Louisiana Voice

As further evidence that he is in the latter stages of dementia and suffering from acute narcissism, that he is delusional and unfit for office, Donald Trump, aka “Doddering Don,” has really taken a plunge off the deep end of the pool with the latest revelation of his note to Norway Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre in which he somehow manages (in his increasingly confused mind) to tie his failure to win the Nobel Peace Prize to his contemplating the invasion of Greenland.

It’s not a misprint or a typo, folks. It’s the real thing. Read it again slowly. Take the potential implications in.

Still don’t believe me? Here is the link to the latest version of the Trump Crazy Train: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/norwegian-leader-says-he-received-trump-message-that-reportedly-ties-greenland-to-nobel-peace-prize

If you’re like me, you’re probably wondering about now how long this country–this planet–can continue to accommodate the addled toddler trantrums of this obviously mentally incapicitated individual. How much longer can the Repugnantcan Party blithely look the other way while attempting to ignore the rantings of ketchup-flinging brat-child? This, I remind you, is the same political party (by name only) that eventually was forced to admit that Nixon was no longer fit for office. If the Repugnantcans were unable to tolerate a blowjob for Bill Clinton, how the hell can they excuse what he’s doing (I could use the coarse description, but the decency I have left prohibits that) to the entire nation?

Sorry to say, the Repugnantcan Party is long past being the Party of Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt or Eisenhower. It’s now the party of thugs, thieves and despots who could not care less about your health care, the poor and homeless, your rights or the price of groceries. But they for damned sure are concerned about your bedroom, your penises and your vaginas.

And Mike Johnson and John N. Kennedy (and I suppose, Bill Cassidy, even though he’s toast) will somehow justify this latest humiliation. They, along with Letlow, KKK Scalise and Clay Higgins, will be the “see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil” among our elected officials in Washington. Likewise, our squeaky-toy governor and his sock puppet attorney general will wait in line for their turn at the Agent Orange butt kissing booth.

But here’s the prediction I will make and I bet it rolls out exactly as I envision it:

Press Secretary Carolying Leavett will try to explain what Yam Tits really meant in his note to Norway’s prime minister and the Mango Mussolini will follow that by explaining he was just joking. And why wouldn’t he be joking? He already got his Nobel from Maria Corina Machado.

Regardless, after all that, J.D. Vance will re-open the debate with some totally off-the-wall, irrelevant gooney-babble that no one will really comprehend.

And the Epstein files will remain in the possession of Pam Bondi, unreleased as we deal with yet another distraction caused by Dorito Face.

A reader wrote: “My friend showed me his medical degree from Harvard. Now I’m a surgeon.”

In line with that joke about Trump’s “participation trophy” (even though he never participated), another friend came up with an absolutely brilliant idea:

Go into your attic, storeroom or wherever, and dig out all your old, useless trophies (especially any old participation trophies) and send them to Donald J. Trump, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington, D.C. 20004.

Or you can send them to Trump The Mar-a-Lago Club, 1100 South Ocean Boulevard, Palm Beach, Florida 33480

He wants participation trophies, give him participation trophies.

Do it! They can’t do anything about someone’s wanting to share his accomplishments with ol’ Yam Tits!

Even Milli Vanilli gets in on the growing wave of sharing:

And then, there’s this:

(Yeah, I know it’s all AI, but damn! Ain’t it fun!)

Well, he’s an avowed supporter of Yam-Tits Trump and Brain-Worm Kennedy, Jr., so you might expect him to skirt Louisiana’s toothless ethics laws to enrich himself through his position as chairman of the State Senate Health and Welfare Committee.

And he does.

State Sen. Patrick McMath (R-Covington) is owner of Southern Interior Solutions and his store has won bids to provide furnishings for health systems affected-and regulated-by his committee, according to a New Orleans TV station.

Trump has never let ethics—or the courts, for that matter—stand in the way of his making a buck off his presidency, so why should McMath be expected to play by the rules, especially when those rules provide a convenient loophole in the state ethics laws?

