Louisiana Voice

I know, I know, I’m supposed to be retired from this blog after almost 13 years – and I am – but I’m still writing other projects and I just wanted to let you know that I have another book out now. It’s a follow-up to Louisiana’s Rogue Sheriffs: A Culture of Corruption.

I decided to take a look at sheriffs in other states and found my suspicions confirmed: Louisiana is by no means unique. America’s Rogue Sheriffs: A Culture of Corruption examines miscreants in sheriffs’ departments in all but three states (those three don’t have sheriffs).

I also updated the chapter on Louisiana to include the Dennis Perkins story that broke after publication of Louisiana’s Rogue Sheriffs.

America’s Rogue Sheriffs opens by listing the consensus list of the 10 worst sheriffs in America. Surprisingly, Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, did not make the list. Others gems plucked from America’s Rogue Sheriffs:

• One state allowed three convicted felons to not only run for sheriff, but they actually won.
• A meth addict was elected sheriff, serving only two days before he was arrested.
• A sheriff and members of a rogue Navy intelligence office in Arlington, Virginia, attempted to establish a secret military training center in west Texas.
• Sheriffs use asset seizure laws to seize property from innocent drivers who quickly find that the burden of proof is on them to prove their innocence, not for prosecutors to prove their guilt – all under the cover of law.
• Sheriffs are involved in drug and sex trafficking, embezzlement, excessive force, money laundering, extortion, racketeering, prostitution, the unauthorized use of military weaponry, and even murder.

To order your copy of this 502-page book, send a check for $40 (which includes mailing costs) to me, Tom Aswell, 107 North College Street West, Denham Springs, Louisiana 70726 or click on the yellow DONATE rectangular button to the upper right of this post to pay by credit card.

Now, for those who might miss the posts of LouisianaVoice (and face it, judging from some of your comments, whatever your motive, even those of you who hated it still read it), I wish to direct you to Bob Mann’s renewal of Something Like the Truth.

Mann, so infuriated Attorney General Jeff Landry that he tried to get Mann fired from his LSU teaching job and now that he’s poised to become governor, he will have the power to do just that. So, Mann beat him to the punch by announcing he is leaving LSU and resuming his political blog, which is certain to be a much bigger thorn in Landry’s side than had he just allowed him to continue his professorship.

Anyway, Mann has reopened for business through a paid subscription of $5 per month or $50 per year. His observations on the body politic are well-worth the investment and I highly recommend that you give him a look by going HERE and follow the “Subscribe” link.:

For samples of his thought-provoking commentary go HERE and HERE.

Obviously, lying about your job history, education and athletic prowess, theft, using campaign funds for personal expenses, including casino visits, Botox treatments and porn surfing give one unchallenged qualification to serve in the US House of Representatives.

That is, if you go by the vote of 114 members of the House who voted No on the measure to expel miscreant member George Santos.

And if you go by the votes of three of Louisiana’s six House members.

Louisiana’s six members split evenly on the vote with Garret Graves, Julia Letlow and Troy Carter voting to evict and Speaker Mike Johnson, Steve “KKK” Scalise and Clay “Law and Order but Can’t Keep a Job” Higgins voting to give the boy another chance.

Only Julia Letlow, a Trump supporter, was an unknown quantity going in but she came through with her vote in favor of the boot. Johnson, Scalise and Higgins dutifully carried the banner of the neo-fascist sentiment now so prevalent in the Republican Party by voting No in lock-step. They may as well have been holding their right arms straight out, in a palms-down salute.

They are members in good standing of the family values party but lying, cheating, thieving and porn watching are acceptable activities so long as they are “free” to dictate what is taught in schools, what you read at the local library, who can and cannot vote and what you may or may not do with your body – if you are unfortunate enough to be a Handmaid’s Tale woman.

Thankfully, the effort to rid itself of the ugly Santos growth succeeded by a 311-114 vote. It was a rare bipartisan exercise, with 206 Democrats being joined by 105 Republicans to vote to oust the New York Republican. Two Democrats voted no and two more simply voted Present while three Democrats and five Republicans did not vote.

Santos, who is facing 23 felony counts, had survived two previous attempts to show him the door but he has been an open, festering wound almost from the day he was elected when a local Long Island newspaper had the audacity to check his street creds and found him lacking in forthrightness and honesty about his background.

In other words, he lied through his teeth.

The outcome of the Friday – and final vote, as it turned out – was pretty much a given. A House Ethics Committee report was pretty much the death knell for his chances of remaining in the body which has managed to survive the likes of Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Matt Gaetz and Gym Jordan – but not Santos, if indeed, that is his real name.

The House has a pretty low bar of tolerance as evidenced by the likes of the aforementioned quartet, and Paul Gosar, Rashida Tlaib, Scott Perry, Clay Higgins, Mike Johnson, Steve Scalise and Andy Biggs, to name just a few of the more controversial members.

But Santos was just too much, even for a clown car being driven by the likes of the current House makeup. Of those named, only House lightning rod Rashida Tlaib voted for Santos’s ouster.

