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Credit: Charleston Place Hotel

The hotel has sued the SRLC and its signatory, South Carolina political operative Robert C. Cahaly over the money dispute. The Charleston City Paper wrote a long feature about the issue.

In its federal complaint, the hotel says in March it originally entered into an agreement for the booking which ran from Thurs. Jan. 19 through Sun. Jan. 22. South Carolina political operative Robert C. Cahaly, who is named as co-defendant in the lawsuit, served as the group's signatory. The contract was amended on Dec. 20, 2011.

In the complaint filed in the Charleston County Court of Common Pleas, the hotel says it has come to believe that the SRLC "was grossly undercapitalized, failed to observe corporate formalities, was insolvent, and was mere[ly] used as a façade for the operations of the defendant Cahaly." In addition it says, "Cahaly, an individual businessman, has sought to hide from the normal consequences of carefree entrepenuring by doing so through a corporate shell.

"Due to their incompetence, the defendants failed to properly plan or manage the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, and it was poorly attended," the hotel says. "The conference was so poorly attended as to cause one Republican candidate, Newt Gingrich, to cancel his appearance.

"Poor attendance caused many of the conference sponsors to leave the conference," it continues. "Poor attendance left the defendants responsible for a significant payment to the plaintiff under the terms of the contract."

The article continues by saying, "at 3:01 p.m., the time when the defendants were due to check out of the hotel, the defendants emailed [hotel] management and cancelled the meeting at which they were supposed to settle the bill." In the email, the SRLC allegedly accused the hotel of difficulties with refunds or adjustments, poor overall treatment and a hotel manager instructing an SRLC staffer to engage in illegal activity, according to the City Paper article.

Sounds more like bitterness over the poor attendance of their conference than mismanagement by the hotel.

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Writing in Salon, Rick Perlstein examines "what Haley Barbour's amnesia tells us" about Southern conservatives' historical revisionism. But largely lost in the imbroglio over Barbour's literal white-washing of the Jim Crow era is that the Mississippi Governor and would-have-been 2012 White House hopeful has plenty of company among the leading lights of the Republican Party. From flying the Confederate flag to talking up secession and nullification, Republicans for years have been casually trafficking in antebellum nostalgia.

In May, Texas conservatives approved an overhaul of the state's textbooks which would remove the word "slave" from the term "slave trade." Of course, that omission was in keeping with two others, as Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell and Mississippi's Barbour celebrated Confederate History Month in their respective states, each without mentioning slavery. As Barbour put it:

"To me it's a sort of feeling that it's just a nit. That it is not significant. It's trying to make a big deal out of something that doesn't matter for diddly."

As for Michael Steele and the Republican National Committee, they apparently considered "nits" like the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to Constitution unnecessary, at least judging from the RNC's May memo attacking Obama Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan:

"Does Kagan Still View Constitution 'As Originally Drafted And Conceived' As 'Defective'?"

As the health care reform debate reached its climax in March, Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia was among those longing for the days of the ante bellum South. Missing the irony that health care is worst in those reddest of Southern states where Republicans poll best, Broun took to the House floor to show that he was still fighting the Civil War:

"If ObamaCare passes, that free insurance card that's in people's pockets is gonna be as worthless as a Confederate dollar after the War Between The States -- the Great War of Yankee Aggression."

If you thought you had heard that outdated term of Dixie revisionist history recently, you did. In February 2009, Missouri Republican Bryan Stevenson took exception to President Obama's support for the Freedom of Choice Act, legislation which would codify the reproductive rights protections of Roe v. Wade nationwide:

"What we are dealing with today is the greatest power grab by the federal government since the war of northern aggression."

That expression was also a favorite of former Senate Majority Leader and later Minority Whip (really, you can't make this up) Trent Lott. Lott was a speaker in 1992 at an event of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a successor to the White Citizens' Councils of Jim Crow days. Among its offerings in seething racial hatred is a "Wanted" poster of Abraham Lincoln. Lott's also offered his rebel yell in the virulently neo-Confederate Southern Partisan, where in 1984 he called the Civil War "the war of aggression." That was years before he lauded the legendary racist and 1948 Dixiecrat presidential candidate, Strom Thurmond:

"I want to say this about my state: when Strom Thurmond ran for President, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."

As Americans learned this week, Trent Lott is not the only Mississippi Republican to support groups like the CCC and honor the Confederate flag. Former Republican National Committee Chairman and now Governor Haley Barbour wore a lapel pin with the image during his 2002 campaigns for the state house - and to keep the CSA emblem flying over it. And as the photographs show, Barbour literally broke bread with CCC racists at a barbeque in 2003.

