Louisiana Voice

The facts seem to be fairly basic.

Officials at Baton Rouge Community College misappropriated more than a quarter-million dollars in student technology fees to illegally bump the salaries of five employees during fiscal year 2017.

Then-Chancellor Dr. Larissa Littleton-Steib acknowledged as much in a Dec. 13, 2017 letter to Legislative Auditor Daryl Purpera, whose office had verified the misapplication of $260,733 of the funds in its Dec. 27, 2017, AUDIT REPORT.

The letter from Littleton-Steib said that BRCC management “concurs” with the findings and that management “recognizes its responsibility for maintaining compliance” with state law. It further outlined “corrective action” she said would be taken to “mitigate future risk and errors.”

There was no indication as to whether or not the recipients of the illegal salary increases would be required to repay the money.

Purpera’s office had been tipped off by George Thompson in early 2016 of the practice which apparently had been going for several years and which could have ultimately resulted in the misapplication of more than a million dollars between 2012 and 2017.

Thompson was subsequently fired and wife Lisa Thompson have filed a lawsuit in 19^th Judicial District Court in Baton Rouge against the Board of Supervisors of Community and Technical Colleges and Ronald Solomon, Chief Information Officer for BRCC.

Thompson was hired by BRCC as Student Technology Fee Lab Coordinator in April 2008. The Technology Fee Committee Agreement was approved in 2005 and was already in place when he was hired.

That agreement mandated a committee of voting members with students holding the majority of memberships. The original agreement also mandated that it could only be amended upon a vote of at least two-thirds of the members.

In May 2012, Thompson was informed by Vice-Chancellor for Administration Pam Diez that she had drafted a new agreement which was being put in place and which would make the original agreement “less restrictive,” according to Thompson’s petition.

Two months later, in July, Thompson was notified that the Student Technology Department was disbanded and that he would be reporting to Chief Information Officer Ronald Solomon.

In November 2012, Solomon introduced a new agreement which he said was retroactive to Sept. 14, 2012, which reduced the committee’s membership to a student minority status and made Solomon chairperson of the committee despite the Student Government Associations’ never having approved the appointment of Solomon as chairperson.

When Thompson brought up the requirement for a committee meeting to approve any funding and that there had been no committee meetings concerning student the fee disbursements, as required, for the entirety of 2013, Interim Auxiliary Services Director Timothy Johnson “became abusive and cautioned that the money may have been used to fill other budget gaps and warned (Thompson) that questioning discrepancies and the status of the student tech budget was hazardous to (Thompson’s) job security,” Thompson’s lawsuit claims.

The kicker came in the summer of 2014 when Thompson made an electronic submission for “small, routing requisitions” for Solomon’s approval from the fee proceeds and the request was returned as “NSF.”

Thompson then researched the system which revealed “large fee expenditures for ‘compensation of board members,’” the lawsuit says. “Additionally, the system showed that salary items had increased substantially since 2012 although no committee meetings had been called to discuss and approve these items,” it said.

Thompson met with Solomon on Friday, May 8, 2015 to discuss plans for summer school registration and during that meeting, Thompson says he reminded Solomon that there was “potential for legal issues” since BRCC had had no meetings or accountability to the students regarding use of the fee proceeds in more than two years. Thompson says in his lawsuit that Solomon “vowed that students would never be allowed to control the fee proceeds.”

One week later, Solomon escorted Thompson to Human Resources where he was handed his termination notice.

He maintains in his lawsuit that he was subjected to systematic harassment by BRCC administrative personnel after he raised questions about the misuse of the fee funds.

“LA. R.S. 17:3351.1 required an annual accounting of the use of monies derived from the fee and a written plan developed where the students have the opportunity to make recommendations concerning the use of fee proceeds,” his lawsuit said.

To view that statute, click HERE.

The Thompsons are represented by Baton Rouge attorney J. Arthur Smith, III.

Thankfully, Donald Trump’s – and Mitch McConnell’s – ploy of loading up the Supreme Court with Trump appointees hasn’t worked.