Bring Back Democracy

Posted by 

Mark Zaborowski

CLAY HIGGINS (R-LA) MAY BE MORE DANGEROUS THAN DONALD TRUMP

There are some similarities between the two politicians. Yes, Higgins is a down home Southern boy and Trump is an East Coast elitist. But they are both salesmen who love the spotlight and would-be hard asses who get off on threatening others. Neither man seems to have much respect for the “sanctity” of marriage; Trump has been married three times and Higgins four times. It goes without saying that both of them spout the Republican “party lines”. They are anti-everything – except guns. Everyone knows about Trump, but maybe it’s time to look into Clay Higgins.

Symbolism: redneck general shot macho promo at Dollar General

The Louisiana GOPer is the Representative of the state’s 3rd Congressional District. He has some college experience, but no degree. Before being elected to Congress in 2016, Higgins had been in the MP force of the National Guard, an automobile salesman, and had a checkered career as a police officer in three different jurisdictions. In his first cop job, he resigned before disciplinary action could be taken against him for police brutality and lying on incident reports. He went on to become a TV spokesman for another police force, where he often strayed from the script to identify and threaten “persons of interest” during broadcasts. He took advantage of his local fame to appear in ads for a security service while in uniform and using taxpayer-funded department equipment to run his own LLC selling shot glasses and T-shirts with his image. He has been sued for unpaid child support and may have hidden certain income from the IRS, though that has yet to be proven. Now that he is in Congress, however, the danger he poses as a violent authoritarian is becoming more evident.

Is the beard a disguise to avoid child support collectors?

When asked what he would do about Black armed protestors, he bragged that he would “drop 10 of them where they stood”. He did assault and physically move one protestor in another incident. As a devoted goose-stepper for the Radical Right segment of Congress, Higgins is a member of the Republican Study Committee and the Freedom Caucus. Consequently, he has been given seats on the prestigious Armed Services and Oversight Committees. As a former lawman, he has shown scant support for the Capitol Police who were assaulted and injured by the Trump-supporting thugs on Jan 6. He actually called for a lenient sentence for one of the rioters who attacked the LEOs with bear spray and shouted on video that they were bringing the violence and that this was “not a peaceful protest!” Higgins has spoken at events sponsored by the Oath Keepers and the Three percenters, even claiming to be one of the latter.

During a hearing, Clay Higgins was questioning FBI director Christopher Wray about some bizarre conspiracy theory concerning “ghost buses” bringing in FBI informants and undercover agents to provoke and promote the Jan 6 insurrection. Not getting the responses he wanted, Higgins threatened the director “Your day is coming”. More recently, he has sent the message to Special Counsel Jack Smith that his “days are numbered” when it comes to his investigation into Donald Trump’s criminality. At the moment Clay Higgins has no more power than any other Congressperson. But if he ever moved into a higher position, say as Speaker or Vice-President, he would be in line for the Presidency itself. Unlike Trump who is all bark, Higgins has proven that he is willing to bite. This is not a man that we want with his finger on any button but his TV remote.

Louisiana Sen. John “Foghorn Leghorn” Kennedy surely got his comeuppance during Tuesday’s attempted ambush of Dr. Megan Ranney of the Yale School of Public Health before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The St. Tammany self-styled scaramouche apparently thought he could browbeat the good doctor, though it was never abundantly clear just what point he was trying to make in his effort to get the good doctor to commit to a barrage of preconceived notions.

It’s admittedly rare that Kennedy, who relies mostly on pithy platitudes to make a point rather than hard statistics but on Tuesday he talked himself into a corner with his only defense being an annoying habit of constantly interrupting Dr. Ranney even as she tried to answer his weird line of questioning.

He really tripped himself up when he attempted to ask her about the gun-related death rate in Chicago. Now, no one is going to argue that gun violence has reached critical mass in the Windy City, but his effort to paint gun violence against the backdrop of those “who lawfully have a gun in their homes for protection, or perhaps for hunting” he suddenly found himself groping to recover the high ground.

Characterizing Chicago as the “LARGEST OUTDOOR SHOOTING RANGE,” he asked Dr. Ranney if she thought the city’s high number of gun deaths was “because of a finite group of criminals who have rap sheets as long as King Kong’s arm,” She shot back that “Mississippi, Louisiana, Missouri have higher firearm death rates, obviously there’s certain…”

She never got to finish her point because Kennedy’s ego will not allow him to hear facts that clash with his opinions. But the fact is, Louisiana, with the nation’s HIGHEST homicide rate, does indeed stand as a more dangerous killing field than Chicago and, get this: Chicago, in 13^th place, ranks well behind number-4 New Orleans and number-5 Baton Rouge in its homicide rate.

Now Kennedy grew up in the Baton Rouge suburb of Zachary in East Baton Rouge Parish and his official residence is now in St. Tammany Parish, which is situated generally between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, so he should have been aware of those statistics before he opened his PLATITUDE-LADEN MOUNTH.

Nevertheless, Dr. Ranney soldiered on, pointing out that she was an academic and not a politician but did manage to say that she thought that contributing factors to gun violence included “easy access to firearms, combined with environmental conditions and lack of great education. There have actually been studies showing that when you green vacant lots and repair abandoned buildings in urban neighborhoods, you see decreases in gunshots and violence as well as decreases in stress and depression in the neighborhoods around them.”

