Eideard

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A record 84 percent of Americans say they disapprove of the way the Congress is doing its job compared with just 13 percent who approve of how things are going, according to a Washington Post/ABC News public opinion poll…

The disapproval rating for Congress inched up two percentage points since October and reflects a year of lows for Congress that ended in a battle over a temporary extension of the payroll tax cuts for 160 million Americans…

A vitriolic debate leading up to an agreement last summer to allow President Barack Obama to raise the debt ceiling fueled public disgust with Congress and prompted Standard & Poor’s credit rating agency to strip the United States of its stellar AAA rating.

When the parties are considered individually, Democrats in Congress have a 33 percent approval rate, while Republicans have a 21 percent approval rate, the poll found.

Congress will be back in session this week after a holiday break, poised to resume where they left off, with Democratic and Republican negotiators preparing for a new round of talks to extend the payroll tax cut for the rest of the year.

The 84 percent disapproval rate is the highest for Congress in nearly 40 years of polling. The previous high was last October, when 82 percent of poll respondents said they disapproved of the way lawmakers on Capitol Hill were doing their jobs.

I saw a Black Congressman from Mississippi on TV, this morning, who was asked about this poll. His response was – “I think the 13 percent of voters who approve of how Congress now works – are in need of therapy.”

This thug still thinks he should be president of the United States
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In his last days in office, outgoing Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour pardoned four men convicted of murder…David Gatlin, Joseph Ozment, Charles Hooker and Anthony McCray received full pardons and were released at 1 p.m. Sunday, said Suzanne Singletary, spokeswoman for the Mississippi Department of Corrections. All four were serving life sentences and worked as trusties at the governor’s mansion, she said.

I guess they were extra polite serving the governor his bourbon and branch.

Gatlin was convicted of murder, aggravated assault and burglary of a residence…Ozment was convicted of murder, conspiracy and armed robbery in a separate case…

Hooker was convicted in a 1991 murder, while McCray was convicted in a 2001 murder, Singletary said…

Families of the men’s victims told CNN affiliates WAPT and WLBT they are outraged by Barbour’s decision…In 1993, WLBT reported, Gatlin walked into the trailer where his estranged wife, Tammy Ellis Gatlin, lived and shot her in the head. The woman’s friend, Randy Walker, survived a gunshot to the head.

“Is Gov. Barbour going to pardon us from our aches and pains and heartache that we have to suffer?” the victim’s mother, Betty Ellis, asked WLBT. “Is he going to pardon a child that had to grow up without a mother? Is he going to pardon me from never being able to feel her arms around my neck again? What is Barbour going to do about that?”

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Voters turned a skeptical eye toward conservative-backed measures across the country Tuesday, rejecting an anti-labor law in Ohio, an anti-abortion measure in Mississippi and a tightening of voting rights in Maine.

Even in Arizona, voters turned out of office the chief architect of that state’s controversial anti-immigration law. State Senator Russell Pearce, a Republican power broker and a former sheriff’s deputy known for his uncompromising style, conceded the race Tuesday with a look of shock on his face.

…Taken together, Tuesday’s results could breathe new life into President Obama’s hopes for his re-election a year from now. But the day was not a wholesale victory for Democrats. Even as voters in Ohio delivered a blow to Gov. John R. Kasich, a Republican, and rejected his attempt to weaken collective bargaining for public employees, they approved a symbolic measure to exempt Ohio residents from the individual mandate required in Mr. Obama’s health care law.

And while voters in Mississippi, one of the most conservative states, turned away a measure that would have outlawed all abortions and many forms of contraception, they tightened their voting laws to require some form of government-approved identification. Democrats had opposed the requirement, saying it was a thinly disguised attempt to intimidate voters of color.

Which is why I consider yesterday’s polling a victory for grassroots, working class, middle-class Americans. These victories didn’t come from Democrat leadership – they came from groups ranging from local unions to Planned Parenthood to the American Civil Liberties Union.

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Federal civil rights officials announced…they have sent election observers to locations in five states to keep an eye out for potential trouble at the polls Tuesday.

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division dispatched 11 staff attorneys along with 85 trained election observers from the Office of Personnel Management to watch activities at the polls and report any irregularities…

In Mississippi, monitors are being dispatched to four counties, as voters go to the polls in a gubernatorial election to replace Haley Barbour, who is term-limited from running again. The campaign features the white Republican Lieutenant Gov. Phil Bryant and African-American Hattiesburg Mayor Johnny DuPree, a Democrat. Mississippi political observers say Bryant is a strong favorite to win the election…

The Justice Department has also assigned monitors to Lorain County, Ohio, to protect the rights of Spanish-speaking voters. Last month, the federal government signed an agreement with Lorain County to resolve concerns that limited-English Hispanic voters were being denied their full voting rights because the county failed to provide language assistance as required by law.

