Louisiana Voice

At least one reader is of the opinion that I’m in failing health (I don’t really think macular degeneration falls within the purview of “failing”) and that I’m in dire financial straits (I can only guess he draws this conclusion from the twice-yearly fundraiser LouisianaVoice conducts which is currently taking place) and that LouisianaVoice is sub-par as a political blog.

Sub-par it may well be because I do not depend on it as a livelihood. I’m involved with several projects, but admittedly, I’m not hi-tech, though I do know the difference between A-1 and A-I.

I also can see that the first 100 days of Making America Great is nothing short of an unmitigated disaster.

But, as we were told repeatedly during the Vietnam War, I think I can see a light at the end of the tunnel – and I really don’t think it’s not an approaching train, which we got back when we were trying to wear down Ho Chi Minh in that ill-advised war of attrition.

Unlike Col. Bonespurs, I did enlist in the military just as Vietnam was heating up, but never set foot in the country.

But today, I see so many areas where this man is stripping us of our rights, of our dignity and of democracy itself.

He has targeted ATTORNEYS AND EDUCATORS, even AMERICAN CITIZENS. He’s deliberately UNDERCUT allies, DEFUNDED a refugee aid agency, threatened to ERADICATE an entire society in Gaza in favor of erecting a tourist mecca – to his own financial benefit, of course and launched an attack on the FIRST AMENDMENT.

And now, he wants to fire Central Bank Chairman Jerome Powell because he is somehow attempting to shift the blame for the coming recession, brought about by his own Daffy Duck-like economic policies, on Powell.

And now we learn that Col. Bonespurs wants a lavish military parade in honor of his 79th birthday next June. The event is anticipated to cost taxpayers a cool $92 million, including $21 million for public safety costs alone. All this, while imported goods are expected to increase for working Americans who haven’t seen him do anything about the price of eggs – one of his big campaign promises.

A military parade for a draft dodger who called military heroes “losers.” Can you spell arrogance, boys and girls?

And during all the chaos, Elon Musk and his DOGE has been running rampant through the federal government while downsizing his TARGETED CUTS of $2 trillion in waste to $150 billion. And yes, a billion here and a billion there, as Everett Dirkson once said, and soon you’re talking about real money. But $150 billion is light years from the anticipated $2 trillion.

But it’s interesting to note that while has been slashing and cutting with the precision of a meat cleaver, his own companies, Space X and Starlink have been mercifully SPARED. Meanwhile, Musk covered his own tracks with a series of OUTRIGHT LIES.

But wait.

It now seems that he has taken aim at a formidable foe by threatening to cut grants to HARVARD, which has the financial resources to fight back. The university, with its $53 billion endowment, may be just the schoolyard nerd to take on the bully and win.

The university, founded in 1636, long before Trump’s immigrant forebears made it to this country as unwashed foreigners, RESPONDED to IMPOTUS’s bluster by placing a chip on its symbolic shoulder and daring the buffoon to knock it off.

By standing up to GOLFER Ima Fraud, Harvard just may have gotten the attention of other schools and attorneys who might find the courage to lock arms with the Crimson.

Already, we’re seeing more frequent and larger demonstrations against this administration and its attempted trashing of the US Constitution.

Revolutions are ignited by a small spark and Col. Bonespurs may have provided that spark.

Like the Energizer Rabbit, he just keeps on running.

Like the wristwatch in the old Timex commercial, he takes a licking and keeps on ticking.

Former Sheriff and former State Rep. Steve Pylant, like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, Heeere’s Steve! – and he’s running once again for sheriff of Franklin Parish.

He will be running to fill the unexpired term of former Sheriff Kevin Cobb who was plucked by the Louisiana Sheriffs’ Association in Baton Rouge to become its new executive director.

Pylant previously served as sheriff for 16 of his 28 years in law enforcement and followed that by serving eight years in the Louisiana House of Representatives.

Apparently, all that public service was not exhaustive enough and he now wants more.

As I wrote in 2019, I omitted him from my book Louisiana’s Rogue Sheriffs: A Culture of Corruption, but it was an oversight and never an intentional slight.

