Posted in Politics on October 1, 2013| 22 Comments »
In the fourth paragraph of the story below about Bill Cassidy, I inadvertently said that Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe, “like Jindal, a Democrat…”
It is times like these that I maintain that the Golden Years are highly overrated.
But to make a mistake like—and on my 70th birthday at that—is inexcusable and requires that I post the correction.
Obviously Jindal is not a Democrat.
I have since made the correction, so if you did not see the original error, forget this contrite admission.
—Tom Aswell
Posted in Politics on September 16, 2013| 15 Comments »
Dear readers:
I hope you haven’t given up on me because I’ve not posted anything for a few days. There is plenty to write about but I am presently working on a story that will be very explosive and which will generate a lot of controversy in both political and religious circles. Because this will likely be, by far, the most emotionally-charged story I’ve yet written on LouisianaVoice, I am required to move slowly and cautiously to verify all facts and to separate facts from unproven allegations.
I know this sounds like some local TV station hyping its 10 p.m. Thursday news stories a week in advance (a practice I abhor), but I wanted to explain why we’ve been relatively silent these past few days.
Your humble newsboy (with apologies to John Hays for stealing his online nom de plume).
Posted in Politics on September 12, 2013| 7 Comments »
It’s not often that we agree with the writers who ply their trade with The Hayride, a web blog that is decidedly pro-Bobby Jindal—especially when the blog refers to Baton Rouge District Judge Janice Clark as a “bully” for threatening to jail members of the LSU Board of Stuporvisors for their failure to comply with her order to release public records to the media.
That said, we rarely call out other bloggers for their opinions because we believe in everyone’s right to his or her own opinions. It’s a position we hope they hold in the same high regard and to date, The Hayride has called me out only once and that was for a sloppy error on my part.
So, we both go about doing our thing, each reading the other on a regular basis and most times disagreeing with the other’s position. That’s the First Amendment working at its best and I hope it can remain that way.
Today’s post by Oscar about the Sports Illustrated series about Oklahoma State and Les Miles found us agreeing in part and adopting a slightly different conspiracy theory, thanks to the suggestion from a friend who put the bug in our ear.
But that is as far as our commonality of conspiracy theories goes. His is a bit limited and localized; mine is much more far-reaching and spiced with more intrigue, kind of like the grassy knoll, the inside job on the Twin Towers, Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate and CIA drone assassinations all rolled into one.
No, wait. That CIA drone assassination thing just might be real.
Oh, well, never mind. Here’s our theory.
The Southeastern Conference (SEC) has been kicking butt in the Bowl Championship Series, almost to the point of boredom.
Since 1998, its inaugural year, SEC teams have won nine titles. The ACC, Big Eight, Big East, Big Ten and PAC 12 divided the remaining six championships.
Even more humiliating to the other conferences, the SEC has won the last seven consecutive titles and eight of the last 10. And let’s not forget that in 2011, the championship game featured two SEC teams, Alabama and LSU. With the exception of LSU’s 2003 title and Auburn’s squeaker over Oregon in 2010, all 10 SEC wins have been by double digits.
We’ve already seen how anemic the NCAA is in both its ability to investigate reports of wrongdoing and to mete out appropriate punishment. To illustrate that weakness, one need only look at the Pete Carroll, Reggie Bush, USC “investigation,” the Cam Newton “investigation,” and the Johnny Manziel “punishment.” A half-game suspension? Really? If Manziel was innocent of selling his autographs (and we’re not suggesting guilt or innocence here), he should have received no punishment. If he was guilty, he should be ruled permanently ineligible under existing NCAA rules. A half-game suspension is a joke. Let’s just split the baby.
So, it is left to hack journalists, with the help of the weak sister conferences, to do the dirty work.
It’s this simple: Notre Dame, Ohio State, Oklahoma and USC can’t compete on the field with the SEC, so they compete in the only way they can—character assassination, innuendo, and stories based on interviews with players who may or may not have an axe to grind. No matter, if the stories can weaken the SEC’s stranglehold on the national championship it’ll open the door to those schools whose boosters are starting to grumble about the lack of top-tier competiveness.
This is not to say that “student-athletes” (I hate that term) don’t screw up. Of course they do; they’re kids away from home perhaps for the first time and they will test the waters. LSU has had its share under Miles and he did exactly what he should have done in each case: He fired the players. And they were front-line players: Ryan Perrilloux and Honey Badger Tyrann Mathieu (the latter after everyone in Baton Rouge had purchased black market Honey Badger T-shirts). I personally disagree with Miles’ decision to allow Jeremy Hill back on the team, but on balance, I like what I see in Miles as a decent human being and a very good coach, his detractors’ opinions notwithstanding.
