Louisiana Voice

I have a great idea to save the State of Loozianner a little money. I’m pretty sure it’s not an original idea because it’s too logical for it not to have occurred to someone else, too. At any rate, here it is:

• Call off the search for a new LSU president.
• Forget about hiring a new athletic director to replace the departing Scott Woodward.
• Abolish the LSU Board of Supervisors altogether.
• Consolidate, consolidate, consolidate. Rebrand Gov. Jeff Landry’s title to Governor/LSU Coach/Athletic Director/President/Board of Supervisors.

Think of all the money it would save. Why, Woodward’s salary alone is more than a million dollars a year. And by now we know what a football coach goes for and college presidents ain’t cheap, either. With all the Board of Supervisor members gone, think of what could be clawed back in terms of complimentary tickets to football, basketball, baseball and all other sports. Why, with those increases in ticket prices, just imagine how much revenue could be generated. And premium parking for those events…Why, they could be money producers for the university as opposed to freebies – especially since those prices are also going up.

By naming Landry to all three positions, he could then drop all pretense to just being an interested onlooker and become far more overt (if possible) in picking coaches, selling tickets, doling out passes to favored politicos, and generally throwing his bantam-weight around like a real-life coach/athletic director/college president.

God knows, he certainly wants to play a role in every aspect of decision-making at LSU. He’s made that quite evident even though officially, he has to pretend to only be concerned about the purse strings.

If you think for one nanosecond that any search committee appointed by a Landry-controlled Board of Supervisors is going to have a scintella of independence to negotiate with and hire a coach, I have some leftover Trump steaks I’ll sell you at a discount.

Landry should know one important fact. If he waltzes in and takes control of administrative matters at LSU, some quality coaches still there are gonna start looking elsewhere. Jay Johnson isn’t going to tolerate interference in a baseball program he has guided to the very top. Same for gymnastics coach Jay Clark and women’s basketball coach Kim Mulkey.

There’s an old adage that says if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

One might argue that the football program is indeed broken and folks would be correct in that assumption. But by driving off an athletic director who is responsible in large part in bringing six national titles in six years to LSU, it would be a tragic mistake to try and revamp the entire athletic program – and that’s just what Squeaky Toy Landry is doing.

In short, he thinks he’s a lot smarter than he really is.

Okay, campers, here’s all you need to know about who suffers and who doesn’t after one full month of the governmental shutdown.

About 730,000 federal employees are working without pay.

About 670,000 workers have been furloughed.

• Two million active-duty and reserve members of the military were paid on Oct. 15 because about $8 billion in Pentagon R&D funds was used but there isn’t enough to meet today’s payroll.
• Federal contractors, including personnel who provide security and clean offices are laid off with no guarantee of back pay. (The exception here might be the contractor who’s constructing Trump’s $300 million grand ballroom.)
• Senate staffers won’t be paid for the remainder of the shutdown after missing their Oct. 20 paychecks.
• Essential staff in the judicial branch are working without pay while other court employees are furloughed.

Moreover, to pile insult onto injury, Chief Yellow Feathers said he is thinking about a new interpretation of the law which will allow him to not provide back pay for furloughed employees once the shutdown is over.

BUT…El Presidente, Hillbilly Boy Vance, members of the Supreme Court and members of the House and Senate have not missed a penny since the shutdown began on Oct. 1.

Here are their numbers:

House and Senate members – $174,000 per year, or $476.71 per day. That comes to $14,778 each for the first 31 days of the shutdown – for doing nothing. Bear in mind, if you will, at the $7.25 federal minimum wage, a worker would have to work 40 hours a week year-round to pull down $15,080. Multiply that $14,778 by 530 members (after excluding the Speaker and the four majority and minority leaders – they get paid a tad more) and you find that as a group they have been paid $7,832.383 since Oct. 1.

Speaker Mike Johnson, who steadfastly refuses to call the House into session so as to keep from releasing the Epstein files in order to protect a pedophile: $233,500, or $529.86 per day. He raked in $18,982.23 for sitting on his ass during October.

The majority and minority leaders in both chambers (4 altogether) receive $193,400 per year each. That’s $529.86 per day each, or $16,425.66 per day each. Multiplied by four and we see that altogether they raked in $65,702.64 for staying home.

