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Boss Hawg rides again. In what can only be described as an inexplicable act, Haley Barbour granted unconditional pardons to 214 prisoners just before leaving office on Tuesday. Included in that motley group? Brett Favre's brother, a few prison trustees who worked in his office, 14 murderers, and others who just happen to be violent criminals.

As you might imagine, the victims' families are outraged by this. It's one thing to give full pardons to people who might have been wrongly convicted, and another entirely just to use the sweep of a pen to release people who present a danger to their victims and victims' families.

Recognizing this, a judge has blocked the release of a few of the prisoners, stating that Barbour violated the Mississippi State Constitution by not publishing their release date 30 days in advance. While that release may stop a few for a short time, it's doubtful that they will be able to defend keeping them in prison if the pardon holds.

According to this report on Megyn Kelly's show (yes, I know, but it's what I was recording), Mississippi Attorney General is attending to the victims' families' complaints. Well, maybe. Honestly, I was a bit chilled to hear him say this:

So I think, they're gonna be fine. Just be careful.

Ya think? I'm not sure what possessed Haley Barbour to grant these pardons, to be honest. It strikes me as a cynical and self-serving move. Maybe he wanted his own posse?

It's great when we can disagree in a civilized way, but it's getting pretty hard to avoid the conclusion that the phrase "right-wing logic," as delivered by the GOP and mimicked by Mitt Romney, has become the mother of all oxymorons. They tell us corporations are people. But people? Not so much. That Right used that argument that in yesterday's elections, but it's starting to look like voters in swing states and the heart of Red America have had enough.

They love to preach the "corporate personhood" principle. IBM, Goldman Sachs, Halliburton: They're people! Why, they can even "speak"! Sure, they may be limited to the crude vocabulary of millions and billions, but you gotta admit: Come election time, they're fluent in it.

These corporations are endowed with freedom of speech, say Mitt and Friends, but employees of the same corporations aren't - especially when that speech involves forming a union. Follow the logic and the conclusion is inescapable: the Right believes that the company is a person but the people who work for it aren't.

Got that?

We're told that corporations have privacy rights, too. They have so much right to privacy, in fact, that when they throw millions of dollars of "speech" into an election we're not allowed to know who's speaking! But the Right says people with jobs don't have privacy rights. Employers can spy on them, say conservatives, even when they're at home using Facebook or Twitter

That anti-human, pro-corporate definition of personhood is part of what Ohio voters soundly rejected yesterday when they overturned the laws passed by its Republican Governor and legislators, who forbid union activities on the part of state employees. In a radical redefinition of the personhood principle,these voters decided that teachers and administrators and other state workers are actually ... people. And as people, they have the right to organize and bargain for themselves.

Some on the Right, including its new recruit Mitt Romney, has also argued that fertilized eggs should have all the rights that accrue to a fully-formed human being. But a full-grown person who happens to be female doesn't have the rights of personhood when it comes to determining how her own body is used.

Some people on the other side of this contentious issue have a genuine difference of belief, a spiritually-based moral code that's worthy of respect. We may disagree vehemently, but we do it with respect when speaking with these people of integrity. It's easy to tell which ones they are; they're the ones who are against killing in all forms. The others believe in a person's right from the moment of conception until the moment they're born without health insurance.

The Mississippi initiative argued that an egg has more rights than the woman carrying it. Voters didn't go for that, even in rock-ribbed fundamentalist Mississippi. Not even the tacit endorsement of new-found "redneck Mitt" - who's started sporting plaid shirts, saying he makes less than working people, and using the song "Born Country" by the group Alabama at his campaign appearances, could persuade them. Even the Tommy Bahama-sportin' hillbilly himself couldn't push this initiative over the line.

Sorry, cowboy.

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For social conservatives, it is often said, life begins at conception and ends at birth. If so, nowhere is that more true than in Mississippi. After all, the Magnolia State seems poised to pass Amendment 26, the so-called "personhood" initiative which by defining a fertilized egg as a human being would ban virtually all abortions and inevitably outlaw many forms of birth control and in vitro fertilization.

But while Mississippi is focused inside the womb, there seems to be little concern about what happens to its residents outside of it. As the dismal rankings in out-of-wedlock births, poverty, family income, education, health care and almost every other indicator of social dysfunction show, personhood is a painful struggle for the actual persons of Mississippi.

