link
This idiot should lose his job.
Introduction
Trent Lott has had a rough week. Eight days ago, Lott made statements that implied he supported centenarian Sen. Strom Thurmond's pro-segregation 1948 presidential bid. Ever since the scandal-generating birthday bash, Lott has been finding himself under a steadily growing attack.
Today, the senator from Mississippi asked the nation for its "forbearance and forgiveness" and called segregation "immoral" and "a stain on our nation's soul." His mea culpa was a far cry from last week's terse apology that referred to Jim Crow laws as "discarded policies." The "sharecropper's son," as Lott described himself, spoke from his hometown of Pascagoula, Miss., where he denied ever having said he favored segregation. The time line below tells a different story and traces the former Ole Miss cheerleader and soon-to-be--if he survives politically--Senate majority leader's long and tangled history with race
Early 1960's
Lott--a University of Mississippi cheerleader and president of the Sigma Nu fraternity--leads the fight to keep his frat segregated. At Ole Miss, desegregation efforts reached a flash point after the arrival of a black student, James Meredith, triggered waves of riots and National Guardsmen were called in to secure the campus. Lott would later say: "Yes, you could say I favored segregation then. I don't now ? The main thing was, I felt the federal government had no business sending in troops telling the state what to do."
1968
Lott gets his first job working for Mississippi Democrat Rep. William Colmer, a fiery segregationist, as a congressional aide. Colmer is perhaps most famous for using his position as chairman of the House Rules Committee to stymie civil-rights legislation.
1972
Lott is elected to the House of Representatives.
1978
Representative Lott spearheads a successful effort to posthumously restore U.S. citizenship to Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Lott is later awarded the United Daughters of Confederacy medal for his work.
1979
Lott joins a bipartisan group that supports a constitutional amendment to prohibit busing to desegregate schools.
1980
At a presidential-campaign rally for candidate Ronald Reagan in Mississippi, Lott follows Sen. Strom Thurmond to the podium and tells the crowd, "You know, if we had elected this man 30 years ago, we wouldn't be in the mess we are today." The comment is very similar to the senator's more recent remark praising Thurmond's 1948 bid for the presidency as a Dixiecrat.
1981
Lott is one of 24 representatives to vote against extending the Voting Rights Act, legislation that eliminates obstacles to the voting booth for minorities. Also that year, Lott files a Supreme Court friend-of-the-court brief supporting a tax exemption for South Carolina's Bob Jones University, a school most famous for its discriminatory policies and for banning interracial dating. He argued that "racial discrimination does not always violate public policy."
1982
The Reagan administration is embarrassed after Lott's letter to the president, which urged him to reverse a longstanding law withholding tax exemptions from schools that discriminate, becomes public. Lott was lobbying the administration on behalf of Bob Jones University. The representative received an answer from Reagan--"I think we should" scrawled in the margins of his memo--and forwarded the president's remark to high-ranking Justice Department and Treasury officials. Reagan initially sides with Lott, but after ensuing controversy the decision is modified.
1983
Lott and 97 others in the House vote against making Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday. Senator Thurmond votes in favor of the legislation. Lott would later tell Southern Partisan magazine, "Look at the cost involved in the Martin Luther King holiday and the fact that we have not done it for a lot of other people that were more deserving."
1984
While serving as chairman of the Republican Party's Platform Committee, Lott tells a meeting of the Sons of Confederate Veterans that "the spirit of Jefferson Davis lives in the 1984 Republican Platform." He would tell Southern Partisan magazine that after the Civil War, "a lot of Southerners identified with the Democrat Party because of the radical Republicans we had at the time." Lott also called the Civil War, the "war of Northern aggression" during the interview
1988
Representative Lott is elected to the Senate.
1990
Lott is one of 34 senators to vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1990. The legislation was sponsored by Republican Sen. Bob Dole and made it easier for victims of employment discrimination to win court cases. Lott is also one of four senators to oppose legislation that would force the Justice Department to keep hate-crime statistics tracking race- and prejudice-based crimes.