Trump’s blatant attempt to overturn the will of the American voters (remember how the Republicans whined that the Democrats were trying to do that during the impeachment proceedings? Funny how short memories can be.) was turned back Friday when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear that silly suit brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

It appears to have been Trump’s last gasp effort to thwart the will of the people and now we need only await the outcome of the Electoral College vote on Monday to make Joe Biden’s election official.

For four years, we saw Congress only as Trump’s lapdog instead of serving as checks and balances, as the Constitution intended, against overreach of power. Thank God the Supremes still understand the separation of powers concept.

From my time as a former part time disc jockey at KRUS, a booming 250-watt AM station in Ruston back in my college days, several songs come immediately to mind that I once played on my request show, appropriately called Requestfully Yours, that somehow now seem appropriate.

Roy Orbison’s It’s Over comes immediately to mind. That would be my first dedication to Trump.

Here are a few others:

• The Supremes to Trump: Stop! In the Name of Love!
• Donald Trump to the Supremes: Where Did Our Love Go?
• Trump to the Supremes: Nothing but Heartache
• Trump to the Supremes: My World is Empty without You
• Trump to the Supremes: River Deep, Mountain High
• Trump to the Supremes: Going Down for the Third Time
• Trump to the Supremes: Some Things You Never Get Used To
• America to the Supremes: I Hear A Symphony

Certainly, there are others and you can add your own to this list but I would suggest that Pigmeat Markham’s Here Comes the Judge is just too easy.

On a more serious note, I said HERE on Thursday that there was a question of whether or not Texas even had any legal standing to bring that ridiculous lawsuit against Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia and on Friday, The Supreme Court agreed that none existed.

That made Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Louisiana AG Jeff Landry and 16 other attorneys general, none of whom were from the four states where the lawsuit was challenging the results of the election, look extremely foolish.

Bigly Extremely.

If one wants to stretch credulity to its breaking point, Paxton’s motives were somewhat understandable: He has spent a large part of his career under indictment for securities fraud; he was recently reported to the FBI by his own deputies for bribery, and the Associated Press has reported his involvement in an extra-marital affair.

Trump can’t help him with his marriage or with any state criminal charges, but if he’s in trouble with the feds, he can throw his loyalist a lifeline before leaving office. To that end, Paxton’s doomed lawsuit could be a signal to Trump that a preemptive presidential pardon before Trump leaves office would be greatly appreciated.

As for the motives of our very own AG and four of our five Republican House members, one can only speculate as to their motives, although political expediency and pandering to their uninformed base would be pretty good guesses.

Of course, Landry is simply a political hack to begin with and he is obviously angling for a shot at the governor’s office in the 2023 election. If he’s successful, he would just be Bobby Jindal 2.0. He would be no more successful as governor than he has been in winning cases as attorney general.

For my money, the best bet for the Republicans in 2023 would be 6^th District Congressman Garret Graves, the only Republican member of the Louisiana delegation with the good sense not to sign onto Paxton’s windmill-tilting lawsuit.

All four of the others JUMPED ON BOARD like they thought they were headed for Disney World. Ralph Abraham (lame duck 5^th District), Steve Scalise (David Duke-dominated 1^st District), Clay Higgins (McCarthyism-tinged 3^rd District) and Mike Johnson (pseudo-family values 4^th District) all joined Paxton’s quixotic quest to overturn the U.S. Constitution.

Their actions take them to the precipice of treason because they were complicit in an effort to strike down the very principle on which a democracy must be based: free elections devoid of intimidation, suppression or threats. To drape their motives in the cloak of patriotism and godliness does nothing to mitigate the felonious intent of their undertaking. Calling themselves patriots does not make them such.

Unsurprisingly, Mike Johnson leaves himself exposed as the ugliest festering boil of the lot: he is supposed to be the family values guy, the one who claims to have “devoted his life and career to fighting for the fundamental freedoms and traditional values that have always been a priority to the people of Louisiana,” according to his WEB PAGE.

