WATERGATE, LOUISIANA, AND RICHARD NIXON!

Monday, June 27^th, 2022

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

 

WATERGATE, LOUISIANA, AND RICHARD NIXON!

 

This month marks the 50-year anniversary of the Watergate break-in.  Those of us who remember we’re often mesmerized by the full press coverage the event produced. I was commuting to Baton Rouge each day in 1972 as a delegate to the constitutional convention. Driving to and from the state capital, I was glued to my radio as events unfolded that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

 

Nixon was the first and so far the only president to resign from office. Those too young to remember the events surrounding Watergate missed one of the most riveting episodes in American history. Nixon survived a number of bitter political fights, but he had always been able to bounce back. However, it was his own words in secret recordings that he personally authorized in the Oval Office that finally led to his downfall.

 

Throughout his political career, the 37^th President made a number of trips to Louisiana. Nixon’s first visit was with his wife Pat in 1941, shortly after they were married. “I remember how we were moved by the wonderful food and the good music, but most of all by the warmth of the hospitality,” he often recalled. He made fast friends with Al Hirt and clarinetist Pete Fountain, both of whom he later invited to perform at the White House.

 

Nixon lost his first bid for President in a close race with John F. Kennedy in 1960. About 10,000 votes could have changed the outcome, and some political observers still feel the election was stolen from Nixon by election shenanigans in Chicago. Two years later, he tried for a political comeback, running for governor of California, but was defeated by then-Governor Pat Brown, whose son later became the state’s governor. Nixon told reporters he was through with politics, and they “wouldn’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”

 

But rumors surfaced a few years later that he again might be interested in the Republican nomination. I was class president at Tulane Law School in 1966 and had the chore of arranging speakers. At the suggestion of my law school roommate Bill Weinberg, I wrote Nixon asking him to address the Tulane student body. To my surprise, he accepted. Over a light lunch at the Tulane Student Center, he quizzed me about Louisiana politics and asked a number of questions about my background and future plans. I found him engaging, funny, and quite the dominating figure one would expect of a former Vice President.

 

I introduced him to the packed crowd, and it was obvious from his remarks that he was running for President again. He invited me to join him for a Republican Party fundraising dinner that evening, and future Governor Dave Treen joined us. Treen and I both felt like we were listening to the next President.

 

As the evening ended, his chief of staff asked if I would consider joining the campaign by heading up a Nixon for President young voters group being formed in New Hampshire, the first primary state. I was tempted but chose instead to begin a new family and a new law career in the Crescent City.

 

My only other meeting with Nixon was in July of 1972 at the St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church in the south Louisiana town of Houma. We both were there for the funeral of Louisiana Senator Allan Ellender. An hour before the funeral, over a thousand people were packed into the street in front of the entrance. Metal barriers had been set up to keep the crowd at bay, and the church was surrounded by state troopers, local police officers, and numerous Secret Service agents. It became obvious why there was so much security. The President and Mrs. Nixon were to join a long list of dignitaries to eulogize the Senator.

 

When the President entered, he was led by the Secret Service to a seat directly in front of me. I introduced myself and reminded him of his visit to Tulane, and the offer to go up to New Hampshire. He said that I had missed a great opportunity.

 

Watergate would prove otherwise. But he also told me that if I had to be living and working somewhere, Louisiana was one of the best places to be. He sure was right about that.

 

Peace and Justice

Jim Brown

Jim Brown’s syndicated column appears each week in numerous newspapers throughout the nation and on websites worldwide.  You can read all his past columns and see continuing updates at http://www.jimbrownusa.com. You can also look over a list of books he has published at www.thelisburnpress.com.

 

 

 

 

 

 

THOUGHTS AFTER TEXAS KILLINGS!

May 30^th, 2022

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

THOUGHTS AFTER TEXAS KILLINGS!

 If you have small children or grandchildren, it’s difficult to process how a deranged assassin could slaughter such innocent youngsters. Yet it has become a regular happening all over America. After each shooting, we hear cries of “not this, not ever again.”  But what’s happening is that the unbearable has become routine.

First, a view of what occurred in Uvalde, Texas.  It’s obvious the locals were unprepared. The shooter stood outside the school and fired shots at passersby for almost 15 minutes. Then he calmly strolled into the unlocked schoolhouse, barricaded himself in one classroom for over an hour, and proceeded unrestrained to kill 19 children and two teachers.  So many troubling questions to ask about the dysfunctional response.

Why was it so easy to walk right into to the school and the classroom?  Many Louisiana schools have a locked fence around the outside entrances.  If a student is late arriving, they should be required to pass through a metal detector, and call in from the outside. Cameras should be well placed at each entrance so someone in the principal’s office can observe who wants to enter. An easy access phone line to local law enforcement officials needs to be readily available.

