Louisiana Congressman-elect Luke Letlow died Tuesday at Ochsner LSU Health in Shreveport with COVID-19.
MORE..
Letlow, 41, was transferred from St. Francis Medical Center to the Ochsner LSU Health ICU on Dec. 23 and has been treated there since then.
He posted an update 8 days ago that he was going to be on the mend soon.. 6 days ago it was reported that he was transferred to Oschner..
Tonight at the age of 41, he is dead.
Letlow, R-Start, announced Dec. 18 he tested positive for COVID-19 and was first quarantining at his Richland Parish home.
“The family appreciates the numerous prayers and support over the past days but asks for privacy during this difficult and unexpected time,” the family said in a statement. “A statement from the family along with funeral arrangements will be announced at a later time.”
This is the most fun time of year. Sometimes in years’ in review past, we gloated about how right we were.. Movies that were Oscar worthy.. presidents who acclaimed victory. Twenty years into this we got a lot right.
When we made out 2020 predictions at the end of 2019, we could not have been MORE wrong. Just about every single thing stated ended up being …. awfully and substantially wrong…
And as we make our 2021 prognostications, remember just has awful our 2020 outlay was… and judge accordingly.
Donald Trump will easily win his reelection in the electoral college but soundly lose the popular vote. There may be early polls indicating his demise.. there could be some excitement around Democrats in the summer.. but we will end the year with Trump causing the second biggest political earthquake of modern times… EASILY!? Not even close. This was the first of many tremendously awful picks for 2020 ..
Bernie Sanders—yes, I am saying it–will be the Democratic nominee for President. He will choose Andrew Yang as his VP nominee.Perhaps this wild card would have actually LOST!? Not even close .. Maybe Yang will hav a shot as Mayor or NYC, but no where near what we thought.
2020 Olympic games in Tokyo: The United States will still reign.. but China will come very close on the heels of the great American empire in the gold medal race. Another massive loss. THERE WERE NO OLYMPICS!
Brexit. It will happen. And it will be chaos at least for the first few months. It did.. but chaos was an understaetment.
5G is coming. 5G will change everything. Maybe 20 years from now it will increase cancer rates, but in the mean time it will increase speed of the net delivery. It didn’t do much. Instead fears over it may have caused the Christmas morning bombing in Nashville.
Robots will continue taking over..DING DING.. finally one right.
Social media will start to wane slowly in popularity.. It is not that we had too much, it is more that the alpha generation has just never accepted social media in its internet forte. Expect the new generation to ditch the social media norms .. But never give up the net. Nope…
STRANGER THINGS 4 will become the biggest Netflix show ever released.. Its debut will coincide with the US Election, and experts will lament that people stayed home from polls in favor of watching the series. For real… another stinker. Not even a chance of anything winning.
The New England Patriots will win Super Bowl LIV No comment………
Mass shootings will continue. We will be overwhelm with horror and heartache as gun violence continues across the United States. Thankfully this was wrong. But yet again, another prediction dreadfully wrong.
PREDICTIONS FOR 2021..let’s see how we do when we rate this in the late December 2021 vault. Locked away until then…
We are going on the record..in
3 2.. 1…..
The bright and shiny future of Joe Biden. While some may say he has a tumultuous first term, we are going out on a limb and saying his first year *and maybe term* will be uniquely successful. Joe Biden is not someone Americans can easily hate. People will rally around him in the spring and summer of 2021. While this is WAY out on a limb, the typical first term midterm blues Presidents face will not happen to him, as people will see him as successful as beating the coronavirus in the United States.
Lock downs and wasted time. COVID-19 will continue to assault our way of life throughout 2021.. And it will not be until 2022 when a semblance of normal returns..
Democrats will continue winning.. this time in Georgia. They will gain the Senate seat and be on their way to a future majority.
Racial harmony may not be perfect, but this year will see a re imagining of race relations. It will be clear that for America to persist as a strong nation, people need to strongly commit to racial justice. That will occur.. eventually. And begin in 2021.
Major world figures will perish. Potentially and a Pope and A Queen. And BTS will join in with the Weekend to do the Super Bowl half time show.
People who suffered from COVID-19 will begin to display strange symptoms that will seem bizarre, but are just signs that once you get the virus, you have it and its effects for the rest of your life.
Massive widespread hackings will occur and past hackings will become clear. Every single person’s identity in the world will effectively be seen as compromised.
The 2020 Olympics, postponed until 2021, will feature no live audience. Just TV.. China will overtake the UK in medals. Ratings will plummet
Movie theaters are dead. . . AMC and Regal will have a difficult time regaining audiences and eventually will succumb to pressures…. The world has changed thanks to WONDER WOMAN 1984.