With some of the most draconian abortion restrictions in the nation, Mississippi is now home to only one clinic providing the procedure. But as it turns out, Mississippi is also home to the most depressing statistics for out-of wedlock births in the entire nation. As the numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau show, Mississippi has the highest percentage of total births to teen mothers (17.1 percent, compared to the national average of 10.5 percent) and unmarried women overall (53.7 percent, compared to 39.7 percent nationally).

Mississippi may not be a Hobbesian dystopia where life is nasty, brutish and short. But as a quick glance at the poverty and income data show, life there isn't easy. The Census Bureau's 2011 Statistical Abstract (which is based on 2008 data), shows poverty and median household income is worst where GOP's laissez-faire crowd finds its strongest support. Financially speaking at least, life is no heaven on earth in America's most religious state.

Of course, Mississippi is one of the poorest states in the Union and has been for some time. According to the 2011 data compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau, Mississippi ranks first in the number of people living below the poverty line. Unsurprisingly, its 50th ranking median household income of $37,790 is the lowest in America, and over $14,000 below the national figure. Per capita income is similarly dismal. It's with good reason that in 2007, Mississippi ranked fourth in per capital federal aid.

That need for federal funding is especially acute when it comes to one of the Magnolia State's greatest failures: education.

The education of its children provides just one of many heart-breaking stories of failure for the people of Mississippi. At $7,890 per student per year, Mississippi ranks 45th in school funding. (And even that meager figure is only made possible by substantial funding from the federal government.) According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests administered by the U.S. Department Education, only 22% of Magnolia State fourth graders read at or above grade level. By eighth grade, the figure falls to 19%. (Only the District of Columbia does worse.) It's no surprise that Mississippi has the lowest mean score on the ACT college admissions test taken by 96% of the state's high school graduates. And as it turns out, only 63% of its children even graduate, less than the national average of 69% (and much lower than the 81% in, for example, that target of right-wing retrograde reform, Wisconsin.)

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Don't kid yourself that this is "just" Mississippi. The Christian right is going after birth control in every state:

Mississippi voters will be allowed to decide on a ballot measure that defines "personhood" from the moment of fertilization, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled last week. The measure could potentially outlaw abortions, birth control, in vitro fertilization and stem cell research across the state.

Measure 26, which will bypass the legislature and go straight to a popular ballot vote, redefines the term "person" as it appears throughout Mississippi's Bill of Rights to include "all human beings from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof." The American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi, Planned Parenthood and the Center for Reproductive Rights filed a lawsuit against the proposal earlier this year, not based on its content or constitutionality, but because Mississippi state law says a ballot initiative cannot be used to change the Bill of Rights.

The Mississippi Supreme Court rejected the lawsuit in a 7-2 ruling, saying that it had no power to review any ballot initiative before the actual vote takes place.

Let's look at some of the interesting legal ramifications. If you go through in vitro fertilization, and it doesn't work, you'd have to report that as a death. Same thing would go for very early miscarriages. How do we know you didn't try to abort your pregnancy? Women would have to prove they didn't murder their blastocyst/zygote/embryo/fetus.

Your blastocyst/zygote/embryo/fetus would have the right to inherit, naturally, so if you have a miscarriage, that could certainly tie up some estates -- not to mention that Social Security would be paying survivors benefit if you're pregnant and your spouse dies. Could be a little more costly!

And if people get illegal abortions, as people will when you make them impossible to get, that means the woman and her doctor can be charged with homicide. Of course, having a drink or a smoke during pregnancy is contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Geez, I just thought of something else -- if you have sex while you're pregnant, is that child sexual abuse?

The mind reels at the possibilities!

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Credit: US Army Corps of Engineers

So what do you suppose Governor Barbour did to protect the people of his state? Do you think he took any measures to help them, or to shore up their homes, or provide emergency shelter?

Here's what he did:

As the water rose, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour moved furniture out of his lake house outside Vicksburg on family land that was inundated during the 1927 flood. A week ago, he urged residents to flee low-lying areas, saying that the state wouldn't assist the evacuations and that people should help one another secure their property and get out.

Widespread flooding was expected along the Yazoo River, a tributary that is backed up because of the bloated Mississippi. Rolling Fork, home of the bluesman Muddy Waters, was also in danger of getting inundated.

