The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

    Mississippi Lord Mississippi

    By rmrd0000 on Wed, 11/14/2018 - 11:24am |

    Mike Espy is now in a runoff in the Mississippi Senate race. The fact that Espy is in a tight race in Mississippi is just as amazing as the Governor’s races in Florida and Georgia. The white Republican candidate exposed the GOP, once again, as the political party that remains entrenched in what it considers the good old days. The Republican Senatorial candidate referred to lynching

    ——————-

    In a video that has now been shared across all social platforms, Hyde-Smith appears to be speaking during a campaign event about support from a Mississippi rancher.

    “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row,” the senator is heard saying in the video.

    During a press conference Monday, Hyde-Smith was being questioned about her comments and the racial insensitivity of it all, considering her opponent is a black man. Hyde-Smith, in her southern drawl, just kept noting that she’d issued a statement and that was all she was going to say about the matter.

    The statement she’s referring to basically said that she was making a joke and if you’re offended, well that’s on you. It’s not clear if Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant was trying to help Hyde-Smith out but he stepped to the podium and attempted to deflect all of the questions aimed at Hyde-Smith by claiming that black women are participating in “the genocide of 20 million African American children” through legal abortions.

    “See, in my heart, I am confused about where the outrage is at about 20 million African-American children that have been aborted,” Bryant said, with Hyde-Smith and National Right to Life President Carol Tobias standing nearby, the Free Press reports.

    “No one wants to say anything about that. No one wants to talk about that.”

    —————

    https://www.theroot.com/mississippi-governor-defends-cindy-hyde-smiths-l...

    Neither the Republican Senatorial candidate or the Republican Governor see anything wrong with their statements. Hopefully, Mississippi voters will show up in the runoff election to point out the error in the Republican thought process.

    Comments

    Whadda they mean no one talks about that? That's all they talk about.

    Republicans have been talking about abortions for 40 years and doing nothing.

    Nothing but exploiting women's private family and medical decisions, to then get elected, and gut women's health care funding, block family planning funds, cut children's health care, eviscerate low income housing, slash welfare support for poor families all while cutting trillions in taxes for the rich, including the dead very very rich.


    by NCD on Wed, 11/14/2018 - 2:33pm

    Republicans have done more harm to Christianity than any other single entity. Why would you be a Christian if Christians are this clueless?


    by rmrd0000 on Wed, 11/14/2018 - 3:18pm

    The GOP Senatorial candidate told another “joke”, this time about voter suppression. She is just a barrel of laughs

    https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/cindy-hyde-smith-voter-suppression_us_5beea9b7e4b0c19de3fecb10

    Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) appeared to endorse voter suppression during a campaign stop this month, saying efforts to undermine voting among liberals at certain colleges would be a “great idea.”

    “And then they remind me that there’s a lot of liberal folks in those other schools who maybe we don’t want to vote,” Hyde-Smith can be heard telling a small crowd of young people outside her campaign bus in a video taken Nov. 3 and posted on online Thursday. “Maybe we want to make it just a little more difficult. And I think that’s a great idea.”


    by rmrd0000 on Fri, 11/16/2018 - 2:41pm

    I lived by accident behind a "Divinity School" among impressively sincere students  , busing to Selma, to campaign  against  the pre Lyndon Johnson race laws and to the State House to campaign against  poll restrictions.

    And  against abortion.

    On which I disagreed with them. Silently. That was when to go for another drink. 

    But if I silently then failed to disagree,  that's no justification for again failing to disagree

    with the over simplification  that those who disagree with us on abortion disagree with us on

    everythingl 


    by Flavius on Fri, 11/16/2018 - 9:53pm

    The Senate candidate jokes about lynching and voter suppression. She does not put Christianity in a good light. The Governor diverts attention from her words about lynching to abortion. Those are the two people under discussion.

    Edited

    changed to does not in the second sentence.


    by rmrd0000 on Sat, 11/17/2018 - 2:05pm

    Politico put a story up on topic and it's currently their #1 most popular: Mississippi Senate race devolves into racial melee


    by artappraiser on Wed, 11/21/2018 - 12:57am


    by artappraiser on Wed, 11/21/2018 - 1:58am


    by artappraiser on Tue, 11/27/2018 - 1:38pm

    interesting tidbit from wikipedia entry on him:

    In October 2007, Espy crossed party lines to endorse Republican Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour's reelection campaign.[6]


    by artappraiser on Tue, 11/27/2018 - 1:44pm

    Perhaps Espy had questions about the Democratic candidate given the statement by Eaves on immigrants. 

