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Articles by Bill Minor
AG nominee has disdain for voting rights laws
Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. Doesn't that sound like a fictional Confederate character in a Broadway play about the Civil War? Well, it isn't. The real Jeff (as he is called) Sessions is a Republican senator from the state of Alabama who has been nominated as the next attorney general of the United States by incoming President Donald Trump.
Miss. congressional delegation unites to honor Evers
Mississippi's entire congressional delegation has for the first time in state history endorsed one of the state's civil rights martyrs for a coveted national award. Last week Mississippi's two senators and four congressmen petitioned President Barack Obama to present the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously to Medgar Evers, the state's first NAACP field secretary, who five decades ago was slain by a sniper's rifle bullet.
Historian covers gubernatorial statesmen, scoundrels
"Soldiers, Statesmen, Scholars, Scoundrels" is the subtitle of retired Ole Miss historian David Sansing's forthcoming book about Mississippi's governors since it became a state in 1817. Sansing, a friend of many years, has produced the imposing book as part of the state's observance of its bicentennial next year. No doubt historians dream of writing one big book during their lifetime. Well, "Mississippi Governors" (scheduled for release Nov. 30 by Nautilus Publishing of Oxford) is just that.
Miss. GOP unprepared for Hillary Clinton administration
Leading Republicans all around the country are conceding the defeat of Donald Trump on Nov. 8. But that word hasn't reached this bastion of nouveau Republicanism down here. Not only is Gov. Phil Bryant, et al, still pushing Trump as their leader but the governor (and the state Republican chairman) went out to Las Vegas to give the Donald aid and comfort for his third disastrous debate with Hillary Clinton.
Bill Minor: Be wary of group tasked with MAEP revamp
We've heard a lot lately about reforming the Mississippi Adequate Education Program with little said about how the state's many poverty stricken school districts can support decent education for their children without substantial state help. Now an outfit called EDBuild, based in richer New Jersey, has been hired by Mississippi Republican leaders to revamp this state's 1997 plan to supplement poor school districts.
Bill Minor: Taxes in poor Mississippi no joking matter
Mississippi, the state with the poorest people in America, is told by a so-called tax expert it should raise its sales tax on a loaf of bread and a bottle of milk so corporations and their executives can pay less income tax. Did I forget to say that poor Mississippians pay the highest state sales tax rate on groceries — in other words, basic necessities — than anybody else in the country? Historically, Mississippi has had the lowest per-capita income.
Bill Minor: Voter ID rigs political system
Fast forward to the night of Nov. 8 after the polls have closed. A Republican glee club assembles outside the secretary of state's office, breaking into song: "Tell us, tell us, dear Delbert, how many fraudulent voters did you catch at the polls today?" "We've been told your voter photo law was going to nab a bunch of these faking critters at the polls. This was your big thing to stop our voter fraud crisis.
Bill Minor: Don't look for Clinton to campaign here
Don't look for Hillary Clinton to set foot in Mississippi during the presidential campaign. Her camp understandably will likely write off Mississippi as safe for Republican Donald Trump, no matter that this Deep South state has nothing in common with the New York real estate tycoon. Significantly, Clinton can claim a personal connection to Mississippi going way back to 1992 when she visited with fellow Southern education activist Winifred Green, the member of a pioneer Jackson family.
Minor: Eastland held sway over Miss. politics for decades
Two biographies of legendary Mississippi Democratic politician Jim Eastland have emerged in recent months. Significantly, neither was written by a state native, resident or contemporary of Eastland. For the benefit of millennials, Eastland, otherwise known as "Big Jim," held sway over Mississippi politics for four decades as a U.S. senator from the late 1940s to latter 1970s.
Minor: WWII carrier only winner in presidential forum
As I see it, the only winner in the NBC presidential national defense forum in New York harbor was my old friend, the retired aircraft carrier Intrepid, scene of the forum. Neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald J. Trump — the Democratic and Republican candidates — proved themselves ready to be leader of the free world, the job they're seeking Why do I call the Intrepid my old friend?
