Showing his true colors, top-ranking Senate Republican Trent Lott (from Mississippi) said at a birthday party for South Carolina fossil Strom Thurmond that he wished Thurmond had won the Presidency on a racist ticket. Here are excerpts from an AP story:

"Lott's troubles began with remarks last week at an event marking Sen. Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday. Lott said Mississippians were proud to have voted for Thurmond in 1948, when the South Carolina politician was running for president as a staunch segregationist.

"And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either," Lott said.

On Monday, he apologized in a short statement for his "poor choice of words."

When that did not stem the criticism, he apologized again Wednesday, saying his words were "terrible" and "insensitive."

Bush and his aides remained conspicuously silent on the matter, hoping it would fade without the president taking the politically risky step of getting involved.

But the White House team, in meetings Wednesday night and Thursday morning, determined the flap threatened to undermine Bush's ability to increase the GOP's paltry support among black voters.

Bush himself received just 9 percent of the black vote in 2000. His advisers have concluded the president must increase that by several percentage points to be re-elected.

After much internal debate, Bush opted to have Fleischer tell reporters: "The president does not think that Trent Lott should resign.'

The Congressional Black Caucus called for a "formal censure of Senator Lott's racist remarks." They cited a "long-standing pattern of behavior that can no longer be tolerated," and party strategists papered Washington with material from Lott's background — including his efforts to restore Jefferson Davis' U.S. citizenship and his 1984 claim that the Confederate leader's spirit was alive in the GOP platform.

While a young GOP congressional leader two decades ago, Trent Lott declared that "racial discrimination does not always violate public policy" as he tried to save the tax exemption of a Christian university that banned interracial dating.

In his 1981 friend-of-the-court filing with the Supreme Court, Lott cited court rulings upholding affirmative action programs at colleges and compared them to the dating ban between black and white students at Bob Jones University.

"If racial discrimination in the interest of diversity does not violate public policy, then surely discrimination in the practices of religion is no violation," he argued, in asking the justices to block the Internal Revenue Service from stripping the school's tax exemption. At the time, he was the Republicans' new whip, the second highest position in the House GOP hierarchy.

Bob Jones University is a fundamentalist Christian school in Greenville, S.C., and its ban on interracial dating among students has long stirred controversy. It has dogged judicial nominees who were involved in the school's various legal fights, and presidential candidates, including Bush, who have been criticized for visiting the campus. The school recently lifted the ban.

The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 to strip the school of its tax exemption about two years after Lott filed his brief.

"The government now advocates penalizing Bob Jones University for its uncontestedly genuine religious beliefs," Lott wrote in one of just a handful of friend-of-the-court briefs filed in the case.

"To hold that this religious institution is subject to tax because of its interracial dating policies would clearly raise grave First Amendment questions," he argued.

The four Republican appointees to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a joint statement deploring Lott's comments as a "particularly shameful remark coming from a leader of the Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln."

Folks, these are the people running the USA -- because we let them.
They're going to roll back any social and environmental progress that's been made in the last 60 years -- because we let them. They're going to steal what's left of Social Security -- because we let them. They're going to start a war over oil and kill thousands of civilians -- because we let them. They're going to kill marine life with sonar -- because we let them.

Let's not let them any more, huh?

Cheers,
Michael