Louisiana Voice

Folks, when I screw up, I have no choice but admit it and apologize. The votes by Kennedy and Cassidy were to keep the $35 cap on the price of insulin intact. I misread the amendment as an effort to remove the cap and had our two senators voting yes.

The amendment, in fact, was not to remove the cap but was a procedural move in an effort to keep the cap. It was voted in favor by a 57-43 vote but needed 60 votes to pass, so the $35 cap for those under private insurance do not qualify for the cap.

The Repugnantcan Party did, in fact, kill the cap, but Kennedy and Cassidy were not part of that effort. My sincerest apologies to both.

I may oppose Kennedy and his grandstanding, but when I err, I must do the honorable thing and admit my mistake and to apologize.

The Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) has come under severe criticisms lately following a couple of cases – one in Baton Rouge and another in north Louisiana – involving infants.

In one case that that has received considerable scrutiny involves the death of a two-year-old toddler from “acute fentanyl toxicity” after ingesting some pills he found on his mother’s bed.

It marked the third time the child had overdosed on drugs. He had been revived twice before but medical personnel were unable to revive him last April.

Compounding the tragedy was the fact that DCFS had, on the previous two occasions, flagged risks to the boy’s life but each time he was allowed to return to his mother’s home.

Contrast that with another case in which a woman, Leah Newell, who was seven months’ pregnant, was involved in an auto accident in Natchitoches Parish on May 6. Her two younger children were with her when a City of Natchitoches truck driver pulled out of a side road and struck her vehicle on the driver’s side.

An ambulance rushed Newell and her two children to the Natchitoches Parish Hospital ER. “That’s where a nightmare would begin for our family,” Newell wrote LouisianaVoice.

At the ER, a hospital social worker was told (falsely, Newell insists) by her sister-in-law and mother-in-law that she was at fault because she was abusing illegal drugs.

On the basis of that information, “The social worker told me that she was a nurse and needed a urinalysis to check on the fetus,” Newell said. “Although I was never given paperwork with results, the social worker claimed I had tested positive for amphetamines. I don’t do and have never done drugs,” she said.

She said she subsequently discovered evidence that proved the tests were never done in the ER. “The social worker who lied and claimed she was a nurse also lied and never drug tested me and then lied about me failing,” she said. 

“The social worker obtained permission from my mother-in-law to test the two youngest children for drugs, and the results came back negative. I had to undergo an emergency C-section to save my unborn child, and when the social worker insisted that the child be drug tested, that test also came back negative.

“My husband and I were drug tested a second time about a week after the accident and were negative for drugs. After a month, DCFS secured a removal order for the three younger children, who were temporarily placed with their paternal grandparents.”

Newell said she and her husband cooperated with DCFS in the belief that their children would come back home. “After six months, in December 2019, our children were finally placed back in their home with us,” she said.

“My husband and I went back to court in June 2020 after DCFS claimed the case would be closed because we had cooperated completely. The DCFS case worker, along with her supervisor and the court appointed CASA volunteer all submitted reports saying the children were happy and healthy and could remain at home. To everyone’s surprise, four days later, during the hearing, the judge ordered the children be removed again and placed back with the paternal grandparents. The judge said there were safety concerns but wouldn’t elaborate. And in a weird twist, moved the case from Natchitoches Parish to Sabine Parish.”

She said that since that day, “DCFS and the family court system in Natchitoches Parish continue to violate our constitutional rights, especially the fundamental right to be parents. The law requires a hearing within 72 hours after the removal of the children, but our hearing happened 9 days after the removal. The subsequent court dates never occurred within the time frame of the law, but we believed that if they cooperated, our children would come home again.”

In May 2021, during a case review hearing, the same Natchitoches judge ruled that the paternal grandparents would be granted custody, although no guardianship motions had been filed. “The court notified neither my husband nor me of this change in placement,” she said.

“Regardless, in July 2021, the judge granted guardianship to the paternal grandparents without even holding a trial. The judge would not grant the parents any visitation until September 2021, when two supervised temporary visits were allowed.”

A permanent plan was not established until late October 2021. The visitation plan granted the parents only two phone calls as week and four hours a month with supervision required.

Despite neither of us ever being charged of any crimes of abuse or neglect, despite DCFS not having a valid complaint for the investigation that led to the 2nd removal (with the DA confirming this in court records), despite three years of court ordered drug testing (urine, hair, and salvia) for both parents which was always negative, despite both of us taking parenting class twice, anger management, substance abuse classes, attending NA meetings, mandatory enrollment in daycare, paying child support and sending groceries and clothing, and begging for visits and phone calls with our children, we are still are being punished by having our parental rights completely ignored.

