Louisiana Voice

(63 Days)

“We’ve arrived at a moment in this campaign that we all knew . . . we’d get to — the moment when Donald Trump would be so desperate, he’d do anything to hold on to power.”

—Joe Biden, speaking in Pittsburgh on Monday.

“[T]he more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is [for the president].”

—None other than departing Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway. [For once, not presenting an “alternative fact.”}

“Rioting is not protesting. Looting is not protesting. Setting fires is not protesting. . . . It’s lawlessness, plain and simple, and those who do it should be prosecuted. Violence will not bring change; it’ll only bring destruction. It’s wrong in every way. I look at this violence and I see lives and communities and the dreams of small businesses being destroyed. Donald Trump looks at this violence and he sees a political lifeline.”

—Joe Biden, again speaking in Pittsburgh on Monday. [The voice of reason would condemn violence on either side. That’s what Biden has done.]

“And Trump? Invited at a news conference Monday evening to condemn violence by his supporters, he declined. [C]alm won’t come unless and until the American president acts like a human being — not a cornered animal.”

—Dana Milbank, The Washington Post, Aug. 31, 2020.

“[Y]ou have right-wing extremists coming in trying to take advantage of the cover of the protests to carry out these violent acts and they are trying to start a race war.”

—Elizabeth Neumann, who recently resigned from her high-level post in Trump’s Department of Homeland Security.

 “the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end. Beginning on January 20, 2017, safety will be restored.”

—Candidate Donald Trump at the Republican Convention in Cleveland, in 2016. [Four years since he said that, and 3 years and 7 months since Jan. 20, 2017. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, are we better off today than we were four years ago in terms of violence and anarchy? I think you can check that box NO.]

In case anyone’s still interested, the shenanigans of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeal and 4^th Judicial District Court (Ouachita and Morehouse parishes) are still occurring unabated in what more resembles some Third World dictatorship than respected systems of justice in north Louisiana.

And in case you’re not interested….you damned well should be. From the Louisiana Supreme Court all the way down to local judicial systems, abusive activities could – and should – warrant closer scrutiny.

Let’s begin with a review of the 4^th JDC and the court’s law clerk Allyson Campbell who is not only employed by the court but, it would certainly appear, protected. This is the same district court that FILED SUIT against the Ouachita Citizen newspaper over the publication’s request for public records in the Campbell matter.

Now, according to a recent story in the Citizen, a special appointed judge has granted a protective order that will seal all testimony or evidence revealed in a lawsuit filed by a Monroe businessman who claims Campbell concealed or destroyed documents pertaining to a separate lawsuit he filed against his former business partner.

(The second part of this story can be seen HERE.

Stanley Palowsky, III, in his lawsuit against Allison, also named five 4^th JDC judges as defendants – Fred Amman, Wilson Rambo, Carl Sharp, Stephens Winters and Benjamin “Ben” Jones (not retired) for conspiring with Campbell to cover up her alleged activity, including using 52 writ applications from Palowsky’s lawsuit as an end table in her office.

Campbell worked as a part-time columnist for the Monroe News-Star.

Campbell is also the daughter of George Campbell, an executive with Regions bank. George Campbell is in turn married to the daughter of influential Monroe attorney Billy Boles. Allyson Campbell also is the sister of Catherine Creed of the Monroe personal injury law firm of Creed and Creed. Christian Creed, Campbell’s brother-in-law, contributed $5,000 to the 2015 campaign of Attorney General Jeff Landry, $40,000 to Gov. John Bel Edwards and $46,000 to the Democrat political action committee Gumbo PAC.

In a small town like Monroe, that’s a lot of cash floating around which quickly translates to a lot of political clout. Predictably, Landry’s office backed off its investigation of Allison.

Now here’s where it really gets weird.

Lawrence Pettiette, of the Shreveport law firm of Pettiette Armand Dunkelman, who served as a “special assistant attorney general” under contract to Jeff Landry’s office in matters involving state agencies.

All that’s well and good, but Pettiette also just happens to represent Campbell.

But wait. Pettiette, it seems, also represents Hanh Williams in the succession of Shreveport oilman Fred L. Houston. Williams had “assisted” Houston in some of his financial matters before his death in 2008. The 1^st Judicial Court in Caddo Parish subsequently found Ms. Williams LIABLE for $1.1 million damages for breach of duty to the trust of Houston. The court also determined that she was liable to the Houston estate for $460,605. Pettiette seems to be the common denominator in several complicated – and controversial – cases.

And just to make sure the waters are sufficiently muddied, Williams had been in a long-term relationship with Henry Brown, chief judge of the 2^nd Circuit Court of Appeal. Brown was barred from the courthouse by the Louisiana Supreme Court and retired a few days later. Trina Chu, who clerked for the disgraced Brown, was ARRESTED for copying documents from the Houston file that was under review by the 2^nd Circuit, and sending them to her friend Williams, who, incidentally, sold her house to Brown.

