Now that the new Police Jury has been sworn in by Clerk of Court, Larisa Holley Field, the formalities give way to the realities. In that respect, new Police Jury President, Rodney Sones, hit the ground running when he announced a meeting to be held Thursday evening at 5:30 P.M. on January 25, 2024, in the Harrisonburg High School Auditorium. The choice of venue is intended to accommodate all interested parties and to solicit their input for dealing with the need to provide ourselves with ambulance service.

I think it is always important to assess where we are and where it seems we are going. To that end, I review here some of the numerous things about which we can be thankful and for which we can be hopeful as we head into 2024.

“Rumour Has It”, a 2011 song by British pop star Adele, seems appropriate to a rumor (Americans and Englishmen don’t spell the same language the same way) that I heard the other day: It is that Rodney Sones may be the next Police Jury president. If that comes to pass this January when the Police Jury re-convenes, I think that would be a good thing. He is qualified by experience, intelligence and, perhaps most importantly, by having skin in the game of economic growth by virtue of operating a business in Jonesville, the Cenla Body Shop.

Chief David Squyres and the Sandy Lake Volunteer Fire Department (Fire District #4) have stepped up to do as much as volunteers can to stand in the gap and provide emergency medical services for Catahoula Parish. If you haven’t read it yet, I strongly recommend the headline story in last week’s Booster (“Sandy Lake Fire District 4, EMT certified”, page 1A, 12/11/2023).

I didn't intend to return to this topic so soon but was so appalled this week I felt compelled to. The presidents of Harvard, MIT and University of Pennsylvania were unable—after being asked several times to do so—to say that calls for the genocide of Jews violated their student codes.

The current Police Jury finished its business for the year on Monday, December 11, 2023. We will begin 2024 with four new jurors.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments this past week in what observers have deemed the most important tax case in decades. To answer the question at issue in the case—whether Congress can tax unrealized capital gains as if they were income—the Court will need to define what “income” actually is.

Democrat Party strategist James Carville, resident of New Orleans, educated at LSU and probably Louisiana’s most famous Democrat since Huey “The Kingfish” Long, reproached another Louisianan of recent repute, Mike Johnson. Johnson, of course, is the representative from Louisiana’s 4th Congressional District and currently Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. Carville proclaimed Speaker Johnson to be a bigger threat to American democracy than Al-Qaeda. The problem? According to Carville, it’s Johnson’s “Christian nationalism”. Carvill called it “a fundamental threat to the United States”.

I have closely followed the Caddo Sheriff election and the legal challenge occurring now in Caddo Parish District Court. The Nickelson Petition (lawsuit) is 80 pages long. The first 14 pages of the suit contain the allegations of mistakes and irregularities. Most of the remaining 66 pages contain numerous 'Notation of Irregularities in the Conduct of the Election' prepared by poll commissioners who were working at the various precincts at which the alleged defects occurred.

The U.S. Supreme Court will soon decide whether to accept Jan. 6 case appeals—the most significant case being the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) questionable use of an evidence-tampering law to prosecute Jan. 6 defendants for felony obstruction of Congress. If accepted it will be the first time a Jan. 6-related case is reviewed by the Supreme Court.