That was because his EYEBROW-RAISING ACTION that same year on behalf four former felons seemed somehow at odds with his rigid law-and-order stance in the legislature.

Normally, I would not open old wounds but Pylant’s re-entry into the public fray qualifies the five-year-old incident as legitimate news.

Typical of today’s brand of Republicanism, a moral code seems to be whatever happens to be convenient at the time, never mind the obvious contradictions.

Pylant obviously applies that logic to his actions, never mind that the action themselves conflict mightily with his public stand as a lawmaker.

That seems to be the trend today, from the very top all the way down to the local level.

Donald Trump has been accused alternately of being a Russian agent, a puppet of Vladimir Putin, a wannabe dictator in the same mold as Putin, or even the subject of blackmail by Putin.

He has done little to dispel those accusations and in fact, some of his actions have only served to veriify and underscore the disturbing claims.

Take, for example a story that The Washington Post broke around 11:00 a.m. today.

Most of my close associates refuse to subscribe to or have canceled their subscriptions to the Post because of owner Jeff Bezos’s decisions to (1) refrain from making an endorsement in the 2024 presidential election and (2) dictating the editorial content of the Post.

I have to admit that their concerns over Bezos’s interference in the Post’s newsroom operations are legitimate. It’s a disturbing development to be sure.

But, it seems, the paper still can hit Trump where it hurts when occasions dictate, Bezos’s lingering presence notwithstanding.

Take that bombshell that hit my in-box today at midmorning:

Trump, it seems has nominated interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin for the permanent role.

That, despite the fact that Martin has appeared more than 150 times on RT and Sputnik, networks funded and directed by the Russian government, as a guest commentator between August 2016 and April 2024.

He told an interviewer on RT in early 2022 that there was “no evidence” of a Russian military buildup on Ukraine’s borders. Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, just nine days after that incredulous claim. Instead, he criticized U.S. officials as warmongering and of ignoring Russia’s security concerns.

When nominated, he had to complete a questionnaire which, among other things, asks nominees to list all media interviews. Somehow, he neglected to mention those 150-plus Russian network appearances. Obviously, they just slipped his mind.

Not only did he fail to disclose the appearances, but some national security analysists have accused him of amplifying anti-American propaganda on the Russian networks and the State Department last years said he had moved “beyond disinformation” to engage in covert influence activities aimed at undermining democracies on behalf of Putin’s administration.

This, folks, is way beyond squirreling away classified documents in Mar-a-Lago’s bathroom.

The U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. is the largest in the nation and has almost unbridled jurisdiction to prosecute important national security offenses.

Think about that for just a nano-second.

With those prosecutorial powers coupled with Trump’s “2025 retribution tour,” what odds would you give any dissident in or out of the Trump administration?

It’s a recipe for the purge of anyone with an original thought and of a frightening attack on the media, on academia, on gays, on women, on blacks, on Latinos, on Middle Easterners and anyone or anything else that might stand in this monster’s path.

A White House official told the Post that Trump had made “a brilliant choice in selecting Ed Martin to serve a full, permanent term as United States Attorney for the District of Columbia,” and noted that Martin had “a distinguished record of service,” and as such, was the perfect choice “to restore law and order…”

The kind of law-and-order Trump has in mind should send chills down all our backs.

Project 2025? Forget that. Yes, Project 2025 is a playbook for an attack on our very economic and social structure. It seeks to implement a system beneficial to the ultra-wealthy would-be oligarchs and reduce the rest of society to peonage status.

But that aside, what this nomination does easily transcends Project 2025 in its severity, its threat to democracy and a free society. If Trump can plant one such person in the most powerful U.S. attorney’s office in the nation, what do you expect him to attempt next? Do you seriously believe he’ll stop there? This is just a preview, the opening act, if you will, of what’s to come.

Folks, Trump is as dangerous as a snake – a deadly venemous snake.

He is either (a) a knowing and willing agent of Russia, (b) an aspiring dictator willing to stop at nothing to assert complete control over Congress, the Supreme Court and each of our lives, (c) a total incompetent, in over his head with no idea what he’s doing or (d) a combination of two or all three.

Take your pick: either way we’re doomed if we allow him to continue to run amok, shredding the Constitution and ignoring the courts and the rule of law.

We can sit back and enjoy our SUVs, our flat screen TVs and our Z-turn mowers in a happy little vacuum of obliviousness or we can get off our asses and demand the return of our government to us, the ones to whom it was endowed in the first place, nearly 250 years ago.

The all-out Nazi purge has come to Louisiana in spades.

First, it was Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University who was deported despite no real evidence that he was a terrorist of any description.

The ICE brownshirts seized him from his New York City apartment on March 8.

But hey, that was way up there in New York. No problem for us, right?

Then, on March 25, masked ICE SS stormtroopers abducted Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk off the street and shipped her off to Pine Prairie, Louisiana.

Why Pine Prairie? Well, it’s remote. So remote, in fact, that any character witnesses in Somerville, Massachusetts, might find it a tad difficult to travel all the way to Jena to testify on her behalf at deportation hearings. It also makes obtaining legal counsel an almost insurmountable task and if they do get an attorney, the lawyer is usually located hours away. Convenient for The Party. Not so much for the Ampleforth-like victim.

Then, the ICE palace guards swooped down upon University of Alabama student Alreza Doroudi. They said he posed “significant national security concerns,” but refused to provide further details or any evidence to that effect.

He, too, was hustled off to Jena, a privately-run prison that has had issues in the past with treatment of prisoners. It’s a black hole where detainees are allegedly abused or, at best, neglected and is every bit as remote as Pine Prairie. See a trend here?

Suddenly, the encroachment of ICE had crept closer to our daily lives.

And now…they’re here.

We mentioned in a previous post that there were engineering students at Louisiana Tech and LSU who were foreign nationals who might be walking on eggshells these days in the legitimate fear that ICE might come calling.

Well, it wasn’t at either of those schools, but that’s not to say they’re being overlooked. Fourteen international students in Louisiana have had their visas revoked, nullifying their permission to continue their studies at four Louisiana universities.

No reasons were given for the action.

Seven of those were students at Southern University in Baton Rouge. Three were from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and two each were students at University of New Orleans and Tulane University.

The Trump administration has launched his own terror campaign against anyone with dark skin or an accent. Due process is not even an afterthought for these people. In fact, U.S. Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Indiana) even said incredulously at a town hall meeting that people in America are not guaranteed the constitutional right to due process. “You break the law, you don’t have due process,” she said, apparently having been absent the day her high school civics class learned that that is literally what due process is for.

But such is the crop of Republicans we seem to have in Congress these days. It seems that the era of Everett Dirkson, Dwight Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller is of another age.

Today, we live in the age of the new Machtergreifung and we’re all subject to its wrath.

Please do not forget we are two weeks into our April fundraiser for LouisianaVoice. It’s one of the oldest blogs going in Louisiana and I do this because I love this state. It’s where I was born and where I grew up, married and raised my children. Like any state, we have our shortcomings but as I like to point out, at least we’re not Mississippi.

I try to point out the shortcomings and warts when I see them. They will not correct themselves if we just look away and pretend they’re not there. We have to be vigilant – both to keep the good and to improve on the bad. You may not always agree with me. For that matter, you may never agree with me. But one thing you can say is I speak my mind on controversial subjects without shrinking in the face of authority. In other words, to use what is fast becoming a cliche, I speak truth to power – and I hate cliches, so that’s probably the last time you’ll see me quote that one.

Regardless, I do my best here to keep readers aprised of what I consider to be dangerous trends – like the attempts to destroy our public libraries, the abuses in the Louisiana State Police ranks or the far-too-many wrongful convictions in our judicial systems (see story below).

But it takes certain finances to accomplish this and I humbly implore you to help in any manner you can, be it large or small. Every dollar helps. The largest single contribution will win a first-edition copy of Huey Long’s autobiography, Every Man a King and evern contributon of $50 or more will get a signed copy of my latest book, 101 Wrongful Convictions in Louisiana.

To pay or contribute by credit card, just click on the YELLOW BUTTON to the upper right of this post and follow the instructions. If you prefer, you may simply send a check by mail to Tom Aswell, 107 North College West, Denham Springs, LA. 70726.

Thank you for your generous support through these 13-plus years!