Louisiana Voice

From this level down here, it’s pretty hard to look up to Donald Trump for inspiration. I’m just an every day person who tries to think for himself. For example, I think:

If I were as smart as Cadet Bone Spurs claims he is, I’d proudly release my college transcripts.

If is were completely above-board with my finances, I’d release my tax returns like other presidents.

If I cared about appearances, I would never accept that 747-8 luxury jetliner from Qatar.

If I really cared about the American middle class, I would not push tax breaks for the rich and I certainly would refrain from using the Oval Office to run grifting schemes on my supporters

If I really had America’s interests at heart, I would never have confiscated my translator’s notes following a 2017 meeting with Putin, nor would I have relied solely on a Kremlin interpreter in that May 2025 meeting with Putin.

If I were a genius as he claims to be, I’d learn some new words besides “hoax” and “witch hunt.”

If I were as innocent as he claims, I would certainly encourage release of the Epstein files.

Just sayin’.

I guess it was inevitable. Donald Trump loves to refer to himself as “47,” sometimes as both “45/47” in homage to his being the 45th and 47th president. It’s purely an ego thing – kind of like that military parade in his honor on July 4 that drew some 8,000 spectators (we get far more than that at the Denham Springs Mardi Gras parade each year).

So, when Jeff Landry decides to open up a new ICE facility at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, he naturally decided to name it “Camp 57.” Want to guess who the 57th governor of Louisiana is? You got it: Jeff Landry. The dude named it after himself. “Take that, Rhonda Santis, and your ‘Alligator Alcatraz!’ You got your white shrimp boots; I wore military fatigues at Wednesday’s presser. Didn’t I look intimidatingly soldierly?”

Like I said in an earlier post, Landry has never had an original idea in his life.

Frankly, if he’s dead-set on naming it after himself, I think a better name would’ve been “Camp Mini-Me.”

You gotta love Mike Johnson.

The House Speaker from Bossier City met yesterday with several women who claim to be victims of sex crimes of Jeffrey Epstein and his words of caution following that meeting smack of the hypocrisy for which he has become known.

His meeting with the women was during hearings by the House Oversight Committee headed by Rep. James Come (R-Kentucky) which learned of “additional names” of persons of interest concerning the elusive Epstein files.

In a classic CYA statement, Johnson had this to say: “We have to very carefully guard their identities. Can’t be haphazard about this,” Then he added the coup de grace (or, as Cadet Bone Spurs might himself say, the Coupe DeVille): House Repugnantcans are committed to leaving “no stone unturned” and that Trump “has the same desire.”

What a crock of home-grown barnyard fertilizer. Anyone with an IQ of 5 or greater knows that Trump is desperate to keep those Epstein files a tighter secret than the JFK assassination files.

But for the record, let’s take a deep dive into just how thorough Johnson has been down through the years, how he has diligently avoided doing anything in a haphazard or rash manner.

Back in 2010, Johnson, then 38, was busily touting a brand-spanking new law school, a “Christian” law school to be located in the old Waggonner Federal Building in Shreveport and run by what was then called Louisiana College (now Louisiana Christian University).

The plan was to train Christian attorneys (as opposed, I suppose, to satanic attorneys), which he said was not only achievable, but inevitable. In an interview with the Alexandria Town Talk after being named dean of the as yet unrealized Paul Pressler Law School, Johnson beamed, “From a pure feasibility standpoint, I’m not sure how this can fail because … it looks like the perfect storm for our law school.”

That was a pretty bold statement in retrospect because when he uttered those optimistic words, he had not yet even seen a feasibility study commissioned by Louisiana College despite the fact that for more than a year, he’d been telling donors and the public that the law school was a done deal.

Fast forward to February 2012. With clouds of concern forming on the horizon, Johnson dispatched an aide on an urgent assignment to locate that feasibility study. The aide finally found it buried at the bottom of a filing cabinet. Its contents proved useless and six months later, in August 2012, Johnson resigned as dean of the non-existent school into which Louisiana College had poured $5 million to purchase and renovate the Shreveport building. Later that year, Johnson would write a “confidential memorandum” to the college’s board of trustees in which he said the feasibility study was a “hodgepodge collection of papers” containing nothing related to the need for a new law school. Nor was there any market study of funding sources or prospects, he wrote.

That 2013 memo revealed that when given a leadership opportunity, Johnson blew it by overselling the project and failing to reveal key problems until after he left the job. That didn’t keep him from blaming others for the debacle, however. In classic Trumpian fasion, he accused others for the problems, saying that the project cratered because of larger issues at the college. He faulted administrators for failing to provide him with the feasibility study and further claimed that problems involving the school accreditation was detrimental to his efforts to have the law school approved. “The ordeal created a real hardship for me and my family,” he sniffed, adding he resigned “with great sadness and only as a last resort.”

