khandu - Wish the Magnolia State had as good a Senator as it has a King. :) "Everyone who agrees or disagrees with me should send me ten dollars." - well since I agree with some of your proposals but not others, guess I owe you $20. I'll gladly pay you Tuesday. / Very sorry there has to be such an uproar over your cousin. When it started, I thought of you & felt sympathy -- for you. But no, not for Cousin Trent. He brought it on himself. Best regards to your Mom though, whom you said he knows well; this must be very tough for her.

Nicole C, agree with you that his willing association with the Council of Conservative Citizens -- apparently lineal descendants of the old fascist White Citizens Councils -- is the smoking gun. Before seeing your link I had searched & found their website. Almost barfed. My God. Take a look, 'Catters (Nicole's link above). *Real* obscenity on the web. But they do have one virtue: at least they're honest about their bigotry. Very little euphemism there. More insidious & dangerous are the Lotts of this world, who support them with winks, nods & code-words.

Ol' Bobert: as always your Left-of-center heart's in the right place. :) Agree with much of your sociopolitical rant um, I mean, analysis. But permit me a parochial (so to speak) dissent re your inclusion of CT's Sen. Lieberman in the racist rogue's gallery. Neoconservative, yes; good presidential choice, no. But Senator Joe, a Trent Lott you're Nott.

Tam the Bam frae Saltcoats Scotland: "If you knew that he was a racist then why did the people vote him in." Why do the people of North Antrim, NI, vote in the sainted Rev. Ian Paisley? The short answer is, BECAUSE he is a bigot, and so are they -- preponderantly. (Yes yes, of course it's more complicated than that; but so is Mississippi. So is everything.) Unfortunately, conscious, non-latent racism is still in the culture of the white voting majority in the American Deep South. Look at South Carolina -- the source of this hoo-rah and the Cradle of the Confederacy. They first elected Ole Strom Hisself, *on a write-in vote* (!!), to the Senate in 1954, and re-elected him ever since. (Maybe they 'didn't know'??)

Re the history of Southern Democrats' racism running up to about 1965: exactly right. The "race-issue" transposition of the Southern Democrats & Southern Republicans began, essentially, at a moment in time: Nov. 3, 1964. On that day Sen. Barry Goldwater (himself not a segregationist but perfectly willing to collect "southern strategy" votes via his naive adherence to "states' rights" doctrine) swept South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana--and Trent Lott's Mississippi with **87 per cent** of its vote--while losing massively to LBJ almost everywhere outside the 11 states of the Old Confederacy (he did moderately well, but still lost, in the "outer South" states). In Alabama & Mississippi, every single House candidate the Republicans had scraped up from somewhere and nominated as sacrificial lambs to the longtime Democratic incumbents -- was *elected*, on Goldwater's coattails! After that, as the Republicans rebuilt from their national 1964 disaster, the flip-flop of the Southern parties accelerated rapidly. And then, as the country shifted rightward, the result was: Nixon (to whom the ever-pragmatic Ole Strom, having switched parties in July of '64 to support Goldwater, delivered the 1968 nomination); and then --- the Real Deal -- Reagan.

Well. I could go on; but I'll adhere to my usual short-summary posting policy. :) Yes, there are plenty of Northern racists; no, not all Republicans, or Southern whites, are racists; etc. Nevertheless: regarding today's Southern Republican party, beware. Institutionally, it is the successor to yesterday's segregationist Southern Democratic party, with a thin PC veneer for public viewing. So, expect the expected.