Despite guardianship being a temporary custody placement, this judge has said on court records that this guardianship would permanently be “a parental visitation-only case until subject children reach majority,” according to the court order. Guardianship is addressed in Louisiana’s Children Code Articles 718-724.1.

“We had their rights violated by the Natchitoches Parish 10th Judicial Court District and by Judge Lala Brittain Sylvester,” Newell said. “We continue fighting in court to bring our babies home, but this judge dismisses us every time. There is no evidence or proof or even any allegations of mistreatment of these children by us. Yet, for the last three years, we have had our family ripped apart because of lies, rumors, misguided DCFS investigations, and a biased judge. 

“There is no justice in Louisiana and certainly no justice in America anymore.”

John Neely Kennedy is quick to disparage the so-called mainstream media yet he is equally adept at using that same MSM to get the widest possible exposure to his every Foghorn Leghorn utterance in his undying effort to appeal to this century’s political base.

For most of this century he has been a John Birchite Repugnantcan but before that he was a liberal Democrat who ran unsuccessfully for the US Sen. against Mary Landrieu and endorsed Democrat John Kerry for President in 2004. Like his hero, the former guy, he was even (gasp) pro-choice in another lifetime.

But after poking his finger into the political winds and discerning a significant shift to red in Louisiana, he hit rewind and switched tracks to right-wing, holier-than-just-about-everyone Repug.

For just about anyone else, that would’ve been like undergoing a warm buttermilk enema in political-speak, but for Kennedy, it came easy because he’s never really had a well-defined political philosophy. Opportunists and con artists rarely do.

The release of his latest reelection campaign ad is spread all over the MSM today and that is no accident. His political flacks have expertly spread the word about what a masterpiece it is – surpassing in wit and cleverness even his 2016 proclamation that he’d “rather drink weedkiller” than support Obamacare.

In this oh-so-sincere version of himself, he proclaims, “Always be yourself, unless you suck.”

Clever, no?

Well, perhaps he should take some of his own advice and be himself, whoever that chameleon may be.

This ad could backfire if exploited properly by the opposition (there are three Democrats running against him).

First of all, he supports increased military spending but recently voted no on a bill to appropriate funding for veterans whose health was compromised by toxic burning at military bases in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. So, send young men and women to war but abandon them when they return home.

It wouldn’t be the first time run an ill-advised ad backfired. In 1999, when he was the secretary of revenue (appointive) seeking the office of state treasurer (elective) he ran a statewide TV ad claiming that as revenue secretary, he reduced the paperwork requirements of businesses “by 150 percent.”

He may have graduated from Vanderbilt and Oxford universities, but anyone with a passing familiarity with math knows it’s physically impossible to reduce anything by more than 100 percent. But such is the nature of self-serving, if untrue, political campaign advertising.

Expedience, not accuracy, trumps (no pun intended) everything.

But Kennedy is one of those marathon runners who has made a career of politics. He’s run in several statewide political races, most unsuccessfully before finally getting himself elected for secretary of revenue and finally, the Senate – on his third attempt.

In gardening vernacular, he’s a perennial.

But he’s nothing if not calculating and conniving.

When he figured out that Louisiana was shifting from blue to red, he changed colors like that lizard. I hope he never tries to hide in a box of crayons; he’ll explode.

But consistency has never been his strong suit.

As senator, he voted for the National Defense Authorization Act but spurned sick vets.

He was quoted as saying, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Yet, he voted to reject the results of the 2020 president election.

He all but accused President Biden’s nominee to head Treasury of being a communist in 2021, telling her he didn’t know whether to refer to her as “professor or comrade,” while overlooking his own furtive trip to Russia three years earlier over the July 4 holiday. He has steadfastly refused to explain the reasons for the trip, although he did walk back his initial claim that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that “interfered” (not meddled) in the 2016 election, claiming that he “misheard” the question.

I’m told that weedkiller can adversely affect one’s hearing that way.

Back in 2019, Kennedy was a guest on Faux News and used the occasion to take Democrats to task over their three years of “whining” about the results of former guy’s 2016 election over Hillary Clinton.

“We’re going into the third year that they’ve been throwing a tantrum over the election result. They need to leave the man alone, let him be president,” he said at the time, adding that if Democrats were dissatisfied with the results, they should “get over it” or campaign against the president.

“I wish I didn’t have to say this,” went on (he’s always going on). “There are some members of the House leadership whose only mission in life is to demonize the president.”

This from a guy who voted not to certify the 2020 results and who has spent nearly two full years “demonizing” the president.

Damn, it’s funny how your words can come back to bite you on the backside.

