Louisiana Voice

I will open this message by repeating what Michelle Obama said of Donald Trump today: It’s not a game. And I will address this to a select few recipients:

Bill Cassidy, you were just re-elected with 59 percent of the vote. Now do your damned job.

John Kennedy, you were elected four years ago with 61 percent of the vote. Do your damned job!

Steve Scalise, you got 72 percent of the vote two weeks ago but you’re pretty much worthless. But you should show a little backbone and do your damned job.

Garret Graves, you were right behind Scalise with 71 percent of the vote but you’ve been strangely quiet. Do your damned job!

Mike Johnson, you are the weak link because you got only 60 percent of the vote but you were likewise re-elected. Now grow yourself a pair and do your damned job.

It’s no longer funny to just sit back and make jokes like calling John “Mouth of the South” Kennedy by the well-earned name of Kornpone. It was funny for a while but it’s just not anymore.

Cassidy, boasting your support for “more medical options” for veterans would be honorable if you weren’t trying to rip medical coverage from 20 million Americans at the same time by working to repeal the ACA.

Graves, you give the appearance of working on behalf of flood victims but there are lot of us who have seen nothing, heard nothing. But that still is not the job you should be doing.

Scalise, you’re just an embarrassment, a homophobic white supremacist who seems to care only about the NRA despite your own brush with death from an assault weapon – from which you were saved by a….gay cop. Oh, the irony.

Johnson, with your blind allegiance to your so-called family values, you’re just irrelevant.

What am I going on about with these clowns?

Simple. One million new coronavirus cases in just the past week. Nearly a quarter-million dead Americans. Yet, our so-called president has not met with his pandemic task force in six months, he has literally been AWOL as the pandemic rages out of control. You know which pandemic I’m talking about – the one that was going to “magically disappear” after Easter, when the weather turned warmer, or on Nov. 4.

It’s the same president who refuses to work with Joe Biden, the man who won the presidency by 5.5 million votes and by precisely the same electoral vote margin as Trump did four years ago.

The same president whose General Accounting Office refuses to cooperate with the incoming administration which, despite all those emails to the contrary, is a lame-duck administration but which steadfastly refuses to enable a smooth transition at a time when this nation so desperate needs just that.

The same president who begs for contributions for his legal defense of the election in those same emails while failing to be up front about the fact that 60 percent of everything he collects goes not for his legal costs, but to his political action committee to retire his election debts.

At a time when those Republicans closest to President Tweet Thang should be whispering in his ear about the importance of helping the incoming administration cope with the pandemic, they are oh, so very strangely silent.

Especially Kennedy who so loves to impart his words of wisdom to any TV camera he can find hanging around the Senate offices. Where y’at, Senator, drinking weed killer?

The term “advice and consent” is generally used to describe the Senate’s role in the responsibility to confirm presidential appointments. It should also be extended to advising a clueless president on the importance of being president, not which club he should use on his approach shot.

It’s long past time when the Republicans in our congressional delegation should assume the responsibility of acting like statesmen instead of the political hacks they really are.

Back in 1974, Sens. Barry Goldwater of Arizona and Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania and House Minority Leader John Rhodes, Republicans all, traveled to the White House to inform Richard Nixon that it was time to go.

Now would be a good time for a few good Republicans (I know – with this bunch, that’s an oxymoron) to do the same with Trump – or at least tell President Tangerine Toddler it’s way past time to let the Biden team go to work if he’s not willing to. It would really be nice of it was a group of Louisiana Republicans who had the cojones to do that now.

But they won’t. They don’t have the gonads. They’re eunuchs.

(You will notice I did not include Democrat Cedric Richmond, who, as a Democrat, wouldn’t have Trump’s ear in any case, Ralph Abraham, who is about the let the door hit him in the butt on his way out, or Republican Clay Higgins, who doesn’t know his ass from bean dip and couldn’t be expected to say anything halfway intelligent anyway.)

To the rest of you: do your damned jobs!

Random25617

There’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democratic Party that are members of the Communist Party.”

—Former U.S. Rep. Allen West (R-Florida), at a town hall meeting, April 2012 [Does this claim sound vaguely familiar? Think Wheeling, West Virginia, February 1950]

There’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out.”

—QAnon supporter Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who recently won election to Georgia’s 14th Congressional District.

Another example of why it is prudent to let the process run its course: Thousands of Uncounted Votes Found a Week After Election in Puerto Rico.”

—Tweet by U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who has a fondness for inappropriately-placed capital letters. […and little knowledge of the fact that Puerto Rico does not vote in presidential elections.]

Our government wasn’t set up for one group to have all three branches of government — wasn’t set up that way. You know, the House, the Senate, and the executive.”

—Former Auburn football coach and U.S. Sen.-elect Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama). [Tommy, you probably should take a civics refresher course before you assume office.]

And all this time, I thought Clay Higgins was dumb as a can of hair. Turns out he’s got plenty of company.

I had fully intended to cease posting quotes about the election once it was over – no matter the outcome. But White House Precious Secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s outrageous crowd estimates for Saturday’s MAGA march (est. 20,000) is so reminiscent of her predecessor Sean Spicer’s crowd estimate for Trump’s inauguration four years ago, I just couldn’t resist. The first quote is Kayleigh’s tweet (remember now, this person is an attorney. Now ask yourself if you’d want her representing you in a court of law):

More than one MILLION marchers for President descend on the swamp in support. Best base in political history – we LOVE you guys!!!”