Another neocon (that is, neo-Confederate) is former Attorney General John Ashcroft.

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I know we posted the Dr. Laura Schlessinger story on C&L a few days ago, but I wanted to make another significant point, if I may. In our book, 'Over The Cliff," we talk about how the Southern Strategy was used by the Republican party and how it evolved from outright racism to using code words to get the same points across. Chapter Six:

In 1981, political scientist Alexander P. Larris sat down for an interview with an anonymous Reagan strategist who outlined for him how the strategy worked:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting
taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that.

But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

It later emerged that the strategist was a young South Carolinian and Strom Thurmond protégé named Lee Atwater, a former chief executive of the College Republicans who had worked on the Reagan campaign under political director Ed Rollins.

What we have happening now is that the extreme right wingers like Dr. Laura and Breitbart are actually throwing their dog whistles in the garbage because they figure that if they yell "nigger " enough times out loud to the world and hold their breaths then that vile word will no longer hold the same despicable meaning that symbolized Jim Crow in American history to the media and their acolytes. Cheap Labor Conservatives do hate to be called racists and they have been trying to shed their racist past, but now with the economy down, conservative propagandists are reverting to a pre-1954 mindset on racism. It's sad and sickening, but it's happening. I actually never thought that in less than two years, the right wing noise machine would be as emboldened as they are now over race. Limbaugh's openly racist rants began as soon as President Obama took office and then FOX News immediately jumped on the bandwagon to promote every phony New Black Panther type smear they could find. All Cheap Labor Conservatives better start loading up their Ipods with the top 100 songs of 1954. Can you name the number one song? It has something to do with the time of day.

And don't forget to buy our book.

While President Obama declared "the book is closed" on Harry Reid's past "negro dialect" comment, Republicans are using the imbroglio to reopen the book on the disgraced Trent Lott. On Sunday, RNC chairman Michael Steele and Arizona Senator Jon Kyl insisted Reid should resign his post as Senate Majority Leader like Trent Lott before him.

Sadly for the Republicans, there is no double standard at work here. Trent Lott didn't merely lavish praise on the legendary racist and segregation stalwart Strom Thurmond. Lott's 2002 reminder that the old times there are not forgotten capped a career of neo-Confederate nostalgia.

Pressured by the Bush White House (as the New York Times detailed at the time), Lott in December 2002 resigned his Senate Majority Leadership post following his public hagiography of Dixiecrat and staunch segregationist Strom Thurmond:

"I want to say this about my state: when Strom Thurmond ran for President, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."

But as I noted in "A Confederacy of Dunces," Lott has been very clear in myriad other ways that he wasn't just whistling Dixie:

Lott was a speaker in 1992 at an event of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a successor to the White Citizens' Councils of Jim Crow days. Among its offerings in seething racial hatred is a "Wanted" poster of Abraham Lincoln. Lott's also offered his rebel yell in the virulently neo-Confederate Southern Partisan, where in 1984 he called the Civil War "the war of aggression."

Still, as Michael Steele himself would probably suggest, you can't blame a brother for trying. As the AP reported:

"There is this standard where the Democrats feel that they can say these things and they can apologize when it comes from the mouths of their own. But if it comes from anyone else, it's racism," said Steele, who is black. "It's either racist or it's not. And it's inappropriate, absolutely."

Arizona Republican Jon Kyl concurred with Steele's assessment that "The reality of it is this, there is this standard where Democrats feel they can say these things and apologize as long as it comes from one of their own, and if it comes from somebody else, it's racism." As Politico reported in a hyperbolic story titled, "Reid fights for political life":

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File this under: No F*@king Way!

AP :

The Rev. Al Sharpton is a descendant of a slave owned by relatives of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond _ a discovery the civil rights activist called "shocking" on Sunday.

Sharpton learned of his connection to Thurmond, once a prominent defender of segregation, last week through the Daily News, which asked genealogists to trace his roots.

"It was probably the most shocking thing in my life," Sharpton said at a news conference Sunday, the same day the tabloid revealed the story.

Some of Thurmond's relatives said the nexus also came as a surprise to them. Doris Strom Costner, a distant cousin who said she knew the late senator all her life, said Sunday she "never heard of such a thing." Read more...

Back in 2002, Trent Lott praised Strom Thurmond at his party. Notice how proud he is of his feelings.

Lott: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either.

Download | play -WMP Download | play -QT

He got booted for it. Now, he's back. Atrios has the story of Lott and reminds us all about Strom's beliefs...

Minority whip--is a rather weird title for him.

via OW