Minor: O'Keefe leaves legacy as politician, businessman
Only a freshman state legislator, Biloxi's Jerry O'Keefe became so enraged that segregationist Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett was representing the state in John F. Kennedy's inaugural parade that Jerry pushed the governor aside and greeted JFK when passing the reviewing stand. That was January 1961. Sixteen years earlier in World War II, Jerry, as a Marine fighter pilot, had already proved undeniably that he excelled when confronted with a tough problem.
What life was like for ex-slave on Coast
Can you imagine reading a 105-year-old ex-slave's detailed account of his extraordinary life on Mississippi's Gulf Coast in the 19th century? Well, that's what I discovered last week in the latest issue of the Pearl River Historical Society's "Historical Reporter," a remarkable monthly publication produced by self-made historian-researcher Mark Davis of Gulfport.
Mississippi physicians became combatants in 'war on poverty'
During Lyndon Johnson's "war on poverty" in the latter 1960s, Mississippi's Delta region, where thousands of displaced cotton plantation workers lived on the fringe of hunger, became a national target. Even New York Sen. Robert Kennedy, brother of slain President John F. Kennedy came down to personally see if LBJ's program was reaching the gut poor in the nation's poorest state.
Bill Minor: Mabus-Fordice battle was landmark election
Every time former Mississippi Gov. Ray Mabus went to a major league game, he took his baseball glove on the chance he might catch a ball hit near him in the stands. Now — years later — as secretary of the Navy, Mabus gets a lot closer to the action on the playing field but still has the same zeal to grip a game ball.
Minor: ALEC flexing muscles in Mississippi
Little to nothing has been said lately about the legislative influence of the right-wing, Koch brothers-controlled lobby group known as ALEC. But with Republicans firmly in charge at the Capitol you can bet ALEC is making itself felt on what comes out of Mississippi's lawmaking body.
State leaders cut wealthy's taxes, citizens' services
One hundred and fifty years ago Jones County's Newt Knight and his frontiersmen battled to get the state to leave the Confederacy. Now Gov. Phil Bryant is trying to rejoin it. We in Mississippi have never been comfortable ensconced in the union of states called the USA. Always the poor country cousins, in last place whenever measured against our 49 brethren. We occupy land that once lay just east of the vast Louisiana territory, bought dirt cheap by Thomas Jefferson in 1803.
Minor: Church burning began infamous Mississippi case
I had no idea a story I broke in 1964 about night-riders (Klansmen) burning a rural Neshoba County church and beating church elders would lead to the death of three young civil rights workers and a massive FBI-led investigation.
Population dictates state's power
Two of Mississippi's seats have gone to Georgia or Texas after the past two decennial censuses. Seldom does the monthly status report on Mississippi's economy issued by the University Research Center of the state College Board have any good news, and last month's report was no different. But one piece in the report on Mississippi’s population growth, or non-growth, caught my eye.
Minor: Trump is antithesis of Mississippi values
Let's say Donald Trump has been elected president. How will this historically outlier state — a mere cabbage patch when viewed from the New York heights of Trump Tower — fit into the picture? Anyone down here who votes for this outlandish billionaire would have to concede he is the opposite of what Mississippi has always claimed to be: devoutly Christian, fiscally tight-fisted, pro-small government, business-friendly to a fault.
Bill Minor: Atom bombs' sole purpose was to end WWII
In a letter to the editor the other day, a reader added his off-target additions to my May 20 column that commended President Harry Truman for his decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japan in World War II. As I sought to emphasize in that column, the atomic blasts in August 1945 ended our fighting with Japan. And, for me, that may well have saved my life, since I and my fellow ship's crewmen were under orders to take part in the invasion of the Japanese homeland.
Minor: Derian - housewife to activist to diplomat
Word came last week that Patricia Derian, 86, formerly a Jackson housewife and state Democratic activist before becoming a prominent diplomat in the 1970s died at her residence in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. For 38 years she was married to Hodding (known as "Little Hod") Carter III, scion of a legendary Mississippi newspaper family who in recent years has taught at the University of North Carolina.
