Attorney General Jim Hood did an excellent job of laying out his decision not to join other state attorneys general in filing suit against the federal government over recently passed health care reform.

Hood did two key things:

1. He acknowledged his personal thoughts on the matter and how he set them aside.
2. He detailed how hard he dug to discover whether or not this was a worthwhile endeavor.

Via the Jackson Free Press:

Hood said he had little taste for the suit that Barbour instructed him to join, but did enough research to declare the endeavor a pointless venture.

“I can’t let my bias and where my heart is in trying to help people get in the way of my job as the state’s lawyer, so I had a duty to give a good close look to see if the (law) was constitutional,” Hood said, adding that he had a difficult time locating lawyers willing to scrutinize the likelihood of a successful suit against the federal government.

“I had trouble getting a constitutional lawyer to actually talk to me about it. I mean, they were just scoffing at it,” Hood told an audience of 50. “I went everywhere. Finally I walked down here to (The Mississippi College School of Law) and got (professor) Matt Steffey, sat him down, and made him get down in the ditch with me and go through this, and discover what could be illegal about this Congressional act. But there was nothing that I could find. The only way this could be illegal is if the Supreme Court … were to reverse hundreds of years of case law.”

Hood said he informed Barbour of the fruitlessness of the suit, and suggested the governor refrain from investing heavily in court fees on the case.

We’re blessed to have someone who puts the state’s interests above their own political interests. Unfortunately, Gov. Barbour does not regularly do this.

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This is a fabulous read by a Mississippian and nationally syndicated columnist. Via NEMS360.com:

Whether he’s dismissing the national shame of slavery, shoveling Katrina relief funds to insurance companies instead of victims, posturing for a national audience that cares not how little he’s done for most Mississippians, Haley keeps a broad smile on his face. He seems like a favorite uncle, the one who made silver dollars come out of his ears.

Only Haley’s silver dollars don’t go to the children. They go elsewhere, to corporations and foreign countries, at least if you judge by per-capita income of my state’s citizens – still the nation’s lowest.

When Haley Barbour was running Reagan’s Mississippi presidential campaign, he must have noticed that sometimes the truth got in the way of a good story. And that Ronald Reagan instinctively knew that whiners were never winners.

Reagan had that way of being relentlessly chipper about any set of circumstances, playing such a good fiddle tune that it didn’t much matter what was burning. Swing your partners, do-si-do.

Haley can do that Pollyanna thing well, too. He can ignore abject poverty, statistics, children without insurance, the history of slavery, criticism, whatever you got. He ignores it, poo-poos it, gladhands it.

Go read the entire column. It’s a hoot and a holler!

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Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant. Sen. Alan Nunnelee. Gov. Haley Barbour.

When people with mental illnesses start getting turned back into the cold and end up spending time in our jails because we do not have suitable hospitals for them, blame the three men above. They drove the budget that did the damage.

Via The Clarion-Ledger:

Among the losers are the state’s 15 community mental health centers, which provide a range of mental health, substance abuse and intellectual disabilities services to thousands of residents in all 82 counties.

The Board of Mental Health voted at its monthly meeting late last week to notify the centers that they must pay the Medicaid match debt owed or they no longer would be approved providers.

The Department of Mental Health followed up with a letter to the six organizations it says are in arrears, ordering them to pay by June 7.

That leaves those organizations three options: pony up, fold or take their battle to court.

One strong advocate for mental health facilities is Sen. Hob Bryan, D-Amory, who chairs the Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee. Here’s his take on the matter:

“My hope is that everybody realizes how serious the situation is, and let’s see if we can work something out sooner rather than later.”

At least one person fully realizes the seriousness of the problem.

“I can’t come up with $12 million without closing facilities,” said Ed LeGrand, the department’s executive di-rector.

This is a serious issue that has never received the attention from Phil Bryant and Haley Barbour it deserves.

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We knew the debate was coming, and now here it is: How much should the cap on damages be for oil companies involved in an oil spill?

Here’s what is a brief summary of the schools of thoughts, via The Clarion-Ledger:

One proposal from Democratic Sens. Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Ben Nelson of Florida would increase the cap to $10 billion.

Menendez said the Senate needs to “stand up to big oil companies and make them pay for their own mess.”

The other proposal, from Republican Sens. David Vitter of Louisiana and Jeff Sessions of Alabama, would increase the cap to an amount equal to a company’s last four quarters of profits or $150 million, whichever is greater. House Republicans plan to introduce a companion bill.

Supporters said that measure differentiates between large companies like BP, which operated the well now gushing oil into the Gulf, and smaller companies that would be crippled by a cap in the billions.

“The smaller operator would be run out of business,” Republican Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi said. “It’s important … to make sure the market isn’t completely dominated by these gigantic oil companies and countries like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.”

Granted, concern for smaller oil companies should be taken into consideration. It’s often smaller companies who are more nimble, efficient and faster that drive innovation in an industry.

At the same time, the size of the company does not in any way relate to the damage that is done when a rig explodes and oil is dumped into the ocean. If the rig causing the devastation in the Gulf had been owned and operated by a much smaller company, the damage would still be the same.

Why, then, should larger companies be held to a higher standard or smaller companies to a smaller standard? Should not the standard be based not on the size of the company but on the cost to clean up such a disaster?

What Sens. Wicker, Vitter and Sessions advocate is protectionism for corporations, first, and the welfare of our property and our people second.

That’s not to say the $10 billion cap is the magic number, but a unilateral approach related to the cost of clean-up seems much fairer to the people, the states and the planet than does the protectionism of a sliding scale based on company profits.

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Want to both acknowledge the disaster that looms and still explain to everyone that the Mississippi Gulf Coast is open for business? Let me give you first-person account of the way to do it.