I recently had lunch with Miles, along with my two sons-in-laws. One son-in-law was the successful bidder on the lunch which benefitted an organization for the hearing impaired. I went in expecting Miles to show up, go through the motions but to be largely aloof and distracted from the moment at hand, to simply go through the motions of fulfilling his public relations obligations.
What I saw was a man who was most attentive to his guests, quite talkative (a talkative Les Miles, imagine that!), friendly and receptive to any questions we might wish to lob his way. He spent most of the lunch talking about the difficulties experienced by his brother, who has been deaf since birth and how teachers initially believed him to be mentally retarded. We found a Les Miles who was able to talk openly about a very personal subject; we saw a man who was warm, open, congenial and personable—traits not normally associated with his predecessor at LSU.
But back to our original point. Is it coincidence that all those stories have come out in recent years about Florida, Auburn, Mississippi State, and now LSU? Three of the four—Florida, Auburn and LSU—have BCS championship trophies (LSU and Florida have two each). Mississippi State was indirectly involved in the sordid Auburn-Cam Newton story and LSU, in addition to being a two-time BCS champion, is joined at the hip with the latest accusations at Oklahoma State by virtue of Miles having coached at both schools.
Of course, it was never necessary to do a hatchet job on Arkansas. Former Coach Bobby Petrino took care of that himself in that bone-headed motorcycle accident with a female employee/girlfriend as his passenger.
Do the Florida, Auburn and Oklahoma State stories represent the opening salvos in the campaign to take down the SEC? Perhaps. Stranger things have happened.
If so, you can look for the next shoe to drop somewhere around Tuscaloosa. (‘Bama, after all, has three BCS trophies.) There are already stories circulating about former ‘Bama players Luther Davis and D.J. Fluker. Fluker, now with the San Diego Chargers, recently tweeted that he took money while a member of the Tide football team. That may explain why ‘Bama Coach Nick Saban lost his temper (what else is new?) and walked out on his weekly news conference on Thursday. (It also explains why I shall never have a Twitter account.)
Whether or not this scenario plays out, one thing is for sure: Sports Illustrated, like the rest of the print media, has fallen upon hard times. Unlike most other periodicals, however, SI seems to be taking desperately sordid measures to forestall the inevitable: the death of a once great but now sadly mediocre—or worse—publication.
Posted in Politics on September 1, 2013| 14 Comments »
This is a saga about a horrendous experience I had last week—an experience from which I was certain I would fail to emerge with body and mind intact. It was an adventure so stressful that in looking back, I would strongly urge everyone reading this to avoid repeating my ill-advised expedition.
It all started with a planned Labor Day weekend in Biloxi and the decision to book two hotel rooms for my wife Betty, me, a daughter and three grandchildren.
Because we wanted two adjoining rooms, I thought it best to call the hotel directly. Instead, the toll-free number I dialed somehow turned out to be that of Hotels.com. Thus began the Nightmare on College Street.
My therapist has since suggested that I advise you that whatever your future travel plans may be, at all costs avoid any dealings with Hotels.com.
Only my experience in trying to extract public records from the Jindal administration over the past two years prepared me for what I was about to endure.
The level of ignorance, ineptitude, disdain for the public and sheer arrogance encountered in my dealings with Hotels.com was almost comparable to that of the Division of Administration and the Department of Education. For the rigorous training those two agencies put me through in preparation for Hotels.com, I am grateful. Without the mental toughness forced upon me by the Jindal administration, I might have given up in my quest for justice for the little man.
Upon receiving an automated answer after dialing the toll-free number, I pressed “1” for English and “1” again for reservations. After a brief wait, a male, heavily-accented voice came on the line. I would learn later that he was in Hotel.com’s call center in the Philippines. So, already I am agitated at the propensity of American businesses to suck up our hard-earned dollars while taking jobs out of the country and hiring cheap help in Third World countries.
That aside, I explained that I wanted two non-smoking rooms with two beds in each room, a request he seemed to understand readily enough. The price he quoted me was precisely twice the rate for a single room—$299.50 for two non-smoking rooms at $149.75 each. I gave him my credit card information, email address and telephone number and everything seemed to be going smoothly. Too smoothly, it turned out.
It’s times like that one should never let his guard down. Little did I know that I was being lured into a mental maze that would leave me foaming at the mouth and ready to take a ride on the Disoriented Express and to be checked into the Hotel Silly instead of the Comfort Inn in Biloxi.
He gave me a confirmation number and we ended the call.
A few minutes later I received an email confirmation and that’s when the fun began.
It was confirmation for one room at $149.75. Well, at least they got the rate correct but the deal was for two adjoining rooms at a combined cost of $299.50.