1992
The senator gives a keynote address at a Council of Conservative Citizens gathering. The CCC is a direct descendant of the Southern white citizen councils that resisted civil rights for blacks. He is quoted as saying that "the people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy. Let's take it in the right direction, and our children will be the beneficiaries." Lott gave three speeches before the group in the 1990s and he has published several columns in the group's magazine, a publication that has advocated segregation. (The senator is currently pictured on the organization's Web page where he is heralded for his work stopping the "illegal alien invasion.")
1995
Lott publicly scolds Rep. Bennie Thompson, an African-American Democrat from his state, for pressuring the government to unseal records relating to the 1966 murder of a civil-rights activist. Thompson was intervening on behalf of a prosecutor who sought to reopen a case against a Klansman who had been freed when a late-'60s jury failed to reach a verdict in the murder trial. "Bennie Thompson would do well to tend to his job in Washington," Lott told the press. "Because we've got a lot of very important issues to work on that affect the Delta and his constituency and leave legal matters and lawsuits to district attorneys and the FBI and people involved."
1997
Lott is photographed standing with the national leaders of the CCC in his Senate office. He later denies "firsthand knowledge" of the group, but subsequently is forced to acknowledge that his self-described favorite uncle is a director of the group.
Dec. 5, 2002
At a celebration honoring the 100th birthday of Strom Thurmond, Lott tells the audience: "I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president [in 1948], 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." A delayed furor ensues after media observers point out that Thurmond's Dixiecrat campaign followed the South Carolina senator's decision to lead several Democratic delegates from Southern states in a walkout from their party's national convention. The Thurmond camp subsequently ran a nearly single-issue anti-civil rights campaign that was provoked by a pro-civil-rights convention speech given by Minneapolis mayor Hubert Humphrey as he made racial equality a plank in the party's platform.
Today
Trying to stamp out an increasingly heated eight-day political firestorm, Lott apologizes again for "reopening old wounds and hurting so many Americans." He does not offer his resignation as majority leader, ignoring demands made by the Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP and pundits and pols from both parties that he step down. "I'm not about to resign for an accusation that I'm something I'm not," Lott said.
from here
This idiot should lose his job.
Introduction
Trent Lott has had a rough week. Eight days ago, Lott made statements that implied he supported centenarian Sen. Strom Thurmond's pro-segregation 1948 presidential bid. Ever since the scandal-generating birthday bash, Lott has been finding himself under a steadily growing attack.
Today, the senator from Mississippi asked the nation for its "forbearance and forgiveness" and called segregation "immoral" and "a stain on our nation's soul." His mea culpa was a far cry from last week's terse apology that referred to Jim Crow laws as "discarded policies." The "sharecropper's son," as Lott described himself, spoke from his hometown of Pascagoula, Miss., where he denied ever having said he favored segregation. The time line below tells a different story and traces the former Ole Miss cheerleader and soon-to-be--if he survives politically--Senate majority leader's long and tangled history with race
Early 1960's
Lott--a University of Mississippi cheerleader and president of the Sigma Nu fraternity--leads the fight to keep his frat segregated. At Ole Miss, desegregation efforts reached a flash point after the arrival of a black student, James Meredith, triggered waves of riots and National Guardsmen were called in to secure the campus. Lott would later say: "Yes, you could say I favored segregation then. I don't now ? The main thing was, I felt the federal government had no business sending in troops telling the state what to do."
1968
Lott gets his first job working for Mississippi Democrat Rep. William Colmer, a fiery segregationist, as a congressional aide. Colmer is perhaps most famous for using his position as chairman of the House Rules Committee to stymie civil-rights legislation.
1972
Lott is elected to the House of Representatives.
1978
Representative Lott spearheads a successful effort to posthumously restore U.S. citizenship to Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Lott is later awarded the United Daughters of Confederacy medal for his work.
1979
Lott joins a bipartisan group that supports a constitutional amendment to prohibit busing to desegregate schools.
1980
At a presidential-campaign rally for candidate Ronald Reagan in Mississippi, Lott follows Sen. Strom Thurmond to the podium and tells the crowd, "You know, if we had elected this man 30 years ago, we wouldn't be in the mess we are today." The comment is very similar to the senator's more recent remark praising Thurmond's 1948 bid for the presidency as a Dixiecrat.