The vaccine, though filled with hope, will either be mostly ineffective or people will refuse taking it. Instead a painful herd immunity will occur… The death toll of COVID-19 will far outweigh the known 1918 virus, and will kill over 950,000 in the United States and 2.9 million people by the end of December 2021.
And that is that.
Sealed and maybe not approved…
2021 will be a mixed bag. Jokes aged bad in 2020. They will age worse in ’21 …
This year has been tragic.. SO many lost.. so many to mourn. It started quickly after 2020 began and seemingly never stopped since then…
Neil Peart of Rush dead of brain cancer at 67 in Los Angeles …
The actor’s mother, Jane Badler, confirmed Harry Hains died at the age of 27. He was an actor in AMERICAN HORROR STORY and the OA
Jim Lehrer, the retired PBS anchorman who for 36 years gave public television viewers a substantive alternative to network evening news programs with in-depth reporting, interviews and analysis of world and national affairs, died on Thursday at his home in Washington. He was 85.
Dead in a helicopter crash.. RIP Kobe Bryant #RIP
Kirk Douglas, the son of a ragman who channeled a deep, personal anger through a chiseled jaw and steely blue eyes to forge one of the most indelible and indefatigable careers in Hollywood history, died Wednesday. He was 103.
Mad Mike Hughes was his name. Flat earth was his game. He set out to prove the truth. Hughes, a self-styled daredevil, flat-Earth theorist and limousine stuntman, died when his jury-rigged contraption propelled him on a column of steam, spiraled through the air and cratered into the sagebrush outside Barstow, California. He was 64.
Eddie Van Halen.. dead in ’20
Jeremy Bulloch, who played the role of Boba Fett in the original Star Wars trilogy, died Dec. 17 at age 75 following health complications, including several years living with Parkinson’s disease.
Longtime Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek died Nov. 8 at age 80 following a battle with stage 4 pancreatic cancer
Sean Connery, the Scotland-born actor who was the first star to play James Bond and became one of the franchise’s most iconic stars, died at the age of 90 on Oct. 31
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died Sept. 18 at the age of 87 from complications of metastatic pancreas cancer.
On July 24, icon TV talk show host, singer, and media personality, Regis Philbin, died from a heart attack in his home
WWE is saddened to learn that Jon Huber, known to WWE fans as Luke Harper, died at the age of 41..
In 2020, so many deaths.. so much COVID. The New York TIMES did a front page story when the death toll hit 100,000.. since then the number dramatically soared above..
We write a year in review each year.. We have done this since we began a website in the year 2000, with 2001 officially being the first named year in review with logo and full wrap..
2020 is the first in these two decades where it feels like than stellar.. less than a twelve month period of 52 that seems worthy of remembering. Because we sadly will NOT forget..
Just about every news headline we saw this year finished its fact with “amid the coronavirus pandemic.”
People voting “amid the coronavirus pandemic.”.. Snowstorm “amid the coronavirus pandemic.” Graduation ceremonies “amid the coronavirus pandemic.”.. Someone stubbed their toe “amid the coronavirus pandemic.”
The election was set to be the big story of the year. All of that tension build up the reality show showdown of Donald Trump vs Joe Biden. Rallies and huge conventions were set to dominate our short attention spans.
Those predictions were dead wrong.
A virus that started in 2019 would obviously become the story of 2020.
U.S. health officials said they diagnosed a second patient with the China coronavirus in January of 2020 after a Chicago woman returned from Wuhan with the infection.. at that time they were monitoring 63 others. The virus obviously had begun to take hold long before lockdowns and government intervention.
The Super Bowl, Mardi Gras, and the funeral for Kobi Bryant were among those super spreader moments.. fleeting moments from an old world that now seems so far gone.
And if you remember that global hysteria, you will recall how much of the world was brought to a halt in the year 2003 .. The virus was discovered in 2002.. it spread around quickly..and there has been no recent known transmission from human to human since 2004..
This new disease has unfortunate potential to be SARS II.. hopefully not worse..
A view from within Wuhan seems desperate.. sources that Coal Speaker have talked to from inside tell of empty streets.. People fearfully staying in their homes and staying away from people.. There is a massive construction project underway to build a hospital from the ground up in just days–enough for 1,000 patients.
One day a few months from now (we hope) we can look back on this time and breathe a collective sigh of relief.. we can applaud the ingenuity of human and thank our lucky stars that the pandemic coronavirus, Covid-19, was a moment in time that we all muddled through together..
We did hope. And the hope is just … still hope.
As the year ends, there is a strong chance that this may be the story of 2021… for all the wrong reasons.
