Louisiana Voice

“DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS, THE BIGGEST OF ALL POLITICAL SCANDALS (IN HISTORY)!!! BIDEN, OBAMA AND CROOKED HILLARY LED THIS TREASONOUS PLOT!!! BIDEN SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED TO RUN – GOT CAUGHT!!!”

—Incoherent tweet by Donald Trump on Wednesday.

“NOW THAT THE RADICAL LEFT DEMOCRATS GOT COUGHT [sic] COLD IN THE (NON) FRIENDLY TRANSFER OF GOVERNMENT, IN FACT, THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN AND WENT FOR A COUP, WE ARE ENTITLED TO ASK THE VOTERS FOR FOUR MORE YEARS. PLEASE REMEMBER THIS WHEN YOU VOTE!”

—Another unhinged Trump tweet on Wednesday. [He’s truly lost it, folks.]

“Mark the date, we have reached the point where even Sean Hannity is asking Trump simple questions that the president can’t or won’t answer.”

—Tweet by Mehdi Hasan.

“Trump won’t tell Hannity if he’s had a negative coronavirus test. He just ignores the question and starts ranting.”

—Tweet by Aaron Rupar.

“Wow. This interview with Hannity is bonkers even by the president’s usual ‘interview with Hannity’ standards. Every day is a new frontier in crazy. Without prodding, Trump goes right after the “peaceful transition of power“ question and Hannity practically throws himself on top of the telephone to stop him.”

—Tweet by Tom Nichols.

“The messaging that President Trump gave to America and the world when he left the hospital about there is no need to be afraid of this virus is probably the most reckless and deadly piece of information I have ever heard.”

—Dr. Rick Bright, ousted earlier this year by Trump from his directorship of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority.

“Pence said Trump listens to scientists. That’s a joke, right?”

Rebecca Leber, writer for Mother Jones, on Pence’s claim during Wednesday’s debate.

NOT A TRUMP QUOTE, but it should be (with apologies to Cavin & Hobbes)

“I’m learning real skills that I can apply throughout the rest of my life … lying and rationalizing.”

The take down of those nutcases up in Michigan yesterday provided an obscure but interesting link to a Louisiana congressman, a link that LouisianaVoice first revealed more than three months ago, back on June 26.

In case you’ve been in a coma or living under a rock, six men have been charged in federal court with conspiracy to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and seven other men are facing separate state terrorism charges for their involvement with the Wolverine Watchmen, a militia group affiliated with the Boogaloo movement.

NBC News said Adam Fox, Barry Croft, Ty Garbin, Kaleb Franks, Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta were charged with conspiracy to commit kidnapping. In a recent social profile verified by date of birth, Croft wore a tricorn hat and a sweatshirt with the insignia of the Three Percenters (emphasis mine), an armed anti-government movement.

The Three Percenters, founded in 2008 following the election of Barack Obama as president, draws its name from the unsubstantiated assertion that only 3 percent of American colonists actually fought the British during the American Revolution.

If they are striving for 3 percent of America for its membership numbers, that would appear to be a bit ambitious. If they represented 3 percent of the U.S. population today, they would number nearly 10 million members instead of fewer than 100,000 suspected members of such militia groups scattered throughout the U.S.

Other similar organizations are the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer and at least seven Louisiana organizations identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as hate groups.

And while Donald Trump insists that all violence, rioting and looting is the handiwork of liberals and antifa, the latest arrests should dampen that rhetoric somewhat. But then there is also this:

• Oath Keeper Charles Dyer was sentenced to 30 years in prison for raping his own 7-year-old daughter.
• The president of a local Ohio chapter was jailed for keeping a live napalm bomb in his home.
• An armed Tennessee man driving a pickup truck with an Oath Keepers logo on it was arrested when he attempted to place two dozen officials in a town under arrest, a-la Gomer Pyle.
• In March 2018, Michael B. Hari, a former sheriff’s deputy who once submitted a proposal to build Donald Trump’s wall on the southern US border, was one of three men arrested in connection with the bombing of a mosque in Minnesota. Hari at the time headed up a group called the White Rabbit Three Percent Illinois Patriot Freedom Fighters Militia.
• Three Percenters have served as self-appointed, heavily-armed “border patrols, attempted to detonate a car bomb outside a bank in Oklahoma City in 2017, and served as self-appointed security during the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia that turned deadly in August 2017.