1981
Lott is one of 24 representatives to vote against extending the Voting Rights Act, legislation that eliminates obstacles to the voting booth for minorities. Also that year, Lott files a Supreme Court friend-of-the-court brief supporting a tax exemption for South Carolina's Bob Jones University, a school most famous for its discriminatory policies and for banning interracial dating. He argued that "racial discrimination does not always violate public policy."
1982
The Reagan administration is embarrassed after Lott's letter to the president, which urged him to reverse a longstanding law withholding tax exemptions from schools that discriminate, becomes public. Lott was lobbying the administration on behalf of Bob Jones University. The representative received an answer from Reagan--"I think we should" scrawled in the margins of his memo--and forwarded the president's remark to high-ranking Justice Department and Treasury officials. Reagan initially sides with Lott, but after ensuing controversy the decision is modified.
1983
Lott and 97 others in the House vote against making Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday. Senator Thurmond votes in favor of the legislation. Lott would later tell Southern Partisan magazine, "Look at the cost involved in the Martin Luther King holiday and the fact that we have not done it for a lot of other people that were more deserving."
1984
While serving as chairman of the Republican Party's Platform Committee, Lott tells a meeting of the Sons of Confederate Veterans that "the spirit of Jefferson Davis lives in the 1984 Republican Platform." He would tell Southern Partisan magazine that after the Civil War, "a lot of Southerners identified with the Democrat Party because of the radical Republicans we had at the time." Lott also called the Civil War, the "war of Northern aggression" during the interview
1988
Representative Lott is elected to the Senate.
1990
Lott is one of 34 senators to vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1990. The legislation was sponsored by Republican Sen. Bob Dole and made it easier for victims of employment discrimination to win court cases. Lott is also one of four senators to oppose legislation that would force the Justice Department to keep hate-crime statistics tracking race- and prejudice-based crimes.
1992
The senator gives a keynote address at a Council of Conservative Citizens gathering. The CCC is a direct descendant of the Southern white citizen councils that resisted civil rights for blacks. He is quoted as saying that "the people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy. Let's take it in the right direction, and our children will be the beneficiaries." Lott gave three speeches before the group in the 1990s and he has published several columns in the group's magazine, a publication that has advocated segregation. (The senator is currently pictured on the organization's Web page where he is heralded for his work stopping the "illegal alien invasion.")
1995
Lott publicly scolds Rep. Bennie Thompson, an African-American Democrat from his state, for pressuring the government to unseal records relating to the 1966 murder of a civil-rights activist. Thompson was intervening on behalf of a prosecutor who sought to reopen a case against a Klansman who had been freed when a late-'60s jury failed to reach a verdict in the murder trial. "Bennie Thompson would do well to tend to his job in Washington," Lott told the press. "Because we've got a lot of very important issues to work on that affect the Delta and his constituency and leave legal matters and lawsuits to district attorneys and the FBI and people involved."
1997
Lott is photographed standing with the national leaders of the CCC in his Senate office. He later denies "firsthand knowledge" of the group, but subsequently is forced to acknowledge that his self-described favorite uncle is a director of the group.
Dec. 5, 2002
At a celebration honoring the 100th birthday of Strom Thurmond, Lott tells the audience: "I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president [in 1948], 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." A delayed furor ensues after media observers point out that Thurmond's Dixiecrat campaign followed the South Carolina senator's decision to lead several Democratic delegates from Southern states in a walkout from their party's national convention. The Thurmond camp subsequently ran a nearly single-issue anti-civil rights campaign that was provoked by a pro-civil-rights convention speech given by Minneapolis mayor Hubert Humphrey as he made racial equality a plank in the party's platform.
Today
Trying to stamp out an increasingly heated eight-day political firestorm, Lott apologizes again for "reopening old wounds and hurting so many Americans." He does not offer his resignation as majority leader, ignoring demands made by the Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP and pundits and pols from both parties that he step down. "I'm not about to resign for an accusation that I'm something I'm not," Lott said.
from here
