Jackson Free Press

Call us suspicious, but we don't believe for one minute that Gov. Haley Barbour thinks the Mississippi Legislature will vote to merge the state's three historically black universities, while not touching Ole Miss or Southern. (We do believe they might merge Mississippi University for Women with Mississippi State, though.)

It seems more likely that Barbour wants the cover of the inevitable firestorm such a proposal would cause in order that he might push an extreme partisan agenda while everyone else is arguing over something unlikely to pass.

Make no mistake: His budget proposal is blatantly, nakedly partisan. Barbour, a lame duck with his eye on Washington, probably thinks he has nothing to lose in doing everything he can to complete Mississippi's (unimpressive) metamorphosis into a guinea pig for his corporate-conservative ideas. Ever since he pushed damage caps through the Legislature based on faulty information, Barbour has tried to use the state to test ideas he has long pushed for nationally (and which are considered radical on that stage): shrinking public education, especially schools in majority-black districts, and shrinking needed transitional services such as pre-school and Headstart programs to help young people break their families' cycles of poverty. And, of course, opposing efforts to extend health care to every Mississippian or to get companies who cause harm to pay for it.

Tragically, Barbour has never seen the need to hide that his policies and attitudes aren't particularly friendly to women or to people of color of all agendas, and can be downright hostile. There is no other way to describe his effort to free and/or pardon a series of men who brutally murdered their wives and girlfriends in recent decades. There is no other way to describe his open use of the southern race strategy to get out the white racist vote for him and fellow Republicans.

This budget proposal continues his partisan theme. Although it allegedly cuts state agency budgets, including the Department of Human Services, 12 percent across the board, well, it doesn't. It makes fewer cuts to both the Department of Corrections (surprise, surprise) and the Department of Public Safety, even as it demands deeper cuts to the law-enforcement office of Barbour's political nemesis, Attorney General Jim Hood. And in stark contrast to Barbour's contempt for domestic-violence murder victims, Hood's office has worked admirably to help crime victims, and to make it easier to prosecute domestic abusers.

Adding insult to injury, Barbour's budget would simply cut out the Commission on the Status of Women in a state where women are arguably worse off than in any state in the U.S. Any of its work that's needed can, Barbour says, shift to the AG's office.

Barbour has inflicted enough gamesmanship on the state of Mississippi. We urge all citizens to plug in and talk back.