What about the local police response?  Should not there have been bulletproof flack suits available so that so that a trained police officer could push right into the school building?  And the locked classroom?  There are small explosives available to blow the lock off the door. Why was the Uvalde police department not better prepared?  It’s inexcusable that police officers waited for almost an hour before entering the school. They were woefully unqualified. Hopefully, this will be a wakeup call for small police departments all over America.

And what about the tepid response from members of Congress? Republicans continue to offer their thoughts and prayers.  What a lame duck answer. The Democrats propose an unrealistic agenda that has no chance of being enacted into law. And whatever changes might eventually become law, it will take years to have any real effect.  After all, our country has more guns than people, with an estimation of some 400 million guns in America today. Eighteen million guns were sold last year alone.

As an avid hunter, I’ve been a gun owner most of my life. Twenty assorted shotguns, rifles, and a few pistols were part of my collection until I turned them over to my son.  But I never had or felt there was any justification owning an automatic weapon. I joined the army during the Vietnam era, and qualified as an expert marksman with an M 16.  Guns like this with large capacity magazines are designed for one purpose of one purpose alone. To kill people. These assault rifles, that are being used time and time again in school killings, have no business being available to some 18-year-old punk who is nothing more than a domestic terrorist.  Yet they are easily obtainable all over the country.

America today is become a country of violence. We allow our young people to start early with video games filled with mayhem that challenge the player to repeatedly kill.  Our nation has been at war for most of our lives, with the evening news fill with death and destruction. Our military culture supplies weapons worldwide, and our top grossing motion pictures are filled with killing after killing.

American writer and scholar Henry Giroux sums up our culture this way.

“Mass shootings have become routine in the United States and speak to a society that relies on violence to feed the coffers of the merchants of death. Given the profits made by arms manufacturers, the defense industry, gun dealers and the lobbyists who represent them in Congress, it comes as no surprise that the culture of violence cannot be abstracted from either the culture of business or the corruption of politics.”

I hate to be a pessimist but I don’t look for consensus on any new solutions from our political leaders in the near future. We need to lock down our schools, protect our kids, and hope for some reasonable compromise that will be palatable to most Americans.  But don’t count on it.

Peace and Justice

Jim Brown

Jim Brown’s syndicated column appears each week in numerous newspapers throughout the nation and on websites worldwide.  You can read all his past columns and see continuing updates at http://www.jimbrownusa.com. You can also look over a list of books he has published at www.thelisburnpress.com.

 

 

ELECTION FRAUD A CAMPAIGN ISSUE!

June 15^th, 2022

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

 

ELECTION FRAUD A CAMPAIGN ISSUE!

 

Undertaking the job of Secretary of State used to be fairly routine.  I should know as I held this elected post in Louisiana for eight years during the 1980s.  I even served as president of the National Secretary of State Association, where then was little controversy among these elections’ officials in states all over America.  We were all high-ranking bureaucrats who just saw that the elections were run in a legal and orderly manner.  Few controversies took place.

 

Well this has all certainly changed today.  Secretaries of State are in the middle of firestorms all across the U.S. This fall’s elections will find incumbents challenged by opposing candidates crying election fraud, and a broken voting system.  Many such challengers are saying that the future if America is at stake. “It doesn’t really matter who is running for assembly or governor or anything else. It matters who is counting the votes for the election,” said Rachel Hamm, a candidate for Secretary of State in California. 

 

And remember Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy? He’s formed an organization called America First that is putting up a slate of candidates for secretary of state across the nation. He formed this organization because he believes “most secretaries of state are corrupt and should all be replaced. They let our country be taken through computers.”

 

New Mexico candidate Audrey Trujillo takes her criticism a step further.  She says that state voting systems, overseen by Secretaries of State, are “no better than any other communist country like Venezuela or any of these other states where our elections are being manipulated. Your vote hasn’t counted for decades. You haven’t elected anybody.” 

 

The America First group has a platform calling for “moving to paper ballots, eliminating mail voting and aggressive voter roll cleanup.”  Well guess what? That’s exactly the system in place during the time I serve a secretary of state 40 years ago.  The bulky voting machines owned by the state printed out a paper ballot that was easy to check and review.  Mail ballots were allowed only for servicemen serving outside the country, and for a limited number of essential public workers.

 

Elections back in my day generally took place without a hitch.  When I first took office in 1980, there was so much public confidence in the elections process that the clerks of court shut down their offices when the polls closed. The only way the news media could report the election results was by having a stringer reporter hang out at the clerk’s office and write down the results as the court workers hand-delivered the ballot totals.  I changed this procedure by meeting with the clerks, and getting their commitment that they would call me in Baton Rouge at the Secretary Of State's office to report the voting totals by telephone.