Via Terry Cassreino writing at Better MS Report:

A steady, late afternoon breeze from the south cooled the beach across from the Courtyard Inn near downtown – and with it came the unmistakable, strong odor of oil.

This was not the odor of gasoline or a lawn mower.

This was no doubt oil, part of the thousands of barrels of crude that have continued to spew for more than a month from a leak at an underwater well some 5,000 feet beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana Coast.

But save for the strong stench of oil, you wouldn’t have known the biggest ecological disaster was taking place miles south of here. It was business as usual along the Mississippi Coast on Saturday as visitors and residents relaxed on the beach unfazed by the oil spill.

My family was among the many beachgoers. I brought my wife and two children to Gulfport late Saturday to relax on the beach and wade in the warm, clear waters of the Mississippi Sound. It was our second trip to Harrison County beaches in two weeks.

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Erin Brockovich was on the coast this weekend, and she summed up perfectly the irritation and frustration with not only BP but with leaders like Gov. Barbour and Lt. Gov. Bryant over their apologists role in this entire matter.

Via The Sun-Herald:

She sees a common denominator in all the environmental cases she’s worked on since 1991.

“What I believe is that the underlying root cause of all of these problems and these disasters is deceit,” Brockovich said in an interview before she spoke Saturday morning to about 20 people in Biloxi who responded to a legal advertisement from The Cochran Law Firm.

“Out of somebody’s fear, greed or haste, they cause a disaster that affects us all. And I’ve been doing this for 19 years. My job is not about standing here bashing industry. That is not what I am about. I have family that works for oil companies.

“It’s about getting them to be open and honest and not act out of fear or greed, but have some morality over money. I think we’d have a lot less accidents. This is a true disaster and tragedy that none of us can take back now. So I do see a common theme. We cut corners. We tell little fibs. We know. We’re afraid to speak the truth. And we get greedy. It doesn’t have to be that way.”

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Here’s our fourth hit in the Nunnelee’s Legacy campaign.

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The Mississippi Democratic Party continued its series of updates on the budget legacy of Appropriations Committee Chairman Alan Nunnelee. Nunnelee recently referred to his work on this year’s state budget as “one of the legacies I’ll leave.” [Clarion Ledger, 4/21/10]

THE LEGACY OF ALAN NUNNELEE, REPORT #4

The Lafayette County School District continued the process of letting employees go at the beginning of this week, citing a shrinking budget. This brings the total count to 23 employees who have lost their jobs since last Thursday. Seventeen others are retiring, and many will not be replaced.

At Lafayette Elementary School, seven employees were terminated. At Lafayette Upper Elementary, six employees, the activity teachers including the library assistant, computer teacher, music and art were terminated. At Lafayette Middle School, four employees including an assistant coach, library and art teacher, were terminated. Lafayette High School had six employees let go, according to Superintendent Mike Foster. [Oxford Eagle,5/14/10]

“The Nunnelee budget has devastating effects on our public education system and our ability to prepare our kids to compete for good, high-paying jobs,” said Mississippi Democratic Party Executive Director Sam Hall. “Nunnelee wants to run on his record and his legacy but Mississippi families are learning how dreadful a record it is. Teachers, law enforcement officers, school students, even librarians – no one is safe from Alan Nunnelee’s knife. The only job he’s looking out for is his own.”

Schools across North Mississippi will be forced to make similar cuts as they approach the new budget year. [Monroe County Journal, 5/12/10]

The Mississippi Democratic Party began exploring the implications of Alan Nunnelee’s legacy in this state budget by raising concern over his “pay cut for thousands of teachers, law enforcement officers and other state and local employees” and continued raising concern about budget cuts that directly affect children. [Mississippi Democratic Party, 5/10/10; 5/12/10]

For more information, please contact Sam Hall at (601) 969-2913 or via email to sam@mississippidemocrats.org.

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Political columnist Sid Salter today highlighted Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant’s disastrous handling of the oil spill, while at the same time giving credit to those who showed better leadership and instincts, such as Gov. Barbour and Rep. Brandon Jones.

Via The Clarion-Ledger:

Mississippi officials are walking a difficult tightrope between trying to honestly deal with both the realities and the fears of the Deepwater Horizon oil well accident in the Gulf and immediate concerns for salvaging the current tourist season for Coast residents whose livelihoods depend upon it.

However well intentioned his remarks, Republican Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant was the first official to fall off that tightrope last week.

During a May 12 speech at the Coastal Development Strategies Conference at the Mississippi Coast Convention Center, Bryant told a story about an encounter with a Coast resident earlier in the week who told him he could smell “gasoline” when he walked outside his home.

“Well, he might want to check his lawn mower,” Bryant said. “That is not gasoline coming out of the Gulf.”

If it were, “we wouldn’t need refineries,” Bryant said. “If anybody says ‘Oh I can smell it,’ … no you can’t.”

The remarks – which Bryant later sought to clarify as remarks made to protect Gulf Coast tourism from unreasonable fears – brought a torrent of criticism of Bryant in the Gulf Coast media and accusations of insensitivity from the Mississippi Democratic Party.

In hindsight, Bryant’s “lawn mower” anecdote might better have been left in his speechwriter’s laptop.

Needless to say, the reminders of how unprepared Phil Bryant is to be governor of Mississippi just keep coming.

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Sen. David Baria recently sent a letter to Gov. Barbour, Lt. Gov. Bryant and others about his concerns over their lack of leadership on the oil spill.

Baria has been getting a lot of attention for his letter, including this interview on WLOX, which is embedded below.

It’s not embedding correctly, so here is the link.

You can also read the full story by WLOX here.

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