Kennedy’s response? “No disrespect, Doc, but that sounds a lot like word salad to me.”

Word salad? Wow, Foghorn. Way to keep the testimony on a higher plane.

I’ll give you this: you do know how to appeal to the worst instincts of your base.

For your enjoyment (or disgust), I have included a video of the exchange. You can watch it by clicking HERE.

As one who has been bombarded with multiple solicitations – that’s multiple on a daily basis, sometimes as many as a dozen in a day – from Donald Trump, the Republican Party and various national Republican candidates, it really came as no surprise when a friend sent me a solicitation she received from House Speaker Mike Johnson in which he was hawking purple and gold “Geaux Speaker” lapel buttons for $10 a pop.

The Louisiana Grifter’s come-on opened by saying, “Ever since I officially became the Speaker of the House, conservative grassroots supporters have been reaching out to me non-stop, asking how to show their support.”

Yeah, I just bet.

If that doesn’t sound like Trump 2.0, I don’t know what does. It appears that he literally took Trump’s pitch and substituted his own name.

“I am so excited to announce that you can officially rock your Official Speaker Merchandise,” he gushed.

“If you want to say Geaux Speaker with a game day pin…

“If ou want to drink a cup of joe out of a cup of Mike mug…

“If you want to keep the Speaker top of mind with a branded hat…

“We’ve got you covered! Just check out our newly launched Speaker Store.”

Still wondering what he meant by keeping the speaker “top of mind,” I made a visit to his “SPEAKER STORE.”

My Gawd.

It’s the K-Mart of grifting, the dollar store of gauche. Well, as they say, one man’s junk is another man’s…junk. All designed to extract dollars from people who, for the most part, can’t afford it and for whom Johnson is literally doing nothing in Washington. Just like Trump.

He’s got “I Like Mike” red, white and blue buttons (strikingly similar to the “I Like Ike” buttons of 1952 and ’56 (kind of a rip-off, really), “I Like Mike” coffee mugs, “Speaker Mike coffee mugs (two designs), “I Like Mike” Tees (long and short-sleeved). More lapel pins, baseball caps, bumper stickers, tote bags, beanies, drink koozies (non-alcoholic only, I assume), fleece pullovers, sweats and Lord knows what else – all emblazoned with some variation of Mike Johnson’s name or image. Most of his merch is in the $10-$15 range but some of his crap runs as high as $50.

With each item is the assurance that the product was “Made in America,” but then, anyone can say that. I have to wonder if they really are, but I won’t belabor the point. But for the dignity of a public office, it’s enough to gag a maggot. As a pure measure of bad smell, this idea could knock a buzzard off a s**t wagon at a hundred yards.

But what can you expect from someone whose lips move only when Trump’s hand moves and who has an app on his phone to keep him from checking out Internet porn?

And to complete the trifecta, we have Kyle Duncan, a pal of Johnson’s from LSU Law School days. The two worked together on behalf of the religious right to overturn federal abortion laws.

Duncan not only is anti-women’s rights, but is also a rabid anti-LGBTQ activist in a day and age when society, if not Duncan and Johnson, has come to the realization that not everyone is cookie-cutter identical to what they prefer in gender, color, or philosophy. They don’t understand that love need not be defined by gender; they have never suffered discrimination in hiring, housing, or any of the myriad ways in which a person can feel pain through indifference, slight, or downright hostility. They have no appreciation that other religions have every right that Christian do or that we have the right to no religion if we so choose.

The Biblical arguments of Johnson and Duncan on behalf of the religious right just don’t ring true. A couple of major characters in the Bible, after all, appeared to have had (gasp!) homosexual tendencies and quite a number of them, including David, Christ’s ancestor, were guilty of adultry in violation of every tenet the religious right holds dear.

In 2018, Trump appointed Duncan to a judgeship on the Fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals which encompasses the states of Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.

Trouble is, Duncan does not reside in either of those states, choosing instead to make his residence in his McLean, Virginia, home he and his wife purchased for $790,000 in September 2016. Do we not have a residency requirement? Or at least the expectation?

But apparently, that’s okay. I mean, after all, Alabama Sen. Tommy Tupperware lives not in Alabama but in Florida.

We don’t know where Cancun Cruz is.

And we don’t know for sure who George Santos really is.

But the man who Johnson succeeded as Speaker really takes the prize.

In an address on Sunday and later in a posing on X, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the California Republican, nee Speaker, apparently after checking out a Rhonda Santis-approved high school history book, DECLARED that “In every single war that America has fought, we have never asked for land afterwards.”

Whoa.

Native Americans might disagree with that and Mexico might decide it wants all or parts of Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, California, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming back.

And how does McCarthy think the US acquired the territories of Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines?

McCarthy is dangerously close to making Clay Higgins look intelligent by comparison.

Now excuse me while I visit the Mike Johnson Store to pick out a pair of “I Like Mike” gold-plated tin medallion earrings for my wife’s Christmas present. At five bucks, they’re a bargain.