Louisiana Voice

A few years back, there was a student newspaper at Louisiana Tech University in Ruston. That’s where I worked as a student journalist (I also wrote for The Shreveport Times and Monroe Morning World simultaneously).

Wiley Hilburn was head of the school’s journalism program and faculty advisor to The Tech Talk, the student newspaper to which I alluded in the first paragraph. I remember Wiley telling me more than once that Tech President F. Jay Taylor had instructed him (Wiley) to allow the paper to report any and all news about Tech – good, bad or indifferent. To Taylor, a free press, even a student-run free press was absolutely essential and he gave the paper free rein. He was strictly hands-off.

But as I said at the onset, Tech had a newspaper “a few years back.” That’s because there is no longer a Tech Talk at Louisiana Tech.

You see, the paper, its editors and reporters were well aware that all was not well on the Tech campus, that on-campus sexual assaults were grossly under-reported. And it said so.

BAM! No more Tech Talk.

Jeff Landry, when he was attorney general, did his damnedest to get  BOB MANN fired as faculty advisor to the LSU communications department because Mann was critical of Landry’s sending a flunky to a campus discussion of Landry’s opposition to the coronavirus vaccine and masking mandates in 2021.

Mann remained at his job until Landry got himself elected governor. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, Mann resigned but that apparently has not ended the rancor between the LSU student paper, the Reveille. and Landry.

Today, ANDREW SARHAN, a mass communication freshman at LSU, penned an op-ed piece in the student newspaper calling Landry “the worst governor in history” and that he should be impeached.

Ouch.

Landry is not only small in stature but awfully thin-skinned to boot. He doesn’t cotton to criticism, especially from upstarts in academia.

Sarhan is a lowly freshman, Landry is governor.

The governor controls – and I do mean controls – the LSU Board of Supervisors.

Sarhan is to be commended for his courage but if he thinks that Landry will sit still for being called the sorry-assed governor that he most surely is, the young man is in for a rude awakening.

As might be the entire mass communications department at LSU, not to mention that given what happened to the Tech Talk (and Landry wasn’t even governor then), the future for the Reveille might not be to bright itself.

I mean, if they can do it to libraries, then squashing a student newspaper is a simple matter. And the precedent has already been set up in Ruston.

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The late Republican Senator Lowell Weicker, Jr. would never recognize today’s Republican Party. Weicker, who died in 2023, did live to see some radical changes – enough so that he pulled out of the party and was elected governor of Connecticut as a third-party candidate.

Before that, he served two terms in the U.S. Senate and sat on the historic Senate Watergate Committee chaired by Sen. Sam Ervin, Jr. of North Carolina.

Attempts by social conservatives to advance their agenda — whether through enacting legislation regarding prayer in public schools or restrictions on abortion rights — drew Weicker’s particular ire, who saw the increasing power of the Christian right in his party as a grave threat to its future.

“No greater mischief can be created than to combine the power of religion with the power of government. History has shown us that time and time again.”

Sen. Lowell Weicker

It was during testimony by White House counsel John Dean that the nation first learned that Republican President Richard Nixon kept an “enemies list.” Following is Weicker’s response to that revelation:

“I say before you and before the American people that I’m here as a Republican and I think I express the feelings of the 42 other Republican senators and the Republicans of Connecticut and the feelings of the Republican party far better than those who committed illegal, unconstitutional and gross acts.

“Let me make it clear, because I have got to have my partisan moment: Republicans do not cover up; Republicans do not go ahead and threaten; Republicans do not go ahead and commit illegal acts; and, God knows, Republicans don’t view their fellow Americans as enemies to be harassed.’’

All of which seems to beg the question: what the hell happened to the Republican Party?

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Two events this week, unrelated in outward appearances but identical in intent, occurring 400 miles apart, provide us with a peek into what is quite likely to become a trend that will adversely affect Americans’ right to know what their government is up to at every level, from town councils and school boards all the way up to the highest federal levels.

