Info on Miss. Gov. Haley Barbour (I'm sick of Freeper-types bashing Blanco

[Roland99]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/campfin/players/barbour.htm

From 1993 to 1996, Haley Barbour was chairman of the Republican National Committee.

While it is mostly the Democratic National Committee that has come under attack for accepting foreign donations, the party's defenders argue that Barbour solicited hundreds of thousands of dollars from Hong Kong businessman Ambrous Tung Young to subsidize the National Policy Forum, a GOP think tank founded by Barbour and subsidized by the RNC.

That money was used as collateral for a $2.1 million commercial bank loan to the NPF. The same day it received the loan, the NPF gave $1.6 million of it to the RNC, which then provided a comparable amount to state Republican parties and other GOP organizations in 15 states during the crucial closing weeks of the 1994 election.

At the time, the NPF, which is now defunct, was seeking tax-exempt status as a nonpartisan policy organization. As a tax-exempt nonprofit, the NPF could have legally accepted foreign contributions. But the Internal Revenue Service eventually rejected the tax exemption application, ruling that the NPF was "a partisan, issues-oriented organization."

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/campaign/july97/hearing_7-24.html
On the witness stand of the Senate hearings on political money Thursday, the former chairman of the Republican Party, Haley Barbour, vehemently denied the Republican party used foreign money in recent election campaigns. Kwame Holman reports.


Haley Barbour and the Council of Conservative Citizens
http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/000758.html

Daily Kos has a picture of Barbour hanging out with CCC members at the Black Hawk Barbecue and Political Rally in July, which the CCC helped co-sponsor.

What's the big deal? Well, the Council of Conservative Citizens is a transparently racist organization that grew out of the "White Citizens Councils" of the old, strictly segregated, South.

As Kos explained, the CCC's website (which I will not link to) includes some helpful summaries of the group's beliefs. For example, the group boasts that it "speaks out" on behalf of "white European-Americans, their civilization, faith and form of government." The CCC dismisses the very notion of racism, arguing that the word "was concocted by a communist ideologues in the 1920s…to instill guilt and shame in the minds of white people and to inflame racial hostility among blacks."

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Once this came to public attention, Barbour said he didn't know anything about the CCC when he met with them. Considering the group's highly-controversial and long-standing role in the state, you'll forgive me if I find Barbour's explanation impossible to believe.