The pleasure boat of Waste Solutions/Trash Raiders owner Dustin Clouatre was recently parked on the Lamar-Dixon Expo near Trash Rangers vehicles. Trash Rangers operates is private trash hauling business from Lamar-Dixon, paying the parish $600 per month rent where other entities pay as much as $3000 per month (see story below). The boat was subsequently moved within an hour of an inquiry about its being parked on public property.

There’s mischief afoot in Ascension Parish and things are getting a little trashy concerning Parish President Clint Cointment and his relationship with the owner of a local company called Trash Rangers which has a long-term sweetheart contract with the parish.

Complicating matters even more, the parish, Trash Rangers and its president, Dustin Clouatre, were named defendants in a lawsuit filed by an unsuccessful candidate for parish president. Cointment promptly fired the parish’s long-time legal counsel, O’Neal Parenton, and hired the same attorney who represents Clouatre. That could conceivably create a conflict of interest in the event that Clouatre and the parish end up pitted against each other over some issue as co-defendants in that litigation.

But the hiring of attorney Jean Paul Robert to represent both the parish and Clouatre means that the parish now appears to picking up the legal costs of Clouatre who is a contractor but not a parish employee.

It’s a tangled story but LouisianaVoice will attempt to pull the string that unravels the entire mess. But to do so, it’s necessary to rewind to Feb. 7, 2019, when Murphy Painter, then a candidate for parish president and on invitation from Clouatre, appeared in Clouatre’s office at Hughes Insurance Agency in Gonzales to discuss the possibility of Hughes Insurance’s possibility of getting the book of insurance for the parish government if he should be elected.

Unbeknownst to Painter, Clouatre taped their conversation and Wade Petite, campaign manager for Painter’s opponent, Clint Cointment, began circulating the news on his Web blog that he was in possession of a tape of alleged wrongdoing by Painter.

The wrongdoing alleged by Petite claimed that Painter covered up the rape of five girls under the age of 12 during his tenure with the Ascension Parish Sheriff’s Office.

Going back even further, Petite and District Attorney Ricky Babin had also taped then-Parish President Kenny Matassa giving money to Gonzales City Council candidate Wayne Lawson in 2016 but Matassa was acquitted of bribery at trial. Matassa’s biggest sin, it appears, was in beating Cointment for parish president that year.

In Painter’s case, Babin called him before a grand jury over the accusations but he was never charged with anything. In fact, the rape case presented to the grand jury occurred at a time when Painter was not even with the Ascension Parish Sheriff’s Office. Painter, however, withdrew from the runoff election after the furor over what he insisted – and still insists – was an altered tape.

Painter has since filed suit against Cointment, Petite, Petite’s online publication, the Pelican Post, Clouatre, Hughes Insurance, and DA Babin. Hughes Insurance was dismissed and the court ruled that Babin had qualified immunity and was also dismissed. The other four remain as defendants and Painter has filed appeals on the two who were dismissed.

Cointment won the parish president’s race by default after Painter pulled out and one of his first official acts was to sign a no-bid $1.4 million contract for the parish’s book of insurance with Hughes Insurance with Clouatre as the agent of record.

But then, as if that were not enough, things began to get really dicey.

It seems that besides being an insurance agent, Clouatre also owns a trash pickup service called Trash Rangers. He’s nothing if not diversified.

In another no-bid situation, Cointment terminated the parish’s contract with its trash pickup company and awarded the contract to Trash Rangers for commercial trash pickup in the parish. The only signatures on the contract, which ran from July 22, 2021 to July 22, 2023, were those of Cointment as parish president and Clouatre as owner/president of Trash Rangers.

The contract also awarded Trash Rangers the right to store its equipment on a corner of the grounds of the parish-owned Lamar-Dixon Expo Center at the brother-in-law rate of $600 per month compared to $3000 per month that it charges other short-term tenants like the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, Entergy, Dixie Electric, and Cat5 Resources — entities which would use the expo center as a staging area in the event of an emergency or natural disaster like a hurricane.

There are ethical questions about a public body giving something of value to a private person or company but that doesn’t seem to matter to Cointment who also agreed to allow Trash Rangers to supply a number of dumpster bins and roll-off containers for Lamar-Dixon’s use during events held here and to charge the parish $600 per container it empties when full.

In a magnanimous gesture, Cointment also approved an addendum that gives Trash Rangers, as a sponsor at Lamar-Dixon, the right to use the parking lot area for storage of equipment on a full-time basis, gives full advertising rights at the center, and even provides a link for Trash Rangers on the Lamar-Dixon Web page.

So, now the Ascension Parish government – and parish taxpayers by necessity – are in the trash business with Clouatre.

Clouatre is rumored to host elaborate parties on his $1.4 million yacht and his $400,000 Greek fishing boat that he paid $40,000 to have shipped to him, according to his boasts on his Facebook page.