, but Jindal also purchased a flexible spending account (FSA). FSAs are highly-regulated by the federal government (which should have gone against Jindal’s very fiber, considering his opposition to everything federal during his term of office). Up to $2,400 a year may be put into an FSA account for a specific purpose such as healthcare expenses or dependent care costs such as daycare. The $2400 is tax deductible so the policy holder saves a bit on state and federal taxes and gives the policy holder free use of the money for the specified purposes.

For state employees, FSA accounts are administered by Discovery Benefits and Jindal, apparently without the sage advice of sidekick Timmy Teepell, submitted his checks for his FSA incorrectly for his COBRA policy, causing “a lot of heartburn” at OGB.

“Discovery Benefits, Inc., is beyond inefficient and impossible to work with,” our source, a retired state employee, said. “There have been many complaints about DBI, including from a state legislator who is outraged over the mess the company has made of her account.

“I made a formal complaint to OGB over DBI’s lack of acceptance of documentation of my dentist’s care, having sent them the requested documentation three times myself, and they had no record either from the dentist or from me. They then locked my account and I could not access my own money. I called DBI and got through after being placed on hold for 20 minutes. I demanded access to my account, which they temporality unlocked.

“OGB staff sent DBI my documentation by email TWICE – DBI never acknowledged either email to my knowledge and demanded that I repay the $100 or so they had paid my dentist, which I refused to do.  So they said they sent a notice to the IRS that I have this $100 taxable income. Idiots.”

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