Posted in Uncategorized on January 6, 2026| Leave a Comment »
“Five years after Jan. 6, 2021, we are still caught up in a struggle between forces who are willing to use authoritarian violence outside the Constitution to take and wield power and those who stand up nonviolently for our Constitution in the streets and in the polling places. Neither side can claim victory yet.”
— Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland)
Posted in Uncategorized on January 4, 2026| 1 Comment »
Posted in Uncategorized on January 3, 2026| 5 Comments »
In pondering the news of the day, a couple of questions keep popping up in light of the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores and statements that the pair will be tried under U.S. law for crimes allegedly committed in their country.
In March 2023, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued ARREST WARRANTS for Bladimir Putin for the war crime of unlawful deportation and transfer of children during the Ruso-Ukrainian War. More simply stated, that’s child trafficking.
Last August, Putin met with our very own Mango Mussolini in ALASKA but was not arrested or detained.
Of course, the U.S. does not recognize the ICC but so what? Putin is a murderer and he was on U.S. soil and the Trump administration did nothing.
Yet, the leader of a country with which we are not at war and which has not invaded any other sovereign nation is TO BE TRIED in the Southern District of New York on charges of narco-terrorism conspiracy and cocaine importation conspiracy.
Not only is he to be tried in the U.S., but Trump actually boasted following Maduro’s capture that the U.S. is “GOING TO RUN” Venezuela.
That wouldn’t be because Venezuela has the world’s largest deposits of oil reserves, would it? Sounds strangely familiar to bogus claims of weapons of mass destruction in another oil-rich country by another Repugnantcan administration.
At this rate, Trump may be asked to forfeit his FIFA Peace Award.
There’s no questioning the fact that Maduro is a thug, a despot, a tyrant. But it seems a tad strange that he could be singled out for his crimes even though there was no indictment and he was captured only after the U.S. invaded Venezuela while Putin is allowed to come and go with impunity in this country and indeed, is treated like royalty.
Just sayin’…
Posted in Uncategorized on January 2, 2026| 2 Comments »
It’s official.
It’s always been suspected but SB46 by Sen. Michael “Big Mike” Fesi (R-Houma) formally certified a handful of legislators who co-sponsored Fesi’s bill and our governor who signed it into law as nut cases.
And when the final votes were tallied, you can include 34 other state senators and 46 additional representatives as candidates for residency in the Hotel Silly.
While virtually every list places Louisiana near the bottom nationally in income, education, obesity, child poverty, teen pregnancy, environment and overall quality of life, 15 morons of mediocrity jumped on the bandwagon last year to sponsor a bill requiring the Department of Environmental Quality to track reports of (gasp!) contrails.
Fesi and his bill’s co-sponsors preferred to call them “chemtrails” when in reality, they’re contrails, or water vapor.
But Fesi, following the lead of Tennessee and a few other hysterical state legislatures, was certain we were being sprayed with chemicals, a conspiracy theory that scientists debunked long ago and far away.
But never mind. Fesi managed to convince fellow Sens. Heather Cloud (R-Turkey Creek) and Valarie Hodges (R-Denham Springs) and 12 representatives: Beryl Amedee (R-Houma), Michael Bayham, Jr. (R-Chalmette), Marcus Bryant (D-New Iberia), Kimberly Coates (R-Ponchatoula), Raymond Crews (R-Bossier City), Kellee Hennessee Dickerson (R-Denham Springs), Kathy Edmonston (R-Gonzales), Peter Egan (R-Covington), Dodie Horton (R-Haughton), Danny McCormick (R-Oil City).
It’s Chicken Little screaming the sky is falling come to fruition.
In the annals of comical acts by the Louisiana Legislature, SB46 has to be one of the most absurd, most asinine pieces of legislation to pass muster and to actually be signed into law (Act 95) by a crackpot governor in the state’s storied history. The same governor and the same legislature, by the way that have blithely sold their souls to the petro-chemical industry that has bestowed upon that stretch along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans as Cancer Alley. Where the hell is the concern over chemical poisoning there?
Oh, I forgot, campaign dollars help to erase inconvenient reality by creating convenient distractions.
Other than those 100 or so plants along Cancer Alley, no one is poisoning us with chemicals from airplanes in the sky and they aren’t chemtrails, they’re CONTRAILS, which are created when airplanes fly in cold and humid atmospheric conditions and ice crystals form around the exhaust particles emitted from the plane’s engines.
But that explanation obviously wasn’t good enough for Fesi, et al. He just had to rush to introduce his bill to save humanity—or at least those living within the borders of the Bayou State.
Even more disheartening is the fact that the full House gave its FINAL APPROVAL by a 58-33 vote with 14 having the good sense to go fishing and not even participate in the vote. The SENATE VOTE was even more lopsided, passing by a 35-0 vote with four of its members choosing not to vote. Thirty-five to zip, folks. They’re speaking gooney-babble in the Louisiana Legislature.
One would think with all the problems facing this state, there would be little time to dawdle over some hairbrained theory about harmless contrails—and be assured, harmless they are..
