Jackson Free Press

The Miami Heat stopped celebrating their NBA Championship to join the rest of the league in New Jersey for the NBA Draft. Miami used their 27th pick to draft Mississippi State forward Arnett Moultrie.

Before the night was done, the Heat trade Moultrie to the Philadelphia 76ers for a second round pick (45th) this year and a future first round pick. That 45th pick turned out to be center Justin Hamilton out of LSU, the Heat's only selection of the night.

Other MSU players who were were looking to hear their name called were Renardo Sidney and Dee Bost. Neither Sidney nor Bost got drafted and will have to try to make a NBA roster as a free agent.

With less than two months left before Jacksonians head to the polls to decide the fate of a proposed 1-percent sales tax increase, Mayor Chokwe Lumumba is taking his message to the people.

Lumumba will host a town hall-style meeting at 5 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 1 at Pearl St. African Methodist Episcopal Church at 2519 Robinson St.

The Mayor will discuss the 1% sales tax proposal, and explain the use of the tax revenue to make infrastructure improvements. The meeting comes as Jackson's City Council debates whether to push the referendum vote to a later date in order to improve it's chances of passing with the 60 percent threshold it must have to become reality.

In a fax sent to media this afternoon, union president Brenda Scott announced that the Mississippi Alliance of State Workers, Communications Workers of America, Local 3570, AFL-CIO (that's all one union) will endorse Chokwe Antar Lumumba in his bid for his father's seat.

"Among his other qualities," the release says, "we find that he possesses a genuine desire, like his late father the Honorable Chokwe Lumumba, to continue the vision of bringing new economic ideas to the city anchored in green job creation, living wages, and strong worker protections."

The official endorsement is scheduled for the steps of City Hall in Jackson on Friday, March 18, at 3:00 p.m.

This Wednesday's show from M Ward and Ardenland will help out the American Red Cross.

Fresh off a controversy in Hattiesburg, in which the owner of the Dollar Box Showroom said he was pressured to cancel her show, Big Freedia is returning to Mississippi with a vengeance. In what the New Orleans bounce artist is calling "Twerkloose" performances, her manager Reid Martin told the JFP today that they have added a March 24 show at Martin's in Jackson, the day before the rescheduled Hattiesburg performance.

Get ready, Jackson.

Will the GOP pay attention to its moderates?

Cool stuff at Morningbell, new releases and regional picks...

Members of the JFP's editorial and design staff have won numerous honors in the 66th Annual Green Eyeshade award, including our first ever "Best in Division" award, receiving the top honor among all non-daily print publications in the contest.

Here at the JFP, we are going into the final push of the city election season before the primaries on May 7. We are still finishing mayoral candidates' JFP interviews (with the goal of doing one for each of them!) and we will be doing additional endorsement interviews with the candidates we deem to be the most competitive in upcoming weeks (starting this week).

We want your help, though. Tell us the questions below that you would ask either all of the candidates or a particular one--include the name(s) if so.

Meantime, read our candidate interviews to date here: Mayor's Race 2013 Jackson City Council Races 2013

We need your input so please take time to weigh in!

I will soon launch our first eBook in a new "Ghosts of Hinds County" series. The first will focus on the juvenile-detention scandal of the 1990s. If you want to hear about it right away, please subscribe (free) to jfpdaily.com. We will announce it to the daily list as soon as it's live.

(An added benefit to subscribing: You get daily breaking news on weekdays and invitations to all our big events, including the Best of Jackson party, so there's that.)

The launch will originally scheduled for early May, but election coverage conspired against me. If you have something you think you could add to a piece about the juvenile detention days of old, please email me at [email protected]. We can talk confidentially if needed.

Superband Wasteband!

State Rep. Deborah Dixon, D-Bolton, has introduced a bill that modifies the state's so-called Castle Doctrine, which establishes parameters for when homicide is justified (e.g. self-defense).

Under Dixon's legislation, HB 179, the Castle Doctrine would only apply within 30 feet of the exterior of a dwelling. Outside of that 30-foot threshold, the shooter would not be immune from criminal liability.

The legislation would also require some shooters in Castle Doctrine cases to "submit to a sobriety test or drug test at the time of investigation to determine whether the individual was under the influence of an intoxicating liquor or controlled substance."

The bill has been assigned to the House Judiciary A Committee, chaired by Rep. Mark Baker, R-Brandon.

Mississippi State Senate 2014 Regular Session YEAS AND NAYS. The yeas and nays being taken, the Report of Conference Committee on S. B. No. 2681 was adopted:

Yeas--Brown, Browning, Burton, Chassaniol, Clarke, Collins, Doty, Fillingane, Gandy, Gollott, Hale, Harkins, Hill, Hopson, Horhn, Hudson, Jackson G. (15th), Jolly, Kirby, Lee, Longwitz, Massey, McDaniel, Montgomery, Moran, Parker, Parks, Polk, Smith, Sojourner, Stone, Tindell, Tollison, Ward, Watson, Wiggins, Wilemon. Total--37.

Nays--Blount, Bryan, Butler A. (36th), Butler K. (38th), Dawkins, Frazier, Jackson R. (11th), Jackson S. (32nd), Jones, Jordan, Norwood, Simmons D. T. (12th), Simmons W. (13th), Turner. Total--14. Absent and those not voting--Carmichael. Total--1.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has published a map of active hate groups in the United States, and in Mississippi, there are 19 groups, including several Ku Klux Klan factions. SPLC defines a hate group as having "beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics." Hate group activities include: criminal acts, marches, rallies, speeches, meetings, leafleting or publishing, SPLC's website says.

Nationally, there are 892 hate groups, by SPLC's definition, and since 1999, the number of hate groups in the country has almost doubled. There are 190 Ku Klux Klan groups in the U.S., SPLC data shows.

To view the map visit: https://www.splcenter.org/hate-map.

In a near unanimous 7-1 decision announced earlier today, the U.S. Supreme Court decline to rule in Fisher v. University of Texas.

You ought to know you're in trouble when the folks who should be your biggest cheerleaders come and do a dance on your head and slap you around a bit.

Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour has been a player in the Republican Party for decades. As a matter of fact, he was one of the big conservative brains (along with Lee Atwater) that came up with the Southern Strategy, a political mindset that has kept Southern politics stuck on the battlefield of black versus white since the days of Ronald Reagan. Barbour served as Reagan's political director and as chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Some might say that Mr. Barbour had a hand in stirring up the witch's brew that created right-wingers like the Tea Party—and I'd agree. But if he stirred the pot, he sure has no control over its content.

Now, Barbour is blasting conservatives, especially those on the ultra-shaggy edges of the right-wing fringe. The Washington Post calls them—the roughly 45 Republicans in Congress who refuse to bend at all, ever, under any circumstances—cast-iron conservatives .

“When you control the House, the Democrats control the Senate and the White House, you can’t exactly cram your stuff down their throat,” Barbour said in a Post TV "In Play" interview yesterday. “Some of our friends sometimes forget that.”

“The guys that wanted to make Obamacare the trip wire for closing down the government and making Obama cave in … that’s not going to happen; that was never going to happen,” he added.

Barbour goes on to blame the conservative troubles on—wait for it—outside agitators. The problem is, they're skunks of the same stripes:

Barbour went on to note that his bigger concern for the party moving forward was the number of outside conservative groups — he mentioned the Senate Conservatives Fund and the Club For Growth by name — who seek to vilify Republican Members of Congress for allegedly breaking with party orthodoxy.

“Some of these same people go out and raise money for outside organizations that attack the other Republicans not over principle, not over policy … over tactics,” said Barbour. “There is no excuse for making people think a conservative Congressman who has a 98 percent conservative voting record is a bad person because you disagree with his tactics.”

See the WaPo's The Fix blog for the entire interview.

Things got very interesting quickly in college football last week. The near upsets from week one turned into upsets in week two. Several national championship contenders went down before we even reach the end of September. Biggest winner of week two has to be the Pac-12 (sans Colorado and Utah) from the pre-expansion teams. That means the Big Ten is the biggest looser this week and the conference laid an egg before their normal New Year's Day implosion.