An interesting sidebar about the proposed name of the fictional law school: it was to be named in honor of Paul Pressler, III, a retired Texas judge and former leader of the Southern Baptist Convention. But wait. Following the collapse of the law school, Pressler was accused in a lawsuit of SEXUAL MISCONDUCT  and/or assault on multiple men, including some who said they were underage at the time. One of the plaintiffs said he was only 14 with Pressler first raped him. The lawsuit was settled in December 2023 and Pressler, who had endorsed Sen. Ted Cruz for president in 2015, died in June 2024 at age 94.

Johnson, however sad he might have been at leaving the phantom law school, appeared to land on his feet as a part-time professor at Liberty University’s Helms School of Government. The school was named for long-time Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina. Helms, a one-time bank lobbyist, was an advocate of a government that aids “those in economic power.” He consistently voted to “slash school lunches for impoverished children, medical care for disabled veterans, prescription drugs for the elderly and wages for working families,” according to MOTHER JONES.

Last year, the school was fined $14 million for mishandling SEXUAL ASSAULTS on campus. Liberty University, in case you may not have known, is the school founded by the late Jerry Falwell, Sr., and more-or-less inherited by his son, Junior, when daddy went to that big pulpit in the sky.

But Jerry Jr. was a rapscallion at best and pretty much a sexual deviate at worst. He liked to watch as his wife had sex with other men, particularly a pool boy named Giancarlo Granda. Sometimes, it was said, he even participated in a ménage à trois with the two.

Now, what makes this interesting, other than from a purely prurient standpoint, is that when the relationship between the three went south, Granda lawyered up. But he didn’t get just any lawyer. He got a guy maned MICHAEL COHEN who also was the self-proclaimed fixer for one Donald J. Trump (what are the odds?). Anyway, it seems there were some, ah, photographs that managed to fall into Cohen’s hands which were used as “leverage” to make a dispute between Granda and the Falwells disappear. Meanwhile, Falwell Jr. became the very first evangelical leader in line to endorse Trump in the Repugnantcan primary of 2016. More not-so-subtle leverage perhaps? Cohen himself says yep.

Now, let’s circle back to Louisiana College at the time that Johnson was trying to get his law school up and running.

It was in the same approximate time frame that a vice-president of Louisiana College attempted a coup to oust incumbent President Joe Aguillard. The attempted takeover cost Timothy Johnson (no relation to Mike Johnson) his job. Timothy Johnson of Choudrant in Lincoln Parish, who led the unsuccessful attempt, is married to the daughter of Rev. Mack Ford who ran New Bethany Home for Girls and Boys south of Arcadia in Bienville Parish for several decades.

LOUISIANA VOICE obtained more than a dozen affidavits from women who lived at New Bethany as teenagers and each one accused Ford of sexual abuse, including rape and in at least one case, of having forced a 17-year-old girl at the school to perform oral sex on him.

The girl, at the time of her statement, a woman with children of her own, said Ford had her follow him into a building on the New Bethany grounds only to encounter a woman who was cleaning the office. He told the woman to leave so he could “counsel” the girl. Once the woman was gone, he directed the girl to get on her knees. “I thought it was to pray,” she said, but then she said Ford unzipped his pants and reportedly let Little Mack loose.

Tim Johnson had knowledge that a crime of rape against a child had been committed, but he chose to destroy the evidence, and brush the incident under the rug, said one former resident of New Bethany.

Tim Johnson claimed he was fired for blowing the whistle on Aguillard. Johnson, she said, had hoped to become president of the school. That was when the Survivors of New Bethany were asked about Johnson’s affiliation with Mack Ford and New Bethany. It was then that the survivors became the whistle-blower on Tim Johnson, revealing all of their stories of abuse. Tim Johnson, was asked what his affiliation with New Bethany was, and he stated he had no knowledge of the place. “I guess he did not remember that his name appeared on New Bethany court documents, and that the slander he claimed would come out as truth,” wrote one of the survivors. Soon after the inquiries, Tim Johnson was fired.

AGUILLARD, meanwhile, had his own problems as the school experienced financial difficulties, its own sexual scandal, payoffs to an employee discovered to be forging accreditation documents, all amid attempts to stifle dissent on the campus. He would eventually be fired himself. He filed a discrimination lawsuit against the school but instead, lost the lawsuit and was ordered to pay the school’s attorney fees.

Granted, all the foregoing is merely circumstantial and there is no direct connection linking Mike Johnson to any of the events at New Bethany, Louisiana College or Liberty University. But it certainly is coincidental that everywhere he has shown up, there has been chaos, disruption, disorganization and confusion – including the U.S. House of Representatives.

