Jackson Free Press

As the dust from a very ugly election settles, one thing is clear: There is a new, disturbing kind of well-funded machine politics that has rolled through the state in recent years, which has little use for Democrats. Granted, Dems haven't responded to the pressures of the U.S. Chamber-funded blitz on Mississippi well—but (slightly) to their defense, they have been broad-sided by huge money and a Bush-appointed Justice Department bent on playing state politics, with a compliant state media to back them up.

The facts behind the selective prosecution of Paul Minor and Oliver Diaz Jr. is emerging as a tale of power gone amok. Diaz is a free man after taxpayers funded two separate trials trying to get him off the Mississippi Supreme Court. Tragically, Paul Minor is sitting in a federal prison—not really because he guaranteed loans for judges like others did, but because he was a big funder of Democrats, and made money suing corporations that fund the Republican Party.

That is not just anti-Republican rhetoric. Based on the facts in these cases, the truth is clear: A Republican Justice Department, and its U.S. attorney in Mississippi, Dunn Lampton, went after Democrats in this state for the same fund-raising shenanigans that Republican attorneys, judges and elected officials engaged in. They didn't even try to hide it then; it's just that back a few years, the Republicans were riding high and, seemingly, could get away with murder.

Or, at least a little political witch hunt.

We call on the Justice Department and U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton to make this charade right. They can do so by putting just as much effort, and taxpayer money, into rooting out other power brokers—attorneys, judges, state officials who have played loose with ethics—and treat them exactly the same way they did Diaz and Minor. Alternatively, Minor's sentence should be shortened.

This is the only way they can possibly prove that they didn't send a man away from his family to federal prison based on his political beliefs.

If Republicans do not want to see big money influencing the judicial system and other high-level decision-making, they need to help change the law in Mississippi to keep big money—even that from the U.S. Chamber—from coming in here and agitating on behalf of outside political and corporate interests. If he's still governor as you read this, Haley Barbour needs to stop blocking every attempt to regulate campaign-finance reform in our state.

Oh, and while he's at it, Barbour needs to show us his tax returns and reveal all details about his amorphous relationship with his former lobbying firm and its current clients. The public has the right to know.

What's good for the Democratic goose is also right for the Republican gander. It's time for the taxpayer-funded hypocrisy to end.