That comes to a grand total of $7,867,753 and change for just the members of Congress during the first month of the shutdown. (And after 3,226 days in office, Sen. John N. Kennedy still has not held a town hall meeting.)

It’s not altogether fair to go beyond those 535 individuals because the administrative and judicial branches have continued to work (work being a relative term), but just for fun, let’s toss in Trump’s $33,972.60 for the same 31 days, J.D. Vance’s $19,967.39, Chief Justice John Roberts’s $26,965 and the $206,281.64 for the remaining eight associate justices and that grand total is bumped up to $8,154,938.

Also continuing to receive pay are members of the FBI (including Director Kash Patel), all political appointees who are confirmed by the Senate, federal judges, 70,000 personnel in the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Secret Service.

Funny, but from this perspective, it appears that priority is being given to those with authority to keep the rest of us in line and to enforce whatever Trump says the law is while rank and file workers who actually get things done are being given the ol’ shaft.

Not sure, but I think that’s called a police state.

Tom, my new illustration of Landry

Was it really a decision of plain-sense economics or was it one of motive-driven politics when Gov. Jeff Landry said on Monday, “I can tell you right now, “SCOTT WOODWARD WILL NOT BE SELECTING THE NEXT LSU COACH”?

On the surface of it, Landry made a lot of sense in criticizing the two multi-year, mega-million-dollar payouts of football coaches’ contracts negotiated by Woodward at Texas A&M (Jimbo Fisher’s $77 million) and LSU (Brian Kelly’s $53 million).

But the LOUISIANA ILLUMINATOR may have – inadvertently or otherwise – revealed a political motive as well as an economically prudent one when it noted that Landry “bench Democrat LSU athletic director Scott Woodward from picking the next LSU football coach…” (emphasis mine)

Stressing that “I’m not going to be picking the next coach,” Gov. Squeaky Toy said that the LSU Board of Supervisors would come up with a COMMITTEE which would “go find us a coach.”

But wait. Squeaky Toy has complete control over the Board of Supervisors and, by extension, utter dominance over the selection of said committee and its subsequence decision over the selection of a new coach.

That, on its surface, would appear that by taking the choice of a next coach out of the hands of Woodward, Landry is making a 100 percent political decision and injecting partisan politics into the hiring of a coach. That, in turn, is going to scare a lot of would-be candidates into running from, not toward, LSU for their next coaching job.

And for anyone who for a nanosecond believes that Landry is going to resist the opportunity to have a say in the selection process, I have some gold moon rocks I’ll sell you cheap.

What coach of any credible reputation would want to inject himself into that position? Why, it’s almost like some crazy person wanting to become the next LSU president. Wait. That’s already happening, isn’t it because Dr. William Tate got fed up with having to be Landry’s mouthpiece some time back and fled for Rutgers University.

I can’t say I disagree with Landry’s antipathy toward multi-year, multi-million-dollar contracts. Saying he was “tired of rewarding failure,” he said, “We are not going down a failed path. This is a pattern. Right now, we’ve got a $53 million liability,” Landry said. “We are not doing that again.”

Most everything he said up to that point sounded good. But then, like the yam-colored Frito Bandito, Landry couldn’t stop there. He just had to say, “Maybe we can get President Trump to pick [the next coach]. He knows winners.”

Yeah, sure. Just look at some of his appointees and identify the “winners.” Even Trump calls them losers after they split and split, they always ultimately do.

But back to LSU. Scott Woodward, hired in May 2019, is in year six of one of those multi-year (10-years in his case) contracts that pays him a grand total of $1.85 million per year. That’s $18.5 million over the life of his contract which expires on April 30, 2029.

(Click on + at top of illustration to magnify; scroll down to read all pages)

Of that $1.85 million per year, $525,000 (($5.25 million over 10 years) is paid by the university with the remainder) $1.325 million per year coming as “supplemental pay,” meaning a chunk of his salary, as well as that of Kelly’s, is picked up by private contributors to the Tiger Athletic Foundation (TAF).

That contract is actually between the LSU Board of Supervisors, Ryan Eric, LLC and Scott Woodward. Ryan Eric, LLC is a corporate entity set up by Woodward, apparently for tax purposes, and whose corporate address is the same as that of Woodward.