THE not BIGGEST STORY OF THE YEAR: The rejection of Donald Trump
Trump still had big rallies, where he could. But he didn’t get a convention, a serenade.. He didn’t get a strong economy. He got a virus, a pandemic and a national nightmare that never seemed to end.
What caused the defeat of Donald Trump in 2020? It would be interesting to see how the election would have ended up in 2019, prior to COVID-19, if Trump battled Biden. Or Sanders.. or someone else.
The economy was strong, the chances of a Democratic defeat looks equally likely.
Fate was beholden to another prospect. Instead, the national mood turned against Trump and he became the first president to get denied a second term since 1992..
But that’s showbiz…
THE DREAMS OF 2020
One of the biggest stories of the pandemic was the nightmares on main street that it brought..
All around the world, something strange was occurring across the planet in March and April.. reports varied, but it seemed some form of night terrors had taken hold.
People of different background and national origin had reported strange dreams. Strange visions at night. I even had one, vivid in my mind to this day..
My father and I were looking out of the window in his kitchen .. my 9-year-old son was busy with a Pokemon toy, shaped like a cross, digging in the dirt.. I wanted to yell out, commanding him to stop. But my dad told me not to.. when I looked out next I saw my grandfather–my dad’s dad–helping my son dig holes… Before I knew it, people who were residents of the nursing home where my mom is living right now were walking towards the square-shaped holes in the dirt.. And they were younger, they were happier.
This was all a dream–a reoccurring dream I have been having over the previous two weeks..
At that time, Professor Mark Blagrove, an expert in sleep and dreaming at Swansea University’s department of psychology has explained that cabin fever, financial pressures and lack of stimulation from being indoors so much is wreaking havoc on sleep patterns around quarantined nations..
It seems that the pandemic dreams have faded since that time.. but wow were they were. And wow were they visceral.. They happened. They happened so much that they began to seem real.
Tons of people from sea to shining sea are thankful for Vicks Pure ZZZs because of this pandemic.
THE MOST IMPORTANT WEBSITE OF THE YEAR
Yet another year where it was not mine. This time, the championship award goes to a site that many fans left: The Drudge Report.
Early in 2019, it appeared that the libertarian influencer began to change his brand from slightly pro-Trump to mightily against.
The links on the site changed style so much that many conservative outlets who relied on Drudge for years suddenly abandoned the site. Some said his web traffic collapsed…
But through it all he didn’t change, with each day of the 2020 election cycle seemingly turning more and more against the President.
And finally, in the end, a link and photo expressed it all when Trump lost, with the headline saying “You’re fired.”
BIGGEST LOCAL STORY OF THE YEAR: THE DEATH OF GRAFFITI HIGHWAY
There were amazingly important local events (for those new to this site we broadcast from Eastern Pennsylvania) .. but the biggest local event had to yet again indirectly take place in “amid the coronavirus pandemic.”
In April 2020, as lockdowns in Pennsylvania took hold, countless people flocked to what many deemed a safe refuge. The former town of Centralia, and its Graffiti Highway.
As the members of the Breakfast Club found out, when you mess with the bull you get the horns. This weekend the bull was put on the spot.. A choice had to be made. Continue to have thousands of people per month stream into this ‘hot spot,’ pun intended, or do something.
News broke early Monday morning: Land owner Pagnotti Enterprises hired Fox Coal Co. Mining to truck 400 loads — between 8,000 to 10,000 tons of dirt — to cover the unofficial popular tourist destination… Trees and grass is rumored to be getting planted next.
State police were actively forcing people away from the scene.. Some lucky news hounds on Facebook got photos, or even live video from the Coal Region site HO BOTT NEWS.
The highway died.
Long live Graffiti Highway.
THE BIGGEST ENTERTAINMENT OF 2020: THE DEATH OF THEATERS
It’s over!!
WONDER WOMAN 1984 has officially premiered on HBO Christmas day, instead of theaters.
As of October 2019, only 305 drive-ins remain in the U.S., according to the United Drive-In Theatre Owner Association (UDITOA). But during the coronavirus pandemic, the promise of a shared entertainment experience from the comfort of a controlled, socially distant environment has fueled a drive-in resurgence — and movies are only part of the offering.
With most live events on pause, the drive-in movie theater became Covid Summer’s go-to venue. In April, Doc’s Drive-In Theatre in Buda, Texas, welcomed 85 cars for a socially distanced wedding live-streamed on the theater’s two screens. Churches resumed drive-in services, reviving a practice rooted in the 1950s. In cities around the world, idled shopping malls and empty parking lots hosted ad-hoc screens for pop-up community movies, while existing drive-ins expanded their offerings to include concerts, art shows and stand-up comedy performances. Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium turned its football field into a giant outdoor cinema. And in July, a boat-in movie theater even popped up in Key Biscayne, Florida, complete with a 60-foot floating screen.