I called the toll-free number again, dialed “1” for English and “1” again for reservations and got a very nice lady named Amanda. She was in Missouri, not the Philippines and I soon learned that (a) it was hot where she was because the air conditioning was out and (b) her computer was down—probably because someone was working on the air conditioning, she reasoned. I failed to make the connection.
I was on the line for a little more than an hour with Amanda and I became increasingly familiar with two of her favorite terms: “I’m sorry about this” and “hold on just a minute.” If I heard those two phrases once, I must’ve heard them 20 times…each.
Somehow, the confirmation email for my second room, at $149.75 did manage to come through despite her computer problems. But then she insisted on transferring me to customer service, along with her recommendation to complain long and loud about the SNAFU. Her, I appreciated because I was certainly prepared to do just that.
But when I got customer service, after another 20-minute hold time, they informed me that they were indeed sorry for the inconvenience but their computers were down and they were unable to help me and could I call back tomorrow?
You betcha.
Friday afternoon I called and pressed “1” again for English and “1” a second time for reservations and asked to be put through to customer service. I have reason to believe the reservations representative moonlights for the Transportation Security Administration (you know, the sadists who work at the airports) because I had to answer an entire battery of questions I believe were designed to trick me and to deny access to customer service.
But I fooled them and got through and after going through the ordeal of explaining my experience from the very first call to make reservations to the computer malfunction call to this call, I gave the guy my two confirmation numbers (two being necessitated because of the original mistake of making a reservation for just one room).
This guy was so sympathetic and understanding that after another series of “I apologize” and “Hold on just a minute,” he came back on the line to assure me he was going to try and get me a partial refund (which, by the way, was precisely what I demanded). “Please hold while I get authorization for that,” he said.
After hearing nothing but silence on the line for about 10 minutes, I finally realized he wasn’t coming back. So I did the obvious thing, glutton for punishment that I am: I called back and dialed “1” for English and “1” for reservations, asked for customer service, answered the same security questions and this time was told that I would receive a 25 percent refund. “On each room?” I asked. By now I was ready to up the ante to 50 percent on each room.
“Hold on, I’ll check,” he said.
Yes, I know what you’re thinking but this time I was not disconnected and he finally returned to say yes, I would get a 25 percent refund on each room. “Great,” I said. “Now I want you to send me written confirmation of that to my email address.”
“What is that name and email address, sir?”
“You already have my name and email address on my original reservation confirmations,” I said.
“But I need it for your refund confirmation,” he said.
I gave it to him and he processed the refund on the first confirmation and whether you choose to believe this absurdity or not, he actually asked for my name and email address again.
“Why do you need that again?” I asked.
“For the second confirmation.” Sounding by this time more like Porky Pig than myself, I managed to give him the information—for what I swear must have been at least the 10th time in this surreal series of telephone chats.
So, I was elated a few minutes later when an email popped up on my screen from Hotels.com. Elated, that is, until I read that the refund was for only one reservation—the original one.
I started to call back but after the mercury shattered the bulb in my home blood pressure kit (and I didn’t even have the Velcro® cuff on my arm), I decided to wait until Saturday morning before we left for Biloxi to see if it might come in overnight. Of course, it didn’t.
Finally, upon our return home Sunday night, I called Hotels.com once more and pounded “1” for English and drove a metal spike through “1” for reservations and once again went through the entire lengthy explanation which by now was taking longer to recite than it took me to read Moby Dick in college (to this day, the only thing I remember from that god-awful book is the opening line: “They call me Ishmael.”).
Believe it or not, I finally got the second email confirmation of the $37.44 refund for the second room. Now, I’ll just have to check my credit card invoice when it comes in to see if the refunds actually went through. To tell you the truth, I’m not holding my breath.
As a postscript to this saga, when we checked into the Comfort Inn in Biloxi, the reservations were waiting for me—adjoining rooms. As a wave of relief swept over me, I explained to the lady behind the counter what I had encountered with Hotels.com.
She just shook her head, handed me a hotel business card and said, “I hate dealing with those people. They’re all a pain. You should’ve just called us direct.”
I gave her my best Bob Newhart deadpan stare and politely referred her to the third paragraph of this rant.
Posted in Politics on August 10, 2013| 6 Comments »
Often one of our fellow bloggers like Bob Mann, C.B. Forgotston or Crazy Crawfish will post something that makes us say, “Wow! I wish I’d said that!”
Our friend Lamar White (CenLamar) has done just that today (Saturday, Aug. 10) with a list of questions put to State Sen. Neil Riser and his candidacy for retiring Congressman Rodney Alexander’s seat in a development where both moves (Alexander’s retirement and Riser’s announcement) looks suspiciously well-coordinated:
