Louisiana Voice

There was a point during Cankle Ankle’s two-hour ramble-tamble monologue, otherwise known as the State of the Union Address, last night when he actually made sense—or would have if the words had come from anyone but Donald J. Trump:

Let’s also ensure that members of Congress cannot corruptly profit from using insider information.

They stood up for that. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. Did Nancy Pelosi stand up, if she’s here? Doubt it. Pass the Stop Insider Trading Act without delay. I wasn’t sure if anybody even on this side was even going to applaud for that. I’m very impressed. Thank you. I’m very impressed.But when it comes to the corruption that is plundering — it really, it’s plundering America — there’s been no more stunning example than Minnesota, where members of the Somali community have pillaged an estimated $19 billion from the American taxpayer. Oh, we have all the information.

And in actuality the number is much higher than that, and California, Massachusetts, Maine and many other states are even worse. This is the kind of corruption that shreds the fabric of a nation, and we are working on it like you wouldn’t believe. So tonight, although started four months ago, I am officially announcing the war on fraud to be led by our great vice president, JD Vance.

He’ll get it done. And we’re able to find enough of that fraud — we will actually have a balanced budget overnight. It’ll go very quickly. That’s the kind of money you’re talking about. We’ll balance our budget. The Somali pirates who ransacked Minnesota remind us that there are large parts of the world where bribery, corruption and lawlessness are the norm, not the exception.

Really? Let’s roll the tape.

• Phillip Esformes, who owned more than 30 nursing homes in the Miami area, was charged by the U.S. Justice Department in July 2016 with what at the time was described as “the largest single criminal health care fraud case ever brought against an individual” when he was accused of running a $1.3 billion fraud and money-laundering scheme. He was eventually sentenced to a 20-year prison sentence which was commuted by Trump in 2020. Four years after his commutation, in October 2024, he was arrested for domestic abuse after he allegedly assaulted his wife and father-in-law in separate incident—and for witness tampering and property damage.
• Rick Scott was CEO of Columbia/HCA that routinely inflated bills, billed for services never rendered and pushed unnecessary medical procedures to maximize reimbursements from Medicare and Medicaid. A 1997federal raid uncovered false cost reports, kickbacks to doctors and upcoding of medical diagnoses that resulted in inflated payments from government programs. Scott was forced to resign in the wake of the largest: LARGEST MEDICARE’MEDICAID FRAUD CASE IN HISTORY. He walked away with $300 million in stock and a $5 million severance package while HCA pleaded guilty to 14 corporate felonies and paid fines of $1.7 billion. Scott, meanwhile, went on to become Repugnantcan governor of Florida and then was elected to the U.S. Senate where he continues to serve.
• Former Trump advisor Eric Herschmann, is defending former pro wrestler Ted “Teddy” DiBiase Jr. in that nasty FRAUD CASE IN MISSISSIPPI that has also involved former NFL quarterback Brett Farve, former head of the Mississippi Department of Human Services John Davis and former Repugnantcan Gov. Phil Bryant. That case involves the misappropriation of about $100 million.

Now then, about that insider trading which suddenly appears to weigh on Trump’s conscience:

It’s somehow ironic that the drifting grifting president would suggest that others not be allowed to game the system considering how he and his family have milked the system for untold millions (maybe billion, who knows?) just during the first year of his final term in office. They have used the office of the president to accumulate as much as they possibly can, legally and illegally.

Nevertheless, let’s delve into this insider trading a bit and we learn that the practice knows no political labels: Repugnantcans and Democrats are both guilty. It’s ironic that Trump should champion a law stopping the practice when the STOP TRADING ON CONGRESSIONAL KNOWLEDGE (STOCK) act attempted to do the same thing in 2012—during the (gasp!) Obama administration. Of course, Agent Orange would never give credit for such progressive legislation to Obama.

It’s almost uncanny how well some members of Congress managed to beat the stock market in 2025

Rember Louisiana’s very own Billy Tauzin. He was an influential House member when he negotiated an agreement whereby Medicare/Medicaid would be unable to negotiate the price of prescription pharmaceuticals. While folks were still scratching their heads in confusion as to why he would do such a thing, he abruptly quit Congress and went to work as head of PhRMA, the lobbying arm of the pharmaceutical industry. Suddenly the scales were removed from our eyes.

In one of the more ironic twists, KALB-TV IN ALEXANDRIA had, of all people, Julia Letlow and Cleo Fields preview Trump’s State of the Union Speech on Tuesday. You’ve probably seen the ads (don’t know how you could miss ‘em unless you live under a rock) shaming Letlow for her belated reports of stock trading. And Fields himself is listed as one of the members of Congress who consistently beat the stock market during 2025.

So, what exactly has produced this sudden pang of conscience among our 535 members of Congress in the collective concern over insider trading?

Well, to begin with, it’s an  ELECTION YEAR and there are just some things that demand bipartisanship, even in Congress and what better way than to try to make the suckers voters back home think they’re actually trying to do something constructive?

But as with any other effort to initiate reform in Congress, a word of caution:

Don’t hold your breath.

I don’t like to say I told you so, but….

Oh, hell, yes, I do. I love being able to say I told you so. Everybody does if they’re honest.

There’s just something inherent in our DNA that gives us that warm fuzzy feeling when we’re able to do that.

Take, for instance, my LOUISIANA VOICE post of last Tuesday (Feb. 17) in which I discussed the trend toward political control of higher education and the fact that Gov. Squeaky Toy Landry has, in two years, made five political appointments to heads of Louisiana colleges and universities.

Well, now you can make that six.

Just as I predicted, Ramesh Kolluru was named as the only finalist for the presidency of University of Louisiana Lafayette.

It wasn’t a particularly difficult prediction, though. Here are some excerpts from that Feb. 17 post:

Kolluru was approached last year by an industry-friendly lobbying group called “Committee of 100 for Economic Development, Inc.,” or C100. That was following the Environmental Protection Agency’s three-day public hearing in Baton Rouge about whether Louisiana should be given enforcement responsibility of carbon capture and storage projects in the state. Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, is a method of reducing greenhouse gases by capturing carbon dioxide from the pollution of industrial smokestacks. The captured carbon is transported via pipeline and, ultimately, injected deep underground.

One of the proposed injection sites is in Lake Maurepas in Tangipahoa Parish where a professor has already been reined in for adverse findings of that proposition. The funding for that research was provided by one of the industries proposing to store the carbon.

C100 desired to continue recruiting support for state control of CCS so, Michael Olivier, former head of C100 ASKED KULLURU TO HELP. “We will be seeking influential business leaders in regions of the state to sign OpEds and we will use social media to influence public opinion in the upcoming EPA ruling. Would you be that person in Acadiana? He asked, according to emails obtained through a public records request.

Kolluru’s response? “Absolutely!” So much for objectivity and non-bias in research.

Kolluru was already serving as interim president following the abrupt resignation of Joseph Savoie last July, But guess what his job was before that? He was the university’s vice president for research, innovation and economic development. His eagerness to assist in the promotion of a controversial matter like carbon capture pretty much throws his objectivity into serious question and automatically tarnishes any research from the school.

Climate scientist and Penn State University professor Michael Mann called the relationship between C100 and ULL “deeply problematic,” according The Lens, a respected New Orleans online news service.

Just remember who told you Kolluru was a sure bet for the ULL job.

After all, this is Louisiana.

Cankle Ankle Trump’s $400 million ballroom construction project aside, there is a lot of other proposed mega-building construction taking place throughout the country with but scant information about the potential impact it might have on local communities.

And Louisiana is right in the thick of it all.

On the one hand, ICE is discreetly snapping EMPTY WAREHOUSES for conversion to massive detention centers capable of storing as many as 8,000 to 10,000 human beings indefinitely without benefit of attorneys or due process.

On the other, water-gulping data centers are also cropping up that will perform God-knows-what functions, buildings that promise to dwarf Walmart supercenters.

Squeaky toy Jeff Landry says the announced Amazon $12 billion center in the Caddo and Bossier parish area will create 540 new permanent jobs as well as 1700 indirect new job opportunities in the state’s northwest region.

Already, construction had begun on another $10 billion (but already edging up to $30 billion in cost) Meta-run AI data center about 100 miles to the east along I-20 in RICHLAND PARISH. It promises to eat up more electric power in a day than the entire city of New Orleans on one of those typically sweltering hot August days.

Anthropic plans a similar $10 billion facility in West Feliciana Parish

But get this: the Richland Parish data center, located in the tiny community of Holly Ridge, is registered to use an astonishing 23 MILLION GALLONS OF WATER PER DAY, or 8.4 billion gallons per year. Those in northwest Louisiana and West Feliciana Parish promise to be equally thirsty for water and power, which is certain to adversely affect consumer rates in the area.

But the bigger—much bigger—question should be: just what in the name of George Orwell’s 1984 will these data systems be used for? Besides posing as a significant drain on subsurface water tables and creating unfathomable demands on electric power, questions should abound on exactly what type of data is expected to be gathered by all these data centers.

The industry as a whole has been criticized for its lack of transparency in development decision. In Louisiana, local and state officials have created seeming airtight NON-DISCLOSURE AGREEMENTS (NDAs) in order to hide the economic development process.

But in an era of Trumpian dystopia when Repugnantcans openly espouse less government intrusion in our personal lives while privately obsessing over our bedroom preferences, our health care, blocking our preferences over the quality of air and water we breathe and drink and stripping away our rights little by little, it’s more than a little alarming to contemplate just how much personal information Big Brother is amassing on us in those mammoth data centers.

Perhaps the promise of good-paying jobs for the few is supposed to assuage the concerns of tens of thousands of others living in the area of these monster structures.

As if those concerns are not enough, there’s the hush-hush effort to buy up empty warehouse space for conversion to DETENTION CENTERS to hold thousands upon thousands of people, most of whom have never done a thing to harm us and in fact, probably have a lower overall crime rate than the general population of this country.

We have those who claim these undocumented people are taking our jobs but an equal number claim they’re freeloaders. They can’t be both. And while they’re claiming that they’re a drain on society, ICE keeps raiding work sites to apprehend them. At the same time, claims are made that they’re taking up our housing while remaining homeless. And Trump’s claim that millions of undocumented types are voting illegally, that is a myth, as well; Even as state legislatures like our very own in Louisiana are passing legislation making it illegal for undocumenteds to vote, it’s already illegal for them to vote and precious few cases of illegal voting have been certified, Trump’s wild claims notwithstanding.

Yet, here we are, building more and bigger prisons to hold these people indefinitely, converting many working people into those wards of the state the Repugnantcans are so damned concerned about.

And more and more, bigger and bigger data centers to keep tabs on the rest of us.

What in the name of Adderall-induced dementia was Mar-A-Lardo Trump thinking when he made the announcement on Truth Social that he was sending a Navy hospital ship—that just happens to be unavailable to sail anywhere—to GREENLAND, which doesn’t want or need the help, on a humanitarian mission to aid in a non-existent health crisis?

Adderall, for the MAGHATS reading this, is taken for the treatment of narcolepsy (not to be confused with epilepsy or necrophilia.)

And just what is Jeff Landry’s role going to be in this head-scratcher?

Could this be a thinly-disguised plan for a military invasion of the country with Landry’s being promoted to Rear Admiral to carry out the attack in an aircraft carrier with a big red cross painted on its bow?

One reader posed the not-so-tongue-in-cheek question, “If part-time governor Landry wants to pull a Trumpian stunt, why not anchor a Navy hospital ship at New Orleans and offer medical care to those who need it?”

Ah, but that makes too much sense to be a viable proactive decision for anyone in Louisiana politics. I mean after all, we have a state legislator from New Iberia as a (legally, I might add) candidate for Congress representing Julia Letlow’s district which is comprised mostly of parishes up around the Arkansas border.

But back to Greenland and that crushing need for humanitarian help. Just what is the urgency, anyway? Well, one American sailor got ill onboard his ship and the good folks of Greenland took him in to a hospital for treatment—treatment that is free in that country, by the way.

And what about America’s two hospital ships? Both the USNS Mercy and the USNS Comfort are themselves incapacitated—sort of like that sick American sailor—because they are in dry dock undergoing maintenance until sometime around July, which kind of makes Trump’s message that a ship is “on the way” seem a little out there in la-la land.

Bear in mind, if you will, this is the same guy who is shutting down FEMA, who denied assistance to the West Coast when it was on fire and who still has not managed to be of much help to the hurricane victims in North Carolina.

That “fantastic” Landry has remained eerily quiet on the topic thus far. What with the 2026 regular session of the Louisiana Legislature cranking up two weeks from today, it would seem that Squeaky Toy would have his hands full splitting time between Baton Rouge and Nuuk.

But one astute reader did note that when she first heard that Cankle Ankles had enlisted Landry’s help, “I assumed we were sending the Cajun Navy to deliver some gumbo to the sick soldier. That’s the most those two might pull off.”

As Larry the Cable Guy would say, “Now that’s funny, I don’t care who you are.”

But, hey, perhaps Landry can dispatch former veterinarian, former pharmaceutical salesman, former congressman, former gubernatorial candidate, former Louisiana surgeon general and former CDC principal deputy director Ralph Abraham (who served in the latter post “with clarity and discipline,” according to a CDC statement) along to supervise U.S. naval and Greenland surgeons with his “clarity and discipline” as they toil to bring this medical catastrophe to a happy outcome. One wonders what the reaction to all this by Doctors Without Borders might be.

Fifth paragraph below photo of Mike Rivault that begins, “Yeargain, who has acknowledged…” should read, “Rushing, who has acknowledged…”