In Alameda County, California, the U.S. will monitor voting following an agreement between federal officials and the county in July. The agreement requires Alameda County to provide election materials and information in Spanish and Chinese. Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez said the agreement “ensures that Alameda County’s Spanish- and Chinese-speaking citizens will be able to cast an effective ballot and successfully participate in the electoral process.”

In Jasper, Texas, racial tensions have run high over the recall election for three African-American city council members responsible for the hiring of the city’s first black police chief.

In Springfield, Massachusetts, activists claim minorities were turned away at the polls in the September primary, and said there was no Spanish-language assistance for voters. Hispanic leaders, the NAACP and ACLU had all urged the Justice Department to travel to Springfield to protect voting rights of all minorities.

Republicans around the country continue to mobilize to deny the franchise to citizens on the basis of ethnicity and language. Nothing new about the practice. Nothing less than bigotry is expected – after all – since the so-called Southern Strategy has never been limited to the South. Or to Black folks alone.

To get to Brandon, you have to drive across the Pearl River, a boundary that seems to separate black Mississippi from white.

In the town’s center, a monument stands honoring the confederate soldiers who fought in the Civil War.

This mostly white town in mostly white Rankin County is about a 30-minute drive from Jackson, Mississippi. It’s here in Brandon that some residents say a gang of teenagers expressed their strong racial prejudice — sometimes through violence.

These residents say the teens were friends with and often led by Deryl Dedmon, now 19 and facing capital murder and hate crime charges for the killing of James Anderson, a black man, who died after he was beaten and run over by a truck in Jackson, according to police. Dedmon has pleaded not guilty and his attorney has refused to answer CNN’s repeated requests for comment…

Parents and students who knew Dedmon tell CNN it was widely known that he expressed a hatred for blacks, white people who had black friends, and anyone he thought was gay. And they say he had a history of harassing teens at his high school.

CNN has learned that Department of Justice investigators have uncovered two other possible incidents where groups of white Rankin County teens, including Dedmon, have sought out and attacked a black person.

But police and school officials told CNN that there were no warning signs, no concerns about Dedmon or his friends before James Anderson’s death this summer. Brandon’s Assistant Police Chief Chris Butts described Anderson’s killing as “an isolated incident” that has been blown out of proportion by the media.

RTFA. It’s long. It’s just as I remember a lot of white Mississippi, White Louisiana.

It wasn’t the same in Black or integrated communities. The balance may have changed by now. The results of official racism obviously haven’t.

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Almost half of Mississippi Republicans say they believe interracial marriage should be outlawed, a poll indicates.

A survey conducted March 24-27 and released Friday by Public Policy Polling of Raleigh, N.C., showed 46 percent of Republicans in Mississippi said they believe interracial marriage should be illegal.

The survey indicated 40 percent said they felt mixed-race weddings should remain legal, while 14 percent said they were not sure.

The poll showed 76 percent of those who responded considered themselves somewhat or very conservative with 68 percent of the respondents age 46 or older.

Interracial marriage in Mississippi became legal in 1967 after the U.S. Supreme Court overruled the state’s laws.

Is there anything that would differentiate the essential outlook on life of a Mississippi Republican from, say, AlQaeda? Aside from the fact that the Republicans probably pray more often.

The detailed survey is over here [.pdf].

The planned overthrow of the United States government ended rather prosaically this fall, with a giant pile of mashed-up trucks in a muddy scrap yard a mile or so off the Interstate.

The crew at Alter Metal Recycling has been piling up the old trucks since the summer and sending them to Alabama, for melting down and reincarnation as everything from cars to washers and dryers.

The process is pretty standard, said Troy Brooks, the yard supervisor. But these trucks were a little different…

In certain circles in the mid-’90s, among those inclined to keep an eye out for black helicopters, they were more than just rumors. To them, the presence of 700 military-looking trucks bearing Soviet-bloc markings in a weed-strewn lot north of Gulfport was clear proof of a United Nations-brokered plan to take over the United States.

The specific outlines of such a plot were rather vague. But conspiracy-cult radio shows and right-wing fringe newsletters delivered somber reports about the vehicles, speaking of armored tanks and secret roads and the role of the vehicles in the establishment of a New World Order…

The apparent threat to national security was broadcast so far and wide that one night in 1994 Timothy J. McVeigh himself broke into the yard to examine the vehicles firsthand. He went away disappointed.

But the real tale behind the trucks, as is often the case, turns out to be more interesting than the conspiracy.

RTFA. A cautionary tale of one after another business scheme falling apart. Little forethought, less expertise, get-rich-quick schemes spinning from Germany’s reunification and more.

In the end, the vehicles mostly sat unwanted in the lot beside Highway 49, next to the Friendly Pawn Shop and across the way from a discount liquor store. The conspiracy theories dwindled, as did the visits by customs officials.

The rusting accelerated after Hurricane Katrina, and for various reasons, including a civil court judgment, the expiration of a trade license and the fact that nobody was interested in rust-covered trucks, Mr. Chawafaty decided to scrap them.

Frank Koval – participant in portions of the schemes – learned about their impending demise by reading about it in the newspaper like anyone else.

He laughed about the episode – failed business schemes, absurd conspiracy theories, all ending up as so much scrap to be melted down and recast as something useful. One can only hope as much ever results from future meltdowns of the Republican Tea Parties.

A Mississippi judge jailed a lawyer for several hours for refusing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, ordering the attorney to “purge himself” of contempt by standing and repeating the oath like the rest of the courtroom.

After Oxford attorney Danny Lampley spent about five hours in the county jail Wednesday, Chancery Judge Talmadge Littlejohn let him go free. Lampley, 49, was released so that he could represent another client, the judge said in a later order.

Lampley told The Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal he respected the judge but wasn’t going to back down.

“I don’t have to say it because I’m an American,” Lampley told the newspaper. “I’m just not going to back off on this.”

The Supreme Court ruled nearly 70 years ago that schoolchildren couldn’t be forced to say the pledge, a decision widely interpreted to mean no one could be required to recite the pledge…

Lampley has won free speech cases before. He sued the Pontotoc school district in northern Mississippi in the 1990s to stop students from praying over the intercom and was victorious representing a Ku Klux Klan leader when a county in the Mississippi Delta tried to prevent a rally…

“I’m speechless. The judge needs a reminder copy of the First Amendment,” said Judith Schaeffer, a Washington attorney who worked on the school prayer case with Lampley. “Danny’s going to stand up for everybody’s principles. Danny loves the Constitution. He’s a staunch defender of constitutional rights…”

The Pledge of Allegiance has faced challenges since it was published in 1892.

In 1943, the Supreme Court ruled that children in public schools could not be forced to salute the flag and say the pledge. In 1954, the words “under God” were added to the pledge, when members of Congress at the time said they wanted to set the United States apart from “godless communists.”

That’s just in case you think our government just discovered how to be corrupt and stupid from the examples of Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush.

I was already skipping the morning prayer which still was forced on schoolchildren back then. I started keeping my silence during the pledge, as well. This was before the Constitution was backed up by court decisions further separating churches from government.

Children running for class officer posts at a Mississippi public school are only allowed to compete for certain positions based on their race, according to a memo handed out last week to students.

The Nettleton Middle School elections are divided between offices pegged for black and white students, according to the memo, which was provided to TSG by a parent. The document was handed out to every student in the school’s sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, and it details the race requirements for each of four class officer spots (president, vice president, secretary-treasurer, and reporter).

Of the 12 offices for which students compete, eight are earmarked for white students (including the three class president spots), while four are termed “black” seats. Middle school administrators have not returned TSG phone calls, so it is unclear how this policy was established, or whether the number of offices apportioned for each race changes annually. Additionally, it is unknown how children who are not black or white would run for student government offices.

Students seeking class office were directed to return their election applications, complete with the petition signatures of 10 classmates, to science teacher Jenny Payne by August 24. The Nettleton middle school has about 400 students, and about 72 percent are white, according to a source familiar with the school board’s operation. The majority of the remaining students are black.

The city of Nettleton has a population of 2013 and is located 15 miles south of Tupelo, the birthplace of Elvis Presley. The middle school’s policy was first reported this week by Suzy Richardson, who operates Mixed and Happy, a blog about mixed-race families.

Suzy Richardson is to the point over at her blog – as we all should be. Email the presidential-wanna-be Republican governor of Mississippi, Hayley Barbour – governor@governor.state.ms.us – and tell him to get his butt on the phone to the racist fools running the schools in Nettleton. Tell them to join up with the United States of America.

The original Tea Party in action

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) has been receiving significant attention this week for the fact that he has issued recognized April 2010 as Confederate History Month, but didn’t include any mention of slavery in his proclamation. He explained that he didn’t include a reference because slavery wasn’t one of the “most significant” aspects of the conflict between the states.

However, McDonnell isn’t the only Southern governor to honor the Confederacy while omitting any mention of slavery — he joins Georgia and Mississippi…

In 2009, the Georgia General Assembly approved Senate Bill No. 27, signed by Governor Sonny Perdue, officially designating April permanently as Confederate History and Heritage Month…

Georgia’s Governor Sonny Perdue, Mississippi’s Governor Haley Barbour and Virginia’s Governor Robert F. McDonnell have all signed a proclamation designating April as Confederate History and Heritage Month for 2010.

Barbour’s 2009 proclamation…has no slavery mention, and we received no response from Barbour’s office to our request for a copy of the 2010 proclamation. Perdue’s office also didn’t respond to our request for an official copy of their 2010 proclamation.

You can bet their tame teabaggers will get word round about governors defending the flag.