Louisiana Voice

The Louisiana State Police Commission (LSPC), the Louisiana State Police (LSP) equivalent to the Louisiana Civil Service Board, has a miserable record of accomplishments and an equally poor record of instability of membership.

And now, as the song goes, another one bites the dust.

Historically, the commission has been a rubber stamp for the LSP administration, woefully inadequate at conducting meaningful investigations and inquiries which, by extension, translates to general inaction in conducting hearings on disciplinary matters.

The commission has experienced a high TURNOVER RATE with members resigning over political campaign activity, trysts between members, and outright disgust for the way meetings degenerate into finger-pointing and name-calling.

The latest to exit is Gov. John Bel Edwards appointee Sabrina Richardson, a New Orleans Police Department captain-demoted-to-lieutenant and more recently suspended for 120 days.

Richardson, who was under investigation for possible double-dipping and payroll fraud, has RESIGNED from the LSPC.

Former New Orleans attorney ASHTON O’DWYER attempted unsuccessfully to get LSPC to investigate his claim that he was tased and shot by State Troopers from beleaguered Troop F in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Instead of giving O’Dwyer a fair hearing, or to even offer the pretense of one, the commission dismissed his claims out of hand, illustrating once again that it is a toothless tiger existing only to validate three different discredited LSP administrations.

I apologize for the graphic language on the banners in the photo above but I am posting the image as a reminder that The Repugnant defenders of all that is decent and good continue to pursue their quest to purge all “objectionable” material from the public libraries in Louisiana.

They have mounted their campaigns in libraries in the parishes of Lafayette, Livingston, Bossier, and St. Tammany – and probably elsewhere because they say they don’t want the kiddies exposed to literature that might poison their minds.

Specifically, they appear to be targeting books containing any reference to LGBQT subject matter but they insist it’s about protecting young eyes from all types of smut. Yet, it’s quite doubtful that a Democrat hung these banners.

It’s called a double standard, folks, pure and simple. And don’t for a nano-second think it’s about decency – it’s about censorship with the end-game being control.

And if you’re not alarmed about this attempt to gain control over the libraries…you should be.

I will go on record as saying up front that I’ve never been a fan of Nancy Pelosi and there are two reasons for that.

First, her husband has a history of making some suspiciously timely real estate and stock investments that have enriched them both and I feel she has used her position in Congress in order to accomplish that. Her apparent lack of enthusiasm in pushing a ban on congressional INSIDER TRADING has done nothing to assuage that belief.

Second, I’m not too crazy about lawmakers making a career of Congress. It was designed to be a service to the country, not an occupation. It seems the longer they remain, the more skilled they become at gaming the system. That’s true, I feel, whether they are Democrat of Republican. Pelosi has been a US representative for 35 years. (There are others who have hung around who should have stepped aside years ago, President Biden among them.)

That said, there is something that far overshadows tenure in Washington and that is the vitriol that exists inside the Beltway among men and women who really should be acting like adults as opposed to members of some sixth-grade, name-calling clique ganging up on the class nerd. MAGAt Repugnantcans raised more money for the legal defense of David DePape (Paul Pelosi’s attacker) in 48 hours than they’ve raised to aid the victims of the mass shooing in Raleigh, N.C. four weeks ago.

Take one Clay Higgins, for example (and he’s a prime example of that mindset). Cast in the same mold as those MAGAts, Higgins is an embarrassment. Or should be, but he will probably be reelected by a constituency that appears to share his IQ level. The very fact that this man has already been reelected once and could be headed for a third term would be astonishing to political observers a generation ago. Sadly, it seems to be the norm today.

Higgins was only too happy to jump aboard the conspiracy train following the attack on Nanch Pelosi’s husband last Friday night.

Almost immediately, the conspiracies began circulating on social media. Roger Stone, the Donald Trump adviser with the tattoo of Nixon on his back wrote that there was a “stench” about the “alleged attack” on Paul Pelosi and Elon Musk, the new owner and CEO of Twitter, posted a link to a right-wing website and tweeted, “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye.”

But Higgins…

• The man who went into Congress telling his ex-wife, to whom it was claimed he owed about $100,000 in child support, that once in Congress, there would be plenty money lying around to be scooped up so that he could catch up on his payments;
• The man who claimed on national television that as a lawman, he had arrested thousands of people (though his former boss, the sheriff of St. Landry Parish, said he arrested “no more than maybe half-a-dozen.”);
• The man who attempted to cut a campaign video while standing at the entrance to the Auschwitz Holocaust memorial;
• The man who has done nothing to bring federal aid to the victims of HURRICANES LAURA AND DELTA.

Higgins, with all the class and finesse of a pro wrestler, posted a joke on Twitter that depicted Nancy Pelosi with her hands pressed to her forehead and a caption beneath the photo saying “That moment you realize the nudist hippie male prostitute LSD guy is the reason your husband didn’t make it to your fundraiser.”

Though the tweet was soon removed, it nevertheless was a clear illustration that Higgins was capable of making a joke of an attack that nearly killed an 82-year-old man even though there was absolutely no evidence of the conspiracy theory that quickly gained traction that the attack was not an attack, but a homosexual encounter.

Remember now, Higgins is a former police officer and deputy sheriff and as such, should be trained to carefully examine all evidence before reaching an investigative conclusion. Let’s just say I’d hate to have him investigate a crime in my home.

To the voters of Louisiana’s Third Congressional District, I can only say that if you reelect Clay Higgins a week from today, you deserve what you get.

Today is the last day of our October fundraiser and we still need your help. There will be no more appeals after today until our April event.