But with a pandemic overrunning our hospitals, with people dying in record numbers from the virus, with people losing their jobs and with businesses shutting down, instead of devoting his time and energy to leading the fight for some sort of economic relief for his constituents, he spends his energies on behalf one constituent: Donald J. Trump.

Mike Johnson should recognize and acknowledge the fact that his priorities do not include a man who cheats on his wife, fondles women as if they were his personal chattels, ridicules physically-handicapped people, consorts with murderous dictators, and who, rather than trying to reach some common ground, viciously attacks anyone who dares disagree with him. Instead, Mike Johnson has become part of the problem with a Congress that takes too many breaks (it’s on one right now) even as Americans are going without food, losing their health insurance coverage, and are facing evictions from their homes because of the pandemic.

Instead of striving to help hurting citizens of the 4^th District, Mike Johnson was lamenting the fact that he wasn’t able to sign more Republican House members onto Paxton’s lawsuit because he “ran out of time.”

What happened to his “family values” credo? Doesn’t he realize that “family values” means keeping families together? Doesn’t he know that “family values” includes security, protection of jobs, healthcare and shelter? Apparently, he’s forgotten all that.

Perhaps Mike Johnson should be reminded that the people of the 4^th District, the people of Louisiana, the people of America, are also running out of time.

I had an uncle, James B. Aswell, Jr., who was an author back in the late 1940s and early ‘50s. His father, James B. Aswell, Sr., was the third president of Louisiana Tech and was later elected to Congress where he served from 1913 until his death in 1931.

I never had the privilege of meeting either man (Congressman Aswell died 12 years before I was born) but I do remember reading the obituary of James Jr. in The Shreveport Times in 1955, when I was 12 and I also remember reading about a book burning event in Natchitoches where copies of his book Midsummer Fires were destroyed by the fine decency-loving citizens because they protested to such vulgar literature.

Years later, I had occasion to read one of his novels. The scandalous story was of a irreverent housewife who rode horseback – Lady Godiva-style – through the streets of Lake Charles. Wow.

Even later, during my 1957-58 freshman year at Ruston High School, I remember one of my fellow band members, an older (a senior) girl, sneaking around to read Peyton Place by the late Grace Metalious. She had to sneak around because we weren’t allowed to read such filth that today would be met by a collective yawn. I kept my copy at home where I devoured page after page of the novel. (I kept it hidden under my bed along with my issues of National Geographic.)

Today, we can read more sizzling stories in our daily newspapers (remember those? They used to be thrown in our front yard by a local college student working his way through school. We would bring them inside along with the quart of milk the milkman left on the front steps.)

The point I’m trying to make here is that it is wrong to censor the written word, be it Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for its liberal use of the N-word, or the availability of books containing LGBTQ characters at the LINCOLN PARISH LIBRARY.

But all that matters little to a few hypocritical types in my hometown. At a recent library board meeting ostensibly called to discuss the library budget, tempers flared over the availability of LGBTQ books that critics said contained suggestive sexual themes.

I suppose sexual-themed passages in heterosexually-oriented books (and they are in abundance, I can assure you) are acceptable. I have one word to describe those people: hypocrites.

We mature in our beliefs and prejudices by exposure to opposing viewpoints. Or at least we should. To refuse to do so is hypocritical and goes against the teachings of Christ, the very one in whose very name many would-be censors purport to speak.

If we were to accept the pseudo-Christians’ condemnation of everything we don’t understand, there would exist no such story of Jesus and the woman at the well (John 4:4-26) in the Bible.

I was once of that mindset of rejecting everything that I did not, would not accept. Again, going back to my RHS days, there was a student with whom I had been friends since our grammar school days at the old Hillcrest Elementary School across the dirt street from Midwest Dairies. But in high school, he came out and we just could not accept a gay in our midst. We (my friends and I) turned on him with a vengeance and I’m convinced we were instrumental in his decision to drop out of school his junior year.

