Posted in Uncategorized on June 17, 2018| 4 Comments »
“You may obtain an original birth certificate or birth card at our office if you were born in Louisiana. If not born in Louisiana, you must contact the state you were born in. You may also obtain a death certificate if you died in Louisiana.”
—From the Assumption Parish Clerk of Court’s Web page.
http://assumptionclerk.com/birth-certificates/
Posted in Uncategorized on June 13, 2018| 2 Comments »
The offenses are listed as misdemeanors but Attorney General Jeff Landry’s office is spending a lot of state resources pursuing the wife of a blogger who once criticized the Terrebonne Parish power structure.
And apparently, he’s not above being used by others to do their dirty work for them.
Wayne Anderson, a Houma Police officer, you may remember, had his home raided some time back by Sheriff Jerry Larpenter who seized his and his children’s computers.
Here are links to a few of the stories that appeared online then:
https://reason.com/blog/2016/08/12/louisiana-sheriff-doesnt-like-critical-b
Anderson and his wife Jennifer, promptly filed suit in federal court and after the presiding judge chewed on Larpenter’s backside for a while, Larpenter decided to SETTLE with the couple for an undetermined amount but which is believed to be about $250,000. Also settling were co-defendants Parish President Gordon Dove and the parish government after a $50,000 settlement of their part of the litigation.
Lesson learned, right? Don’t mess with people’s right to freedom of speech.
Well yes and no.
Jennifer Anderson subsequently was arrested for DWI. Deputies said she had a child in the vehicle at the time but she insists there was no child in the car with her. It’s not for us to say whether or not she was drinking and driving. That should be decided in a court of law, but it should be done so properly and according to legal procedures. Instead, what has ensued is a series of missteps on the part of prosecutors and those blunders have shown just how vindictive the local power clique can be when crossed.
District Attorney Joseph Waltz, Jr. recused himself from the DWI matter because he was prominently mentioned in Wayne Anderson’s blog Exposedat. That was the proper thing to do and the case was referred to Attorney General Jeff Landry’s office.
But when the Assistant Attorney General handling the case, one Angad Ghai, failed to appear for Anderson’s arraignment on four separate occasions, 32nd Judicial District Court Judge John Walker dismissed the case. Dismissals usually are handed down after two misses but the court gave the state every opportunity to prosecute its case in this matter. LouisianaVoice, by the way, was told Monday (June 12) that Ghai is no longer employed by the attorney general’s office.
LouisianaVoice does not condone drinking and driving and this is not a defense of Jennifer Anderson by any stretch. But when prosecutors neglect to show up in for courtroom proceedings not once, not twice, not three times, but four times, then the onus is on them.
Over and done on a technicality, right? Wrong. It’s not a technicality when prosecutors are negligent—or inept. Accordingly, Attorney General Jeff Landry should have simply tucked his tail, admitted his office’s incompetence and skulked back to Baton Rouge.
But no. Landry is an ego-driven politician, so he sent Assistant Attorney General Molly Lancaster into the fray to re-file charges on March 15 of this year—15 months after Anderson’s Jan. 20, 2017, arrest.
It was the classic example of re-filing as a means of judge-shopping and this time the AG got a different judge, Judge George Larke. We don’t know if that was an advantage to Landry or not. It really doesn’t matter.
What does matter is who initiated the new charges.
That would be the parish president, Gordon Dove, which makes no sense since he is not an attorney and, on the surface of it all, has no dog in the hunt. But that wouldn’t stop Dove.
For a little background on Dove, consider this:
How ironic.
More irony.
Still more irony.
For a more complete dossier on Dove, go HERE.
But now we have Gordon Dove who is so concerned about the safety and welfare of the good folks of Terrebonne Parish (if not the good folks in Montana) that he goes out of his way to pursue charges (which had already been dismissed) against a woman whose husband had the audacity to criticize the political structure of the parish, a structure that features Dove in the mix, along with others already mentioned.
And they’ve got good ol’ Jeff Landry carrying the water for them while the attorney general ignores citizen complaints about the Jennings City Council’s refusal to allow citizens to speak at its meetings without prior approval of a secret “pre-meeting” where the agenda is drawn up.
(LouisianaVoice will have more on that in the days to come. But the point is that Jeff Landry likes to cherry-pick the causes he fights for, generally opting to help political allies and ignore anyone who can’t advance his career.)
The June 11 hearing on the continuance motion for Anderson’s case was one for the books. Anderson was arraigned, she wasn’t arraigned. No one knew for sure. The court’s minute clerk’s records said the case was allotted to Division A, another official said Division B. No one knew for sure (It was finally determined the case was allotted to A).
And during all this, Anderson was somehow never served with any notice of Landry’s renewed efforts.
But never mine, Jeff Landry is happy to dance the two-step with Gordon Dove.
Isn’t it rich, isn’t it queer
Losing my timing this late in my career
But where are the clowns – send in the clowns
Don’t bother they’re here.
—Frank Sinatra: Send in the Clowns
Posted in Uncategorized on June 3, 2018| 22 Comments »
Posted in Uncategorized on June 3, 2018| 7 Comments »
Long before anyone ever heard of such right-wing zealots as Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, David Duke, Pat Robertson, or Ted Nugent, there was a bona-fide mouth-frothing, fire-breathing purveyor of conspiratorial fascist-speak who could put them all to shame.
(Well, maybe not ALEX JONES. He probably has no peer for sheer detestable stupidity but you get the idea.)