Here are some of the responses to her embarrassingly inaccurate crowd estimate:

LOL! ‘A million’! Well I guess seeing as you’re Kayleigh Macaroni, we should give you a point for not saying ‘a bajillion’…”

If that a million people, then Joe Biden won by 5.5 billion votes instead of 5.5 million.”

Girl, you can’t count. Maybe that’s why you are having such a hard time understanding the election results.”

The inability to tell the difference between a thousand MAGA march and a million MAGA march is another reason Trump lost the counts in GA, PA, MI, AZ, NV AND WI.”

This administration is going out the same way it came in: by blatantly lying about crowd size.”

I see that you went to the Sean Spicer school of crowd size.”

Shouldn’t you be working on your linked in profile right now?”

McEnany 11:16 am: “More than one MILLION marchers.”

Trump 3:24 p.m. “Hundreds of thousands of people.”

Trump 12:00 a.m.: “Tens of thousands of people.”

Following is Sen. Kennedy’s response to the pandemic, given during one of his town hall meetings:

The news just doesn’t get any better for LaSalle Corrections.

The Ruston-based private prison company has been cited by authorities for failure to properly train its employees, for falsifying documents certifying that received training courses they never received, falsifying documents certifying that guards checked prisoners periodically when those prisoners ultimately died or had to be transferred to nearby hospitals after their physical conditions deteriorated after beatings or after being denied medications for conditions prison officials were aware of.

The company has also been the subject of numerous lawsuits by inmates, their families and former employees – lawsuits that have cost the company hundreds of thousand of dollars in awards and settlements.

A federal investigation was launched when a whistleblower at its facility in Georgia accused the prison of performing unwanted hysterectomies on female detainees.

More recently, LaSalle has taken down web pages for all 25 private prison it runs in several states, including 10 in Louisiana, as well as the web page for its corporate headquarters in Ruston.

Almost exactly two years ago, a Lafourche Parish resident was found dead in his cell at the LaSalle-run Catahoula Correctional Center, prompting a joint INVESTIGATION by the Catahoula and Lafourche parish sheriffs’ departments.

Kevin Percle, 50, of Chackbay, had been transferred to Catahoula Correction Center on Oct. 21, 2018 and during his stay he became involved in an incident with another inmate during which he suffered a blow to the head.

The incident was not reported at that time and he was transferred back to Catahoula Correctional Center on Nov. 4 for an impending court date. On Nov. 12, correctional officers found him unresponsive with labored breathing. He was later pronounced dead and an autopsy determined the cause of death to be homicide, the result of trauma to the brain.

At LaSalle’s ICE Processing Center in Jena in March of this year 79 female protestors were left in a room filled with PEPPER SPRAY.

When LaSalle took over the local jail in JOHNSON COUNTY, TEXAS, guards Marion Dahn, 65, and Chris Stevenson, 43, were fired. They sued and ultimately were awarded $795,321 ($222,846 for Dahn for harassment on the basis of his age and $572,475 for Stevenson for retaliation for reporting a sexual harassment claim).

Because Catahoula is a poor parish, it needs to remain in the good graces of LaSalle for jobs, according to SHERIFF TONEY EDWARDS.

LaSalle first approached the parish in the late 1990s with a proposal to build what Edwards described as a “turnkey operation” to house Louisiana Department of Corrections prisoners. The facility was at first managed by LaSalle but paid for by the parish. Within a few years, the parish handed ownership of the prison over to LaSalle, which agreed to pay the sheriff a “sponsorship fee” of $10,000 per month for the right to operate the prison.

Was that a good deal for LaSalle? With the influx of federal detainees under the Trump administration, the answer to that would be a resounding “yes.” The State of Louisiana pays private prisons about $24 per day to warehouse inmates while Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has upped the ante to $65 to $75 per person per day.

Using conservative figures that indicate LaSalle houses about 2,800 federal detainees at its 10 Louisiana facilities and is being paid $65 per day per prisoner. That comes to more than $5.8 million per month. There is overhead to consider, of course, like employee salaries and splitting some of that income with the local sheriffs but you’re still looking at nearly $70 million per year gross for LaSalle – and it’s one of your smaller private prison companies.

Of course, LaSalle doesn’t overlook the help it gets from the local sheriffs. During the 2019 campaign, the company contributed $5,000 to Edwards’s reelection campaign.

And private prisons offer little, if any, rehabilitation or educational programs for prisoners, which helps keep costs down and profits up.

If you’re still not convinced that private prisons are big business, consider the numbers:

In 1980, there were 41,000 persons in state and federal prisons in the U.S. Today, that number exceeds a half-million. Has crime really increased that much over the past 40 years? Not likely.

State and federal governments spent $6.9 billion on jails and prisons in 1980 compared to $80 billion today. Private prison companies have shelled out millions of dollars to persuade state and local governments to create new crimes, impose harsher sentences and keep more people locked up so they can earn more profits.

In 1980, the U.S. violent crime rate was 596.6 per 100,000 population. In 2019, the rate was cut by more than 38 percent to 366.7. During the same time period, the murder rate was cut by more than half, from a 10 per 100,000 of population to 4.9. Likewise, property crime was cut by more than half, from 6,353.3 to 2,565.3.

Make no mistake: It long ago stopped being about crime prevention. It’s all about profits now.