Evangelicals have no reason whatsoever to continue wrongminded support for evil Donald Trump

https://www.jacksonfreepress.com/news/2020/feb/03/opinion-i-quit-republican-party-i-will-now-work-ag/

Fred Rand- an opinion writer for the Jackson Free Press

"I will raise that small voice as loudly and frequently as I can to call out hypocrisy..." 

Maine Writer opinion - All Republicans, who ignored the evidence against Donald Trump during the excellent prosecution presented by Rep. Schiff and the Democrats who led the Senate impeachment trial, were voting on the wrong side of history. (Yes, that includes Senator Susan Collins!) 

Donald Trump is guilty of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Fred Rand published two echo opinions in the Mississippi newspaper Jacksonville Free Press in Mississippi:

"I Quit the Republican Party! I Will Now Work Against GOP, Trump"

"Southern Evangelical: Trump 'Fits the Scriptural Definition of a Fool'": Honorable Richard Burr and the Honorable Thom Tillis.

Vote Blue!

You may have read the Jan. 17 letter calling on Richard Burr and Thom Tillis to do their sworn duty and hear the evidence U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff and other House managers presented without prejudice or partisan motives in Donald Trump's impeachment trial.

The long epistle ended on what are sound, Scripture-based, conservative reasons to question Evangelical support of Trump with a solemn pledge of my own:

"This should be a search for the truth, which all Americans can support. I urge you to take up that debate and represent in word and deed the best interests and the will of all Americans."

If Senate Republicans fail to honor their sworn oath to support and defend the Constitution and find out the truth, I must withdraw my membership in the GOP and work against Republicans in November. I am one small voice, but I will raise that small voice as loudly and frequently as I can to call out hypocrisy and hold our elected leaders accountable for their actions. I believe God will support my cause and strengthen my lone voice through my faith in Jesus Christ and my belief in His Truth."

I tried to withhold my personal judgement in this trial until all arguments were made. As I said in my last column, I thought that the House managers easily won their case. Even some Republican senators, like Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, credited the Democrats with a win on the facts. But, I struggled in anticipation of what dawn would bring our republic. Would the GOP senators come to their senses and hold this president accountable?

As comments by GOP senators came out on social media, the message was clear. The Republican Party is now under the complete control of our new national dictator, Donald J. Trump. In the most horrifying display of self-abasement ever seen in the proud history of our country, the United States Senate has proven itself to be spineless cowards. This was a choice they made. And they are blindly leaping to their political deaths like the lemmings they have shown themselves to be.

Now they have to live with it.

Echo from Mississippi - Confederate racist statues

Take them down. Every last one of them.

James M. Thomas

Confederate Monuments and White Victimhood

Opinion echo by James M. Thomas, published in the Jackson Free Press, in Jackson Mississippi

Carved from marble, the University of Mississippi's Confederate monument measures nearly 30 feet in height. A Confederate soldier stands atop its large base, saluting with a rifle by his side. Photo by Donna Lad

JACKSON FREE PRESS- A towering monument to the Civil War Confederacy stands guard over the entrance of the University of Mississippi, where James M. Thomas has worked the past seven years. 

In fact, the monument, commissioned and funded by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1906, is in remembrance to "the valiant heroes of Lafayette County."

As a scholar who studies the causes and consequences of racism, I am often asked for my thoughts on our University's monument, and Confederate iconography more generally.

A recent report from the Southern Poverty Law Center situates the university's Confederate monument within a larger effort across the American South "to create a more acceptable version of the region's past" (in other words, they are marble "revisionist" symbols.)

Moreover, the timing of these monuments' construction reveals their racist motives. Most were commissioned between 1900 and 1920, and then from the mid-1950s through the end of the 1960s. Their commissioning was concurrent with the enacting of Jim Crow legislation, the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, and the modern Civil Rights Movement. They reflect and amplify white southerners' racial backlash to significant political gains made by an emancipated African American population.

Carved from marble, the University of Mississippi's Confederate monument measures nearly 30 feet in height. A Confederate soldier stands atop its large base, saluting with a rifle by his side. Two cavalry swords crossing one another are etched into the base, along with a passage from Lord Byron's "The Siege of Corinth" and an elegiac couplet by the Greek poet Simonides. Translated, it reads, "Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to Spartan law, we lie." The couplet is identical to that which is engraved on the monument to the Spartans who died at the Battle of Thermopylae.

The term "stranger" was a common rhetorical device within ancient Greek epitaphs for making sympathetic appeals to passers-by. In the monument's epitaph, the passerby, or "stranger," is compelled to tell all who will listen that the Confederates gave their lives to a noble cause. Their death was honorable, and their service obedient.