That's right. He told them they were on their own, to just do whatever they could. Well, that, and he did remember to apply for federal assistance. After all, the federal government is great when conservatives don't want any responsibility for anything.

Those folks most affected by flooding aren't people Barbour cares all that much about, I guess.

While some farms in the cotton-, rice- and corn-growing Delta are prosperous, there is also grinding poverty. Nine of the 11 counties that touch the Mississippi River in Mississippi have poverty rates at least double the national average of 13.5 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

All those good folks in Mississippi can take comfort in the fact that conservative lawmakers nationwide are praying for them. They're not doing anything to help them, but they're praying for them. All hail the Very Earnest Conservatives.

Haley Barber has done a marvelous job in Mississippi. He didn't mind sharing his thoughts about what a great organization the Citizens Councils was back in the day and he said that growing up there during the civil rights revolution wasn't all that bad. MLK came to town and it was like a country picnic.

So, are you surprised by the PPP's latest polling on Mississippi, which produced a pretty revealing portrait of Mississippians' views on interracial marriage?

The PPP polled Mississippi and found a very interesting response about marriage.
46% of these hardcore Republican voters believe interracial marriage should be illegal,
while 40% think it should be legal.

PPP surveyed 400 usual Mississippi Republican primary voters from March 24th to 27th

TPMDC writes:

The poll also found that voters who thought interracial marriage should be banned liked Barbour, Palin, and Huckabee the most among the slate of potential GOP presidential candidates. Seventy-nine percent of those voters said they approved of Gov. Barbour's job performance, while 74% said they had a favorable opinion of Sarah Palin, and 73% viewed Huckabee favorably.

Jon Perr wrote a detailed post about Haley's town on C&L called: The GOP Has Seen America's Future - in Mississippi
Here's some of what ot said:

Mississippi is one of the poorest states in the Union and has been for some time. According to the 2011 Statistical Abstract compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau, Mississippi ranks first in the number of people living below the poverty line. Unsurprisingly, its 50th ranking median household income of $37,790 is the lowest in America, and over $14,000 below the national figure. Per capita income is similarly dismal. It's with good reason that in 2007, Mississippi ranked fourth in per capital federal aid.
--
Using data from the Census Bureau and the Legal Community Against Violence's state-by-state comparison of firearm laws, the Daily Beast in January concluded Mississippi was the deadliest gun state in the nation. Its divorce rate is among America's highest; the teen birth rate is at the very top.
--
UPDATE: Almost on cue, White House hopeful Haley Barbour attacked President Obama's handling of the economy, claiming his own state serves as a shining example. ""We still have more to do in Mississippi," Barbour said, adding, "But we have made great progress and are laying a foundation for the future.

Palin and Huckabee would do pretty well there. I'm sure Donald Trump would poll OK there too, since he's been pushing the Birther nonsense. Mississippi, the state of conservative values and miscegenation-law nostalgia. For a minute I thought about the justice of the peace who refused to marry an interracial couple, but that was in Louisiana.

A Louisiana justice of the peace said he refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple out of concern for any children the couple might have.

Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, says it is his experience that most interracial marriages do not last long.

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Credit: National Journal

Republicans have seen the future and it's in Mississippi.

On the same day Wisconsin Republicans turned to unprecedented and possibly illegal maneuvers to strip public workers of collective bargaining rights, the Michigan legislature blessed emergency powers for Governor Rick Snyder to terminate municipal contracts across the state. As Idaho joined Tennessee in seeking to curb teachers' unions, Ohio and other states pushed ahead with even tighter handcuffs on government employees. And while Republicans in Maine, Missouri and New Hampshire have introduced virtually identical legislation targeting private sector unions, back in Washington GOP Senators introduced a national "right-to-work" bill designed to make today's draconian red state restrictions on union organizing the law of the land tomorrow.

Sadly, the numbers show that incomes, working conditions, educational performance and health care are worst where union protections are weakest and Republicans poll best. And by almost any measure of social dysfunction, it is Mississippi - the most conservative state in the nation - where the GOP race to the bottom leads.

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Credit: American Rights at Work

To make their case during the stand-off in Madison, conservatives took aim at Wisconsin's teachers. Unfortunately for their GOP echo chamber, the right-wing blogosphere made the mistake of complaining that Wisconsin received millions of dollars in federal education aid when solidly Republican red states get much, much more. Then, the would-be Republican union busters are whining that Badger state students can't read. As it turns out, Wisconsin students outperform their counterparts in those reddest of states where collective bargaining rights are few - or non-existent.

