This post might be a bit premature, as we haven’t substantiated it yet despite a good deal of time researching the issue, but we decided it was worth throwing the question out there and perhaps inviting a bit of crowdsourcing on it. The question being whether Baton Rouge mayor-president Sharon Weston Broome is the only prominent Louisiana elected official to break bread with Arthur “Silky Slim” Reed and bring the latter in as part of a brain trust.

By now many of our readers have seen the picture above – it’s of Gov. John Bel Edwards and Silky Slim at an event celebrating the passage of a criminal justice reform package in this year’s regular legislative session. Here’s another picture, of Silky Slim standing next to the governor at the actual signing…

And here’s the pic from the top of this post, cropped a little more embarrassingly…

Is this in and of itself a big deal? Not especially – lots of people get their picture taken with politicians, and those pictures end up being awkward all the time. It’s fair to question whether the governor’s staff would have wanted these pictures in particular – it isn’t like Silky Slim was an unknown commodity. They had to have seen this, after all, from last year when the Alton Sterling shooting was still fresh and he implied there would be violence if Kip Holden didn’t resign as the then-mayor-president in Baton Rouge…

And there’s his conviction for murder, the 56 other lines on his rap sheet, his hip hop discography with titles like “I Feel Like Killin’ A N*****,” and the other telltale signs that he might not quite be a prime time player.

So perhaps we can just say it was “questionable” to bring Reed to the governor’s mansion for the smiley pics at the signing ceremony.

But late last week, when the revelations about Silky Slim’s BRAVE contract to teach kids about respecting the police – our joke about this was that’s money spent about as well as digging up Derrick Todd Lee to run workshops on how to meet women – popped out, another of Baton Rouge’s leading political lights turned up. Here was state representative C. Denise Marcelle to castigate Broome for throwing one of her assistants under the bus…

Dr. James Gilmore is the Assistant Chief Administrative Officer for the city-parish government in East Baton Rouge Parish. It was Gilmore who appeared at the Metro Council back in February to effectively cancel LSU’s contract to provide crime data to the BRAVE program; the $125,000 not spent on LSU appears to have been the source of the money that paid Silky Slim, Isaiah Marshall, Cleve Dunn and the others. Marcelle thinks Gilmore is being hung out to dry on this controversy and she doesn’t like it.

But then we get something irritatingly familiar, namely this business of why white people have selective outrage over the conduct of black people – so there’s a call-out of District Attorney Hillar Moore for working with Silky Slim (we didn’t know about it and would like to find out more, because that certainly isn’t acceptable), and then there is this representation of him being named to a police reform/community relations committee.

We’ve been looking for evidence of this since Friday and haven’t found it. We invite our readers to help. Because we’d like to assure Rep. Marcelle that if she’s right, and Silky Slim was on some gubernatorially-appointed committee or board tasked with making or advising on crime or urban policy, we will do everything we can to insure John Bel Edwards is in for every ounce of the backlash that Sharon Weston Broome has received for having associated with a murderer, thug, drug addict and radical racist.

And if Rep. Marcelle would like to help us with some proof of this, we’d be in her debt.