A say all this as a preface to the story of a current-day fear-monger named John Guandolo, a former FBI agent once assigned to New Orleans and who figured prominently in the investigation and prosecution of former U.S. Rep. William Jefferson when he became romantically involved with a witness in the case. But I’ll get to Guandolo in a bit.
It was back in the very early 1960s that a Tulsa radio evangelist named Billy James Hargis exploded onto the nation’s airways with his daily 30-minute Christian Crusade broadcasts which were introduced by the full-throated strains of a choir singing, “Glory, glory Hallelujah.”
What invariably followed was anything but any Scripture-based sermon but a ranting, screaming diatribe directed at the Democratic administration of John F. Kennedy and all those “godless communists” running our country. Hargis, if you can imagine it was even possible, advanced his communist conspiracies even further than had Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
For those too young to remember, the communists were the target of the hate groups after the Native Americans and blacks and before the invasion of those hordes of Mexicans and Islamics took their place as threats to the white man’s rule. (On that note, I have to wonder how the Native Americans might feel about border protection against undesirables encroaching on their land and their way of life.)
Paranoia, in fact, seems to be ingrained into the American culture these days, especially whenever it involves anyone with dark skin pigmentation.
I caught a Billy James Hargis address upstairs in the Louisiana Tech Student Center (the Tonk) back about 1961 and he was everything I had imagined—namely a lunatic—as I listened to his noon broadcasts over KRUS, that throbbing 250-watt AM station where I would later find employment as a manic disc jockey (people knew my voice all the way to the edge of the city limits).
But there was one small problem with the good reverend. Well, actually two problems but that second one would not arise until more than a decade later, after Hargis had already fallen somewhat out of favor.
The first came after Hargis allied himself with GEN. EDWIN WALKER, another darling of the right ordered against his will by President Eisenhower to enforce the historic 1957 desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock. Walker would join the John Birch Society two years later and would then go on speaking tours with Hargis.
The problem was that in 1960, Hargis became a suspect behind a series of five bombings of Little Rock public schools. The bombings were a message to civil rights leaders even as Walker was supposed to be keeping the peace. FBI special agent Joe Casper believed Hargis was planning to bomb the Methodist Church-affiliated Philander Smith College in Little Rock, a historically black university.
Then, in 1974, Tulsa, the so-called “Christian Fundamentalist Capital of the World,” was rocked when it was revealed that two students at Hargis’s Bible college married and on their wedding night, confessed to each other that each had had sexual relations with the good reverend. Hargis was forced into premature retirement by the scandal.
Now to JOHN GUANDOLO, the former New Orleans FBI agent-turned hysteria-spreading-profiteer-of-Islamophobia in the grand style of Hargis, Alex Jones, et al.
Guandolo, who has made his Understanding the Threat presentations to law enforcement groups in Hammond, Alexandria, and St. Charles Parish—you know, the really troublesome hotspots for Islamic activity—at a cost of about $12,500 a pop.
But here’s the real kicker responsible district attorneys and sheriffs should be concerned about:
Guandolo recently (on May 4) held one of his SESSIONS for 27 “students,” primarily police officers and sheriff’s deputies in a San Angelo, Texas, Baptist Church (ministers were allowed to attend free of charge).
Trouble is, the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement (TCOLE), which serves as the state’s law enforcement accreditation agency. DECLINED TO APPROVE Guadolo’s course for credit, saying the daylong course (during the event, Guandolo repeatedly plugged his more expensive three-day and week-long courses and offered to sign copies of his book at his “product” table) “painted an entire religion with an overly-broad brush” and “provided no training value for law enforcement attendees.”
Besides enlightening attendees on ways to spot jihadis in their midst (beards without mustaches, apparently, are a dead giveaway), Guandolo shared his interpretations of 14th-century Islamic law, gave tips on how to identify a jihadi job applicant, and how to thwart the Muslim Brotherhood in its conspiracy to topple America.
Pretty exceptional qualifications for a former FBI agent who couldn’t seem to keep his pants zipped around a star federal witness he was supposed to be…. well, handling.
All of which should really embarrass law enforcement officials in Rapides, Tangipahoa, and St. Charles parishes.
But probably won’t.
Posted in Uncategorized on May 26, 2018| 2 Comments »
Okay, here’s the deal.
I have written about a half-dozen novels, most of which are political in nature and all but one of which are situated in Louisiana.
While I have had two non-fiction books published and have edited two others that have been published, fiction is a completely different animal and it’s extremely difficult to interest traditional book publishers in a first-time fiction writer.
I refuse to self-publish but I would like very much to publish the novels as e-books.
The problem is, I am technically-challenged and haven’t the foggiest notion of how to format, publish, and market an e-book. Technology left me behind when they switched from Beta to VHS back in the ’80s.
I want to publish the novels and place them on Amazon and I will do what limited marketing I can on LouisianaVoice.
So, here’s my proposition:
I need someone in the Baton Rouge area (Baton Rouge, Central, Zachary, Livingston, Ascension or Tangipahoa parishes or the Felicianas to walk me through the process of formatting, cover design, and publishing. And while my financial resources are limited, I am willing to pay someone a fair fee for helping me do this with the first couple of publications and perhaps my feeble brain can absorb enough to do the others myself. If not, I’ll keep paying to have it done.
If you are reading this and possess the expertise and are willing to pick up a few bucks, please email me with your contact information (phone number, email address, etc.) at:
or mail me a letter the old-fashioned way (though I can’t imagine why) to:
LouisianaVoice
P.O. Box 922
Denham Springs, LA. 70727
$2.50 each or three for $6.00