Minor: Mississippi GOP lemmings now Trumpsters
Republican leaders in Mississippi were like lemmings last week, jumping off the party cliff with Donald Trump. And this is the same crowd that always delighted branding loyal Democrats "yellow dogs," implying Dems would vote for a yard dog before casting a ballot for a Repub. Down the line they came — Phil Bryant, Trent Lott, Roger Wicker, and even master politician himself Haley Barbour — quickly lined up as Trumpeters.
Minor: Mike Chaney is Mississippi GOP's truth-teller
He's one Republican state official with the guts to tell the truth about how his fellow Republicans who control the Legislature have massacred the state's general fund budget. Instead of merely trimming agency budgets, the Legislature "cut down the tree." That is how Chaney described the fiscal hatchet job done by his fellow Republicans at the 2016 session.
Minor: GOP race stirs memories of party's 1964 campaign
Have you ever heard of Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona? Chances are that, if you were voting age (and white) in 1964, you voted for him for president, staking your personal claim as a pioneer Mississippi Republican. While Goldwater nationally in 1964 was buried under President Lyndon Johnson's landslide victory, he incredibly carried Mississippi with 87.2 percent of the vote. Remember, Mississippi was at that time a reliable part of the "solid" Democrat South.
Minor: 2016 Legislature seals Mississippi's last place
In my seven decades of covering politics in this unfathomable state, I've often said we'll stay in last place because we elect leadership to keep us there. The just-ended 2016 session of the Legislature, plus Gov. Phil Bryant, Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves and their Republican henchmen in both legislative chambers certainly guaranteed we'll stay on the bottom. If anything. they've combined to bury Mississippi deeper in the hole.
Minor: Photo helped seal elder Bush's presidential win
Small boys. That's what the fleet commanders called naval destroyers such as mine (Stephen Potter) in World War II. "Tin can" was another name for us DDs, denoting our relatively thin hulls for first-line fighting ships. Our primary job when cruising on a mission with a huge task force was to screen aircraft carriers — our chief offensive naval weapon as we learned soon after Pearl Harbor — from attack by enemy aircraft and submarines.
Minor: State has execution by firing squad in sights
Now that we've strapped pistols on ushers in churches, it's only natural that we talk about firing squads to take care of business at Parchman's death row. Gov. Phil Bryant says he's all for it if lawmakers put the question on his desk. As the 2016 legislative session moves closer to its end, the boom-boom option was still in play in the meat grinder up at our state Capitol. A few details need to be worked out. For instance, is this going to be a circular firing squad?
Minor: Reeves could learn from Jindal's costly mistakes
Lite Guv. Tate Reeves and his brain trust could save Mississippians from a world of fiscal hurt in years ahead by taking a lesson from Louisiana's $2.8 billion budgetary crisis left by departed Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal. Known as a "boy wonder" for privatizing most state hospitals in the 1990s, Jindal as governor the last eight years set out to make national news as a tax-cutting, government-shrinking state leader.
Minor: Reagan sharp contrast to today's GOP field
The other day, Nancy Reagan had her regal funeral according to her specifications and designated eulogists, bringing down the curtain on one of the world's most tender romances, the story of Ronnie and Nancy. She couldn't have planned one thing, however: that her interment would bring a one-day intermission in the madcap Republican presidential race to fill the nation's highest office which her soulmate, Ronald Reagan, held three decades ago.
Minor: Murrah High alums pen book on school integration
For one shining moment — actually for five years in the early 1970s — Jackson's prized Murrah High School became a laboratory to test if court-ordered racial integration of teenage white and black students could work. Amazingly, in hindsight, it did. Only to come crashing down by the end of the 1970s. Some would call it a "social experiment" imposed by federal judges based miles away from Mississippi's capital city upon students and faculty of two separate races.
Minor: Mississippi lawmaker raises school choice alarm
It took a freshman House member — Democrat Jay Hughes of Oxford — to sound the alarm that killed earlier this week the school voucher bill many had seen as the first step to dismantle public education in Mississippi. The House Appropriations Committee (of which Hughes is not a member) delivered the coup de grace by simply declining to take up House Bill 943 on Tuesday's deadline day.