(revisionists!)

In 2016, then-university Chancellor Jeffrey Vitter approved the addition of a plaque to be placed in front of the monument. The original wording noted the construction of monuments located all across the South, during the post-Reconstruction period, as a response to Confederate veterans' passing from the scene in increasing numbers. It also noted the monument's significance as the rally point for segregationists in 1962, that were attempting to prevent James Meredith from integrating the campus. The original wording closed by stating the monument is a reminder of both the university's past and its present commitment to becoming a more inclusive campus.

The plaque's addition was met with mixed response. Defenders of the monument claimed the plaque diminished the sacrifice those former university students made. Others claimed its wording failed to acknowledge the preservation of slavery as the true cause of the Confederacy. Still others asserted the plaque co-opted later struggles to integrate white institutions, and minimized the university's violent resistance to its integration in 1962.

Following several weeks of protests, letters and appeals, a chancellor-appointed committee of four faculty members drafted and approved new language for the plaque. The revised wording emphasized the monument's role in promoting "Lost Cause" ideology, and the significance of slavery in the Confederacy's formation and maintenance.

Many thought the revised language was an improvement. Others argued it further diminished the former students' sacrifice. Still others maintained that the very presence of the monument served as tacit support for a violent system of racial domination.

So what does James M. Thomas think?

I think that when white Confederate sympathizers demand that we honor their dead, they ignobly play the victims twice over. First, in proclaiming as virtuous their ancestors' sacrifice to a Lost Cause. And again when demanding that we honor such shameful deeds.

I think Confederate monuments should be removed from public spaces. I think their cheap, bronze and zinc casts should be melted down, their marble bases ground into dust. I do not think monuments to soldiers who fought and died to preserve white supremacy belong in front of our community courthouses, public squares or public universities. To be sure, if a museum wishes to house them, then let those museums have them. But I doubt many do.

Some claim these monuments have public value. But their claims make it clear that these monuments' public value is dependent upon a definition of "public" so narrow as to only include aggrieved white people.

Others declare these monuments honor the brave men who defended their homes from federal invasion. Yet these declarations willfully ignore that enslaved labor and its profits built and maintained those homes, and that slavery was the principle cause for secession.

Some proclaim those who fought and died for the Confederacy had no choice, most of them were poor farmers, and few of them owned slaves. To be sure, the percentage of households that owned slaves varied—from 12 percent in Maryland, to 49 percent in Mississippi. Yet the men, women and children who lived in bondage had no choice in the matter of their enslavement. The men who fought to defend slavery had, at minimum, more choice than none at all.

Still others will accuse me of destroying history. On the contrary, I demand a clearer history. Confederate monuments simplify and obfuscate the historical record. Scholarly texts on America's Civil War are plenty. Our precious resources are better spent supporting public libraries in which those texts are housed.

There are those who believe that the men these monuments honor were just men of their time, and should be judged against the values of their era and not ours. They must also believe that the nearly four million enslaved men, women and children either had no values, or shared the values of their enslavers.

Finally, there are those moderates of whom Martin Luther King Jr. warned us about, who offer contextualization as a great educational compromise for passers-by. Yet a plaque in the place of a monument would serve the same purpose, but without the hypocrisy.

Take them down. Every last one of them.

James M. Thomas is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Mississippi. 

Failed Mississippi leadership - Cindy Hyde Smith caught in health care lies

If you are a cancer survivor as my sister and I, and many of our loved ones, are, insurance coverage for pre-existing conditions is enormously important.*

Echo opinion published in the Jackson Free Press in Mississippi: Factchecking Hyde-Smith, She Lied About Pre-Existing Conditions

By Vicki Slater

We've heard a lot about protecting insurance coverage for pre-existing conditions this election cycle. Mississippians, like all Americans, have anxiety about maintaining that coverage. Cancer survivors, diabetics, heart patients or parents of children born with disabilities do not want to return to pre-Affordable Care Act days when those same conditions were grounds for denial of insurance claims and even cancellation of coverage.

If you are a cancer survivor as my sister and I, and many of our loved ones, are, insurance coverage for pre-existing conditions is enormously important.

U.S. Senate candidate Mike Espy campaigned on protecting health insurance coverage for pre-existing conditions. 

On the other hand, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith voted to destroy, repeal and deny that coverage in both the Mississippi Senate and the United States Senate.