Looking back, it’s probably the one thing I’ve done in my life that embarrasses me the most and causes me the most shame. He was a decent human being who experienced the same emotions, the same hurts, the same hopes and dreams for the future as the best – and worst – of us. And we made life miserable for him. It was an inexcusable, immature, unforgiveable thing to do and I will forever regret that I was a part of it.

Obviously, I didn’t listen very well as a teenager, but my grandfather taught me that every person I meet is a potential friend until that person shows me that he/she doesn’t want to be (“You can be friends with anyone as long as you know who they are,” he once admonished me after I questioned his friendship with a certain unsavory character). He also taught me to rob a person of their dignity. Today, though I still fall short in my efforts, I do my utmost to subscribe to those two principles.

I am no less heterosexual today than I ever was, but without exposure to different cultures and different viewpoints, I might still cling to the thought of myself as somehow superior to another person who is not an incarnation of Satan himself, just different.

What’s next after you pull those books? What else might offend your sensibilities? Publications about slavery and injustices suffered by Blacks? Books about wrongful convictions of the innocent? Overcrowding of prisons because of harsh punishment enacted by “law and order” politicians for minor offenses? What about books that document American genocide, aka the near-eradication of Native Americans? Everything critical of any political viewpoint you happen not to share? Perhaps a certain cookbook because you happen to not like broccoli?

Gambling is supposed to be a sin but I bet some of those same ones in such a lather over the availability of such books have visited Las Vegas or at least a casino in Shreveport, New Orleans or Mississippi. (And we’re not even going to talk about lying and cheating or fudging on taxes or [gasp] extramarital affairs.)

To those fine people in Ruston (and I probably know a few of them, though I’ve been gone for 40 years now) who would rid the Lincoln Parish Library of all books they find offensive to their fine, Christian values, I would suggest you pull out your Bible and read Matthew 7:1-3.

A few notable quotables to start the day:

“Based on the sentiment I’ve perceived in the Senate and on the evidence from the House impeachment articles, if we voted on (impeachment) now, it’d be as dead as a fried chicken.”

–Sen. John (Kornpone) Kennedy, Oct. 18, 2019.

Here’s what Louisiana’s congressmen said about Trump’s impeachment (thenewsstar.com)

“The vote today was nothing more than a proxy vote on President Trump. It was a partisan impeachment in both houses. Our founders did not intend impeachment to be used this way. I believe Speaker Pelosi’s attempt to normalize impeachment and to turn it into a routine political weapon was a mistake. In fact, it was reckless. A country as great as ours deserves better, and so do her people.”

–Sen. John (Kornpone) Kennedy, Feb. 5, 2020

https://www.kennedy.senate.gov/public/2020/2/sen-kennedy-statement-on-senate-impeachment-vote

“Many Democrats, some Republicans, a lot of members of the media, have their bowels in an uproar because the president refuses to concede and he’s gone to court,” he said. “Everybody’s entitled to their opinion. This is America. The president has every right to offer his opinion about the election. Number two, he has every right to go to court and contest the results of the election, and you have every right to disagree. But that doesn’t degrade democracy. It elevates it.”

–Sen. John (Kornpone) Kennedy, Dec. 4, 2020.

Kennedy: Democrats, some Republicans ‘have their bowels in an uproar’ over Trump not conceding | Fox News

Perhaps I appear to be picking on our junior senator in pulling up these three quotes, but they do conjure up fond memories of the time that Earl Long, in his final campaign, said of his opponent, U.S. Rep. Harold McSween way back in 1960, “He’s the only person I know who can talk out of both sides of his mouth and whistle at the same time.”

Kennedy, who seems bent on becoming a hybrid version of folksy Uncle Earl and the Rhodes Scholar that he is, serves as something of an example of how the Republicans in Congress can twist logic completely out of shape to fit their agenda – which seems to be “anything Donald Trump wants.”

But to be fair to Kennedy, here’s another Republican’s quote

“When all is said and done, when the history of this impeachment is written, it will be said that my Washington Democrat friends couldn’t bring themselves to work with Donald Trump, so they consoled themselves instead by silencing the will of those who did, the American people.”