Run-on sentences aside, the incident in Washington only illustrates the hypocrisy that exists on both sides of the aisle in Congress. Nothing new there other than how it casts even more shade on the pseudo-Christianity of House Speaker Mike Johnson.

But legislative action by the State of Ohio serves as definite harbinger of things to come, probably in every state, before all is said and done. And I would add that it’s a direct attack on the public’s access to public records.

Let’s take Congress first. Mikey, our very own Speaker, this week revived an investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. He did so at the behest of Donald Trump who is hellbent on punishing those members – and witnesses – who participated in the first investigation.

But then, an aide to Johnson pointed out that if subpoenas are issued to say, Cassidy Hutchinson, it could prove embarrassing to certain representatives who just might happen to be Republicans and, gosh, we can’t have that.

You see, it turns out that after Hutchinson originally testified in 2022, she became the recipient of “several texts from [House] members who were trying to engage in sexual favors” with her.

What? Members of the People’s House engaging in SEX SOLICITATION BY TEXT? Why, that’s unthinkable! Can you say Gaetz? MTG? Boebert?

Actually, there are 435 members of the House, more than 300 of them males. Could’ve been any of them. As a member of Johnson’s staff pointed out that subpoenaing Hutchinson could “potentially reveal embarrassing information.”

Since when is the U.S. House of Representatives concerned about a little “embarrassing information”?

They didn’t seem so embarrassed when MTG flashed those nude photos of Hunter Biden in committee. Hell, not even Hunter appeared overly embarrassed.

Lauren Boebert didn’t seem too embarrassed when she was fondling her date’s genitals during a performance of the Beetlejuice musical in 2023.

And of course, it’s fairly well known that Johnson his own self has an app on his phone and on his son’s phone so that each can keep tabs on the other so that neither will be tempted to take a sneak peek at online porn. Interesting that he should have a need for such an app.

But let us now consider what has taken place in Ohio, a development that I personally consider far more important and ominous than anti-porn phone apps.

In August 2022, a police officer gunned down 20-year-old Donovan Lewis in his bed. Police body cam footage revealed that in contrast to what police said, there was never any “altercation.” He never fought police; he wasn’t even given time to resist because officer Ricky Anderson drew and fired in less than a second. That video footage helped spur the indictment of Anderson on charges of homicide and reckless endangerment.

So, what was the upshot of all that? With no hearing, no public comment, no advance warning, a proposal was snuck into an omnibus bill in the closing hours of the Ohio legislature last month that now IMPOSE A FEE of up to $750 for access to body-cam or other video footage.

Let’s say, for example, that an incident where four or five state police set up someone like, say, a Ronald Greene and unlike the Greene case, each cop has his body-cam running. The victim is killed by police and his grieving mother insists on viewing the body-cam to see if police are telling the truth when they say he wrecked his car and resisted officers. Do the math: $750 multiplied by five cops comes to $3,750 that the mom must pay to determine if her son was wrongly killed.

It’s not just Ohio, either. The Indianapolis metropolitan police department charges $150 per video and the state of Washington allows for a charge of 49 cents per minute of footage and some departments add a fee based on the time necessary to edit footage. Edit? No thanks. I would prefer unedited footage. It’s even worse in California where police footage must be redacted before becoming public.

Michael Weinman, director of government affairs for the Ohio Fraternal Order of Police, said the charge will deter those who only want the videos for the purpose of monetizing social media sites. While there is some merit to his argument, there has to be a better solution than an across-the-board charge of $750.

I don’t think I’ve given anyone any ideas. No, just the opposite. I believe these departments communicate with each other and they’re light years ahead of us already. So, get ready because it’s coming. We’re going to have to pay and pay dearly for our right to know in the not-so-distant future.

After that, it’ll be a slippery slope to the loss of other rights and freedoms even as we are told to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain – until one day we wake up and wonder “what the hell happened?”

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