During the only debate between the candidates, Cindy Hyde-Smith accused Mike Espy of discriminating against an employee with a child with a pre-existing condition. "There is a story that just broke today where my opponent discriminated against an employee because they had a child with a pre-existing health-care need," Hyde-Smith told the debate panel. "My opponent was charged against the EEOC, and the individual won. My opponent was guilty of taking advantage and not promoting an employee because of a pre-existing health care. I care about all Mississippians."

This statement by Hyde-Smith is patently false.

LIE!  Hyde-Smith is referring to an employee's situation that had nothing to do with insurance coverage for pre-existing conditions.

In 1987, James Patterson began working for the USDA, six years before Espy became secretary of agriculture in 1993. In 1990, Patterson began working for the Foreign Agricultural Service, a unit within the USDA. In early 1992, Patterson applied to serve as agricultural attache to Mexico. If assigned to Mexico, Patterson would have to move there, which he was willing do and move his entire family there. He had a daughter born with a congenital heart defect that required an initial surgery and continued care.




Before Espy worked there, the USDA assured Patterson that it had no problem with the family moving to Mexico.

#The U.S. State Department must sign off on Foreign Agricultural Service officers. In 1992, the State Department denied a medical waiver for the daughter to move to Mexico because the distance from medical care might put her life in danger and/or cost the taxpayers too much money to travel back and forth to the United States for the care she needed. The State Department sent the file back to the USDA. At no time did the State Department or the USDA make any statement or take any position to deny health insurance coverage to this child with a pre-existing medical condition. Note that Espy was not secretary of agriculture at this time or an employee of the State Department.

#Federal employees were not covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act, which forbade denial of a promotion based on an employee's relationship with someone who has a disability. Federal employees were covered by the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which was similar but not explicit. There was no clear law and, at any rate, it was not the USDA that was denying the promotion; it was the State Department. At no time was the issue of health insurance for the daughter's pre-existing medical condition an issue.

#In 1992, the year before Mike Espy became agriculture secretary, Patterson filed a charge with the EEOC. Health-insurance coverage for the daughter's pre-existing condition was not an issue in the EEOC charge.

#Late in 1992, after Patterson's application for foreign service, Congress passed amendments to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 to include the protections in the Americans with Disabilities Act. It was unclear if these amendments were retroactive.

#In 1993 or 1994, while Patterson's 1992 EEOC charge was still pending, the Department of Agriculture entered into a mediation to resolve the situation in a way that would afford Patterson the foreign assignment that he applied for. The USDA, by then led by Espy, offered a five-year assignment to the post that Mr. Patterson that could be converted to a permanent assignment with separate maintenance (paying for) the mother and child to remain in the United States during the foreign assignment.

#The State Department's medical staff and the Department of Agriculture medical staff were of the opinion that the daughter's condition was very high risk and that the foreign assignment would render her condition life-threatening. At no time was health-insurance coverage for Patterson's daughter's pre-existing condition an issue. (Mike Espy was secretary of agriculture at this time).

In April 1994, U.S. Sen. Tom Harkins wrote a letter to Secretary Espy opining that The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 had been amended in 1992 to cover Patterson's situation. At no time, either before or after Espy's tenure, was health-insurance coverage for the child's pre-existing condition an issue.

In August 1994, Secretary Espy wrote to Sen. Harkins explaining all the attempts to settle the matter with Patterson and Patterson's rejection of all the offers. Patterson had insisted that an official decision on the record from the USDA be completed by the end of the summer. Health-insurance coverage for his daughter s pre-existing condition was still not an issue.

#In 1995, after Espy had left, the EEOC issued the decision Patterson wanted, saying he and his daughter and family could move to Mexico. The EEOC did not address health-insurance coverage his daughter because it was never an issue.

The facts show that Hyde-Smith made patently false claims.
Ironically, Hyde-Smith also said in the debate: "I strongly believe in the pre-existing condition."

Notice that she did not say she strongly believes in health-insurance coverage for pre-existing conditions, just that she believes that pre-existing conditions exist. But then she added: "Obamacare is the worst thing that happened to us." She said to end the ACA because "free-market opportunities for insurance companies to sell across state lines is vital."

Where does she think coverage for pre-existing conditions comes from? It is in the provisions of the Affordable Care Act. If you "end Obamacare," you stop coverage for pre-existing conditions, period. Prior to the Affordable Care Act, we had free-market opportunities for insurance companies, and we all know we had no insurance coverage for pre-existing conditions then.

Lies kill. And this lie told by Cindy Hyde-Smith will kill people when she votes to repeal Obamacare.