Minor: Netherlands scholar pens James Eastland bio
When political powerhouse Jim Eastland stepped down from the Senate after six terms in 1978, I wrote he was the last of the Bourbon politicians in Mississippi. I had also predicted that he would be replaced by an economic populist such as Cliff Finch or Bill Waller, both of whom had won the governorship with appeals to the working class. On end of the Bourbons I was right. On populists, not. It has taken 38 years for a biography about "Big Jim" Eastland to appear.
Minor: Mississippi GOP pioneers were civic minded
Death of Tupelo's Jack Reed and Meridian's Gil Carmichael within the span of one week virtually wiped out the handful of Mississippi Republican progressives active in public life. The two were stalwarts and civic visionaries who, during the 20th century, not only brought the formerly hated Republican Party out of its post-Civil War doghouse but also laid the foundation for Mississippi to be transformed into a two-party state.
Minor: Courage was hallmark of Bert Case's career
It's odd, but true. I will always associate my great friend — the recently deceased broadcast journalist Bert Case — with the day President John F. Kennedy was killed by a gunman on a Dallas street Nov. 22, 1963. Those outside the central Mississippi viewing area may not readily recognize Bert Case's name.
Minor: Dearing 'godfather' of Mississippi gaming
State Sen. Bob Dearing, the Democrat from Natchez, has been in the news quite a bit lately because of an election dispute, not for the reason he should be most remembered. You could say that Dearing is the godfather of Mississippi's multibillion-dollar casino gaming industry. The 81-year-old Dearing had authored a bill back in 1990 to let Mississippi River gaming boats dock in Natchez. At that particular time, the grand old river city's economy was suffering from a steep tourism decline.
Minor: Court elevated lieutenant governor's powers
No state law or constitutional provision conferred on Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves gives him the power he is now about to exercise: to appoint Senate committees and assign bills each will consider. When the Senate adopted without debate Senate Resolution No. l setting out permanent rules of the Senate after the 2016 Legislature convened Jan. 3, that was the only authority, legally or otherwise, giving the lieutenant governor the vast power to control the structure and operations of the Senate.
Minor: Unlikely take on rebel flag
So you think you've heard the most unlikely Civil War story involving peoples' ancestors? Well, I'm about to challenge that from a Civil War ancestry story that has fallen into my lap. Out of the blue, Alfred Arnold has become my physical therapist and in doing so he was fascinated by a framed, certified document from the state Department of Archives and History hanging on the wall in my home.
Minor: Miss. lags other states in school funding debate
Those, especially opinion writers who pedal the GOP argument that Initiative 42 is some untried scheme giving a lower court judge power to take control away from the Legislature over school funding, are doing a disservice to students in the state’s poorest school districts. Plus, they ignore why 200,000 Mississippians signed a petition to install a mandatory constitutional provision to provide an “adequate” funding base for each school district in the state, an issue with racial undertones.
Minor: Bryant about to lose an anti-Medicaid buddy
Mississippi and Louisiana are two of the few states that elect governors in odd-numbered years. It happens that Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal and Mississippi’s Phil Bryant are buddy-buddy staunchly opposed to Medicaid expansion to qualify for Obamacare federal funds.
Minor: Cochran should be applauded for stepping up
After Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in August, 2005, Time Magazine named Mississippi's Thad Cochran one the 10 best U.S. senators, calling him "the Persuader" for squeezing $29 billion in desperately needed hurricane recovery funds through Congress before Christmas break. This was Thad's finest hour. Then age 68, Cochran was chairman of the Senate Appropriations committee, a vital post in the nation's spending mechanism that came to him through seniority.
Minor: Political scandal brewing next door in Alabama
Possibly Mississippians have been too absorbed with football fever or the bizarre Republican Senate race to notice the juicy political scandal raging next door under the dome of the Alabama state capitol. No less than the speaker of Alabama's House of Representatives, Mike Hubbard, who is a power in the state's Republican Party, was indicted on October 19 by a special grand jury on 23 counts of felony ethics violations.
Minor: Voter ID issue still not settled
Anyone who thinks it is settled law that states can require photo ID in order to vote is barking up the wrong tree. All sorts of land mines have been planted by courts in a half dozen states which could eventuality put the photo ID scheme back in the grave where it had resided for decades among other Jim Crow practices until recreated by Republicans as an vote integrity measure.
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