Haley barbour why

The sisters had no criminal records before receiving double life sentences for allegedly orchestrating an armed robbery with three teenage boys in Barbour chose not to pardon them, but he did commute their sentences on the bizarre condition that one sister donate a kidney to the other, who needed a transplant because of diabetes.

The sisters, who will remain on parole for the rest of their lives, had asked for full pardons. Of course, 11 th -hour pardon scandals have blown over in the past. Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders.

In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. But it wasn't -- and it isn't -- just Northerners who saw a connection between the Citizens Councils and the Klan.

Here's how the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette explained the history of the Councils in The Delta was home to the Citizens Councils, a name familiar to Southerners who lived through the turbulent s and '60s. The first Citizens Council was organized by ardent segregationists at Indianola during the summer of By the next year, there were 60, members in Mississippi. The councils claimed to oppose violence, but their goal was to prevent black inroads during those nascent days of the civil rights movement and to protect what members characterized as the "Southern way of life.

By their very presence and rhetoric, the councils created a climate in which racial murder could be tolerated still longer in Mississippi.

Bush, whom Barbour used to call Junior. When Barbour required a little air, he could step out onto his private balcony and gaze upon the Capitol, off to his left, and the White House, over to the right -- each of them mere blocks away and with doors that were very responsive to Barbour's knock.

If he desired prandial refreshment, Barbour could stroll down to the Caucus Room, with feasting senators in the lunchtime crowd and a salad on the menu named after him.

That's an insider joke. Barbour is prone to prime steaks with his bourbon, and at the Caucus Room there is always a tender cut waiting for him. There had better be: he founded the joint. Yet even more intriguing than Barbour's decision to forsake this gilded life for the more rustic pleasures of the Mississippi Statehouse is the mere fact of his candidacy. Lobbyists are by definition the champions of special interests, the landlords of the back room with scant interest in the little guy who cannot afford their costly rents.

Their infamous reputation is the reason that, through most of this country's history, the mere idea of a man with such a professional background running for governor would have been risible.

That Haley Barbour may become the first political lobbyist of his stature ever to win a high elective office, indeed, that he is a viable candidate at all, is a weather vane that points vividly to where we are now as a political nation. On a recent Friday morning, a gleaming succession of expensive sedans and S. That guest was President George W. When Ed Gillespie, the Republican Party chairman, came to Jackson in August, he promised that the party would ''do everything that we're legally allowed to do'' for Barbour.

As for the other Republican races this fall, Gillespie allowed that ''they're all important to us, but Haley Barbour and I go way back.

One of Barbour's political skills is his ability to have things both ways. As a man of means running for office in a disadvantaged state, he has employed a folksy conversational insouciance to leaven his aura of privilege even as he is stressing his high-placed connections.

The day before the Bush luncheon, he told The Clarion-Ledger, Jackson's paper, that he and the president were the sort of friends who ''talk politics, prop up our feet, walk over somewhere and get lunch. He seeks the cash because election politics in Mississippi are really no longer much different than they are everywhere else. Old-style retail handshaking and speechifying may still be necessary for cosmetic reasons, but as Senator Thad Cochran, a Mississippi Republican, says, they are ''not nearly as important as having a good television strategy.

It also helps buttress the impression that as a man with access to powerful people he will be a governor with the ability to extract favors for the state. What remains to be seen is whether Barbour can spend himself local. He has, as they say, been away for a while. The son of a lawyer, the grandson of a banker, Barbour comes from Yazoo City, a small town on the fringes of the Mississippi Delta, the vast flood plain that contains some of the richest soil and poorest people in the United States.

Ignatius Semmes Luckett, who went to the University of Mississippi with Barbour, says that the Delta ''was a wonderful place to grow up if you were a privileged white kid. If you had the sensitivity of an anvil, it helped you though. Mississippians frequently describe their politics as ''inbred,'' and the great incubators are the elite Ole Miss fraternities. Barbour enrolled at the university in , and Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi recalls him as ''one of the stars going through rush.