Mississippi voters are busy trying to make a living, raising up their children and grandchildren and caring for the least of these. Mississipians do not have time to run around behind a grown U.S. senator, whose words cannot be trusted to determine if at any given moment she is lying or telling half-truths or, in fact, telling the whole truth. We do not have time to work to undo the caricature she makes of Mississippians, or the embarrassment she brings to us and the defamations she speaks of us.

Instead, Mississippi deserved serious, mature senator, someone we can believe. We need a senator who puts Mississippi first, instead of 50th. We need a senator who respects our tax dollars enough not to lie to us, but who will go to Washington to represent all of us.

Mike Espy respected Mississippi enough to tell the truth in the debate; Cindy Hyde-Smith did not.  Mississippians and our loved ones with pre-existing conditions deserve a fair chance and good health, peace of mind and financial stability.

Vicki Slater is an attorney in Jackson, Miss.

*Although this opinion column was published before the Mississippi special 2018 senatorial election, the intention is relevant and I slightly modified the tense of some sentences to reflect the urgency of the health care coverage debate.  (IMO Cindy Hyde-Smith is a racist idiot.)

Mississippi echo opinion - enemy of lies and coruption

Jackson Free Press, Mississippi editorial - "We are here to serve American democracy despite any elected official's (especially Donald Trump) open disdain for it. We are not the "enemy of the people"—we are the enemy of lies and corruption."

The Jackson Free Press, and its editors and journalists, have come under fire many times since we launched 16 years ago in Mississippi's capital city. This newspaper was months old when we published facts about the myths behind the Iraq War as a cover story just after it started, amid patriotic fervor and a near-clampdown on any criticism of George W. Bush's rationale.

Popular former Mayor Frank Melton yelled across a restaurant 12 years ago that he would run us out of business in six months because we reported myriad facts about him that other media had ignored until we came along, eventually leading to him facing two trials and losing a re-election bid. We were the only outlet to report that he was lying under oath during his campaign, even as other media knew.

Local developers and businessmen were furious when we reported that they owned potential waterfront property along the "Two Lakes" footprint, and that many of them had put money into an undisclosed political action committee to elect a pro-Lake mayor—names we had to fight to uncover and reveal. 

For years, some of them disparaged and blacklisted this newspaper, even sending the editor drunken emails in the evening about how terrible we are. (To be fair, that person eventually apologized.)

When the editor of the Jackson Free Press interviewed former Sheriff Malcolm McMillin in response to allegations that he had covered up details of a local drunk-driving tragedy, a local blogger, who uses a fake name in his posts, called her a "journalistic slut." The blogger was pushing the conspiracy and had not tried to interview the sheriff.

In the early years, a conservative blog called for boycotts of the Jackson Free Press because we dared talk about the racism behind crime rhetoric that a white district attorney candidate used to disparage his black opponent. One commenter even started a "parody" blog linking the picture of the young daughter of a backer of this newspaper to a picture of genital warts.

A man from Brooklyn, N.Y., who supports the Confederate flag threatened the newspaper's male publisher physically and by phone and email for weeks because we support changing the Mississippi flag.

In a heated U.S. Senate race between the right-wing State Sen. Chris McDaniel and incumbent Thad Cochran, this newspaper exposed how the Republican Party was directing money into PACs for black leaders, so they could gin up support for Cochran, who had a less-than-stellar voting record on many issues affecting black Mississippians, including opposing a congressional apology for doing too little about lynching.

Now, as national progressive media publish glowing reports of Jackson's current mayor's promises on criminal-justice reform, the JFP publishes critiques of his decisions to allow the police department to participate in Jeff Sessions' controversial "Project Eject," to continue withholding names of police officers who shoot and kill citizens and to promote mugshots of accused juveniles tried as adults, as well as agreeing to "perp walk" juveniles for media. We endorsed the mayor, but it is still our job to hold him accountable. (To date, our coverage led to the mayor revoking the mugshot and perp-walk policies.)

When we broke the story that Gov. Phil Bryant had (again) declared Confederate Heritage Month, his press person (again) would not return our calls to confirm or deny, later giving a statement to the Associated Press after our story went viral nationally.

To add journalistic insult to injury, some newsroom leaders in the state ask not to appear alongside our journalists and editors in discussions because they apparently fear we might bring up some of the under-covered stories in the state. And we might—respectfully, of course.

This is a small list of the responses this newspaper has faced for doing our damn job and challenging the entrenched status quo in Mississippi. But we continue doing our job to afflict the comfortable with accurate journalism and, in so doing, comfort and help those afflicted by it, to borrow from an 1893 phrase about the role of a free press.