Could it be? The rebirth of something long gone? A lost art and a long feeling…
The revenge of the past.
THE INSURRECTION OF 2020
There was so much this year it is hard to believe that during some trying months of 2020, we actually thought the White House would be attacked…
There are these moments when you realize you are living through fast moving history..
Only days ago the nation was greeted with news of lockdowns and curfews due to a virus.. now we are hit by arrests and curfews due to protests going violent in cities across the United States..
Tonight, as the President of the United States was set to address the nation from the Rose Garden, a decision was made to tear gas relatively peaceful protestors in Lafayette Park.. That is where the “church of the presidents,” St. Paul, had fire damage from protesters a day ago.
x x x
THE LOST NOSTALGIA OF 2020
This year was a tragic moment for those who loved weird nostalgia. Roadside America is no more, and the insides are being auctioned off after sellers failed to sell the famous attraction.
Various local affiliates across different cities in multiple states are reporting that people are receiving packages in the mail. Unsolicited.. NO orders. No expectations.
According to reports, the packages are coming from China and they contain… Seeds. The mystery is what the seeds are and why they are being mailed.
The disgraced Hollywood kingmaker was convicted Feb. 24 of raping an aspiring actress and sexually abusing a TV and film production assistant. The verdict was celebrated by his dozens of accusers and their supporters as a watershed moment for the #MeToo movement.
The coronavirus pandemic triggered a global recession as numerous countries went into lock down. The Dow Jones industrial average suffered its worst single-day point drop ever on March 9.Kim Jong Un death rumors
Ghislaine Maxwell arrested..
And murder hornets.
Finally…
THE YEAR OF VIRTUAL
For better or worse, most of us did not see each other much in 2020. It was all virtual. Zoom.. Teams. Pick your poison.
These were paradigm-shifting events after all.
Virtual has made business… better? Worse? Or just different.
Schooling has become.. better? Worse? Or just different.
All those memes and jokes about the “worst year in history” are now behind. Suddenly people are social media blitzing their profile pictures and stories with happy and hopeful messages. Clearing out that dreaded ’20 from our sight and moving forward with open eyes to ’21..
We have done this before, as humanity.
This yearly ritual of desperation to end the morbid year we are in, and a new profound hope for the months to come.
With each New Years Eve kiss that turns into a drunken slobber fest after Midnight, we strike the usual tone. Year in and year out.
For as much as we want the time to change, we get stuck in our ways. We don’t change at all, don’t adjust.. don’t do anything much to lose weight, and decry the ‘terrible new year’ we are stuck in come February and March.
Heck sometimes even late January..
But maybe this time it will in fact be different.
2020 was a year made up of terrible mixtures of awful and perfect things. Working at home brought us closer to family and friends, but somehow made us distant from neighbors and loved ones who were the most dear to us before lockdowns. It was filled with unprecedented death and heart ache, but yet joys and moments of inspiration.
For every drop of tear gas fired into crowds, there were tears of love at new life, new love, and equal amounts at the bedsides of those passing away from a rampant virus. For most, window-side as we were not allowed in to see loved ones during the most wrenching moment in a life..
2020 was unfair. And just. 2020 was the best of times. And yes clearly it contained the worst of times.
Some may argue that the new year and celebrations about it are pointless. That they don’t matter..
If it does not matter why did humanity take to the traditions so early? There has to be something special, no?
It wasn’t always filled with love and splendor of course.
In the year 46 B.C.E. the Roman emperor Julius Caesar first established January 1 as New Year’s day.
Janus was the Roman god of doors and gates, and had two faces, one looking forward and one back. Caesar felt that the month named after this god (“January”) would be the appropriate “door” to the year. Caesar celebrated the first January 1 New Year by ordering the violent routing of revolutionary Jewish forces in the Galilee. BLOOD flowed in the streets.
In later years, Roman pagans observed the New Year by engaging in drunken orgies—a ritual they believed constituted a personal re-enacting of the chaotic world that existed before the cosmos was ordered by the gods.
x x x
We are all in the mood for a deep breath, now. A recovery.. not from hustle and bustle, but rather more of a recovery from everything else.
525,600 minutes 525,000 moments so dear 525,600 minutes How do you measure, measure a year? In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife..
We had the experiencing of all of them in am amplified way in 2020.
So here’s a cup of hope… maybe 2021 will actually be better. Maybe it will be a positive experience for humanity.
Indeed, a cup of hope for the new year. But is that cup half full.. or half empty?
The eyes of the beholder will get a bird’s eye view in 2021.