The main responsibility of any school’s AD, by definition, is to hire personnel and negotiate contracts. And he ain’t done too badly with the hire of Kim Mulkey for women’s basketball, Jay Clark for gymnastics or Jay Johnson for baseball. Between them, LSU has four national championships in four years.

So, with Squeaky Toy’s stepping in and usurping Woodward’s authority, what can we expect of Woodward in the future? What’s he going to do to earn the remainder of that $18.5 mil? What authority does he have left, administering concession and season ticket sales (another sore point, considering the hike in ticket prices and tailgate parking permits during a down season for LSU football)?

It wouldn’t surprise me to see Squeaky Toy pull some stunt to gain control over those as well.

So, don’t be surprised if Woodward bids the Ole War Skule arrivederci and buenas noches (if he’s bilingual) at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Speaker of the House or jester to the king?

Mike Johnson, the self-proclaimed “Moses of the House,” is not above lying.

In fact, he’s damned good at it. Maybe that’s why Pedo-POTUS ridicules him behind his back.

Trying his best – and failing miserably – to be empathetic, he said this week there “cannot be a regular legislative session so long as the government is closed and Americans are feeling so much pain.”

First of all, he doesn’t feel any pain so long as he continues to collect his $612.33 per day even as federal workers go without pay during the current shutdown.

Second of all, the shutdown is the choice of Republicans in Congress, not the Democrats as they would have you believe.

Johnson says if the Democrats would only vote to approve spending bills, everyone could get back to work. The Democrats, however, to their credit, refuse to return unless action can be taken to keep Affordable Care Act (ACA) premiums from skyrocketing, making coverage unaffordable for millions of Americans. So, Johnson is lying when he attempts to lay the blame for the shutdown at the feet of Democrats.

Besides, while Johnson blames the Democrats for the shutdown, which began Oct. 1, it was Johnson who sent House members home back on Sept. 19 – in order to avoid a vote on releasing the Epstein files. Those Epstein files, by the way, could arguably be linked to the Seventh of the Ten Commandments Johnson claims to adhere to.

Johnson also is lying – and he knows full-well he’s lying when he claims that millions of undocumented immigrants are receiving Medicare/Medicaid or ACA benefits. It’s not true because it is illegal for them to enroll in either of the programs. Johnson knows that, yet he continues to make the claim otherwise. So much for the Ninth Commandment.

Likewise, Johnson is lying when he insists that he is prohibited from swearing in newly-elected Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-Arizona) while Congress is not in session. He points to Louisiana’s Julia Letlow as an example of one who was not sworn in until about a month after her election when in fact, it was Letlow herself who chose the date that she would be available for the ceremony.

Oops.

Moreover, two other Republicans were elected during a recess but they were immediately sworn in – by Johnson. Still, he chooses to lie through his teeth while claiming to be a devout Christian. Grijalva, by the way, is the final vote needed to force a vote on releasing the Epstein files. Mikey wouldn’t be letting that little fact dictate his reluctance to administer the oath of office, would he” Nah, couldn’t be something that crass.

Johnson has also defended (a) Herr Frump’s demanding payment of $230 million in damages from the Justice Department over past federal investigations (in other words, Johnson, an attorney, sees nothing wrong with der Führer’s suing himself), (b) the demolition of the East Wing so that el Presidente may erect a 90,000-square-foot, $300 million ballroom while children on SNAP are about to go hungry and federal workers go without paychecks and (c) endorsed TACO Don’s pardon of former Rep. and convicted con man George Santos because MAGA-man believes in “redemption” even as he pursues prosecutions of three of his critics. All that fealty pretty much knocks Commandment Nos. One, Two and Eight in the head

It’s certainly no wonder that Ol’ Yam Tits was recently heard privately claiming that it is actually he, not Johnson, who is “speaker and president.”

Want to hear a good one? Johnson was quoted by MSNBC as saying Republican House members are currently doing “some of the most meaningful work of their careers,” adding that he is reluctant to “pull them away” from their time in their home districts.

On second thought, he’s probably right that by staying out of the Beltway, they may well be doing “some of the most meaningful work of their careers,” because they sure as hell haven’t shown much evidence of work in Washington.