If you are smart, you do not go into journalism, or start a newspaper, to have citizens, elected officials or a political party universally love you. If you are serious about doing serious journalism, you get into this industry ready to be pummeled near daily, personally and as an organization, for reporting facts that one or more people would rather you ignore. Journalism requires a tough skin and hard work, and we have the First Amendment to protect our role for a reason. We are the watchdogs of democracy and truth when we do our jobs well. It is not about soft-pedaling to maintain access; it is about reporting facts.

Good journalism is not designed to make people comfortable, especially public servants whom the public elects and pays to represent us and, ostensibly, to make good decisions. Donald Trump, of course, is pushing the same marginalization of good journalism that we have long faced in Mississippi, so it's not unfamiliar to us. But it is very dangerous to our democracy when the nation's top official works constantly to comfort the very comfortable and afflict the afflicted by creating distrust in those of us willing to report truths he would rather us not.

Newspapers around the nation are publishing editorials today warning about the risk of elected officials weaponizing lies about the media in order to cover up their own corruption and malfeasance. We are not here to reinforce what any public servant of any party tells us we need to support. We are not here to dote on the governor at cocktail parties so we get invited to the next signing of a discriminatory bill. We are not here to reinforce the views of any elected official or political party, even if we endorsed that candidate.

In a time when journalism is very difficult to sustain, those who remain in this industry must dig deep into issues that the public does not have the time nor the expertise to investigate for themselves. We are here to give the public information they need. We are here to warn the public about lies, deceit and false information.

We are here to serve American democracy despite any elected official's open disdain for it. We are not the "enemy of the people"—we are the enemy of lies and corruption.

Mississippi ~ immigrant deportations echo opinion

OPINION: Immigration and the First Amendment ~ an echo opinion published in the Mississippi Jackson Free Press, by Joe Atkins. 

OXFORD, Mississippi —My late friend Marty Fishgold, a longtime labor writer in New York City, liked to say that "good journalism is a subversive activity" because it tells truth to power. 

Veteran Boston journalist Tom Oliphant said "Good reporters are anarchists" because they question all ideologies and authority.

Those are good things, and that's why journalism gets special protection in the First Amendment. It may be the best-known promise in that document and why the constitutions of nations as far-flung as Poland, Brazil, Egypt and Bangladesh include such language as well. One could argue that many of those countries don't practice what they preach. Well, guess what? We don't always, either.

Take the case of Manuel Duran, who currently sits in prison in Jena, Louisiana. 

Duran, who owns the Spanish-language news outlet Memphis Noticias, came to Memphis after working as a reporter in his native El Salvador, a war-and-drug-torn country whose cruelest goons trained at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Ga.

He's now facing deportation back there, perhaps the equivalent of a death sentence.

Let's consider why he sits in prison in Jena, which Father Michael McAndrew, who works with immigrant communities in Greenwood and north Mississippi, says is one of the "worst detention centers" in the U.S. for its treatment of immigrants.

On April 3 in downtown Memphis, police arrested Duran and eight others who were protesting immigration policies. Police said they were blocking a roadway, and Duran refused to move as ordered. The protest also took place without a permit, police said. Two days later, prosecutors dropped charges against Duran.

He was far from a free man, however. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers immediately arrested him and sent him to Jena. ICE officials said he missed a scheduled appearance in an immigration court in Atlanta in 2007 and thus had since been living in the States without legal status. His attorneys said he received no notice to appear that day, and they have asked the Atlanta court to reopen the case.

If Barack Obama were still president, Duran might be free since he has no criminal history other than misdemeanor driving offenses. 

Under President Trump, however, none of the 11 million immigrants in this country without full legal status are even temporarily safe from deportation.

"The actions pursued by government officials in this case threaten core First Amendment freedoms that are essential to our democracy," says a federal petition by the Southern Poverty Law Center seeking Duran's release.

Duran's greatest "crime" may be that he has been critical of the Memphis Police Department in his reporting. In July 2017, he reported in a Facebook post allegations that immigration enforcement officials and Memphis police had joined in a traffic stop operation, despite claims that they do not work together. Memphis police asked him to take down the post. His coverage also raised questions about police handling of the case of a Latino immigrant whose body was found in a police impound lot 49 days after he was shot in a robbery.

The Duran case evokes memories of what happened in Jackson to Daniela Vargas, a 22-year-old native of Argentina who had been living in the U.S. since the age of 7. Despite earlier protection under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, her more recent lapsed status resulted in a March 1 arrest and federal deportation proceedings. A SPLC petition helped win her release nine days later, but her fate remains as uncertain as Manuel Duran's.

Joe Atkins is a veteran journalist, columnist and journalism professor at the University of Mississippi.