And one can’t even blame this whacko conspiracy theory on Donald Trump, though on the surface, it sounds like something he would embrace in a late-night message on Truth Social. Instead, his administration has actually PUBLISHED A WEB PAGE debunking the chemtrail conspiracy theory and attempting to explain exactly what those long white clouds are.
Perhaps our squeaky-toy governor should’ve checked with Trump before signing SB 46 into law.
But then it would be completely out of character for our state elected officials to take a logical approach to a real problem–like industrial poisoning of our air and water.
Posted in Uncategorized on December 30, 2025| 1 Comment »
The size of Hammond may be about to swell by some 40 percent.
An otherwise sleepy college town an hour’s drive east of Baton Rouge, the city has apparently been designated as the future location of one of several human warehouses where immigrant detainees will be held in preparation for faster deportation procedures.
Apparently not satisfied with moving detainees around the country to whichever detention center happens to have space to accommodate them, the Trump administration is planning to contract with private prisons to construct the equivalent of express lanes in the form of warehouses capable of housing between 5,000 and 10,000 people each where they would be staged for more expedient deportation.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) plans to share the concept this week with private detention facilities like LaSalle Enterprises in Ruston, CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corp. of America) of Brentwood, Tennessee and the Geo Group of Boca Raton, Florida, to gauge interest in the plan.
On the face of it, it appears silly to offer conjecture on why a private prison may or may not be interested—of course they’re interested!
If ever there was such a thing as a cash cow, the emergence of private prisons as an economic force would certainly qualify.
Private, for-profit prisons currently house MORE THAN 91,000 PERSONS. That represents 8 percent of the total state and federal population. And the industry is one of the FASTEST-GROWING businesses in America.
And now Hammond is being considered as the possible location of a center to house up to 9,000 individuals (that’s equivalent to another 63 percent of the entire enrollment of Southeastern Louisiana University) as part of an overall plan to warehouse as many as 80,000 human beings.
It’s important to remember that private prisons are run for one purpose and one purpose only: to make a profit. That means—and history has borne this out—that private prisons prioritize cost-cutting over inmate welfare. That fact is supported by several multi-million-dollar settlements of lawsuits brought against a single private prison, Lasalle. See HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE.
Not only do these private prisons earn the most profit by providing the minimum in terms of health care, food and non-existent rehabilitation services, but they will even go to great length to protect those profits whenever a family squabble THREATENS THEIR BOTTOM LINE.
Other than owning a Chic-Fil-A franchise, running a private prison under contract to ICE and Homeland Security is about the MOST LUCRATIVE GIG going these days. Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, passed and signed into law last July, included a whopping $45 BILLION (with a B) for ICE to build those new immigration detention centers like the one to be located in Hammond.
Perhaps CoreCivic CEO DAMON HININGER said it best when he said back in August, “Our business is perfectly aligned with the demands of the moment.” He went on to say that private prisons “are in an unprecedented environment with rapid increases in federal detention populations nationwide and a continuing need for solutions.”
To bolster that assertion, CoreCivic reported total revenues of $538.2 million during the second quarter of 2025, up 9.8 percent from the same quarter in 2024.
In seeking a problem to fit a solution, the federal government has aided private prisons and defense contractors in turning deportation into a THRIVING BUSINESS MODEL while families are torn apart and lives disrupted—all over scare tactics that somehow are repeated in this country over and over.
Whether it’s the Irish, the Japanese (remember the internment camps?), Middle Easterners, Somalis, the Latinos, Native Americans or Blacks, we have always managed to find some group to fear and hate. That seems to be locked into our DNA.
And yet, even as we round up tens of thousands of men, women and children (some of whom are actually citizens of this country), we have yet to arrest or detain the first individual who hires them to perform landscaping, who reap our crops, roof our buildings and work in our restaurants.
Just to be sure we fear and reject those who don’t look and talk like us (whoever “us” is supposed to be), the administration has made certain to let us know that those unwanted aliens are soaking up our welfare payments and stealing our jobs and houses.
That, my friends, is a myth. They are not on Medicare or Medicaid. They don’t vote and believe it or not, if their employers are being honest, they also pay taxes. And they’re not eating our dogs and cats.
What they are doing, however, is allowing private prison operators and parish sheriffs to enrich themselves handsomely. Why do you think so many SHERIFFS are scrambling to build newer and bigger jails? It’s because the federal government pays generously to house detainees in local jails.
Why else are these local and state law enforcement agencies so eager to sign agreements with ICE?
If you’ve been paying attention, you may have noticed a recent spurt in the number of private prisons that have SUDDENLY APPEARED on the scene. Do you think that’s a coincidence? It’s a GROWTH INDUSTRY, pure and simple, and for a reason: a GENEROUS UNCLE SAM.
If a building program to house 80,000 people seems large, here’s some context: That number is dwarfed by the more than 580,000 people deported by the administration this year alone. It’s enough to make one wonder what the end game goal is for Homeland Security and ICE. Where does it end? What happens when they run out of Latinos, Africans and Mid-Easterners. How will they justify their continued existence (because we know that once created, an agency is rarely abolished).
Who will be targeted in the next wave of deportations? That is a question that must be asked. After all, nearly half of the 68,000 people being held at the beginning of this month had no criminal record at all. That’s more than our President can say about himself.
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Louisiana Voice 