Confused enough? Wait. There’s more. While charges are pending against Chu for theft of intellectual property and trespass against state computers, she is nevertheless a candidate for a seat on the 2^nd Circuit Court of Appeal.

Meanwhile, back to Brown. He is accused of judicial activism and for failure to recuse himself in a case where he had a multi-million-dollar verdict for a Mangham contractor OVERTURNED.

The contractor, JEFF MERCER, had won a unanimous jury award of $20 million against the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development after Mercer convinced the jury that he had been the target of shakedowns, extortion, and discrimination while performing highway construction work for the state in north Louisiana (in Louisiana? I’m stunned!).

As if the foregoing were not enough, consider this story written by the late investigative reporter Ken Booth back in 2016 about a judge’s careless OVERSIGHT that freed a child predator.

So, maybe we should be paying a little more attention to our judicial candidates.

64 Days (if we can hold this country together that long)

“These are not my words. I have lost my ability to speak, but not my agency or my thoughts. You and your team have doctored my words for your own political gain.”

—ALS victim Ady Barkan, responding to a video produced by Rep. Steve Scalise which altered his electronically assisted voice in an interview to make it appear that Joe Biden supported defunding the police. [This is a particularly reprehensible, despicable and unethical tactic – even for someone as reprehensible, despicable and unethical as Steve Scalise. To understand what “defunding the police” actually means, read Saturday’s post on LouisianaVoice.]

“We must not become a country at war with ourselves; a country that accepts the killing of fellow Americans who do not agree with you; a country that vows vengeance toward one another.” 

—Joe Biden, on the escalating violence in Portland, Oregon and Kenosha, Wisconsin.

“The only people to blame for the violence and riots in our streets are liberal politicians and their incompetent policies that have failed to get control of these destructive situations. This President has condemned violence in all its forms.”

—White House spokesman Judd Deere. [No, Mr. Deere, he most certainly has not “condemned violence in all its forms.” In fact, quite the opposite is the case; he has encouraged it from suggesting that the 2^nd Amendment take care of Hillary to encouraging his faithful to “beat the hell” out of a protester at one of his rallies to calling white supremacists “very fine people.”. Please don’t take us for fools, Mr. Deere. There is plenty of blame to go around – from robo cops to looters to white supremacists who infiltrate protest groups to vigilantes to the Tucker Carlsons of the world all the way up to the White House steps and its occupant who dog whistles his fringe element faithful to action.]

“Four years ago, when the United States was in the eighth year of an economic expansion and enjoying a time of relative peace and prosperity, Donald Trump saw only carnage. ’Our convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation,’ he told the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, describing a nation full of ‘death, destruction. . . and weakness.’ Now, America actually is in crisis: a world’s worst 177,000 dead from the pandemic, nearly 6 million infected, 6 million net jobs lost during Trump’s presidency, nearly $7 trillion added to the debt, and racial violence in the streets.

“Back in 1980, when presidential candidate Ronald Reagan asked his famous question, ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’ he said, ‘If all of the unemployed today were in a single line allowing two feet for each of them, that line would reach from New York City to Los Angeles, California.’ If we made a similar line today of all those on some type of unemployment relief, that line would cross the country five times. Trump can’t ask Americans whether they are better off than when he took over because we all know the answer. The best he can do is pretend everything is hunky-dory, and hope people fall for it.”

 — Dana Milbank, Washington Post, Aug. 27, 2020.

“The big backlash going on in Portland cannot be unexpected after 95 days of watching and incompetent Mayor admit that he has no idea what he is doing. The people of Portland won’t put up with no safety any longer. The Mayor is a FOOL. Bring in the National Guard! Our great National Guard could solve these problems in less than 1 hour. Local authorities must ask before it is too late. People of Portland, and other Democrat run cities, are disgusted with Schumer, Pelosi, and [their] local ‘leaders.’ They want Law & Order!”

—Donald Trump tweet following fatal shooting in clash between BLM protesters and pro-Trump supporters in Portland, Oregon, Aug. 30, 2020.

“We don’t need your politics of division and demagoguery. Portlanders are onto you. We have already seen your reckless disregard for human life in your bumbling response to the COVID pandemic. And we know you’ve reached the conclusion that images of violence or vandalism are your only ticket to reelection.”

—Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, in response to Trump’s tweet rants, Aug. 30, 2020.

“Congressional oversight of intelligence activities now faces a historic crisis. Intelligence agencies have a legal obligation to keep Congress informed of their activities.”

—Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), acting chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, on Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe’s announcement that the intelligence community will scale back in-person congressional briefings on election security. [A cynic might say the move is just another attempt by Trump to divert attention away from election interference – or worse, to conceal it.]

“I fear that we are witnessing the end of American democracy.”

—Harvard psychologist Joshua Greene.

When it comes to political rhetoric, the human attention span is roughly equivalent to that of a squirrel. That is to say, roughly one full second – or if the squirrel happens to be focused on an acorn, four seconds. As Casey Stengel would have said, you can look it up right HERE.