In June, LouisianaVoice published a story that showed an affiliation between the Three Percenters and Livingston Parish’s CAJUN GUARD.

In March 2018, it turns out, U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana’s 3^rd Congressional District hinted to representatives of the oil and gas industry that he was a MEMBER  of the 3 Percenters.

“Some of you know, some of you perhaps do not, that the Revolutionary soldiers that gave birth to this nation represented only three percent of the populace, the colonists,” he erroneously told attendees at the Expanding Global Gas Infrastructure seminar. “Some of us refer to ourselves as ‘Three Percenters,” he added (emphasis mine).

While it was not immediately clear whether Higgins really counted himself as an active member of any Three Percenter chapter, he has done little to dispel any such notion. He would again be linked to the organization two months later when he hawked T-shirts with what appeared to be a Three Percenter logo on the backs.

The shirts were distributed to participants in a “Redemption Ride,” a jeep and motorcycle ride with Higgins and Dog the Bounty Hunter. Online payments for the shirts were processed as individual contributions to Higgins’s congressional campaign.

The link to that online store, which sold clothing and accessories in preparation for the civil war that some members appear to anticipate – and relish – has since been taken down.

Higgins, by the way, is up for reelection on Nov. 3. A vote for him could be perceived as an endorsement of the planned kidnapping of the governor of Michigan. You have to ask yourself the following questions:

• Is this really what America stands for?
• Is the darkness that has swept over this country productive?
• Is this what I really want for my children and grandchildren?
• When will the madness that has permeated this country end?
• Is violence and insurrection the answer?
• What can I do to end the vitriol?

Answer: you can vote.

I can’t tell you how to vote – and I wouldn’t – because that’s in your own heart and while I may not agree with your choice, it’s your right to make it.

But if you don’t vote, you have no right to complain about any aspect of our government.

“My debate ranking:

1. Senator Harris
2. The fly
3. Vice President Pence.”

—Tweet by Bill Kristol

“Who will land the interview with the fly? The ride time was amazing.”

—Tweet by Josh Marshall

“A fly landing on Pence’s head while he’s saying ‘systemic racism isn’t real’ is the universe’s way of saying, ‘This is B.S.’”

—Tweet by Nate Dern

“He was terrible and amazingly stiff and fake. And looked sick with the pink eye AND the fly was attracted to sh*t.”

—Tweet by Claudia Jordan

“There is a part of Trump that will never forgive Pence for that fly.”

—Tweet by Adam Parkhomenko.

“The fly spent longer on Pence’s head than Pence spent on the pandemic.”

—Tweet by Jess Dweck

“I just couldn’t stand by and listen to his lies any longer.”

—The fly.

“I don’t think it’s ever a good sign when a fly lands on your head for two minutes. You know … he who commands the fly has always been seen historically as the mark of the devil.”

—Steve Schmidt, founder of the Lincoln Project, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, on MSNBC.

“The fly is part of the Deep State.”

—Tweet by Donald Trump. [Just kidding. Sorry, couldn’t resist.]

“Now he is going to be an ‘expert’: he’s had it so nobody can tell him anything. If he ever even paused for a second for any medical advice before, that’s over. He knows more about wars than the generals; he will now know more about the coronavirus than any doctors. All the people that he’s exposing by this, the poor Secret Service, the medical personnel, the pilots on the helicopter, all the White House staff. It’s mind-boggling.”

—Writer Gwenda Blair, on Trump’s defiance of medical advice and his flouting of safeguards.

“What’s so shocking to me is that not only are the signals that Donald Trump is sending by removing a mask and not engaging in social distancing clearly bad for public health, sending a terrible example to people, but it’s also bad politics. I would chalk it up to the medication that he was given – except this is the way he has been behaving since he descended from the escalator in 2015. This is just who he is.”

—Zac Petkanas, of the health pressure group Protect Our Care.

 “If you take the blue states out, we’re at a level that I don’t think anybody in the world would be at. We’re really at a very low level but some of the states — they were blue states, and blue-state management.”

—Donald Trump, on Sept. 16, claiming (erroneously, as usual) that the highest coronavirus infection rates were in states run by Democrats. [So, how many Democrats were at that Rose Garden event? How many White House staffers are Democrats?]

“We’ve all known people who lie, exaggerate, engage in magical thinking, delude themselves, and even, in extreme cases, construct their own private reality. Psychiatrists see them often. What remains inexplicable is how such a person was able to bring along 40 percent of a great nation.”