    Eaves also expressed concerns regarding the state's growing Latino population. When Governor Haley Barbour stated that "We have a lot of Spanish people that are here and I don't know what we would have done without them on the coast," Eaves responded: "I know where we'd be. We could have record employment instead of the highest unemployment in the South." Because Barbour's statement applied to both undocumented immigrants and Latinos living in the country legally under H2B work visas, some commentators viewed Eaves' remarks as racist.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Arthur_Eaves

     


    by rmrd0000 on Tue, 11/27/2018 - 2:10pm

    thank you for that. I only noted it because I have often found that the more one delves into learning nuances about a state's politics, the more I find that things are not exactly as they are presented by the national media and pollsters in order to fit into their "red vs. blue nation" narrative, nor even the liberal vs. conservative or Democrat vs. Republican narrative.


    by artappraiser on Tue, 11/27/2018 - 2:47pm

    Few lines at polls as Mississippi votes in US Senate runoff

    @ AP, 25 minutes ago


    by artappraiser on Tue, 11/27/2018 - 1:47pm

    Washington Post national political reporter says this

    the whole related paragraph suggests the apology notes were written with help of the White House:

    Trump himself has also become far more engaged, calling Hyde-Smith last week to express concern about her flailing campaign. He urged her to apologize for her comment about being willing to join a supporter on the front row of a public hanging, according to a source briefed on the call. The next night, reading from notes she had before her, she offered a conditional apology to anyone who might have been offended.


    by artappraiser on Tue, 11/27/2018 - 7:25pm

    The statewide races involving black Democratic candidates in Georgia, Florida, and Mississippi were disgusting. Republican Mia Love voted with Trump 96% of the time, yet he mocked her loss and cast her aside. Mia will remain Republican because she has no self-respect. The GOP is now the party of Trump. The GOP is willing to allow racists to headline their campaigns for state offices. Steve King was elected in Iowa.

    We await the full breakdown of the midterm vote, but it looks like some white Republicans or Independents could no longer stand the stench of the current GOP. People of good conscience cannot vote for Republicans. Perhaps as auto plants close and soybeans rot, other voters will turn from the GOP. The result in Mississippi was not a surprise, but it was a disgrace. 

    In the words of Nina Simone, “Mississippi Goddam”

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Goddam


    by rmrd0000 on Tue, 11/27/2018 - 11:01pm


    by artappraiser on Wed, 11/28/2018 - 7:13pm

    Espy got 18% of the white vote in the initial race 

    https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/11/mississippi-election-racial-resentment-polarization-espy-hyde-smith.html

    Espy. lost the runoff with 44% of the vote. Mississippi is about 37% black. I’m guessing most white Mississippi voters are Evangelicals. Dowd’s number are based on past exit polls.

    Edit to add: 

    The problem was the number of national corporations who had no problem donating to a racist.


    by rmrd0000 on Wed, 11/28/2018 - 9:48pm

    The problem was the number of national corporations who had no problem donating to a racist.

    If one thinks that was a factor, it is also admitting that there were plenty of swayable voters, as it means spending on advertising. Straight out racist voters wouldn't need advertising to tell them which is the black candidate and which is the white one.


    by artappraiser on Wed, 11/28/2018 - 10:59pm

    WGIF signs?


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 11/29/2018 - 12:11am

    Racists just like grandpappy's days.

    Theodore Bilbo, Senator, KKK, from the Great State of White Racists Mississippi, Wiki:

    Bilbo was a prominent participant in the lengthy southern Democratic filibuster of the Costigan-Walker anti-lynching bill before the Senate in 1938.

    Senator Bilbo said:

    If you succeed in the passage of this bill, you will open the floodgates of hell in the South. Raping, mobbing, lynching, race riots, and crime will be increased a thousandfold; and upon your garments and the garments of those who are responsible for the passage of the measure will be the blood of the raped and outraged daughters of Dixie, as well as the blood of the perpetrators of these crimes that the red-blooded Anglo-Saxon White Southern men will not tolerate.[


    by NCD on Wed, 11/28/2018 - 11:38pm

    Not sure what point people who deny that racism played a role in the statewide Mississippi race are trying to make. Perhaps it’s the tired , how dare you call all white Southerners racist diversion. In statewide races in Georgia, Alabama, and Florida, Republicans ran openly racist campaigns and received the majority of the statewide vote. In the midst of that, Lucy McBath won in Georgia-6 and 4 black circuit judges won in Hinds County, Mississippi. Three of those judges are black women.