No less authority than the LOUISIANA BOARD OF ETHICS itself says in its Summary of the Louisiana Code of Governmental Ethics that “The Ethics Code provides an additional prohibition applicable to legislators, certain executive branch officials, their spouses, or legal entities in which either owns an interest in excess of 5% from entering into a contract with any branch, agency, department, or institution of state government, with a few specific exceptions.

“Example: A Louisiana Senator and his business were prohibited by Section 1113D from bidding on or entering into a contract with the Louisiana Recovery School District, provided the Senator owned an interest greater than 5% in the business. (Advisory Opinion No. 2010-988).”

The Baton Rouge Advocate on Wednesday (sorry, we can’t share it because the publication has a paywall to its online stories, most of which lately have been devoted to LSU football and the transfer portal) pointed out that historically, Louisiana legislators have promoted legislation that benefitted their own personal businesses. “[L]awmakers who own nursing homes have sought to ease their legal liability in cases of understaffing, lawmakers who own gas stations have pushed bills to sideline their competitors, lawmakers who own timber companies have proposed sales tax exemptions for their products,” The Advocate story said.

In addition, legislators who are attorneys representing specific industries, such as insurance or oil and gas, for instance, have shown little hesitancy to pull double duty by jumping into the legislative fray.

But thanks to Govs. Bobby Jindal and Jeff Landry, Louisiana ethics laws have been so watered down as to be virtually meaningless. Oh, elected officials and public employees must still take a so-called “ethics course” yearly but its enforcement powers are a cruel joke to good-government advocates.

That’s precisely why McMath can serve as chairman of a powerful committee and sell furniture to entities regulated by his committee: the law prohibits lawmakers from “contracting” with state government and selling furniture is technically not a “contract.”

The owner of a competing furniture store told WWL-TV that he was told by a person at a local (St. Tammany Parish) health system that they were replacing his company with Southern Interior Solutions because they were “instructed to use SIS.”

So, while the letter of the law does not appear to be violated, there’s no question that the spirit of the law is in open violation despite McMath’s admission that certain boundaries do exist and his assertion that “I take those boundaries serious, and I’ve stayed within them.”

And like Trump, he appears to have been unable resist twisting the knife a bit: “I also understand why competitors who are losing business might be frustrated. But frustration isn’t an ethics standard. We compete on price, service, and performance — and we win on those terms.”

Yep. Republican to the core.

Accreditation.

There is so much about that word that the average person has so little knowledge about.

What does accreditation mean? Who does the accreditation? How is accreditation conducted? Why is accreditation important? Is it important?

To the last question, the answer may vary, depending upon which institution is being evaluated for accreditation. For hospitals, as an example, accreditation is important, even critical. We want to know we’re receiving treatment from an institution that meets the highest standards of care.

For prisons, the value of accreditation is iffy at best. We’ll take a closer look to learn why that is in a follow up story.

For colleges and universities, accreditation is also important in that one should know whether or not he is paying good money to obtain a degree from a reputable institution or just shelling out big bucks to enrich some huckster like Donald Trump and his so-called Trump University (which was forced by the courts to adopt the name “seminar” and to drop “university.”

That, of course, was before the investigation that completely stripped it of any credibility and eventually forced Trump to pay back some $25 million to students Trump had defrauded with his school.

Accreditation or the lack thereof also weeds out other schools and so-called universities which fall short of reaching any degree (no pun intended) of accountability. Those may include business and trade schools that are fly-by-night or schools that call themselves seminaries for the benefit of bestowing Doctor of Divinity degrees to anyone who pays the fees but which aren’t worth the paper the diplomas are printed on.

Southeastern Louisiana University (SLU) might well be a case in point. The university, nestled in Hammond, about an hour east of Baton Rouge, recently was granted accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on College (SACSCC). More specifically, it had its accrerditation “reaffirmed.”

But wait. The announcement of accreditation was made in December at the commission’s annual meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, where SLU President William Wainwright was elected to the commission’s Board of Trustees.