–Then U.S. Rep. (now White House Chief of Staff) Mark Meadows, of North Carolina.

And another:

“They’re here to perpetrate the most massive interference in an election in American history. And we can’t allow that to happen.”

–White House counsel Pat Cipollone, defending Trump in the impeachment trial, Jan. 25, 2020.

https://apnews.com/article/21791704b5434669225117a0638b7a1a

So, just how did we get to such a point in the history of this country? How is it that Republicans in the House and Senate who were so strident in protesting the Trump impeachment, claiming that Democrats wanted to undo the will of the people who elected him? How could they ignore the fact that he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 3 million votes (so his election wasn’t exactly a mandate of a majority of the people) even though the very procedure of impeachment is designed for just that purpose – overturning bad decisions?

Yet now, four years later, those same Republicans and at least 18 state attorneys general want to overturn the will of the people who defeated trump by 7 million votes. – and by the very same electoral vote that Trump won by four years ago. That could be called a mandate. Kennedy, though, is by no means alone among those Republicans who insist on wearing blinders and ear plugs.

Take, for example Louisiana’s Attorney General Jeff Landry, the man who probably knows more about losing in a court of law than just about any attorney in the state. He’s neither folksy nor particularly smart; he’s just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill political hack trying to ride the tide of (red state Louisiana) public opinion into the governor’s office.

It’s of little consequence that he can’t win a court case – not even for TONY SPELL, despite a U.S. Supreme Court decision that appeared to back Landry and Spell on the freedom to attend religious services during a pandemic that has killed nearly 300,000 Americans. (Landry wasn’t the legal counsel for Spell in the controversy over limiting attendance at Spell’s Life Tabernacle Church in Central, but he offered considerable vocal support for the pastor.)

And now, Landry continues tilting at windmills by joining 16 other state attorneys general in supporting the lawsuit of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that asks the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the election results in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin.

One news outlet, The New York Times, hinted that Paxton has his own legal problems (he is under indictment in a securities fraud case and facing separate accusations in another case of abusing his office) and may be fishing for a preemptory presidential pardon for himself.

The Quixotic effort by the eight Republican attorneys general would be laughable were the effort not so transparently and blatantly partisan – and ridiculous, prompting a University of Washington law professor to describe Paxton’s brief as “legally incoherent, factually untethered and based on theories of remedy that fundamentally misunderstand the electoral process.”

And it is being litigated by the highest elective legal officers of 18 states, none of which are from the actual states where the results are being challenged – which raises the immediate question of whether they even have standing to bring the suit.

All of which rings rather hollow against earlier claims of “the most massive interference in an election in American history.”

There’s another Earl Long quote about former Attorney General Jack P.F. Gremillion that could just as easily be said about Landry:

“If you want to hide something from (him), put it in a law book.”

I have never in all my 77-plus years seen anyone as despicable as Donald Trump.

And I know writing this will generate the usual comments from the Trump devotees who can see no wrong in anything their champion does. Whether it’s RIDICULING a physically handicapped reporter or bragging about groping women, it’s okay because he’s “gon’ make Amurica grate agin.”

A decent person would never do that. If I had made fun of a less fortunate person while growing up, my grandfather would have slapped me three ways from Sunday. And he would’ve been justified. If you can defend mocking a physically handicapped person, you can rationalize defending just about anything – and it makes you less of a human being.

I have a news flash for you: Trump is no more interested in “making America great again” than he is in understanding his daily intelligence briefings. He is interested in one thing and one thing only: siphoning off millions of dollars for Donald J. Trump.

And he’s doing that right now in spades and his followers are too blind to see it. Those 20-30 emails per day he is sending out daily in the names of himself and his family members and political allies, ostensibly to raise funds to fight the legal battle for the presidency (that he, incidentally, has already lost) are actually to benefit DJT, affectionately known here as President Tweet Thang.

Since the election (which again, he LOST), he has already raised a figure north of $200 million, of which his special PAC gets 60 percent or more. And get this: there are no restrictions on how he can spend that money. It will go to pay him a nice seven-figure salary as well as paying his deadbeat kids.