That’s why Donald Trump gets away with spewing his distortions to his cult followers: they have the approximate focusing ability of an Irish Setter and apparently, more than twice the unquestioning loyalty and unconditional devotion.

So, when Trump says something so asinine as the claim that Joe Biden, if elected president would DEFUND THE POLICE, it becomes not simply a distortion, but an outright lie. And his base eats it up and nothing I say here is going to change that.

But I’m going to say it anyway – because pathological liars are a clear and present danger and Trump is a pathological liar, maybe even a psychopathic one.

Let’s take a look at the facts, something that neither Trump nor his tunnel-vision devotees ever bother to do.

Way back in 1982, then-President Ronald Reagan was pushing a bill that would legalize asset forfeiture, a practice that has come under widespread abuse by profiteering police departments, it was then-Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware who pre-empted the White House with his own bill that essentially gave Reagan everything he was seeking. It passed the Senate by a bipartisan 95-1 vote (source: Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, by Radley Balko, p. 146).

Fast forward to 1989, when the first President George Bush created “joint task forces” to further coordinate between the military and law enforcement agencies for drug enforcement, it was Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Biden who told the Associated Press, the Bush-Bennett (Drug Czar William Bennett) plan “is not tough enough, bold enough, or imaginative enough to meet he crisis at hand.” (Source: Balko, pp. 167-168)

Nor was the escalation of the so-called drug wars restricted to the Republicans. Realizing that police departments had morphed into an “us versus them” mentality on both sides of law enforcement, President Clinton in 1994 launched a new grant program under the Justice Department called Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS).

Under COPS, local police departments were supposed to use the grant money to hire more officers who would implement more community-oriented policing strategies. The first year’s funding for the program was $148.4 million. The second year, appropriations jumped to $1.42 billion (that’s billion with a “B”). (Balko, p. 217)

But instead of cops twirling batons, whistling and walking beats, learning the names of school principals and attending community meetings, cops were beating people over the heads with batons and teargassing reporters in communities where citizens protested the needless killings of American citizens. Grant money meant to solidify relations between police and American neighborhoods were used instead for the purchase of military hardware to invade those same American neighborhoods – all in the name of busting some teenager with an ounce of pot in the country’s failed drug war.

The influx of federal grant money and income derived from asset forfeiture made policing a profitable enterprise, even in the country’s smallest communities who suddenly saw a pressing need for their own SWAT teams, low instances of terrorism and hostage-taking notwithstanding.

Born in Los Angeles, SWAT teams soon began invading wrong addresses, killing innocent people – and spreading across the landscape to such crime-infested communities as Mukwonago, Wisconsin (pop. 7,519), Middleburg, Pennsylvania (pop. 1,363 – half the adult population must’ve been members of that local SWAT team), Mt. Orab, Ohio (pop. 2,701), and Butler, Missouri (pop. 4,201).

The grant money also went for military hardware, that many small nations could envy. Between 1997 and 1999, the Pentagon doled out $727 million in equipment, including 253 aircraft (mostly six- and seven-passenger airplanes and Blackhawk and Huey helicopters, 7,856 M-16 rifles, 181 grenade launchers, 8,131 bulletproof helmets, 1,161 pairs of night-vision goggles, assault vehicles, boats and (for a Wisconsin police department) one periscope

So, when people talk about “defunding” the police, they’re not talking about what Trump calls turning over the cities to the Islamic hordes or domestic terrorists – though to listen to his followers to respond to such dog whistles, you’d certainly think so.

The term “defunding the police” does not mean abolishing police departments; it means reallocating or redirecting funding away from such macho programs and mind-sets at the growing militarization of police departments and directing them back to that original intent of community interaction instead of reaction, cooperation instead of confrontation, assistance instead of antagonism.

No one is naïve enough to believe we ever had or will have the Norman Rockwell image of citizen police. But neither should we have the mentality that no one has a right to question or protest official actions or policy. That’s what this country is all about – having your voice heard.

I’m certain there will be those who will attack me as a bleeding-heart liberal. Never mind that I was a conservative Republican for more than 30 years until I saw what the Wall Street Republicans and corporate greed were doing to this country and to the working people who form the backbone of democracy.

You can attack me all you want, but that doesn’t change the facts that I have given you here. You can twist my words, spin your own philosophy to fit that of an ill-educated, egocentric would-be dictator, but that doesn’t change history.

And that history is that Joe Biden, no matter any of his other faults and shortcomings (and he has those; we all do), the one big lie of Donald Trump is that Biden is anti-law enforcement.

Nothing – absolutely nothing – could be further from the truth.

The biggest mystery of it all is if I can dig those figures up sitting her in Denham Springs, Louisiana (with more than a little assistance from author Radley Balko), why haven’t those so-call investigative reporters and political pundits at The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the rest of the MSM done so?

It’s to their everlasting shame that they haven’t. And it’s a pity that 40 percent of this country won’t accept those facts when – and if – they’re placed in front of them.

Deal with it. And try to focus longer than a squirrel contemplating an acorn.