—Tweet by Mona Charen

“We are witnessing a death match between Selfishness and Stupidity.”

—Tweet by Dan Rather

“Donald Trump could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and infect … everyone and not lose any supporters. except for the ones who die.”

—Tweet by Jeff Tiedrich

It’s just plain fun to see how far some candidates for political office are willing to go to get elected.

It’s also pretty disgusting.

It’s not disgusting because of any personal feelings I have for either candidate for 21^st Judicial District Court Judge; I don’t know either candidate, Colt Fore or his opponent, William Scott Dykes. In fact, I never even heard of them before this election.

When I saw their signs start popping up out here in Livingston Parish yards, I just wondered why so many homes were suddenly on the market and being listed with those particular realtors. (That’s a joke, son. You’ll get it later.)

And I’m not trying to defend Fore. He is an attorney, after all, with a firm with whom I had a brief difference a few years back over the right of a Baton Rouge television station to tape proceedings of a controversial city council meeting (the city’s legal counsel, a member of that firm, said since the law did not specifically mention television cameras in allowing the photographing of meetings, it was within the city council’s authority to ban them, which was a patently abusive overreach on his part).

But today, I received in my mailbox a flyer, a political cheap shot, really, that proudly pointed out that Fore “gave thousands of dollars to Democrat Hillary Clinton for President.”

And while it’s true that federal campaign finance reports reflect that Fore, in fact, CONTRIBUTED $2,700 to Clinton in 2016, it conveniently neglects to add that he contributed $850 to Trump this year.

God knows, I’m no fan of Hillary Clinton, but when it came down to making a choice between her and Trump four years ago, it was a no-brainer for me: I voted for Hillary because I simply could not stomach the idea of Donald Trump as leader of the free world.

It turns out my instincts then were correct. The man has been nothing short of an unmitigated disaster, an embarrassment. I don’t know what kind of president Hillary would have made – probably a bad one – but nothing she could have done could ever have approached the train wreck this country has witnessed for the past four years.

But I digress. This rant is not about Trump or Hillary or Biden. It’s about electing judges.

And my question is this: why the hell should a judge’s election revolve around candidates’ personal political philosophies? And why do political parties even enter into the equation?

Judges’ races should be about the letter of the law, not about the 2^nd Amendment, stricter sentences for offenses, abortion or who a particular candidate supports for president.

No candidate for a judgeship should enter a race or be considered for nomination to a judicial appointment on the basis of his or her preconceived notion on any ideology whatsoever. A judge’s job is to hear arguments on cases coming before the court without personal feelings entering into the discussion and to render a ruling based on the law, not some hackneyed political viewpoint or on the basis of which attorney contributed to the judge’s campaign.

The flyer I received said, “Colt Fore says he is a Republican now…but when he is not running for office, Colt Fore knows he’s with her (Hillary).”

The flyer’s disclaimer said it was paid for by Louisiana Law, Order and Justice of 7350 Jefferson Highway, Suite 485, Baton Rouge.

Corporate records on file with the Louisiana Secretary of State indicate that one Chadwick Melder is the agent and only officer listed for Louisiana Law, Order and Justice.

Melder is also the agent and only officer of CAMCO CONSULTING, a political communications and public affairs concern which has the same mailing address as Louisiana Law, Order and Justice but which is domiciled in Woodworth, in Rapides Parish.

What confuses me about the flyer, however, is the rest of that disclaimer that says Louisiana Law, Order and Justice is “not affiliated with any candidate or committee.”

If that’s the case, why does it claim to be the one that paid for the flyer when it’s obvious it was paid for either by or on behalf of Dykes.

But if you take a peek at Dykes’ campaign expenditures of $1,000 or more, you see payments to such entities as Capital Business Services ($11,425.50 and $2,500), Tangi Graphics ($4,828.70, $3,685.88, and $1,570), Lamar Advertising ($4,075 and $1,800), and a few lesser expenditures in Tangipahoa and St. Tammany parishes.

The only ones in Baton Rouge are Capital Business Services and Lamar Advertising and since the $11,425.50 payment to Capital Business Services was on Sept. 22, it’s quite likely that was the check written to pay for the flyer with Louisiana Law, Order and Justice’s payment coming out of that payment.

So, even though the Louisiana Ethics Commission requires the reporting of campaign contributions and expenses, there are clever ways to conceal the sources of both.

All in the name of democracy and maintaining the integrity of our courts, of course.