 

Absentee voting? You couldn’t do it unless you signed an affidavit swearing that you would be out of the state on election day.  I was voting at my home in Ferriday back then.  But I had to be in my Baton Rouge office to oversee the election process. How was I to legally vote? I got up at 3 o’clock in the morning, drove two hours to Ferriday, stopped at Hubert Lee’s donut shop to pick up a box of hot donuts for the commissioners, and arrived at ward one, precinct 1, held in the Flemings flying service hanger at 6:00 AM when the polls opened. After a brief visit with the commissioners, all who I knew well on a first name basis, I voted, then quickly headed back to Baton Rouge so as to be back in my office shortly after 8:00 AM. A real labor of love to cast my ballot which I did for a number of years.

 

Life seemed so much simpler then. My how our country is changed.  Unfortunately, manipulation of voting machines, widespread voter fraud, crooked elections officials, and foreign hacking have all become a rallying point for those who see conspiracies as our current election cycles roll around.

 

Personally, it’s hard for me to buy in to such schemes of election manipulation.  But we’re living in a different world today where claims of crooked elections have become a way for candidates to raise campaign money. And like it or not, allegations of voting fraud will be a part of numerous elections across the country come this fall. So we better get used to it.

 

Peace and Justice

Jim Brown

Jim Brown’s syndicated column appears each week in numerous newspapers throughout the nation and on websites worldwide.  You can read all his past columns and see continuing updates at http://www.jimbrownusa.com. You can also look over a list of books he has published at www.thelisburnpress.com.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

INSURANCE REFORM FALLS FLAT

June 20^th, 2022

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

INSURANCE REFORM FALLS FLAT

Remember your ancient history of how Nero fiddled as Rome burned?  Boy does that apply to the Louisiana legislature.  Now we are talking about the state that has far and away the highest insurance rates in the nation. Yet in the recent legislative session, insurance reforms were all but ignored.  Political columnist Clancy Dubos said it best when he wrote about the winners and the losers. Insurance companies were the big winners and Louisiana policyholders were hands down the big losers.

A newly released study by S&P Global Market Intelligence says that not only does Louisiana lead the country in having the highest insurance rates, but the gap between other states also continues to widen. For example, the Louisiana insurance department gave State Farm a 7.2% rate increase which was “the most-impactful single rate increase during the month of April” that applied to 1 million policyholders, who will pay $95.3 million more in premiums.  Allstate received a 14.9 per cent increase.

  Now remember it was two years ago when the legislature approved so called tort reform that the insurance commissioner promised would reduce auto insurance rates by 25%.  So what happened?  Have you checked your policy lately?  Rather than rates going down, big rate increases continue to take place. Legislators were sold a bill of goods and they bought right into it.  Now policy holders are paying the price.  A Big price.
  

Got a teenage driver?  Are you in for shock.  Louisiana has the highest teen car insurance rates in the country.  Your child will pay an average of $5,000 yearly, more than twice as much as teens in Mississippi and Alabama.  In California, where they have an aggressive insurance commissioner who has really cracked down on insurance companies overcharging, the average teenager pays $1,805. That’s almost three times less than it costs a kid in Louisiana.  In California, any request for a rate increase is closely scrutinized, and insurance companies are regularly examined.  In Louisiana, as is regularly pointed out, insurance companies rule the roost.

In another example of why insurance rates are so high, Louisiana’s insurance department allows companies to charge higher rates to those drivers who do not have a high credit score. And even though credit scores have nothing to do with a person being a safe driver, a recent study by WalletHub found that Louisiana drivers pay anywhere from 60% to 135% more if they have poor credit scores.

The disparities allowed by the insurance department are numerous and staggering. For instance, wealthy drivers with a DWI pay less than drivers with a spotless record but a low credit score. And in numerous cases, African Americans pay significantly more, as much as 70%, for their car insurance than whites according to the Consumer Federation of America.

Douglas Heller, a nationally acclaimed auto insurance expert, makes no bones as to who is at fault over all these unfair disparities. “It’s not just the insurance companies are overcharging Louisianians with low credit scores. It’s that the state Department of Insurance hasn’t done anything to stop companies from these egregious premium hikes.” As Heller told legislators; “If you drive safely, you should pay the same price as anyone else who drives safely, regardless of your credit score. Your credit history should not matter.”

And how about this shocking Louisiana regulation!  Did you know that there is a “widow penalty” allowed by the Department of Insurance? That’s right. If you have lost your spouse, you are changed as much as 15% more for your car insurance by many companies operating in Louisiana. Most states prohibit discriminating against widows, but not Louisiana. What a terrible message to send to someone who has lost their spouse. This widow penalty should be prohibited.

In a state plagued by the nations’ highest insurance rates, the legislature’s failure to address these serious insurance issues will be a big disappointment to Louisiana policyholders.

Peace and Justice

Jim Brown

Jim Brown’s syndicated column appears each week in numerous newspapers throughout the nation and on websites worldwide.  You can read all his past columns and see continuing updates at http://www.jimbrownusa.com. You can also look over a list of books he has published at www.thelisburnpress.com.

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