Like in Mississippi.

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After Haley Barbour's wink-and-nudge act about the White Citizens Councils caught a lot of people's attention, Eric Kleefeld at TPM called up Barbour's spokesman, Dan Turner, who gave Kleefeld a decidedly prickly and paranoid interview -- including this nugget:

"Tell me what in Gov. Barbour's past gives any indication of any racist leanings, and I'll be glad to address the question," said Turner. "Otherwise, it's not a legitimate question. There's nothing in his past that shows that. If you pick out a sentence or a paragraph out of a fairly long article and harp on it, you can manipulate it. And that sounds to me like what you're trying to do."

Hmmm, that's tough. Oh yeah. There is this:

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This is Barbour on July 19, 2003, at the Black Hawk Barbecue and Political Rally, held to raise money for [wink wink, nudge nudge] "private academy" school buses. The barbecue is the big fund-raising shindig thrown every year by the Council of Conservative Citizens -- the successor organization to the White Citizens Councils and one of the nation's most prominent white-supremacist outfits. On the far right (appropriately) is the CofCC's national field director, Bill Lord.

Barbour later tried to claim, incidentally, that he didn't know anything about the CofCC. Considering how knowledgeable he appears to be regarding the White Citizens Councils, this doesn't seem particularly credible anymore. Still, he declined to ask them to remove his photo from their website:

"Once you start down the slippery slope of saying 'That person can't be for me,' then where do you stop?" Barbour said. "Old segregationists? Former Ku Klux Klan like (Sen.) Robert Byrd, D-W.Va.? You know?

"Once you get into that, you spend your time doing nothing else," Barbour said. "I don't care who has my picture. My picture's in the public domain. It gets published in newspapers every day."

Suuuuuure.

Wanna bet if an outfit called the "Council of Conservative Pedophiles" ran Barbour's picture, he'd be so sanguine?

Kos had details at the time about Barbour's participation in the picnic.

Be sure to read all of Kleefeld's interview, which is pretty remarkable -- especially these exchanges:

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Credit: NEMS360

The month of October has certainly started out with a bang when it comes to First Amendment issues. On Thursday, the Supreme Court heard the case against the Westboro Baptist Church and their protests at military funerals and earlier this week, a Mississippi judge jailed a lawyer who refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance out loud in his courtroom:

Chancellor Talmadge Littlejohn ordered Lampley jailed shortly after court began in Tupelo this morning.

Eyewitnesses said Littlejohn asked the court audience to rise and repeat the pledge. Lampley rose but failed to vocalize the words to the pledge, an act he has done before, apparently to the judge's consternation.

Oh my -- what will those freedumb loving teabaggers think about this? As Alan Colmes points out over at his blog, Liberaland, the SCOTUS ruled back in the 1940s that a child cannot be forced to salute the flag or to recite the pledge. One would think adults would be covered under that ruling too, no?

Personally, I find it disturbing that anyone in this country could be jailed for choosing not to verbally recite the pledge. I understand that judges rule the roost in their courtroom, but this goes well beyond the pale. It should also be noted that Lampley is a constitutional lawyer, but according to this update, cannot sue the judge for his wrongful imprisonment. That...is a shame.

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This is disturbing. KHOU.com's interview with a Houston BP call center employee exposes the empty PR operation that is supposed to be sincerely concerned with ideas for cleaning up the oil spill in the Gulf.

According to the employee, the operators are supposed to take down the information from callers and enter it into a database. Because employees believe the information stops with them, some aren't even bothering to note the information given by callers or enter it into the system.

This call center is not responsible for claims. That responsibility has been assigned to third-party risk manager and claims administrator ESIS, Inc. ESIS has field offices in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

The Houston call center's responsibility, according to KHOU.com:

They answer phones from the hotline number designated for the Vessel of Opportunity Program and for cleanup ideas.

I can understand the overwhelming nature of the calls coming into BP from around the globe, but if I were BP, I'd be thinking hard about the wisdom of ignoring calls in about cleanup suggestions and even containment suggestions, given the White House's order to BP to step up their game and stop more of this oil from pouring into the Gulf.

If this operator's allegations are true, it is another nail in BP's strategy to do whatever they please while appearing to care. Might be time for them to actually DO what they pretend to do.