If you needed something, Haley could arrange it. In , he ran for student-body president. Among the candidates was another Delta boy named Walter Thompson. Less than a week before the election, a Barbour campaign worker mimeographed a one-page anti-Thompson screed and, in the dead of night, distributed what became known as ''the smut sheet.

That summer, Barbour presided over 30 counties for Richard Nixon's presidential campaign. Republican politics had begun to offer rare opportunities for a young, talented Mississippian. Goldwater won 87 percent of the vote in Mississippi. With the party only beginning to field candidates, Barbour became a regional power broker while still in his early 20's.

Clarke Reed, a businessman who took on the revival of Republican politics as a personal mission and admired Barbour's efficiency and intensity, says he was ''publicly invisible, doing the work, making the contacts. With Mississippi suddenly in play on a national political level, Reed and Barbour could get an appointment to see virtually any Republican they wanted, including senators, congressmen, President Nixon and members of his cabinet. In the mid's, Barbour joined the family law firm in Yazoo City.

It was in those years, Reed says, that Barbour first ''evolved into lobbying. Lobbying is just another form of advocacy. It's like trying a lawsuit. Seated in his campaign R. He insists that he will be a persuasive advocate for the state.

That ''Mississippi's in crisis'' is a fundament of Barbour's campaign. But Barbour's lobbying partner Lanny Griffith admits that part of the rationale is, ''He's been successful, and it's a way to cap off a career. In his campaign office one recent morning looking eerily energized after he had, as usual, permitted himself four hours' sleep, Gov. Ronnie Musgrove regarded Barbour's revelations skeptically.

For decades, Mississippi has rated near the bottom in nearly every quality-of-life index, including per capita income. The numbers remain bleak, with nearly 18 percent of all residents living below the federal poverty level. Yet, of late, there have also been some causes for optimism. Barbour is running and raising so hard because he has a formidable rival. Musgrove is a man without pedigree, an anti-abortion-rights, bird-hunting conservative Democrat who in many ways embodies the Republican ideal of the self-made man.

Driving around the country and meeting people from all walks of life had a profound effect on Jason Childs, and he began seeing America very differently than the way he had been taught. He saw people, not Christians, not heathens, not the unworthy, he just saw people. His heart changed, his mind opened, and he turned from the evangelical teachings of Liberty University and became an activist against the bigotry and homophobia he had once embraced.

Some had served their time and were released on parole, but some had not. All in all, Barbour issued pardons, including 17 to convicted murderers. There is an odd pattern to some of these, and an odd pattern to the eight men Barbour pardoned in In , Haley Barbour pardoned eight men, all of whom had been convicted of murdering either their wives, ex wives or ex girlfriends.

These men included Michael Davie Graham, who stalked his ex wife for 3 years before shooting her to death with a guage shotgun while she waited at a traffic light, Clarence Jones, whose ex girlfriend had filed multiple assault and trespassing charges against him. Jones waited for her in her apartment and stabbed her 22 times, and Jimmy Lee Avera, who shot and killed his estranged girlfriend while she was pregnant and in front of her two children. David Glenn Gatlin drove nine hours to shoot and kill his estranged wife while she held their infant son, and Anthony McCray, convicted of shooting her to death after an argument.

Dominionists believe that everything in the Bible is true and is to be taken literally, including the sexist, misogynistic and quite frankly, violent way men are to treat women. Women are property, chattel, often worth less than a cow. Because of Eve. Haley Barbour clings to this dogma with both hands. And that is why Barbour thought nothing of wiping the record clean for men who were convicted of murdering women.

Much like the Quiverfull movement, Dominionists do not have respect for women, or see them as equals. Understand, all these murdering, battering men had to do in exchange for these pardons is tell King Haley Barbour that they accepted Jesus as their lord and savior.