We make sincere efforts to keep abreast of developing stories in Louisiana and, when the occasion warrants it, elsewhere, such as Washington when a story directly affects us in Louisiana – like when there are efforts to infringe on our rights or on congressional votes that impact our state or our residents.

We don’t always get there first but we try to tell you the story within the story and we will let you know when our US senators or representatives are not acting in our best interests.

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Freedom.

It’s an abstract concept to some, absolute to others.

To the absolutist, it means we are free to go where we want, when we want, associate with whomever we want, say what we want, and to be free to live life the way we choose. We enjoy the liberty to choose our religion – or to choose no religion at all.

The only constraints the absolutist places on freedom is when our freedom infringes on the rights of others.

And then there are those who define freedom in the narrowest of terms.

Take, for example, the Louisiana legislator who gave her unqualified support a few years ago to the allocation of state taxpayer dollars to church-affiliated schools. Public funding of religious schools was just dandy until an Islamic school in New Orleans applied for funding. It was at that point that she went into orbit, proclaiming the bill was intended for “Christian” schools, certainly not those based in the Islamic faith.

The same legislator made immigration a major issue, too, fretting publicly about the “invasion” of our southern border, as a former president put it. But when that legislator’s husband purchased two rent houses, who do you suppose he hired to perform the renovation work on the structures?

That same legislator, Valerie Hodges of Livingston Parish, recently raffled off an AR-15 as part of her ongoing fundraising efforts, prompting one of her constituents to tweet, “This the same person raging against the library. Tell me again…how many books have killed children?”

That constituent, you see, is school librarian Amanda Jones, who has been under relentless attack by those who view freedom in somewhat conflicting terms: they want “absolute” freedom of the Second Amendment but are determined to restrict freedoms for anyone with whom they have a philosophical or moral disagreement.

This, then, is the mindset of the American equivalent of the Islamic morality police who killed Mahsa Amini after her arrest over Iran’s hijab law: confirm to our puritanic standards or face the consequences.

There are those, I am certain, who feel I am being unfair to compare the so-called Christians to Islamic radicals, but is it really an unfair comparison? After all, no one has been killed over a library book.

But let us look at the larger picture. Women’s right to choose has already been placed on the chopping block over the so-called right to life argument. But is it right to life or right to birth? After all, the pro-lifers have stripped away or are in the process of doing so to social programs to help the vulnerable and have voiced their intentions to going further in abolishing programs for hungry children born into poverty and abuse. They want the children to be born but quickly turn their backs on them after that.

On another front in the ongoing culture war, we are seeing voting rights being taken away from minorities on a scale not witnessed since the dark days of the KKK and the Citizens Council 70 years ago.

We’re in a period of runaway inflation, but precious little is being said about raising the minimum wage so that a person can make a decent living. And the income disparity continues to grow as the middle class disappears.

There is ample finger-pointing between Democrats and Republicans over high energy prices. Republicans scream (correctly) about President Biden’s restriction on domestic production while Democrats point out (correctly) that before leaving office, Trump prevailed upon OPEC to cut production in order to jack up oil prices.

Meanwhile, flying below everyone’s radar were reports that EXXON had record profits of $20 billion (with a B) for the third quarter, SHELL nearly doubled its profits during the same quarter, and UTILITY COMPANIES are lavishing bonuses and salary increases on their top executives even as consumer suffer.

But no one talks much about a windfall profits tax even as big oil SELLS OFF its wells in an effort to pass along environmental cleanup to taxpayers.

Meanwhile, the culture war continues to expand. There is a concerted campaign to curtail or even eliminate the teaching of certain elements of history that Some would rather be forgotten – subjects like slavery, the Civil War, civil rights, women’s suffrage, and of course, the “don’t say gay” agenda. We’re written extensively about efforts to suppress and censor libraries (and make no mistake, it’s all about censorship, no matter what the morality police try to tell us) in Livingston, Lafayette, and Bossier parishes. Now the fight has been taken into St. Tammany and the battle is becoming more and more contentious.

People are so damned afraid of what the kiddies might see on the library shelves that they are predicting infantile debauchery perpetrated by evil, pedophilic librarians even as they overlook the ease with which Porn-R-Us is available to young prying eyes on the Internet.

I can’t help but wonder how many of these “concerned parents” have enjoyed extra-marital trysts in the past or continue to do so.

I also have to wonder just how many children (or adults, for that matter), have turned gay by reading about it. Probably the same number who became werewolves or zombies or witches by going trick-or-treating or the same number who grew up to be cowboys and war heroes by watching a John Wayne movie (it’s got to be both or it doesn’t count).

But having said that, I will concede that there is a certain book that is chock-full of murder, corruption, homophobia, bestiality, incest, and cruelty – which is often read to little children, particularly on Sundays.

This book:

• Advocates limiting women’s rights;
• Advocates control of people’s sexuality;
• Wants to force prayers in schools;
• Wants to control government policy;
• Wants to influence the judiciary system;
• Promotes hatred;
• Is judgmental;
• Promotes violence and perpetuates conflict;
• Populates the world through incest (twice);
• Promotes killing at least two dozen times and then orders the killing of anyone who kills.

This book advocates the killing of every opponent in battle, including infants (even ripping them from mothers’ wombs) but gives the victors permission to take young virgins for themselves.

It is graphic in describing how one man, a king at that, was guilty of voyeurism and lust to the point of ordering the object of his desire’s husband to the front lines in battle so the poor sap would be killed and the king could have the widow, whom he’d impregnated, to himself.

It tells of the killing of the first-born of an entire country and it even describes how a father first offers his daughters to his neighbors for their pleasure and later impregnates them himself.

Yet, no one has advocated that this book be relocated out of the reach of little impressionable children.

We must ask ourselves — and answer honestly: are our morality police really any different than their Islamic counterparts?