This is money in large part from people who can ill-afford to lay out cash for some pseudo-televangelist-like huckster who has no more concern for working American than he has for those children he’s locked in cages.

Yesterday, at his rally in Georgia, he boasted that he has worked harder in the past three weeks than ever before in his life. That’s probably true, but has he been working for Americans or to overcome the pandemic? Hell, no.

• He’s been working to overturn a constitutionally legal election that he lost by more than 7 million votes.
• He’s been working to give his kids, political allies (and possibly himself) preemptive pardons, raising the obvious question of why do they need pardons if they’ve done nothing illegal?
• He’s been busy attempting to speed up federal executions so he those he hasn’t killed by ignoring the coronavirus threat he can pick up via firing squad.
• He’s been busy attempting to strip environmental protections for air, water and wildlife to the benefit of corporate donors.
• And when he wasn’t doing all that, he was playing golf at his own resorts, forcing US taxpayers to pick up the tab for millions of dollars for housing and feeding (water at Mar a Lago: $5 a glass) Secret Service details, hangers-on and family members. Meanwhile, First Lady Melania (“Let them eat cake”) Antoinette blithefully announced a new White House tennis pavilion – in the midst of a pandemic and an economic recession. That should ease the pain of losing your job, your health insurance and perhaps your home.

It’s not like he didn’t have the opportunity to do more. Earlier this year, PFIZER offered to sell the US another 100 million doses of its coronavirus vaccine in addition to the 100 million initially ordered, but Trump passed on the offer. That could cause delays in distribution in this country. The 100 million doses first ordered are sufficient for only 50 million Americans and now the US is going to have to wait until Pfizer has supplied other countries before it gets additional doses.

How bone-headed is that to not order as many doses as possible to stem the pandemic in this country?

Donald Trump has the blood of more than 282,000 Americans who have died of Covid on his hands. Make no mistake about that. Likewise all those patriotic members of Congress like Sens. Tom Cotton, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, John Cornyn, Marco Rubio and yes, John N. Kennedy, and Reps. Clay Higgins, Steve Scalise, Mike Johnson, Jim Jordan, Devin Nunes and all the others who have sold their souls and sacrificed their principles at the altar of reelection and campaign contributions while forsaking America.

Yes, I am calling their patriotism into question and if they don’t like it, tough. If they stand by such a person, and look the other way when he says and does the things he has, I don’t consider them patriots.

Don’t believe me when I say to Trump’s frenzied fanatics that your patriotic priorities are misplaced? Well, try chewing on this a while:

For all those people whose misguided sense of patriotism has them thinking he’s so damned good for the country (certain of my family members included), I would offer this little civics test:

• How many amendments are there to the US Constitution?
• How many amendments are there in the Bill of Rights?
• We all know what the First and Second Amendments provide, but what does the Fourth Amendment provide?
• Which amendment did Trump violate when he walked across the street for that photo-op of him holding a Bible upside down in front of that church?
• How many Cabinet positions are there?
• Is the Vice President a member of the Cabinet?
• How many members of Congress (both houses combined) are there?
• How many members are there in the House of Representatives?
• How many senators?
• How many US Representatives does Louisiana have?
• Name four of them.
• How many Senators does Louisiana have?
• Name them.
• How long are the terms of representatives?
• How long are the terms of senators?
• How many justices are there on the US Supreme Court?
• How long are the terms of federal judges?
• Does the President have the line-item veto?
• How many combined members (House and Senate) does the Louisiana Legislature have?
• How many representatives?
• How many senators?
• How many justices sit on the Louisiana Supreme Court?
• How long are the terms of Louisiana Supreme Court justices?
• Name the capitals of at least 20 states.
• Name at least 25 presidents.

If you are unable to get at least 15 of these 25 questions correct, you need to (a) go back to school, (b) cease debating politics altogether, (c) quit watching/listening to Fox News, OAN, Info Wars, and/or QAnon,  (d) turn in your membership card to whatever militia you belong to, (e) all of the above.