The JFP got more great news Friday night when we learned that we are winning two first-place and one second-place award from the Society of Professional Journalists' southeastern division. Valerie Wells takes first place for feature writing, the Personhood team (this time, including R.L. Nave and Adam Lynch) takes second place for public service, and I won first place for serious commentary. Here is the full press release. Cheers to the team, congratulations to all the winners. We're honored to be in your company:

Lost in some of the Rand/Medicare/Taxes discussion of Rep. Paul Ryan was a glib line that he's now offered a few times on the stump, taking President Obama's "You Didn't Build That" line out of context to suggest that Obama was saying that small businesses didn't build their businesses.

The irony is two-fold (a.) Ryan has spent his adult entire career working in government in Washington, aside from a year he listed as a "marketing consultant" for his family's company and (b.) his family business, Ryan Incorporated, began in the 1800s building railroads for the government, switched to roads and highways (for the) government in the 20th century, had a hand in building O'Hare in Chicago, and more recently has made a a fair bit of scratch on defense contracts. In other words, the family fortune has done just fine by way of the government and, particularly, the infrastructure that Obama was talking about when Ryan misquoted him.

A current search of Defense Department contracts suggests that “Ryan Incorporated Central” has had at least 22 defense contracts with the federal government since 1996, including one from 1996 worth $5.6 million. … Mr. Anti-Spending secured millions in earmarks for his home state of Wisconsin, including, among other things, $3.3 million for highway projects. And Ryan voted to preserve $40 billion in special subsidies for big oil, an industry in which, it so happens, Ryan and his wife hold ownership stakes.

Speaking of his wife, Janna Ryan was a D.C. lobbyist before she became the "stay at home mom" that she has been introduced as -- for big pharma, big oil, "nuclear waste issues," health insurance and the cigar lobby, as they fought to keep the same warnings off cigars that cigarettes have.

Obviously, people weren't paying attention when, right after the reelection of Barack Obama to a second term, Mississippi asked for permission to secede from the Union.

(Again.)

Or whenever Gov. Phil Bryant says he doesn't want anything to do with the Obamacare -- which extends to a state health-care exchange that's been in the works since before Bryant took office.

Clearly, people thought Mississippi was kidding last week when Bryant called on state lawmakers to resist any new federal gun regulations.

And today, at the urging of Republicans, the House even passed a bill that lets the Department of Public Safety ignore companies who try to levy fines on Mississippi residents who get out-of-state photo traffic tickets.

So Reps. Jeff Smith and Gary Chism, both Republicans from Columbus, have a bill that make it clear once and for all:

Hey, federal government, leave us alone!

Their HB 490 clarifies that "protected rights under state sovereignty may not be infringed upon by federal action(s)." The provisions of the act include:

TO ASSERT THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THE STATE UNDER THE MISSISSIPPI CONSTITUTION OF 1890

TO PROHIBIT THE INFRINGEMENT OF THE CONSTITUTIONALLY PROTECTED RIGHTS OF THE STATE OF MISSISSIPPI, OR ITS PEOPLE BY MEANS OF ANY FEDERAL STATUTE, MANDATE, EXECUTIVE ORDER, JUDICIAL DECISION OR OTHER ACTION DEEMED BY THE STATE TO BE UNCONSTITUTIONAL

TO CREATE THE JOINT LEGISLATIVE COMMITTEE ON THE NEUTRALIZATION OF FEDERAL LAW

TO PROVIDE FOR THE MEMBERSHIP AND DUTIES OF THE COMMITTEE; AND FOR RELATED PURPOSES.

That Chism and Smith look like a couple of extras out of Django Unchained isn't the only reason their bill has been making the Internet sad all day. It's also because invoking the word sovereignty tends to give thinking Mississippians chills. As Smith and Chism are no doubt fully aware, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission was a clandestine organization the Legislation created to spy on Mississippi’s citizens involved with the Civil Rights Movement.

For now, HB 490 fate rests with Constitution Committee Chairman Scott Delano, R-Biloxi. We'll see if it has legs.