Earlier this month, a website (that most folks have not heard of, 24/7 Wall Street) ranked Shreveport as the 21st worst city in the U.S. to live in, just behind Compton, Calif., and Little Rock, Ark.

Common sense is not partisan, nor political. It’s not racial. It matters not to common sense how much money you have, nor your gender, creed or family name. It pays no attention to how many diplomas are framed up on your wall, nor which side of the tracks you grew up on.

A 4-year-old is killed in a late-night Shreveport shooting. A 15-year-old is found murdered next to a bullet-riddled SUV.

Watching a magic trick can make us feel like a kid again. It might be as simple as the disappearance of a coin from our hand and having it appear again behind our ear, but it still delights us. It’s thrilling because we’re all attracted to things we cannot explain logically.

We’ve all heard the phrase, "In the future, everybody will be famous for 15 minutes." Along with radio, television and the growing affordability (and accessibility) to Internet technology, combined with our instinctive appetite for the urgent and dramatic, there are now billions who have the opportunity to seek the attention of billions of others.

Nearly halfway into President Trump’s first term, there are some who might say that America today is more polarized than at any time in its history. And this goes beyond mere partisan disagreements, or bickering, regarding any number of subjects – taxes, health care, immigration, education – or even more fundamentally, the role of government itself.

“Hhelping ave you ever written anything about the needy among us?” began an e-mail I received from a reader in response to a recent column I had written. “Democrats are trying to help our people who need help,” the reader continued, “not the ones who party at Mar A Lago and have plenty of money.

Perhaps not since 1989, when the number one song that year was Milli Vanilli’s “Blame it on the Rain,” has there been a more grand fraud perpetrated upon the people of Louisiana than the incessant and child-like reasoning of Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards.