Mississippi

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Arkansas motto: thank god for Miss

merri ok

220 gas pipeline rupture

see stinktank

bak 6 23

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AN 8 26

The fallout from President Donald Trump’s unpopular Big Beautiful Bill keeps hitting impoverished red states harder than others a hospitals and voters come to terms with yawning debt and healthcare cuts threatening critical hospitals.

Mississippi Today reports state lawmakers face a “daunting task” trying to fill the holes Trump blasted into the state budget with his looming federal cuts. Unhappy with their options, the Republican-dominated legislature failed to address some of the most pressing issues with Trump’s cuts during the legislative session, so the looming blast holes are still waiting.

Mississippi is one of many impoverished state with a high percentage of uninsured population who do not reimbursement hospitals for visits. But Mississippi Today reports Medicaid is expected to lose $1 billion over the course of the next decade as a result of “Trump’s sweeping tax and spending bill signed into law in July.” To further complicate matters, Republicans let federal enhanced premium tax credits for Affordable Care Act Marketplace insurance expire late last year, making health care much more expensive for “hundreds of thousands of Mississippians.”

The problem is such a big issue that Republican state Rep. Sam Creekmore predicted much of next year’s legislative session will involve patching over Trump’s federal cuts.

“I figure that will be a lot of our time going forward out of session and next year,” Creekmore said.

But Joan Alker, executive director of Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families, said people like Creekmore shouldn’t get their hopes up for a solution.

“As a general matter, states are not going to be able to fill the gaping hole that Congress and President Trump have created here,” Alker told MS Today. “[No] state, no matter how wealthy or well-intentioned, is going to be able to sustain that.”

Sen. Hob Bryan, a Democrat, lamented that state lawmakers were powerless to do anything about problems made at the federal level.

“… I’m absolutely terrified about what is going to happen to people in rural areas. Rural areas have been transformed by the big boys before,” Bryan said.

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Young people, too, would acquire more “independence” thanks to Project 2025 — at least if what they want to do is work in more dangerous jobs where they are presently banned. As Berry explains:

“Some young adults show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs. Current rules forbid many young people, even if their family is running the business, from working in such jobs. This results in worker shortages in dangerous fields and often discourages otherwise interested young workers from trying the more dangerous job.”

The operative word here is “adults.” In fact, no laws presently exclude adults from hazardous work based on age. What Berry is talking about is allowing adolescents to perform such labor. Duvan Tomás Pérez, for instance, was a 16-year-old who showed just such an “interest” in an inherently dangerous job: working at a poultry plant in Mississippi, where he died in an industrial accident. The middle schooler, a Guatemalan immigrant who had lived in the United States for six years, was employed illegally by the Mar-Jac Poultry company. If there are “worker shortages in dangerous fields,” it’s because adults don’t want to take the risks. The solution is to make the work less dangerous for everyone, not to hire children to do it.

We’re Gonna Roll the Union Over

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2017

while about seven in 10 Americans identify with some branch of Christianity, the share of U.S. adults who describe themselves as Christians dropped by nearly 8 percent between 2007 and 2014, according to a survey by Pew Research Center.

But while Americans as a whole have become somewhat less religious in recent years – largely due to an increase in the share of people who do not belong to any organized faith – those who are religious are even more devout than they were a few years ago, according to the Pew report. (The sum of the percentages of the population that practices each religion may not equal 100 because of rounding.)

These are the most religious states in America, according to the Pew survey.

10. North Carolina

In North Carolina, 65 percent of adults are highly religious, according to Pew’s index. While 39 percent attend worship services at least weekly, nearly three-quarters say they believe in God with absolute certainty. Of North Carolina adults, 77 percent are Christian, 20 percent are unaffiliated with any religion and about 3 percent are non-Christian faiths, the largest share being Jewish.

8 (tied). Oklahoma

Pew categorizes 66 percent of Oklahoma adults as highly religious because 65 percent pray daily and 71 percent say they believe in God with absolute certainty. Of Oklahoma adults, 79 percent are Christian, 18 percent are unaffiliated with any religion and about 2 percent practice non-Christian religions, with those of Jewish, Islamic and other faiths each making up less than 1 percent of Oklahoma adults.

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8 (tied). Georgia

Two-thirds of Georgia adults are highly religious, according to Pew, because 74 percent of adults say they believe in God with absolute certainty and 64 percent say religion is very important in their lives. Of Georgia adults, 79 percent are Christian, 18 percent are unaffiliated with any religion and about 3 percent are non-Christian faiths.

7. West Virginia

About 69 percent of West Virginia adults are considered highly religious because while 46 percent attend worship services at least weekly, 77 percent of adults say they believe in God with absolute certainty and 68 percent pray daily. Of West Virginia adults, 78 percent are Christian, 18 percent are unaffiliated with any religion and about 3 percent are non-Christian faiths.

6. South Carolina

Pew considers 70 percent of South Carolina adults highly religious because 69 percent say religion is very important in their lives and two-thirds say they pray daily. Of South Carolina adults, 78 percent are Christian, 19 percent are unaffiliated with any religion and about 3 percent are non-Christian faiths.

5. Arkansas

In Arkansas, 70 percent of adults are categorized as highly religious by Pew’s index because 77 percent of adults say they believe in God with absolute certainty and 70 percent say religion is very important in their lives. Of Arkansas adults, 79 percent are Christian, 12 percent are unaffiliated with any religion and about 1 percent are non-Christian faiths.

4. Louisiana

About 71 percent of Louisiana adults are considered highly religious by Pew because 75 percent say they believe in God with absolute certainty, while 68 percent pray daily. Of Louisiana adults, 84 percent are Christian, 13 percent are unaffiliated with any religion and about 2 percent are non-Christian faiths, the largest share being Buddhist at about 1 percent.

3. Tennessee

Pew considers 73 percent of Tennessee adults highly religious – 78 percent say they believe in God with absolute certainty, while 51 percent attend weekly worship services. Of Tennessee adults, 81 percent are Christian, 14 percent are unaffiliated with any religion and about 3 percent are non-Christian faiths.

1 (tied). Mississippi

In Mississippi, 77 percent of adults are classified as highly religious because 74 percent say religion is very important in their lives and 75 percent pray daily. Of Mississippi adults, 83 percent are Christian, 14 percent are unaffiliated with any religion and about 2 percent are non-Christian faiths.

1 (tied). Alabama

Pew categorizes 77 percent of Alabama adults as highly religious because 82 percent of adults say they believe in God with absolute certainty, while 73 percent pray daily. Of Alabama adults, 86 percent are Christian, 12 percent are unaffiliated with any religion and about 1 percent are non-Christian faiths.

10 Most Religious States

• Alabama (tie)
• Mississippi (tie)
• Tennessee
• Louisiana
• Arkansas
• South Carolina
• West Virginia
• Georgia (tie)
• Oklahoma (tie)
• North Carolina

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an no lnx orig

Thom Hartmann August 27, 2023

America is rapidly bifurcating — becoming two nations — and one of the main drivers of the process is a federal system that encourages Red states to mooch off Blue states, using essentially stolen tax money to reinvent the old Confederacy, “own the libs,” and wage “war on woke.”

Most Red states have become oligarchic white supremacist medieval-like fiefdoms with obscene levels of often multigenerational wealth at the top, extreme poverty at the bottom, and working people, women, and minorities kept in subordinate roles through explicit government and corporate policy.

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In this, these Red states are following the once-classic European and later Southern US tradition of a patriarchal, hierarchical society run by male kings, nobles, plantation masters, and wealthy churchmen, with all the work done by serfs, slaves, women, or impoverished wage-slaves.

Frederick Douglass, who was born into Southern slavery, described the South as “a little nation by itself, having its own language, its own rules, regulations, and customs.”

Fewer than 2000 families — six-tenths of one percent of the Southern population — owned more than 50 enslaved people and ruled the oligarchy that we call the Confederacy with an iron fist. The 75 percent of white people in the South during that era who did not own any enslaved persons generally lived in deep poverty.

Women had no rights, queer people were routinely tortured and murdered, education for both enslaved Africans and poor whites was generally outlawed, religious attendance was often mandated, and hunger and disease stalked all but those in the families of the two thousand morbidly rich planter dynasties.

Modern-day Red states are doing their best to recreate that old Confederacy, right down to state Senator Kathy Chism’s new effort to return the Confederate battle flag to Mississippi's state flag. Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence have both emphasized their presidential pledges to restore the names of murderous Civil War traitors to American military bases, celebrating their armed defense of the “values” of the Old South.

Today’s version of yesteryear’s plantation owners are called CEOs, hedge and vulture fund managers, and the morbidly rich.

They use the power of political bribery given them by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court — with Clarence Thomas’ tie-breaking Citizens United vote on behalf of his sugar daddy Harlan Crow — to lord over their Red states, regardless of the will of those states’ citizens.

Working people in Red states are kept in poverty by “Right to Work for Less” laws based on the GOP’s 1947 Taft-Hartley Act (passed over Harry Truman’s veto), deprived of healthcare by their governors’ refusal to expand Medicaid to cover all low-wage working people, and draconian cuts along with byzantine bureaucratic obstacles to getting state aid ranging from housing support to food stamps to subsidized daycare to unemployment insurance.

Women are returning to chattel status in Red states, the property of their fathers or husbands, their bondage enforced by bounty systems and the threat of imprisonment should they try to assert agency over their own bodies.

Multiple Red states have outlawed teaching the actual history of slavery, Jim Crow, and the ongoing violence and persecution suffered by racial, gender, and religious minorities. Many are using government tax revenues to subsidize typically-all-white “Christian” religious schools, a trend spreading across Republican-controlled states like an out-of-control fungus.

Almost a dozen GOP-controlled states have passed laws criminalizing protests against Republican policies, and, writes The Atlantic quoting the International Center for Non-for-Profit Law, “several of those states have simultaneously provided civil or criminal protection for drivers who hit [and kill] protesters…”

Others have banned books and fired teachers who dare discuss diversity or basic sex education. Many, as I wrote here yesterday, are withholding state funds from banking and investment institutions that consider the environment, social justice, or governance on behalf of the working class and the poor (ESG) when making business decisions.

Climate change, they’ll tell you as they take campaign funds from the fossil fuel industry and the billionaires it’s created, is a hoax perpetrated by liberal scientists who are somehow “getting rich” by warning the world of its consequences.

Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis no longer rule the South on behalf of the notorious “2000 families” but their spiritual heirs, today’s Red state governors, would make them proud with their restrictions on voting, encouragement of armed white supremacist vigilantism, and state tax subsidies for American oligarch billionaires and theircorporateempires.

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp — whose family, investigative reporter Greg Palast discovered, was the first to bring enslaved Africans to Georgia— famously signed a law codifying 10-hour voting lines in Black neighborhoods and giving his state the power to throw people off voting rolls without justification in a closed-door ceremony before a painting of one of the 2000 families’ Georgia slave plantations.

It’s said that Red states are trying to take us back to the 1950s. In fact, most are shooting for the 1870s, when women were the property of their husbands, poor children worked 12-hour days for pennies, queer people were invisible, and Black, Asian, Native American, and Hispanic people could be murdered with impunity.

On the other hand, Blue states have embraced 21st-century values of inclusiveness, tolerance, education, healthcare, a clean environment, worker’s rights, higher minimum wages and unionization, gun safety, paid sick leave, and are working to override the electoral college to bring democracy to the race for president.

Most have enacted gun control laws that often include assault weapon bans, outlawed forced “captive audience” union-busting meetings, expanded drug treatment programs, decriminalized marijuana, strengthened abortion rights protections, raised their minimum wages, and are moving quickly to green their economies to mitigate climate change.

They’re offering protections to asylum seekers, women seeking medical care, and transgender individuals fleeing overt persecution in Red states. They celebrate gay marriage and honor the holidays of religious minorities. Women and racial minorities make up large parts of their legislative bodies and occupy many of their governor’s offices.

In this, Blue states are following the vision and values laid out by several of America’s Founders who helped create the first nation in world history espousing the idea that nobody should have to live in poverty and an important role of government was to prevent people from falling through the cracks.

Thomas Paine, for example, laid out a proposal for what we today call Social Security in his pamphlet Agrarian Justice, and Thomas Jefferson created the nation’s first totally free university (the University of Virginia). Half the delegates to the Constitutional Convention spoke against slavery as a curse against our nation’s ideals, although it took a bloody war to end that “peculiar institution” held so tightly in the grip of the 2000 families.

Even in the first years of our republic, the founding generation understood that caring for the public good was an essential function of government, as referenced in the preamble to the Constitution. President George Washington signed the first legislation providing federal funds for poorhouses that including food, clothing, shelter, and medical care along with job training.

Three decades later, when the legislation was up for renewal, President James Madison (the “Father of the Constitution”) vetoed a provision proposed by Southern states that would have cycled those revenues through local churches, writing in his veto message that federal funding of churches — even for charitable antipoverty purposes the government supported — “would be a precedent for giving to religious societies as such a legal agency in carrying into effect a public and civil duty.”

So, how did we get here and what can we do about it?

Ironically, it turns out that Red states are able to carry out their campaign of reviving the old Confederacy and its values of patriarchy, hierarchy, and wage slavery in large part because Blue states are subsidizing them.

While Donald Trump carried 2,497 counties in the 2020 election compared to Joe Biden’s 477 counties, the Blue counties Biden carried generated a total of 71 percent of the nation’s economic activity.

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The fiscal health of Blue states and counties — along with widespread Red state poverty exacerbated by Red State tax breaks for the morbidly rich — accounts for the bizarre reality that Blue states are subsidizing the brutal and retrograde policies of Red states.

A March 2023 report from the Rockefeller Institute lays out how glaring this appropriation of Blue state revenue is by the Red states. In just New York, for example, they write that over a five-year period:

“New York taxpayers have given $142.6 billion more to the federal government than New York residents have received back in federal spending.”

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As the Associated Press summarized in an article titled AP FACT CHECK: Blue high-tax states fund red low-tax states:

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“Mississippi received $2.13 for every tax dollar the state sent to Washington in 2015, according to the Rockefeller study. West Virginia received $2.07, Kentucky got $1.90 and South Carolina got $1.71.

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“Meanwhile, New Jersey received 74 cents in federal spending for tax every dollar the state sent to Washington. New York received 81 cents, Connecticut received 82 cents and Massachusetts received 83 cents.

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“California fared a bit better than other blue states. It received 96 cents for every dollar the state sent to Washington.”

When the Biden administration tried to just slightly slow down the Red state gravy train, specifying in the American Rescue Plan that the subsidies to the states for helping people who lost their jobs due to Covid could not be misappropriated and redirected to tax cuts for local billionaires, their politicians — dancing to the tune of their in-state oligarchs — went ballistic. As Forbes documented:

“So far, a total of 18 red states are plaintiffs in five separate lawsuits challenging a provision in the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Biden signed into law last month which says that state governments cannot use any of the $350 billion in federal pandemic relief funds coming their way to ‘either directly or indirectly offset a reduction’ in their net tax revenue resulting from state tax cuts.

“In a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, 21 Republican state attorneys general described it as ‘the greatest attempted invasion of state sovereignty by Congress in the history of our Republic.’”

Federal policy fails to equalize revenue flowing to Red states against the tax money they send Washington DC. This loophole in US tax law is driving this bizarre process where citizens in Blue states are forced by law to pay for all-white “Christian” academies, enforcement of abortion restrictions, persecution of asylum seekers and immigrants, and political attacks on queer people.

Red state “welfare queen” governors and legislatures are going to happily continue this grift as long as we let them get away with it. Congress should pass legislation mandating that Red state revenues to DC must at least match 90 percent of the money they get back; 100 percent would be better, and help hugely with our nation’s budget deficit.

It’s time to end Red state welfare!

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an 8 23 no lnx

bILOXI — A candidate’s concession speech usually reveals a lot about how a person will handle an election loss. They can use their words to graciously accept the will of voters or work to assure their supporters that despite the loss, there are better days ahead.

But when the Associated Press at 11:30 p.m. on Tuesday declared that firebrand state Sen. Chris McDaniel had lost his bid for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor, there was no one at McDaniel’s election night party to hear such a speech.

The uber-conservative state senator’s supporters had gone home, TV journalists had returned to their broadcast stations and the rock band who entertained guests earlier in the evening had broken its equipment down.

McDaniel, aided by more than $1 million in dark money spending by out-of-state groups, spent weeks attacking incumbent Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann for not being conservative enough for Mississippi Republican voters. By the time McDaniel’s election party had cleared Tuesday night, it was apparent that those very voters decisively disagreed.

READ MORE: Republican Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann defeats Chris McDaniel, will face Democratic newcomer in November

It was an anticlimactic end for McDaniel’s fiery statewide campaign, but the effect of the evening was much more significant to Mississippi politics: For the first time since 2008, Mississippi's far-right conservative movement had no clear leader. And to make matters worse for the group, Republican voters had soundly rejected its coordinated effort to grow in 2023.

For more than a decade, McDaniel worked hard to pull his fellow Republican elected officials farther to the right. In this endeavor, he was successful. He built and leveraged a sizable base of conservative voters who followed his lead and lived in the minds of establishment Republican elected officials. McDaniel might not have won a statewide election, but those GOP leaders long feared the effects of his political organization and ideology.

But on Tuesday night, after his third statewide loss in a row, McDaniel conceded his race against Hosemann and conceded much more. Appearing visibly tired and speaking with a clear tone of dejection, he suggested to reporters he would step away from public life and that it was time for a fresh face to carry his far-right wing of the Republican Party forward.

POLL: Should Trump be allowed to hold office again?

"I think it’s on life support," McDaniel told Mississippi Today of the movement he's led. "It doesn’t have to be me that brings it back. Anybody can that delivers the message well."

But the movement suffered a much bigger blow Tuesday night than just McDaniel. Numerous representatives of far-right conservatives in Mississippi circulated an endorsement list on social media that included 11 candidates for statewide, regional commission, or legislative seats.

These candidates were all challenging Republicans who the faction deemed “not conservative enough.” As one leader wrote of the endorsements in an email the night before Election Day, “This election is Mississippi’s fight for conservative government. If the liberal Hosemann side of the Republican party wins tomorrow, I believe Mississippi will return to a Democrat controlled government within a few years.”

The warnings and coordination fell flat, to say the least. All but one of those endorsed candidates, listed below in bold, lost their primaries — and most by substantial vote margins.

Chris McDaniel lost to incumbent Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann by 9 percentage points.

Incumbent Southern District Public Service Commissioner Dane Maxwell lost to Nelson Carr by 8 points.

Lauren Smith lost to incumbent state Sen. Chad McMahan for the Senate District 6 seat by 14 points.

Ricky Caldwell lost to incumbent state Sen. Nicole Boyd for the Senate District 9 seat by 52 points.

Alan Sibley lost to incumbent state Sen. Bart Williams for the Senate District 15 seat by 18 points.

Walter Hopper lost to incumbent state Sen. Kevin Blackwell for the Senate District 19 seat by 18 points.

Don Hartness lost to state Rep. Robin Robinson for the Senate District 42 seat, previously held by McDaniel, by 12 points.

Jamey Goodkind lost to Kimberly Remak for the House District 7 seat by 5 points (provisional votes are still being counted as of Friday afternoon, and it's possible Goodkind will face Remak in an Aug. 29 runoff).

John Williams lost to W.I. Harris for the House District 28 seat by 34 points.

Phil Harding lost to two candidates, Zachary Grady and Felix Gines, for the House District 115 seat after earning just 258 votes.

The only candidate on the endorsement list who won his primary was former state Rep. Chris Brown, who handily beat political newcomer Tanner Newman for the Northern District Public Service Commission seat.

Steven Utroska, the Mississippi director for the State Freedom Caucus Network which helped distribute the endorsement list, attended McDaniel’s party in Biloxi on Tuesday. While McDaniel was never a member of the Freedom Caucus, an organization of House members who support conservative policies, the Jones County senator is broadly respected by the members of the organization.

Utroska, in an interview with Mississippi Today in Biloxi, struck a somber tone when discussing the election results.

“It certainly seems like there’s a conservative vacuum, and we’re losing strong conservatives,” he said.

With McDaniel’s loss and the loss of his fellow far-right hopefuls, the future of the faction is unclear. Mississippi, of course, has no shortage of Republican officials, given the state GOP will continue to make up a supermajority of the legislative seats in both chambers of the state Capitol. But the faction McDaniel has led for the last decade now has no clear leader.

Election night results show that Republican state Sen. Kathy Chism of New Albany will be the only ultra-conservative and McDaniel ally to return to the state Senate in January. Several House Freedom Caucus members appear to have survived the primary election carnage, but there is no clear leader of the far-right conservative movement.

But the handful of ultraconservative members returning to the Capitol will have even less influence than they wielded in recent years.

Rep. Jason White is expected to become speaker of the House in January, and most Capitol observers predict he will continue the role of his predecessor, Philip Gunn, in appointing primarily mainstream conservatives to lead powerful committees and largely shutting out the right-wing crowd.

And if Hosemann defeats his Democratic opponent in the November election, the lieutenant governor will almost certainly wield his power to relegate the few members of the far-right faction to the back benches of the 52-member chamber, leaving them with little influence over policy.

Over the next four years in state government, the Freedom Caucus and like-minded lawmakers will have to start from scratch to chart out a new path for their faction and determine what their organization will look like in a new state government.

“I think in the next few months we’ll be reaching out to new members who have been elected to get to know them and their beliefs,” Utroska said. “And after that, we’ll just have to see where it goes.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Missisippi Ctr for Public Policy

open ltr w tppf?

ilya shapiro racist

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note ilya shapiro legal shop

an 6 23 no lnx

'Invidious scheme': Supreme Court refuses to hear case challenging Mississippi 'Jim Crow' law

Maya Boddie June 30, 2023

The United States Supreme Court, on Friday, decided not to hear a case against a longtimeMississippi rule denying the right to vote to persons "convicted of certain felonies," CNN reports.

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Per the report, and according to critics, the state rule disproportionately impact Black voters.

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According to NBC, "The court's decision not to hear the case prompted a sharp dissenting opinion from liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by fellow liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor," who "contrasted the decision on Friday with the court's ruling a day earlier that" ended affirmative action.

READ MORE: Unequal Justice: The Supreme Court’s voting rights ruling is not as good as it seems

Furthermore, CNN notesboth justices "argued that the court had made 'clear and momentous errors.'"

Jackson wrote, "If the court viewed affirmative action as race discrimination, then the Mississippi measure must be seen similarly," adding, "So at the same time that the court undertakes to slay other giants, Mississippians can only hope they will not have to wait another century for another judicial knight-errant. Constitutional wrongs do not right themselves."

CNN reports:

The challengers in the case, Roy Harness and Kamal Karriem, are Black men in the state who have been convicted of forgery and embezzlement, respectively, and have served their time. They are currently barred from voting under state law – Section 241– because of their convictions. They argued that the law is tainted with racial animus.

NBC notes, "In asking the Supreme Court to weigh in, Harness and Kariem's lawyers point to the fact that the court in 1985 struck down a similar measure that was enacted in Alabama in 1901."

READ MORE: 10 years after Supreme Court gutted voting rights, advocates urge Congress to reverse damage

Backing the plaintiffs, the Legal Defense Fundfiled a brief that referred to the rule as a "Jim Crow law," according to CNN, that was put in place as a "deliberate and invidious scheme to disenfranchise Black People."

LDF's assistant counsel Patricia Okonta told the news outlet, "While the state is home to the highest percentage of Black Americans of any state in the country, it has not elected a Black person to statewide office since 1890."

The Guardian reports:

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Sixteen per cent of the Black voting age population remains blocked from casting a ballot, as well as 10% of the overall voting age population, according to an estimate by The Sentencing Project, a criminal justice non-profit.The state is about 38% Black, but Black people make up more than half of Mississippi’s disenfranchised population.

Harness and Karriem's attorney, former United States Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., wrote, "Today, in 2022, many thousands of Mississippi's African American citizens are disfranchised by a provision that was enacted in 1890 to ensure 'a home government under the control of the white people of the State.'"

READ MORE: 'Jim Crow': Symone Sanders accuses Republicans of waging 'an all-out assault' on Black people

CNN's full report is available at this link. NBC's report is here. The Guardian's report is here.

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fucking brexiteer

douglas Carswell was appointed President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy in January 2021.

Since taking on the role, Douglas has helped secure:

The largest tax cut in Mississippi history, with the state income tax slashed to a flat 4 percent.

A universal occupational licensing law, making it easier for people to find work in Mississippi.

A law to combat Critical Race theory which prevents public money being used to divide America.

Previously a Member of the British Parliament, Douglas co-founded Vote Leave, the official campaign that won the Brexit referendum. He played a pivotal role in securing the Brexit vote in the first place, changing parties and calling a Special Election on himself in 2014 (which he won with the largest increase in voter share in any election in British history).

In 2022, the State Policy Network awarded the Mississippi Center for Public Policy the “Biggest Win for Freedom” Award for securing historic tax cuts.

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https://www.alternet.org/mississippi-gov-reelection-cosplaying-shooting/

no lnx vid tet

mississippi’s Republican Governor Tate Reeves, who has the highest firearm mortality rate in the entire country, this week launched his re-election campaign with a video depicting him as Clint Eastwood shooting people of color.

Although the video (below) was released Tuesday, few seemed to notice until a Talking Points Memo article was published Friday afternoon.

“Reeves’ face is superimposed on Eastwood’s in clips from the classic Dollars trilogy movies. He’s seen cosplaying the white anti-hero, the Man with No Name, shooting at Mexican bandits with a Colt revolver and puffing on a cigarillo,” TPM’s Emine Yücel writes.

In addition to the inherent racism and violence in the video, there is no policy discussed, and not even any bragging about Reeves’ record.

There may be a reason for that.

Governor Reeves almost from the start of the coronavirus pandemic – due to policy choices he made – has one of the absolute worst records on COVID in the country.

Mississippi ranks 34th in population, yet was 18th in total cases per capita. It gets worse from there: Mississippi ranks third in deaths per capita.

Just one year into the pandemic, in March of 2021, Tate declared, “The governor’s office is getting out of the business of telling people what they can and cannot do,” as he lifted mask mandates and COVID-19 restrictions.

READ MORE: ‘Major Campaign Finance Complaint’ Filed Against Herschel Walker: Report

Under Tate’s leadership, Mississippi has suffered a huge health crisis. In September of 2020, the Mississippi Clarion Ledger revealed a “new report ranks Mississippi’s overall health care system dead last. ‘It’s an embarrassment,’ said one health expert.”

“Even before the pandemic, Mississippi’s health care system and outcomes were deteriorating under several metrics,according to a new report by The Commonwealth Fund” the Clarion Ledger added. “The health research organization’s ‘Scorecard on State Health System Performance’ ranked Mississippi No. 51 — below every other state and Washington, D.C. — where it has stood for several years. The researchers relied on data from before COVID-19.”

One year later, Politico scored each state on their response to COVID. With a score of 34 out of 100, Mississippi tied for second-worst.

And on overall health, Mississippi is also doing poorly. Forbes in January reported on the “Top 5 Least Healthy States.” Mississippi came in at number two, the second-worst.

In other areas, like education, Governor Reeves’ record is also bad. Mississippi, according to World Population Review, ranks 43 out of 50.

READ MORE: Clarence Thomas in 2001: Being a Supreme Court Justice Is ‘Not Worth Doing for What They Pay’

Meanwhile, back to Governor Reeves and his cosplaying video.

On Tuesday, as TPM also reported, Governor Reeves told supporters, “this is a different governor’s campaign than we have ever seen before in our state because we are not up against a local-yokel Mississippi Democrat, we are up against a national liberal machine.”

“They are extreme. They are radical and vicious,” he said of Democrats and the “national liberal machine.”

“They believe welfare is success. They believe that taxes are good and businesses are bad. They think boys can be girls, that babies have no life, and that our state and our nation are racist.”

Response to Gov. Reeves’ video has been highly critical.

Former Nettleton, Mississippi mayor Brandon Presley, a Democrat running to unseat Reeves, tweeted: “Mississippi has real problems and Tate Reeves releases this foolishness as his first video of campaign. I guess we will have to wait and see if any welfare dollars were diverted to his buddies for the production of this silliness.”

Presley was referring to what CBS News is calling “the largest corruption case in Mississippi state history.” which appears to involve Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre, who has not been criminally charged.

“Gov. Tate Reeves’ first 2023 re-election video features him as an AI cowboy killing a bunch of folks with a gun. Totally normal campaign launch in the state with the highest gun death rate,” noted Mississippi Free Press news editor Ashton Pittman.

“This is what Republican messaging has been reduced to, at least in Mississippi: ‘Watch me, a sitting governor, CGI cosplay as Clint Eastwood and shoot Mexicans,'” wroteHarvard’s Neiman Lab’s Joshua Benton.

Democratic consultant Brannon Miller appeared to agree with Benton.

“I know that Tate Reeves himself didn’t make this, but it’s such a perfect window into the psyche of everyone over in his shop,” Miller wrote. “There’s no message, no policy, no positive good. Just a man, role playing as a tougher man, who is himself role playing an actually tough man.”

The Lincoln Project’s Stuart Stevens, a top political strategist, announced, “The only conclusion to come to is that @tatereeves campaign hates him.”

Watch Gov. Reeves’ video below or at this link.

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'You can’t be serious': Gavin Newsom mocks Mississippi GOP gov for challenging him to a gun 'debate' - Alternet.org ›

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boing 9 22

what does a multi-millionaire professional football quarterback, a former professional wrestler, a horse farm and a volleyball complex have in common? Well, in Mississippi, the poorest state in the U.S., where the capital city is experiencing a water crisis, all of these entities received money from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) fund. How much? For Bret Favre, the payment was for $ 1.1 million in 2017 and 2018 for motivational speeches to young people. None of the speeches were ever given. Neither did the other $68.9 million go to needy families. According to the NBC news report, "Favre hasn't been accused of a crime or charged, and he declined an interview. His lawyer, Bud Holmes, said he did nothing wrong and never understood he was paid with money intended to help poor children. Holmes acknowledged that the FBI had questioned Favre in the case, a fact that hasn't previously been reported."

Speaking of community money and elite graft, with regards to Covid relief funds, of the $800 billion given out, "70% of it—or nearly $370 billion—went into the pockets of business owners and shareholders in the richest 20% of the population," according to this Quartz article. For more on elite capture of public resources, check out this recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research detailing the audits done for Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) given out the first year of the pandemic.

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an 3 22

Robert Foster, a Republican former Mississippi state representative and failed gubernatorial candidate Friday night launched an unhinged assault on transgender allies, calling for their death by firing squad. After online outrage, he doubled down Saturday morning.

The Mississippi Free Press reports Foster is “using his social-media platform to call for the execution of political foes who support the rights of transgender people.”

Friday night Foster tweeted: “Some of y’all still want to try and find political compromise with those that want to groom our school aged children and pretend men are women, etc. I think they need to be lined up against wall [sic] before a firing squad to be sent to an early judgment.”

Saturday morning Foster, a farmer who runs an agritourism business and calls himself a “Man of Faith,” and a “Constitutional Conservative,” doubled down, attacking his foes and defending his hate-filled remarks while trying to claim he was not referring to transgender people.

“I see this really set some of the wackos off, let me elaborate for you. First, that tweet says nothing about shooting or killing transgendered people. It clearly says groomers,” he wrote. “Groomers” is a commonly-used word to describe pedophiles or those who establish relationships with children in service of pedophiles, but has been used increasingly by conservatives to demean LGBTQ people with a false claim that equates them with pedophiles. And in writing, “pretend men are women,” Foster clearly was referring to, at minimum, supporters of transgender people.

He did not stop there.

“To those adults that groom children into dressing like the opposite sex, telling them they can be a different sex, encouraging them to take hormone treatments to ‘transition’ and ultimately have surgery to remove their sex organs, I propose they be given the death penalty,” Foster added.

Foster, like many Republicans who attack transgender children and adults, clearly has not done his homework, but he did release a statement to the Mississippi Free Press:

“I said what I said,” he wrote, adding to what he had tweeted. “The law should be changed so that anyone trying to sexually groom children and/or advocating to put men pretending to be women in locker rooms and bathrooms with young women should receive the death penalty by firing squad.”

And he tweeted:

“Adult groomers of transgendered children are all pedophiles. Pedophiles deserve the death penalty.”

At around 11:00 AM ET Foster’s original tweet was removed and Twitter stated: “This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules.” So far his remaining tweets have not been deleted.

Foster, the Mississippi Free Press notes, “authored the state’s current death penalty law in 2017, allowing for executions by gas chamber, electrocution and firing squad.”

For those who think Foster’s anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, coupled with his electoral loss have hamstrung his political power, Mississippi Free Press adds:

“Despite winning less than 18% of the GOP primary vote, Foster’s farm venue has become a prime destination for Republicans since 2019, with GOP officials like U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, U.S. House Rep. Trent Kelly and House Speaker Philip Gunn attending fundraisers and other events on the property.”

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https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2022/03/new-report-destroys-gop-talking-points-blaming-dems-for-crime-trump-states-have-8-out-of-the-10-highest-murder-rates/

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New Report Destroys GOP Talking Points Blaming Dems for Crime: Trump States Have 8 Out of the 10 Highest Murder Rates

Published on March 16, 2022 By David Badash

Consider these explosive headlines from Fox News over the past several months: “Democrat-run cities overwhelmed by crime surge,” “Murder and crime rates spike in Democrat-run cities – is it a control play?” or, “Democrat-run cities experience record breaking homicide rates.”

Ten days before Christmas last year House Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy falsely blamed Speaker Nancy Pelosi for a “crime wave” that’s “spreading across the country.”

“Speaker Pelosi should look in the mirror to see what caused the ‘attitude of lawlessness’ spreading across the country,” he wrote. “Democrat politicians defunded police, raised money for rioters, and pushed policies that are soft on crime. They own this crime wave.”

And here’s McCarthy just days ago, again lying, claiming crime is “created by Democrats.”

A new report from Third Way destroys all these GOP talking points – and points out that “murder rates are far higher in Trump-voting red states than Biden-voting blue states. And sometimes, murder rates are highest in cities with Republican mayors.”

About that claim Leader McCarthy made? He should look in the mirror – and at his own district before pointing fingers.

The report notes that “the homicide rate in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco was half that of House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy’s Bakersfield, a city with a Republican mayor that overwhelmingly voted for Trump.”

In fact, in all of 2020, “per capita murder rates were 40% higher in states won by Donald Trump than those won by Joe Biden.”

It gets worse for the GOP.

“8 of the 10 states with the highest murder rates in 2020 voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election this century,” the report reveals.

The actual facts blow away what an average Fox News watching die-hard Republican voter would think.

“We found that murder rates are, on average, 40% higher in the 25 states Donald Trump won in the last presidential election compared to those that voted for Joe Biden. In addition, murder rates in many of these red states dwarf those in blue states like New York, California, and Massachusetts.”

“Mississippi had the highest homicide rate at 20.50 murders per 100,000 residents,” Third Way reports, “followed by Louisiana at 15.79, Kentucky at 14.32, Alabama at 14.2, and Missouri at 14. The national average was 6.5 per 100,000 residents, but the top five states had rates more than twice that high.”

These red states are not generating “murder is out of control” national headlines. They seem to generate no headlines at all. The rest of the top ten were filled out by South Carolina, New Mexico, Georgia, Arkansas, and Tennessee—all states rarely talked about in breathless media reports about rampant crime in Democratic strongholds.

The report does not even mention guns, which are a massive part of the problem, exacerbated by red state gun free-for-all policies.

And for those Fox News watching die-hard Republican voters who may say Third Way is a left-wing think tank, it’s actually been criticized by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. And former bank regulator William K. Black has accused Third Way of being a “group that pretends sometimes to be center-left but is actually completely a creation of Wall Street.”

Read the full report here.  https://www.thirdway.org/report/the-red-state-murder-problem

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Mississippi Today|7 days ago

The Senate Education Committee passed legislation banning critical race theory in Mississippi K-12 public schools and in public universities.

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Your way’s not working': CNN's Jake Tapper corners Mississippi GOP governor over state's COVID crisis

Elizabeth Preza

A combative Gov. Tate Reeves (R-MS) battled with "State of the Union " host Jake Tapper on Sunday morning after the CNN host pointed out the massive death toll in his state...

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state scotus cody f

in a brutal loss for direct democracy in Mississippi, the state's supreme court struck down a ballot amendment on Friday that legalized medical marijuana in the state. But the ruling didn't stop there. Invoking a technical flaw in the law, the court invalidated the entire process for amending the state's constitution by popular vote.

"The killing of our ballot initiative process means that Mississippi is, definitively, the state with the least democracy, the most restricted ballot access, and where voters' voices matter least when it comes to the deciding our future," said Ashton Pittman, a reporter at the Mississippi Free Press....

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/mississippi-supreme-court

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an 521

mississippi secretary of state calls for more Christians to be elected because 'the end times' are here

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson is calling for more Christians to be elected to office "today more than ever before," because "the end times" are here.

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A modest, practically harmless October Surprise. But it’s typically down ballot where the average Project Veritas video tends to have its most pernicious effects. Less well known than O’Keefe’s blunders on the national stage are the numerous documented instances in which his stings have been cited to justify new and more onerous voter I.D. laws or other election integrity legislation in state legislatures across the country.

In April 2012, Chris McDaniel, then Mississippi’s Senate elections committee chairman, cited a Project Veritas voter fraud video as evidence justifying the passage of the state’s “photo identification requirement” bill⁠, which the state’s Republican Governor Phil Bryant signed that May. Despite legal challenges, this law is still on the books today.

Also that year, a Republican Minnesota state representative, Steve Drazkowski, praised a locally shot O’Keefe video—in which Project Veritas undercover operatives requested ballot applications for their friends “Timothy Tebow and Thomas Brady”—during a floor debate for his party’s own draconian voter I.D. bill. While Minnesota’s Democratic Governor Mark Dayton vetoed a strict version of that voter I.D. legislation, and Minnesota voters backed his decision in a ballot initiative later that year, the state’s Republican Party still plans to revisit the issue again this year. (“We have had a number of studies that have been completed, there’s a lot of new data on this topic, and there are court cases that have been decided,” as Minnesota GOP State Senator Scott Newman ominously put it, “none of which we had in 2012.”)

O’Keefe’s “Primary of the Living Dead” stunts during the and primaries in 2012—in which his operatives requested but crucially did not actually attempt to use, the ballots of deceased primary voters—aided the passage of stringent voter I.D. laws in those states. After New Hampshire enacted a law in 2018 tightening the state’s voting statutes, partly in response to a new series of Project Veritas videos, Democratic legislators made repeated attempts to repeal them, only to be thwarted by Republican Governor Chris Sununu’s veto.

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****

no lnx ya cheap bastard

Los Angeles Times

POLITICS

People live longer in blue states than red; new study points to impact of state policies

States that have pursued more liberal policies in education, environment and civil rights have a longer life expectancy.

States such as California that have pursued more liberal policies in education, environment and civil rights have seen a swifter rise in life expectancy than more conservative states. Above, the California Capitol in Sacramento.(Los Angeles Times)

By NOAM N. LEVEY STAFF WRITER

AUG. 3, 2020

WASHINGTON —  Weak environmental protections, safety rules and labor and civil rights protections may be cutting lives short in conservative states and deepening the divide between red and blue states, according to a new study on links between life expectancy and state policy.

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The report, published Tuesday in the health policy journal Milbank Quarterly, finds that states where residents live longest, including California, tend to have much more stringent environmental laws, tougher tobacco and firearms regulations and more protections for workers, minorities and LGBTQ residents.

Since the mid-1980s, the gap among U.S. states in how long their residents live has widened, reversing decades of progress toward greater equality.

One group of states, mostly in the Northeast and the West, have seen average life expectancies rise relatively steadily, placing them on par with the wealthiest nations of Western Europe. Those states tend to have more stringent regulations.

By contrast, the life expectancy in states with more conservative health, labor and social policies — concentrated in the South and Appalachia — have stagnated in recent decades, according to the study, which adds to growing research on health and political disparities between states.

California has among the highest average life expectancies in the country, at 81.3 years. It also had the most liberal policies in the nation in 2014, the most recent year the study analyzed, according to the system the authors developed to rank states.

Although the study’s authors note that they can’t prove that state policies caused the gap in life expectancy, the correlation is a persistent one across multiple states and several decades.

“It’s disheartening to see another example of a missed opportunity by policymakers,” said David Radley, senior scientist at the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund who studies differences in state health policies and the effects on people’s health. Radley was not involved in Milbank report.

[pix Bakersfield, CA., March 4, 2020 - Jenny Morones, 26, of Bakersfield poses for a portrait on Wednesday, March 4, 2020 in Bakersfield, California. Morones is working mother struggling to raise three children on a low income. Morones fled an abusive relationship and though in her twenties, has dealt with health challenges.Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, Morones had health insurance that protected her from financial ruin. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)]

Coronavirus widens healthcare divide between red states and blue states

May 25, 2020

The new report may help shape efforts to rethink government policy in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, which has exposed deep structural weaknesses in the U.S. as well as yawning gaps in many state safety nets.

“The overarching conclusion is clear: States that have invested in their populations’ social and economic well-being by enacting more liberal policies over time tend to be the same states that have made considerable gains in life expectancy,” the study’s authors wrote.

Even before the current public health crisis, life expectancy in the U.S. had been declining, setting America apart from most other wealthy nations. That decline has fueled tough questions about domestic policy.

The opioid epidemic, which has had a devastating impact on regions of the country already hit hard by economic stagnation, has been the focus of a lot of the discussion about that shift.

But Syracuse University sociologist Jennifer Karas Montez, the lead author of the new study, said the impact of opioids may be only part of the story.

“When we look at what is happening with life expectancy, the tendency is to focus on individual explanations about what Americans are doing,” she said, noting obesity and smoking behaviors as well as drug use. “But state policies are so important.”

To assess what role these policies may be playing, Montez and other researchers reviewed more than 120 policies enacted by states over the years and assessed whether each policy choice in each state was more liberal or more conservative.

Policies included housing rules such as rent control; health and welfare policies such as Medicaid eligibility and welfare limits; labor protections such as paid sick leave and minimum wages; and civil rights policies such as gender discrimination bans, hate-crime laws and same-sex marriage.

They also looked at state abortion restrictions, tax policy, education spending, immigration rules and gun control laws.

Each state was ranked by how liberal or conservative its policies overall have been, going back to 1970.

The researchers then compared these findings to trends in life expectancy in all 50 states.

Montez said the trends they saw were unmistakable. They also correlated with important points in the nation’s political history.

Through the 1960s and 1970s, for example, state life expectancies generally converged. That trend began to reverse in the mid-1980s, around the same time that a conservative movement, led by President Reagan and mirrored in many state capitols, became ascendant.

The gap between states accelerated further after 2010, when sweeping Republican victories in state elections shifted policies further to the right in many places.

By 2017, residents of the state with the highest life expectancy — Hawaii — were living on average seven years longer than residents of the state with the lowest life expectancy — Mississippi.

By contrast, the gap between the best- and worst-performing states in 1984 was less than five years.

The gap is not only about policy: States where people live longer tend to be wealthier and have better educated populations, for example.

But Montez noted that decisions by state leaders have helped shape those factors.

“States like Connecticutare investing in their population, investing in schools, setting an economic floor for their workers, discouraging behaviors like smoking that kill people,” she explained. “You have other states like Mississippi and Oklahoma that aren’t doing any of this.”

In Connecticut, whose policies have become steadily more liberal over the last half century, life expectancy increased 5.8 years between 1980 and 2017 to 80.7 years.

In Oklahoma, which has become markedly more conservative, life expectancy increased only 2.2 years over the same period, reaching 75.8 years in 2017.

Identifying which state policies may have the most impact on how long people live is difficult, the researchers concede. But the study points to a group of policies that appear to correlate most closely with longer lives.

These include some unsurprising candidates such as tougher environmental laws, which the authors note may protect people from toxic substances. The authors also found a correlation between longer life expectancy and labor policies that increase economic security, such as a minimum wage.

Tougher gun laws appear to track with longer life expectancies, the study notes, as do stricter tobacco controls.

The authors also point to civil rights laws, which they suggest may protect residents from ill health related to persistent stress.

And they found a correlation between longer life expectancy and better access to abortion, which the study notes may reflect other research that has linked abortion restrictions to women’s poverty and ill health.

Noam N. Levey writes about national healthcare policy out of Washington, D.C., for the Los Angeles Times. He covered passage of the 2010 Affordable Care Act and has written extensively about the landmark law and reported on its implementation from around the country. A former investigative and political reporter, he is a Boston native and a graduate of Princeton University. He joined the newspaper in 2003 and has reported from Washington since 2006.

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120 an

far-right Mississippi governor predicts ‘1000 years of darkness’ if state elects first black senator in over 139 years

Alex Henderson

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/civil-rights-group-reaches-agreement-mississippi-reinstate-over-100000-drivers

splc suit

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http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/map-shows-huge-differences-in-educational-attainment-across-us

• District of Columbia is the best-educated part of the country: 56.8% of its residents have at least a Bachelor's degree.
• Second is Massachusetts, with 42.7%. While a lot of dark blue clusters on the East Coast, the third-highest score is for Colorado, way out west: 39.9%.
• Worst-scoring state isWest Virginia,where just 20.8% of the residents 25 and older have at least a Bachelor's degree. That's just over a third of the share of Bachelor's degree holders in DC.
• The Mountain State is marginally outperformed by Mississippi, where 21.8% have completed a college or university education.

Educational attainment is linked to income. In 2016, the average median income as divided per highest attained degree was as follows:

• $27,800 – didn't finish high school
• $36,700 – high school or equivalent
• $67,300 – Bachelor's degree
• $95,200 – advanced degree

Map found here at Overflow Data, via Simon Kuestenmacher. Additional information here at Marketing Charts.

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a historic vote this morning, Mississippi state regulators slammed the brakes on the Kemper coal power plant, saying they will refuse to ask utility customers to pay anything for Kemper's non-functional multi-billion dollar “clean coal” gasification technology and will re-designate the plant as a natural gas facility.

In a joint press release explaining their unanimous decision, the three Mississippi Public Service commissioners said they seek a solution that “eliminates ratepayer risk for unproven technology and assures no rate increase to Mississippi Power customers,” and that they want Mississippi Power, the Southern Company subsidiary that built Kemper, to consider rolling back existing rates.

“I think it's high time we finally turn the corner on this project and also strongly protect our ratepayers, who should only have to pay for what actually delivers electricity,” said PSC chairman Brandon Presley in an interview. Presley was, until recently, the lone opponent of a bloated, runaway project that saw costs jump from $2.3 billion in 2010 when work began to $7.5 billion now.

Read more

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upR 7/7/16

gunDKPPKPpl miss long hist of straw buy pipeline to chicago

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http://www.alternet.org/education/schools-poorest-state-become-even-poorer

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http://www.alternet.org/personal-health/5-most-dangerous-states-live-and-5-safest

According to the study, the five safest states to live in are Massachusetts, Vermont, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Hawaii.The least safe states to live in are New Mexico,Tennessee, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Mississippi. Massachusetts is the state with the lowest share of residents who lack health insurance, the second fewest number of fatal occupational injuries, and the second lowest rate of fatal automobile accidents.

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Longtime Sen. Thad Cochran has the Washington ties you'd expect given how long he's been in the nation's capital. But challenger Chris McDaniel is getting lots of help from outside his state's borders, too. » READ MORE

• See who else gets most of their campaign cash from out-of-state

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forbes oecd:

On the low end of the scale it’s Mississippi. They rank just 3.81 out of 10 with an average life expectancy of 75, 76% of the student aged population (3-24) are in school and only 12% with a bachelor’s degree. Just 7% of the state have advanced degrees and 19% have less than a high school education. That state is run by Republicans except for one Democrat in the House of Representatives.

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toxic 20 nrdc:  , "Both senators from eight states of the 'Toxic 20' states -- Kentucky, Indiana, Georgia, Texas, Virginia, South Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi -- supported a resolution by Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., to repeal the health-protective mercury and air toxics standard."

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Mississippi poised to pass ‘Anti-Bloomberg’ bill banning healthy food regs

By Susie Cagle

Mississippi is just the kind of place one might expect to find a backlash against the ��organic agenda.” Apparently spurred on by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s (newly tossed out) pet ban on big sodas, Mississippi is currently on the verge of passing a bill that would bar every local government in the state from requiring that restaurants post calorie counts or cap portion sizes.

A far-reaching, big-government bill to counter other far-reaching, big-government bills? Uh, sure, Mississippi.����NPR has the full scary deets:

“The Anti-Bloomberg Bill” garnered wide bipartisan support in both chambers of the legislature in a state where one in three adults is obese, the highest rate in the nation.

The bill is expected to be signed by Gov. Phil Bryant, a Republican. It was the subject ofintense lobbying by groups including the restaurant association, the small business and beverage group, and the chicken farmers’ lobby.

����The chicken farmers’ lobby���� could be a caption for an unfunny New Yorker cartoon, but in Mississippi it’s also apparently a powerful business group — though hardly the only one with skin in this game.

Mike Cashion, executive director the Mississippi Hospitality and Restaurant Association, says the bill is a direct reaction to Bloomberg-style government intervention in public health.

“If you look at how menus have changed, whether it be in fast food or family dining, you are seeing more and more healthy options,” Cashion says. “Not because of legislative mandates or regulatory mandates, but because of consumer demand. Our industry has always been one to respond to the marketplace.”

Cashion is on a real free-market trip! But free markets and consumer demands always seem to go hand in hand with business profits, and Cashion’s loyalties are with the restaurants, not with the people who eat at them. The Mississippi Hospitality and Restaurant Association’s website proclaims that the “industry is represented by a team of government affairs experts that is dedicated to protecting you from harmful legislation while promoting legislation that will benefit the industry. We estimate that our Government Affairs victories have saved the average restaurant over $10,000 over the past 4 years.”

This isn’t a story about how Mississippians don’t want to know what they’re eating. It�����s yet another example of business buying government — the food business has proven to be pretty good at that over the years. And in that way, it’s hardly news at all.

http://grist.org/news/mississippi-poised-to-pass-anti-bloomberg-bill-banning-healthy-food-regs/

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Mississippi’s voter identification law might prove literally impossible for some of its residents to adhere to. In the state, a measure written by State Senator Joey Fillingane (R) and approved by a ballot initiative requires voters to have photograph identification, which they can only obtain if they’ve got a birth certificate to present. But they can only get a birth certificate using photo ID. (It is worth noting here that Fillingane is a member of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which is notorious for its voter suppression efforts).

State officials acknowledge the problem Fillingane’s law might cause:

State officials are running into problems with the new voter-identification law even before the federal government has approved or rejected it. Voters without a photo ID are facing a circular problem: They need a certified birth certificate to get the voter ID, and they need a photo ID to get the birth certificate.

Pamela Weaver, spokeswoman of the Mississippi Secretary of State’s office, today confirmed the catch-22 problem, which the Jackson Free Press learned about from a complaint posted on Facebook. One of the requirements to get the free voter ID cards is a birth certificate, but in order to receive a certified copy of your birth certificate in Mississippi, you must have a photo ID.Not having the photo ID is why most people need the voter ID in the first place.

The law is not yet in place, since the federal government needs to approve it under the Voting Rights Act. That Act forbids state voting laws that have a discriminatory impact on minority voters, and, because of Mississippi’s sordid history of voter suppression, requires that the state’s voting laws be precleared by the Justice Department or a federal judge before they can take effect.

There’s no good reason why the Mississippi law should survive such scrutiny. Voter ID laws are especially likely to prevent certain historically disenfranchised communities from voting — 18 percent of elderly voters lack a valid photo ID, as do 25 percent of black and 20 percent of Asian adults.