Somehow, that appears as something of a conflict of interests—or at least a too-cozy relationship between accreditor and accreditee. Why would an officer of an institution be a member of the organization evaluating his institution—and pay the organization to be a member in addition to its accrediting services?

According to the SACSCOC’s FEE SCHEDULE, it’s not a cheap process.

• The application fee for membership (payment to accompany application): $12,500.
• Candidacy fee for institutions authorized a Candidate Committee:   $5,000.
• Pre-Applicant Workship (registration fee and lunch per person:  $250.
• Fee and expenses for a Reaffirmation Review: actual travel expenses plus $750
• Review by the Off-Site Reaffirmation Committee:  $3500
• Review by Interim Review Committee (for institution’s Fifth-Year Interim Review: $3500
• Fee for an institution seeking review of a substantive change prospectus or application for level change:  $500.
• Per-SACSCC member fee for a substantive change involving multiple institutions: $500
• Administrative fee for Substantive Change Committee:  $2000
• Actual cost of the Committee (includes travel, lodging, food and related expense for each evaluator and staff and incidental expenses for each evaluator) and Administrative Fee for Special Committee:  $1,500
• Chairs and other members of SACSCOC review committees receive an amount for incidental expenses in addition to their actual reimbursable expenses: $300 for Committee Chairs, $150 for Committee members.

Gov. Landry has tossed out the idea of employing another, or perhaps even creating a new accrediting organization as a way of cutting costs of accreditations.

But other organizations have their own fee structures. For example, the HIGHER LEARNING COMMISSION (HLC) has base dues of $5400, plus 65 cents per student. With an enrollment of 14,400 or so, SLU’s total per-student fee under that structure would be almost $10,000 over and above the base fee of $5400. Plus, there are more than a dozen other fees the HLC keeps in its back pocket to whip out at a moment’s notice, fees that run from $3450 to $10,000.

Having said that, it’s somewhat interesting to note that SLU Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs Eric Skipper sent a two-page letter to all department heads at the university on Dec. 17 informing them that they “should plan for at least 30 percent of instructional activity (based on workload hours) to be provided by part-time instructors, including lecturers, graduate teaching fellows (GTFs) and qualified staff members who teach.

To more easily read, click on the + above letter to enlarge. slide bar at bottom of second page to right to see entire page.

A special report compiled by Program in Higher Education Leadership at the UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS indicates that a high ratio of full-time to part-time instructors generally translates to higher graduation rates, higher retention rates and more instructor advising.

The same study says that part-time instructors:

• Are less likely to use high-impact teaching practices
• Have less teaching experience
• Spend less time preparing for class
• Have less access to administrative and technical support
• Are less likely to hold an advanced degree

The American Federation of Teachers says that the model faculty and college excellence legislation calls for 75 percent of undergraduate courses in each department to be taught by full-time, tenured or tenure-track faculty.

Skipper said in his letter that, “All departments that have graduate programs should be utilizing Graduate Teaching Fellows to the fullest extent possible.”

The base salary for graduate teaching fellows is $4500 for the fall and spring semesters and $2250 for the summer. The base salary for professional services assistants is $12.03 per hour for 20 hours per week, or approximately $3850 for the fall and spring semesters and about $1825 for the summer. The base salary for administrative assistants is $10.46 per hour for 20 hours per week, or about $3350 for fall and spring and $1675 for the summer.

Bear in mind, if you will, the root of all this cost-cutting and economic austerity goes back to The Jindal administration when college budgets were repeatedly cut to the bone in order for Jindal to balance his state budget, brought to the brink of bankruptcy by his insistence on cutting corporate taxes to accommodate his supporters at the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry (LABI).

But taxes, budgets and full-time to part-time ratios notwithstanding, it just seems a bit out of kilter to have any public institution purchasing membership in an organization that evaluates that institution. But to have a member of the institution serving on the accreditor’s board and for the institution to be paying the organization of which it is a member for accreditation just seems a bit like buying a sundae from your own ice cream store where you’re always sure to get the flavor you wanted. It’s just too incestuous for a healthy relationship.