There’s an old hymn that somehow seems appropriate when looking back 20 years after Hurricane Katrina nearly drowned New Orleans:

Precious memories, how they linger
How they ever flood my soul

Everyone in southeast Louisiana has a special story to commemorate the 20^th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the fourth-most intense hurricane to make landfall in the lower 48 states. I certainly have mine.

My wife, Betty, had undergone brain surgery for a benign tumor in July at Ochsner Hospital in New Orleans. She had to return to the facility because of a leakage of spinal fluid and we were there as Katrina barreled towards us. I, foolishly, was going to remain at Ochsner because (a) I felt that Betty should not be moved and would receive the best care there and (b) because I figured the hospital could withstand the force of the storm. Our three daughters felt otherwise and flooded (no pun intended) us with desperate calls to “get out! Now!”

Finally, we relented, even though Ochsner assured us that we would receive top care there. I told them if she needed attention, we could go to medical personnel in Baton Rouge so, we departed.

Rather than exit along Jefferson Highway to I-10’s clogged contraflow, we exited the rear of Ochsner’s parking garage onto River Road that proved to be a wise move. Still, despite the lighter traffic along the two-lane route to the Sunshine Bridge, where we routed our exodus through Port Vincent and into Denham Springs via Pete’s Highway, the 70-mile trip took exactly seven hours. God only knows how long I-10 or Airline Highway might’ve taken.

That’s our personal story and I’m happy to report that Betty made a full recovery. But the rest of my story revolves around the callous profiteering done by those who took full advantage of the situation to enrich themselves and around the federal government’s unbelievably inadequate response and waste of precious resources.

First of all, following Katrina, Riga and Wilma, the three hurricanes of 2005, the federal government paid for approximately 82,000 blue tarps to cover roofs damaged by the storms. To get the tarps placed, contractors were hired and this is where the government’s incredible lack of oversight came into play.

The overall contract to place the tarps was awarded to The Shaw Group (since sold to Chicago Brick & Irin) and an outfit called Westcon Construction. Shaw was paid $175 per installed 10-foot-by-10-foot tarp – and the company never touched a tarp. That’s because Shaw sub-contracted the work to a company called A-1 Construction at a cost of $75 per square. Bingo, Shaw nets $8.2 million for never lifting a finger.

But wait! A-1 sub-sub-contracted the work out to Weston Construction at $30 per square. Wow! Another $3.28 million for A-1 for doing nothing but shuffling paper. Weston? They got theirs by paying the actual workers who installed the tarps a whopping $2 per square, thus netting for themselves nearly $2.3 million. Those who actually did the work? They got about $162,000 of the total $14.3 million paid for the installation.

And that didn’t even count the cost of the tarps – not paid by the contractor or subcontractors, but by the federal government. That was about another $6 million.

Mike Lowery, an estimator for an Austin, Texas, company, said his company would charge about $300 to tarp an entire 2,000-square-foot roof – $15 per square. That’s about 20 tarps. At the $175 per 10 X 10 tarp that the feds were paying, that’s about $3,500. That’s more than 11 times what Lowery said his firm would’ve charged.

Now, let’s look at those FEMA trailers, which one critic said were more appropriately serve as egg incubators.

FEMA spent $2.7 billion to purchase about 145,000 of those 8-by-32-foot (256 square-feet) and 14-by-22-foot (308 square-feet) trailers. That’s about $19,000 per unit. But that didn’t include the transportation and set-up costs, which ranged from $75,000 to $84,000 per unit. RVs at the time averaged a bulk rate cost of about $10,000 to $19,000. The cost of cleanup, management of unused units and efforts to minimize the potential health hazards from the high levels of formaldehyde and other toxins cost millions more.

Then, there were the surplus trailers that were not used. Those babies were sold off as campsites, etc., at steeply discounted rates as low as a couple of thousand dollars.

Finally, there were those infamous ice trucks.

Federal officials, including the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, ordered more than 200 million pounds of ice that was loaded onto thousands of trucks and sent out to destinations all over the map to locations that had no need for ice, incurring more costs as they waited or reassignment. Some were eventually routed as far away as New England to have the ice placed in cold storage.

American taxpayers ended up paying $12.5 million to store the unused ice for nearly two years. Finally, in July 2007, two years post-Katrina, FEMA decided to melt the ice despite requests for donations. A FEMA spokesman said the agency “had no takers” for the huge surplus.

I won’t dwell upon the horrendous injustices heaped upon a New Orleans attorney named Ashton O’Dwyer – and the political assassination of his career. Instead, I’ll just attach this LINK and allow you to read the details for yourself.

And I haven’t even touched on the inhuman treatment and suffering of the tens of thousands of those without transportation who were trapped in New Orleans in the aftermath of the storm.

In the immortal words of President George W. Bush to FEMA Director Michael Brown just days before Brown resigned in disgrace, “You’re doing a heckuva job, Brownie.”