    McBath

    https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/georgias-6th-district-race-drags-on/868...

    Hinds County

    https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/politics/2018/11/27/winner-judi...

    The challenge that Democrats face is clear

    ———-

    In a state where politics has long been cleaved by race, Mr. Espy was reckoning with a conundrum that Democrats face across the South — from Mississippi and Alabama, which have been hostile to the party for years, to states like Florida and Georgia that are more hospitable in cities but still challenging in many predominantly white areas. Even as they made gains in the 2018 elections in the suburbs that were once Republican pillars, Democrats are seeing their already weak standing in rural America erode even further.

    Now, as Democrats mount a last-minute and decidedly against-the-odds campaign to snatch a Senate seat in this most unlikely of states, they are facing the same problem that undermined some of their most-heralded candidates earlier this month.

    The campaigns of Stacey Abrams in Georgia, Andrew Gillum in Florida and Beto O’Rourke in Texas may have electrified black and progressive white voters — just as Ms. Hyde-Smith’s comments may energize Mississippians to support Mr. Espy — but they had an equal and opposite effect as well: in rural county after rural county, this trio of next-generation Democrats performed worse than President Barack Obama did in 2012.

    ——-   

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/24/us/politics/south-race-mississippi-se...

    Why deny reality? Hyde-Smith made racist comments, DeSantis attended meetings with white supremacists, Kemp openly suppressed votes. For some, nothing racist to see here..The take home message is that Democrats can win local races in otherwise hostile territory. This can force Republicans to have to run a 50 state race.

    Edit to add:

    Tim Scott has voted in favor of moving Thomas Farr, a supporter of voter suppression, out of the judiciary committee. He is as worthless as the white voters who supported Hyde-Smith

    https://www.theroot.com/it-should-be-easy-for-only-black-republican-in-senate-t-1830725350

     


    by rmrd0000 on Thu, 11/29/2018 - 8:24am

    Multiple studies point out that racial resentment drove Trump to victory

    https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/12/15/16781222/trump-racism-economic-anxiety-study

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/12/15/racial-resentment-is-why-41-percent-of-white-millennials-voted-for-trump-in-2016/?utm_term=.99ed2a220809

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/08/22/economic-anxiety-isnt-driving-racial-resentment-racial-resentment-is-driving-economic-anxiety/?utm_term=.7ce9b79268b0

    http://people.umass.edu/schaffne/schaffner_et_al_IDC_conference.pdf

    https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1368430216677304

    There are other studies indicating the role racial bias plays in the Republican Party. We cannot pretend that it does not exist.

     

     

     

     

     


    by rmrd0000 on Thu, 11/29/2018 - 10:08am

    Hakeem Jefferson:

    “We find that charging Trump's campaign appeal as racist does not persuade racially conservative whites to decrease support for Trump. Rather, it causes racially liberal whites to evaluate Trump more unfavorably.” #SocSciResearch https://t.co/UvXdNOIfvG

    — Hakeem Jefferson (@hakeemjefferson) November 29, 2018

     


    by artappraiser on Thu, 11/29/2018 - 1:16pm

    This seems to be a water is wet argument. Racists aren’t bothered by racism or racist campaigns, what a surprise.

    Look at the message from the Roll Call cited in the WaPo article you posted. Independents swung 12 points towards Democrats in the midterms. Trump has 88% approval among Republicans. Democrats need to appeal to Independents because there are more Independents willing to listen to a Democratic message

    WaPo

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/11/27/which-motivates-independents-to-get-politically-involved-pocketbook-issues-or-fear-that-trump-is-hurting-u-s-democracy/?utm_term=.20ea09131388

    Roll Call

    https://www.rollcall.com/news/opinion/independents-decided-election-2018

    Democrats don’t have to chase racist Republicans to win campaigns. Racists are happy in their natural home in the GOP. That was the statewide message in Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Mississippi. Independents are receptive to a Democratic Party message.

     


    by rmrd0000 on Thu, 11/29/2018 - 2:49pm

    Politico has an interesting interactive map feature on the results, where if you toggle between the two versions;

    • see winners by margin
    • see winners

    there are a lot of different shades of blue and of red in the "see winners by margin". That suggests to me that gerrymandering doesn't have as big effect in this case as one might presume. Far fewer strongly red or strongly blue districts than one might expect with Mississippi.


    by artappraiser on Wed, 11/28/2018 - 11:09pm

    oops that is a map for Wicker vs. Baria, and not this race. Still, the difference between the two maps is interesting.


    by artappraiser on Wed, 11/28/2018 - 11:51pm